Marilyn’s well-being I sought to nurture.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with that,” I admitted. “She was an orphan kid who always wanted a family. She wanted a daddy. You were it for a while… till she fired your ass.”
That got a rise out of him. Or a frown, anyway.
“She did not fire me as her psychiatrist.”
“What then?”
“The last time I saw Marilyn, she informed me she’d fired Pat Newcomb, which I thought was an excellent decision, incidentally, as well as Eunice Murray, which I considered unfortunate, because Eunice was, to use your word, supportive of her. I suppose I was ‘fired,’ too, in a sense… but only as what she called her ‘de facto agent.’ She was very smart, Mr. Heller. She knew what I didn’t, or hadn’t admitted-that I was out of my depth, trying to help her in the career department.”
“Sounds like maybe she’d finally shaken her worst dependency. And I don’t mean drugs.”
“You mean,” he said quietly, “me.”
“I mean you, Doc. She comes to you to cure her insomnia, and you prescribe total dependence on you. You give her twenty-four-hour service. You make house calls. You were the drug she was in danger of overdosing on.”
The sardonic smile returned. “And… as you say-she finally shook that dependance. I believe that last day of her life, though unpleasant, should have been a turning point.”
“Well, it was a turning point, wasn’t it? A turn into Westwood cemetery.” I waved off his good intentions. “You called it suicide, Doc. Every interview you’ve given, whether to the cops or the press, has it suicide.”
“And yet it wasn’t suicide.” His eyebrows were up, but nothing quizzical about it. “You needn’t bother making the case for me, Mr. Heller. I know it wasn’t suicide. I’ve read the autopsy results.”
“So are you prepared to say it’s murder?”
He sighed heavily. “I’m prepared to say-I have said in my interview with Deputy D.A. Miner and another with the so-called Suicide Squad-that Marilyn was in no way despondent, and that she was a poor candidate for suicide.”
“Those statements haven’t been made public.”
“That’s not up to me, is it? Mr. Heller, in the four days preceding her death, Marilyn took three business meetings, bought a ten-thousand-dollar Jean Louis gown, twice ordered deli food, and purchased one hundred dollars’ worth of perfume.”
Chanel, no doubt.
He was saying, “Over those few days, Marilyn met with me for eleven and a half hours, and they were good sessions, healthy sessions, with the expected ups and downs, but…” He shook his head, chuckled glumly. “The bittersweet truth, Mr. Heller, is that Marilyn was finally making spectacular headway in therapy. She was on her way to achieving a degree of security for the first time in her life. And she was ecstatic about the possibilities of the future.”
“Was she ecstatic at your last session? After her fight with Bobby Kennedy?”
“That was rough. That was difficult. But we are not talking here about unrequited love-no. She had already decided that she was moving on from the Kennedys.” He frowned. “Understand, she found it gratifying to be associated with such powerful and important people. But she felt used and betrayed, and she insisted on being treated respectfully. Bobby Kennedy barged in that afternoon, making accusations, demanding she hand over tape recordings and notebooks, and generally treating her like… chattel.”
“So who wouldn’t flip out?”
“Indeed. But any notion that she would have gone public with what she knew about the brothers, well, it’s nonsense. So is the notion that this confrontation would send her deep into a well of despondency.” He sighed. “Mr. Heller-would you put away the weapon? And would you allow me to play you a tape recording?”
I got up, took a magazine from a stack off a lower bookcase shelf, and folded it open over the nine- millimeter. I also moved the couch into its former position, and sat on the edge, facing him.
He nodded, twitched half a smile, and lifted an upright reel-to-reel tape recorder off the floor behind his desk somewhere, and rested it on the blotter. Then he removed a white cardboard tape box from a desk drawer, which required unlocking (the doctor’s security measures weren’t much), and fixed the spool in its niche and wound the tape into place.
“In the last few months,” he said, “Marilyn made a number of recordings herself. At home.”
He was telling me?
“These were stream-of-consciousness sessions, where she could talk to me, though I wasn’t present, as frankly and openly as she wished, particularly if I was not available and she wanted to express these thoughts and feelings. I have several hours of these tapes, and if they were made public, the notion that Marilyn took her life would soon disappear.”
“What’s on this tape?”
“Something interesting near the very beginning of the reel. Let me cue it up…”
He did.
And he clicked the machine on, the tape whirring, and a very familiar, soft, slightly halting voice filled the little den.
“ To have been loved by John Kennedy only to be rejected so badly is hard to understand. It really is. But Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. And the first duty of a soldier is to the commander in chief. He says ‘do this’ and you do that. ”
I could well imagine Jack telling Marilyn to “do this.”
“My bruised little ego isn’t important. What is important is that these men will change the country. No child will go hungry. No person will sleep in the street and get his meals from a garbage can. They’ll transform America like FDR in the thirties.”
Greenson made a small openhanded gesture, as if to say, “See? Everything they did to her, and she was still loyal.”
“The president is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother. And so would I. I would never embarrass him. Or Bobby.”
“So much for a press conference,” I said.
“But there’s no room in my life for Bobby right now. All I ask is that he face me and deal with me directly, like a real man… and treat me with a modicum of respect.”
He clicked off the machine. Got up, moved it off his desk and onto the floor, then resumed his seat.
“These tapes in toto reveal,” he said, hands folded again, “a woman in command of herself, changing direction in positive ways. She’s decided herself to end any relationship with Robert Kennedy, she’s already fired Paula Strasberg, and soon would do the same with Eunice Murray and, for that matter, me… as her manager, that is.”
I shrugged. “You don’t have to be a shrink to know she doesn’t sound suicidal.”
“No. She had her sights on new artistic horizons-absurd as it might sound to some, she hoped to one day perform Shakespeare. She had the kind of long-term plans that do not reflect a patient on the verge of suicide.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, Doc. She was murdered.”
This made him uncomfortable. Suddenly the dark eyes were looking somewhere other than my face.
I gave him a friendly grin. “Let’s talk about you, Doc. You don’t think she committed suicide. You know the accidental overdose verdict is bogus, based on the evidence. Yet you’re waist-deep in the cover-up.”
Dark eyes beseeched me from under a furrowed brow. “Haven’t I given you enough, Mr. Heller? What more could I have for you?”
“Let’s find out. You were there through the night. You know what happened. You know an ambulance came, you know high-level cops from the Intelligence Division were everywhere, all kinds of government spooks, and of course a studio cleanup crew. You let this go on for hours without officially notifying the police. You could lose your license for that, Doc. You don’t let a corpse sit for four hours or more before notifying the coroner.”
“You said it yourself, Mr. Heller. The police were already there.”
“So why did you play along? I have theories. Would you like to hear?”
He shrugged, his smirk stopping just short of disgust.
