anything?”
“I sat down with Frank. He gave me this really sad look. He looked like he’d been crying, Bob. Funny guy, Sinatra. Part heartless prick, part hopeless romantic. He didn’t order food. Just Jack Daniel’s. Sat in that booth drinking Jack Daniel’s, and when I sat down, he said, ‘I didn’t know, Charlie. I had no way of knowing.’ All I said was, ‘So that’s how it went-Lawford called you, and you called Mooney.’ He shook his head, Bob, but he wasn’t saying no. He told me he had no idea it would go that way. No idea anybody would ‘hurt that girl.’ And he said he was finished with Giancana, ‘fucking finished.’ Never wanted anything to do with that son of a bitch again.”
Bobby said nothing. A mild breeze was stirring. His hair ruffled, the pool rippled, the sun glided under a cloud. We sat in cool blue light.
“Giancana gave the order,” I said. “ He made the call. But your CIA friends had anticipated the need, and had provided the means. This was all part of that unholy marriage you officiated, between the Outfit and the Spooks. All to kill Castro, and how’s that going, by the way?”
His eyes were closed.
“Once Peter was informed she was dead, he began making his series of alarmed phone calls, to get people to check up on her-so somebody, anybody but him, would find the body. Poor bastard. If ever anybody was in over his head… Still, it was one of his more convincing performances.”
Bobby turned to me. He seemed much older than I remembered. Grooves, lines, shadows. His eyes were moist.
“What do you want from me, Nate?”
“Nothing. I guess I wanted to make sure Marilyn dying meant something to you. As your conscience, I like to think you learned something more than just, well, that you’d gotten away with it.”
“Goddamnit, Nate, I didn’t-”
“Sort that out any way you choose.” I waved it off. “The real reason I’m here, all kidding aside, is to ask you to mark me off in your address book. I’m retired from government service. Pass the word to Jack, too, would you? I’ve allowed myself to get involved with your various ill-advised crusades, from playing double agent with Jimmy Hoffa to your goddamn Operation Mongoose, and I am not available for future fun. Understood?”
“… Understood. I’m sorry it’s… Nate, I’m just sorry.”
I stood, and he did, too.
As we were trudging up the hill, I said, “Just so you know, that red notebook of Marilyn’s? It’s safely tucked away.”
“Safely tucked away where?”
“Where as long as nothing suspiciously fatal happens to me, it stays tucked away.” Those oldies but goodies. “So is a set of the tapes of that last night, too, though you can bet the killer turned his machines off before going inside and doing the deed.”
“You have the tapes?”
“Yeah. Somebody else may, too. Somebody in your camp, maybe.”
I stopped. We were on the terrace now.
“What the hell was Giancana after, anyway?” I asked him. “I mean, I understand the national security implications of Marilyn maybe running her mouth, and how unkindly the spooks might view that. But what good does taking Marilyn out of the equation do that wop bastard?”
The wind was kicking in. The sun had stayed under the clouds and it was cool.
Bobby said, “He doesn’t want Operation Mongoose exposed any more than we do. Hiring his people out as killers on the one hand, and consorting with the enemy, which is to say me and Jack, on the other.” He shrugged. “Maybe he thinks he has something on us now, and I’ll give him a free ride.” His eyes grew colder than the day had turned. “One thing I can promise you, Nate…”
“Oh?”
“He’s going to be disappointed.”
Maybe there was a little Eliot Ness left in him, after all.
The bulk of Marilyn’s estate went to Lee Strasberg, but the actress had died less than well-off. She would of course generate much income in the future, for the Strasberg family, and a squabble arose with Inez Melson and lawyers descended. Word got out that Marilyn had already set an appointment with a lawyer to remove Lee and Paula from her will, but that didn’t matter: the Strasbergs prevailed.
The police had closed its file by year’s end, and only a few items about the unusual, suspicious circumstances surrounding MM’s passing even made it into Hollywood columns, most prominently Winchell’s and Flo Kilgore’s.
By most accounts, Marilyn’s passing destroyed Dr. Ralph Greenson. “The fire went out,” one colleague said. “He never really recovered. He went on, but turned inward after that, and became a bit strange.” Unlike certain friends and associates of the actress, Greenson did not capitalize on his famous patient, and refused any interviews on her life and death. The 1963 film Captain Newman, M.D., which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Sinatra’s young rival Bobby Darin, depicted Greenson’s wartime psychiatric care of battle-traumatized patients. Two textbooks he wrote in the 1960s are highly regarded and still much-used, but for all of this, he is remembered most for having been Marilyn Monroe’s final analyst. He died in 1979.
Though she spent her later life in a series of small Santa Monica apartments, Eunice Murray took three European tours in the 1960s. She cowrote a book about Marilyn, and gave numerous interviews (on and off camera), with a story that changed substantially over the years, ultimately admitting Bobby Kennedy’s afternoon visit and the post-murder cleanup by his protectors. She died in 1995.
Mrs. Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jefferies, ducked interviewers (the police never bothered with him) until 1993, when, terminally ill and in a wheelchair in a nursing home, he told an interviewer the story he’d shared with me on the Santa Monica pier.
After her sojourn at the Kennedy compound, Pat Newcomb went on an extended European vacation. In 1963 she took a position with the United States Information Agency, headed by Bobby Kennedy’s friend George Stevens, Jr. She served as liaison between the Capitol and Hollywood, involved with film festivals internationally and arranging for movie stars to travel abroad and promote America and its film industry. She often socialized with the Kennedy family and was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill. When Bobby ran for New York State Senator, Pat joined his staff. She is now valued as one of Hollywood’s most successful and discreet public relations consultants, representing the likes of Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, and Jane Fonda. She, too, refused most interviews and has turned down repeated lucrative offers to write a book about her time with Marilyn.
Arthur Jacobs became a producer at Twentieth Century-Fox; some have called it his reward from the studio. Among his first projects was What a Way to Go! in 1964, with Shirley MacLaine stepping in for Marilyn. He is most famous for producing the original Dr. Dolittle and the hit Planet of the Apes movies, all of which featured his wife, Natalie. He, too, remained silent about the circumstances of Marilyn’s death. He died in 1972.
In 1963, Captain James Hamilton left the LAPD to become head of security for the National Football League, a high-paying job arranged by Bobby Kennedy. Hamilton died a year later of a brain tumor. Intel’s renowned secret files were eventually destroyed.
Chief Parker never got J. Edgar Hoover’s job, as the FBI director’s own secret files continued to protect his job. Parker died in 1966 at a testimonial in his own honor-the Police Administration Building was renamed Parker Center, but everybody still calls it the Glass House. (Upon his death in 1972, Hoover’s files were burned by his longtime companion, Associate Director Clyde Tolson).
Upon Parker’s passing, Thad Brown finally became chief, but served only briefly. When he passed away in 1972, Brown left behind a Marilyn Monroe file he had secretly assembled, including the impounded phone records and seven hundred pages of suppressed interviews, depositions, photographs, reports, and other pertinent documents. Despite this, two subsequent official inquiries-in 1982 and 1985-rubber-stamped previous questionable findings.
In 1975 Sam Giancana was shot once in the back of the head and six times in the face in the kitchen of his finished basement at his Oak Park, Illinois, home. He was frying sausage and peppers, and I had an alibi.
That same year, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.
In 1976, Johnny Rosselli was strangled and shot and partially dismembered before being stuffed into a fifty-
