five-gallon steel fuel drum, which was found floating in Biscayne Bay.
Frank Sinatra became a Republican.
Joe DiMaggio never remarried. For twenty years, he had half a dozen red roses delivered three times a week to his former wife’s crypt at Westwood Cemetery. He died of lung cancer in 1999, and his last words were: “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.” I still don’t like him.
Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who gave very few interviews about his famous patient, practiced for many decades in Beverly Hills and passed away in December 2005. Rumors that he’d been paid substantial hush money were never substantiated.
Milton “Mickey” Rubin-whose clients included not just Marilyn and Sinatra but Liza Minnelli, the Jackson 5, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lucille Ball-never gave interviews about MM; he died in 1999, protecting his clients to the end.
Until his death in 1998, Sergeant Jack Clemmons was an outspoken voice, much quoted and interviewed, on the subject of Marilyn’s murder.
Walter Schaefer, whose ambulance service continues very successfully, has gone public in recent years, confirming that one of his ambulances was indeed dispatched to pick up Marilyn Monroe.
As for Bobby and Jack, I won’t insult your intelligence-you surely know the broad outlines of their sad fates. For now, I’ll add only that JFK’s murder brought me back in touch with both Flo Kilgore and Bobby Kennedy.
After her 1966 divorce from Peter, Pat Kennedy Lawford battled both alcoholism and cancer. She worked with the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, and the National Center on Addiction, and helped found the National Committee for the Literary Arts. She died in 2006.
Peter Lawford gave numerous interviews about Marilyn over the years, his story changing as if the ravings of a drug-addled mind, which was the case. After Sinatra banished him, Lawford saw his show business career ebb and flow, mostly ebb. He died in 1984, and for a time his ashes were in a crypt fifty feet from Marilyn’s. In 1988, however, his ashes were evicted for nonpayment of funeral bills, only to be scattered at sea by his third wife, for a National Enquirer photo op.
In 1966, a raid on the home of Bernard Spindel turned up (as Spindel later charged in an affidavit) “tapes and evidence concerning the circumstances surrounding the causes and death of Marilyn Monroe which strongly suggest that the officially reported circumstances of her demise were erroneous.” Spindel was a well-known wiretapper, though the A-1 had never used him. But I will wager Roger Pryor had, as Spindel-a known Hoffa crony who died in prison in 1972-apparently aided him in a non-radio-transmitted, hardwired bugging of Fifth Helena.
An incident involving actress Veronica Hamel seemed to confirm that. When the Hill Street Blues TV star bought Marilyn’s house, she got rid of the bougainvillea vine Marilyn had planted along the master bedroom wall. Something else had been planted, it turned out, as Hamel’s efforts uncovered a nasty tangle of cables extending from roof tiles. She called the phone company to remove the old cables, and was told, “These aren’t phone lines, ma’am-they’re surveillance lines.”
As for me, in the several official inquiries and the many more launched by authors and documentary filmmakers, I routinely declined to be interviewed. Most everything I knew could be had elsewhere, and the things that only I knew were still risky to talk about. No statute of limitations on murder, for example.
Anyway, I always told them, I might write my own book some-day.
By the way, Fred Rubinski and I finally made some real money off Sherry’s, by selling it. The restaurant became the famous rock club Gazzarri’s, running from 1963 to 1993. Fred retired in the 1980s and passed away in 1990. My son, Sam, still runs the A-1 Detective Agency, with offices in half a dozen cities. I’m officially a consultant, not that I remember ever being consulted.
Marilyn? Well, I don’t have to tell you. She didn’t make that many movies, with only a handful that could be called good, and one or two that might be great (for me, Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, both Billy Wilder). And yet she’s the biggest superstar of all, leaving Liz and Cleopatra in the dust. The gold standard of female beauty, worldwide, how many years later? But if one thing makes me sad about her luminous, enduring fame, it’s the focus on her death. And now here I am adding to it.
Of course, Marilyn gets the last giddy laugh. Over the years, to make itself look better, the Fox studio had always portrayed her work on Something’s Got to Give as a drug-addled, unusable embarrassment. Many authors to this day routinely accept that assessment.
But in 1988 master tapes of the lost footage were smuggled out for a group of fans to enjoy. What they saw was a radiant, glowing Marilyn, funny and displaying fine comic timing. Not missing a cue, only rarely flubbing a line, and-between takes-professional and easy to work with. In addition, she seemed sleeker, and more modern, keenly attuned to the 1960s, poised to leave the pinup fifties behind, exhibiting a natural delivery that bore only the faintest hints of her famous dumb-blonde hesitancy.
Eventually the studio realized what they had, and in 1990 a documentary-including an edited version of the existing material, to show what the movie would have been-showcased Marilyn’s beauty and her talent, along the way becoming the highest-rated news program in the history of the Fox Broadcasting Network. With Marilyn, their most underpaid star, again making Fox a pot of money.
What it came down to was, the studio had tried to kill her reputation. But the film she shot had told the truth.
You see, the camera had something in common with the rest of us.
It loved her.
