Pardon My Hearse: A Colorful Portrait of Where the Funeral and Entertainment Industries Met in Hollywood (38 page)

At our first meeting with the INS, the Korean interviewer spoke to us in broken English with a very heavy accent, which made it difficult to understand what he was saying. He finally got around to asking the question he seemed most curious about—our ages. I told him that I was 52 and Olga was 27, at which point he picked up his pen and jotted a note in Olga’s file. What difference did our ages make if we chose to get married? When my mother and father were married, he was 42 and she was 17, and they were together for more than thirty years until his death. So it was exactly as that famous philosopher Hank Williams Jr. once sang, “It’s just an old family tradition.”

Even before we were married, it was clear that Olga had some serious health problems. We went from one specialist to another and they ran multiple tests with no conclusive results. The answer finally came one evening on
60 Minutes
, which started with a scene of Ed Bradley wearing a white radiation suit, proclaiming that he was speaking from the most dangerous place on earth. He said he was in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan, close to Mongolia. According to Bradley, the Russian government had been experimenting on the people of this area to see what the long-term effects of radiation would have on the human body. It wasn’t long before they got their answer, as many babies were born with birth defects.

After the show ended I asked Olga if she had ever heard of Semipalatinsk. She responded that she knew exactly where it was, so I asked her how she knew. She said that she was born in Ust-Kamenogorsk, just forty miles away, adding that everyone there had been aware of the Soviet nuclear tests being conducted. Olga told me that her mother’s doctor discovered that she was suffering from radiation exposure and told Olga’s father that he should get her out of the area as soon as possible. That’s why they moved to Moscow.

It turned out that Olga was right about her disposition because one day I returned home and was shocked to find that she had moved out and rented an apartment in North Hollywood. We continued to see each other and I paid all of her expenses, hoping she would reconsider her decision to live alone. I spent many nights at her apartment, which made it much the same as our living together. When her father arrived from Moscow for a visit, he slept on the couch in her living room. One night, while she was translating for her father, something came up that surprised us both. It was when she informed her father that he was slightly younger than me.

Losing Kathy made me realize the extent to which someone can give their heart and soul to another, but my feelings for Olga were never the same. In fact, my motivation was well exemplified in the lyrics of a Kenny Rogers song that begins, “Show me a bar with a good lookin’ woman, then just get out of my way.” It goes on to say, “Somethin’s got a hold of me, it’s cheap but it ain’t free,” and ends with a realistic picture of my frame of mind at the time: “Love or somethin’ damn near like it’s got a hold on me.” Looking back on that fateful day I first saw Olga with her pure Russian beauty, I’m sure I had an immediate Pavlovian reaction. The funny thing is I don’t remember drooling.

Olga at 25.

In retrospect, my thirty-year love affair with Kathy could have never been replaced by anyone on this earth, because my first taste of Russia still lingers in my heart and on my tongue.

It seems that the more time that passes since Marilyn Monroe’s death, the more interest there is in her story. Whenever someone was conducting research for a book or documentary about her death, they usually contacted Westwood Village, which had my permission to give out my name and number. All these years later, reporters still contact me to ask questions or request a formal interview. The question that comes up most often is “Do you think she committed suicide or do you think she was murdered?” I have always felt that she was murdered, but we will probably never know.

An attorney in London, making a documentary about Marilyn for the BBC, contacted me for an interview. When he arrived in Los Angeles, he came to the mortuary and we talked for over an hour. At the end of the interview his last question was whether I thought she was murdered. I turned the tables and asked him the same question. He admitted that when he had originally been asked to investigate her death for this documentary, he considered it nothing more than a Hollywood fluff piece. He decided to take the assignment strictly for the money and a chance to do some traveling with all expenses paid, but said that now he was confident that she had been murdered and by what means. He had changed his opinion about the manner of death only after interviewing over eighty people.

He stated that it was possible that an overdose had been administered to her by means of a drug-laced enema. Now, the obvious question was, why wouldn’t she have fought her attackers? Many in-depth interviews established the fact that she had a history of overmedicating herself with sleeping pills and chloral hydrate, the infamous Mickey Finn. Once she was in a drug-induced stupor she wouldn’t have been able to fight back. The cause of death from barbiturate poisoning is actually asphyxiation because the drug causes the diaphragm’s involuntary movement to cease, which halts respiration.

I remember seeing Dr. Noguchi’s pathology report that noted a great deal of barbiturate residue in her intestines, which had become discolored and inflamed. A drug-laced enema would explain that condition. If she had taken the drug orally in a large enough dose to kill her, it would have killed her before it had time to reach her lower intestines. There should have been more barbiturate residue still in her stomach, and there wasn’t, according to Noguchi. A documentary produced four decades after her death made a flawed attempt to address this question. The filmmakers took a beaker of water, added some powder and placed a rotating paddle into the liquid to stir it, but a person lying motionless on a bed has no such agitation. That wasn’t a valid comparison by any standard.

In 2005, John Miner, who was key in our investigation, announced he also felt that Marilyn had been murdered. It took him over forty years to admit that, but he explained that he had sworn to certain parties he would never reveal his conclusion. There is no question that Marilyn’s death and the subsequent investigation became the most politically motivated case in the twentieth century because of her well-known involvement with John and Robert Kennedy. Miner must have been under a great deal of pressure to keep quiet.

Milton Greene was one of the photographers who took many photos of Marilyn, but he had also been instrumental in helping her break her 1951 contract with Fox Studios. Milton convinced her that a star of her magnitude should be making much more than what her contract stipulated. Greene had entered her life at a time when she was especially vulnerable. When she finally won the legal battle, she started Marilyn Monroe Productions as its president, with Milton Greene as its vice president.

One of Greene’s sons, Anthony, made a documentary about Marilyn called
Life After Death
. Anthony’s office called and asked me to take part, which I did. Many years later I came upon an HBO program in progress and saw myself talking about Marilyn. It really caught me off-guard because they had never sent me a copy of the documentary, as they promised.

Before her death, Joe DiMaggio had purchased crypts at Westwood Village, one directly above the one for Marilyn and another kitty-corner to hers. When DiMaggio and Marilyn divorced in 1954, DiMaggio sold the two crypts to a friend of his, Richard Poncher. When Poncher lay dying in 1986 at age 81, he asked his wife, Elsie, for a final wish. He made her promise that she would put him facing down in the casket directly
above Marilyn. So there lay Poncher for two and half decades, his wish fulfilled by his wife when she asked the funeral director to turn him over after everyone had exited the chapel. But while
Playboy
publisher Hugh Hefner secured an eternal space beside Marilyn in 1992 for $75,000, it seems that Poncher’s eternal sleep may be disrupted. Elsie was trying to sell the crypt where her husband was entombed and planned to move him to the adjacent crypt intended for herself, which she doesn’t need since her wish is to be cremated.

Interestingly, much of the fascination with Marilyn Monroe originates from abroad, as half of the calls that have come in over the years have been from other countries. In one such call, a German lady asked me to verify a Marilyn photograph. I knew before she even told me what photograph she was referring to. It was in Anthony Summers’s book about Marilyn called
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe
. The picture was taken at the coroner’s office of her lying on a morgue table. You can clearly see her swollen and wrinkled neck and the discoloration of her face that I remember well from the Westwood Village prep room. Amazingly, Theodore Curphey had instructed the coroner’s office personnel that no photos of Marilyn were to be taken, presumably to avoid the possibility of the photo leaking out. However, the Los Angeles Police Department did take photos of her there as part of their investigation.

All coroners’ offices have one or more people whose job is to document the dead with photos. In Thomas Noguchi’s best-selling book
Coroner
, he expresses appreciation of his faithful forensic photographer Bill Lystrup, who had been one of our limo drivers for years before he went to work for the coroner’s office. Photographs of the dead are never intended for distribution, but just like my experience at Westwood Village, there are often large monetary incentives offered to anyone who can procure such a photo for publication.

The only thing strange about the call from Germany was that this was many years after
Goddess
was published. The caller stated that they were going to use the photo in a German magazine called
TV-Movie
, but they couldn’t use it unless someone who had seen her as she appeared in this photo could verify it. Even with my assurances that the photo was authentic, they wouldn’t use it unless it was shown to me and acknowledged as being genuine. Two weeks later a gentleman arrived at the mortuary with the photo and got my confirmation.

The following month they called me again, saying the magazine had sold out in two days and caused a firestorm of controversy. Now they were requesting an extensive interview with a picture of me holding the photo in front of our mortuary. They offered me a fee of $500 because it was going to take the better part of a day. When it was over they sent me a check for something in the neighborhood of about $350, because that’s what 500 deutsche marks converted to in U.S. dollars. Silly me for not remembering they had offered to pay me in a foreign currency.

Later, a representative of
Der Spiegel
magazine in Germany contacted me about an interview for their annual issue called
Spiegel Special
. He and his photographer accompanied me to cemeteries with celebrities’ graves, like Holy Cross Cemetery, where Bing Crosby and Gary Cooper are buried. They seemed especially interested in being able to stand at the grave of Béla Lugosi, or Count Dracula, if you prefer. Afterward, we went to Forest Lawn to visit the mausoleum where Clark Gable and David O. Selznick are entombed.

I also did an interview for a Japanese magazine that photographed all of my Marilyn memorabilia, including her lock of hair, falsies, and the memorial folder from her funeral. One of our employees from the ’60s named Drake Jasso, who knew I owned these items, called me up one day and wanted to know if I was interested in doing a deal with my memorabilia collection. Drake, now a vintage magazine dealer, had about forty copies of the first
Playboy
magazine, which featured Marilyn. Just being the number one issue made them extremely collectible, but Marilyn’s appearance made them even more valuable. A man named Ed Pitts contacted him about buying a copy, but apparently he was not prepared to spend $5,000 for a pristine one.

During their conversation, Drake mentioned that his former employer had spent three days working on her funeral and that I had three or four rare items. Ed asked Drake if he would set up a meeting with the three of us to talk about a trade of some kind. He claimed that he had her original 1951 Fox contract, which was the first time she used the stage name Marilyn Monroe—derived from her mother’s maiden name, Monroe—instead of Norma Jean Baker. This was a seven-year step-up contract that began her salary at $500 a week and each year thereafter bumped it up in increments of $250. By the fifth year of the contract, the studio was making millions from her films.

Drake called and said we could all meet at a restaurant in Studio City that was closed to the public for the day because of a book signing. In exchange for the contract, Ed wanted the lock of hair, the memorial folder, and $5,000 in cash. I didn’t want to invest any cash in the trade, so I took Drake aside and asked if he would be willing to give him a primo copy of
Playboy
instead. When we made the offer, Ed agreed to the deal but then began expressing some concern about the authenticity of the lock of hair. I told him to call Westwood Village to confirm my presence throughout her preparation and service.