The Murder of Marilyn Monroe (19 page)

In a 1974 paper titled “On Transitional Objects and Transference,” which was compiled along with others in his 1978 book
Explorations in Psychoanalysis
, Ralph Greenson discussed the frustrations that he felt while treating Marilyn Monroe during the last months of her life and how he broached the subject of his European vacation. “I told an emotionally immature young woman patient, who had developed a very dependent transference to me, that I was going to attend an International Congress in Europe some three months hence,” Greenson wrote. “We worked intensively on the multiple determinants of her clinging dependence, but made only insignificant progress.”

The psychiatrist explained how he was trying to not make Marilyn so dependent on him. “The situation changed dramatically when one day she announced . . . she had discovered something that would tide her over my absence,” Greenson wrote. “It was not some insight, not a new personal relationship, it was a chess piece. The young woman had recently been given a gift of a carved ivory chess set.”

Still making little progress as time went on, Ralph Greenson continued to note Marilyn’s growing attachment to him in the months leading up to her singing “Happy Birthday” for Jack Kennedy. This took place at Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. One piece from Marilyn’s new chess set occupied the center of the discussion between the psychiatrist and his star patient. Greenson relayed, “The evening before her announcement, as she looked at the set, through the sparkling light of a glass of champagne, it suddenly struck her that I looked like the white knight . . . The realization immediately evoked in her a feeling of comfort, even triumph. The white knight was her protector.”

Marilyn considered the white knight a temporary substitute for the psychiatrist while he left the country. “The patient’s major concern about . . . my absence was a public performance of great importance to her professionally,” explained Ralph Greenson. “She now felt confident of success because she could conceal her white knight in her handkerchief or scarf; she was certain that he would protect her from nervousness, anxiety or bad luck.”

On May 10, 1962, Greenson dashed to Europe for a little rest and relaxation before his scheduled lectures. Joan explained, “Father was to give a lecture in Israel for the International Psychoanalytic Society, and from there they planned to visit my mother’s family in Switzerland.”

Greenson wrote, “I was relieved and delighted to learn . . . that her performance had indeed been a smashing success . . . However, I received several panicky transatlantic telephone calls from her. The patient had lost the white knight and was beside herself with terror and gloom, like a child who has lost her security blanket.”

Eunice Murray remembered, “Marilyn took a handsome chess piece from the set she had bought in Mexico—one knight to wrap in her handkerchief while she sang. A friend [Dr. Greenson] had suggested she take it and pretend he was right there with her to lend her courage. Marilyn . . . lost it somewhere in New York.”

“That vacation we had, it was constant telephone calls,” Greenson’s wife Hildi recalled. “We were in Israel and we got phone calls from Marilyn and from the studio. Finally, when we got to Switzerland, my husband said, ‘I promised them I’d come back and we’ll save the picture.’ That was the idea.”

Greenson wrote more than two weeks after his patient’s death, “I left Marilyn in the hands of a colleague [Milton Wexler] whom she knew and I told her that I would return if it was necessary. As you know, after three weeks my colleague called me, and finally she called me, and I returned to Los Angeles [late on the night of June 6]. She was depressed, but within 24 hours of my return she had bounced up again and I reported to the movie studio that she would return to work within 48 hours. They, however, in their fury at Elizabeth Taylor, decided to fire Marilyn, which they did [on June 8].”

According to Greenson’s daughter Joan, she and her brother Danny received a call from Marilyn on June 2, the day after Marilyn’s thirty-sixth birthday, and the actress “sounded really druggy. Her thick-tongued-ness usually was a sign that she had taken lots of sleeping medication but still couldn’t sleep . . . Danny and I went to her house. Her room was dark. The black-out drapes were pulled shut, and not a drop of light was let in. Marilyn was in bed with just a sheet pulled up around her. Her bed looked like she had had a bad night. It was totally disheveled. She asked Danny to come sit next to her bed and talk to her . . .

“What a sad picture, to have Marilyn in that darkened cave of a room so terribly unhappy. And there seemed that there was little, if anything, anyone could do to help her. What a terrible feeling of helplessness and hopelessness. My father didn’t seem to be able to help her. I knew she had been talking to him on the telephone. Nothing seemed to be able to help . . . She seemed like such a contrast. In a sense she was so childlike herself yet she was so streetwise and suspicious of things and could see the ulterior motives. She’d had such a rotten childhood, and now she had made it and it felt like if there was any fairness in the world, Marilyn should have it easy and good now.”

Hildi added, “She was bright and lovely and interesting, but there was something really very schizzy about her.”

“Marilyn didn’t want to interrupt the psychiatrist’s trip with her problems,” Mrs. Murray reported. “His son had made a point of requesting that Marilyn let him get through the speaking engagement in Switzerland and a side trip to Tel Aviv without calling him home.”

Dr. Milton Wexler was to be phoned during an emergency while Ralph Greenson was out of the country. “A Dr. Wexler was on call for Dr. Greenson’s patients,” Mrs. Murray remembered. “When he came out to visit Marilyn, he took one look at the formidable array of sedatives on her bedside table and swept them all into his black bag. To him, they must have seemed a dangerous arsenal.”

“It was clear that there was really no way Marilyn was going to make it through that picture without my father here or without some massive help,” Joan Greenson recalled. “Father flew from Switzerland to New York, New York to LA. He took a cab home. I remember greeting him at about 10 p.m. at the front door. He looked really tired. I took his suitcase into the house, and he found his car keys and went straight to the garage. He said he would just stop by and see Marilyn and would be back shortly.”

Dr. Greenson took up the story in his 1974 paper: “A colleague of mine [Milton Wexler] who saw her in that interval said that all his interventions were to no avail and he reluctantly suggested that I cut short my trip and return. I hated to interrupt my vacation and I doubted whether my return would be beneficial.”

It turned out to be very beneficial. In fact, the moment Marilyn saw Ralph Greenson after his early return to the United States, as the psychiatrist explained, “Her anxiety and depression lifted. It then became possible to work . . . on how she had used me as a good luck charm rather than an analyst. The talisman, the chess piece, served her as a magical means of averting bad luck or evil. It protected her against losing something precious.”
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Nevertheless, by June 22, 1962, Greenson was telling colleagues and friends that he was fed up with Marilyn Monroe. In letters to his friend Lucille Ostrow and fellow psychoanalyst Anna Freud, he complained about Marilyn having ruined his vacation and how, in light of her firing from
Something’s Got to Give
, his early return home had been a complete waste of time. Greenson wrote to Anna Freud, “This was a most frustrating experience, since now I was back home and she was feeling fine, but she no longer had to work and therefore I was free to return to Europe, which was impossible.”

On July 2, 1962, Freud replied, “I have tried to follow your fate in the newspapers and I saw that your patient was acting up. But I did not realize that this would interrupt your holiday and I do feel sorry for this. I wonder what will happen to her and with her.” Marilyn Monroe was now the subject of gossip among leading psychoanalysts.

Freud family maid Paula Fichtl relayed how she heard from Anna that Ralph Greenson was “the last person to phone [Marilyn] the night of her death. Later it is even claimed that he had killed Marilyn Monroe. In 1985, the Swiss newspaper
Blick
, which reprinted this allegation was sentenced to a fine—of which 10.000 Swiss francs went to the Anna Freud Centre in London.”

“That felt very good, winning my suit,” Hildi Greenson told private investigator Cathy Griffin.

“That was the story that she was shot in the heart?”

“Yeah, and they had to pay and I sent it to the Anna Freud Clinic in London. They had to give $20,000 . . . They had to pay me for my lawyers in Switzerland and the lawyer here, and I think I came out with the travel fare for going to Switzerland.”

Indeed, contrary to what Donald Spoto claimed in his Monroe biography, the assertions that she was murdered didn’t commence with the writings of authors Frank Capell (
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe
, 1964), Norman Mailer (
Marilyn: A Biography
, 1973), and Robert Slatzer (
The Life and Curious Death of Marilyn Monroe
, 1974). On January 5, 1964, the
Oakland Tribune
noted, “Following her death, Dr. Greenson was flooded with mail from haters who denounced him as a ‘criminal so-and-so . . . a Communist quack . . . a Hollywood murderer.’ There were so many threats to his life that Dr. Greenson was compelled to turn them over to his lawyer.”

Just over two weeks after Marilyn died, Dr. Greenson wrote to Dr. Kris: “And on top of it all, the notoriety, the press all over the world writing about it and constantly linking my name with this tragic event, and often so wrongly . . . I was besieged by phone calls from all over the world. I received many terrible letters from people, accusing me of being a murderer or going after her money.” Frank Capell’s controversial red pamphlet indeed was released two years
after
the threats to Greenson’s life. According to Greenson himself, these threats began within days of Marilyn’s death.
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DOES GREENSON’S OFFICIAL STORY CHECK OUT?

In late 1973, Ralph Greenson publicly stated that, on August 4, 1962, after leaving Marilyn’s house, he and his wife had dinner at the residence of a Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Alberts. However, a confidential source revealed to Jay Margolis that Greenson actually went to the home of actor Eddie Albert and his wife Margo. Albert would star in the 1963 movie
Captain Newman, M.D.
, based on Greenson’s own World War II experiences.

According to Greenson, he didn’t return home until “around midnight” and was tempted to call Marilyn but “didn’t want to wake her.” For years, his family has maintained that he did not receive a call from the Monroe home until at least 2:00 a.m. on August 5. The police report stated that Greenson arrived there shortly after 3:30. Dr. Hyman Engelberg then pronounced Marilyn dead at 3:35 or at 3:50 a.m., depending on whether the first or follow-up reports are to be believed.

Interestingly, Mrs. Murray blurted out to Sgt. Jack Clemmons, the first policeman officially on the scene, that Marilyn’s lifeless body was discovered around midnight, and Clemmons stated that neither Greenson nor Engelberg disagreed with this recollection. However, in 1982, when investigator Al Tomich of the District Attorney’s Office asked Engelberg about his arriving at midnight and then waiting several hours to call the police, the physician dismissed this as “Nonsense. Absolute, utter nonsense.”

Later, Clemmons noted how the three principals told Detective Sgt. Robert Byron a different story from the one he’d first heard: Mrs. Murray had called Dr. Greenson at 3:30 a.m. Living less than two miles away, Greenson told her he would be right over and instructed the housekeeper to call Dr. Engelberg. Greenson then arrived before Engelberg and, using a fireplace poker, broke the only unbarred window to Marilyn’s bedroom because, he claimed, her door was locked.

“The door was locked to the bedroom,” Hyman Engelberg said to Al Tomich. “Mrs. Murray first looked in through the window and saw her, and the way they got in was, I guess, through the window. Either they smashed a pane or turned a lock or were able to push it open. I don’t recall which.”

A photograph still exists of a man’s hand pointing at the broken window, proving someone could not reach in to undo the latch without cutting his or her fingers on the glass. According to the official police report, Engelberg stated that, within five minutes of receiving the 3:30 a.m. call from Mrs. Murray, he got dressed and drove to Marilyn’s home before then pronouncing her dead another five minutes later. However, this would have been impossible if one is to believe what the same physician claimed twenty years later.

“I was parked in the basement of the parking area of a small apartment house and somebody parked in back of me,” Engelberg recalled in a statement he made to the District Attorney’s Office. “That must have delayed me about ten or fifteen minutes . . . I was living in an apartment on Beverly Boulevard, just west of Doheny.”
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Contrary to the official police report, Joan Greenson wrote in her unpublished manuscript that the call to the Greenson home, alerting her parents that Marilyn was in trouble, was made “in the middle of the night,”
not
at 3:30 a.m.

“I went to bed around 8:00,” Joan recalled. “I fell asleep fairly quickly and didn’t hear my parents come home . . . I was awakened sometime in the middle of the night by the phone ringing. Then I heard my father . . . head down the stairs . . . Mother followed, and I heard the car drive away.”

“I was very worried, and my daughter was here and we immediately stayed up,” Hildi Greenson added. “We just went downstairs and sat around until my husband called me and said that Marilyn was dead.”

This contradicted what Joan wrote in her manuscript: “I must have been in my bed for maybe five minutes when I heard the phone ring, and I got out of bed and went back to my mother’s bedroom, and I knew it was Father on the phone. Mother turned to me and said, ‘It’s all over.’”
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