Max Collins - Bye bye,baby

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.

“Your treatment of Marilyn is riddled with unethical behavior. Whether that rises to the standard of you getting your license yanked, I couldn’t say. But you took Marilyn on, even though a lover of hers, a man she nearly married during this period, was already your patient-Frank Sinatra. You took Marilyn on even though Mickey Rudin, your brother-in-law, was her attorney. You placed a former psychiatric nurse of yours, Eunice Murray, in your patient’s home as a spy. You inserted yourself into your patient’s business affairs, and-”

“Need we go over this ground again, Mr. Heller? I won’t argue I may have crossed certain ethical lines, but nothing that would cost me my license to practice.”

“Yeah? What if your first loyalty wasn’t to your patient? What if you were really working for the Kennedys?”

“What?”

“Frank Sinatra knew about Marilyn and Jack. Mickey Rudin knew. Back around ’60, when you took over Marilyn’s case, Frank was very close to the Kennedys. Was placing you as Marilyn’s shrink a way to keep track of her state of mind?”

Now the disgust was openly displayed. “Perhaps you should return the gun to your hand, Mr. Heller. Because that’s the only way I will sit for such insulting nonsense.”

“Well, it’s actually the lesser of two evils. The other possibility is that you’re a Soviet spy.”

His dark eyes showed white all around. “Oh, my God -you really do need to leave, Mr. Heller. I have tried to be cooperative…”

He’d asked me to, so I got the gun back in hand. Didn’t exactly point it at him. Didn’t exactly not point it at him.

“Your Communist ties are well known by Uncle Sam,” I reminded him. “You and Dr. Engelberg. I’d like to talk to him, too.”

“You can’t. He’s in Switzerland.”

“What, making a deposit? You Beverly Hills Commies kill me. So, with your ties to Eunice Murray and her husband-who I understand built this very house we’re in-and ol’ silver-spoon Communist Vanderbilt Field and a whole passel of fellow travelers, you’ve surrounded Marilyn with caring, Communist attention. But what if you have arranged to be Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist so you can hear the things that Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy shared with this eager-to-learn young woman? And didn’t you even help her craft questions to ask Bobby, for her to write the answers down in her notebooks?”

“You can’t believe this.”

I let the gun droop. “Actually, I can’t. It is absurd-are you working for the Kennedys, or the Soviet Union? Or maybe Jack and Bobby are Commie spies. Even Ian Fleming couldn’t sell this crap. But you couldn’t take that chance, could you?”

“What chance?”

“That your very real Communist associations would come out. That’s why you had to go along with whatever the Kennedys’ favorite at the LAPD, Captain Hamilton of the Intelligence Division, asked. And what was asked of you by the CIA or FBI or Secret Service or whatever mix of spooks came around to haunt Marilyn’s hacienda that night. You had no choice. You even, at first, became the spokesman for the suicide crowd. But that finally caught in your craw, didn’t it?”

He said nothing. He was looking past me, either at the window or maybe into his conscience. I considered offering him mine-the nine-millimeter one.

“It’s not often I have to give a doctor a bad prognosis,” I said, “but here it is-today somebody pulled me in and told me bad things about you. Some true, some false or at least exaggerations. I have a reputation, as you noted, for what these gents call ‘rough justice.’”