Max Collins - Bye bye,baby

“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-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.”