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MARILYN MONROE’S FINAL DAys
The last few weeks of Marilyn’s life were not just a straight drug-induced run to the grave. Some days she was able to pick herself up, and Truman Capote, lunching with her early in June, was surprised to note, “There was a new maturity about her eyes. She wasn’t so giggly anymore and she had never looked better.” Marylin had two last public engagements, a photo session for Vogue and the interview with Life.
Nobody knows what it is like to have all that I have and yet not be loved or know happiness. All I ever wanted out of life is to be nice to people and have them be nice to me . It’s a fair exchange. And I’m a woman. I want to be loved by a man from his heart as I would love him from mine. I’ve tried but it simply hasn’t happened yet.
I really resent the way the press is now saying that I’m depressed and in a slump, as if I’m finished. Nothing’s going to sink me although it might be kind of a relief to be finished with moviemaking. You think you’ve made it. But you never have. There’s always another scene, another film, and you always have to start all over again…. I want to be an artist and an actress with integrity; I really don’t care about the money, I Just want to be wonderful. She was dead less than a week later.
Of the 300 books that have been published about Marilyn since her death, fifty are full-length accounts of only the last week in her life and the multiple, conflicting, contradictory and often downright fantastical conspiracy theories that have grown up around her demise.
One of these claims that she was killed by the Mafia because she knew too much about a possible relationship with Frank Sinatra; another that the Kennedys somehow had her killed before she could spill the beans on the brothers’ sexual antics, time and again the CIA has been cited as a possible murderer murderer because her loose-cannon sexuality meant that she was altogether too directly plugged into the innermost secrets of the United States; and there are many who believe that the shadowy cares of her last weeks killed her for the contents of her jewelbox and safe. The following facts, however, are indisputable.
At about midnight on 4 August 1962, Marilyn went to her room, taking her personal telephone with her. She bade Mrs Murray goodnight and shut her door. When Marylin’s lawyer called he was told that Marilyn was in her bedroom but the light was still on. Mrs Murray says At about 2 a. m., she noticed that the light was still on and she became concerned. She knocked but could get no response and finally called the ambulance service to effect a forced entry. At 3:30 in the morning of 5 August, Marilyn was found dead, nude on her bed, one arm stretched out towards the telephone. The first coroner’s report declared that her death was due to “presumed suicide caused by an overdose of barbiturates.”
Marilyn went down like a battleship. Firing on her rescuers; it must also be admitted, though, that among those rescuers were doctors and nurses anxious to deep her totally dependent upon them and therefore inclined to allow her to abuse herself with whatever substance was available on or off prescription. The most likely cause of death, on balance and with the wisdom of almost forty years’ hindsight, seems to be that Marilyn did indeed swallow, quite possibly unintentionally in her already drugged state, the overdose of hoarded Nembutal barbiturates which rapidly killed her before she could once again rescue herself by calling either Mrs Murray or a friend by telephone.
However, this verdict does not rule out the fact that there were a large number of people who by now wanted her out of the way for one reason or another. In that sense, her suicide was one of the most welcome and well-timed acts that Marilyn ever succeeded in carrying through.
