In the light of the three-quarter moon on this clear August night, the two-story Monterey-style Spanish colonial, with its floor-length cantilevered balcony and thickness of trees out front, played games of light and shade, the stucco cut by dark wood trim, greenery glimmering with a slight breeze, ivory touches here and there, splotches of black elsewhere.
Here, on Franklin Street in Santa Monica, lived Dr. Ralph R. Greenson and his wife, Hildi (their son and daughter off at college); they enjoyed a nice backyard hilltop view of the ocean a few miles west, the Brentwood Country Club and golf course nearby. Maybe they belonged, unless it was restricted.
On a clear night like this, you had a nice backyard view of the Pacific Palisades, too. And I can report this because the back way was how I entered the house. There were glass doors off the garden patio, with an easily picked lock, and if Greenson had an alarm, it was a silent one. I was prepared to take my chances.
The Greensons were out for the evening, though they should be home soon. I’d followed them to La Scala-Marilyn’s favorite Italian restaurant, by the way-where their mid-evening reservations indicated they weren’t planning to take in a movie. I supposed a jazz or folk music club was a possibility.
Still, I figured they’d be home soon.
No dog greeted me, so the dog biscuit laced with chloral hydrate (a nice ironic touch, I thought) went unused, stuck in a pocket of my black zippered Windbreaker. Which went with my black slacks, black polo, and black Keds-I looked like a cross between a ninja and a tennis coach. The nine-millimeter Browning was in my waistband.
A few lights were on and I was immediately struck by how the living room-with its open rough-hewn-beamed ceiling, big fireplace trimmed in colorful Mexican tiles, and antique wooden table-resembled Marilyn’s on Fifth Helena. The decor of the big room, which took up half of the first floor, had clearly influenced her.
The kitchen had more of those tiles, but the den was a small, cozy, predictably book-lined affair, with a massive old desk with wormholes and lots of character. A typing stand beside the desk with a stack of manuscript pages indicated a work in progress. A black couch was opposite the desk along a shaded window. Was this for home visits by patients?
I stretched out on the couch, fairly sure I wouldn’t fall asleep. I had the nine-millimeter in my right hand, draped across my lap. Maybe Greenson would find that significant; he’d studied with Freud, after all. But sometimes a nine-mil is just a nine-mil.
The sound of a garage door opening stirred me-despite my confidence, I had gotten drowsy, dangerous for a housebreaker-and I could hear them coming in and talking in soft, muffled tones about nothing special. They were in the living room, just beyond the cracked den door.
His wife said she was going on upstairs to sleep, and Greenson, in that first tenor touched by both Brooklyn and Vienna, said he’d be up soon. He wanted to do a little writing.
To his credit, he didn’t yell in surprise or fear, seeing me. Not even in outrage at his home being invaded. He was in a black-and-white houndstooth sport coat, pretty snazzy, a gangster-ish black shirt with white tie, and gray slacks. The tie he’d been in the process of loosening as he entered his den.
“I guess I should have expected this,” he said.
“Why? It was just this evening I decided to stop by. I was planning a night out with my son.”
“This is about me refusing to see you.”
“I never got that far, to be refused.”
He shut the door, shrugged. “Well, it’s fair to say I’ve been avoiding you. I know of your reputation, Mr. Heller, but I hardly think you’re here to do me any harm.”
“Don’t be too sure.”
“If you were going to kill me, you would not do it where my wife would be an innocent victim in whatever confused scenario you have contrived.”
I sat up on the edge of the couch. “Wow. That’s very analytical of you, Doc. Have a seat.” I indicated his desk with a friendly wave of the nine-millimeter.
“You don’t need that gun.”
“I was thinking of asking you about that, Doc. See, this is the gun my father used to kill himself. He was disappointed in me for joining the Chicago PD. He was a leftist, a real true Marxist, so you can identify. And ever since, this is the only gun I’ve carried. I like to call it the only conscience I have. What do you make of that, Doc?”
He had seated himself in his comfortable leather chair, which swiveled and rocked. But he wasn’t rocking. The dark eyes in his somber face-made more mournful by the bandito curve of black mustache that provided such stark contrast to his white hair-were trained on me. His hands were folded. He appeared relaxed. He wasn’t.
“I don’t think you’re a good candidate for therapy, Mr. Heller,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because you seem rather too attached to your neurosis. I would say, on some level, in certain instances at least, it provides a sort of engine for your activities.”
“Bingo. Do you mind if I get comfortable?”
“Certainly not,” he said, dryly sarcastic. “You are, after all, a guest in my home.”
I got up, moved the couch around so I could face him more easily, and stretched out again. The weapon in hand I kept against my side, away from the door. He frowned, noting this.
“In case your wife comes checking,” I explained. “Just say I’m a patient. Emergency situation.”
“I wouldn’t be entirely lying, would I?”
“Not really.”
He shifted, settled in the chair, somehow found a sardonic smile for me. “Now, what can I do for you, Mr. Heller?”
“You can answer some questions, in a while… but first, just do what makes you the big bucks-listen. No note-taking necessary.”
He nodded in acceptance.
“Now, you can interrupt or interpose a thought or question at any time. You and I, Doc, we don’t stand on ceremony. We share a common goal, or at least we once did.”
His eyebrows went up questioningly.
“Marilyn’s well-being,” I said. “She was your patient, and she was my client. And I believe you did care about her. That you did try to help her. I mean, you are in a sense the hero of this story-you saved her from a number of overdoses, I understand. You weaned her off drugs. You helped build up her confidence and self-worth.”
“I’m not a hero, Mr. Heller, but I did do those things.”
“Trouble is, you’re also an egomaniac, at least as big a one as me-that’s a layman’s usage, Doc, not a diagnosis-plus you are one controlling son of a bitch. That’s my diagnosis, by the way. You tried to better yourself through your famous patient. You wheedled and wormed your way into aspects of her life that should have been off-limits-interfering with her movie studio, putting a personal spy in her home, even controlling her interaction with people like Ralph Roberts and Whitey Snyder, who were always supportive influences.”
Greenson sighed. “I did those things as well.”
Was he playing me?
“And, Mr. Heller, I crossed other boundaries of the patient/doctor compact. I often brought Marilyn into my own home, made my family her surrogate one. This I think may have been ill-advised, but it was, as you say, Marilyn’s well-being I sought to nurture.”
“I don’t see anything wrong with that,” I admitted. “She was an orphan kid who always wanted a family. She wanted a daddy. You were it for a while… till she fired your ass.”
That got a rise out of him. Or a frown, anyway.
“She did not fire me as her psychiatrist.”
“What then?”
“The last time I saw Marilyn, she informed me she’d fired Pat Newcomb, which I thought was an excellent decision, incidentally, as well as Eunice Murray, which I considered unfortunate, because Eunice was, to use your word, supportive of her. I suppose I was ‘fired,’ too, in a sense… but only as what she called her ‘de facto agent.’ She was very smart, Mr. Heller. She knew what I didn’t, or hadn’t admitted-that I was out of my depth, trying to help her in the career department.”
“Sounds like maybe she’d finally shaken her worst dependency. And I don’t mean drugs.”
“You mean,” he said quietly, “me.”
“I mean you, Doc. She comes to you to cure her insomnia, and you prescribe total dependence on you. You give her twenty-four-hour service. You make house calls. You were the drug she was in danger of overdosing on.”
The sardonic smile returned. “And… as you say-she finally shook that dependance. I believe that last day of her life, though unpleasant, should have been a turning point.”
“Well, it was a turning point, wasn’t it? A turn into Westwood cemetery.” I waved off his good intentions. “You called it suicide, Doc. Every interview you’ve given, whether to the cops or the press, has it suicide.”
“And yet it wasn’t suicide.” His eyebrows were up, but nothing quizzical about it. “You needn’t bother making the case for me, Mr. Heller. I know it wasn’t suicide. I’ve read the autopsy results.”
“So are you prepared to say it’s murder?”
He sighed heavily. “I’m prepared to say-I have said in my interview with Deputy D.A. Miner and another with the so-called Suicide Squad-that Marilyn was in no way despondent, and that she was a poor candidate for suicide.”
“Those statements haven’t been made public.”
“That’s not up to me, is it? Mr. Heller, in the four days preceding her death, Marilyn took three business meetings, bought a ten-thousand-dollar Jean Louis gown, twice ordered deli food, and purchased one hundred dollars’ worth of perfume.”
Chanel, no doubt.
He was saying, “Over those few days, Marilyn met with me for eleven and a half hours, and they were good sessions, healthy sessions, with the expected ups and downs, but…” He shook his head, chuckled glumly. “The bittersweet truth, Mr. Heller, is that Marilyn was finally making spectacular headway in therapy. She was on her way to achieving a degree of security for the first time in her life. And she was ecstatic about the possibilities of the future.”
“Was she ecstatic at your last session? After her fight with Bobby Kennedy?”
“That was rough. That was difficult. But we are not talking here about unrequited love-no. She had already decided that she was moving on from the Kennedys.” He frowned. “Understand, she found it gratifying to be associated with such powerful and important people. But she felt used and betrayed, and she insisted on being treated respectfully. Bobby Kennedy barged in that afternoon, making accusations, demanding she hand over tape recordings and notebooks, and generally treating her like… chattel.”
“So who wouldn’t flip out?”
“Indeed. But any notion that she would have gone public with what she knew about the brothers, well, it’s nonsense. So is the notion that this confrontation would send her deep into a well of despondency.” He sighed. “Mr. Heller-would you put away the weapon? And would you allow me to play you a tape recording?”
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.’”
Now his eyes met mine. “I don’t follow you, Mr. Heller.”
“Somebody, CIA or FBI or, yeah, even Secret Service, grabbed me and tried to sell you to me as Marilyn’s killer. Thinking I would do something rash, like break into your house and put a bullet in your brain.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I do kid around. But not this time. They thought they could play me. Manipulate me into taking you out. Play me a phony tape and watch me dance. Chances are, I would have wound up either dead or arrested for your murder. Maybe Hamilton is sitting out there in an unmarked car, waiting for a gunshot. Anyway, in somebody’s eyes, you would make a good corpse and I would make a better patsy.”
He thought about that. “What can I do?”
“I would write everything down or record it, essentially a full confession, and let everyone know… start with Hamilton… that should you have a fatal accident, that information will go public. Public in the way they thought Marilyn was going to.”
Now his smile bore no disgust. “That is good advice, Mr. Heller. You may not be as ‘crazy’ as you seem.”
“First, hearing that from a psychiatrist is kind of a relief. Second, I got out of the Marines on a Section Eight, so don’t be too sure.” I stood, tucked the nine-mil in my waistband, zipped the jacket over it. “You mind if I go out the front door?”
“Please.”
“Sorry for the intrusion, Doc.”
I was halfway out the den when he said, “There is no way in my lifetime, Mr. Heller, that I can ever make up for this-for aiding the very people who likely took that sweet child’s life…”
“You’re right. Probably isn’t.”
“I don’t really know if I will ever get over it, completely. And I’ll always wonder if there was some way I might have saved her.”
I shrugged. “You might try therapy.”
And left him there.