The Strange, Still Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe

A special playboy report

The night Marilyn Monroe died, the whole world, it seems, was listening.

She had been living in her new house on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood for only five months, but the phones were tapped, and every room was bugged, including the bathroom. The attic, it would later be revealed, was stuffed with sophisticated electronic listening equipment.

It was August 1962, and Monroe was at a pivotal moment in her career; her movies were tremendous box office hits, and she commanded one of the highest salaries in Hollywood. At 36, Monroe enjoyed a level of fame unknown even among film stars, though she remained a troubled and lonely woman. To help her through her days, she had developed a predilection for sedatives and a growing co-dependence on her psychotherapist.

Monroe sought love from the world's most famous and powerful men. Frank Sinatra wooed her; Arthur Miller and Joe DiMaggio married her. She traveled with the Rat Pack, and that connection, with her beauty and desirability, gained her entrance to the highest levels of power in America, the social whirl around Robert and John F. Kennedy.

It was a badly kept secret in Hollywood and Washington that Monroe had been involved in sexual relationships with both Kennedy brothers, and that is what drew the wiretappers and surveillance experts to her new home. Most of the handiwork at Fifth Helena Drive had been done by the infamous Hollywood private detective Fred Otash, who said he was called to her home the night she died. Otash claimed actor Peter Lawford, a Rat Pack crony and the actress's liaison to the Kennedy family, hired him to go to Monroe's and sweep the place.

Otash knew what that meant; the detective had previously wired both Lawford's beach house and Monroe's Brentwood home at the behest of Jimmy Hoffa, the powerful boss of the Teamsters union, who was looking for dirt on the Kennedys. And that was just the tip of it. FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who loathed the Kennedys, had Monroe's house bugged under the pretense that her conversations with the attorney general could constitute a national-security breach. The CIA, it has been reported, also had the house bugged. Later, Otash, who died in 1992, revealed that Monroe had also hired him, to tap her own phones.

How could so many people be monitoring Monroe's every move in that sweet little hacienda-style home without our knowing with certainty what happened in the final hours of her life? Hers is now one of the world's most investigated lives and deaths in history, the subject of two police inquiries, numerous biographies and countless documentaries. Despite the intense scrutiny, unanswered questions and conflicting accounts remain about Monroe's last days and hours.

And new revelations continue to surface. On August 5, 2005, the 43rd anniversary of her death, Monroe--who would have been 79--again made headlines. The Los Angeles Times reported that former Los Angeles County prosecutor John Miner, who was present at the actress's postmortem, had in his possession transcripts of tape recordings Monroe made shortly before her death. On the front page of the Times, Miner, now 87, testified that these transcripts, taken together with Monroe's autopsy, showed in no uncertain terms that she did not commit suicide. Miner had given the transcripts to author Matthew Smith, who published parts of them in the 2003 book Marilyn's Last Words; Miner later talked to Playboy about the inadequate police investigations, his take on the missing lab evidence and his theory of how she died.

In addition, in a series of exclusive interviews with Monroe's and DiMaggio's friends and family, Playboy has discovered new information about the actress's final days that supports Miner's theory. This includes details from three sources that Monroe and DiMaggio planned to remarry on August 8, 1962, which became the day of her funeral, and that DiMaggio was the friend who advised Monroe to keep the detailed notes that became known as the "red diary," which disappeared from her room the night she died. DiMaggio, it turned out, told friends he went searching for the diary the day after Monroe died, but according to a knowledgeable source it ended up in the hands of a Kennedy family friend.

More details about Monroe and her last hours were revealed in interviews with DiMaggio's niece June, a close friend of Marilee, as June called her. Joe DiMaggio never spoke publicly about his ex-wife's death, but friends of the baseball great have furnished poignant new details from the very private legend that cast further doubt on the accepted version of events.

The official determination of Monroe's cause of death was suicide. Or rather, "probable suicide." Even Thomas Noguchi, the famed coroner, hedged his bets when signing his report. At the time it seemed a safe guess. For years Monroe was becoming increasingly addicted to sleeping pills and booze. Her relationships with men were a constant drama. She had no family to speak of, she never knew for sure who her father was, and her mother was confined to a mental hospital. She had tried suicide before--including, if you believe some reports, the weekend before she died, when she was ensconced in Frank Sinatra's Cal-Neva Lodge. And everyone knew of the breakdown after her marriage to Arthur Miller fell apart--just 18 months before her death--that landed her in the Payne Whitney psychiatric hospital in New York. Even DiMaggio, who was in love with her until the day he died, told friends she could quickly go from being on top of the world to being despondent. As psychological profiles go, Monroe's is a match for suicide.

And then there was the cover-up. There seems to be no doubt that the house was cleaned up, that possessions vanished and that possibly even the death scene was altered. The home was not secured until well after 4:35 A.M., when the first officer arrived at the scene, which had already been compromised by the presence of Monroe's housekeeper, Eunice Murray (who was doing laundry at that time of the morning and initially said Monroe was dead or dying at about midnight); lawyer Milton Rudin; Monroe's therapist, Dr. Ralph Greenson; her physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg; and press agent Arthur Jacobs and his employee Pat Newcomb. Neither Rudin, Jacobs or Newcomb was contacted for follow-up questioning. Even en route to the morgue, Monroe's body was briefly diverted to the Westwood Village Mortuary. Former LAPD chief Thomas Reddin later criticized the secrecy and the incomplete nature of the investigation. But all of that could just as likely fit the suicide (continued on page 82)Marilyn(continued from page 78) theory as the foul-play one. In those days studios controlled stars' images in life and death, and if Monroe had secrets, plenty of secrets, powerful people would have wanted to get rid of any trace of what she knew. Or recorded. Or wrote down.

We are left with a haunting photograph of her--lying naked on her stomach on her bed, partially wrapped in white sheets, with a phone receiver dangling from her hand, her face in a pillow, her hair a gorgeous mess of platinum blonde--taken on the morning of August 5, 1962. The phone cord leads out of the room; on the bedside table are pill bottles. This is what the Los Angeles Police Department found when called to the scene at 4:35 A.M. by Greenson. He was on the premises with Engelberg, who had pronounced Monroe dead at four A.M. from an overdose of barbiturates.

But even this photograph, part of the official scenario, has been contradicted, questioned and refuted for half a century. Was the night table really bare, as some witnesses reported, and then later covered with empty pill bottles? Did the water glass magically appear later? Was her body really found that way? And why was the housekeeper doing laundry at 4:30 in the morning?

John Miner has never disputed that Monroe died from an overdose of Nembutal, the highly addictive sleep aid of the time. But he claims that no evidence from her autopsy proved she swallowed 30 to 40 pills that night. His interpretation of Noguchi's analysis of her stomach contents and the condition of her organs led him to conclude she did not swallow those pills. Nor was there any evidence that she or someone else had injected the drugs; no needle marks were found on her body. That left a surprising theory: death by enema.

Miner's hypothesis--backed by some forensics experts, disputed by others--is that sometime on the night of August 4, 1962, Monroe was given a dose of chloral hydrate, a sleeping pill that would knock her out cold, and then was administered an enema filled with a toxic Nembutal solution that poisoned her liver and killed her within an hour.

But murder by enema? Actually, it has been done. Last February a Texas woman was indicted for negligent homicide for giving her husband a sherry enema that caused fatal alcohol poisoning. But more important, anyone who knew Monroe knew that she, like other female stars of her time, including Mae West and Joan Crawford, was fond of enemas. They were routinely used in Hollywood to purify the body of toxins, as a means to youthful skin and in some instances as an erotic thrill. To the question of whether Monroe could have administered the lethal enema herself, Miner says the potency of the drug makes that impossible; she would have passed out. (See "Somebody Killed Her," page 79.)

Miner's main disclosure has less to do with forensics and everything to do with the most riveting subject: Monroe's state of mind in her final days. In addition to serving as a deputy DA in Los Angeles at the time, Miner happened to be a social acquaintance of Greenson's. After Monroe's death and after seeing her cold body dissected on a slab in the morgue, Miner paid Greenson a visit. What he heard that day in 1962 from Monroe's well-known and highly regarded (but also controversial) shrink was explosive: hours of tape-recorded ramblings Monroe made in the days and weeks leading up to her death. (It has been established that she bought a reel-to-reel tape recorder in mid-July.)

Miner would wait four decades to divulge all the details of what he heard, in part because he promised the therapist he would never reveal the recordings' contents. But over the years aspersions were cast on Greenson, whom Miner greatly admired, and Miner asked his widow if he could finally come forward with what he knew. There are, to be fair, a few red flags about Miner's 40-year-old memories. Miner admits that when Greenson played him the Monroe tapes he neither recorded what he heard nor took notes but ran home and re-created from memory everything he'd heard. Because of that, what is purported to be Monroe's exact words should of course be tempered with the understanding that few humans could possibly re-create the precise wording from memory, even if the voice was Monroe's. (Greenson apparently destroyed the tapes before his death in 1979. See our excerpt, Marilyn Uncensored, which begins on page 80.)

Here was evidence, Miner claimed, that Monroe was not suicidal in the days preceding her death. His bombshells included the news that she was trying to dump Robert Kennedy (not the other way around), that she was (continued on page 192)Marilyn(continued from page 82) getting her career and personal life together and that her newfound strength was precisely why she posed more of a threat to the powerful men in her life. Oh, and she had a one-night stand with Joan Crawford. You can't make this stuff up.

But was it murder?

Everything about Monroe's last days has been shrouded in mystery and scandal. Did Robert Kennedy really visit her in the hours before her death? Did he break her heart, or was she trying to dump him--perhaps because she planned to remarry DiMaggio? Was she really over John Kennedy? Or was there a new boyfriend? Monroe's friend Hollywood columnist James Bacon, now 91, says, "She had a Mexican boyfriend at the time. I forget his name." He thought that was why she was suddenly running off to Mexico.

And what did all those listening devices turn up? Widely reported was the utterance she allegedly made to Lawford that night on the phone: "Say good-bye to the president."

Monroe's last months were turbulent. On May 19, just 11 weeks before her death, she famously sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to John Kennedy before 15,000 people at Madison Square Garden while wearing a dress so tight she had to be sewn into it. No one who watched--or saw the endless replay of that clip--could possibly doubt she had been intimate with the president. On June 1, her 36th birthday, she spent her last day on the set of Something's Got to Give. About a week later her studio, 20th Century Fox, sued her for breach of contract for missing too many days of shooting, embarrassing her in national headlines. By late July Monroe and the studio seemed to have resolved their differences, but she died before the movie resumed shooting.

The weekend before her death, Monroe was with Sinatra and the gang at Cal-Neva Lodge. Was she there for an intervention by her Rat Pack friends, as Lawford claimed? Was DiMaggio really watching her cavort naked by the pool from the balcony of the hotel next door because Sinatra wouldn't let him into the lodge?

Even the events of her final day have been told in multiple versions. We do know she had various phone conversations and several visitors. One of them was Playboy contributor Lawrence Schiller, who says he visited her that morning. "I stopped by her house on my way to Palm Springs to show her some photos from the shoot and to go over negotiations we were having for a front and back cover for Playboy," he says. "She was tending her flowers, and nothing was unusual about that day. She seemed completely fine."

By the afternoon, however, Monroe was despondent, according to her therapist, and she took to bed in the evening, taking the telephone with her and closing the door. She had been invited to a beach party at Lawford's house but declined to go.

Something changed her mood. Was it a conversation with Robert Kennedy? (Over the previous weeks she had made numerous calls to his office at the Justice Department and to the White House.) Was it the arrival of a box with a stuffed tiger inside--later found thrown on her lawn and photographed? According to Anthony Summers's Monroe biography, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, and Matthew Smith's Marilyn's Last Words, the tiger had been sent by friends of the Kennedy family as a warning to stay away from Robert. Yet others who spoke to Monroe that night say she sounded perfectly normal.

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"I know she was murdered," says June DiMaggio, the niece of Monroe's second husband and a close friend and confidant of the actress for years. June is 77 now and has waited half a century to tell what she knows. But she wanted to tell it all before she died: the story of the Monroe she knew, the Monroe she visited on the day of her death and what she knows about Monroe's last moments on earth, including the phone call she believes was interrupted by her killer or killers.

This month June is publishing her memoir, Marilyn, Joe and Me, co-written with Mary Jane Popp. Much of what June has to say is startling. She has never met Miner and wasn't familiar with his report, yet her independent recollections are hauntingly consistent with his theories. (Neither Miner, June or the DiMaggio friends who spoke to Playboy believe the Kennedys had any responsibility in her death.)

June has spoken on the record only once before, on the night of August 4, 1962, when the police arrived at her door in Beverly Hills. They had only one question: Where can we find Joe DiMaggio? June is certain the police came sometime between 11 P.M. and midnight, because her boyfriend had dropped her off at 10:30 P.M., and she had bathed and put on her pajamas before the knock at her door.

The timing of the cops' visit is the first surprise: Official police reports say the cops weren't called to Monroe's house until 4:30 on the morning of August 5. According to most reports, Eunice Murray claimed not to have discovered the body until at least three A.M., when she woke in the middle of the night and, alarmed by a light under Monroe's locked door and a phone cord going into her room, went outside, peered through the bedroom window and saw Monroe sprawled facedown on the bed. Murray called Greenson, who came to the house, discovered her dead, called Dr. Engelberg and then called police. But this time line has long been disputed as a tissue of lies to support the suicide theory. According to the autopsy findings and other reports, rigor mortis had set in sometime in the early hours of the morning, indicating she had been dead at least five or six hours. The question is, When was she really found? It seems clear that those hours were used to clean up the scene and rid the house of any evidence that could be used against a president, an attorney general or anyone else.

But June insists that police came to her door late on the night of August 4. "All I know is when they came to my house," she says, "a sheriff and a policeman trying to find Joe. I lived just a couple of miles from Marilyn. They asked, 'Are you June DiMaggio?' I said yes. 'Do you know how we can get in touch with Joe DiMaggio?' I said, 'Yes, he's in San Francisco, playing in an old-timers' game." She said she could probably track him down but asked why it was so urgent.

Then they told her the reason for their visit.

June had befriended Monroe when her uncle started courting the star. The two women got along; they were both actresses, close in age and "both Geminis," adds June. Both adored Joe, and both had bodies that could stop a clock. June's parents, Tom and Lee, who ran DiMaggio's Restaurant in San Francisco, were the best man and matron of honor at Joe and Marilyn's wedding. June and Monroe remained close friends after the divorce and even through Monroe's subsequent marriage to and divorce from Arthur Miller. One of the biggest misconceptions about Monroe is that she was most comfortable around men. She was very much a girls' girl, says June. As someone who grew up in foster homes and orphanages, Monroe longed for the family atmosphere the big Italian DiMaggio clan provided. June's memoir is filled with tender, loving memories of Monroe's visits to San Francisco, where Joe kept an apartment close to June's family. She writes of Monroe donning an apron and trying to learn how to cook Joe's favorite Italian dishes, her pain over not having children, her close relationship with June's mother--the last person to speak with her on the phone--and her yearnings for a normal life. Not to mention the revelation that Monroe, the biggest sex symbol of all time, "never did like sex." (See Body and Soul, page 82.)

She confided to June that she did it just to get through it. There were nights, says June, when Monroe would visit her after a casting couch session at the studio. "She used to come to my house, crying. Then she would take a douche in my bathroom."

"She felt dirty," says Popp. "And it was not only her," June adds. "Oh, honey, most of the stars under contract had to do that. Not only Marilyn Monroe."

Morris Engelberg, the executor of DiMaggio's estate and his longtime friend and lawyer (no relation to Monroe's physician, Hyman Engelberg), says Joe and Marilyn's relationship was quite unusual. "Their love was so special, on her side also, because whomever she married or went with, she always slept with Joe. They never stopped being lovers. That's what caused the divorce with Miller. She said Miller told her one day, 'You don't love me. You still love that man.' "

Monroe always knew she could count on DiMaggio whenever she was in trouble. Her calls were always to be put through, no matter what. He advised her on everything from her various heartaches to her studio contracts and played knight in shining armor on numerous occasions. She called DiMaggio from New York City after suffering a breakdown and attempting suicide when her five-year marriage to Miller fell apart in early 1961. Joltin' Joe showed up at the mental hospital and demanded that his "wife" be released. Says DiMaggio's close friend Dr. Rock Positano (a New York foot specialist who met DiMaggio when he treated his heel-spur injury), "He wasn't technically married to Marilyn, but he went in there and said, 'Listen, you give me my wife right now or I'll rip this place apart piece by piece.' " No wonder she still loved him.

Monroe's past suicide attempts were always pleas for help. So why didn't she call DiMaggio that fateful night?

"Because it wasn't suicide," says June.

Most crucial to this argument is that, according to Joe's closest intimates, the two were planning to remarry on August 8, 1962, the day of Monroe's funeral. DiMaggio had a dress made for her and purchased a new wedding ring from a Newark jeweler named Boots. (Well, not purchased; DiMaggio, who was notoriously cheap, never paid for much.) The ceremony was set to take place at Saints Peter and Paul, DiMaggio's Roman Catholic parish in San Francisco. According to June, Monroe was over the moon about remarrying. This time both parties wanted to get it right. They had learned plenty from their nine-month marriage, which ended soon after a furious DiMaggio watched Monroe stand over that grate in New York City, the flashbulbs popping while her white halter dress blew into the air, revealing among other things that she was not a natural blonde. According to June, her uncle had already been punishing Monroe with the silent treatment for other indiscretions. After three months she finally couldn't take it anymore. But they never fell out of love. This time she was going to be a better wife, says June, and he was going to be a more understanding husband. They even had plans, according to Morris Engelberg, to adopt a baby. To consider a child not genetically his "was huge for Joe," says Engelberg, "but he knew that Marilyn wanted more than anything to be a mother." Given her track record--several miscarriages at least--adoption seemed the only way to make Monroe happy.

All of which raises the question, Would a woman who was about to remarry the love of her life, the only man who was there for her unconditionally, kill herself on the eve of the wedding? Or had she gotten herself into something she wasn't ready for?

In the years that followed, DiMaggio had a hard time even speaking of Monroe. He was intensely private to begin with, and Engelberg and Positano, his two closest friends in the years before his death, knew never to bring up her name. But always her haunting presence was felt. DiMaggio would go into his "Marilyn mood," as some of his friends call it. "He would have these moments," says Positano, "when he would be having a great time with me, and then he would go absolutely dead silent. I'd say, Joe, what's the matter?' And he'd say, 'Aw, Doc, you know what's the matter. I'm thinking about my girl.' He used to call her that."

"No woman in the world will ever be loved the way he loved her," says Engelberg. "He loved her in life and in death."

"It was pretty heavy to be with him when he got into one of those moods," says Positano. "He wouldn't get mean, but he would get stone silent." Or he would turn on Ella Fitzgerald's "Embraceable You" in the car. "He used to tell me, 'Doc, that was our song.' And he'd play it over and over again. You could see he would be somewhere else." Usually he'd have the driver stop, and, says Positano, "he'd leave the car for about four or five minutes. You just sort of knew what was going on."

Sometimes he spoke of her funeral--how he arranged it and banned certain people from attending, particularly Sinatra, whom he referred to as "the pimp." He said to Positano, "Doc, I made sure none of those people who really killed her were there." Says Engelberg, "He said, 'You know, Morris, instead of kissing her at the altar, I kissed her in her casket.' "

Engelberg, who was at DiMaggio's deathbed, says the athlete's last words to him were not to feel sad about his dying. "I'll get to see Marilyn again," DiMaggio said.

But the very private DiMaggio confided something else to his two friends: "They killed her." He went to his grave believing the love of his life was murdered.

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Whom did he blame? And did he really think someone came in and killed her? From what DiMaggio told his friends, it seems most likely that he blamed a great many people for her death, whatever the actual means. "He never believed it was natural, let's put it that way," says Positano. "He would say either they killed her or they helped it along."

"He blamed the Kennedys, he blamed Sinatra, he blamed Sam Giancana," says Engelberg. "They gave her drugs. They gave her booze. They used her. Oh yeah, she was murdered. But when I would say, 'You know, Joe, if that was my wife, I would have gone after them,' he'd say, 'They're the Kennedys. They're too big. They're bigger than life. And why would I want to embarrass her?' "

Therein was the rub, say DiMaggio's friends. The thought of airing all of Monroe's sexual activity with the Kennedys--even if it somehow contributed to her death, even if it was a suicide--was too much for DiMaggio to bear.

But it's hard to believe that DiMaggio wouldn't have gone bananas if he actually thought it was murder. "Well, he did," says Positano. "I mean, for the rest of his life he went bananas. We're not talking about just an angry spurt that lasted three weeks or a year. We're talking about anger that lasted 40 years."

"Did he hate the Kennedys?" asks Engelberg. "Beyond anything you can imagine." Once he was invited to the Kennedy Center to speak at an event honoring "six people who gave their whole lives to helping the blind," Engelberg says. "And Joe wanted to go to this thing. He was the main speaker. But I had to get a contract, a written agreement, saying no Kennedy would be present at the Kennedy Center or else he wouldn't go."

He hated Sinatra even mores according to these two friends. Stories vary on what Monroe's actual relationship with Sinatra was. She spent a great amount of time at both his Palm Springs home and Cal-Neva Lodge, a resort Sinatra owned with Chicago mobster Giancana on the California-Nevada border. Others claim that after a short, torrid fling, they became like brother and sister. Members of the Rat Pack considered her one of the gang, and it was not unusual for Monroe to prance naked around Sinatra's pool.

On the weekend before her death Monroe went to the lodge to spend several nights with Sinatra and his cronies. Is this what a woman does 10 days before her wedding? Not surprisingly DiMaggio wasn't thrilled with the idea; he flew out to Cal-Neva to rescue her from Sinatra. "It was a very sad weekend," says Engelberg. "They wouldn't let him in the gates." DiMaggio checked into a nearby resort.

Lawford told actor Leon Isaac Kennedy (no relation to the president's family) that what happened at Cal-Neva that weekend was an intervention, though he didn't use that word. "They didn't call it an intervention in those days," says Kennedy. "But I remember Peter saying, 'We were all trying to get her to feel better.' He went as far as to say, 'Hey, we'll get you some other parts.' He said she was like one of the fellas and that they were trying to help her because she had been so down in the dumps and despondent. They were trying to rally her spirits."

A week later she was dead.

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At 10:30 A.M. on the last day of her life, Monroe called June, asking her to bring over one of her specialties. "She loved this pizza that I made, and she called me up and said, 'Oh, Junie, can you make me one of your pizzas?' " June made the pizza and drove the couple of miles to Monroe's place, arriving between noon and 12:30 P.M. She had a key to the back kitchen door (Monroe entrusted several friends with keys to her house) but didn't need it. Monroe answered the door, smiling, in her typical daytime outfit of pedal pushers and a blouse. They talked for just a few minutes. Monroe told her she wanted to call June's mother (who was even closer to Monroe than she was to June) to see if she would take a quick jaunt to Mexico with her the next day. Monroe had spotted beautiful wrought-iron patio furniture there on her most recent trip across the border and wanted to buy some for her new house before the wedding. She also purchased a full set of china, "simple, with gold trim and a few flowers," that June now possesses. She was determined, says June, to be the perfect wife this time.

June kissed her good-bye and went off for a day of tennis and then dinner with her boyfriend.

When she returned home around 10:30 P.M. she tried to call Monroe to see how the pizza was but got a busy signal. That wasn't unusual; Monroe loved to talk endlessly on the telephone (unlike Joe, who limited his phone conversations to one-minute daily check-ins, unless of course Monroe needed more time).

Approximately an hour later came the knock at the door.

June was in her pajamas when she opened it to find two cops. When they told her why they were looking for her uncle, she fell to pieces but had the presence of mind to call her mother. She knew Joe was going to her parents' place after the old-timers' game. When her mother answered, she was already sobbing as well. "Because she already knew," says June--and not from any official call.

According to her daughter, Lee DiMaggio was the last person to speak to Marilyn Monroe. While they were chatting about their trip to Mexico, Monroe suddenly screamed. This is what Lee told June, the cops and later Joe. "Marilyn screamed and dropped the phone," says June. Her mother also led her to believe Monroe had screamed a name first and that more than one person had entered her bedroom. But Lee took to her grave precisely what she had heard and what Monroe had said. It seems incredible that she never shared those details, but as Lee repeatedly said to June, "I want you all to live." June claims her mother even told the cops, "You put me on a lie detector and I'll lie like hell!" By all accounts Lee was a simple, honest person. What horrible thing could she have heard that she was too afraid to repeat?

DiMaggio told his friend Engelberg that he returned to Monroe's house after her death, looking specifically for one thing. He wanted to get the red diary, but it had already been removed. "See, she slept with Bobby and Jack, okay?" Engelberg says. "And Sam Giancana." DiMaggio, he explains, knew about that but still loved her. "And when she stopped sleeping with them, Bobby would still call her up every night and tell her what was happening. 'We're getting Giancana; we're getting this one.' Joe was a very funny guy; he wrote everything down. He said to her, 'Write it down in this red book. Just keep track of what he's saying.' So when Joe got to the house he went looking for the red book, the famous red diary."

DiMaggio told Positano similar things. "He said, 'Everything that everybody wants to know was in this little book I called the red diary.' "

Even if it was suicide, plenty of people might have wanted (or wanted to destroy) the contents of Monroe's diary. The question of who took it has remained a major mystery. But Playboy has learned that Lawford confided to at least one person that he had the book. Leon Isaac Kennedy, who starred with Lawford in the 1981 film Body and Soul, became close friends with the actor and Kennedy in-law. "Sometimes at the end of a long day Peter might have a few drinks, and he would say things he might not share at other times," says Kennedy. On one of those nights "he was reminiscing about Marilyn and sharing the fact that he had a great love for her and that she was a very sensitive but troubled person and that his heart always went out to her. She saw him as a kind of big brother, someone she could regard as a security blanket. He said, 'She had trouble sleeping, you know. Sometimes I would talk to her for hours until she fell asleep.' Then he went on to say she talked to him several times that last night. And he told me he was the one who went over there and cleaned up the house after she died, before the police or doctors or anybody else got there." Lawford told Kennedy he had his own key. "He looked at me with that little wink he can give and said, 'That famous little diary that would have caused so much trouble? That's what I was supposed to find. And I did.' "

Kennedy adds that Lawford also told him "there were various secrets of the heart and other frustrations that Marilyn had written down that could have caused a lot of embarrassment." Leon Isaac Kennedy took that to mean embarrassment for the Kennedys.

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June knew nothing about the red diary, but she too returned to the house on Fifth Helena Drive, at 5:30 in the morning. In a state of shock and grief, she wanted to reclaim a keepsake teddy bear that she and a friend, Barbara Klein, Monroe's voice coach, had given the actress after she told them she had never had one as a child. According to June, Monroe slept every night with the adorable white bear, which was dressed in a strand of pink pearls. "I don't know why, but I just felt I had to go there, and I had to get the teddy bear," June says.

When she arrived at Monroe's house crime-scene tape was all around it, but no one was inside. The world and the media had yet to learn the shocking news. "The house was dark and empty," says June. She used her key to open the kitchen door. Her empty pizza pan was sitting on the counter. She went to Monroe's bedroom with a flashlight. The bear was still on the bed. On the night table, she says, was a full bottle of Nembutal. She doesn't remember the bed being stripped. She took the bear and on her way out the kitchen door reclaimed the pizza pan.

A few days later June attended Monroe's funeral, riding in the limousine with her uncle Joe and Joe DiMaggio Jr., who also spoke with Monroe the night of her death, reportedly about a broken romance of his; he died shortly after his father. June remembers refusing to look at Monroe in her casket. "I just couldn't look at her that way," she says. "She was supposed to be in a wedding dress that day."

Shortly after, says June, Joe showed up at her parents' door in San Francisco with a huge suitcase. Inside were all the things Monroe had left at his Beach Street residence: gorgeous negligees, hair curlers, stunning dresses she wore to entertain the troops in Korea. He couldn't bear to keep them.

DiMaggio would outlive Monroe by 37 years but never got over her. After DiMaggio's funeral in San Francisco, Engelberg remembers returning with the family to Joe's place on Beach Street. "It's funny. I used to go to his house a lot, but he never let me into his living room. I didn't know why. But the day he died, his grandkids took me there. First they said, 'Take off your shoes.' There was all-white carpeting and nothing on the walls but a picture, an eight-foot oil painting of Marilyn's face. Just her face. I guess he didn't want me to see that. I never realized how beautiful she was."

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Today the faithful continue to pay tribute to Marilyn Monroe at her burial plot in Westwood Memorial Park. Every week for years after her death, DiMaggio saw to it that a bouquet of flowers was delivered. But like everything in Monroe's life and death, even that was part myth. "He never paid for the roses," says Engelberg, chuckling. "We never got a bill. People did this stuff for him if he signed enough baseballs."

Numerous devotees of Monroe's--including John Miner--believe the only way we may ever know for sure what happened to Monroe is by exhuming her body and using modern forensics to reinvestigate.

But even then we may never know the mysteries of her heart.

The transcripts contained bombshells: Marilyn was trying to dump Robert Kennedy, she was getting her career and personal life together, and her newfound strength threatened the powerful men in her life.

Body and soul

Marilyn Monroe's adoring multitudes imagined that all she thought about was sex, but that was true only of the characters she played. And Marilee, as I called her, confided in me that she didn't even like making love.

Since Marilyn was always welcome in our home, I always kept a terry cloth robe for her to lounge in after a shower, along with a clean T-shirt and pair of her own jeans for her to change into. One time when she arrived I saw an extra sadness on her face. I didn't want to pry but sensed that it was after one of the times she'd been forced to succumb to the wishes of one of those degenerates who ran the studio.

Marilyn couldn't afford emotions when she had to sleep with wrinkled old men to survive in the business. She had to protect herself by virtually turning them off during those times--as if she were playing a part in order to remove herself from the horror of the situation. When these highly placed, high-priced moguls owned her body and soul, she couldn't afford a life of her own. There were times, she told me, when she came home exhausted from a day's shoot and some powerful old geezer would telephone and her skin would crawl.

After some of the horrors of her studio sex she would come over and stay in our shower for an hour or more. She wanted to wash away the terrible experience she'd had to endure. Then she'd sit down to dinner and ask for second helpings. I think she wanted, consciously or not, to gain enough weight that maybe they'd leave her alone.

Once when I asked Marilyn, "Did you have an orgasm?" she simply asked back, "What's that?" And she wasn't being funny!

My mother, Lee, was very close to Marilyn. Once I told her that Marilyn was so sexy and that I wished I could be more like her. This time Mother got angry, and it slipped out: "Poor Marilyn hates sex," she told me. "Because she's a sex symbol, they think she's in bed with everyone."

Actually, she wasn't fond of sex even with Joe, though she did love him. She felt only an obligation as his wife--at least at the beginning. But I think through his patience and affection she did learn how to enjoy the beauties of lovemaking.

Excerpted from Marilyn, Joe and Me, by June DiMaggio, as told to Mary Jane Popp, copyright December 2005, Authentic Creations Inc., Atlanta, Georgia. Special thanks to Robert W. Otto, president and CEO of Marilyn Monroe Exhibits LLC, for his assistance.

"Lawford looked at me with a little wink and said, 'That famous diary that would have caused so much trouble? That's what I was supposed to find. And I did.' "