What Marilyn Monroe said before her mysterious death: ‘I have many shocking secrets about the Kennedys. I could surprise the world.’

Buddy Greco, a jazz singer and pianist, is captivated by the beauty of a woman he sees outside Frank Sinatra’s bungalow in Lake Tahoe. The woman turns out to be Marilyn Monroe, who greets him with a warm hug. Greco describes Monroe as witty, smart, and fragile during their brief encounter, along with their mutual friends, Peter Lawford and his wife Pat, who are all guests of Sinatra for the weekend.

The guest list also includes other Hollywood celebrities and individuals associated with the Mafia, such as Sam Giancana. Sinatra, Lawford, and their circle are concerned about Monroe’s well-being, especially in light of her complicated relationships with the Kennedys, which have left her feeling used and abandoned. They hope that a change of scenery away from Los Angeles may help lift her spirits.

In the recent weeks leading up to the gathering, Monroe has been struggling with depression and isolation. She has limited her interactions to her housekeeper, Mrs. Murray, and her frequent visits to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and physician, Dr. Hyman Engelberg, reflecting a challenging period in her life.

That night, after Greco walks off stage after performing The Lady Is A Tramp, his big 1960 hit, he spots an unsteady Marilyn standing in the doorway, clearly intoxicated, defiant and angry. ‘Who the f*** are they all staring at?’ he hears her say. This is not the star we’re used to seeing, he thinks.

Sinatra is quick to react. He calls over his bodyguard, who scoops up the tiny blonde and carries her away. Greco is worried about her and follows her outside to make sure she’s all right.

He finds Marilyn sitting alone by the pool in the moonlight, looking pale and out of it, so he escorts her back to her bungalow.

She passes the next hours suspended in a fog. She may have nearly overdosed.

She may have fallen out of bed. She may have been unknowingly assaulted. She can’t remember.

The next day she is flown back to Los Angeles with Lawford on Sinatra’s private plane. She stumbles off, barefoot and bedraggled, and gets into a limo waiting to take her home. On his way home, Lawford stops to make a lengthy phone call from a pay phone. Marilyn’s a loose cannon, and there are people he has to warn.

Marilyn is now on a mission, complaining to anyone who’ll listen that the Kennedy brothers used her. She calls her friend Bob Slatzer, fuming. ‘I’m going to blow the lid off this whole damn thing! I’m going to tell everything! That the Kennedys got what they wanted out of me then moved on!’ When she hears that Bobby will be attending a legal conference in San Francisco, 350 miles north of Los Angeles, she plans to confront him there.

Bobby arrives in San Francisco with his wife Ethel and four of their children. From home, Marilyn tries several times to contact him at his hotel, but to her fury he’s not answering her calls.

Friends attempt to calm her down and talk her out of holding the threatened press conference. Try to be a little more discreet, Slatzer cautions. Everyone is worried about her state of mind. If she talks to the press in her current state, who knows what she’ll say?

She is being monitored in case she flips. Dr Greenson comes over once every day, sometimes twice. Lawford invites her to near-daily gatherings. Her publicist Pat Newcomb finds pretexts to sleep over at Marilyn’s house. One night they go out to a restaurant, Marilyn drinks too much, then swallows sleeping pills in an attempt to get some rest.

But sleep is elusive, not least because she is repeatedly woken by the shrill ringing of the white telephone by her bed, her personal line. ‘Leave Bobby alone, you tramp,’ an unknown woman repeatedly curses at her. ‘Ethel?’ asks Marilyn. The line goes dead.

Sid Skolsky is a journalist with an inside track on Hollywood and has been friends with Marilyn for decades. He calls to check on her and she starts in on her problems with the Kennedys. She’s seeing one of them, she insists. Tonight.

Later recordings from a secret surveillance microphone that has been hidden in her house reveal that a meeting did indeed take place. The equipment has been installed by a former vice detective named Fred Otash who makes his living as a ‘fact verifier’ for gossip magazines.

On tape he has Lawford and Bobby deep in conflict with a highly emotional Marilyn, who’s demanding an explanation as to why Kennedy was not going to marry her. According to Otash, it is ‘a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises Bobby made to her. She said she was passed around like a piece of meat.’

Bobby, then US attorney general, loses control of his tone of voice. He screeches that he’s not leaving without finding what he came for – Marilyn’s little red book where she kept all her notes about ‘political things’ she discussed with him and, before him, his brother.

‘Where the f*** is it?’ he yells at her. ‘We have to know. It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it.’ Marilyn refuses to answer. Otash reports: ‘She was screaming. Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbours from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.’

Left on her own, Marilyn lies in bed with her telephone. For the moment she’s calmed herself with some pills, but later that evening she’s on the phone and rambling about ‘betrayals… men in high places… clandestine love affairs’.

She tells one caller, ‘I know a lot of secrets about the Kennedys. Dangerous ones.’ To another she claims to have news that ‘will one day shock the whole world’.

Lawford rings. She was supposed to have dinner at his house tonight. As he speaks to her, he is alarmed by the drifting quality of her voice. He shouts at her, trying to draw her focus. Marilyn answers, ‘Say goodbye to Pat [his wife], say goodbye to Jack and say goodbye to yourself, be…’ Then silence.

It is August 5, 1962, and Marilyn’s housekeeper Eunice Murray wakes suddenly, fear lodged in the pit of her stomach. It is 3am and she is worried without knowing why. It could just be the stifling heat. She gets out of bed, fumbling for her pink slippers and matching dressing gown, opens her bedroom door and crosses the corridor to Marilyn’s bedroom.

The door is shut, but under it is wedged the cord of the telephone that Marilyn uses for the interminable calls she makes most nights. Lamplight seeps out from the crack under the door. She listens. The silence concerns her. No giggles. No breathy whispers. Something isn’t right.

Eunice tries the handle, but the door is locked. That’s unexpected. Marilyn is fearful of locked doors. Her door is only locked when she’s with a gentleman friend. Tonight she went to bed alone.

Starting to panic, Eunice runs into the next room, grabs another phone and dials Dr Greenson. He lives nearby and had been at the house earlier. When he picks up, she blurts out: ‘It’s Marilyn. Her door is locked. I can’t raise her.’ He is immediately on his way.

Eunice grabs a metal poker from the fireplace in the sitting room, goes out on to the lawn and stops in front of Marilyn’s bedroom. The light is on but the curtains are drawn. One window is slightly ajar. Standing on her tiptoes, she pushes the poker through the crack and jabs at the top of the curtains, edging one aside along the rail, exposing an eerie scene.

Marilyn is lying there on the bed on her back, her eyes shut, her lips slightly parted. Naked. The alabaster skin. The bleached blonde hair in loose curls around the famous face. The sheets are wrapped around her calves. Her hand still clutches the telephone, which hangs off the hook. She looks so peaceful. Has she overdosed again? Is she simply asleep? Or is she actually dead?

A car comes screeching down the road and Dr Greenson runs across the lawn. ‘Is she breathing? Has she moved? Can you see her?’ he asks. He sees the poker, grabs it and smashes the bedroom window, then swings his leg over the windowsill and climbs in.

He leans over Marilyn and presses gently on the side of her slim neck. Please, God, let there be a pulse. He presses harder. The flesh feels tepid, not as warm as he would like. Maybe there is something? There! Then he realises it’s his own pounding heartbeat. ‘We’ve lost her!’ he cries out, his knees buckling beneath him.

He unlocks the bedroom door from the inside to let in the weeping housekeeper, then he counts the pill bottles on the nightstand. Eight. Ten. Twelve. Fifteen. All opened. There’s a trail of white pills scattered across the carpet, but a 50-capsule bottle of Nembutal is completely empty. The customary dose is one tablet a night.

Is this what she wanted? Dr Greenson can’t believe it. She was in a low mood when she called him yesterday evening, complaining about her personal life and that she couldn’t sleep. But he’s sure she wasn’t suicidal.

The front door slams. Running feet hammer across the terracotta tiles in the hall. ‘Where is she?’ demands Dr Engelberg, Marilyn’s personal physician, who’s also been rung by Eunice.

He bursts through the bedroom door. ‘Is she breathing? Have you checked for a pulse? Are you sure she’s not still alive?’

‘She’s gone,’ replies Dr Greenson, with a slow shake of his head. Dr Engelberg examines the body with his stethoscope, then agrees. ‘There’s no sign of foul play, no blood or wound,’ he declares, ‘but she is most certainly gone.’

He sighs and picks up the empty bottle of Nembutal. ‘I gave her that prescription only three days ago,’ he says, ‘and only after she begged me.’

Dr Greenson interjects crossly. ‘I thought we’d agreed we were weaning her off medication. No more drugs.’

‘We had,’ acknowledges Dr Engelberg, ‘and I’d got her usage right down. Until her last appointment, when she wouldn’t let me leave without prescribing 50 capsules.’

He scans the labels of bottles. ‘Chloral hydrate. Jesus,’ he whispers. ‘Knockout drops. Where did she get 15 bottles of that? I’d never prescribe that. Mix it with alcohol and Nembutal and…’

He looks down at Marilyn on the bed and shakes his head. ‘I think we should cover her up, don’t you? Or at least roll her on to her front? Give the place a little decorum.’ They roll her over and cover her and call the police.

‘Marilyn Monroe has died. She’s committed suicide.’ It’s 4.15am and Sergeant Jack Clemmons of the Los Angeles Police Department presumes it is a hoax. ‘Who did you say was calling?’ he asks. ‘I’m Dr Hyman Engelberg, her physician. She’s committed suicide.’

‘I’ll come right away,’ says Clemmons, but it is almost 5am when he arrives. He’s radioed for back-up. He hopes they won’t be long. It’s never pleasant attending a suicide. He knocks on the front door but it takes a while for someone to answer. He can hear whispering and shuffling sounds from inside. Finally, a woman answers. ‘I am Marilyn Monroe’s housekeeper,’ she tells him. ‘Or I was… She’s committed suicide.’

Eunice Murray takes him to the bedroom where Dr Greenson sits with his head in his hands and Dr Engelberg paces the carpet. There are pills and handbags and clothes on the floor, which is covered with shattered glass.

The officer looks down at Marilyn’s body, covered in a sheet. She is lying on her front. One arm hangs off the bed, her hand in a claw. Her fingernails are bitten to the quick.

Clemmons furrows his brow. This isn’t right. Marilyn’s legs are perfectly straight. Her face is buried in a pillow. He’d like to get a look at her mouth, check for signs of foam or vomit. Suicides are usually messier than this. The normal signs of distress or struggle are not present.

Clemmons pulls back the sheet. There are the distinctive blonde curls, the smooth curves of her shoulders, the luminous white skin of her back. It feels almost indecent to carry on. He covers her quickly.

There’s a knock at the front door and standing on the step is a young man dressed in workman’s dungarees. He’s Mrs Murray’s son-in-law and she’s called him to fix the window that Dr Greenson smashed to get in. As the handyman steps inside he tells the sergeant there are newsmen outside the house. Twenty or 30 of them. ‘Has something happened?’ he asks.

The secret is out. Hollywood’s screen goddess is dead. Clemmons’s radio call for back-up was overheard and newspaper editors are waking reporters, demanding they get over to the house. News trucks are soon parking up along the road.

Inside the house, the police set up an office in the kitchen as more officers join the investigation. A police photographer documents Marilyn’s bedroom.

A gossip columnist manages to get in and take photos of Marilyn on the bed. Pretending to be from the coroner’s office, he’s only removed when the real team arrives.

Everyone wants a glimpse. Of what? The body? A curl of blonde hair hanging off the back of the stretcher? The mortuary director crosses Marilyn’s arms over her chest and covers her in a blanket before she is lifted on to a gurney.

Dr Engelberg accompanies the sombre procession to the van waiting outside. ‘Oh, dear, dear Marilyn,’ he sighs as the van disappears through the gate to the explosion of a thousand flashbulbs.

In an interview Marilyn gave eight years earlier, she had said, ‘I knew I was the kind of girl they found dead with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.’

It seemed her prediction had come eerily, horribly true.

Or had it?

Was it an accidental overdose?

Or was it deliberate, making it suicide? Was it, perhaps, murder? The coroner who first pronounces on the case gives a ‘presumptive opinion’ that ‘death was due to an overdose of some drug’. He assigns the matter to a ‘suicide team’.

But homicide detective Jack Clemmons believes what he had witnessed was ‘the most obviously staged death scene I had ever seen. The pill bottles on her table had been arranged in neat order and the body was deliberately positioned.’

The actions of others raise questions, such as Lawford’s quickly delivered instruction to investigator Fred Otash to ‘do anything to remove anything incriminating’ at Marilyn’s house that could connect her to Jack and Bobby Kennedy.

During an interview with the BBC, Mrs Murray says words to the effect of, ‘Oh, why do I have to keep covering this up?’ The interviewer asks: ‘Covering what up, Mrs Murray?’ ‘Well of course Bobby Kennedy was there,’ she replies.

There is also something odd about the autopsy, when a junior medical examiner, Dr Thomas Noguchi, is appointed rather than the more experienced chief examiner.

He detects neither needle marks, indicating a drug injection, nor signs of physical violence. The autopsy confirms blood toxic with barbiturates and a stomach empty of food particles, even the yellow dye that coats Nembutal capsules.

But he never performs the full range of organ tests. He admits later: ‘I didn’t follow through as I should have.’

John Miner, who heads the medical-legal section in the LA District Attorney’s Office, is convinced that someone administered an enema to Marilyn containing the lethal combination of Nembutal and the sedative chloral hydrate. He considers Dr Greenson an unofficial ‘suspect’.

As questions like these remain unanswered, one wonders if Marilyn Monroe will ever rest in peace.

For her funeral, her make-up

artist Whitey Snyder performs his final duty. He applies eyeliner. Blush to her cheeks. A red lip. He dresses her in an aqua-blue dress by Italian designer Emilio Pucci.

But her body doesn’t look right. Too flat. Marilyn without a bust – she’d have freaked, Snyder thinks, and adds bits of cushions and newspaper to give her the perfect shape.

© James Patterson, 2025 Adapted from The Last Days Of Marilyn Monroe by James Patterson and Imogen Edwards-Jones (Century, £20), to be published July 3. To order a copy for £18 (offer valid to 12/07/25; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.