Free Marilyn & Me by Lawrence Schiller Page B

been Mickey Rudin, Marilyn’s attorney. He was walking beside another man, who was leading Marilyn’s dog out of the house. Earlier, Marilyn’s body strapped to a gurney, beneath a coroner’s blanket, had been wheeled out a side door. Marilyn—so alive before my cameras—was now dead. She was being taken to the coroner for an autopsy.
    Photos of that day showed me dressed in a white short-sleeved shirt and dark-colored slacks with only one camera around my neck. My attempts to remain professional were to no avail. I just stopped taking pictures and returned to my car. I don’t even remember whether I went home or just hung out with Woodfield.
    Months later, it would be confirmed that Marilyn spoke on the phone with Peter Lawford on the evening of her death. Joe DiMaggio’s son would tell friends that he called her asking for advice about his girlfriend. FBI files released four decades after her death revealed that in Los Angeles Bobby Kennedy had borrowed a car that afternoon and had driven over to see Marilyn, though he was known to be in Northern California that night. When you string these facts together, it didn’t seem like Marilyn was on the brink of taking her life.
    Later on the afternoon of her death, I went to my studio to develop my film. When I opened the door, I found an oversize envelope on the floor. It was the one I had givenMarilyn. It was now marked to my attention. Someone had slipped it through the large mail slot in the door. It was eerie. It took me a while to open it, and when I did, I pulled out a single print. Someone had written on the back: “Send this to
Playboy
, they might like it.” Years later I was able to confirm it was Marilyn’s handwriting. The agreement with
Playboy
for the purchase of the poolside photos of Marilyn was concluded in September 1962, but Hefner, not wanting to exploit the circumstances of her death, decided not to publish them until the January 1964 issue of
Playboy
, which appeared in late November 1963, ironically the week of President Kennedy’s assassination.

    Both
Life
and
Paris Match
had assigned me to cover the events surrounding the tragedy over the next few days, though I wasn’t the only photographer they assigned. Marilyn’s body was at the mortuary in Westwood when I got a call from Billy Woodfield. He said he had a way in and asked if I wanted to go with him to take pictures—the last pictures anyone would ever take of her. I told him flat out that I had no interest and hung up without saying good-bye. Why capture someone who was so vibrant and beautiful as a lifeless corpse? I was sure that someone would take that picture, though, and I was just as sure that it would be an ugly picture.
    In the days before the funeral Joe DiMaggio visited Marilyn’s body at the funeral home in Westwood. Whitey did her makeup, and Gladys Rasmussen—her hairdresser from her early days at Fox—did her hair. Missing at the services at the Westwood Village Mortuary were many who had worked with her and loved her. Her
Some Like It Hot
co-stars, Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, were not there. The directors George Cukor, John Huston, Billy Wilder, and Elia Kazan were not there. Her first husband, Jim Dougherty, and her third, Arthur Miller, were not there. Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford, Dean Martin, and Wally Cox were not there. The Kennedy brothers were not there. The word was that DiMaggio had made sure that those he thought had destroyed her were not invited to pay their respects.
    The Strasbergs were there, and Lee Strasberg delivered the eulogy. He called her “a legend.” He described her as “a warm human being, impulsive and shy and lonely, sensitive and in fear of rejection.” He talked about her hopes for the future and spoke of her “luminous quality—a combination of wistfulness, radiance, yearning—that set her apart and yet made everyone wish to be part of it.”
    Of the pictures I took that day, the one that resonated for me was of Joe DiMaggio and