Free The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe by Donald H. Wolfe

the time is inconsistent with the statements of all those who are known to have spoken with her between 7:30 and 10 P.M. : Joe DiMaggio, Jr., Henry Rosenfeld, Jeanne Carmen, Sidney Guilaroff, and José Bolaños. If Lawford is to be believed, then the call when Marilyn apparently lapsed into unconsciousness must have occurred after 10 P.M.
    In 1986 Lawford’s guest “Bullets” Durgom confirmed that Marilyn’s last conversation with Lawford took place sometime after 10 P.M. Durgom stated, “It was at about ten or eleven that Lawford tried to call Marilyn back and could not get through.” According to Durgom it was after that when “the lawyer [Mickey Rudin] and somebody else went over to the house…and it was too late.” Lawford’s maid, Irma Lee Reilly, confirmed “there was no word of worry over Marilyn” before ten o’clock.
    According to Joe and Dolores Naar, who were also guests at Lawford’s that evening, when they arrived at approximately eight o’clock there was no indication of alarm or concern about Marilyn. The dinner, which turned out to be Chinese takeout, wasn’t served until about nine. The Naars recall that Lawford had been drinking heavily, and the party ended early. They left the Lawford house shortly after ten. The Naars are adamant that, during the two-hour time frame when they were with Lawford, no alarm was raised about Marilyn Monroe and not a word was said about a phone call in which she asked Lawford to “say good-bye to the President.” Dolores Naar recalled, “It was a very light, up evening. Duringdinner there was one call from Marilyn that Peter took, but he wasn’t gone long, and when he returned, he calmly said, ‘Oh, it’s Marilyn again’—like she does this all the time. His attitude didn’t change. There was no indication that anything was wrong. I picked up on nothing like that.”
    The Naars knew Lawford and Marilyn well and insist that if anything alarming had happened while they were at the Lawford residence, they would have known about it. The Naars recalled that they returned to their home “well before eleven” and were getting undressed for bed when they received an urgent phone call from Lawford. “He was in a panic about Marilyn,” Dolores Naar stated. “Marilyn had called him and was incoherent. He was afraid she had taken too many pills and was in trouble….”
    Clearly, this was the call in which Marilyn had lapsed into unconsciousness. The call hadn’t occurred at “approximately seven-thirty,” as Lawford stated to the press and later to the police. Marilyn’s alarming call occurred after the Naars had returned to their home, sometime after ten and “well before eleven.”
    The Naars recalled that Lawford’s urgent call to them occurred at approximately ten-thirty. “We lived near Marilyn’s house, and he asked Joe to run over there and see what was wrong.” Joe Naar had already undressed for bed, but by the time he had put his clothes back on and was hurrying out the door to drive to Marilyn’s house, Lawford called back. “He said that he’d spoken to Marilyn’s doctor,” Dolores recalled, “and he had said that he had given her sedatives because she had been disturbed earlier and she was probably asleep—‘so don’t bother going,’ Peter told Joe.”
    The pair of phone calls to the Naars is perplexing. Lawford stated that when Marilyn’s voice seemed to fade away, he yelled at her over the phone in an effort to revive her, then the phone went dead. When he called back he received a busy signal. In the 1962 press reports, Lawford said he had the operator check the line, and was told that the phone was off the hook and there was no conversation. Were both of Marilyn’s phones off the hook with no conversation on either line? This would have been the case if,