The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

An Overdose Because of JFK?

On April 10, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was scheduled to meet with the screenwriter of Something’s Got to Give, Henry Weinstein. The day before, while at Fox for makeup and costume tests, she looked absolutely beautiful and performed quite well for many hours. However, for her follow-up meeting with Weinstein, she was late. That wasn’t surprising. When he telephoned her to find out when she might be arriving, he was alarmed to find that there was no answer. After repeated attempts, she finally picked up the phone. “Oh, I’m just fine…” she told him. However, she didn’t sound “fine” to him at all. Her voice was slurred and she seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. Alarmed, Weinstein told her that he would be right over and hung up. Then he called Dr. Greenson and the two rushed to Marilyn’s Brentwood home. There they found her in bed, out cold.

“She was almost naked,” Weinstein recalled. “And she was almost dead, as far as I could see. She was at least in a drug coma. I couldn’t imagine what it was that had happened, why she did this to herself. The fact that she had been so upbeat one day and then in this state the next day was very disconcerting. Somehow, Dr. Greenson revived her. I was so shaken, I could not get over it. He kept coming over to me and saying, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.’ It was as if he had seen this so many times, he was not alarmed by it. But for me, it was traumatic.”

Later, it was determined that Marilyn had taken what could have amounted to a deadly combination of Nembutal, Demerol, chloral hydrate, and Librium. “Immediately afterward, I tried to get Fox to delay the movie. I said, ‘Look, this girl is in no shape to make a movie. She needs time. She’s very sick. She has severe mental problems.’ The studio said, ‘No. The movie goes on. If we had stopped production of a film every time Marilyn Monroe had a crisis, we would never have gotten a single movie out of her.’

“I don’t think I ever got over the shock of finding her that way,” said Weinstein. “You don’t get past something like that easily. I spent hours trying to understand what had gone so wrong. I thought, well, [George] Cukor hadn’t shown up to direct the costume tests the day before and maybe she was unhappy about that. Maybe she thought it was a slap in the face, or a rejection. But… I don’t know… it had to be something more.”

It was something more. One source who was close to Marilyn Monroe at that time and who asked for anonymity rather than risk the possibility of retaliation from any member of the Kennedy family summed it up this way: “JFK. That’s what was wrong. She’d just been jilted by the president of the United States. Do you really think that after all she’d been through with moviemaking she was going to try to kill herself because a director hadn’t shown up for a day’s work at the studio? It was Kennedy. That’s why. Kennedy.”