Page 97 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

It’s a simple, private service.

Among the twenty-five mourners invited are her half sister, Berniece; studio workers; her favorite limo driver, Rudy Kautzsky; Ralph Roberts, her masseur; Miss Emmeline Snively, who first contracted Marilyn for the Blue Book Modeling School; the Strasbergs; Dr. Greenson and his family; Eunice Murray; Pat Newcomb; and Grace Goddard’s family. They file into the chapel where eulogies and Scripture passages are read over her flower-draped coffin.

DiMaggio puts out word that no members of the Rat Pack—or the Kennedy family—would be allowed entrance. Marilyn’s attorney Mickey Rudin complains that it’s unfair that DiMaggio keep all her friends away, to which DiMaggio answers: “If it weren’t for those friends, she would still be alive.”

Whitey Snyder acts as a pallbearer, but first he fulfills his long-ago promise to Marilyn that he would do her makeup while she was “still warm.” He applies eyeliner. Blush to her cheeks. A red lip. He and his wife dress her in the aqua Pucci dress that she wore to greet the press at the Continental Hilton Hotel in Mexico City.

But her body doesn’t look right.Marilyn without a bust—she’d have freaked,Synder thinks, adding bits of cushions and newspaper to give her the perfect shape.

Hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff, who’d spoken to Marilyn on the night she died, is too overcome to dress her platinum hair one last time. She’s buried in the wig she wore to filmThe Misfits.

Before the casket is closed, Joe DiMaggio kisses his ex-wife on the forehead. “I love you, I love you,” he repeats. He attends alongside his son Joe Jr., in military dress. Joe Jr. had been one of the last people to speak to Marilyn on the night she died. “If anything was amiss, I wasn’t aware of it,” he says. “She sounded like Marilyn.”

Marilyn’s most recent ex-husband, Arthur Miller, doesn’t attend the funeral. He can’t leave his heavily pregnant third wife, Inge Morath. He instead sends flowers on behalf of him and his two children, Jane and Bob, whom Marilyn also adored.

His sentiments mirror DiMaggio’s. “Instead of jetting to the funeral to get my picture taken I decided to stay home and let the public mourners finish the mockery,” Miller writes on August 8, in an unpublished essay about the anticipated mourners “weeping and gawking” over “this lovely girl who at last you killed.” “Not that everyone there will be false, but enough. Most of them there destroyed her, ladies and gentlemen.”

Truman Capote pens a tribute to the friend who’d inspired his classic character, Holly Golightly. On the day of Marilyn’s funeral, Capote writes to literary critic Newton Arvin, “She was such a good-hearted girl, so pure really, so much on the side of the angels.”

Says Billy Wilder, “Nobody else is in that orbit; everyone else is earthbound by comparison.”

“M.M. was late for everything—but much too early for death,”Varietymourns.

The Vatican City weekly,L’Osservatore della Domenica,writes that “for all the million words written about the death ofMarilyn Monroe, perhaps few people said the prayer for repose of her soul.”

Albie Pearson does say a prayer.

The Los Angeles Angels outfielder who escorted Marilyn to the Dodgers Stadium home plate on her recent birthday is on a road swing in New York.

“I go down to the lobby to get a morning paper and there’s the headline,MARILYN MONROE COMMITS SUICIDE.

“I didn’t save Marilyn but I could save others. I had to save others. So I prayed and turned my life over to God.”

“I feel I’m just getting started; I want to do comedy, tragedy, interspersed,” Marilyn had told George Barris in July.

“The happiest time of my life is now. As far as I’m concerned, there’s a future and I can’t wait to get to it—it should be interesting!”