Eunice Murray
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Eunice Murray (1902 - May 3, 1992) was the housekeeper of Marilyn Monroe, who found the actress dead at home on August 5, 1962. Discrepancies in her accounts of the hours which led up to the discovery of Monroe's body have helped fuel speculation that her death was suspicious.
Born Eunice Joerndt in Chicago and raised in Urbana, Ohio as a Swedenborgian, she was educated at the Swedenborgian Urbana School and Academy, which she left at age sixteen in 1918. In 1921 she married John Murray and went on to have three children with him: Jaquelyn, Patricia and Marilyn. By the end of the Second World War in 1945 the Murrays were living in Santa Monica in a Monterey-style five-bedroom house, which, after she and her husband separated, Eunice sold to psychiatrist Ralph Greenson in 1946. Greenson and other psychiatrists subsequently hired Eunice Murray as a support worker for some of their most prestigious clients.
In 1961 Greenson advised Marilyn Monroe to recruit her as a housekeeper, and Murray took up residence with Monroe. Murray located the house in Brentwood, California in which Monroe was to spend the last months of her life, and after they moved into it began (according to the testimonies of Monroe's friends) reporting to Greenson on Monroe's daily activities. In an attempt to assert her independence from Greenson, Monroe fired Murray in May 1962 but shortly afterwards rehired her. However, in August 1962 when Murray requested a month's holiday, Monroe granted it, paid her, and asked her not to return. Murray's last contracted day of work was Saturday August 4, 1962.
Marilyn Monroe was found by Murray in the nude, dead in the bedroom of her Brentwood in Los Angeles home clutching her telephone sometime in the wee hours of August 5, 1962. Many days later, when Murray attempted to cash her last paycheck from Monroe, it was declined and marked "deceased." This check, one of the last that Monroe ever wrote on her Roxbury Drive Branch account at City National Bank in Beverly Hills, is today on display at the Hollywood Entertainment Museum in Hollywood in Los Angeles.
After Monroe's death, Murray lived quietly in various locations in West Los Angeles. For many years she rented a guest cottage in Santa Monica from relatives of the late actor, Richard Cromwell from the mid-1960s until the mid-1970s. There, she pursued her many interests, including sewing, macrame, horticulture, Astrology, babysitting, and letter writing. In the mid-70s she married Franklin Blackmer, a Swedenborgian minister, and moved east with him to Bath, Maine. After his death, she returned to her family in Southern California, living close to Monroe's former home on Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. Later, she lived with her family in Tucson, Arizona, until her death in 1992.
She published a memoir in 1975, Marilyn: The Last Months (co-authored by Rose Shade) and repeatedly gave interviews to biographers and journalists writing about the circumstances surrounding Monroe's death. Details in her account have been questioned since 1962 and have lead theorists to suspect that these and other irregularities may conceal evidence of a homicide. Repeated investigations, however, have yet to find evidence which supports this view.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, by Donald Spoto (1993)
- Marilyn: The Last Months, by Eunice Murray, with Rose Shade (published in paperback by Pyramid Books, 1975)
