For death looked lovely in her lovely face.’ At the time, though, it’s safe to assume that Petrarch was not uppermost on his mind. When he’s asked how Marilyn Monroe looked in death, Noguchi, who has a fondness for poetry, quotes the Latin poet, Petrarch: ‘It’s folly to shrink in fear, if this is dying. I just assumed it was someone else who had the same name.’ But when he walked into the autopsy room and lifted up the sheet that had been placed over the naked body, any doubts were swept away.
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‘Even then,’ says Noguchi, ‘I didn’t think for a moment he meant the movie star.
It was only after he had read the report that someone told him that she was better known as Marilyn Monroe.
Various bottles of pills, including an empty bottle of the sleeping pill Nembutal, had been found close to her body. When Noguchi looked at the police report, he saw that the dead woman was 5ft 4in tall and weighed just over 10 stone. But for reasons that still puzzle him, this did not happen. In prominent cases, the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr Theodore Curphey, invariably conducted the autopsy himself. He was, he says, rather taken aback by the request. There was, Noguchi was warned, a good deal of press interest in the case. She had been found eight hours earlier in a small house in Brentwood – the victim, it appeared, of a drugs overdose. Perhaps none stranger than what happened on the morning of Sunday, Augwhen Noguchi, then a junior medical examiner, reported for work at the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office.Īs soon as he arrived, he was told that the Chief Medical Examiner wanted him to perform an autopsy on a young woman. And what a strange, often terrible, story these hands have to tell. When he closes his eyes, it looks as if he is in prayer. He has long, delicate fingers and as he talks he folds them together. Marilyn Monroe, Robert Kennedy, Sharon Tate: Dr Thomas Noguchi, Hollywood’s coroner to the stars, tells all about the dark age of Hollywood homicide.Īs you talk to Thomas Noguchi, it’s hard not to glance down at his hands.