Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Love and kisses,

  Marilyn

  P.S. Slogans for late ’60:

  ‘Nix on Nixon’

  ‘Over the hump with Humphrey (?)’

  ‘Stymied with Symington’

  ‘Back to Boston by Xmas — Kennedy’

  Obviously this was the letter of someone who either knew their politics, or — as was likely the case with Marilyn — someone who had been giving themselves a crash course in current affairs.

  Marilyn by now talked regularly with the Greensons, whose politics were quietly liberal. They thought Marilyn quite radical. ‘Marilyn was passionate about equal rights, rights for blacks, rights for the poor,’ recalled Joan Greenson. ‘She identified strongly with the workers, and she always felt they were her people.’

  Years earlier, when she had first plunged into her self-education through reading, Marilyn expressed admiration for India’s leader, Nehru. She felt Cuba’s Fidel Castro should be given a chance to show whether he really intended to permit democracy.

  In the spring of 1960, her name headed a list of Hollywood figures, including Marlon Brando, Gene Kelly, Shirley MacLaine, and Peter Lawford, sponsoring SANE, the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. Asked by an interviewer what dreams or nightmares she had, Marilyn responded, ‘My nightmare is the H-bomb. What’s yours?’

  Marilyn had a healthy skepticism, which might not have seemed so healthy to right-wingers of the time, about U.S. foreign policy. In the summer of 1960 she telephoned long distance to Rupert Allan, one of her press aides, to discuss the morning’s newspaper headlines. She was irritated that more prominence had not been given to a story about an American naval aircraft trespassing in Soviet airspace. Moscow claimed the plane was spying, while Washington said it was merely conducting an oceanic survey. This assertion of innocence came just weeks after a far greater furore, over the downing by the Russians of a CIA U-2 plane, piloted by Gary Powers. The U.S. government had at first claimed, falsely, that the U-2 had only been engaged in weather research.

  Marilyn wanted to know why this fresh story, about the naval aircraft, was being treated as minor news. Allan, a Navy veteran, replied that this time, perhaps, the U.S. government was telling the truth. ‘I don’t know, Rupert,’ Marilyn said. ‘I don’t trust us.’ On the other hand, said Allan, Marilyn ‘loved being an American. She was very pro-America, naively sometimes.’

  Marilyn was a registered Democrat. In April 1960, with the primaries under way, the Democratic town committee in Roxbury, Connecticut, where she and Arthur Miller were residents, named her as an alternate delegate.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ said a committee spokesman, ‘if Marilyn could be a delegate to the convention?’ The gesture was not entirely serious, but on the eve of the convention a Los Angeles newspaper reported that ‘Marilyn Monroe’s own Democratic friends are urging her to attend.’

  *The Markels lived in the same building as the Strasbergs and Marilyn’s current New York psychiatrist, Dr Marianne Kris.

  31

  IN THE SECOND WEEK of July 1960, meeting in Los Angeles for the first time in forty years, the Democrats gathered to choose their candidate. The Kennedys, of course, were there in force — brothers John and Robert, and their father, Joseph, the latter ensconced in the Beverly Hills mansion loaned to him by one of the great movie stars of his own era, Marion Davies.

  Of Marilyn Monroe there was not a sign, nor was she mentioned, except behind the scenes at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Fred Karger, the musician Marilyn had wanted to marry twelve years earlier, refused to play at a ball attended by John Kennedy. He withdrew his entire band, said Karger’s first wife, Patti, because he ‘had heard of Kennedy’s fooling with Marilyn, and it appalled him.’ The Democrats made do with Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland instead.

  Marilyn was not to be seen for a good reason: she was in New York during the brief hiatus between finishing Let’s Make Love and starting The Misfits. Ralph Roberts, the actor who at this time became her masseur and friend, was giving her a massage at the 57th Street apartment when news came through that Kennedy had won the nomination.

  Two days later, as the sun began to set, a weary Kennedy stood in the Los Angeles Coliseum to declare: ‘We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier — the frontier of the 1960s — a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. … I am asking each of you to be new pioneers on that New Frontier.’

  By now, the evidence suggests, Marilyn had flown to Los Angeles and was with Kennedy on his night to triumph.

  That night Peter Lawford threw a party for Kennedy, and borrowed the head bartender from Romanoff’s, the Beverly Hills restaurant owned by one of Marilyn’s oldest friends. The bartender, Ross Acuna, was a man used to watching the famous at play, and he had a long memory.

  Acuna said of the party on the night of the Coliseum speech, ‘I saw Sammy Davis coming in with Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t get the drift, but I was a bartender; you see a lot of things, you keep your mouth shut. But pretty soon here comes the Kennedy boy, from making that speech at the Coliseum. In fact when he ordered his drink he never told me what he wanted — he wrote it down because his voice was gone from making so many speeches. He used to drink daiquiris. Soon I saw that Monroe and the Kennedy boy were pretty close together. Sammy Davis? I think they just asked him to bring Monroe in.’

  Jeanne Carmen, then Marilyn’s neighbor and confidante at the Doheny apartment, also said Marilyn met Kennedy that night. Her source is Marilyn, who mentioned it months later. Taking together Acuna’s statement, and Carmen’s, it seems the information given to the District Attorney’s investigators may have been well-founded.

  Peter Summers, the Kennedy campaign official who had seen Marilyn with Kennedy earlier in the year, now saw them again. He noticed that Marilyn’s lack of confidence around Kennedy had evaporated. ‘I think that the next couple of times I saw them together, right after the nomination, she seemed so much more comfortable.’

  If Marilyn did indeed see Kennedy at the Convention, she did so in the midst of her turmoil over Yves Montand and the collapse of her marriage to Miller.

  Later, on the set of The Misfits, Marilyn asked British correspondent W. J. Weatherby what he thought of Kennedy. Weatherby replied cautiously that he preferred Kennedy to Nixon. Marilyn, who struck Weatherby as ‘mischievous … excited,’ said how fine it would be to have a President who was so young and good-looking.

  ‘You mean he has a Hollywood image?’ asked Weatherby.

  ‘You must admit,’ Marilyn replied, ‘it’s better than having old uglies who have no brains or beauty.’

  Marilyn now told Weatherby she wanted Kennedy to win in November. He did, of course, and just a day later Art Buchwald wrote:

  Let’s Be Firm on Monroe Doctrine

  Who will be the next ambassador to Monroe? This is one of the many problems which President-elect Kennedy will have to work on in January. Obviously you can’t leave Monroe adrift. There are too many greedy people eyeing her, and now that Ambassador Miller has left she could flounder around without any direction.

  Few, except her psychiatrists and closest friends, knew how desperately Marilyn was floundering. She was now in that solitary three-month period before the ordeal at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic. Miller was gone, Montand was finally rejecting her, and Marilyn was in a narcotic nose dive. She found some solace in occasional visits to the Actors Studio, and it was there she bumped into reporter W. J. Weatherby again. The Englishman suggested a drink, and thus began a series of conversations any journalist would have envied.*

  Weatherby and Marilyn met several times in the coming weeks in a nondescript, now defunct, bar on New York’s Eighth Avenue. Over the first drink, Marilyn eyed Weatherby’s notebook warily, then decided to trust him. ‘Put me in the notebook if you like,’ she said, ‘but don’t write about it now. Do it when I retire!’ Weatherby duly scribbled a record of their conversations in two shorthand notebooks, and honored Marilyn’s embargo till long after her d
eath. In context, her comments on the Kennedys are revealing.

  A month after the election Weatherby got a curt response from Marilyn when he ventured that even John Kennedy did not talk sense all the time. ‘Oh, he does,’ came Marilyn’s quick riposte.

  Joan Greenson, daughter of Marilyn’s psychiatrist, recalled that Marilyn ‘liked to have everything black or white, right or wrong, good or bad. Her intensity of feelings made it, at times, difficult to have discussions.’ This was something Weatherby now discovered.

  In January 1961 Marilyn arrived for their meeting in a state that had Weatherby worried. She said she had been on pills, and her mood veered wildly from bright to irascible, from articulate to long, depressed silences. They talked of civil rights; Marilyn had mentioned once having had an affair with a young black, and Weatherby himself was involved with a black girl. He now dared to suggest that Kennedy would give only limited help to the black cause. ‘The President will go all the way …,’ Marilyn insisted. ‘The Kennedys know all about the situation already. … You just wait and see. You’re in for some surprises.’

  Two decades later, in his interview for this book, Weatherby still remembered vividly that ‘Marilyn would not have me say a word against Kennedy. She talked in a knowing way, as though she had some sort of inside track.’

  At their next rendezvous, the last in 1961, Marilyn was again dopey, fading in and out of the conversation. She enthused about establishing a memorial of her late drama teacher, Michael Chekhov, and seemed serious at the notion that the President himself might help. ‘She seemed like a star-struck girl at the mention of the President’s name,’ Weatherby recalled. It struck him as odd, and he hastily steered her away from the subject of the Kennedys.

  When in New York, before and after the election, John Kennedy favored the Carlyle Hotel as his base. There he had a suite with spectacular views of Manhattan, a management who catered to his every whim, and total respect for his privacy. The press might be on watch downstairs, but during the presidency Secret Service men would accompany the President on his private escape route, a series of tunnels that connected the Carlyle with the nearby apartment houses and hotels. The hotel was eighteen blocks from Marilyn’s apartment.

  Reports that Marilyn visited Kennedy at the Carlyle are supported by Jane Shalam, a member of a New York family prominent in political circles. The windows of her apartment looked down on the side, or back, entrance of the Carlyle. ‘I saw Marilyn coming and going at that time,’ said Shalam, ‘and she was certainly in and out enough to notice her. Most times people wouldn’t know who she was — when she took her makeup off, and had her hair back, you wouldn’t know it was Marilyn Monroe. I saw her going there when the Kennedys were at the Carlyle. There seemed no other reason that she would be there.’

  The President, like other mortals, once had to wait for Marilyn when he invited her to an intimate dinner at the Carlyle, according to reporter Earl Wilson, quoting the ‘beard’ of the evening — the front man used to escort Marilyn to the rendezvous. Wilson would not identify his source, but Peter Lawford’s agent, Milt Ebbins, once played a similar role.

  Ebbins, by now a man on friendly terms with the President, recalled Marilyn asking him to take her to a party on Park Avenue. He finally got her there two hours late; whisked her, unrecognized, past a group of newsmen in the lobby (Marilyn was wearing wig, bandanna, and dark glasses), and was then promptly abandoned. The President was at the party, and Marilyn was with him when Ebbins slipped away.

  Marilyn herself told several people about her relationship with John Kennedy. Paula Strasberg, now dead, said privately that Marilyn told her of the affair. She added that she was in possession of related correspondence, which she had ‘placed in a safe deposit box, to remain unopened for fifty years, so that people should not be hurt by it.’

  Marilyn also talked about John Kennedy with Sidney Skolsky, the veteran Hollywood reporter who had advised her since the start of her career. In 1983, weeks before he died, Skolsky said, ‘She told me she was having an affair with the President, and I did not doubt her.’ Skolsky wrote nothing about Marilyn’s confidence until years after her death, and, when he did refer to it, reflected, ‘I confess I still find it grim to speculate on what might have happened to me if I had tried to write about this romance in my column when it first came to my attention.’

  Skolsky said Marilyn always referred to Kennedy as ‘the President,’ never by his first name. ‘She did complain to me,’ Skolsky recalled, ‘about the difficulties involved in being alone with the President. And even when Marilyn and the President were alone in Peter Lawford’s beach house in Santa Monica, they had to leave a light on. If anything happened, if the light went out, the Secret Service would break down the door and burst in. I don’t think that ever actually happened!’

  Two other West Coast reporters claimed they learned from prime sources of Marilyn’s affair with the President. James Bacon, who had known Marilyn for years, said, ‘She was drinking heavily at the time — I think it was less than a year before her death — and she said she was sleeping with Jack Kennedy. She said he wouldn’t indulge in foreplay, because he was on the run all the time.’

  Jimmy Starr, also a Los Angeles columnist at the time, learned of Marilyn’s involvement with Kennedy from actress Angie Dickinson, then a younger and less tight-lipped lady than she was to become. Like Skolsky and Bacon, he published nothing at the time.

  ‘When he became President,’ recalled Marilyn’s New York confidant, Henry Rosenfeld, ‘she became very excited. Her opinion was that this was the most important person in the world, and she was seeing him. She was so excited, you’d have thought she was a teenager.’

  Rosenfeld, as did Skolsky, thought Marilyn gloried in the secrecy of the whole business, even as she was being indiscreet. Sometimes, on the telephone, she would refer to the President as ‘You know who.’

  As Rosenfeld understood it, ‘In New York I believe they met occasionally at a place on Fifty-third Street, near Third Avenue. And Marilyn went to Washington to see him once or twice, though I’m almost sure she never went to the White House.’

  In 1984, in Los Angeles, I talked to Pat Newcomb, Marilyn’s last press aide and the woman most in her company at the end of her life. She knew John Kennedy before the election, and grew close to the Kennedy family. Asked about Marilyn and the President, Newcomb said, ‘No comment.’ Asked about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy, she replied, ‘I did not know about it.’

  Almost everyone close to the Kennedys stayed silent on the subject of Marilyn, but I did find one distinguished exception. Senator George Smathers of Florida was a freshman Congressman with John Kennedy in 1947, and preceded him to the Senate. Smathers himself was known as ‘Gorgeous George’ or ‘Smooch.’ He was the only politician to act as an usher at Kennedy’s wedding, and by the time of the presidency had become an old and trusted friend, invited to private dinners at the White House.

  Senator Smathers said he heard about Marilyn Monroe from John Kennedy himself, and then in the context of his brother, Robert. ‘I never did believe that Jack Kennedy had a big deal going with Marilyn Monroe until after Bobby,’ he said. ‘He took her away from Bobby, something like that — Jack would take a girl away from his brothers, or a friend, for a short relationship, at any time.’

  Smathers added that he also heard about Marilyn ‘around the White House and in family circles.’ He said he asked the Kennedys’ brother-in-law, Stephen Smith, about it, and that Smith, too, said, ‘I thought Bobby was the first one to get involved with Marilyn Monroe.’

  The accumulated information is compelling evidence that Marilyn was indeed involved with both Kennedy brothers. For the President she may have been another female diversion. For Robert, the ‘puritan,’ as his elder brother called him, the commitment may have been greater.

  Robert Kennedy was hardly ever seen in public in Marilyn’s company. They were observed once, though, by a man who knew the Kennedys well: Stanley Tretick, the Look maga
zine photographer who took some of the most memorable pictures of intimate moments in the life of the First Family. He had access to the White House, visited the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port, and frequently traveled with Robert Kennedy.

  Tretick saw the Attorney General with Marilyn at a social occasion ‘for invited guests only,’ — he believed it was during a stop in San Francisco, and during the last nine months of Marilyn’s life. According to him, ‘They were dancing together. It was in a hotel, at a posh, semi-private affair, a fund-raiser sort of thing. They were dancing very closely, with their bodies very close together, and it looked rather romantic. It just struck me at the time, “My, they really look like a nice couple together,” but then I just dismissed it out of my mind.’

  Tretick did not photograph the couple. He recalled, ‘There were certain times when you couldn’t photograph, or when something was not relevant to the story I was doing. I am not even sure I had my cameras with me. The reason I remembered the incident is that they looked very good together, looked like they were very friendly. …’