Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Another witness had no doubt about the nature of Marilyn’s relationship with Robert Kennedy: Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn’s neighbor at the Doheny apartment in Los Angeles, said she remembered an astonishing episode, which probably occurred in the spring of 1962. ‘I was at Marilyn’s place one evening when the doorbell rang. She was in the tub, and she called to me to get it. I opened the door, and there was Bobby.’ Carmen said she recognized the Attorney General at once, but was completely nonplussed. So was Robert Kennedy. ‘He had that expression of not knowing whether to run, or walk, or stay,’ said Carmen. ‘I was stunned, and I kept saying, “Come in,” but went on standing in his way. Finally I got out of the way, and Marilyn came flying out of the bathroom, and jumped into his arms … she kissed him openly, which was out of character for her. …’

  That night, said Carmen, she shared a glass of wine with Marilyn and Robert Kennedy — in a somewhat awkward atmosphere — then left them alone. She said Marilyn had told her some time earlier that she had seen John Kennedy, but never said much about the elder brother.

  There was another occasion, says Carmen, when John and Robert arrived together with a couple of companions, then left almost at once with Marilyn. There was, she said, one further encounter with Robert Kennedy. She discussed it with some reluctance, and understandably so. If true, it was a remarkable episode, with a bizarre background.

  Carmen discovered early on Marilyn’s mischievous delight in nudity. They once went to the movies together, each of them naked under a mink coat. (Given Marilyn’s history of such antics, this seems plausible.) Carmen said they were both friends with comedian Jack Benny; Marilyn had known him since 1953, and witnesses confirmed they were friends. Benny’s home number appears in Marilyn’s address book.

  Benny, said Carmen, would accompany Marilyn and herself to a massage parlor on Sunset, where they would all have facials. Once, for a lark, and to tease Benny, the two women walked out of the building and ‘flashed’ their mink coats open at Benny, who was waiting outside in the car. Both were naked under the coats.

  Carmen said nudity became something of a running joke for the trio — she made it clear there was no sexual aspect so far as Benny was concerned — and they occasionally ventured forth to a ‘nude beach.’ In the early sixties there was a beach where nude swimming was permitted, well to the north of Santa Monica, near the present Pepperdine University. As a sort of mutual dare, Carmen said, Jack Benny and Marilyn would accompany her to this beach in disguise — Marilyn in her black wig, Benny in a false beard acquired specially for the purpose. It worked; nobody recognized them. The false beard remained lying around in Marilyn’s apartment and — in 1962 — that was how Robert Kennedy came into the story.

  ‘The beard was lying there,’ Carmen said, ‘when Bobby came to see Marilyn, and I think he asked us what it was for. We explained, and told him about the Benny thing, and he said, “You could recognize Benny if he had ten beards on.” And Marilyn said, “Oh, no, you couldn’t. Nobody’d recognize you if we fixed you up.” And she put the beard on him, I put sunglasses on him, and we put a hat on him like a baseball cap sort of thing. And he looked in the mirror and said something like “I could probably get away with this.” And we said, “Okay, we dare you! Let’s go.”’

  Carmen was aware her story sounds preposterous, but she said Robert Kennedy simply seemed unable to resist a dare. That, certainly, is in character. They went off to the nudist beach in Carmen’s convertible — Kennedy in his getup and Marilyn in her wig. It was late, she said, and not many people were around. ‘We walked up and down, and sat on a blanket we brought from the car,’ Carmen recalled. ‘Once we got out there and found nobody cared — here were two famous people that nobody recognized — we just sort of lounged around. On the way back, we really laughed a lot.’

  Checks of her background, and her own voluminous file on her show business career, indicate that Carmen was what she says she was and had many of the friends she claimed she had in that period, including Peter Lawford and Frank Sinatra. She correctly named the landlady of the Doheny apartments at the relevant time, and was clearly familiar with the building when we visited it together. Marilyn did not give up the apartment at once when she moved to her new house in spring 1962.

  Carmen said the first encounter with Robert Kennedy was ‘after Marilyn telling me about being at a party at the Lawfords’, and what a blast it was seeing RFK.’ Research dates the party as February 1962.

  The evidence is that Marilyn also saw Robert Kennedy’s elder brother in the fall of 1961. In mid-November, a year into his presidency, John Kennedy returned to Los Angeles for the first time since his election. He had come to make speeches, and to fire the enthusiasm of key supporters in California. At the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where he stayed, there was a reception for about two hundred guests drawn from the ranks of local politics and administration.

  One of the guests was Philip Watson, then beginning his campaign to become Los Angeles County Assessor, a post he would win and hold till 1977. Watson was a Republican, but the Assessor’s office was a nonpartisan appointment, and he was courting support from both parties. An introduction to the President could open many doors, and Mark Boyar, Kennedy’s finance chief in California during the presidential campaign, fixed Watson’s invitation. First, upstairs in the Hilton’s Escoffier Room, Watson, one of a long line, shook the President’s hand. Later, to get him closer to Kennedy, Boyar took Watson to a smaller gathering in a suite on a lower floor. This time, he found the President was accompanied by Marilyn Monroe.

  ‘She was there in the room with him,’ Watson recalled, ‘along with a couple of dozen other people. I had heard stories about them, and it came as no particular surprise. I was introduced to them both, I spoke to her too, and thought her a beauty — she was in a skin-tight white dress — but empty-headed was how I thought of her that evening. There was nothing obvious. They weren’t holding hands or anything.’*

  Whatever the precise nature of the Kennedy brothers’ overlapping contacts with Marilyn, they were playing with fire. Robert Kennedy’s former press secretary, Edwin Guthman, recalled that Marilyn was present at two or three parties attended by Robert Kennedy at the Lawford house, although he knew of no sexual relationship between them. ‘After one of the parties,’ Guthman remembered, ‘she had too much to drink to drive home, and we both drove her to her place. Bob asked me to come along too. He didn’t say why, but his reason was pretty obvious. He didn’t want to be seen to be going off alone in a car at night with Marilyn Monroe.’

  The Attorney General was aware of the risk that came with philandering, or even the appearance of philandering in an innocent situation. Perhaps, however, he was neither sufficiently worried nor soon enough. By the time Marilyn died, the danger would be extreme. Only years later did it become possible to piece together the extent to which the Kennedys’ bedroom secrets were uncovered at the time by their bitter enemies — the leaders of organized crime.

  Former FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans, J. Edgar Hoover’s liaison with Robert Kennedy, was famous among reporters for his elliptical way of parrying questions. In discussion of President Kennedy’s vulnerability to sexual blackmail, however, Evans said, ‘There was, I know, an effort to bring pressure on the presidency — by organized crime. … That’s my recollection.’ He had said little, but more than any official source before him.

  Pleading a poor memory, Evans would not be lured into providing detail, but pointed the reporter towards two key Kennedy enemies — Sam Giancana, one of the most powerful Mafia bosses in history, and Jimmy Hoffa, criminal head of the Teamsters’ Union. Evans indicated that at least some of the pressure involved Marilyn Monroe.

  I asked the former Assistant Director whether at any stage he was aware of ‘any sort of a flap about Monroe … or of organized crime attempting to use involvement with Monroe as pressure on the President or his brother.’

  Evans replied, ‘I certainly heard such stories, because they were rampan
t both in Washington and Los Angeles, well before she died. Whether they were true or not I had no way of knowing. I had my own suspicions …’

  Evans pointed out, almost with relief, that his unenviable role as liaison between Hoover and Robert Kennedy, two men who deeply disliked each other, meant that neither necessarily gave him all the facts.

  Some of the facts about Marilyn and the Kennedys are likely still locked in FBI files. In a tell-tale footnote to correspondence, a Bureau official has noted that the FBI’s ‘references pertaining to the late Marilyn Monroe are voluminous.’ Some more documents on the actress have been released since that letter was written. The word ‘voluminous,’ however, one of a number of stock descriptions used to describe file holdings, hardly describes what has so far been released.

  The researcher, driven back to his jigsaw puzzle, must take a hard look at another of Marilyn’s lovers, one with whom she was having an affair at the same time she was involved with the Kennedys. He was, and is, a singer named Frank Sinatra.

  *Weatherby’s contact with Marilyn is confirmed by the discovery of his name in Marilyn’s address book, located by the author.

  *The day after the Hilton reception the President visited the Lawfords at Santa Monica. Whitey Snyder, Marilyn’s makeup man, drove her to meet the President at the Lawfords’ beach house, almost certainly on that day, November 19, 1961.

  32

  SHORTLY BEFORE HER DEATH a reporter asked Sinatra how well he knew Marilyn Monroe.

  ‘Who?’ Sinatra replied sarcastically. ‘Miss Monroe,’ he observed, ‘reminds me of a saintly young girl I went to high school with, who later became a nun. This is a recording.’

  Marilyn, told of this exchange, responded tartly, ‘Tell him to look in Who’s Who.’

  Marilyn had first met Sinatra, according to photographer Milton Greene, at a dinner at Romanoff’s in 1954, when the DiMaggio marriage was collapsing. The ‘Wrong Door Raid,’ in which Sinatra helped his friend DiMaggio in his pursuit of the unfaithful Marilyn, followed within weeks.

  Six years later, in 1960 — when the Miller marriage was falling apart, and just after John Kennedy’s nomination as President — Sinatra made contact with Marilyn again. In August of that year he invited the entire company of The Misfits to see him perform at the Cal-Neva Lodge, not far from the Nevada location where the movie was being made. Marilyn went, accompanied by an Arthur Miller who looked rather out of his element.

  Sinatra was in the process of buying the Cal-Neva Lodge, a casino and resort complex on the wooded shores of Lake Tahoe. It sat on the heights overlooking the lake, with a swimming pool and a cluster of luxury bungalows. Advertisements called it ‘Heaven in the High Sierras,’ but it was a paradise custom-built for gangsters.

  The Lodge’s gimmick was that the state line dividing California and Nevada bisected its public rooms and swimming pool. Casino activity could take place only on the Nevada side of the line, because of the laws banning gambling in California. Sinatra expanded the casino facilities, and brought in new managers. One was Paul ‘Skinny’ D’Amato of Atlantic City, one day to be described by the Chief Counsel of Congress’ Assassinations Committee as ‘a New Jersey gangster.’ His role at the Lodge, according to the same authority, was to protect the interests of Chicago Mafia chieftain, Sam Giancana.

  Giancana was the ‘boss of bosses’ of the Chicago syndicate, the ruler on the throne once occupied by Al Capone. By 1960 he was master of an organized crime network reaching across huge swathes of the United States, including casinos and show-business rackets on the West Coast. With the advent of the Kennedy administration Giancana would become a prime target for prosecution. As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy took on no less a task than the destruction of the Mafia in the United States. Giancana, if cornered, would be desperate.

  In 1981, in sworn testimony to the Nevada Gaming Control Board, Sinatra was to say that as of 1960 he knew Giancana only slightly, and did not realize he was a mobster. He said he never invited Giancana to the Cal-Neva Lodge, and — when he did learn he was there — issued instructions that he was to leave.

  Giancana’s daughter, however, said she was present at several meetings between the two from as early as 1954, and that Sinatra always greeted Giancana ‘with an embrace of respect and friendship.’ According to Peter Lawford, Sinatra ‘almost took a pleasure in flaunting his friendship with Giancana,’ and ‘Giancana often stayed at Frank’s house in Palm Springs.’

  The Cal-Neva Lodge was to bring Sinatra his greatest public embarrassment, arising from his reported association with Giancana. The Mafia boss, overheard on FBI surveillance microphones, said he owned part of the Cal-Neva.

  In 1963, the official discovery of Giancana’s presence at the Lodge would lead to Sinatra’s withdrawal from the business, and a decision by the Gaming Board to revoke his gambling license.

  The Kennedy family also had links with Cal-Neva. President Kennedy’s father often visited the place before the Sinatra takeover, and the Cal-Neva maintenance manager used to ship two ten-foot Tahoe Christmas trees to the Kennedy family each December.

  The President’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, was a regular, and would accompany Marilyn to the Cal-Neva during the last weeks of her life. Marilyn’s comings and goings at the Lodge were to loom large in the mysteries surrounding the end of her life.

  At the end of 1960, as soon as Marilyn separated permanently from Arthur Miller, Sinatra became solicitous. He presented her with a replacement for Hugo, the basset hound, which stayed with Miller. The new dog was a white poodle, and Marilyn swiftly dreamed up a name for it. In the light of the talk about Sinatra’s friendships with mobsters, she christened it ‘Maf,’ for Mafia. She thought the idea was hilarious.

  In 1961, when Marilyn flew back to California after her spell in the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic in New York, Sinatra, who was away at the time, gave her the use of his house. According to George Masters, Marilyn’s hairdresser at this time, Sinatra sometimes used an apartment in the Doheny building where Marilyn settled that year.

  Masters said, ‘I had never met Sinatra, though I felt as if I knew him intimately from my association with Marilyn. … Marilyn would take me with her to his home in the Bel-Air hills — when I was driven there, I never knew where I was going, it was a big secret — or to his openings in Las Vegas. So far as I was concerned he remained as invisible as Howard Hughes.’

  In May, Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr Greenson, wrote to a colleague: ‘Above all, I try to help her not to be so lonely, and therefore to escape into the drugs or get involved with very destructive people, who will engage in some sort of sadomasochistic relationship with her. … This is the kind of planning you do with an adolescent girl who needs guidance, friendliness, and firmness, and she seems to take it very well. … She said, for the first time, she looked forward to coming to Los Angeles, because she could speak to me. Of course, this does not prevent her from canceling several hours to go to Palm Springs with Mr F. S. Sheds unfaithful to me as one is to a parent. …’

  Early the next month, when Sinatra performed at the Sands Hotel, Las Vegas, Marilyn was there. Also present were two of President Kennedy’s sisters, Pat Lawford and Jean, wife of Stephen Smith.

  Singer Eddie Fisher, who was there with his then wife, Elizabeth Taylor, recalled, ‘Elizabeth and I sat in the audience with Dean and Jeanne Martin and Marilyn Monroe, who was having an affair with Sinatra, to watch his act. But all eyes were on Marilyn as she swayed back and forth to the music and pounded her hands on the stage, her breasts falling out of her low-cut dress. She was so beautiful — and so drunk. She came to the party later that evening, but Sinatra made no secret of his displeasure at her behavior and she vanished almost immediately.’

  In July, when Marilyn was back in Los Angeles after her gall bladder operation, Dr Greenson saw her constantly. He now thought, as he later wrote to a colleague, that ‘she was terribly, terribly lonely,’ and expressing a ‘feeling of mistreatment, which had paranoi
d undertones.’ Greenson said he felt Marilyn was reacting to her current involvement with ‘people who only hurt her.’ He did not name the people concerned.

  The next month, August 1961, Marilyn spent a weekend with Sinatra on his yacht. Dean Martin’s wife, Jeanne, and Gloria Romanoff, who were also aboard, were to make it clear that Marilyn was present as Sinatra’s woman of the moment — she shared his cabin.

  Marilyn put up a show of socializing, but she seemed disorientated and was using drugs heavily. Jeanne Martin said, ‘I remember going up to Frank’s house before we got on the boat. And he said, “Will you please go in and get Marilyn dressed, so we can get in the limo and go.” She couldn’t get herself organized.’

  ‘She was taking sleeping pills,’ Gloria Romanoff recalled, ‘so she’d disappear at ten o’clock at night and not be awake till eleven or twelve the next day. We kidded Frank, saying, “Some romance this is!”’ Jeanne Martin remembered Marilyn ‘wandering around the deck, pitifully trying to find more pills. She’d be unable to sleep, and go lurching about half-dressed, trying to find someone who could give her “reds” at three o’clock in the morning.’

  At the end of the trip, as everyone else was planning a get-together ashore, Marilyn simply walked off and vanished, without saying a word to anybody.

  A month later Marilyn summoned her maid, Lena Pepitone, from New York, to bring out a dress she wanted for an evening with Sinatra. Pepitone was present when Sinatra came to pick up Marilyn. ‘He pulled a box out of his pocket,’ Pepitone said, ‘and clipped two gorgeous emerald earrings on Marilyn’s ears. They kissed so passionately that I was embarrassed to be standing by.’

  Hairdresser George Masters, who also remembered the earrings, said Marilyn wore them only once. She then gave them away to Pat Newcomb, her press assistant.