Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  The FBI, said Kane, had been told by informants that the Attorney General had spent an afternoon ‘out in the desert near Las Vegas, with not one, but two girls, on a blanket. Somebody — in organized crime — had taken telephoto pictures … and the word we got from our informants was that they were going to use them to blackmail the Attorney General of the United States. And this was confirmed several times over from several different sources. …’

  According to Kane it fell to Courtney Evans, Hoover’s liaison with the Justice Department, to warn Robert Kennedy. The Attorney General, said Kane, listened in a characteristic pose, sleeves rolled up and feet on the desk. Then he simply asked what Evans was doing for the holiday weekend, and ended the meeting. ‘He couldn’t have given a shit less,’ Kane thought. ‘There was as much of a chance of shaking him down, or embarrassing him, as of flying to the moon.’

  Former Assistant Director Evans did not recall this particular incident, but explained, ‘It probably did happen as described. There were many times I had to go in with that sort of information. That was a typical Bobby Kennedy response.’

  He added, ‘When I would take an allegation to the Attorney General concerning the President, he never said yes or no. He was just non-committal. If it concerned himself he was inclined to say, “I can’t be responsible for what other people say about me.” I was there to give information, not to get it.’

  Evans, who regularly traveled with Robert Kennedy, said, ‘The only place he ever went out alone at the end of the day was when we were in Los Angeles. I had my own suspicions at the time that he was seeing Marilyn Monroe. What I guessed, others may have known.’

  The Kennedy brothers’ insouciance was foolhardy, for little escaped the notice of their enemies. Involvement with Marilyn was folly, for she was by now unreliable. By the end of 1961, she was disintegrating.

  *Reports in files of the Los Angeles DA’s Bureau of Investigation, covering 1961, refer to Peter Lawford raising funds to aid Cohen’s associate, Candy Barr, then in jail on narcotics charges. Lawford was ‘desperately attempting’ to obtain compromising sound tapes of ‘parties’ he had attended in Barr’s dressing room.

  *Sinatra was approached for an interview in connection with this book but declined — as was his usual custom.

  34

  FOR ABOUT A WEEK, in September 1961, the same female voice kept coming up on the call-in line of radio station KDAY in Los Angeles. Tom Clay, a well-known disc jockey, handled the calls. ‘I asked for the woman’s name,’ Clay said, ‘because that’s the only way you put anyone on the air,’ and she said she’d give it to me only if I promised not to say it on the air. She sounded really frightened, and I promised, and she said, “I’m Marilyn Monroe.” I said, “Oh, okay, and I’m Frank Sinatra,” and I hung up on her. She called back, really mad. And three or four days later she asked me if I’d ever like to come and have a cup of coffee with her.’

  Tom Clay still did not really believe it, but he went to the address the voice provided. He cannot recall the exact address, but the description fits that of the Doheny apartment. The woman he found there was indeed Marilyn.

  She welcomed Clay to her home, about 9:30 in the morning, wearing a bathrobe and drinking champagne. There was no question, he says, of a seduction routine — only the outpourings of a lonely, disorientated woman.

  ‘For about three weeks,’ Clay recalled, ‘I’d go over about every other day and stay about an hour. The thing she was most interested in was my family life, my wife, and my children. She wanted to hear just every word she could about my kids. She would ask me about my littlest baby, whom I called “Rebel” because she was such a devil. I asked her once, “How can you be so lonely?” Marilyn said, “Have you ever been in a house with forty rooms? Well, multiply my loneliness by forty.’

  Marilyn’s life in Los Angeles was now a dangerous vacuum, more dangerous than has ever been understood. Gloria Romanoff, who saw a good deal of Marilyn during her Sinatra summer in 1961, said, ‘There were several incidents when she had been mixing drink and sleeping pills, and had to be revived — very close calls.’

  After one such scare, a sleeping-pill overdose, Twentieth Century-Fox chiefs hired security consultants to make sure the matter was hushed up. For the studio, Marilyn’s self-destructive tendencies meant a risk of ‘wrong’ Monroe publicity and higher insurance when she came to make her next film.

  In the same period, the consultants were also used to smooth over a bizarre matter involving a Hollywood woman who claimed to have had a lesbian encounter with Marilyn and who seemed likely to brag about it. The woman was silenced with a cash payment, though the facts of the matter were never resolved.

  Homosexuality was again a factor in Marilyn’s psychiatric treatment that summer. Dr Greenson was seeing Marilyn seven days a week, ‘mainly because she was lonely and had no one to see her, and nothing to do if I didn’t see her.’ He identified two clear problem areas: Marilyn’s obsessive fear of homosexuality and her inability to cope with any sort of hurt.

  ‘She couldn’t bear the slightest hint of anything homosexual,’ Dr Greenson wrote. ‘She had an outright phobia of homosexuality, and yet unwillingly fell into situations which had homosexual coloring, which she then recognized and projected on to the other, who then became her enemy.’ An example, Greenson said, was the occasion one of Marilyn’s female friends dyed her hair with a streak roughly the same color as Marilyn’s hair. ‘Marilyn instantly jumped to the conclusion that the girl was “trying to take possession of her, that identification means homosexual possessiveness.” She turned with a fury against this girl.’

  Dr Greenson identified the girl as ‘Pat’ in his correspondence. Apart from Pat Lawford, the ‘Pat’ Marilyn was close to in her last years was her press aide, Pat Newcomb. She indeed remembered incidents like the pathetic fuss over hair coloring, and vividly recalled Marilyn’s ‘frequent rages.’ It came as news to Newcomb, though, that Marilyn had any anxiety concerning homosexuality.

  As for his patient’s attitude toward men, Dr Greenson was to note Marilyn’s increasing trend toward random promiscuity. In her last months she was to tell him she was having sex with one of the workmen remodeling her house. Once she invited in a taxi driver who brought her home late at night. An undercover investigator for the Los Angeles District Attorney, engaged on another case, told of stumbling on Marilyn having sex with a man in a darkened hallway during a Hollywood party.

  By late 1961, for Dr Greenson, Marilyn was both patient and ever-present family friend. It was difficult to maintain the vital separation of the doctor-patient relationship. Marilyn, he found, took great offense at the slightest irritation on his part, could not abide the notion of any imperfection in ‘certain ideal figures in her life.’

  ‘Marilyn could not rest until peace had been reestablished,’ Greenson wrote. But the psychiatrist feared that only one conclusion could bring the perfect peace Marilyn sought. Her inability to handle anything she perceived as hurtfulness, along with her abnormal fear of homosexuality — Greenson was to write — ‘were ultimately the decisive factors that led to her death.’

  In December 1961, Greenson wrote, ‘She went through a severe depressive and paranoid reaction. She talked about retiring from the movie industry, killing herself, etc. I had to place nurses in her apartment day and night and keep strict control over the medication, since I felt she was potentially suicidal. Marilyn fought with these nurses, so that after a few weeks it was impossible to keep any of them.’

  Marilyn’s address book for this period, located by the author, lists no less than thirty-six doctors, and several nurses. Few can have been necessary, and all — for Marilyn — represented optional sources of unnecessary drugs.

  That last Christmas was not wholly desolate for Marilyn. Joe DiMaggio, who had made the holiday bearable the previous year, again came to the rescue — almost certainly in response to an initiative by Dr Greenson. Marilyn bought a tiny Christmas tree and lights, and tried to make
her apartment look cheerful. She and DiMaggio spent the afternoon of Christmas Day at the Greensons’ home, where — to Marilyn’s delight and everyone’s amusement — DiMaggio, the baseball hero, was the center of attention.

  On New Year’s Eve, after midnight, Dr Greenson’s daughter Joan, with a boyfriend, dropped in at the apartment to see Marilyn and DiMaggio. They drank champagne and roasted chestnuts on the open fire.

  DiMaggio seemed ‘doting, caring, like family,’ Joan recalled. ‘As for Marilyn, it seemed to please her to be doing things for him. It was like visiting an old married couple.’

  Long after the holidays were over, and DiMaggio gone, Marilyn kept the lights burning on the minuscule Christmas tree. It stayed till the decorations were drooping and the tree dead.

  As 1962 began, at Dr Greenson’s suggestion, Marilyn began to look for a house of her own. She had never owned her own home, and Greenson hoped it would give her security, encourage her to stop thinking of herself as a homeless orphan.

  Marilyn began house-hunting, helped by Eunice Murray, a sixty-year-old woman with some experience in looking after psychiatric patients. She had been brought in by Dr Greenson before Christmas, when trained nurses refused to tolerate Marilyn’s behavior.

  From now on, Mrs Murray was to act as general factotum and helpmate; she herself preferred the tag ‘devoted assistant.’

  House-hunting had its difficulties. At one potential house a woman shrilled, ‘Get off my property!’ when she saw the would-be purchaser was Marilyn Monroe. At the end of January, though, a house was found — a modest, single-story home in the residential district of Brentwood. The style was Mexican, like Dr Greenson’s house, with woodbeamed ceilings, a large, central living area, and small bedrooms.

  The house was a far cry from the ostentatious homes expected of Hollywood stars, but it was what Marilyn wanted. It was at the closed end of a cul-de-sac, and therefore private. It was also close to homes where Marilyn sought a very different kind of solace. Dr Greenson lived a few minutes’ drive away, and so did Peter Lawford, at whose home Marilyn sometimes saw the Kennedy brothers.

  The house was quickly purchased, using the lawyer Marilyn shared with Frank Sinatra, and some borrowed funds. She had not made a film for a year now, and her percentage of profits from previous movies would not come in for a long time. Much of that money, indeed, would come in only after Marilyn’s death. She had little ready cash when she bought her new home and was to die with a mere $5,000 in her current account.

  Marilyn burst into tears when she signed the contract for the Brentwood house, and explained later, ‘I felt badly because I was buying a home all alone.’

  By early 1962, Dr Greenson felt the drug problem was under control, and hoped Marilyn was at last going to make real progress. Nobody, it seems, took note of the odd little coat of arms emblazoned on tiles outside the front door of the house. The motto read, in Latin, Cursum Perficio. This means, in English, ‘I am finishing my journey.’

  Marilyn was nearly thirty-six. She had six months to live.

  35

  ‘GODDAMMIT,’ MARILYN SAID, SITTING with Dr Greenson’s son, Danny, in the dining room of the Greenson home, ‘I’m going to dinner at the Lawfords’ place, and Bobby’s going to be there. Kim Novak will be talking about her new house near Big Sur, and I want to have something serious to talk to him about.’

  It was late January 1962. Marilyn was indeed about to dine with Robert Kennedy — and it would be no secret. Marilyn was one of several guests invited to be at the Lawford home on February 1, when the Attorney General and his wife would pass through Los Angeles at the start of a world tour.

  That much was reported at the time in the newspapers, and the occasion has been used, depending on one’s loyalties, either to pinpoint the start of an affair or as evidence that Marilyn and the Attorney General were meeting for the first time.

  In her talk with Danny Greenson, Marilyn was looking for political issues that would make talking points. ‘She ended up writing them down,’ recalled the younger Greenson. ‘They were left-of-center criticisms — way back then I was worried about our support of the Diem regime in Vietnam — and there were questions about the House Un-American Activities Committee, and civil rights and so on. … She wanted to impress him. …’

  Robert Kennedy was at first impressed. Then he caught Marilyn peering into her purse at the list of questions, and was much amused. The story has been used to mock Marilyn’s intelligence. In fact, ever eager to make a good showing, Marilyn for years made a habit of planning dinner-table conversation in advance. In this case, her homework seems to have paid off.

  A few weeks later, on a trip to Mexico City, Marilyn talked about the dinner to Fred Vanderbilt Field, an American expatriate. Field recalled Marilyn telling him that ‘sometime in the evening, she and Kennedy retired to what she called the den. She said they had a very long talk, a very political talk. She told me she had asked Kennedy whether they were going to fire J. Edgar Hoover — she was very outspoken against him — and Kennedy replied that he and the President didn’t feel strong enough to do so, though they wanted to.’

  Gloria Romanoff, one of the guests at the dinner, remembered Marilyn dancing with Kennedy that evening, in all propriety. She added a merry detail: ‘Kennedy called his father long-distance to say he was seated with Marilyn Monroe, and would his father like to say hello to her?’

  Six months later, when Marilyn died, many of her personal papers were destroyed. Her executrix, Inez Mason, simply threw them out while clearing the house. She did, however, keep a handwritten letter she found in a drawer, because it shocked her. It had apparently been sent to Marilyn by Jean, one of the Kennedy sisters.

  Under the letterhead bearing the address ‘North Ocean Boulevard, Palm Beach, Florida’ — the Kennedy vacation home — the note reads:

  Dear Marilyn —

  Mother asked me to write and thank you for your sweet note to Daddy — He really enjoyed it and you were very cute to send it —

  Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East!

  Again, thanks for the note —

  Love, Jean Smith

  The letter, supposedly from Jean Kennedy Smith to Marilyn, found after the actress’s death. The reference to ‘Bobby’ has yet to be explained. Jean Kennedy’s name, however, appears in Marilyn’s address book. The two were undoubtedly in touch with each other.

  The John F. Kennedy Library, the repository of vast quantities of family correspondence, claimed that it was ‘unable’ to find a specimen of Jean Kennedy’s handwriting for the relevant period.

  In 1984, I took the letter to Jean’s husband, Stephen Smith, who managed the finances of the Kennedy family, to ask whether the letter seemed authentic. Smith said, ‘It could be, could be, it’s a possibility, let’s say. The script is not entirely dissimilar. If Jean wrote the letter, she might or might not remember if she did. She would certainly remember her own hand. I’ll have to ask Jean.’

  The Kennedy brother-in-law became irritated as he reread the letter, but said he would indeed consult his wife. Smith later wrote to me to say that she ‘has no recollection of ever writing such a letter and cannot identify the document. …’

  Assuming the note is genuine, what does it mean? It is undated, but there may be a clue in the reference to Marilyn’s ‘sweet note to Daddy.’ ‘Daddy,’ seventy-three-year-old Joseph Kennedy, had suffered a serious stroke on December 19, 1961, at Palm Beach. He would remain chronically ill for many months, and incapacitated till the end of his life.

  As for ‘Bobby’ returning to the East Coast, this could refer to his return from the global trip he was starting at the time of the Lawford dinner party.

  On the other hand, the Attorney General’s sister may have been replying to a note of sympathy sent to Joseph Kennedy anytime after Christmas, or — if Gloria Romanoff correctly recalls Marilyn speaking to the elderly Kennedy on the phone from the party �
� just after the dinner. Either way, that would place the date of the letter as January or February 1962.

  Timing aside, what does one make of the provocative sentence, ‘Understand that you and Bobby are the new item!’? Was this a wry jest, uttered in light of some public gossip linking Marilyn and Robert Kennedy? Hardly. There was no such gossip at this stage. Did this then mean exactly what it said, in the vernacular of the period? Was Jean Kennedy cheerfully acknowledging an affair, a dalliance of some sort, between Marilyn and her brother?

  Allegations about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy have been made of fragile stuff, some of it malicious rumormongering. Both are dead and cannot defend themselves. Not least because Kennedy figures so prominently in the mysteries surrounding Marilyn’s death, their relationship demands exhaustive investigation.

  Robert Kennedy’s personal secretary, Angie Novello, responded circumspectly but frankly to questions about Marilyn and her former boss. She remembered meeting Marilyn at the Lawford house in spring 1962, when both Kennedy and Pat Newcomb were present. Dating from about then, she recalled — and Marilyn’s available phone records confirm — Marilyn made numerous calls to Kennedy at the Justice Department.

  Angie Novello said Kennedy always accepted a call from Marilyn, or would return it soon afterward. ‘He was such a sympathetic kind of person; he never turned away from anyone who needed help, and I’m sure he was well aware of her problems. He was a good listener and that, I think, is what she needed more than anything.’ Novello pointed out that Kennedy was also a good friend to singer Judy Garland, and nobody has hinted at an affair with her.

  Kennedy’s press secretary, Ed Guthman, said the Attorney General ‘may have met Marilyn a total of four or five times.’ Other Kennedy associates had different memories. One, who preferred not to be named, told the Manchester Guardian reporter, W. J. Weatherby, that he ‘accepted a Monroe affair as a fact, but that it had been Bobby’s only one.’

  Tongues were apparently loosened in 1968, on the night of Robert Kennedy’s murder. Two of his friends, writer John Marquand and Freddy Epsy, the present wife of George Plimpton, sat reminiscing. The conversation, said a participant, included the matter-of-fact recollection that ‘there was a good deal of flying about and flirtation, and that Miss Monroe was very much in love with Bob Kennedy.’ This witness, a former member of Professionals for Kennedy, also preferred to remain anonymous.