Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Spindel told Jaycox that some of the information on Marilyn and Robert Kennedy came from a bug installed at the Justice Department in Washington. Spindel described the bug as transmitting through conductive paint from a device hidden in the baseboard of the Attorney General’s office. The ‘product’ was then collected by Spindel’s contact in the Justice Department.

  Preposterous though this sounds, FBI documents show that, from summer 1961 till the spring of the year Marilyn died, there was serious concern that Hoffa had ‘two contacts in the Criminal Division of the Department.’ One Hoffa infiltrator was identified and investigated; the second source of the leaks remains a mystery. Was this Spindel’s hidden bug, rather than a human being?

  We know Marilyn did make frequent calls to the Justice Department, from interviews with Kennedy’s own secretary and from what remains of Marilyn’s California telephone records. The most distinguished corroboration for Spindel’s claims, though, came from a man who spent much of his career working for Robert Kennedy.

  James Kelly, a former police detective, worked closely with Robert Kennedy on Senator McClellan’s Committee on Investigations, Kennedy’s original forum for the pursuit of Hoffa. He went on to become Chief Investigator for another congressional committee, and director of a law enforcement training project for the Justice Department. Kelly also worked for the CBS News’ Fact-finding Unit, and became director of a Boston television channel. He was universally respected for his integrity as a congressional investigator. His investigative skills had been praised by Kennedy personally, in The Enemy Within.

  Kelly knew Spindel from 1955, when the electronics expert was acting as a consultant to the New York City Anti-Crime Committee. Although on opposing sides of the law enforcement fence, the two men developed a professional respect for each other. Kelly was sometimes an overnight guest at Spindel’s country home.

  In 1979, shortly before his death, Kelly had lunch in Washington with Dan Moldea, the author of an investigative book on Jimmy Hoffa. One Kennedy loyalist was confiding in another, and Moldea was shocked to hear what Kelly said when the talk turned to wiretapping and Bernard Spindel. Kelly said Spindel had not only told him about his ‘Monroe tapes,’ but had allowed him to hear one of them. It was purportedly a record of ‘pillow talk’ between Marilyn and one of the Kennedys. The sound quality was poor and somewhat garbled, as are many surveillance tapes. Kelly, however, who knew both brothers, believed the tape was genuine.

  Joseph Shimon, the former Washington police inspector, knew both Spindel and Hoffa well. ‘Jimmy Hoffa hired Spindel,’ said Shimon. ‘He was trying to get something on Bobby to blackmail him. … The rumor was that Bobby was playing around with Marilyn Monroe, and Spindel was to bug Marilyn — and I knew Bernie was out on the West Coast that year.’

  Hoffa himself was asked directly, in the 1970s, what he had known about the Kennedy brothers’ sex lives. He reacted with a series of violent denials when asked if he had Marilyn bugged, adding, ‘I already had a tape on Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy, which was so filthy and nasty — given to me by a girl — that though my people encouraged me to do it, I wouldn’t do it. I put it away and said the hell with it. Forget about it. …’ Asked whether he might have wanted to use such a tape against Robert Kennedy, Hoffa declared, ‘I would not embarrass his wife and family.’

  Few would believe that protestation. Two of those closest to Hoffa said he did obtain smear information on Robert Kennedy. Chuck O’Brien, Hoffa’s foster son and once-trusted aide, still with the Teamsters, said, ‘Spindel told me he was in California working on this thing. He was working on the Monroe thing for the old man and for some political people. He did obtain tapes.’

  Laurence Burns, who was then a Teamsters’ attorney, said he was ‘well aware’ that Hoffa got compromising material on Kennedy, but declined to discuss the matter further. ‘It’s a touchy subject,’ Burns said. ‘Hoffa was close-mouthed.’ The Teamsters boss disappeared, presumed murdered, in 1975.

  As we shall see, it seems Hoffa did scheme to use the Monroe affair against Robert Kennedy, and was still toying with the idea of using the information after her death. It is clear enough that he commissioned electronic eavesdropping, with evil intent, in the months before she died.

  In the light of all the fresh information on the bugging of Marilyn, I went back to Fred Otash, the Hollywood detective alleged to have been commissioned by Joe DiMaggio. At this second interview Otash revealed, ‘I was contacted by Bernard Spindel on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa. I said I would have nothing to do with it. Spindel did come out to the Coast and hit the phones. There was a room bug too — it wasn’t just the phone. Barney Ruditsky had been covering Monroe already. He worked with me, and he had files on Monroe and the Kennedys.’

  Barney Ruditsky, the former New York policeman who organized the ‘Wrong Door Raid’ for Joe DiMaggio, is dead. DiMaggio, of course, was not accessible for interview on anything concerning Marilyn.

  Despite all the loose ends, there is enough testimony to indicate that there was a bugging operation against Marilyn and the Kennedys, and that tapes were obtained. It is fair to theorize that an operation that began with no evil intent — if first commissioned by Joe DiMaggio — ended up as the focus of malign interest by Jimmy Hoffa, one of the Kennedys’ most dangerous foes. If Marilyn had even an inkling of what was going on in 1962, she had good reason to be frightened. There are signs that she was indeed nervous. According to her companion, Eunice Murray, she ‘had her neighbors checked out’ and did not have her private number printed on her telephone.

  Mrs Murray interpreted all this as a great star’s natural obsession about privacy, and that may have been part of her concern. The worry, though, went deeper. In New York and California, Marilyn now made many of her calls from public telephones. Two West Coast friends, in particular, noticed this.

  Robert Slatzer, who had known Marilyn since the forties, said, ‘She said she thought her phone lines might be tapped, and she started carrying a heavy purse of coins around — she tried to go out to a public phone when she had to make a call of any importance. She seemed very paranoid.’

  Arthur James, whom she saw a good deal in her last months, said, ‘Marilyn would call up every few weeks from a booth in Barrington Park, and say “Please, can we meet?” She’d say she’d been standing in the booth watching the children play — it was very sad. She called from public phones, as I understood her, because she was obsessed with the idea that the secret life she was leading would leak. I couldn’t blame her, when I myself had been asked a few months earlier to help bug her home. But I still didn’t tell her that.’

  Even if Marilyn had been warned of the dangers, it is doubtful if she would have been able to fully understand and assess them. She was now highly volatile, less in control of herself than ever before.

  In the spring of 1962 another friend, poet Norman Rosten, was in Hollywood. He and his wife visited Marilyn at her new home in Brentwood. They listened to her eager chatter about the house, made appreciative noises about the tin masks from Mexico and the Aztec calendar. Yet, standing in the half-furnished rooms, their windows temporarily curtained with white sheets, Rosten felt a deep unease. Listening to Marilyn, he heard only ‘controlled desperation.’

  By chance, Rosten met both DiMaggio and Sinatra. ‘DiMaggio,’ Marilyn said, ‘keeps an eye on me, sort of. If I have any trouble, I just call on Joe.’ With Sinatra, who came to take her to dinner, Marilyn seemed ‘giddy, a bit nervous.’ Next morning she called at 7:30 A.M. to talk about Sinatra. ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ Marilyn asked.

  ‘The tone in her voice,’ Rosten thought later, ‘was not eagerness, but panic.’

  One evening Rosten sat with Marilyn as they listened to a tape of him reading his poetry. She said she had ‘taken a little pill’ before he arrived, and she got into bed. Rosten left as she lay there drowsing, with the tape recorder still turning. He felt, increasingly, that she was drifting beyond the help of friends.

  On
Rosten’s last day in California he and Marilyn clambered into a limousine and went to look at art galleries. Marilyn’s eye was caught by a Rodin, as it had been seven years earlier — again with Rosten — in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. This Rodin, one of a set of bronze copies, showed a man and woman embracing — the man predatory, the woman submitting. ‘Look at them both,’ said Marilyn, ‘how beautiful. He’s hurting her, but he wants to love her, too.’ She promptly bought the statue — for more than a thousand 1962 dollars — and insisted on rushing off to show her purchase to Dr Greenson. What followed was troubling to both Rosten and the psychiatrist.

  Greenson said he found the statue striking. Marilyn, not satisfied, kept touching it. ‘What does it mean?’ she wanted to know. ‘Is he screwing her, or is it a fake? I’d like to know. What’s this? It looks like a penis.’ Her voice was oddly on edge. Examination suggested it was not a penis, but Marilyn kept asking, ‘What do you think, Doctor? What does it mean?’

  Rosten felt Marilyn wanted answers to the unanswerable — how could she feel, recognize, be protected against, love’s tenderness or brutality? ‘The truth was,’ he decided, ‘she was falling apart.’

  Rosten knew nothing of Marilyn’s tangled involvement with the Kennedy brothers, had no inkling of electronic eavesdroppers or of the sinister forces swirling around her. Sidney Skolsky, her reporter friend, did know by now — from Marilyn — about the connection with the President. She called Skolsky regularly each weekend, in an atmosphere of intrigue so palpable that Skolsky got his daughter to listen on an extension to witness what was said.

  ‘She was lost,’ Skolsky reflected later, ‘a climber. A child of nature. The higher she climbed the more lost she became. Like Hemingway’s leopard on Mount Kilimanjaro.’

  39

  IN THE MIDST OF Marilyn’s turmoil, there was a film to be made. A few months earlier, Marilyn had sat down in the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel and guzzled three bottles of champagne. She drank them with the paternal assistance of Nunnally Johnson, the scriptwriter of two previous Monroe screenplays. Now they were talking about Something’s Got to Give, the film which Twentieth Century-Fox insisted that Marilyn make and which Dr Greenson hoped would get her out of herself.

  Marilyn had little confidence in the movie, a rehash of a 1939 comedy called My Favorite Wife — the story of a woman, presumed dead for years, who comes home the day her husband remarries. The studio hoped to convince her, with the appointment of Henry Weinstein — a friend of Dr Greenson — as producer and Johnson as scriptwriter, that it could be a success. Marilyn was agonizing over Arthur Miller’s real-life remarriage, but Johnson — and the champagne — won her over.

  ‘She had slipped during the last two years,’ Johnson recalled, ‘and she was convinced that this was the one that would bring her back.’ When he left California, the script complete, Marilyn rose uncharacteristically early to see him off. She got herself up to Johnson’s hotel room by telling the desk she was a prostitute, then drove him to the airport ‘soaring with happiness.’ Once he was gone, things quickly fell apart.

  Marilyn had confidence in her director, the great George Cukor, with whom she had made Let’s Make Love. That trust, though, was soon dissipated in arguments about the script. Cukor felt it was still not right, and in early April, two weeks before shooting was due to start, a new scriptwriter was asked to produce another rewrite. The changes threw Marilyn into panic, and her friend Nunnally Johnson was not there to hold her hand.

  Something’s Got to Give was doomed, caught up in a disaster greater than the fears and foibles of its star. Twentieth Century-Fox was being bled dry by the financial hemorrhage caused by another star and another movie half a world away, in Rome: Elizabeth Taylor and her Cleopatra. The studio had lost $22 million the previous year, and the new Monroe film was seen as a relatively low-budget money-maker. This star came cheap — she was to be paid a mere $100,000, under the old 1955 contract with Fox made by Milton Greene. For Marilyn it was a way to work out her commitment. Nobody got what they wanted.

  Producer Weinstein had feared the worst weeks earlier, when he personally rescued Marilyn from a barbiturate overdose. Now he discovered that this was indeed ‘one very ill, very paranoid lady.’ Marilyn was sent script pages with the suggestion that she put one cross by a line she felt uncertain about, and a double cross — XX — by one she really disliked. To Weinstein’s consternation, Marilyn read this as meaning that, somehow, she was going to be double-crossed. Only Dr Greenson’s intervention resolved the upset.

  The new scriptwriter, Walter Bernstein, found Marilyn ‘at once tentative, apologetic and intransigent.’

  ‘Remember you’ve got Marilyn Monroe,’ she told him once, when she insisted on wearing a bikini in a scene. ‘You’ve got to use her.’

  This Monroe, however, outdid her own legendary insecurity. She convinced herself that fellow actress Cyd Charisse wanted to have blonde hair like herself. Assured that Charisse’s hair would be light brown, Marilyn replied knowingly, ‘Her unconscious wants it blonde.’

  Just to be on the safe side, the studio darkened the hair of even the fifty-year-old actress playing the part of a housekeeper. Scriptwriter Bernstein was ordered to remove any and all lines suggesting that Marilyn’s screen husband, Dean Martin, could be attracted to any other woman.

  The studio could fall over itself to please, but it had no way to counter Marilyn’s absenteeism. In thirty-five days’ shooting, Marilyn graced the studio with her presence only twelve times. When she did appear, the guard at the studio gate would shout to subsequent arrivals, ‘She’s back! She’s back!’

  The excuse was illness. Marilyn had been suffering from a virus, ever since the Mexico visit, that gave her sinusitis and sporadic high temperatures. The study of her temperature now became everyone’s daily preoccupation. It was agreed that the star would work unless the thermometer registered higher than 98.8 degrees, and executives hovered in the corridors as the studio doctors made the crucial readings.

  Marilyn was by now cooperative only when it suited her. Hairdresser George Masters, attending her at home, recalled maddening delaying tactics. ‘She tried to keep me “accidentally on purpose,” by smearing cream in her hair, just so I wouldn’t make a plane. When I was getting her ready to go out she would take nine hours. Not that I worked on her all that time — she just wanted me to be there.’

  At the studio, Marilyn was infuriating. One day she swept out on learning that Dean Martin had a cold, deaf to medical assurances that he was no longer contagious. Virus or no virus, she procrastinated. Billy Travilla, her designer friend, was walking toward the studio exit one afternoon when a limousine stopped beside him. The window rolled down, and a figure in dark glasses called excitedly, ‘Billy! Billy!’ Then, after chatting normally for a minute, Marilyn clapped a hand to her mouth. ‘Oh, Billy,’ she whispered hoarsely, ‘I forgot. I’ve lost my voice today.’

  When she did arrive at the studio in the mornings, Marilyn was sometimes seen standing near the entrance gate, retching. Producer Weinstein, a kind man, put it down to sheer dread of performing. ‘Very few people experience terror,’ he said. ‘We all experience anxiety, unhappiness, heartbreaks, but that was sheer, primal terror.’

  Marilyn’s anchor, to the extent that she had one at all, was Dr Greenson. She saw him almost every day. As crisis followed crisis, and as Marilyn threatened to fall back wholly on drugs, his sessions with her would last four or live hours. ‘I had become a prisoner of a form of treatment that I thought was correct for her, but almost impossible for me,’ Greenson later wrote. ‘At times I felt I couldn’t go on with this.’

  Greenson’s wife was unwell, and the doctor had repeatedly postponed a vacation in order to see Marilyn through the movie. On May 10, leaving her in the care of a colleague, he departed with his wife for Europe. That very day, Marilyn’s ‘virus’ stopped production. A week later she absconded to the East Coast to make her last memorable public appearance — fo
r President Kennedy.

  Earlier, in an atmosphere of great intrigue, Marilyn had summoned designer Jean-Louis to create a dress that was extraordinary even for her. He said, ‘It was nude, very thin material, embroidered with rhinestones, so she would shine in the spotlight. She wore nothing, absolutely nothing, underneath. It cost about $5,000. It didn’t look very pretty from the back, but …’

  As Jean-Louis struggled with pins and zippers, a maid told Marilyn, ‘You have a call from Hyannis Port.’ Jean-Louis knew that was the Kennedy home in Massachusetts, and Marilyn’s excitement told him what the dress was for. She started singing, ‘Happy Birthday, Mr Presi—’ and then said with a giggle, ‘Oops, I’m not supposed to say that.’

  The Birthday Salute at Madison Square Garden on May 19 had some of the flavor of a British Royal Birthday — it was not held on the President’s actual birthdate. Fifteen thousand Democrats were gathering to cheer on their leader, and pour a million dollars into party coffers. Jack Benny, Henry Fonda, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Maria Callas were going to perform, and Peter Lawford said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if Marilyn Monroe could sing “Happy Birthday” to the President.’

  The idea had been mentioned to the producers of Something’s Got to Give, before the production turned into a debacle. Now they protested vociferously, but Marilyn tricked Weinstein. She pleaded a heavy period as a reason for missing yet more work. By the time Weinstein had asked himself, ‘Why didn’t she have a period last month?’ it was too late. Weakly, the producer waved good-bye as Peter Lawford whisked Marilyn away from the studio aboard Frank Sinatra’s helicopter.