Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Robert Kennedy, as is well documented, was indeed in California that weekend. But did he stay in the San Francisco area, or did he go to see Marilyn in Los Angeles?

  ‘Even Peter Pan would have had a hard time doing that,’ said John Bates, Kennedy’s host that weekend. ‘It’s mind-boggling.’ During their weekend on the Bates ranch, Robert and Ethel Kennedy and their children spent much of their time with the Bates family. Although they used a separate guest cottage, most meals were eaten communally.

  Bates thought everyone went horseback riding together sometime on Saturday, Marilyn’s last day alive. He believed he would have known if Kennedy had left for long enough to reach Los Angeles and return by the early hours of Sunday.

  The ranch is at Gilroy, three hundred miles northwest of Los Angeles. Certainly, the parish priest confirmed, Kennedy was in Gilroy by 9:30 A.M. on Sunday, attending Mass at the church of St Mary.

  Questioning of the Bateses aside, further checks on Kennedy’s time at the ranch are difficult. The weekend arrangements were private. The Kennedys were assisted at various stages by the San Francisco office of the FBI, but the Special Agent in Charge at the time was not helpful during research for this book. The agent, Frank Price, refused to comment on the Attorney General’s movements.

  If Robert Kennedy did make a trip to Los Angeles that Saturday, he must have made it by air. There are several airstrips in the vicinity able to take private aircraft. According to a number of people in Los Angeles, Kennedy did make the journey.

  Ironically, information on this seems to have come from Peter Lawford himself, the man who in public was adamant that Robert Kennedy was nowhere near Los Angeles that weekend.

  Marilyn’s former business partner, Milton Greene, told me the matter came up when he lunched with Lawford in New York after Marilyn’s death. Green said Lawford told him Kennedy ‘was in town. He saw her. He left, and went to the beach, and Marilyn got on the telephone to Lawford.’

  Two senior policemen have long been quoted as saying Kennedy came to Los Angeles. According to former Mayor Yorty, Chief Parker told him the President’s brother ‘was seen at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the night she died.’

  Chief of Detectives Thad Brown told several people he believed Kennedy was in Los Angeles. Brown’s brother, Finis, himself a former detective, did some work on the case. He said he talked to contacts who ‘said they had seen Kennedy and Lawford at a hotel the night she took the overdose. I went to Thad with the information and he said he had been informed of the fact. He did believe Kennedy was in Los Angeles that night.’

  Hugh McDonald, who was in charge of Homicide at the Sheriff’s Department in 1962, quoted Thad Brown as saying, ‘Bobby was indeed at the Lawford house that night, but failed to keep a dinner engagement with her.’

  During the District Attorney’s review in the 1980s, former Deputy DA John Dickey told investigators that, in 1962, he received information that Kennedy had been in Los Angeles, and believed it.

  ‘The truth is,’ Chief Daryl Gates wrote in 1992, ‘we knew Robert Kennedy was in town on August 4. We always knew when he was here. … While we knew Robert Kennedy was in town that day, we paid no attention to where he went or what he did.’

  Two fragmentary reports, one from a police source, one from a former member of the Twentieth Century-Fox staff, Frank Neill, suggest Kennedy arrived in the city by helicopter, putting down near the studio’s Stage 18, in an open space then used by helicopters serving the area near the Beverly Hilton. According to these sources, the President’s brother arrived in the early afternoon.

  In 1982 the District Attorney gave cursory attention to a report that Kennedy was seen arriving at Marilyn’s home during the afternoon. I tracked that story to its source, a woman called Betty Pollard. She said her mother was playing bridge at a neighbor’s home that day, when her hostess drew the players’ attention to a car parking outside. Kennedy, immediately recognizable, emerged from the car and went into Marilyn’s house. The hostess mentioned that she had seen him visiting on previous occasions.

  If this happened as described, it must have been before 5:00 P.M., when Dr Greenson arrived. Eunice Murray denied seeing Kennedy that day, but agreed that she went out shopping between two and four o’clock, leaving Pat Newcomb and Marilyn in the house.*

  It was, of course, at 4:30 that afternoon that Dr Greenson, who had thought Marilyn in fairly good spirits the previous day, received a sudden, unexpected call from her, sounding drugged and depressed.

  One of the things she was distressed about, according to a Suicide Prevention Team doctor who interviewed Greenson, was that ‘Marilyn had been expecting to see one of the “very important people” that evening, but the arrangement was canceled. Something had happened.’

  One firsthand witness claimed to have sighted Kennedy in Los Angeles that day. A check of many former beach residents located Ward Wood, who lived next door to the Lawford beach house. He said he happened to be outside his house in the late afternoon or early evening, and saw Kennedy arrive. Wood says Kennedy was not in an official car. Wood, who used to be in the automobile trade, thought the vehicle was a Mercedes.

  Former Herald Tribune Bureau Chief Joe Hyams, and photographer William Woodfield, teamed up for several days after Marilyn’s death to dig deeper into the events of the fatal night. They hired a former policeman, who was interviewed for this book, to help with the research. Hyams and the former policeman both said they learned that a helicopter touched down on the beach, close to the Lawford house, late that night. They discovered this in separate interviews with Lawford’s neighbors.

  There is nothing inherently improbable about a helicopter being used as early as 1962 to move people to or from the Lawford beach house. Checks with neighbors, and in old press clippings, revealed that Peter Lawford was infatuated with this relatively new form of transport, in those days reserved for the military and the very wealthy.

  Lawford himself, in his interview with this author, cheerfully admitted that he was ‘chopper-happy’ in those days. Neighbors at the beach regularly complained that helicopters, which were permitted to land on the beach during the Kennedy presidency, blew sand into their swimming pools.

  Reporter Joe Hyams tried to track down the helicopter said to have landed at the beach on the night of the tragedy. At an aircraft rental company, he established that ‘a small helicopter had been rented in the night of Marilyn’s death. But the company was not willing to allow me access to the records and flatly refused to tell me the name of the passenger. I was, in fact, warned off the premises.’

  Photographer William Woodfield, Hyams’ colleague, had better luck. He had recently used a helicopter for air-to-ground shooting, while preparing an article on Frank Sinatra’s luxurious private plane. The helicopter in question was one regularly chartered by Sinatra and Lawford. Within three days of Marilyn’s death, Woodfield said, he revisited the pilot, who had flown him before, at Clover Field, Santa Monica. That is the nearest airfield to the Lawford beach house.

  Woodfield said he went back to the pilot on the pretext of preparing a follow-up article on the use of helicopters by celebrities, an idea he had discussed when they previously met. It promised welcome publicity for the pilot and his company, and he proved agreeable. He raised no objection when Woodfield asked to leaf through the helicopter’s logbook, supposedly in search of famous customers who had recently used the service.

  Seated quietly with the log, Woodfield turned back a few days to the page covering the night of August 4, 1962. He found what he had hardly dared to hope for. An entry for the night of Marilyn’s death showed that a helicopter had been rented to pick up a passenger at the Lawford beach house and to deposit him at the main Los Angeles airport.

  ‘The time in the log,’ Woodfield recalled, ‘was sometime after midnight — I think between midnight and two in the morning. It showed clearly that a helicopter had picked up Robert Kennedy at the Santa Monica Beach.’

  Four days after Marilyn’s deat
h, Hyams and Woodfield realized they had the makings of a remarkable story. Huddled in the little office behind Hyams’ house, they placed a call to Robert Kennedy’s office in Washington. They told an aide what they had learned, and asked if Kennedy would comment, ‘to put the story to rest.’ The reply came quickly. They were told, Woodfield recalls, ‘The Attorney General would appreciate it if you would not do the story.’

  Hyams did phone the story to the Herald Tribune desk in New York. An hour later he received a call from a senior editor, congratulating him on his research. ‘But although we’re a Republican paper and it’s an election year,’ said the editor, ‘the story would be a gratuitous slap at the President. He’d be guilty by association. So we’re killing it.’

  Marilyn’s adult life had been one long newspaper event, yet the only serious effort to report her death had been scuttled. The stage was now set for two decades of whispers and half-truths.

  Today, for the first time, taking all the evidence into account, we can build a scenario for the last days and hours of Marilyn’s life. It seems that for many months she engaged in intermittent intimate encounters with both the President and Robert Kennedy. For both the brothers, and for Marilyn, there had been the initial attraction between stars, each glittering prizes in the interlocking galaxies of politics and show business. The brothers, bred to the knowledge that they could have any woman they desired, at first failed to perceive that in Marilyn they were dealing with a female who was doubly dangerous.

  Marilyn was dangerous in a way that less celebrated mistresses — like Judith Campbell — were not. Unless literally caught in the act, perhaps by the lens of a prying camera, allegations of an affair could easily be shrugged off. In those pre-Watergate days of assumed trust in public figures, allegations about most women would hardly need dignifying with a denial. Marilyn Monroe, however, was another matter altogether in a real sense, her name was as potent as that of the Kennedys’ themselves.

  Marilyn was additionally dangerous because she was so unstable. It is doubtful that either Kennedy saw past the beauty and the intelligence to the truly shattered nature of her personality. It was one which, as her psychiatrist later admitted, would have made her a candidate for an institution — had her name not been Marilyn Monroe.

  For her part, Marilyn — her grip on reality failing — may have dreamed that something permanent could come of a Kennedy relationship. Reading between the lines of some of her comments to friends, it seems she even deluded herself — after marriages to great American stars of sport and culture — that she could eventually obtain the ultimate prize, the hand of a Kennedy in marriage.

  In more lucid moments, the total improbability of such a notion must have dawned on Marilyn. Meetings with the President were always sporadic; by the summer of 1962 it must have been apparent that his interest was little more than his habitual, affectionate but careless self-indulgence. Meanwhile, there was Robert Kennedy.

  The Attorney General, never the womanizer his brother was, may have begun his relationship with Marilyn as a rescue mission, an attempt to steer her into emotional calm. Soon, though, perhaps initially tempted to follow his brother merely in grasping the sexual prize, Robert then fell for the flickering light of Marilyn’s fragile spirit. Their affair lasted for months. Then, alarmed not least by the flood of reports that criminals were hoping to take advantage of the Kennedy follies, the Attorney General tried to sever the connection.

  It was not easily done. Nose-diving into her last despair, Marilyn proved hard to discard. She became a pest, demanding constant attention and — as Robert Slatzer suggested — may have tried to hold her man by threatening exposure.

  Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford seems to have been assigned to contain the danger. He was a weak creature, a man seduced by turns both by his White House connections and by his association with criminals like Sam Giancana. To calm Marilyn, he chose to take her more than once to a place infested with Kennedy enemies, the Cal-Neva Lodge. It was there that she spent her last full weekend alive, floundering in drink and drugs, beyond the help of the one man who could perhaps have brought her back from the brink, Joe DiMaggio.

  On the last Friday, when Robert Kennedy arrived in San Francisco, Marilyn’s pleas seem to have reached a peak. Imagining perhaps that he could reason with her, the Attorney General made a hurried visit to Los Angeles, arriving soon after midday on Saturday. He probably saw her briefly at her home in Brentwood, reiterated that the Kennedy affairs could not continue, and retreated — to spend the evening either at Lawford’s house, or somewhere nearby.

  Unable to smother her anguish with a steady intake of sedatives, Marilyn now called in her psychiatrist, Dr Greenson. She told him that she had expected to see Robert Kennedy that night, said she was being rejected. Greenson tried to talk her down, as one would a person teetering on some high rooftop. He left, believing he had succeeded.

  Alone with her telephone and her drugs, Marilyn made a series of calls for help. Ordinary friends were either not at home, or failed to understand that this despair was different. Repeated calls to Robert Kennedy, or frantic messages to him through Peter Lawford, failed to bring Kennedy running. Like many a man or woman attempting to shed a lover, he may have believed that the kindest course was the hard stance, to hang tough, to keep his distance. And it was also safer not to risk a further visit to Marilyn’s home in the light of the danger of exposing himself to his enemies.

  Today it is impossible to say whether Kennedy’s enemies — the agents of Sam Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa — played an active role in Marilyn’s last hours. The medical evidence, as we have seen, leaves open the possibility that someone other than Marilyn administered the fatal barbiturate dose. More probably, she simply underestimated the effects of a sudden large dose taken on top of a steady intake during the day. Alternatively, she deliberately took her own life.

  Late that Saturday night, probably soon after 10:00 P.M., Marilyn made her final call to the Lawford home. She was rambling and confused, and it was suddenly obvious that she was slipping into unconsciousness. It is fair to hypothesize — and one would like to believe — that word of this jolted Robert Kennedy into a decent, humane action. It may have been he, perhaps accompanied or followed by Peter Lawford, who now hastened the short distance to Marilyn’s home. There they found her comatose, but not yet dead.

  Here the evidence that an ambulance was called, albeit fragmentary, becomes pivotal. If the information from the director of the ambulance company is correct, Marilyn was taken from the house still alive. She may have died on arrival at Santa Monica Hospital where, without makeup, and swathed in blankets, she may not have been recognized. This author thinks it more likely that Marilyn died before arriving at the hospital — that someone accompanying her, perhaps Robert Kennedy himself, was faced with an awful dilemma.

  Marilyn was dead, under circumstances that could spell utter ruin for the Attorney General. Even had he never had an affair with Marilyn — and all the evidence suggests the contrary — for a Kennedy to be found with a dead Marilyn Monroe, even on a legitimate mission of mercy, would have meant certain political disaster.

  The solution was to return the body to the house in Brentwood, and into the bed from which she had made her last frantic calls. Now, time was needed, above all time to allow Robert Kennedy to slip out of town, time for a cleanup operation at Marilyn’s home. Only when all this had been accomplished did a call go out to Dr Greenson, who duly came to ‘discover’ the body sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 A.M.

  As the trail followed by reporters Hyams and Woodfield indicates, the Attorney General left for northern California by air. Meanwhile, he commissioned private detective Fred Otash to sweep dust over whatever telltale tracks might remain. In any event, Otash and his associates were able to do little. By the time they were activated, early on Sunday morning, more powerful wheels had been set in motion.

  Summoned from the concert at the Hollywood Bowl, Marilyn’s public relations consultant, Ar
thur Jacobs, a man with considerable power in Los Angeles, rushed to her home. He may never have known the full story of the night’s events, of the aborted ambulance journey and of Robert Kennedy’s nocturnal movements, but he was the right man, as his widow put it, to ‘fudge everything.’ Meanwhile, someone with real power, probably Robert Kennedy himself, roused FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Orders went out from Washington to remove the telephone records covering Marilyn’s last hours, at that time still retrievable from the telephone company.

  This scenario may be wrong in certain details, but it is a fair construction from the information now available. In all probability, no serious crime was committed that night, although the return of Marilyn’s body to her home was highly irregular. For Robert Kennedy, those night hours and the days that followed must have been the most harrowing of his life. If our reconstruction is essentially correct, the death of Marilyn Monroe had been his Chappaquiddick. Unlike his less fortunate brother Edward, he escaped public exposure, but only by a hair’s breadth.

  In 1983, on the day of his own death, the man who had directed two of Marilyn’s movies, George Cukor, discussed Marilyn’s passing. It is not known what personal knowledge Cukor had of what occurred on the night of August 4, 1962, but his comments were right on the mark. ‘It was a nasty business,’ he told a companion, ‘her worst rejection. Power and money. In the end she was too innocent.’

  *Otash did meet Lawford as he admitted on publication of Goddess in 1985. His important further statements are reported in the Postscript.

  *Shortly before Murray went out a mechanic, Henry D’Antonio, returned her car from the garage. He contradicted himself on whether he entered the house or not, and became highly defensive when asked what he observed that afternoon. He referred all questions back to Mrs Murray.

  Part Six

  AFTERMATH