Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  Before leaving for Mexico, in February, Marilyn had taken a drive with her old friend, Hollywood correspondent Sidney Skolsky. ‘She talked about the President again,’ Skolsky recalled. ‘She said she’d told him about me. She said she was going to dinner at the White House in March, and she’d be taking me with her.’

  Come March, no more was said about the White House visit. Yet the President did not balk at having Marilyn flown down to meet him in California within forty-eight hours of Hoover’s warning about Campbell.

  The President’s decision not to stay with Frank Sinatra on this visit is often put down to advice from his brother. Firsthand testimony, however, suggests that Robert’s attitude was the precise opposite.

  ‘It was reported erroneously,’ recalled presidential assistant Kenneth O’Donnell, ‘that the Attorney General had advised against staying at Sinatra’s house because of Sinatra’s associations with known criminals, but, as a matter of fact — Bobby called me to put in a pitch for Sinatra [author’s italics]. “Bobby, the Justice Department isn’t arranging this trip,” I told him. Bobby said, “Oh, all right. Have it your own way.”’

  A Kennedy staff source, interviewed for this book, placed Robert Kennedy socializing with Sinatra in Florida as late as 1965. Things are not always as they seem.

  In May 1962, far from advising caution, Robert Kennedy played an aggressive role in bringing Marilyn to New York to sing at his brother’s Birthday Salute.

  The then Chairman of the Executive Committee at Fox, Milton Gould, recalled receiving an imperious call from Robert Kennedy. ‘I explained to Kennedy,’ said Gould, ‘why we couldn’t do it. He got very angry and abusive, and banged the phone down on me. He called me a “no-good Jew bastard”, which I don’t like very much. … He made it clear to me in subsequent meetings that he resented what I’d done. He never forgot.’

  Gould, a lawyer, claims that later in the sixties, when Lyndon Johnson wanted to appoint him to the Federal Bench, Kennedy opposed it.

  Was the extent of the Kennedy folly simply to play the lover carelessly, heedless of the peril? Today, through the patina of the Kennedy myth, research reveals the shape of an even more dangerous scenario.

  It seems possible that Mafia boss Sam Giancana was not simply a shadowy gangster pursued at the Kennedys’ long-range orders. Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford certainly saw Giancana during the presidency. ‘Peter’s conduct in Las Vegas, with Sam Giancana,’ said Dean Martin’s former wife Jeanne, ‘was just mind-boggling … a total disregard for what people might think.’

  Was there a moment, before or during the presidency, when John or Robert Kennedy themselves personally encountered the Mafioso? According to one source, they did. There may even have been a quarrel, over a woman.

  In 1962, probably in the summer, Peter Lawford and a friend met at New York’s Drake Hotel. The friend was Taki Theodoracopulos, British-educated son of a Greek ship-owner. Today, after lengthy reporting experience, he is a veteran columnist for Britain’s Spectator magazine. During the Kennedy presidency he moved in society circles, playing star-class tennis and mixing with the famous — including the Kennedys.

  During the meeting at the Drake, said Theodoracopulos, Lawford introduced him to ‘Sam Moody or Mooney’. Mooney was one of Sam Giancana’s nicknames since childhood, and this was indeed the Mafia leader. Theodoracopulos came to know him quite well.

  ‘Sam Giancana was always talking about the Kennedys,’ said Theodoracopulos, ‘and Lawford responded like a man who knew they all knew each other. In other words, you could tell that they’d met together, all of them. It was clear that Giancana had, at some point, met both brothers.’ Theodoracopulos remained convinced — especially because of the anecdotal interplay between Giancana and Lawford — that the two were discussing shared memories. A further detail is even more ominous.

  Theodoracopulos said he heard Lawford and Giancana ‘talk fondly about past shenanigans with the First Family … they talked about the girls Mooney used to produce for the Kennedys. Mooney was proud of it, very proud of his Kennedy connections.’

  Unfortunately for the memory of Camelot, Giancana may well have pointed women in the direction of the Kennedys — whether they fully understood it or not. He and his henchmen had long moved in the same glittering circle, publicly dominated till 1962 by Frank Sinatra.

  The testimony of Judith Campbell to the Senate Intelligence Committee is closed to historians till the year 2025. Privately, however, she said the President knew — during their affair — that she was also seeing Sam Giancana.

  John Davis, author of a thorough book on the Kennedy dynasty, said, ‘I don’t believe Kennedy would knowingly carry on such a dangerous relationship merely for fun and games. He didn’t trust the FBI or the CIA. Perhaps he was carrying on a private intelligence operation through Judy Campbell.’

  On Giancana’s part, there may have been some old-fashioned jealousy. According to Campbell, ‘Sam was after me to leave Jack,’ once she began having sexual relations with the Mafioso. ‘Sam was not too thrilled,’ she recalled, ‘the few times I saw Jack in 1962 … it wasn’t funny anymore. I could tell by his silence that he didn’t like it.’

  Taki Theodoracopulos recalled something else about the night Lawford first introduced him to Giancana. Lawford mentioned there had been ‘some kind of altercation. Bobby had made a pass at Sam’s girl. … Everybody reminded Kennedy who “Mooney” was, and that Mooney didn’t look kindly upon anybody touching his girl. … It happened, Lawford told me, in California.’

  Giancana’s associates felt that pursuit of women led him to neglect mob affairs, and one FBI agent described him as ‘pussy-whipped’. Professor Robert Blakey, former Chief Counsel of the Assassinations Committee, believes that womanizing was the President’s ‘fatal flaw’. Perhaps the Kennedys and Giancana were grotesquely linked by the same fatal flaw, by passing passions that led to disproportionate disaster.

  Less than a year after Marilyn’s death, in June 1963, Giancana brought an injunction against the FBI to stop the Bureau’s relentless surveillance. In the process, in court in Chicago, the mobster laid himself open to cross-examination. Justice Department lawyers had been waiting for such an opportunity for years. Yet, at the last moment, the government waived the right to cross-examine — on the personal orders of Robert Kennedy.

  Why did Robert Kennedy withdraw at the last minute? ‘The reason,’ said Kennedy biographer John Davis, ‘was that by now Robert Kennedy knew too much about Sam Giancana … He pulled back for the sake of his brother’s and his government’s reputations.’

  More to the point, Giancana knew too much about the Kennedys. By organizing massive vote-stealing in Illinois, he had helped Kennedy win the presidency in the first place. He knew about the plots to kill Castro. As for womanizing — by brothers who exploited their public image as family men — Giancana was freighted with devastating knowledge — most of it involving Hollywood women.

  Mob influence had removed the President’s name from the divorce suit against starlet Judy Meredith. Then there was Judith Campbell. And, by that time, Giancana knew only too much about the Kennedys and the most famous name of all, a dead woman called Marilyn Monroe.

  Giancana knew, and Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa knew. And J. Edgar Hoover knew — perhaps more, and earlier, than we have understood.

  The Monroe Tapes — and What Became of Them?

  With the publication of Goddess, it became clear that hidden microphones produced smear material on Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers. For the first time, the wiretappers and technicians began talking, and new information became available, new clues to what really occurred in the last hours of Marilyn’s life.

  Who was behind the bugging? The easy answer has always been that it was Jimmy Hoffa, because the wiretapper he regularly employed, Bernard Spindel, was deeply involved. Yet Spindel’s widow insisted, ‘Bernie certainly said he had tapes, including tapes made the night Marilyn died. But he did not tell me he himsel
f made them, nor that the work was done for Hoffa.’

  Spindel, like a few others at the top of a profession in its infancy, was an electronic mercenary. He installed bugs for politicians, removed those planted by their enemies. He gave lectures to the police on bugging devices. One associate personally observed Spindel working with intelligence operatives, apparently from the CIA. Robert Kennedy had once tried personally to woo him away from Teamsters’ boss Hoffa and, according to his longtime technician, Earl Jaycox, Spindel sometimes worked for Mafia boss Sam Giancana.

  Spindel was an indispensable expert. He was also a volatile figure, a dangerous man to be holding dangerous secrets. Earlier in this book,* we noted how Giancana had been overheard — on a room bug installed by the FBI — discussing his bitterness against the Kennedys, and his frustrated efforts to get Robert Kennedy off his back.

  The same conversation, according to congressional transcripts sustain, included discussion on bugging devices between Giancana and his Hollywood henchman, Johnny Roselli. It ended with an apparent reference to Robert Kennedy. The mobsters’ dialogue is reported here for the first time:

  Giancana: ‘What I want is something really small.’

  Roselli: ‘Alright, here’s one you can put on a wall, I got a guy out there, this is what he brought me.’

  Giancana: ‘You can’t take a big mike like that and put it in a flat …’

  Roselli: ‘Sure, if you can take it apart.’ Giancana: ‘If you take it apart, you might not get the volume as clear as …’

  Roselli: ‘Well, you play with it, you get an electronics guy … One thing, let me tell you what it is. The CIA has it …’

  Giancana: ‘Like a cigarette.’

  Roselli: The FBI out there … has got a portable, it takes conversations way out. … I told them, for Christ’s sakes report on that thing … CIA … I got another kind you … A guy in LA who’s got an electronic cap kind of a thing, and he showed me that … so I got to find out what the smallest thing is. If you put it in there, you got a receiver? And receive it when you are set up?’

  Giancana: ‘Maybe a block, two blocks, three blocks …’

  Roselli: ‘How big was your receiver?’

  Giancana: ‘Like a … the box was only this big, maybe three inches by three inches. We were talking “blah, blah, blah.” It picked it up. Think about it.’

  Roselli: ‘Yeah. I’ll work on it. Bobby is in Washington.’

  This conversation took place in December 1961, by which time the President’s bedroom activity had already been monitored. As reported in this book, John Danoff, a technician working for Hollywood detective Fred Otash, listened in as John Kennedy made love to Marilyn at Thanksgiving 1961, in Peter Lawford’s Californian beach house.

  Danoff went into greater detail. ‘When I located the strongest signal,’ he said, ‘about five hundred yards from the house, I maintained my position. … To my amazement I started to recognize the voices — because of the President’s distinct Bostonian accent, and Marilyn Monroe’s voice. … Then you heard them talking and they were going about disrobing and going into the sex act on the bed. …’

  Danoff said he took the tapes, according to routine, to his boss, Fred Otash. Otash let him believe the client was Joe DiMaggio, but added, ‘What you don’t know won’t hurt you.’ Otash, who had previously denied any personal involvement in the bugging operation, finally admitted Danoff was telling the truth.

  In interviews for ABC and the BBC, Otash told how, in 1961, he received a call from Bernard Spindel, requesting a meeting in Florida. ‘I got on a plane,’ he recalled, ‘and I met Hoffa and Spindel. What they wanted was for me to start developing a real, in-depth, derogatory report file on Jack and Bobby Kennedy.’

  Otash agreed. As a former police Officer, he says ‘I had access to information as to the President’s movements and Bobby Kennedy’s, and when we had information they were going to be in town, that’s when the bugs were all activated. There were four or five in place at the Lawford house.’

  Spindel helped conceive the operation, but he was East Coast based. In California Otash hired his own specialist. He was a consultant who has served politicians, Las Vegas casino operators, and government agencies, for many years. Unlike Spindel, he always shunned publicity, and admitted his role only on condition — by written agreement — that he not be named.

  The consultant’s career vividly reflected the risks run by powerful men who resort to covert surveillance. One of his main customers, for years, was millionaire Howard Hughes, then busy manipulating politicians to benefit his vast interests in defense, aviation, and Hollywood. In 1962, while hired by Republicans during Richard Nixon’s campaign for the governorship of California, the consultant discovered that Robert Kennedy had ordered surveillance of Republican headquarters. ‘We were watching his people watching the Republicans,’ said the consultant, ‘and I personally observed the resulting tapes being flown East and going through the gates of Robert Kennedy’s home in Virginia.’

  The bugs at the home of Peter Lawford, says the consultant, were installed before the interest in Marilyn. The devices had been planted earlier, when the consultant attended a large social occasion at the house.

  So it was, in late 1961, that Otash and the consultant found themselves reviewing a tape-recording of the President making love to Marilyn Monroe. The consultant had bugged Robert and Edward Kennedy before, at a San Francisco apartment, during the presidential campaign. The job had been on behalf of Jimmy Hoffa — and the consultant had regretted it. He did not like Hoffa, and — suspecting that the Monroe tapes were also commissioned by him — he turned squeamish. The consultant claimed, and Otash confirmed, that one tape of the President with Monroe was destroyed.

  On other occasions, Otash himself had no such qualms. He admits that ‘twenty-five or thirty’ tapes were shipped to Bernard Spindel. The recordings were a tangible threat to the presidency — in the hands of middlemen with direct connections to the mob — Spindel, who worked for Hoffa, and sometimes Giancana. Giancana’s man in Hollywood, Johnny Roselli, knew both Otash and his operative Danoff.

  In March 1962 — just as Robert Kennedy began his entanglement with Marilyn, he became the specific target of the bugging. Marilyn’s friend, Arthur James, received a message from the mob’s East Coast friend, Carmine DeSapio, asking him to lure Marilyn away so that bugging equipment could be installed in her home. James refused, but the bugs went in anyway.

  Detective Fred Otash, in his new disclosures, said, ‘In the last months of Marilyn’s life, Bernie Spindel came out to California and wanted me to engineer the wiring of her home, the placing of illicit devices in the bedroom, and wiretaps on the phone … and I said, “No, I didn’t want to be any part of that.” He said, “Well, can you give us some support, some personnel?” and I said, “Yes, I can.”’

  Otash continued to play a key role. He offered facilities and field operatives, whom he has named; and he continued to send the results to Spindel.

  For the first time, Otash and others have described what the microphones picked up. ‘There were more tapes made on Robert Kennedy and Monroe,’ Otash said, ‘than there had been on Marilyn and the President.’ The tapes contained the sound of love-making — and of quarrels.

  ‘On one tape I heard,’ Otash said, ‘she was screaming, just screaming on and on at him. Because, according to her, he had promised to get divorced and marry her. She kept bringing that up, and it led to fights.’ It was from his operatives, and from a police source — Otash said — that he learned of Marilyn’s claim that she was pregnant.

  Spindel’s technician Earl Jaycox, who had earlier admitted only to seeing tapes, admitted that Spindel played him recordings of Marilyn’s 1962 telephone conversations with both Kennedy brothers. There were calls to the White House, and to Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department. ‘When she was calling looking for Jack,’ said Jaycox, ‘there was a male secretary she spoke to quite frequently. … Kenny was the name, I think.’ Presid
ent Kennedy’s personal assistant was called Kenneth O’Donnell.

  ‘Marilyn was almost always agitated on these calls,’ said Jaycox, ‘very agitated. … She was acting like a betrayed woman.’

  There was talk of a rendezvous at a location in Virginia, and of Robert Kennedy having failed to meet Marilyn at Lake Tahoe. The calls to the President, Jaycox said, seemed designed to worm information out of him about his brother’s intentions. ‘Jack Kennedy would talk to her rather calmly,’ Jaycox recalled. ‘He covered pretty well for his brother.’ Robert Kennedy, in contrast, ‘would get infuriated and hang up on her.’

  It is claimed that tapes were made the very day Marilyn died, and there is no logical reason to reject the notion that the microphones were active that day. Otash said they showed that Robert Kennedy did visit Monroe in the afternoon, that the couple made love, then began a violent argument. It led to an outburst in which Marilyn said, in effect, ‘I feel passed around — like a piece of meat. You’ve lied to me. Get out of here. I’m tired. Leave me alone.’ Kennedy left.

  The hours that followed ended in Marilyn’s death. For a moment, we turn from the electronic ear to the human beings involved on the night of Saturday, August 4th. Renewed research harvested additional clues.

  Subterfuge in the Night

  Peter Lawford, the Kennedys’ brother-in-law, was a drunk and a drug-user, but the Kennedys had cause to be grateful. He refused to reveal what he knew about Marilyn, not out of loyalty to Robert, but out of an almost obsessive devotion to the President’s memory. However, Lawford did tell one reliable source something of what happened the night Marilyn died.

  In the early seventies, ABC News producer Jørn Winther spent time with Lawford while making a documentary about Marilyn. It was agreed that Lawford would not be asked to discuss the Kennedy connection. At the end of the production, though, sitting alone with Winther in a screening room, Lawford discussed the fatal night, and efforts to get Marilyn down to the beach house.