Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Finally she was allowed a phone call. She telephoned Joe DiMaggio, a man of considerable influence in New York. DiMaggio was able to get Marilyn released from Payne Whitney and moved to Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, where she was treated as a normal hospital patient and slowly weaned of her addiction to sleeping pills.

  Within a year Marilyn had bounced back, and by early 1962 she had begun a new life in California. Although she had kept her New York apartment, she purchased the first house she had ever owned in Brentwood, about a fifteen-minute drive from Peter’s house, and was now spending most of her time in Los Angeles. She strengthened her friendship with Peter, often visiting with him and Pat in Santa Monica, and Peter’s friends found themselves charmed by her.

  “One night Marilyn came to dinner,” Dolores Naar recalled. “She was late as usual, and she arrived looking very disheveled. She had on a pair of pedal pushers from Jax, which was the only really hot store in LA at that time. She had a soft voice and that little-girl quality and there was a shyness about her.” As the group drank cocktails before dinner, Pat put the original-cast album of the current Broadway hit How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying on the stereo. “‘I Believe in You’ was the big hit at that time,” Dolores recalled, “and Marilyn and Pat and I were all doing our dance versions of it. Marilyn was singing and dancing sensually to the music and had the most charming way about her, very innocent, fragile. Not fragile physically, but fragile — like you could destroy her if you said boo.”

  In the late spring of 1962 Marilyn made preparations to begin her first movie in nearly two years, Something’s Got to Give, took trips to Mexico to buy furnishings for her new house — and intensified her affair with Jack Kennedy. That the most powerful man in the world — and the handsomest head of state — found her desirable bolstered Marilyn’s precarious self-esteem, made her feel that she hadn’t lost the sexual allure that had made her a movie idol. Like a little girl at play, she delighted in disguising herself for their trysts and fantasized that Jack would divorce Jackie and marry her. “Can’t you just see me as First Lady?” she asked Jeanne Carmen.

  Carmen recalled that Marilyn studied world politics so that she could hold her own in a conversation with the President and make herself a more suitable candidate for his wife. “She wanted to learn, so in case she got to be a great lady, she could go out there and act like a great lady. It may seem silly of her, but Nancy Reagan did it, didn’t she? And she was never more than a starlet in Hollywood.” While Marilyn had seen Jack Kennedy only at intervals since their first meeting in 1954, by early 1962 she was trying to be with him as often as possible. They saw each other whenever Jack was in California, and on at least two occasions during the spring of 1962, Marilyn made a special trip to New York to be with Kennedy.

  The first was a black-tie dinner party in the President’s honor given by Fifi Fell, a socialite, in her Park Avenue penthouse. Among the two dozen guests were a number of presidential aides, Ambassador Earl Smith, Peter, Milt Ebbins, and Marilyn. Around seven o’clock, Ebbins and Dave Powers were dispatched to pick Marilyn up at her apartment and bring her to the party. “We got there at about seven- thirty — dinner was at eight — and she wasn’t ready,” Ebbins recalled. “Powers didn’t want to wait for her, so he told me to stay and went back to the party, then sent the limousine back for us.”

  As Ebbins sat and waited, he noticed that everything in the apartment was white — the rugs, the ceilings, the walls, the furniture, even a piano. At eight o’clock, Marilyn’s maid told Ebbins that her hairstylist, Kenneth, was finishing up Marilyn’s hair. “She should be out very soon.” At eight-fifteen, the phone rang, and Ebbins picked it up. It was Peter. “Where is she? The President’s here. Everybody’s waiting!”

  “She’s not ready yet. I’m sitting here waiting for her.”

  “C’mon,” Peter shouted. “Dinner’s practically ready!”

  At eight-thirty, the maid announced to Ebbins that Marilyn was done with Kenneth and should be out in just a few minutes. By nine o’clock, there was still no Marilyn. Peter called again. “You son of a bitch!” he screamed. Ebbins could hear Dave Powers in the background, threatening him with physical violence.

  By nine-thirty, Ebbins couldn’t take it anymore. He opened Marilyn’s door and walked into her bedroom. He saw her sitting at her vanity table, naked, staring at herself in the mirror. “Marilyn, for crissakes,” he said. “Come on! The President’s waiting, everybody’s waiting.”

  Marilyn looked at him dreamily. “Oh,” she said finally. “Will you help me on with my dress?”

  “So I’m watching this giant international movie star standing there stark naked in her high heels,” Ebbins recalled. “She puts a scarf over her hair so it won’t get mussed and pulls this beaded dress over her head. This dress was so tight it took me ten minutes to pull it down over her ass! She says, ‘Take it easy. Don’t tear the beads.’ I’m on my knees inching this dress down over her ass and my face is right at her crotch. But I’m not thinking of anything but getting her to that goddamn party.”

  Finally, at ten o’clock, Monroe was ready. Ebbins was astounded. “Whew, did she look sensational — like a princess. I said to her, ‘Jesus Christ, you sure are pretty.’ She just said, ‘Thank you.’”

  Marilyn put a red wig over her hair, slipped on dark glasses, and rode in the limousine with Milt to Park Avenue. When they arrived, over fifty photographers were milling around the lobby of the building, hoping to capture some of the celebrities attending the party upstairs as they left. Not one of them recognized Marilyn. When she got off the elevator three Secret Service men watched her slip off the wig, fix her hair, take off the glasses and become Marilyn Monroe again.

  As she and Ebbins entered the apartment, Jack Kennedy had his back to them. He turned around, smiled at Marilyn, and said, “Hi!” She sashayed up to him and he took her arm. “Come on,” he said to her. “I want you to meet some people.” As they walked away, Marilyn looked back at Milt Ebbins and winked.

  For a few seconds, Ebbins thought he was in the clear. Then someone grabbed him by the back of the neck and pulled him into a bedroom. It was Peter, red with fury. “You son of a bitch!” he hissed, and raised his fist, measuring Milt for a punch. Dave Powers grabbed Ebbins by the collar and tore open his shirt at the neck.

  Ebbins managed to calm the two men down, and it was then that he learned that there had been no dinner. “Everybody just ate hors d’oeuvres and drank and got blind drunk and happy as larks,” he recalled being told. “Nobody cared about dinner after a while. They told me the chef tried to jump out the window. Here he had cooked a fabulous dinner for the President of the United States and nobody ate it!”

  MARILYN’S REPUTATION FOR tardiness became a running gag at a star-studded fund-raising gala in Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962, held to celebrate the President’s upcoming forty-fifth birthday. Attended by fifteen thousand loyal Democrats, the extravaganza featured Jack Benny, Henry Fonda, Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, and Maria Callas, among others.

  It was Peter’s idea to have Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday” to Jack as the evening’s finale. It would be the first time Monroe would perform before a live audience since 1954, when she entertained American troops in Korea during her honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio.

  Marilyn asked her favorite designer, Jean-Louis, famous for the sensational flesh-colored gowns he’d created for Marlene Dietrich, to design something similar for her, a dress that would look like “a second skin.” Made of flesh-colored mesh studded with rhinestones, the gown cost five thousand dollars and had to be sewn on. Marilyn wore no underwear beneath it.

  Mickey Song, who had cut Jack’s and Bobby’s hair for the occasion, begged Bobby to let him have a shot at Marilyn Monroe’s hair. “She didn’t want me to work on her, because she didn’t know me. But Bobby convinced her. I didn’t know if I’d get the chance until she showed up backstage at Madison Square Garden. Her hair had been set, but it needed
some finishing touches.”

  “While I was working on Marilyn,” Song recalled, “she was extremely nervous and uptight. The door was open and Bobby Kennedy was pacing back and forth outside, watching us. Finally he came into the dressing room and said to me, ‘Would you step out for a minute?’ When I did, he closed the door behind him, and he stayed in there for about fifteen minutes. Then he left, and I went back in. Marilyn was all disheveled. She giggled and said, ‘Could you help me get myself back together?’”

  As showtime approached, Marilyn grew terrified — not only of performing live, with no chance for retakes, but of singing in front of the President and other high government officials. With the show’s producer, Richard Adler, she had endlessly practiced the familiar verse to “Happy Birthday” and a special stanza written especially for Kennedy. She had had trouble remembering the new material, and Adler warned the President that Monroe might flub some lines. “Oh, I think she’ll be very good,” Kennedy responded.

  As she waited in the wings to go on, Marilyn’s nervousness threatened to undo her. She had been drinking to fortify herself, and by this point she was visibly tipsy.

  With Peter onstage as an ad hoc master of ceremonies for the purpose of introducing Marilyn, the preplanned running gag began. As the President sat near Bobby and Ethel Kennedy (Jackie spent the day horseback riding in Virginia), Peter gave Marilyn her first of several introductions: “Mr. President, on this occasion of your birthday, this lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual. Mr. President — Marilyn Monroe!”

  A roar arose from the audience, but Marilyn didn’t appear. Peter shrugged theatrically and walked offstage, and several other acts came on to perform. Then Peter returned for another go, calling Marilyn “a woman about whom it may truly be said — she needs no introduction.” A drumroll announced her entrance — but again there was no Monroe.

  After a long pause, Peter continued. “Because, Mr. President, in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who has meant so much . . . who has done more . . . Mr. President, the late Marilyn Monroe!”

  Cheers rocked the Garden as Marilyn, panicking and being pushed from the wings by Milt Ebbins, appeared onstage. Swathed in white ermine, taking tiny mincing steps that were all she could manage in her skintight gown, she sidled up to Peter, who removed her fur and exited stage left. The thousands of rhinestones on Marilyn’s dress reflected the spotlights and made her seem more a celestial vision than a human being.

  She stood silently in front of the microphone for several long moments, collecting herself. Then she breathed heavily, eliciting more cheers. After flicking the microphone with her finger to make sure it was working, she began to sing “Happy Birthday” as it had never been sung before. Slowly, breathily, sensually, Marilyn made the song seem somehow suggestive, particularly when she intoned, “Happy Birthday . . . Mr. Pres . . . i . . . dent . . . Happy Birthday . . . to you.”

  Marilyn brought the performance off without a hitch, just as Jack Kennedy had predicted. “The President was a better showman than I was,” Richard Adler admitted. “But you couldn’t hear [her singing] anyway. For the crowd was yelling and screaming for her. It was like a mass seduction.”

  At the conclusion of the song, Marilyn urged the audience to join her (“C’mon, everybody, Happy Birthday!”) and a huge cake was wheeled onstage. Within a few minutes, the President was at the microphone. “I can now retire from politics,” he told the crowd, “after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

  Later Marilyn attended a private party in the President’s honor given by Arthur Krim, the head of United Artists. There her glittery presence mesmerized the male guests, who in addition to the Kennedy brothers included Vice-President Johnson, Adlai Stevenson, and Arthur Schlesinger. Stevenson wrote a friend that Marilyn was wearing “skin and beads. I didn’t see the beads! My encounters [with her], however, were only after breaking through the strong defenses established by Robert Kennedy, who was dodging around her like a moth around a flame.”

  Schlesinger later wrote, “Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me — but then she receded into her own glittering mist. There was something at once magical and desperate about her. Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did.”

  After Krim’s party, Marilyn was whisked into the Carlyle Hotel to spend a few hours alone with the President. It would prove to be their last rendezvous.

  BY JUNE 1962, MARILYN MONROE was as emotionally needy as she had ever been in her life. She once again was caught up in a spiral of insecurity, depression, alcohol, and drugs. She had just been fired from Somethings Got to Give because of repeated lateness and absences. They were caused, she said, by illness, but her Twentieth Century-Fox bosses mistrusted the excuse and pointed to her flight to New York to sing for the President as proof that she wasn’t as ill as she claimed. Headlines across the country screamed, “Marilyn Gets the Sack,” and now it wasn’t only her irrational fears that suggested her career might be over — commentators were speculating about the same thing.

  Worse, Marilyn’s involvement with John Kennedy, initially a euphoric high, had left her feeling abused. She had realized that to Kennedy she was, like so many other girls, little more than another piece of “poon,” and it hit her like a fist in the face.

  Like college fraternity brothers with a sexy coed, Peter and Jack had become more brazen with Marilyn as time went by. At first, she had been part of a small group to dine with the President at the beach house, and he would take her back to his hotel at the end of the evening. But before long, as Mrs. Dean Martin recalled, they got a little too “gleeful” and “not discreet at all.” Peter had once telephoned Marilyn to invite her to a party, and she asked who else would be there. Among the names he gave her, she recognized two high-priced call girls. She coldly declined the invitation.

  Jack Kennedy’s cavalier treatment of Marilyn left her alternately clingy, belligerent, and despondent. Her Los Angeles psychiatrist’s son, Daniel Greenson, now a doctor himself, remembered going to see Marilyn that summer when his father was out of the country. “This woman was desperate. She couldn’t sleep — it was the middle of the afternoon — and she said how terrible she felt about herself, how worthless she felt. She talked about being a waif, that she was ugly, that people were only nice to her for what they could get from her. She said life wasn’t worth living anymore.” Milt Ebbins tried to cheer Marilyn out of one of her depressive moods by telling her, “Cmon, Marilyn, you know everybody loves you.” She replied, “Everybody doesn’t love me. The only ones who love me are the guys who sit in the balcony and jerk off.”

  Marilyn was devastated when Jack Kennedy tried to distance himself from her. She began to call him at the White House and wrote him what Peter termed “rather pathetic letters.” Finally — appalled at being ignored — she threatened to reveal the affair to the press. This had the hoped-for effect: Jack responded. He sent Bobby to Los Angeles to talk to Marilyn and soothe her feelings.

  According to Peter’s third wife, Deborah Gould, Peter told her that Bobby’s mission as messenger for his brother marked the beginning of an affair between him and Marilyn. They had been sexually intimate a few times before the encounter in Marilyn’s dressing room at Madison Square Garden, but now they found themselves deeply drawn to each other — Marilyn out of a kind of desperate transference of her affection from Jack to Bobby, and Bobby because his physical attraction to Marilyn was now joined by a deep compassion for her suffering, that “directness of response to distress” that Arthur Schlesinger had observed in him.

  This affair, by all accounts, was far more serious than the one between Marilyn and Jack, and it developed quickly. Bobby began to spend more time in Los Angeles, always seeing Marilyn, often at the Lawfords’ house. Lynn Sherman, a neighbor of Peter’s,
14 noticed that “there were many rendezvous there. The official car used to drive up, and you knew Robert Kennedy was in town, and then the help would come in and say, ‘Marilyn’s arrived.’ . . . Sometimes I’d notice Bobby and Marilyn go out through the patio to the beach to walk.”

  Chuck Pick, a twenty-year-old parking attendant at Romanoff’s whom Peter had befriended two years earlier, recalled working a party at the Lawford house one night. “Marilyn was there, and so was Bobby. One of the Secret Service guys said to me, ‘You have eyes but you can’t see, you have ears but you can’t hear, and you have a mouth but you can’t speak. You’re gonna see a lot of things, but you have to keep quiet.’

  “I didn’t know what he was talking about, but a little while later I guessed. The party was breaking up, and Marilyn and Bobby were leaving together. I brought around his white 1956 T-bird and Marilyn got into it and I just sat there — I guess I wanted to sit next to Marilyn Monroe for as long as possible. Finally Bobby said, ‘Okay, you can get out now,’ and he got in and they drove away.”

  The Lawfords’ next-door neighbor Peter Dye recalled Marilyn’s telling him that she was “nuts” about Bobby. “Absolutely crazy. But it wasn’t a physical attraction for her. It was more mental. Because she was depicted as a dumb blonde. You always want what you don’t have, and Bobby was a bright guy. That’s what turned her on.”

  Marilyn had kept a diary for years, mostly to remind herself to do things and bring some organization to her sometimes jumbled affairs. Now, with the attorney general of the United States spending so much time with her, she began to jot down notes of the things she and Bobby discussed — especially after he complained that she didn’t remember half the things he’d told her.