Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  “She wanted so much to be a part of his world,” a friend of Marilyn’s recalled. “Again, she thought Bobby would be her passport to becoming a great lady. I saw the stuff in Marilyn’s diary — things about Jimmy Hoffa [the corrupt Teamsters Union leader Bobby was investigating] and Fidel Castro. It didn’t mean anything to me because I was just a stupid young girl and couldn’t have cared less if they all killed each other.”

  It seems unlikely, however, that Bobby had confided in Marilyn about sensitive issues as much as her diary notations seemed to indicate.

  “She may have made the notes while Bobby was talking on the telephone, in the hope of having something to talk to him about later. It would likely not have occurred to Bobby that she was taking notes.”

  Neither did it occur to him, at first, that anybody else was. But by late July 1962, he, Jack, and Peter became aware of the fact that Peter’s beach house, and both Marilyn’s house on Fifth Helena Drive and her apartment on Doheny, were bugged. The Kennedy brothers’ affairs with Marilyn Monroe, they both now realized, had left them extraordinarily vulnerable. The enemies the Kennedy administration had made — from the Mafia dons they had betrayed, to the pro-Castro forces whose leader they had attempted to kill — were not lax in collecting as much evidence of Kennedy malfeasance as possible, in the hope of retaliation.

  Suddenly, Robert Kennedy’s relationship with Marilyn Monroe had become dangerous — and Bobby knew he would have to end it.

  14 Not the Lynne Sherman married to Milt Ebbins.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Marilyn was frightened. She sat on the beach at Point Dume, north of Los Angeles, bundled against the growing chill and watching the remains of a blazing mid-July sun disappear behind the Pacific Ocean. Her companion, her old friend Bob Slatzer, listened as she poured her heart out about Bobby Kennedy, wondering why he wouldn’t return her phone calls. To Slatzer’s astonishment, Marilyn then said that the attorney general had promised to marry her. Slatzer tried to reason with her, tried to explain that there was no possibility that the President’s brother, a staunch Catholic with seven small children, would risk such a scandal. Marilyn began to sob. “Then you’re saying . . . that maybe . . . he never even meant it?”

  Slatzer nodded, and Marilyn’s mood, as it often did in connection with the Kennedys, changed from sadness to anger: “I was good enough to be around when he wanted to see me!”

  Slatzer strongly urged Marilyn to forget the whole thing, put the Kennedys behind her, and go on with her life.

  After a few moments of silence, Marilyn said, “You know something? What really has me scared is all the strange clicks and sounds I’ve been hearing on my phone lately. That’s why I called you from a pay phone. I don’t know what to think.”

  She had good reason to be afraid. By now, her house, like Peter Lawford’s, was thoroughly bugged — a maze of electronic eavesdropping lines intermingled with the telephone wires throughout her attic. The installations allowed surveillance experts to listen both to her telephone conversations and to the activity in her bedroom through a hidden microphone.

  The equipment had been in Monroe’s house since March, shortly after Arthur James, a real estate agent and friend of Marilyn’s, received a call from an emissary of Carmine DeSapio, the New York Tammany Hall politician with ties to the Mafia and Jimmy Hoffa, who wanted to “get” Bobby Kennedy in retaliation for his dogged investigation of Teamsters Union corruption. “The request,” James told Anthony Summers, the Monroe biographer, “was that I should get Marilyn away from her house for a while. . . . They wanted her place empty so they could install bugging equipment. I knew about Marilyn’s relationship with Robert Kennedy — she had told me — and that was evidently the reason for wanting to bug her.”

  According to Fred Otash, there were a number of people besides Jimmy Hoffa on whose behalf Marilyn Monroe’s and Peter Lawford’s houses were bugged. Initially, in 1959, “certain elements” of the Republican Party had hired Otash to bug Peter’s house for purely political reasons. “Later,” recalled Otash, “when things started developing with Giancana and Roselli and the Kennedys, there were other electronic devices installed by other people for other reasons. Now you’re developing another profile to embarrass the White House, because now the Kennedys are in power. Now they’re fucking over a lot of people who are taking great offense at what they’re doing. You’ve got the Teamsters who had a hard-on for them, organized crime who had a hard-on for them, the FBI who had a hard-on for them. You had the CIA who wanted to neutralize them because they didn’t want them to take over control of the agency. And the Republican Party was still interested in a derogatory profile, because they wanted them out after four fucking years.”

  For over two decades, Otash refused to say whether or not the Kennedys had been under surveillance, but when several of his deputies began to speak out, he joined them. “I would have kept it quiet all my life,” Otash said. “But all of a sudden I’m looking at FBI files and CIA files with quotes from my investigators telling them about the work they did on my behalf. It’s stupid to sit here and deny that these things are true. Yes, we did have the place [Lawford’s house] wired. Yes, I did hear a tape of Jack Kennedy fucking Monroe. But I don’t want to get into the moans and groans of their relationship. They were having a sexual relationship — period.”

  According to Otash, Bernard Spindel, an East Coast wiretap specialist, approached him in the last months of Marilyn’s life about bugging the star’s house for a client Spindel would not name. “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 don’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.’”

  Marilyn, it turns out, was already bugging herself. She had gone to Otash and asked him to give her electronic equipment with which she could bug her own telephone. “I have no idea why she wanted to do this,” he said. “Maybe she wanted to have something she could hang over Bobby’s head.”

  The Kennedy hairstylist Mickey Song learned that Marilyn was bugging herself from two conversations he had — one with Marilyn and one with Robert Kennedy. Late in July, Marilyn summoned Song, who happily assumed she wanted him to style her hair. When he arrived at her home, he was taken aback to find that she didn’t want her hair done. Instead, she pumped Song for information about the Kennedys. “She figured who else would know more about what’s going on than a hairdresser,” Song said. “She was used to that at the studios, so she came right to the source.”

  Marilyn asked Song about both Bobby and Jack — where they had been, whether he had ever seen them with other women. “I didn’t want to get involved, and I remembered how Peter, Bobby, and Jack had tested me to see if I was a gossip, so I kept telling her, ‘I don’t know . . . I don’t know.’

  “She knew I was being evasive, so she said, ‘Don’t you want to help me?’ I said, ‘I don’t want to get involved.’ Then she told me that the Kennedys were using me just as they were using her. She tried to make us comrades against the Kennedys. I just said, ‘I’m not being used. They’re treating me great.’”

  Song told Marilyn nothing, and a few weeks later, after Marilyn’s death, he was glad he hadn’t. “I saw Bobby and he said to me, ‘You’re always defending the Kennedys, aren’t you? That’s good.’ I just thought he’d heard something about me from someone, but then he said, ‘I heard a tape Marilyn made of you a couple of weeks ago.’

  “I was stunned. I had no idea she was taping me. I guess she was trying to get something on them, to keep them in line. At the time, I didn’t really care about Marilyn and the Kennedys. Now, I think she was abused. They played with her, and they tired of her, and I think they found her a lot of trouble to get off their hands. She wasn’t going to go that easily.”

  By mid-July, both Kennedy brothers knew that their affairs with Marilyn Mo
nroe had put the administration in great jeopardy. According to Otash, a disgruntled former employee of his had tipped Peter off about the bugging devices in his house. Suddenly it was clear that any number of Kennedy enemies could have gathered damaging information about the President and the attorney general — information that at the very least could be used to influence sensitive decisions or, in a worst-case scenario, might bring down the Kennedy presidency.

  Robert Kennedy’s first gentle attempts to extricate himself from the Monroe affair were unsuccessful. Marilyn reacted badly, refusing to accept the end of the romance without an adequate explanation. “He should face me and tell me why,” she said. “Or tell me on the phone. I don’t care. I just want to know why.” A reason was not forthcoming, and Marilyn called Bobby repeatedly to get one. He changed his private office telephone number, forcing her to place calls through the Justice Department switchboard. The calls — her phone records reveal eight in a little over a month — went unanswered. Angry, Marilyn called Bobby at home for the first time, and he was furious with her.

  Matters continued to worsen, and Marilyn finally turned to Pat Lawford for help. According to a friend, Marilyn never blamed Peter for involving her with the Kennedys. “He was always the good guy. Peter could do no wrong as far as she was concerned.”

  Marilyn told Bob Slatzer that she had spoken to Pat Lawford about her problems with Bobby. “Pat told her that she really should forget it, that she should ignore Bobby’s promises. She told Marilyn something like, ‘Bobby’s still just a little boy. But you have to remember he’s a little boy with a wife and seven kids.’ She told Marilyn that marriage to Bobby was out of the question. She also said that part of the reason Bobby broke off with Marilyn was tremendous pressure from his mother, Rose. She strongly disapproved of Bobby and Jack’s behavior. Rose laid down the law to Bobby about Marilyn about a week before he broke things off with her.”

  Peter and Pat had watched Marilyn’s disintegration with alarm. She was taking more and more pills to sleep at night, drinking champagne earlier and earlier in the day to elevate her moods. Her fears of aging, of losing her appeal, had been so badly exacerbated by her firing from Something’s Got to Give and by her rejection by the Kennedy brothers that she was now chronically depressed. Increasingly, she was “letting herself go.” Bill Asher remembered playing volleyball at Peter’s when “Marilyn came out of the house, and it was so sad. She was wearing slacks and she had a slit in the back of her pants. She had lost all of her sense of respect for herself. By then she was unkempt and dirty and wobbly on her legs.”

  Don Pack, the photographer for the Santa Monica Evening Outlook who had befriended Peter, recalled seeing Marilyn passed out on Peter’s sofa one evening. Later, Peter spoke of awakening one early morning to find Marilyn, who was sleeping over at his house, standing at a balcony railing and staring at the swimming pool below, as if she were contemplating jumping. At closer range he saw that she was crying. “I led her in and made breakfast, and Pat and I consoled her for hours. She was completely down on herself, talked about how ugly she felt, how worthless, how used and abused.”

  In the hope that a change of scenery might do Marilyn some good, Peter and Pat brought her in late July to the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, a casino resort allegedly co-owned by Frank Sinatra and Sam Giancana. It was a disastrous weekend during which, according to restaurateur Mike Romanoff’s wife, Gloria, “they were all drinking a great deal.” Marilyn told Gloria that she had become so immune to the effects of barbiturates that they no longer worked for her except in large doses. “So she’d begin about nine in the evening, and build up that lethal combination of booze and pills.”

  Employees of the Cal-Neva Lodge recall a depressed, withdrawn Marilyn Monroe, so afraid of being alone that she left her telephone line open to the casino switchboard when she went to bed. It was this open line that saved her life on Saturday night. The operator heard labored breathing and alerted Peter and Pat, who rushed to her room and found Marilyn on the floor, drugged, barely conscious, apparently having fallen out of bed. They revived her with coffee and long walks around the room.

  Mae Shoopman was the cashier at Cal-Neva, and she recalled that Marilyn’s close call was an accidental overdose. “There was no suggestion of a suicide attempt. She just couldn’t sleep and took more pills than she should have.”

  On the trip back to Los Angeles, both Marilyn and Peter were drunk. (Pat had flown from Tahoe to Hyannis Port for a visit with her family.) The airplane pilot’s widow, Barbara Lieto, recalled that Peter got into a nasty argument with her husband, Frank Lieto, over where the plane should land, insisting that the pilot touch down at Santa Monica airport even after being told the airport was closed.

  After landing at LA airport, a staggering, barefoot Marilyn went home in a limousine and Frank Lieto and two other crew members gave Peter a ride to Santa Monica. Peter further angered Lieto when he insisted that he stop the car, although it was after midnight and they were only a few blocks from the beach house. Peter hopped out and stepped into a phone booth, where he spoke to someone for half an hour while the others waited for him with growing impatience and wondered why he couldn’t have made the call from his own telephone, minutes away.

  The reason, of course, was that his phone was bugged, and what Peter said during the thirty-minute conversation was of a very sensitive nature. He was warning Robert Kennedy that Marilyn Monroe had begun making threats — threats that, given her highly unstable condition, could not be taken lightly.

  The most disturbing of them was Marilyn’s ultimatum that unless she heard from Bobby, unless he explained to her face-to-face why their relationship was over, she would hold a press conference and reveal their affair. She hinted to Peter that she had tapes of herself and Bobby, tapes she would play to prove what would be a startling revelation. It was the knowledge that Marilyn had bugged Bobby and might use the tapes against him that led Peter to make his frantic late- night dash to the telephone booth.

  Did Marilyn seriously consider holding such a press conference, which would have created a scandal that could have toppled the administration and might have ended her own career? Or was she bluffing? Marilyn talked about it to Jeanne Carmen, and she believed Marilyn was serious. “She would have gone through with it. Because she didn’t realize the seriousness of it. She wasn’t the type of person who played games or bluffed. She was like a hurt little girl and she wanted to get even.”

  MARILYN WAS NOW REACHING OUT for any kind of psychological anchor. Her near-daily sessions with her psychiatrist were not enough to ease her pain, and she constantly telephoned friends, indiscreetly telling them about her travails with Bobby. From phone booths, she called Arthur James to complain that Bobby had “cut me off cold.” On August 3, she called her old friend from the time she’d been married to Arthur Miller, poet Norman Rosten. He thought her voice sounded frenetic and unnatural, and it worried him. She called Anne Karger, the mother of an early lover, to whom she sounded depressed. She told Karger she was going to marry Bobby Kennedy. Incredulous, Karger pointed out the absurdity of that notion. Marilyn quietly replied, “If he loves me, he will.”

  Peter tried his best to keep Marilyn calm and rational and prevent her from carrying out her threats against his brothers-in-law. On Thursday, August 2, she attended a gathering at his house. Peter’s friend Dick Livingston remembered her vividly that night. “She came in carrying her own bottle of Dom Pérignon champagne. She drank it over little ice cubes from Peter’s ice-cube maker. She had on the damnedest outfit — a pair of hip-huggers with a bare midriff that revealed her gallbladder operation scar and a Mexican serape wrapped around her neck. She was absolutely white, the color of alabaster.”

  When Livingston said to her, “My God, Marilyn — you ought to get some sun,” she looked at him and whispered, “I know. What I need is a tan . . . and a man.”

  The next night, Friday, August 3, Peter took Marilyn to a local restaurant to dine with him and Pat Newcomb,
one of Monroe’s press agents and an intimate friend. Once again Marilyn became badly intoxicated, so much so that she failed to recognize Billy Travilla when he came over to the table to say hello. Travilla had designed Marilyn’s clothes in eight of her biggest hits, and created her most famous outfit, the pleated white dress that swirls up around her in The Seven Year Itch. “She looked at me with no recognition at all,” Travilla recalled. “Then all of a sudden she said, ‘Billy!’ I left the table very hurt and upset.”

  Marilyn returned home that evening drunk and determined to talk to Bobby Kennedy. She had made her last call to the Justice Department on the previous Monday, July 30 — a call that lasted eight minutes, according to her phone records. Whether she spoke to Bobby or to his secretary, Angie Novello, is unknown, but she was clearly left unsatisfied. When she learned that Bobby was due in California at the end of the week, she called Peter to ask where Bobby would be staying. Peter told her to call Pat in Hyannis Port. Pat told her that Bobby had a reservation at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, along with his wife, Ethel, and four of his children.

  The late New York Daily News reporter Florabel Muir, according to her former assistant Elizabeth Fancher, was one of a handful of journalists who attempted to re-create Marilyn’s last days after her death. Muir paid an operator at the St. Francis for information and was told that Marilyn called Bobby several times during the day on Friday, August 3, and left messages. As far as the operator knew, the calls were not returned.