Sinatra

by James Kaplan

  All this made Hank Sanicola very nervous. The casino’s gaming license was at stake, as was his own significant investment. Sanicola fretted more and more about the situation that summer, and he didn’t like to keep his feelings to himself.

  —

  It was an eventful summer at Cal-Neva, though not all events made the papers.

  The night after the opening, a local deputy sheriff named Richard Anderson came to the lodge to pick up his wife, Toni, an attractive cocktail waitress just finishing her shift. The two had been married for three months; prior to this, Toni had been involved with Frank Sinatra. Yet even though she was now a married woman, Frank—who was, after all, also her employer—continued to treat her in a proprietary way. Anderson had warned Sinatra to stay away from his wife.

  On the night of June 30, as the deputy stood in the lodge’s kitchen, talking to the dishwashers while he waited for his wife, Frank came in and asked Anderson what he was doing there. When Anderson said he was picking up his wife, Frank tried to throw him out. Anderson refused to leave; matters escalated. In the scuffle that ensued, Anderson punched Sinatra—so hard that Frank was unable to perform for the next couple of days. In retaliation, Sinatra had Anderson suspended from the police force.

  Two weeks later, the deputy sheriff and his wife were driving to dinner when a car moving at high speed in the oncoming lane forced them off the road. The Andersons’ car smashed into a tree, and Richard Anderson was killed instantly. His wife, thrown from the car, suffered multiple fractures. The other car—a maroon convertible with California plates, according to an eyewitness—never stopped, and the driver couldn’t be traced.

  —

  Marilyn Monroe seems to have managed an almost miraculous turnaround after her firing from Something’s Got to Give. Within a week of her dismissal, executives at 20th Century Fox, realizing what a valuable asset they were pushing away, had changed their minds and commenced discussions about rehiring her and revising the script. She emerged from the brouhaha looking like the innocent victim, and of course she was still a great star: scripts flowed in for her consideration; magazines lined up to interview and photograph her. At the end of June and the beginning of July, she posed for what would become a famous series of photographs by Bert Stern, who was on assignment for Vogue. Seen today, the pictures show her, at thirty-six, glowing with a new kind of serenity, a mature beauty.

  But with Marilyn, serenity was always fleeting. That spring and summer, she also had a series of contacts, mainly by telephone but at least once in person, with Robert Kennedy, who, “with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did,” Arthur Schlesinger writes. “He met her again at Patricia Lawford’s house in Los Angeles. She called him thereafter in Washington, using an assumed name. She was very often distraught. [Kennedy’s secretary] Angie Novello talked to her more often than the Attorney General did. One feels that Robert Kennedy came to inhabit the fantasies of her last summer.”

  Some have suggested that one of these fantasies was that Bobby Kennedy would marry her.

  The younger Kennedy, by most accounts as uxorious as his older brother was promiscuous, seems to have had a shy crush on Monroe; she, on the other hand, appears to have been idealistically rather than physically drawn to him. Once, when Marilyn asked her masseur and confidant Ralph Roberts if he’d heard rumors that she and Bobby were having an affair, he said, “You can’t not hear. It’s the talk of Hollywood.” She replied, “Well, it’s not true. Anyway, he’s too puny for me.”

  Did they sleep together? Did the Savonarola of Washington, Frank Sinatra’s sworn enemy and Sam Giancana’s nemesis, slip and fall with Marilyn Monroe? On the free-associative tape Marilyn made for her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson in the spring or summer of 1962, she went on at worshipful length about Jack Kennedy (“Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her Commander-in-Chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world”) and then remarked,

  I’m glad he has Bobby. It’s like the Navy. The President is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby will do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I’ll never embarrass him. As long as I have memory I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy. But Bobby, Doctor, what shall I do about Bobby? As you see, there’s no room in my life for him. I guess I don’t have the moral courage to face up to it and hurt him. I want someone else to tell him it’s over. I tried to get the President to do it, but I couldn’t reach him. Now I’m glad I couldn’t—he’s too important to ask.

  This is all very titillating—except that the words come not from the tape itself but from a “near-verbatim” transcript made shortly after Marilyn’s death by John Miner, head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, and revealed by him, thirty-five years later, to the Kennedy muckraker Seymour Hersh. RFK might have slipped, MM might have let her fantasy carry her away, but there are just too many variables affecting the account—a transcript, after all, of a free-associative tape made for her hovering and possessive doctor by an actress of fluid ego and under the influence of many different drugs—to take it as a certainty.

  What is certain is that that summer Monroe reconnected with the love of her life, Joe DiMaggio. Both had grown during the ten years since their divorce, and they spent some quiet days together in June and July, getting to know each other as they now were. Marilyn told DiMaggio of her concerns about Greenson. She might have said less about the psychiatrist’s associate and pharmaceutical dispenser, an internist named Hyman Engelberg, who was constantly on call to give Marilyn “youth shots”—a combination of tranquilizers and speed—and other injections to help her get to sleep at night. Engelberg, too, had become proprietary about her and sometimes took it upon himself to dose Marilyn independently from Greenson’s instructions.

  Sometime toward the end of July, Monroe spent a weekend at Cal-Neva. Accounts of her stay there differ sharply.

  Almost all assert that Marilyn spent the last weekend of the month, July 27 to 29, at the resort—an idea with a built-in poignancy, since this was also the last full weekend of her life. The assertion is almost certainly not true.

  According to Donald Spoto, the Lawfords invited Marilyn to accompany them to Cal-Neva from the twenty-seventh to the twenty-ninth, and she happily accepted, telephoning DiMaggio and asking him to meet her there. Others say that it was Frank Sinatra who invited Monroe to Cal-Neva, because he was worried about her, and that DiMaggio wasn’t there. “Frank is a very, very compassionate person,” Mickey Rudin said later. “He brought Marilyn to Cal-Neva to give her a little fun, a little relief from her problems.”

  All accounts agree that Peter and Pat Lawford—despite Frank’s ongoing feud with Lawford—accompanied Monroe to the resort. If this is so, then the weekend in question had to have been July 20–22 (Variety places the Lawfords there then), not July 27–29. And while Joe DiMaggio was verifiably in the Lake Tahoe area around that time, he was not there the following weekend: he was at Yankee Stadium, playing in the Old-Timers’ Day game.

  But even though DiMaggio did go to Lake Tahoe sometime over the weekend of July 20–22, he did not stay at Frank’s pleasure dome.

  Newspaper accounts confirm the Yankee Clipper’s presence at Harrah’s, on the south shore of Tahoe, over that weekend, and a former Cal-Neva bell captain named Ray Langford recalled that DiMaggio checked into the Silver Crest Motel, just down the road, rather than stay at Sinatra’s resort.

  Joe D. was the closest of friends with Skinny D’Amato, who was to Cal-Neva what Jack Entratter and Carl Cohen were to the Sands. But DiMaggio had come to hate his former drinking buddy Sinatra, whom he considered just another Hollywood phony and whom he knew to have been involved with Marilyn.

  Knowing nothing of her reconnection with DiMaggio, Frank expressed annoyance when he discovered that Joe was in the vicinity. “If the guy don’t want her, why doesn’t he leave her the fuck alone?” he said. “He’s just making
things worse here.” And why was DiMaggio at Lake Tahoe, if not to be with Marilyn? He appears to have gone to keep an eye on her rather than to spend time with her: he hovered around the edges of Cal-Neva that weekend, going fishing with Ray Langford, and was not spotted at the resort.

  Sinatra, though, seems to have stayed close by Monroe’s side. A former security man at Cal-Neva recalled,

  Mr. Sinatra wanted a special meal prepared for her—lots of food, a steak, potatoes, a cheesecake. He went to the kitchen and gave a menu for every day she was to be there. I know that the meal was sent to her chalet. Mr. Lawford answered the door in Marilyn’s room. The waiter never saw her. Then the tray was back in the kitchen about two hours later. The only thing that had been eaten was the cheesecake, and someone said that Mr. Sinatra had eaten that.

  The same employee reported that “when Frank saw Marilyn, he was alarmed at how depressed she seemed. He was on the phone to her psychiatrist, screaming at him, saying, ‘What the hell kind of treatment are you giving her? She’s a fucking mess. What the hell is she paying you for? Why isn’t she in a sanitarium, or something?’ ”

  Two persistent rumors cling around Marilyn Monroe’s weekend at Cal-Neva: that she overdosed on barbiturates, and that she engaged in (possibly perverse) sexual relations with Sam Giancana, and possibly other mafiosi as well.

  As to the first story: Spoto calls it “scurrilous and unfounded.” Yet a former kitchen worker at the lodge reported receiving a frantic phone call from Peter Lawford: “ ‘We need coffee in Chalet 52,’ he screamed into the phone, then hung up…No less than two minutes passed and it was Mr. Sinatra on the phone screaming, ‘Where’s that goddamn coffee?’ I learned later that they were in 52, walking Marilyn around, trying to get her to wake up.”

  Lawford also told Kitty Kelley, “I did see Frank briefly when we took Marilyn up to Cal-Neva, but he got so mad at her after she overdosed and had to have her stomach pumped that he just snarled at everyone.”

  As to the second rumor, Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan assert that Giancana was present at Cal-Neva that weekend and that Frank supposedly shot, with his own camera, a series of shocking photos, showing (according to the photographer Billy Woodfield, who said he developed the film) “Marilyn, on all fours. She looked sick. Astride her, either riding her like a horse or trying to help her up—I couldn’t make out which—was Sam Giancana.”

  Woodfield said that Sinatra took out his lighter and burned the pictures in his presence.

  It’s horrifying, but again direct evidence is missing—in this case, of the incident itself and even of Giancana’s presence at Cal-Neva while Monroe was there. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a reliable witness who was close to both Giancana and Sinatra, claims that Mooney was absent. “I was in Lake Tahoe that weekend,” she recalled, “and I saw Marilyn eating dinner. Giancana and his crowd weren’t there, and I would have known if they were.”

  He had been there, though, and he would soon be back.

  —

  Why does it matter which weekend in July Marilyn Monroe spent at Cal-Neva?

  Because she was in a fluctuating and delicate state of mind that summer; “she could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung,” said Mickey Rudin, who was Marilyn’s lawyer as well as Sinatra’s.*2 In Peter Lawford’s telling, Frank had thrown up his hands where she was concerned by the time she left Lake Tahoe.

  In Donald Spoto’s version, Monroe and DiMaggio spent a romantic and secluded last weekend in July at Cal-Neva, in the course of which he proposed that they remarry, and she accepted. “Marilyn and Joe planned a wedding date of Wednesday, August 8, in Los Angeles,” Spoto writes, “and a radiant Marilyn returned home with Joe’s pajamas.”

  It’s pleasant to think it happened this way—pajamas and all—but by the last weekend in July, DiMaggio had flown east for Old Timers’ Day. And his proposal is unlikely to have come before or during the previous weekend, when Marilyn Monroe, by most accounts, was not behaving like a blissful fiancée.

  It’s most likely that he proposed early in the week of July 23: by midweek, he was off to San Diego to celebrate the graduation of his son, Joe junior, from the U.S. Marine Corps Recruit Depot, and then he headed east, not scheduled to return to the West Coast until a charity baseball game in San Francisco on August 4. On July 25, Marilyn met at her home with the 20th Century Fox production chief, Peter Levathes, who brought welcome news: he was personally rehiring her for Something’s Got to Give, at a higher salary. “She seemed to him very pleasant and reasonable,” Spoto writes, “and before he departed she said something that stayed with him over the years: ‘You know, Peter, in a way I’m a very unfortunate woman. All this nonsense about being a legend, all this glamour and publicity. Somehow I’m always a disappointment to people.’ ”

  —

  Frank had considered marrying her himself, to save her. “He felt that if she were his wife, everyone else would back off, give her some space, and allow her to get herself together,” a friend recalled. “ ‘No one will mess with her if she’s Mrs. Frank Sinatra,’ he said. ‘No one would dare.’ ”

  “Yeah, Frank wanted to marry the broad,” Jilly said later. “He asked her and she said no.”

  She was saving herself for Joe.

  —

  And then came August 5, and the terrible death that seemed, in an instant, to subtract a real measure of beauty and hope from the world. Marilyn’s infinite vulnerability had stirred love and hate but seems to have left no one indifferent. Her sudden loss was an end of innocence and in its own strange way a herald of even worse things to come. Frank was “devastated,” his valet recalled. Joe DiMaggio was devastated, too, and he was also furious: at Hollywood, which had chewed Marilyn up and spat her out, and at “the fucking Kennedys,” as he called them that day. “She was a toy for them,” he told a friend. “Bobby Kennedy was the one Joe talked about,” the friend recalled. “He hated him. And Sinatra—Joe cursed Sinatra.”

  DiMaggio and Monroe’s half sister, Berniece Miracle, agreed to make the funeral—at Westwood Village Memorial Park on August 8, the day Marilyn and Joe were to have been married—a strictly private affair. They invited some two dozen people: mostly, as DiMaggio biographer Richard Ben Cramer writes, “people who had served Marilyn—a maid, her housekeeper, her secretary, her driver, her masseur Ralph Roberts, her psychiatrist Ralph Greenson (and his family), her publicist, her lawyers, a couple of hairdressers, and her loyal makeup man, Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder.”

  Patricia Lawford flew west for the funeral from the summer White House at Hyannis Port, only to find upon arriving that neither she nor her husband (who had been the last person to speak with Marilyn on the night of her death)*3 had been invited. “I’m shocked,” Peter Lawford told the Associated Press’s James Bacon. “I don’t know who’s responsible but the whole thing was badly handled.”

  Joe DiMaggio was responsible. Not a single movie star had been invited. “Those in charge of the arrangements explained that if they invited one star, they would have to invite many, and to have a big crowd would mean a circus-like funeral,” Bacon wrote. But he continued, doubtless expressing the feelings of many in Hollywood, “The absence of the big movie names may have given a dignified, almost quiet tone to the funeral, but it hardly seemed the type of final sendoff for a star of Miss Monroe’s magnitude.”

  Marilyn’s friend Inez Melson, who was present, later said that Frank arrived at the cemetery with bodyguards and tried to force, then bribe, his way in. He was turned away.

  Mickey Rudin, who was invited, protested to DiMaggio that he was barring many important people in the movie industry, not just stars. What, Rudin asked Joe, was he supposed to tell them?

  “Tell them,” DiMaggio said, “if it wasn’t for them, she’d still be here.”

  —

  Frank returned to Cal-Neva. After all, the place now had his name on it (it was officially Frank Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge); there was business t
o be done. Joe E. Lewis, a strangely consoling presence with his tragic face and drunk jokes, was headlining in the Celebrity Room through the ninth, to be followed by Eddie Fisher.

  Life went on in its often absurd way. The headlines were black with Marilyn’s death, but the gossip sections lagged while the columnists assembled their tributes. And on August 6, oddly juxtaposed with the obligatory front-page story about the weekend’s tragic events (CORONER AND POLICE PROBE MARILYN MONROE’S DEATH), many papers ran an assessment of the Kennedy presidency at midterm by the Associated Press’s Relman Morin. Under the headline JFK SHOWS NO CRACKS IN HIS CALM, the piece began,

  President John F. Kennedy appears to be the best air-conditioned man in Washington these days.

  While the political sirocco blows hot from Capitol Hill, Kennedy looks cool.

  He sits in his rocking chair, crunching the ice from a soft drink, slowly smoking a thin cigar, examining the record as he approaches mid-passage in his first term in the White House. There are no visible cracks in his marble calm.

  A year before, Morin wrote, America had been embroiled in foreign-policy problems, chiefly the Berlin crisis; now the president was plagued by relatively minor domestic matters: the Senate’s killing of the Medicare bill; the shelving of the farm and school aid bills; the economy’s slow rally after the previous year’s recession. Yet though businessmen considered JFK antibusiness and conservatives called him “socialistic,” the president’s popularity, which had recently stood at an astounding 79 percent (and had slipped slightly), was still high.

  Few outside Kennedy’s inner circle knew of the turmoil behind the facade. Marilyn’s death might have solved one potentially devastating problem for the president, but another was still boiling. “His liaison with Judith Campbell Exner was still a secret from the public,” Seymour Hersh writes, “although J. Edgar Hoover and dozens of FBI agents now knew of Kennedy’s involvement with her and that she met regularly with Sam Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. Hoover also knew that a senior employee of General Dynamics, one of two bidders for the $6.5 billion TFX [F-111 fighter] aircraft contract, had been part of a team that in August broke into Exner’s apartment in Los Angeles.” The burglars, Hersh contends, were seeking evidence with which to blackmail the president into giving General Dynamics the contract.