Others who were well aware of Bobby’s fling with Monroe included select members of President Kennedy’s White House staff. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, a speechwriter for JFK, later wrote what has come to be regarded as Robert F. Kennedy’s definitive biography. When asked why the biography failed to mention RFK’s affair with Monroe, Schlesinger pointed out that as a loyal friend to the family, he didn’t wish to cause more anguish than they’d already endured. “That’s not to say that it didn’t happen,” Schlesinger added. “It did happen. Bobby was human. He enjoyed a stiff drink now and then, and he liked attractive women. He indulged that side of his personality primarily when he traveled—and in his position as attorney general, he had to travel a good deal.”
• • •
The evening of July 21, Joe DiMaggio drove Marilyn home from Cedars of Lebanon after yet another surgical procedure, performed by Dr. Leon Krohn, to alleviate some of the symptoms linked to her chronic endometriosis. Following the procedure, DiMaggio asked the physician if Marilyn could still have children. “It’s possible,” responded Krohn, “but not probable.”
For better or worse, children or no children, Joe was determined to do whatever it took to convince Marilyn to commit to a mutually convenient wedding date. Before returning to the East Coast to complete his obligation to Monette, he once again broached the subject of marriage. Less enthusiastic than she’d been in their previous discussion but probably not eager to argue with Joe, Marilyn suggested he pick the time and place. He told Marilyn he wanted to marry her at Los Angeles city hall on August 8. He ordered food and champagne for a small reception to be held at Marilyn’s house following the ceremony. Through his New York travel agent, he reserved two round-trip, first-class airplane tickets from Los Angeles to Rome. Besides Rome, they would honeymoon in Venice, Florence, and Sicily. Joe had always wanted to take Marilyn to Italy and show her the region of his parents’ birth—and now he finally could.
That, at any rate, might have been one ending to the saga. There were other possibilities as well. But the ending that finally did evolve may well have been inevitable and most probably had been set in motion long before Marilyn first met Joe DiMaggio in mid-March 1952. The seeds of her slowly developing self-destruction had originated in a traumatic and loveless childhood marked most profoundly by a schizophrenic mother, an endless stream of indifferent foster families, a prisonlike orphanage, and the uncertainty associated with a pattern of continuing and constant abandonment on the part of nearly everyone she’d ever known and cared about. Her heightened sense of abandonment would once again come back to haunt her. Following her latest rendezvous with Bobby Kennedy, it became clear to the actress that something was terribly wrong.
That summer, Pierre Salinger saw the attorney general at the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. “After a family dinner,” said Salinger, “Bobby invited me into his study for coffee, cognac, and an illegally obtained Cuban cigar. He knew I was familiar with the entire Marilyn Monroe mess, starting with Jack, and he wanted my advice. He’d recently seen her and discovered a notebook in her house with some scribblings in it on the Kennedys. And in addition, she was calling him all the time, at all hours of the day and night. He’d thought it over, and he realized he’d perhaps made a mistake, gone too far. Originally, he’d wanted to help her because of Jack, but now he wanted to bow out—gracefully, if possible.”
Salinger recommended that for starters Bobby would do well to change his private telephone number.
“I’ve already done that,” said RFK.
“Well, then, why not just call her up, and tell her the truth?”
“Why don’t you call her for me?” said Kennedy.
“If you’re not going to call her yourself,” said Salinger, “then your best bet has to be Peter Lawford. He and Marilyn are great pals. He’s known her for years. He’ll know what to say.”
It therefore fell on Peter Lawford, as it so often did, to clean up the mess left behind by one or another of the Kennedy brothers. “Pat invited Marilyn over for dinner,” Lawford recalled. “We plied her with booze to make it easier on everyone. We blamed the breakup on Ethel. We told Marilyn she knew about the affair, which she probably did, and that she’d threatened to divorce Bobby. ‘But then that’s perfect,’ Marilyn interjected. ‘Bobby promised he’d divorce Ethel and marry me. So it works out perfectly.’ I pointed out that Bobby was first and foremost a politician. After Jack, the presidential torch would be passed to Bobby, and a divorce would be the kiss of death. He’d never win the election. Marilyn blew up. ‘He asked me to marry him and have his children,’ she persisted. ‘If he and Jack think they can pass me around like a football and then jilt me, they’re sadly mistaken. I’m not one of those broads they bring into the White House for their daily swimming pool orgies.’ The more she drank, the angrier she became. ‘The Kennedys use you, and when they’re done, they dispose of you like so much rubbish. Your former buddy Francis Sinatra warned me about them, but I didn’t listen. He was right. And if the Kennedys think I’m going away, they’re wrong.’ ”
Because Marilyn had put away so much alcohol, Peter thought it would be better for her to spend the night. He and Pat helped her into the guest bedroom. Peter woke up very early the next morning and found their guest in one of Pat’s robes perched on the balcony staring into the pool below. “Are you all right?” Lawford asked her. She was crying. He led her into the house and prepared breakfast, and then he and Pat consoled her for hours. She was, as Lawford noted, “completely down on herself, talked about how ugly she felt, how worthless, how used and abused.” Then she reiterated what she’d said the night before. She wasn’t going away. She wasn’t going to surrender. And then she said something that alarmed Peter.
Marilyn had decided to hold a press conference. She would tell the nation all about Jack and Bobby Kennedy—their extramarital affairs, their empty promises, and the way they used people and then discarded them. She had reams of documentation to support her charges, from correspondence to tape recordings. Jean Kennedy Smith had written to her, acknowledging the affair with her brother Bobby. She had all sorts of notes and letters on the same subject from Peter’s wife. And then she had tapes of herself with the attorney general that would prove more than a little embarrassing, were they to be played. When Peter warned her that such a scandal could possibly bring down the government and hurt the country, Marilyn told him it could only help the country to know what its leaders were up to in their spare time.
“They’re not going to fuck with me!” she vowed.
• • •
Back in Brentwood, Marilyn’s emotional tirade ran the gamut from hysterical weeping to uncontrollable rage. Like a child suffering a tantrum, she threw breakable objects against a wall—mirrors, plates, drinking glasses, anything she could lay her hands on. She spent hours spewing venom on the recording device she used for her free-association tapes for Dr. Greenson. Unable to sleep, she contacted Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, her former psychiatrist, currently residing in Haifa, Israel. They’d spoken several times earlier in the summer. In addition to the Kennedys, Marilyn complained to Hohenberg about Dr. Greenson. He’d tried to control her, cut her off from everyone she knew. He was a possessive, tyrannical figure, who could succeed as a therapist only in a place like Hollywood. She’d barely finished talking to Dr. Hohenberg when the phone rang. It was Milton Greene, whom she hadn’t heard from in years. “I heard you’re going through some difficult times,” he said. “Do you want me to come out there?” “Yeah,” responded Marilyn. “I can only stay a few days,” said Greene, “because I have a photo assignment in Paris.” It was all arranged, but then Marilyn called him back. “Never mind, I’m okay for the moment,” she said. “You go to Paris and then fly to LA. We’ll be able to spend more time together.” She concluded the conversation by telling her former business partner that she planned on moving back to New York. “I’m sick of Hollywood, and Hollywood’s sick of me,” she said.
Surprisingly, Mon
roe now turned to Mickey Song, the hairstylist who’d been present at Madison Square Garden the evening of President Kennedy’s birthday gala. “I felt happy to hear from Marilyn, although I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted,” said Song. “She asked me over for a drink, and I thought maybe she wanted me to become her full-time hairstylist. Jazz musician Hank Jones happened to be visiting me, so I asked Marilyn if he could come as well. She didn’t mind. She knew him because he’d accompanied her on the piano when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to JFK. So we drove to her house and found her in a state of despair.”
Monroe wanted to talk about the Kennedys. As a member of their West Coast entourage, Song presumably knew where most of the bodies were buried. Marilyn asked for the names of other Hollywood actresses with whom the Kennedy brothers had been romantically linked.
“I told her I was privy to the same rumors as everybody else,” said Song. “She didn’t believe me, because she asked why I went out of my way to protect the Kennedys. Didn’t I feel used by them? They used everyone, she said, and I was no exception. I told her I didn’t feel used. On the contrary, they’d afforded me opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise have had, such as a trip to the White House to cut the president’s hair before a state dinner when his regular barber was out of town. I had the impression that Marilyn felt emotionally abused by Jack and Bobby and was trying to dig up dirt on them. She interrogated me for an hour or so, then turned to Hank Jones and began interrogating him. After a while, he said to her, ‘I don’t know what the Kennedys did to you, but you ought to let it go. Life’s too short.’ ”
Neither Song nor Jones realized that Marilyn had secretly taped their conversation. “I learned that she’d hired a private investigator to install a hidden recording device in both her bedroom and living room. She’d amassed an entire inventory of tapes containing conversations with nearly everyone, including Bobby Kennedy. It’s illegal to do that in California. After she died, Peter Lawford got hold of the tapes and presumably destroyed them.”
Peter Lawford had been placed in an unwelcome and untenable position of middleman between Marilyn and the Kennedys. Related to the Kennedy clan by marriage, he also considered himself one of Monroe’s closest and most stalwart friends. Nevertheless, concerned about her threat to hold a press conference in which she planned to divulge details of her love affairs with the president and the attorney general, Lawford felt he had no choice but to call Bobby Kennedy and discuss the matter with him. “I didn’t know if my own phone was bugged,” said Lawford, “so I called from a public phone booth. Bobby was alarmed by what I told him. He finally realized the potential danger he and his brother faced having become involved with an exceedingly famous but thoroughly unstable woman. He advised me to phone her shrink, who would surely be able to quiet her down. So I called Dr. Greenson.
“Marilyn had already informed him as to her curt dismissal by RFK. She’d placed numerous phone calls to him at the Justice Department, none of which he’d returned. The problem was that she’d constructed an entire romantic fantasy in her mind, which initially involved the president; after Bobby entered the picture, she made him the focus of her fantasy. In her disoriented state, she had difficulty discerning the difference between fantasy and reality. What worried Greenson was that in the past, Marilyn often made suicide threats and would fake a suicide attempt in order to gain sympathy. The one person Greenson felt could truly help Marilyn was Joe DiMaggio, but because the situation centered on Marilyn’s imagined desire to marry Bobby Kennedy, he couldn’t bring himself to involve DiMaggio.”
An event that ordinarily would have elevated Marilyn’s mood took place in July 1962. An exuberant Mickey Rudin contacted her with what he considered wonderful news: Peter Levathes had revived Monroe’s contract with Fox, offering to double her previous salary and agreeing to restart shooting on Something’s Got to Give. Rudin subsequently told Ralph Greenson about the offer, and Greenson relayed the information to Peter Lawford.
“I went to Marilyn’s house to congratulate her in person,” said Lawford. “She looked pretty grim. All she could talk about were the Kennedys. So I told her I was going to Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe for the weekend. I invited her along thinking some peace and quiet and a change in scenery might cheer her up. ‘We’ll celebrate your new contract,’ I said. She brightened a bit. ‘Thanks, Peter,’ she replied. ‘You’re a good man, and there aren’t many like you.’ ”
Chapter 20
PEACE AND QUIET WERE NOT commodities in great supply at the Cal-Neva, a resort and gambling casino that attracted the Rat Pack, the Mafia and an assortment of high rollers and heavy drinkers. Before departing Los Angeles, Marilyn received a hypodermic injection courtesy of Dr. Hyman Engelberg and a fresh supply of barbiturates and sedatives as prescribed by Dr. Greenson. Besides the new supply, Marilyn had stocked her suitcase with an arsenal of pharmaceuticals taken from her medicine cabinet. She’d been taking pills for so long, she told a fellow resort guest, that only high doses had any effect.
Marilyn had spent a day at Cal-Neva with the Lawfords earlier in the month and had swallowed enough pills to knock herself out. She’d left her telephone line open to the resort switchboard, and when the operator heard her labored breathing, she located the Lawfords, who rushed to the room to find Marilyn unconscious on the floor next to the bed. Peter and Pat alternated cups of coffee with walks around the room until Monroe regained her senses. Frank Sinatra flew her back to Los Angeles that night in his private plane.
Joe DiMaggio had heard about the earlier Cal-Neva incident and blamed Sinatra and Skinny D’Amato, who’d left the 500 Club in Atlantic City to manage Cal-Neva, for plying Marilyn with alcohol. When Inez Melson, MM’s business manager, apprised Joe of Marilyn’s departure for the Lake Tahoe gambling resort, he made immediate arrangements to follow her there. To avoid a confrontation with Sinatra, he checked into the nearby Silver Crest Motor Hotel and surprised Marilyn when he walked into the Cal-Neva dining room, where she was seated with the Lawfords.
“We were eating dinner, and in marched Joe DiMaggio,” said Peter Lawford. “It was the first time in a long time I’d seen Marilyn crack a big smile. She leaped out of her chair and embraced DiMaggio for what must have been a good five minutes. To be honest, Pat and I were delighted to see him because it took the onus of responsibility for her well-being out of our hands. DiMaggio spent the night with her in one of the bungalows on the property. He had some business to attend to on Saturday afternoon and disappeared for several hours, which was when Marilyn again became very despondent and testy. She started drinking and taking pills. She also renewed her threat to ‘get even’ with the Kennedys. I took this to mean she still planned to give a press conference. She quieted down only when DiMaggio returned. We spent Sunday morning, July 29, by the swimming pool. Sam Giancana came by with a few assistant hoods, if I can call them that. He knew DiMaggio, and the two of them chatted for a while. After they departed, Marilyn said something that in retrospect seemed rather prophetic. She talked about growing old and wasn’t sure she wanted to go through it. ‘What’s worse than an aging sex symbol?’ she asked. ‘Everything—breasts, belly, bottom—begins to sag.’ ”
That Sunday night, Joe DiMaggio accompanied Marilyn and the Lawfords back to Los Angeles before continuing on to San Francisco, still secure in his conviction that he and Marilyn would be remarried on August 8. “Marilyn never uttered a word to me concerning her intention to rewed Joe DiMaggio,” remarked Peter Lawford. “I heard about it after she died. I have to believe this was DiMaggio’s fantasy, not Marilyn’s. Her fantasy resided in the hope that Bobby Kennedy would change his mind, and they would walk down the aisle together. And if that didn’t happen, she intended to bring him down. To preclude this eventuality, Pat and I were determined to stick as close to Marilyn as possible.”
On July 30 the Lawfords joined Marilyn and Pat Newcomb for dinner at La Scala. At another table, across the room, sat a New York publicist named Connie Stanville and Billy Trav
illa, Monroe’s former fashion designer. “Billy and I were good friends,” said Stanville. “We would have dinner together whenever I found myself on the coast. So we were dining at La Scala when I spotted this woman on the opposite side of the restaurant. She looked very thin and wore no makeup. ‘Isn’t that Marilyn Monroe?’ I asked. Billy gazed in the woman’s direction and said, ‘I think it is.’ When we finished our meal, we went over to her table. It was Marilyn, all right, but she didn’t look well. In fact, she looked stoned and glassy eyed. She stared at Billy but obviously didn’t recognize him. He asked her how she was doing, and she smiled but said nothing. After a minute or two, she asked, ‘Billy, is that you?’ We left the restaurant and headed for the street. Billy seemed hurt and upset. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him. They’d been very close at one point. In fact, they’d had a brief affair. He called me the next day and said he was going to write her a nasty letter. Marilyn died a few days later. Billy called me again. ‘Thank God I didn’t write that letter,’ he said. ‘Thank God!’ ”
• • •
In the late afternoon of August 1, Marilyn called Ralph Roberts and asked him to take her to Largo, a Los Angeles nightspot with a strip club on one side of the establishment and a gay bar on the other. “Largo was a bit sleazy,” said Roberts, “but it was unique in that it catered to both heterosexuals and gays. You had a lot of straight men watching the young female strippers on the club side, and a whole gay crowd—men and women—packed into an adjacent bar. The bar had a jukebox and a small dance floor. The men danced with men, the women with women. A soundproof wall separated the bar from the strip club.
Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love Page 37
