Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe

by Anthony Summers

  The sources so far quoted on the alleged pregnancy all said they were told the father was one of the Kennedy brothers, but differed on whether he was John or Robert. Arthur James, who learned of a ‘miscarriage’ from Marilyn herself, understood that Robert was responsible.

  Two other sources, who were well placed to know what was happening to Marilyn, become relevant here. In 1962, Michael Selsman worked for Arthur Jacobs, a close friend of Marilyn’s who ran her press relations. He was thus a colleague of Pat Newcomb, who personally handled Marilyn.

  Selsman said he had heard Newcomb and his employer, Jacobs, discussing Marilyn’s affairs with the President, and subsequently with Robert. They were concerned, he said, that exposure of the relationships would damage the Kennedys politically. Selsman said he too heard that Marilyn had an abortion in her last months.

  Arthur Jacobs, who was also a prominent Hollywood producer, was dead as this book was being prepared. His widow, Natalie, however, became a significant source on Marilyn’s last year. ‘Everyone that knew her,’ said Natalie Jacobs, ‘knew about her and the Kennedys. It was so pathetic in those last months. Sometimes Arthur and I would stay at her house till five or six in the morning talking to her, to try to stop her drinking or taking pills.’

  According to Natalie Jacobs, ‘Arthur absolutely knew about the affair with the President. John Kennedy used to come here — Arthur told me this — very often not in Air Force 1, but incognito. Don’t ask me how he managed to be incognito — God knows how he did it. He always stayed at Peter Lawford’s house on the beach.’

  She continued, ‘Marilyn was madly pursuing the President. I think he was enamored of her, but it was a passing thing. There’s a children’s book called A Wrinkle in Time, and I think that’s what she was for him, a wrinkle in time. I am not clear what the relationship was with Bobby, but he too came to see her here.’

  Natalie Jacobs also heard about Marilyn’s supposed pregnancy shortly before she died. ‘Marilyn said she had had a miscarriage. Arthur did not know whether to believe her, or whether she had fantasized it.’

  Marilyn’s friend Arthur James, the only person who claimed to have heard about the pregnancy direct from Marilyn, was still not sure what to make of it. He knew she had serious gynecological problems, and knew she would sometimes go for months without having a period.

  Doctors, consulted for this project, say that people using drugs and alcohol lose touch with reality. Marilyn was on occasion prone to fantasizing, and — not least because she appears to have been the main source — the pregnancy story must be treated with caution. Truth or fantasy, it made the danger of potential scandal over Marilyn even greater. Now at last, almost certainly, the Kennedys tried to distance themselves from her.

  Natalie Jacobs said that in her last weeks Marilyn desperately tried to get through to the brothers, but found herself fobbed off. ‘I believe that was the cause of her final despair,’ says Mrs Jacobs, ‘and so did my husband.’

  During the weekend at Laguna, some six weeks before her death, Marilyn’s friend Arthur James had the same impression. ‘She spoke quite openly,’ he said, ‘with nothing but love and admiration for the Kennedys. But she was terribly hurt when she was told never to call or contact them — either John or Robert — again.’

  Marilyn may now have seen a bitter irony in the fact that she had sung to President Kennedy, at his birthday gala, to the tune of ‘Thanks for the Memory.’ For her Kennedy connection, it appears, was now severed.

  41

  MARILYN HAD BEEN CALLING Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department using an assumed name, according to the Attorney General’s biographer, Arthur Schlesinger. Kennedy had given her a ‘special number’ to call, said Marilyn’s companion, Eunice Murray.

  The phone records for Marilyn’s home numbers have long been missing, but research for this book recovered a large part of them, covering June to early August 1962. They consist of a list of calls, compiled by police during a visit to the General Telephone Company after Marilyn’s death. They show that, as of June 25, Marilyn was no longer calling a special number but the main Washington switchboard number of the Justice Department — RE7-8200.

  The call listed on June 25 lasted only a minute, and presumably contained no significant conversation. As she was probably told, Robert Kennedy was already in the air headed for the West Coast by way of Chicago. She would see him the next night for dinner at the Lawford house, and the day after that, during the Kennedy visit to Marilyn’s home witnessed by Eunice Murray and her son-in-law.

  There were two more calls to the Justice Department, both very brief; on July 2, when Kennedy had just returned to Washington. Another occurred on July 16, when the Attorney General was about to leave for Las Vegas, and two more the next day.

  Parts of Marilyn’s phone records, long missing after her death, and retrieved by the author. The lists each cover one of the actress’s two telephones. Note the eight calls to Washington RE7-8200, a 1962 number of the Justice Department. ‘Kennedy?’ (in the right-hand margin) has been written in by a detective.

  During this month Marilyn was in repeated contact with Robert Slatzer, the lover of years earlier who had always kept in touch. As noted earlier,* the author traced a number of witnesses who confirmed the Slatzer relationship existed, and who were on occasion present when Marilyn called him. In 1974, in his controversial book about Marilyn, Slatzer said Marilyn told him in her last weeks about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, and how the liaison with Robert was collapsing. †

  Slatzer’s book was received with some skepticism, not least because he used the dubious technique of wholesale reconstructions of long conversations he could not possibly have remembered verbatim. In the context of the new information gathered for this book, his claims seem far more credible.

  Slatzer quoted Marilyn as saying of Robert Kennedy, ‘He’s been ignoring me. I’ve been trying to reach him on the telephone, and I just can’t get to him.’ Slatzer said Marilyn was cut off from Kennedy after he had the number of his private line changed. He said he heard this from Marilyn in the first two weeks of July 1962, the very period that the phone records show Marilyn started making repeated calls to the main Justice Department number. In judging Slatzer’s veracity, it goes in his favor that he made his allegations years before the discovery of the telephone logs.

  In the course of intensive interviews, Slatzer estimated dates of his contacts with Marilyn in a way that fits wholly with the phone records and other details, none of which Slatzer knew. Indeed, as this book went into its first edition, he was still unaware that the telephone logs existed.

  In the summer of 1962, Slatzer produced a television wildlife series, dividing his time between Hollywood and a cutting room in Columbus, Ohio. In mid-June, he said, he visited Marilyn at home. Like others, he had heard rumors about Marilyn and the Kennedys, and asked her about it.

  Marilyn startled Slatzer by admitting that she was having an affair with the younger Kennedy, and even seemed to be deluding herself that she might one day marry him — shades of her hints to British reporter Weatherby. Slatzer was appalled. He told her it was ludicrous to imagine the Attorney General would wreck his political career, and gravely endanger the President’s, by doing any such thing. Monroe, however, was in no mood to listen to common sense. Slatzer said he simply warned her some more, and assumed the affair was headed for disaster.

  Several weeks later — Slatzer reckoned it was about ten days after the Independence Day holiday, and thus just before or after her miseries at the Cal-Neva Lodge — Marilyn called him from a pay phone to arrange a meeting, around the corner from her house. That evening they drove up the coast to the beach at Point Dume, which they had visited in the past. Marilyn, said Slatzer, seemed weary and tense. When she blurted out that Robert Kennedy had been refusing to take her phone calls, Slatzer again advised her to put the whole thing behind her.

  Marilyn alternated between tears and anger. Slatzer said she suddenly fished in an ou
tsize shopping bag and produced — from a clutter of pill bottles and makeup paraphernalia — some papers held together with a rubber band. They were handwritten, on Justice Department stationery, and Marilyn said they were notes to her from Robert Kennedy. She allowed Slatzer only a glimpse, but she also showed him ‘a small red book.’

  Marilyn let Slatzer peruse the book, which she called her ‘diary.’ He said it contained notes of conversations with Kennedy, including references to Cuba, the Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year, and to Kennedy’s determination to put Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa in jail.

  Incredulous, Slatzer asked Marilyn why she had made the notes. ‘Because,’ Marilyn replied, ‘Bobby liked to talk about political things. He got mad at me one day because he said I didn’t remember anything he told me.’

  Many have scorned Slatzer’s entire story because of the diary anecdote. Marilyn, they claim, was not organized enough to keep any sort of record. They are wrong. For years Marilyn kept scribbled notes precisely because she was disorganized. Slatzer said the book he saw was ‘not a day-to-day log but a record of highlights of Marilyn’s activities,’ — and that was in character.

  Marilyn bought herself a ‘daily diary and memo book’ as early as 1951, according to Time correspondent Ezra Goodman. Reporter James Bacon was amused to see her using it to write down something witty he had said. In 1955, Amy Greene noticed Marilyn carrying around ‘a leather-covered diary with a little key,’ and Susan Strasberg remembered her as ‘a great note-taker.’ As late as 1960, Richard Gehman observed her jotting in a notebook. Marilyn was still scribbling during her acquaintance with Robert Kennedy, and he may have known it.

  According to Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn’s neighbor at the Doheny apartment, ‘She did keep some sort of diary. She would say, “Oh, wait, I want to write that down before I forget it,” and she’d take it out and write a few lines. It could be trivial things. On one of the occasions I saw her with Bobby, he told some joke about the difference between a wife and a secretary. Marilyn reached for her book, and Bobby took a look at it and said, “Ah, get rid of that”. At the time I thought it was purely dismissive. Now, I don’t know, maybe he was really concerned.’

  It may be that Kennedy did tell Marilyn more than jokes and, without giving away state secrets, said things that were better left unsaid. Slatzer and the diary references aside, two people Marilyn met in Mexico said she was full of her latest conversation with the Attorney General at the Lawford house. The man who introduced her to Mexico, Fred Vanderbilt Field, told of Kennedy’s confidences about his attitude to J. Edgar Hoover. José Bolaños, her Mexican lover, quoted Marilyn as saying she and Kennedy discussed Castro’s Cuba. As we shall see, Marilyn’s loose lips may have made her a security risk.

  Less than a month before Marilyn’s death, Marilyn’s last agent, George Chasin, realized how close his client was to Robert Kennedy. On July 13 the government brought an anti-trust suit against his company, the Music Corporation of America, because of MCA’s takeovers in the empire of show business. Chasin had been aware of a government investigation, but did not expect the suit. Six months earlier, over dinner in Romanoff’s, Marilyn had warned him there would be one. When he failed to take her seriously, she hinted that her source was the Attorney General. That is not the way government is supposed to operate.

  Harris Wofford, former Special Assistant to the President, said, when writing of Judith Campbell, Sam Giancana, and the CIA plots to kill Castro: ‘Aside from moral issues, the morass of potential blackmail in which the Attorney General found himself must have appalled him. … How could the CIA and John Kennedy have been so stupid? What could they or the Attorney General do to extricate themselves and minimize the risk of exposure?’

  Perhaps by July the Kennedy brothers finally realized the folly of associating with Marilyn, not to mention the other women the President had been seeing. It was none too soon.

  In May, after months of shilly-shallying, the CIA had told Robert Kennedy of its involvement with Mafia leaders — and with Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli specifically — in the plots to assassinate Castro. Only two months had passed since Kennedy had been told the FBI knew that the President was seeing Judith Campbell while she was also consorting with Giancana.

  Also in May, the day before the President’s birthday jamboree, Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa had been indicted for extortion, the latest blow in a judicial assault that was now occupying all his time. In June, although investigators did not know it till later, Hoffa went so far as to discuss one solution to the problem — Robert Kennedy’s murder. Sitting in his Washington office, Hoffa said of the Attorney General, ‘Kennedy has got to go. … Somebody needs to bump that sonofabitch off. … You know I’ve got a rundown on him. He drives about in a convertible and swims by himself. I’ve got a .270 rifle with a high-power scope on it that shoots a long way without dropping any. It would be easy to get him with that. But I’m leery of it; it’s too obvious. …’

  Hoffa said this at the end of June or in the fast days of July. It was on June 27, in exactly that period, that Kennedy had visited Marilyn at home, driving alone in a convertible. It seems that Hoffa, the man said to have been requesting surveillance of Marilyn and Kennedy, indeed had ‘a rundown’ on the Attorney General.

  In the same week, in a conversation with a woman identified only as Jeanne, New York mobster Eddie McGrath had been wiretapped by the FBI. He was overheard saying, ‘Since when is fucking a federal offense?. … And if it is … I want the President of the United States indicted because I know he was whacking all those broads Sinatra brought him out. …’

  Less than two weeks later, Justice Department attorneys produced the first of their reports on Frank Sinatra. Two more would follow that summer. They went into detail about the Cal-Neva Lodge and its criminal manager, Skinny D’Amato. They referred flatly to Sinatra’s ‘friendship’ with Sam Giancana, the man who had threatened to ‘tell all’ about the Kennedys.

  The man who compiled the Sinatra reports, Dougald McMillan, shied away when asked whether he knew at the time of Marilyn’s simultaneous connection with the Kennedy brothers and Sinatra. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I don’t think I should get into that.’

  In May, in light of Giancana’s involvement with the CIA, Robert Kennedy agreed not to prosecute the Mafia chieftain in a wiretapping case. He met FBI Director Hoover two days later, and Hoover noted that Kennedy ‘well knew the “gutter gossip” was that the reason nothing had been done against Giancana was because of Giancana’s close relationship with Frank Sinatra who, in turn, claimed to be a close friend of the Kennedy family. The Attorney General stated he realized this and it was for that reason he was quite concerned. …’

  On June 27, the day Robert Kennedy visited Marilyn at home in Los Angeles, he showed uncharacteristic hesitation with regard to Jimmy Hoffa. An FBI report, partially censored for release to the public, shows that the Attorney General conferred that day with Jerry Wald, the would-be producer of Kennedy’s own expose of the Teamsters, The Enemy Within. ‘There seems to be some question in the Attorney General’s mind,’ said the report, ‘as to whether this picture should be produced until after prosecutions in which James Hoffa is involved are completed.’

  Robert Kennedy was aware that this was a time of extraordinary peril. There had to be an end to the Kennedys’ escapades with Marilyn Monroe.

  On July 19, Joan Greenson’s birthday, Marilyn put on a brave show. She helped arrange a surprise party, then made a point of doing the Twist with a black girl who had no dancing partner. She and Joan were to talk on the telephone a few more times, but Marilyn’s mind seemed elsewhere. Four days later she tried calling the Justice Department again, but again hung up within a minute.

  Jeanne Carmen saw Marilyn briefly, and thought ‘she looked like death.’ In the midsummer nights, sleep came harder than ever. She called on Ralph Roberts for late-night massages. Once she saw Dr Greenson twice in one day, as well as her internist, Dr Engelberg. She a
lso telephoned Engelberg at two o’clock in the morning.

  Marilyn now indulged a taste for intrigue and an ugly side to her temper. When studio bosses came to discuss a possible revival of Something’s Got to Give, she had Pat Newcomb hide in the next-door room to witness what was said. Paula Strasberg, summoned back from Europe to help in the negotiations, found herself spurned. Marilyn abused her for doing nothing, and Strasberg flew back to New York.

  Eunice Murray was not immune to Marilyn’s rage. One day her son-in-law, Norman Jeffries, arrived to find Murray with her bags packed, ready to leave. Then she stayed on, after all.

  The nights began to merge with the days. While Strasberg had been there, she had awakened to see Marilyn pacing the hall in the small hours. In happier days, Marilyn had sometimes donned a wig and dark glasses to watch the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier. Now she was seen loitering on the pier, just a few hundred yards from the Lawford house, in the dark of the night.

  At the end of the week before her death, Marilyn returned to the most dangerous territory of all — the mob-infested Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe. Eunice Murray said she ‘just cannot remember’ the trip, and Peter Lawford never mentioned it.

  This was a trip shrouded in mystery, unmentioned in the press except by Marilyn’s friend, Sidney Skolsky. Members of the Cal-Neva staff, who remembered it well, told of a miserable episode.

  Joe Langford, who worked under the Bell Captain, his brother Ray, recalled picking up Marilyn at the airport. ‘I’d say it was a week before she died,’ he said. ‘She came on Sinatra’s plane, and I remember the pilot saying, “God, am I glad to get rid of her.” I guess she’d been drinking heavily; she drank a lot that weekend.’

  Ray Langford, the Bell Captain, saw Marilyn in her chalet that weekend, after Sinatra called for room service. He placed the visit ‘just a few days before she died.’ When he saw her, Marilyn had ‘a kerchief round her face, and dark, dark glasses. She looked very sad.’ Other employees told a similar story.