by Lois Banner
Tired of her behavior, Sinatra found her an apartment in September in the Doheny Drive apartment building where she’d once lived. Gloria Lovell, his secretary, had an apartment there, and he kept one there for himself. He didn’t own the building, but he had such influence with its owner that, according to George Jacobs, his butler and confidant, it was called “the Sinatra Arms.” Sinatra’s close friends and assistants lived in some of its apartments.15
Although he had a habit of leaving relationships with women when they became serious, he remained friendly with his first wife, who had divorced him, and he never got over his fixation on Ava Gardner, who married and then divorced him. In the late fall of 1961 he became involved with the young dancer Juliet Prowse, even becoming engaged to her for a while before he suddenly broke up with her. Marilyn was upset by Prowse, especially because the dancer had beautiful legs and Marilyn didn’t think much of hers. In a snit, she gave the emerald earrings Frank had given her to Pat Newcomb.16
Sinatra’s involvement with Prowse was partly a way of freeing himself from Marilyn, even though he remained close to her. Like so many others, he felt paternal toward her, as he did toward Judy Garland; both were great stars who were neurotic and needy. Gloria Romanoff told me Frank was always concerned about Marilyn, always asking how she was, always worried about her pill taking. George Jacobs said Marilyn was a favorite of Frank’s because she praised him extravagantly—his singing, his kindness, his sexual skill. When hairdresser George Masters did her hair, Sinatra’s “invisible presence” was always there, “hovering over us like her guardian angel.” He remembered that Frank had an apartment in the Doheny Drive apartment building on one side of Marilyn’s, with Gloria Lovell, his secretary, in an apartment on the other side.17
But Frank was dangerous. He was tempestuous; he got into brawls. He consorted with gangsters, and he loved their casual, brutal, gentlemanly style. The mob kingpin killer Sam Giancana was a close friend: Sinatra traced his ancestry to Sicily, as did DiMaggio and Giancana. Sinatra said that if he hadn’t become a singer he would have been a Mafia don. When Sinatra gave Marilyn a small white poodle to replace Hugo, she called it Maf, short for Mafia. Marilyn knew Mafia henchmen like Pat DiCicco and Johnny Roselli from her years as a Hollywood party girl. She’d met Giancana, Skinny D’Amato, and others when she was with DiMaggio. All Hollywood was fascinated with gangsters—both with the image and the reality. When W. J. Weatherby asked Marilyn to comment on The Last Tycoon, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel about Hollywood, she replied that Fitzgerald had overlooked the violent and tough gangster element in the industry.18
The men in Sinatra’s inner circle could be scary, and he wasn’t often without them. He didn’t like being alone; even as a young singer he had Italian toughs with him. In Mafia terms, he was the padrone; they were his acolytes. Like the power brokers in Hollywood and like the Mafia men, the Rat Pack passed women around. Cami Sebring, then married to Jay Sebring, Frank’s hairdresser, told me she was pressured to have sex with Sinatra and the others, but she refused. The group, she said, passed women around like candy. They ruined Joi Lansing, a sensitive young actress, who fell in love with Sinatra, was passed around, and then got hooked on drugs. When I asked Cami why she was telling me this, instead of telling it herself, she replied, “You’re the feminist. You tell it.”19
George Jacobs maintained that Marilyn fell apart after Sinatra left her for Juliet Prowse in the fall of 1961: she didn’t bathe or change her clothes for days on end, while she put on disguises at night and went to the bars on Santa Monica Boulevard to pick up men. These claims are impossible to substantiate, although Ralph Greenson told the story of a patient whose thinly disguised characteristics match those of Marilyn. She was so angry when he refused her sexual advances that she went to a bar, picked up a man, and had unprotected sex with him. The next day she told Greenson about it. Hildi Greenson, his wife, stated that she invited Marilyn to stay for dinner after her sessions with her husband and then drove her home because Marilyn had once invited a cab driver into her house, presumably for sex—which was dangerous. It’s hard to accept that Marilyn, who was calculating about her career, would run the risk of blackmail posed by this, but her compulsions and her sense of failure in her marriage to Arthur Miller may have driven her to it.20
When Marilyn decided to remain in Hollywood, she persuaded Ralph Roberts to move from New York and join her as her driver and masseur. He did so. Once he arrived, her days followed a pattern: he would take her to Madame Renna’s salon for a facial, then to a grocery store or a clothing store to shop, then to a session with Ralph Greenson. Marilyn and he would eat dinner together on her patio, often with Gloria Lovell and Pat Newcomb, often steaks that he barbecued on a grill. Betsy Duncan Hammes, a nightclub singer who knew Sinatra from performing with him in Las Vegas, lived in the Doheny Drive apartments. When she came back to her apartment after staying out late performing, she often heard Marilyn and Gloria Lovell talking and drinking on Marilyn’s patio.21
In the late fall photographer Douglas Kirkland shot Marilyn for Look magazine. He was a neophyte, and Marilyn taught him a lot about camera angles and posing. He photographed her naked in bed, with a sheet covering her body—a classic Marilyn pose. He met her three times, and she was a different person each time. When he arrived at her apartment before the shoot to discuss it with her she was playful, easily making small talk. On the day of the shoot she was a superstar, seducing him by dropping her robe so he could gaze on her naked body. When he took her the proof sheet several days later, she seemed deeply depressed. She was wearing dark glasses, and she looked like she had been crying.22
Throughout the fall her lawyers and agents negotiated with Fox executives over casting her in a remake of the 1940 film My Favorite Wife, about a woman who returns to her children and her newly remarried husband after having been stranded on a South Seas island with another man for five years. It’s not clear she wanted to do the film, but Ralph Greenson pressed her to finish her commitment to Fox. Marilyn was also offered the starring role in a television version of Somerset Maugham’s Rain, with Lee Strasberg directing. Strasberg thought she would be superb as Sadie Thompson, the prostitute who seduces a missionary and ruins him by destroying his moral framework. Joan Crawford had done an acclaimed film version of Rain in 1932.
With this proposed television drama in mind, Marilyn wrote Strasberg, asking him to consider moving to Hollywood to set up a joint production company with her so she could get out of the “quicksand” she was in. She’d discussed the idea with Marlon Brando, she said, and he was interested.23 Marilyn was looking for creative endeavors like MMP that would allow her to work with people she trusted. No record of Strasberg’s reply exists.
Marilyn still had many friends, although she sometimes broke appointments that year or didn’t show up. She was in touch with the Shaws and the Rostens, and she spoke on the phone with Xenia Chekhov, Anne Karger, Clifton Webb, Sidney Skolsky, and others. She saw Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra, and Marlon Brando. Dorothy Parker and her husband lived around the corner from the Doheny Drive apartment, and they socialized with her. Dorothy wrote to a friend that she and her husband had written a darling, bawdy farce for Marilyn, but Fox, unfortunately, had turned it down. Marilyn was always “in terror,” but that wasn’t so bad because Dorothy also had that problem. All in all, she was “crazy” about Marilyn.
Marilyn had become close to poet Carl Sandburg, the populist biographer of Abraham Lincoln, after she met him when she was making Let’s Make Love and he was using a former dressing room of hers as an office while working on the screenplay for The Greatest Story Ever Told. They joked and clowned around with each other like children and shared their poetry. Marilyn called him a poet “of the people, by the people, and for the people.”24
Marilyn had been going to the Peter Lawford beach house by 1960, if not before. When she returned to Hollywood in 1961, she was already close friends with Patricia Kennedy Lawford. Pat’s humor, her height (sh
e was nearly six feet tall), and her horsey look complemented Marilyn’s femininity, while Pat provided a link to the Kennedy brothers. Always drawn to Hollywood celebrities—part of the reason she married Peter Lawford—Pat liked Marilyn’s emotional openness, which was not a Kennedy trait. According to Pat’s son Christopher, the film star became like a little sister to her. Peter and Pat combined Hollywood’s love of poker with the charades played at the Kennedy home in Hyannis Port, to hold casual parties featuring those games. Accompanied by Pat Newcomb, Marilyn often attended their parties. Peter still loved surfing and volleyball, and he played the game with friends at public courts laid out on the beach directly behind his house. Those games didn’t appeal to Marilyn, who sat by the pool or went walking on the beach.25
When the Kennedy brothers were there, sex play was sometimes part of the activities. In an outline for an unpublished autobiography, Peter wrote that he suffered from sex addiction. The Kennedy brothers weren’t far behind him. When the Kennedys went to the Lawford house, they sometimes acted like randy boys. Jeanne Martin said that Jack and Bobby Kennedy chased women and openly groped them. The Kennedy women didn’t make a fuss; they’d been schooled in their family to find women for their brothers. As powerful men, they claimed the spoils of success, including women.
Patricia Tierney Cox, then the wife of Richard Livingston, a wealthy manufacturer and close friend of Peter Lawford, knew the Kennedy family. (She had dated Peter before she married Dick Livingston.) The Kennedy sisters pimped for the brothers, she told me. Peter and Pat Lawford tried to persuade her to have an affair first with Joe Sr., then with Jack, and then with Teddy. She refused. Tierney, who later married Wally Cox, had been a starlet in the MGM contract pool when Marilyn was at Fox. She was a great beauty, with many Hollywood lovers.26
The sources I have consulted validate that Jack Kennedy had sex with Marilyn at the Lawford house, especially individuals who listened to conversations on the electronic bugs and wiretapping devices that private detective Fred Otash and electronics expert Bernie Spindel had placed there. When I visited the house in December 2008, the servants joked with me about their trysts, showing me an elevator in which they said the two had had sex. The tiny elevator dated from the 1930s and had never been modernized; to me it looked like a very uncomfortable space. I suspected they were pulling my leg. I searched for the pink onyx bathtub that was, according to Peter Lawford’s widow, Patricia Lawford Stewart, a favorite place for sex, but I couldn’t find it, although the house is large and portions of it have been redone. The house resembles a Cape Cod mansion, with folk Mexican touches.
At some point during these years, when Pat was out of town with the children, at the Kennedy mansions in Hyannis Port or Palm Beach, Forida, Peter held what amounted to sex parties, with prostitutes present. According to screenwriter Mary Anita Loos, Anita Loos’s niece who lived down the beach from Peter and Pat, “Peter Lawford would call Marilyn and say: ‘Oh, Marilyn, so and so’s going to be here. We’re going to have a party. Some girls are here and you can join.’ And Marilyn would say, ‘That’s what I am for him, a party girl with some girls at a beach house?’ If prostitutes were there, Marilyn wouldn’t stay long.”27
Multiple sources maintain that the sex parties involved sadomasochism and the use of enemas. Some Hollywood people, I’m told, were jaded with conventional sex acts and turned to unconventional forms. George Jacobs said Frank’s male entourage called the beach house “Hi-anus-port.” Daniel Stewart, a member of the Beverly Hills Police Department, participated in police stakeouts of the house. When I asked him what kind of sex activities went on at the Lawford house he told me, “Anything you can imagine.”28
John Miner, a Los Angeles assistant district attorney at the time, who participated in Marilyn’s autopsy, became an authority on her death. I interviewed him on many occasions, and he told me about the parties. He had never been to them, but he had met a dominatrix who had regularly been there and she had told him about them. He said Peter had gone to the flea market in Paris and bought eighteenth-century piston syringes (a variant of the bag and water variety, with a large syringe, like a Fleet enema). They were used at the parties, according to Miner. In fact, enemas were a major form of medical treatment from the Greeks through the nineteenth century for almost any ailment. Daily use was supposed to aid the complexion. Eighteenth-century aristocrats used piston syringes as sex toys. When I asked Patricia Lawford Stewart, Peter’s fourth wife, about this, she said Peter was uneducated, despite his elegant manner, and he was mostly interested in surfing and volleyball. He wouldn’t have known about the Paris flea market.29
There were sightings of Marilyn at the Lawford house with Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy during the fall of 1961. In October Bobby was at a party at the Lawfords’—as attorney general he traveled frequently, visiting local offices. Marilyn became intoxicated at the party, and Bobby, accompanied by his press secretary, Edwin Guthman, took her home and put her to bed. By then, if not before, Marilyn had been given Jack Kennedy’s private number, a line that rang in the family quarters of the White House after hours. Jackie sometimes answered the phone when Marilyn called, but she was more concerned than jealous. She’d made her peace with Jack’s philandering, and she chided both Jack and Bobby for playing with Marilyn, whom she saw as “a suicide waiting to happen.”30
Shortly before Thanksgiving 1961 Jack Kennedy went to Los Angeles for a fund-raising dinner and spent time with Marilyn at the Lawford house. He was observed at an evening party talking to Marilyn. By November 1961 the house was bugged—by private investigators Fred Otash and Bernie Spindel. Some authors claim that Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa commissioned the bugging, looking for evidence of Kennedy improprieties he might use to defend himself against Bobby Kennedy’s vigorous attack on the ties between the Mafia and organized labor. Others say Joe DiMaggio hired Otash, and still others claim it was the Mafia, the FBI, or the CIA. Otash, a former police officer, was the major private detective in Los Angeles, and he often was hired by Hollywood stars to cover over or to discover untoward behavior. He had been present in 1954 at the “wrong-door raid.” Otash assistants listening to the tapes heard the sounds of sexual encounters between Marilyn and Jack Kennedy, as did an anonymous associate of Otash’s whom I interviewed.31
In early December Marilyn flew to New York to meet Jack Kennedy at a gathering at the apartment of socialite Fifi Fell. Wealthy New Yorkers were as eager as anyone else to meet her. But the insecurities of involvement with the Kennedys, added to Sinatra’s inconstancy and Arthur Miller’s new romance, were hard on her. Within three days of returning from the Fell party, she overdosed on drugs. The overdose seems related to these personal issues, but Greenson was convinced that it stemmed from her deep transference to him as a father figure and his exasperation at her constant complaints about Twentieth Century–Fox and about her friends.32
We don’t know who found her after the overdose; it may have been Gloria Lovell or Pat Newcomb, both of whom were often with her, or someone else looking for her. (Gloria Romanoff stated that all Marilyn’s close friends at one time or another had the experience of reviving her from an overdose.) In a stupor, Marilyn may have called Ralph Greenson, whose house in Santa Monica was about twenty minutes from the Doheny Drive apartment. In fact, the overdose may have been a cry for help, a way of getting special attention, which is not unusual among individuals suffering from severe depression.
Marilyn probably needed to be hospitalized for drug detoxification, but Ralph Greenson feared that another incarceration might remind her of Payne Whitney and cause her to engage in a serious attempt at suicide. So he had her treated in her apartment. He hired round-the-clock nurses and sent Engelberg to her apartment daily to give her injections of vitamins, especially B12, and decreasing doses of Nembutal. He probably put her on another class of drug. It was a standard detox method that minimized withdrawal symptoms, which can be lethal. Marilyn quickly recovered. But Greenson was just at the beginning of
his problems with her.
Ralph Greenson was an important figure in Marilyn’s life. His academic credentials were impressive. He had a BA from Columbia University and an M.D. from the University of Bern, in Switzerland, where he became interested in psychoanalysis and did a formal analysis with maverick psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel. He moved to Los Angeles to do his medical internship at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, and he underwent a second formal analysis with Otto Fenichel, an orthodox Freudian. Psychoanalysis was then at the cutting edge of psychiatry, and Greenson was thought of as an innovative “young Turk.” He gained a reputation during World War Two when he served as chief of neuropsychiatry at the Army Air Force Convalescent Hospital in Fort Logan, Colorado. He successfully treated servicemen suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder by giving them sodium pentathol injections to unlock their memories, and then doing individual and group therapy with them. His technique seemed successful, although follow-up studies showed that the traumas often returned later. He became a founding member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Society and was appointed to the faculty of the UCLA medical school.33
A gifted raconteur, he became friendly with screenwriter Leo Rosten (no relation to Norman Rosten). Leo Rosten was a Jewish man from New York with a gift of gab, who was the brother-in-law of Margaret Mead. Rosten recommended Greenson as an analyst to his Hollywood friends. Psychoanalysis was then in vogue, and Greenson attracted many Hollywood clients. He was an amateur violinist, and he held a weekly salon in his house in Santa Monica, at which he played chamber music with several friends. To the individuals who attended the salons they seemed to be an outpost of sophisticated New York in provincial Hollywood.