Given this real or assumed invulnerability, Marilyn’s fascination with the Kennedys, and some honest friendship, especially between Marilyn and Bobby, an equally important question is: Why did this end so abruptly or at all?
The answer ought to include Marilyn’s own extreme vulnerability—and perhaps it did. But the real pressure seems to have come from organized crime. Key mob figures were angry at the Justice Department’s campaign against them, led by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and they were threatening to expose the Kennedys. The FBI became increasingly aware of the threats, and their increasing vehemence as mob leaders felt more pressure. Just the day before President Kennedy’s Birthday Salute, Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the Mafia-influenced Teamsters Union, had been indicted for extortion. (Bobby may not have known it yet, but subsequent investigations showed that Hoffa actually discussed shooting the attorney general with a high-powered rifle as he rode in an open convertible. “But I’m leery of it,” Hoffa reportedly cautioned, “it’s too obvious…”) Mafia boss Sam Giancana, who was literally threatening to “tell all,” was a close friend of Marilyn’s lover Frank Sinatra. Even a movie to be made from The Enemy Within, the book Robert Kennedy wrote as an exposé of organized crime and the Teamsters, was causing anonymous letters and threats of exposure.
Both the president and the attorney general had ignored J. Edgar Hoover’s warnings about their vulnerability to sexual scandal in the past, but they were now forced to look at the peril. Marilyn was one part of this. She was a threat by her own indiscreet and out-of-control presence. She was also a threat because of her intimacy with Sinatra and her visits to the Cal-Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe, which was frequented and allegedly owned jointly by the mob and Sinatra.
Whatever reasons he gave, Bobby seems to have tried to explain the break-off personally. On June 26, the day after the changing of his private telephone number, Bobby Kennedy came to Los Angeles and Marilyn joined him for dinner at the Lawfords’. On June 27, he drove to Marilyn’s house. According to her housekeeper, Bobby stayed about an hour, but when he left, Marilyn was not “excited by his visit” as she usually was. Indeed, if depression is any measure, such discussions began earlier. Friends and employees alike have testified to Marilyn’s deep despair beginning the first few days of June, even before her firing from Something’s Got to Give.
But in Marilyn’s July, one could find an argument for almost any future fate—a cause of depression, or a cheerful sign of a way out. She was still trying desperately and apparently unsuccessfully to reach Bobby. (To Robert Slatzer, she complained that Kennedy “had got what he wanted” and that men “used her only as a plaything.”) She was seen disastrously drunk or drugged or both at the Cal-Neva Lodge. She had not yet negotiated her way back into Something’s Got to Give. On the other hand, Marilyn was making plans for future movies, posing for the photographs in this book, doing interviews with George Barris and others, talking on the phone to friends, and working on her new house. To Slatzer, Marilyn was threatening to have a press conference, or show a notebook, which she kept of some of her conversations with Bobby, to Ethel Kennedy. To Anne Karger, Freddy’s mother, she still maintained that she was going to marry Bobby, though Anne tried to say she was deluding herself. To Norman Rosten, whom she phoned in New York, she talked about future plans, a Life interview that had just appeared, and a trip East.
As the heat of an August weekend and Marilyn’s last days began, Marilyn tried unsuccessfully to reach Robert Kennedy in the San Francisco area where he was staying with Ethel and four of their children. She spent the morning of August 4 with Patricia Newcomb, who had stayed overnight on Friday and inadvertently enraged Marilyn with her ability to sleep late, spent much of the day on the phone to friends, and some time with Dr. Greenson, her psychiatrist. As she frequently did, she probably also took pills containing phenobarbital and chloral hydrate during the day, and phoned her friend Jeanne Carmen several times in an unsuccessful attempt to find still more. As the autopsy would reveal, Marilyn’s blood had absorbed about ten times the usually recommended amount of the first chemical, and up to twenty times the usual dose of the second. Friends said that her last phone calls had been more and more slurred in speech, though that was not unusual for Marilyn. The final one had left the phone off the hook and clutched in her hand. Even with her unusual tolerance for drugs, and even without her usual addition of alcohol, she probably breathed her last somewhere before midnight.
From Joe DiMaggio’s son to Marlon Brando, friends had called her that day. From her psychiatrist to her housekeeper, she had been surrounded with service. Pat Newcomb had been with her, Jeanne Carmen had talked to her. Sidney Skolsky, her journalist friend who called her each weekend, was told, “Maybe I’ll go down to the beach. Everyone’s going to be there.” That meant the Lawfords, and Marilyn said one of the Kennedys would be there. She did talk on the phone to Peter Lawford, but she stayed home.
In the end, she died alone on a Saturday night.
Organized crime killed Marilyn Monroe. The idea was to frame and discredit the Kennedy administration, thus ending its drive against the Mafia, crime-controlled unions, and other parts of the crime syndicate.
The FBI, CIA, or some right-wing group killed her, with the same motive of framing and discrediting the Kennedys. Why? Because they were too liberal.
The Communist Party or other left-wing elements killed her in order to save Robert Kennedy from exposure—a theory of right-wing groups who opposed the Kennedys.
The Kennedys killed her to avoid the public sex scandal she was threatening.
Those are the theories of conspiracy and murder in descending order of their popularity. Not one can be totally disproved. It’s difficult to disprove anything in the negative. But none of the advocates of these theories has dug up enough evidence to make a good journalistic case, much less a legal one.
As for a plot by organized crime, there is this bit of evidence: there were attempts, probably successful, to bug Marilyn Monroe’s house, and perhaps the phone lines of the Lawfords as well. Some sources link this effort to the Mafia, though there is at least one allegation that the surveillance was ordered of both Marilyn and the Lawford home by a jealous Joe DiMaggio. Marilyn herself told friends that her house was bugged. In the last months of her life, she carried a purse full of change, and made or received some of her calls in phone booths.
J. Edgar Hoover was not a friend of the Kennedys, or vice versa. But he did seize Marilyn’s phone records after her death, thus preventing a personal scandal, and putting the administration in his debt. As for the CIA, many would say that the Kennedys were not critical enough of its operations.
As for the Kennedys, a dead Marilyn was probably more dangerous to them than a live one. They behaved in such a cavalier fashion with Marilyn that it’s difficult to believe they feared her. It’s even more difficult to believe that Marilyn would have carried through a threat, especially against people whose love and approval she craved. In fact, she had not responded with public accusations against any of the people in her life who had done her harm.
What gives some small credence to all these theories is not that there was a crime. There was a cover-up of a noncrime: the personal relationship between Marilyn and John and Robert Kennedy.
For instance:
It’s probable that Robert Kennedy came privately from San Francisco to Los Angeles on Saturday, tried again to explain why Marilyn must stop trying to reach him, spent the evening with the Lawfords or elsewhere, may even have tried to rescue her after her fatal overdose, and was spirited back to San Francisco by air after Marilyn’s death.
It’s likely that Peter Lawford employed a private detective to sweep the house in the hours after Marilyn’s death, and to destroy any evidence embarrassing to the Kennedys, including a suicide note or unfinished letter. Deborah Gould, Lawford’s third wife, remembers Lawford confessing such events years later. Marilyn’s housekeeper was also seen conscientiously, but oddly, cleaning up even after th
e arrival of the police.
It’s even possible that Marilyn was found still breathing, rushed to Santa Monica Hospital by ambulance in an effort to save her, and returned to her own bed only after she was dead. There is some testimony to this on the part of ambulance drivers from a company that had transported Marilyn before. Anthony Summers reports the possibility that her unsuccessful rescuers could have been Robert Kennedy, or Peter Lawford, or both, responding in alarm to a last slurred phone call from Marilyn.
Events like those would help to explain the five or six hours between the time of Marilyn’s probable death and the time the police arrived. They would account for helicopter comings and goings from the Lawford beach house. They would explain the housekeeper’s zeal for cleaning. Ironically, this cover-up may have created inconsistencies that were later cited as evidence of murder. In other words, a cover-up of the noncrime of an affair may have led to theories of a crime.
The bottom line is that thorough investigators and tough critics have come up with conclusions like this one in Anthony Summers’s Goddess: “In all probability, no serious crime was committed that night, although the return of Marilyn’s body to her home was highly irregular, and Lawford’s destruction of the note clearly unlawful.” Aside from this cover-up that, if true, discloses a Robert Kennedy who tried to save Marilyn and then was haunted by the circumstances of her death for the rest of his own life, Summers and most others conclude that Marilyn probably died by her own hand, but not as a clear and conscious suicide. As Diana Trilling wrote just after Marilyn’s death, “I think it would be more precise to call this kind of death incidental rather than purposeful—incidental to the desire to escape the pain of living…” In other words, she meant to die for the evening—but not to die forever.
But most tragic of all, the time, effort, and obsession that has gone into explaining Marilyn’s death has done little to explain her life. Or her constant brushes with suicide.
If we admit that she died by her own hand, we must also admit that her sugary smile was false, that her external beauty covered intense pain, that this sex goddess, as Andrea Dworkin wrote, “hadn’t liked It all along—It—the It they had been doing to her, how many millions of times? … her apparent suicide stood at once as accusation and answer: no, Marilyn Monroe, the ideal sexual female, had not liked it.”
The Body Prison
I daydream chiefly about beauty. I dreamed of myself becoming so beautiful that people would turn to look at me when I passed.
—from the unfinished autobiography of Marilyn Monroe
CHILDREN WHO ARE NOT the focus of loving attention may come to feel they are invisible. They fight to be noticed to prove they exist.
For Norma Jeane, this feeling of existing only at the periphery of people’s vision, of being the center of no one’s life, began as early as her consciousness. Talking was not yet a way she could gain attention; and indeed talking to strangers, remembering lines, and just coping with the complexities of language would remain weak points for the rest of her life. Instead, her physical self became and remained her way of proving she was alive. “I never dreamed of anyone loving me as I saw other children loved,” Marilyn wrote. “That was too big a stretch for my imagination. I compromised by dreaming of my attracting someone’s attention (besides God), of having people look at me and say my name.”
For the well-meaning Ida and Albert Bolender, the fundamentalist family with whom Norma Jeane’s mother boarded her at birth, nudity was probably not encouraged, even in very young children. Norma Jeane may have discovered early that just taking her clothes off her small body was a gentle form of rebellion that earned notice, but not the razor-strop beatings that might follow such serious misbehavior as upsetting her cereal bowl or taking the tricycle away from the Bolenders’ own son.
In fact, Norma Jeane had been rescued as a toddler from one of these beatings by her grandmother, Delia Monroe, who lived across the street. Delia hated Ida’s razor strop and screamed, “Don’t ever do that again!” Ida Bolender remembered being so embarrassed that she let Delia take her granddaughter to her own house, even though Delia—who had recently returned alone after following her third husband all the way to his engineering job in India—was herself in despair and on the edge of breakdown.
For the rest of her life, Marilyn would insist that she remembered waking from a nap in her grandmother’s bedroom and “fighting for my life. Something was pressed against my face. It could have been a pillow. I fought with all my strength.” There were no other witnesses to any attempt by Delia to smother her own granddaughter, and few have trusted Marilyn’s memory of an event that would have happened when she was barely more than a year old. But perhaps Delia, in her own distress, did believe that only a gentle death could save her daughter’s illegitimate child from a life of pain. Just a few days later, Delia tried to break through the Bolenders’ door in another rage of rescuing. The police took Delia to an asylum. She died there nineteen days later of a heart attack suffered during a manic seizure. Her death would remain a haunting precedent for her daughter, and then for her granddaughter.
Clearly, Norma Jeane could not hope to be rescued by her grandmother, or by her mother, Gladys, who was a semi-stranger she saw only on weekends. To survive, she had to make herself lovable to the Bolenders. Her hunger for attention focused mostly on fantasies of being noticed in the fundamentalist church where the Bolenders went to services twice a week—probably the only place Norma Jeane saw large groups of people.
“No sooner was I in the pew with the organ playing and everyone singing,” the grown-up Marilyn remembered of herself as a little girl, “than the impulse would come to me to take off all my clothes. I wanted desperately to stand up naked for God and everyone else to see. I had to clench my teeth and sit on my hands to keep myself from undressing. Sometimes I had to pray hard and beg God to keep me from taking my clothes off.
“My impulse to appear naked and my dreams about it had no shame or sense of sin in them,” wrote Marilyn. “Dreaming of people looking at me made me feel less lonely.”
When she lived in an orphanage from age nine to age eleven, some nudity was doubtless routine in the girls’ dormitory as well as in the gym and showers of the public school nearby. It may have given her a sense both of belonging and of being an individual. “I think I wanted them to see me naked because I was ashamed of the clothes I wore—the never-changing faded blue dress of poverty,” Marilyn said, recalling the orphanage uniform, a blue skirt and white blouse. “Naked, I was like other girls and not someone in an orphan’s uniform.”
This feeling of being more comfortable with nudity than with clothes, especially around women, lasted for most of her life: women friends, housekeepers, even casual acquaintances and employees have all commented on it. As Natasha Lytess, her acting coach and early roommate, wrote about Marilyn: “She’d come wandering naked from her bedroom and into the bathroom… Then—still without a stitch on—Marilyn would drift in a sort of dreamy, sleepwalking daze into the kitchen and fix her own breakfast.
“When she became a famous star,” Lytess explained, “Marilyn had her own luxury bungalow on the set, with dressing room, bedroom, wardrobe room, and bathroom.
“And she still ambled unconcerned, completely naked, around her bungalow among wardrobe women, makeup girls, hairdressers.
“Being naked seems to soothe her—almost hypnotize her.”
The image of a nude Marilyn Monroe reading, relaxing, or just walking through her own house has been described as titillating or narcissistic by many who have written about her. Indeed, Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn’s second and very possessive husband, was angered and confounded by this nonsexual use of nudity, even though only he and one of Marilyn’s women friends might be in the house. But the truth seems much simpler: Marilyn found some odd comfort and sense of being at home with this childhood habit that had brought rare feelings of being alive and belonging to Norma Jeane.
Nonetheless, her nudity in public or ar
ound men who were not husbands or lovers was far more purposeful and self-conscious. Even before she was a teenager, she was enjoying and courting the new attention that her developing body brought her, yet there was a sexual motive in it that she didn’t share or understand. It made her feel used, even endangered. “I used to lie awake at night wondering why the boys came after me,” Marilyn remembered. “I didn’t want them that way. I wanted to play games in the street, not in the bedroom. Occasionally, I let one of them kiss me to see if there was anything interesting in the performance. There wasn’t.
“I decided finally that the boys came after me because I was an orphan and had no parents to protect me or frighten them off. This decision made me cooler than ever…”
As a young model and actress, this same wariness and self-protectiveness kept her from posing nude or acting in pornographic movies as many other starlets in need of money had done. Her one fifty-dollar nude modeling job—the calendar that was to become the proud possession of millions of men, from garage attendants to J. Edgar Hoover—was done only in desperation for money, after years of refusing better-paying offers to pose nude, and with the flimsy protection of a phony name. But, for most of her life, her dilemma—as well as her art—was revealing enough to achieve the attention she craved, yet not revealing so much that she could be ridiculed or victimized. It is a dilemma this culture imposes on many women whose beauty is their only power.
Intimately with men, Marilyn used her body as a gift, to gain love and approval. In the 1964 production of After the Fall, Arthur Miller’s autobiographical play in which he portrayed their marriage, Maggie, who is Marilyn, takes her clothes off eagerly in front of her new lover, like a child unwrapping a gift she is eager to give to a parent By Marilyn’s own testimony to her friends, her body was not a source of sexual, orgasmic pleasure to her. By the testimony of lovers, she was often generous, loving, and seeking their approval more than her own pleasure. Sex was less a reward to herself than a price she paid gladly. She was still seeking the love, security, and closeness she had missed as a child.
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