Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love

by C. David Heymann

  Before leaving, Joey asked how Marilyn’s negotiations were going with Fox. “Those bastards!” she said. “I’ve made millions for them over the years, and this is how they thank me—by letting me go. They’re lucky I’m even willing to negotiate with them.”

  Marilyn reminded Joey of an angry young child. “I told her I was sure in the end it would all work out,” he said. “She walked me out of the house and gave me her usual warm hug. I’d driven to Brentwood from Camp Pendleton in the car Marilyn gave me. She followed me to the car and gave me another hug. ‘Call me later to let me know you arrived safely,’ she whispered. She turned, and I watched her walk back into the house. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course, but I never saw Marilyn again. She died about a month later.”

  • • •

  Jeanne Carmen met Joe DiMaggio only once or twice but recalled thinking that while he may not have made a good husband for Marilyn, no one cared more for her. He was always, both before and after their divorce, her most devoted friend. “When they first met,” said Carmen, “Marilyn had yet to prove herself as an actress, whereas Joe’s baseball-playing days were behind him. I’m convinced that had she lived, they would’ve at some point remarried. And it would probably have been a much more successful union the second time around.”

  Carmen noted that over the last two months of her life, Marilyn seemed despondent at times but never to the point where she became reclusive or showed any signs of giving up. “She remained active,” said Marilyn’s friend. “She talked a lot about prospective film projects. She was thinking of doing a musical with the songs of Jule Styne and had planned to see Styne in New York in mid-August to discuss the project. She also wanted to play Lady Macbeth in a movie version of Shakespeare’s play. And she was still floating the idea of playing Jean Harlow in a bio flick, an idea she’d been kicking around for some time. She and Sidney Skolsky drove to Indio, past Palm Springs, to meet Jean Harlow’s mother. Mama Jean said Marilyn was ‘just like my baby.’ The comment pleased Marilyn no end. I think she considered herself a reincarnation of Jean Harlow, destined to depart at an early age. I’ll never forget the night Whitey Snyder came to her house for dinner, and she said to him, ‘Promise me that if something happens to me, nobody must touch my face but you. Promise me you’ll do my makeup, so I’ll look my best when I leave.’ ”

  Beyond the prospect of a new film venture, Marilyn engaged in activities such as yoga and tai chi (meditation) lessons, which she took at home with a private instructor while listening to the music of Bach and Vivaldi. She ate dinner, often alone, at La Scala. She took walks with Maf along the beach at Santa Monica or in Barrington Park, where she invariably paused to watch children romp in a playground. She went to Renna’s place—called Madame Renna’s—in Beverly Hills for facial massages with Dr. G. W. Campbell. Ralph Roberts would appear at her house every evening to give her a body massage. She would leave the kitchen door unlocked so he wouldn’t have to deal with Eunice Murray. Apparently Eunice caught him sneaking into the house one night and reported him to Dr. Greenson, who berated Marilyn: “I thought we agreed you weren’t going to see Ralph Roberts any more—how can I help you if you don’t listen to me?” For once Marilyn told Greenson off. Whether he liked it or not, there were several men in her life she wasn’t willing to discard, and one of them was Ralph Roberts. ‘The other two that immediately come to mind,’ she told him, ‘are Frank Sinatra and Joe DiMaggio.’ ”

  According to Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn seemed most depressed following her sessions with Dr. Greenson. “I’d occasionally pick her up at his home after a session,” she said, “and her beautiful blue-gray eyes would invariably be filled with tears. And it wasn’t because she’d experienced some great psychiatric catharsis or awakening. Yet when Greenson went away on a European vacation with his wife, Marilyn couldn’t deal with it. She and Greenson had worked out some weird ploy whereby one of the pieces in a chess set she’d bought in Mexico earlier that year supposedly came to represent her psychiatrist, and in his absence she carried the chess piece around with her wherever she went; appropriately enough, it was the white knight. She also had a copy of the children’s book The Little Engine That Could, which Greenson’s daughter had given her to instill confidence. Unfortunately, she couldn’t cope without her shrink. So they reached him in Switzerland and asked him to return. Because he left while she was still involved with Something’s Got to Give, Marilyn blamed him for many of her troubles on and off the set; he, in turn, held her responsible for making him cut short his vacation.”

  Lotte Goslar spent early July in New York, where she’d gone to speak to publishers about the possibility of penning a book on acting. “Marilyn had offered me the use of her East Fifty-Seventh Street apartment,” she recalled, “but I decided to stay at the Chelsea Hotel instead. While there, I received a letter from Marilyn in which she said Joe DiMaggio had sent her a surprise package. Inside the package were two items: a new nightgown and a pair of his pajamas. ‘I think he’s trying to tell me something,’ Marilyn wrote. Enclosed with the letter was a poem she’d just written. Her friend Norman Rosten, whom I’d met through Marilyn, told me that poetry was her way of saying difficult things to herself. A theme that ran through her body of poems had to do with Marilyn becoming one with nature. . . . And now, in death, she’d returned to nature, become one with the universe.”

  Soon after his son saw her, Joe DiMaggio arrived in Brentwood to spend a few days with Marilyn. During his visit, they shared simple dinners at home and only once went out to eat. After dinner Marilyn would brew tea for Joe, and they would watch a bit of television. They rented bikes and rode on San Vicente Boulevard in the direction of the ocean. They went shopping together. He accompanied her, as he had in former days, to Saks Fifth Avenue and Jax, both in Beverly Hills, to buy clothes. She purchased cashmere sweaters, a half dozen blouses, two evening dresses, and a pair of stilettos. That night she modeled the stilettos, sans apparel, just for Joe in the privacy of her bedroom.

  Joe escorted Ralph Greenson and Marilyn when she went to see Dr. Michael Gurdin, a well-known plastic surgeon, to explore the possibility of some minor facial work. DiMaggio then took her to attorney Mickey Rudin’s office to discuss a revision of the will she’d executed the year before in New York with Aaron Frosch. The actress had left a sizable portion of her estate to Lee and Paula Strasberg, and while she didn’t want to excise them from the document, she did want to reduce and reapportion their present bequest. Rudin suggested they table the discussion until early August. (“Let’s face it, Marilyn, it’s not as if you’re going to drop dead tomorrow,” he said.) The attorney later admitted that Ralph Greenson, his brother-in-law, had indiscreetly suggested to him that Monroe was “gradually losing touch with reality.” Rudin wondered whether a new last testament would stand up if it were challenged in probate court. He made no mention of his reservations to either Monroe or DiMaggio. Instead, he told them he thought his negotiations with Fox, on Marilyn’s behalf, were going better than expected. He felt they were planning to reshoot Something’s Got to Give and that Fox would almost certainly offer Marilyn an increase in salary.

  Although Joe DiMaggio had ended his employment with Monette, he’d promised to make several appearances for the company at the end of July. Before leaving Marilyn, and with few expectations, he once again “popped the question,” asking her to marry him. To his utter surprise and immense delight, he heard her say “Yes.”

  When he reached New York, Joe told George Solotaire that Marilyn had told him she was tired of Hollywood, tired of the studio creeps, tired of Ralph Greenson, tired of Eunice Murray, and, yes, maybe it was time to start over again. She was finally ready to make a change. After all, what was more important in life than happiness? Her career and her life to date—full as they were with mistake after mistake—had afforded her little in the way of joy. And when she thought about it, she realized that all the years of therapy and psychoanalysis had done virtually nothing for her. Thanks t
o her own devices, she knew now who was important to her and who wasn’t, who cared about her and who didn’t. And Joe cared. She’d always known that but hadn’t always wanted to admit it. But now, finally, once and for all, she realized that Joe was her man. More than anything she wanted to be with him, grow old with him, have children with him, and be his wife. Together they would make right everything that had previously gone wrong. Joe would accomplish what nobody else could: he would help her conquer her addictions; he would steer her career, or what remained of it, in the right direction, and he would protect and cloister her from all the negative forces that threatened to do her in. In short, he would make her whole, make her complete.

  • • •

  The complexity inherent in Marilyn’s private life, the chaos within a mind that struggled for clarity, remained unresolved despite her stated intention to remarry Joe DiMaggio. For reasons she herself probably couldn’t fathom or explain, she was still sleeping with her personal physician. She and Frank Sinatra were even now occasional lovers. From time to time, there were others, including a Los Angeles cab driver in whose taxi she found herself one afternoon and whom she invited home for lunch because “he looked hungry.” Furthermore, he resembled a young Clark Gable, which was apparently enough of an endorsement to land him a spot in Monroe’s bed.

  And then there was Bobby Kennedy, who’d taken it upon himself to divert the actress’s attention away from his brother the president and onto himself. Instead of cutting off Marilyn, Bobby only drew her deeper into his family’s orbit. Smitten by her, and perhaps feeling sorry for her, he encouraged her to communicate with him. She did, often chatting with Angie Novello, his private secretary, when the attorney general wasn’t available. But when she succeeded in reaching him, they would sometimes talk for hours. It didn’t seem to disturb Bobby in the slightest that the movie star’s phone had been bugged and that transcripts of their conversations were being turned over to any number of interested parties, including J. Edgar Hoover.

  “To John Kennedy, Marilyn was just another fuck,” contended Jeanne Carmen. “I doubt he ever really cared for or about her. Bobby had a reputation as a cutthroat politician—a real rattlesnake, when it came down to it—but in my opinion he seemed much more sensitive and compassionate than JFK. For whatever combination of reasons, Bobby truly fell for Marilyn. I’m not saying he was in love with her, but in his own fashion he was enamored of her. As for Marilyn, whereas she’d previously fantasized about marrying JFK and becoming First Lady, she now fantasized about marrying Bobby and eventually becoming First Lady, a fantasy RFK encouraged by telling MM, in a moment of passion or perhaps weakness that he would love to be married to her. It was common knowledge that Bobby was being groomed to take over after his brother’s second term in office. And after Bobby, there was Teddy. These were the Kennedys, and that was the game plan.”

  Jeanne Carmen wasn’t alone in feeling that Robert Kennedy had come to inhabit Marilyn’s fantasies during her last summer. A journalist friend of hers, W. J. Weatherby of the British newspaper the Manchester Guardian, remembered her telling him that she might get married again—no, not to Joe DiMaggio; rather, someone in politics, a Washington insider. He’d asked her to marry him. She couldn’t divulge the person’s name, but he was important and powerful.

  Meanwhile, late in July, with Joe DiMaggio safely ensconced at Monette Company headquarters in Virginia, Bobby Kennedy flew to Los Angeles to attend a party at Peter and Pat Lawford’s beach house. Marilyn had last seen him there on June 27, when the Lawfords gave a luncheon to celebrate RFK’s book The Enemy Within, which had just been made into a motion picture. On that occasion, Bobby had brought along his wife but nevertheless managed to spend several hours alone with Marilyn that evening. This time he came alone, without Ethel. Chuck Pick, a parking lot attendant by day and a bartender by night, worked the bar that evening at the Lawford residence. “The minute I arrived,” said Pick, “a Secret Service agent took me aside and issued a curious warning: ‘You have eyes, but you can’t see; you have ears, but you can’t hear; and you have a mouth, but you can’t speak. You may see things here tonight, but you have to remember to keep your trap shut.’ Other than the usual array of celebrities that one would expect to find at such a gathering, nothing seemed particularly unusual—that is, until around ten at night when Marilyn Monroe showed up. She was two hours late.

  “Marilyn had a few drinks and socialized with everyone for an hour or so, at which point she and Robert Kennedy walked out the door together, hand in hand, and vanished into the night. When they left, so did the Secret Service agent who’d spoken to me earlier in the evening. I found out they went back to Monroe’s house in Brentwood—Bobby and Marilyn in a Cadillac convertible owned by Bill Simon, chief of the Los Angeles FBI office; RFK’s Secret Service escort in a separate car directly behind theirs.”

  Bobby and Marilyn spent the night together. The following morning, Jeanne Carmen joined them for a hot breakfast of oatmeal and cheese omelets prepared by Eunice Murray. “I figured Mrs. Murray would report back to Dr. Greenson about Bobby, and all hell would break loose,” said Carmen. “Then again, I don’t think Marilyn cared any longer what the sinister Dr. Greenson thought. As demonstrated by Marilyn’s reaction when he told her not to see Ralph Roberts, it seemed pretty evident he’d lost his hold over her. She saw him at this time primarily as an enabler, a supplier of drugs. Dr. Hyman Engelberg filled a similar role.

  “Years after Marilyn’s death, I heard a rumor that she and Engelberg might have been romantically involved, which didn’t surprise me. She saw a great deal of him that summer. He gave her a series of what Marilyn claimed were multivitamin injections, though, frankly, I never bought that explanation. I believe he was giving her liquid Nembutal and Amytal intermingled with other substances. He reminded me of President Kennedy’s physician, Dr. Max Jacobson—Dr. Feelgood—who traveled everywhere with Kennedy and saw him regularly in the White House. Jacobson injected JFK with meta-amphetamines and porcupine piss, or something along that order. Engelberg had become Marilyn’s Dr. Feelgood. Dr. Lee Siegel, Fox’s Dr. Feelgood, supplemented Engelberg’s injections by giving Marilyn shots of his own.”

  After breakfast, as Jeanne Carmen remembered it, an argument broke out between Bobby and Marilyn, when he came across a journal she’d been keeping, which contained notes on conversations she’d had with JFK and him. “It wasn’t the so-called little red diary that supposedly disappeared after Marilyn’s death,” said Carmen. “In fact, there was no little red diary. I’d been to Marilyn’s house dozens and dozens of times and never saw anything that even remotely resembled a little red diary. In 1963, with the press all abuzz about this supposed diary of Marilyn’s, I asked Ralph Roberts if he’d ever come across such an item. Nobody was closer to Monroe than Roberts. He assured me he’d seen lots of journals and notebooks in her possession but never a little red diary. And no single notebook was devoted only to the Kennedys. Her notebooks were filled with notations of all sorts: poems, aphorisms, fragmented thoughts, bits of conversation, lists of all kinds. Bobby saw one or two paragraphs on his brother and assumed the worst. He grabbed the notebook and threw it on the floor. ‘Get rid of this!’ he shouted. I assume this was the moment Bobby started to realize just how dangerous the relationship might really be for him and his career.”

  Despite Bobby’s sudden awareness that he was susceptible to the possibility of a scandal were he to be discovered in a compromising relationship with Marilyn (or anyone else, for that matter), he seemed determined to continue the affair, even to the extent that he was willing to falsify his logbook schedule in order to spend time with the movie star. His schedule for July 19, for example, has him back in Washington (and then Hyannis Port), whereas he actually spent the afternoon driving around Malibu with Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen.

  “We put Marilyn in a black wig and baseball cap,” said Carmen. “She had a fake goatee that belonged to one of her actor friends, so we put it on Bobby and gav
e him a baseball cap as well. I don’t know how, but he somehow got rid of his Secret Service detail, after which we clambered into the Cadillac and drove to a nude beach, past Pepperdine [University]. Once there, we walked by the water. We kept our clothes on. Nobody recognized RFK or Marilyn. Later we drove back to Marilyn’s house. I left, and the two of them spent a few more hours together before Bobby returned to Peter and Pat Lawford’s place.”

  One of the oddities of the RFK-MM fling was that while neither the press nor the public at large seemed aware of it, the Secret Service, the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, the FBI and even the CIA knew practically everything. The FBI reports of that period were rampant with references to Marilyn’s involvement with both Kennedys. At least some of the information on the two affairs was developed by way of multiple taps on Monroe’s phone. Several of the involved agencies also seem to have bugged Marilyn’s Brentwood home as well as Peter Lawford’s. The FBI reportedly used a surveillance operations expert Bernie Spindel to do its dirty work, aided by a former private investigator named Fred Otash. As a precaution against anyone breaking into her house to plant a hidden mic, Marilyn kept changing the locks on her doors. Other than Eunice Murray, the only person with keys to the residence was Joe DiMaggio. One might wonder what would have become of Robert Kennedy had DiMaggio paid a surprise visit and found the attorney general in bed with the actress.

  One of the more explicit FBI reports to wind up in J. Edgar Hoover’s hands was filed in October 1964, more than two years after Monroe’s death. The report, pertaining to an undated party that took place at Peter Lawford’s house, read as follows: “During the period of time that Robert Kennedy was having his sex affair with Marilyn Monroe, on one occasion a sex party was conducted at which several other persons were present. A tape recording was secretly made and is in the possession of a Los Angeles private detective agency. A certified copy of the recording has been made. All voices on the tape, including Kennedy’s and Monroe’s, are identifiable.”