There was, or at least there may have been, another “marriage”. This marriage—if real—would have been the second, before DiMaggio and after Jim Dougherty. Though undocumented, this marriage is of great interest to those who believe Marilyn Monroe was murdered, for it was to the man who has maintained a single-minded crusade to expose the murder to the world, a man named Robert Slatzer. Slatzer is a writer and producer who met Marilyn in the summer of 1946, when he was a young fan-magazine reporter and she was the struggling model and would-be starlet Norma Jean Mortenson. Slatzer has subsequently claimed that he and Marilyn fell in love and were married in an alcoholic haze in Tijuana, on 4 October 1952. According to his account, the young couple lived together as man and wife “about three days”, until they were strong-armed by Darryl F. Zanuck—the head of 20th Century-Fox and Marilyn’s boss at the time—into annulling the marriage and having all records of it destroyed.
Monroe’s biographers are divided on the marriage story. It is well established that Robert Slatzer and Marilyn were certainly good friends, and that their friendship extended from the late 1940s until her death in 1962. In any case, Slatzer’s credibility is a crucial issue in the murder story, as much of the firsthand evidence in the case comes either directly from him or from his long and determined legwork.
To accompany the confirmed and could-be husbands there is a Homeric list of confirmed and could-be lovers. Marilyn could be ambivalent about how much she personally enjoyed the sex act, but there is no doubt she enjoyed attracting men. “If fifteen men were in the room with her,” said one Hollywood publicist, “each would be convinced he was the one she’d be waiting for after the others left.” Through personal magnetism, compulsion, or both, she raised the art of seduction to a new level. Not too surprisingly, a vast number of the men who had speaking acquaintances with her have claimed at one time or another to have shared her bed. But for our purposes the most interesting of the lovers are those who could not afford to brag. Of these there are two more interesting than all: the President of the United States and his brother, the Attorney General.
Some accounts trace the origin of Marilyn’s affair with John F. Kennedy to the early 1950s, when Kennedy was a rising star in the US Senate and Marilyn was an established sex symbol in Hollywood. Other sources say the romance began just before Kennedy received his party’s nomination for president in 1960. Whenever it may have started, the affair—judging by the independent testimony of several who witnessed it firsthand—seems to have reached its peak in the early, heady days of the Kennedy presidency, through the offices—and in the beachfront Santa Monica home—of the President’s brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford. The timing of the coupling is significant. Marilyn was at the end of a marriage and in a downward spiral both professionally and personally, due to heavy drug abuse and the endless drain of her own insecurities. John Kennedy was very much married and the most powerful man in the world. As a security risk, the unstable Marilyn was as risky as they come.
Not that John Kennedy was above taking risks where sexual adventure was concerned. The list of his confirmed and could-be liaisons rivals Marilyn’s in its proportions. For Kennedy—and his brother Robert—the indiscretions may have seemed a sort of family tradition. “Dad”, JFK revealed to Clare Boothe Luce, “told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.” Joe Kennedy had taken his own advice. He himself had reportedly enjoyed Hollywood girlfriends in his heyday, the most famous being Gloria Swanson.
Robert Kennedy’s fling with Marilyn is less well documented than his brother’s, and its beginnings are no less difficult to trace. There are those who claim Robert was the first Kennedy to date Monroe. At least one firsthand account, however, suggests that Robert’s affair began as the President’s was ending—in the summer and fall of 1961. The inference has been drawn that the younger Kennedy was enlisted to soften the blow of the end of the President’s dalliance, and that he, like so many others, found Marilyn’s temptations impossible to resist. However and whenever it started, this affair appears to have continued until just prior to Marilyn’s death in August of 1962. At least from Marilyn’s viewpoint, there was an important difference between the ways the two brothers conducted their affairs. From what she reportedly told others, it seems the love goddess took Robert Kennedy’s attentions more seriously than John’s. Speaking of the President, she could be lighthearted: “I think I made his back feel better” and “I made it with the Prez.” Of the Attorney General: “Bobby Kennedy promised to marry me.”
Again, the timing relative to Marilyn’s state of mind is important. Her life, never securely anchored, was becoming increasingly unraveled as the decade of the 1950s wore into the 1960s. Her attempted “suicides”—some or all of which were accidental overdoses—had recurred perhaps a dozen times, with increasing frequency in later years. Her tendency to keep whole, and enormously expensive, film production ensembles awaiting her appearance for hours and even days had increased to the point that she had been fired from her last film, Something’s Got to Give, on 8 June 1962, after showing up on the set only twelve times during thirty-three scheduled shooting days. Marilyn’s last day before the cameras had been 1 June, her thirty-sixth birthday. Her psychiatrist had noted an alarming disintegration beginning in the summer of 1961, including “severe depressive” reactions, suicidal tendencies, increased drug use, and random promiscuity. She may have been a goddess, but she was not a goddess to be trusted with anybody’s secrets. And the Attorney General of the United States may have trusted her with the most important secrets that he knew.
The source for this intriguing possibility is Robert Slatzer. Slatzer was one of a number of friends in whom Marilyn confided about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, but he appears to be the only one she told about Robert Kennedy’s weakness for dangerously indiscreet pillow talk. Slatzer says Marilyn told him Bobby had become annoyed when she forgot things he had told her during previous visits, and that she had resorted—unbeknownst to the Attorney General—to making notes of their conversations in a red diary. Ten days before she died, Marilyn showed Slatzer the diary, as they sat on a beach at Point Dume, north of Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway. Most of the entries, Slatzer says, began with “Bobby told me.” He remembers entries about Kennedy’s war with Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, with Kennedy swearing to “put that SOB behind bars”. But most chillingly, he remembers an entry that read, “Bobby told me he was going to have … Castro murdered.”
The Kennedy administration’s bungling attempts to kill Fidel Castro—through the strangely combined efforts of the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and the American Mafia—first came to light during US Senate hearings in the mid 1970s, and have since become common knowledge. But in 1962, a revelation of this kind would have been the most dangerous political fiasco imaginable. It could certainly have done critical damage to the administration; it could feasibly have started a nuclear confrontation; it could even cause the assassination of the President of the United States—which, as matter of fact, it may well have.
According to Slatzer, Marilyn not only knew these state secrets, she was prepared to tell the world about them. He says she talked of plans to call a press conference and “blow the lid off this whole damn thing,” revealing her affairs with the two Kennedys and the broken “promises that had been made to her”. The date allegedly mentioned for the press conference was Monday, 6 August 1962—the day after she was pronounced dead. Slatzer says he asked if Marilyn had told anyone else of her plans for the press conference and she replied that she had told “a few people”. He claims to have warned her that what she knew was “like having a walking time bomb,” but that she said she “didn’t care at this point … these people had used her … and she was going to … tell the real story.”
Some confirmation of Slatzer’s story comes from Peter Lawford’s ex-wife Deborah Gould. Gould has said that—years after the fact—Lawford broke down and offered a tearful account of the end of Marilyn’s life. Taken as a whole, Lawford’s �
�confession” raises as many questions as it answers. But in this case Lawford’s alleged account echoes Slatzer’s: Marilyn tells Lawford, “I’ve been used … thrown from one man to another … and I’m going public with everything.” If Marilyn wanted word of this threat to get back to the Kennedys, she could have chosen no better vehicle than Peter Lawford.
There is no record that Marilyn notified anyone in the media about plans for a press conference. The fact remains that the mere suggestion of such an ultimatum could have been an extremely dangerous gambit. It appears Marilyn was desperate enough to play this card in hopes that it would force Robert Kennedy to contact her. She had told several friends that Robert had abruptly ended the affair, and no longer called her or returned her phone calls. He had gone so far, she said, as to disconnect the private number he had given her, and the Justice Department operators refused to put her calls to the main switchboard through. Marilyn’s frequent calls to Justice during July of 1962 are documented on her phone records. The last call for which records are available was placed 30 July, the Monday before her death.
Marilyn’s reasons for calling Robert Kennedy may have gone beyond the sting of the spurned lover. In late June, she told an interviewer, “A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child … especially when she’s not married to him. And when a man leaves a woman when she tells him she’s going to have his baby, when he doesn’t marry her, that must hurt a woman very much, deep down inside.” Between late June and early July, she told several friends that she had lost a baby, without specifying abortion or miscarriage. To some friends she confided that the father had been John Kennedy, to others, Robert. At least two sources have reported that there was an abortion, performed in Tijuana by an American doctor. Depending on which authority you trust, this may have been the fourteenth abortion of Marilyn’s life, an especially sad count for a child-woman who spent her final interviews talking about how much she wanted a child of her own. During the same period, Marilyn told several friends—to universal disbelief—that she and the Attorney General would someday be married.
In the available accounts of these last scenes of her life, there is another word that crops up frequently in descriptions of Marilyn. The word is scared. One long-time friend, Arthur James, recalls that Marilyn was “frightened stiff”. Slatzer says she told him that “because of circumstances that led all the way to Washington”, she was “scared for her life”. James and others say she became convinced that she was being watched, that her phones were bugged, and that she resorted to making personal calls from a phone booth in a park near her home, lugging pocketfuls of change for this purpose.
Marilyn may have had paranoid tendencies, but in this instance she was very much in tune with the real world. She was right about the phones. She was right about being watched. In fact her whole home was bugged, and so was Peter Lawford’s home, where she had rendezvoused with her two most powerful lovers. The bugging was not being done by the government.
Though she almost surely did not know it, the recording devices and the sinister people behind them may have been precisely the reason Robert Kennedy had become incommunicado. Kennedy was in the fifth year of a personal war against organized crime in general and Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa in particular. The struggle had been joined when Kennedy was Chief Counsel to the McClellan Committee in the US Senate, and carried on, with unprecedented force, when he became Attorney General. Hoffa was convinced Robert Kennedy had used the attack on his union as a stepping stone to national power for himself and his brother, and in a sense he was right. The union boss and his mob friends hated both of the elder Kennedy brothers enough to want them dead—and were reportedly not above saying so, among themselves—but they especially hated Bobby.
In the course of the struggle, Robert Kennedy had created a special “Get Hoffa” strike force in the Justice Department, with the FBI, the IRS, and the government itself aligned on his side. But Jimmy Hoffa and his Mafia allies were not without their own resources and their own considerable army of foot soldiers. Hoffa knew the Kennedys were vulnerable because of their womanizing. When he learned of the amorous dance of John and Robert and Marilyn Monroe—by one account the information came to him as early as 1957—he must have rubbed his hands in glee.
The ideal weapon for this phase of the war on Kennedy happened to be a human being who happened to already be on Hoffa’s payroll—the man acknowledged by his peers to be the best wiretapper in the world, one Bernard Bates Spindel. Spindel had learned the basics of his trade in the US Army Signal Corps and in army intelligence during the Second World War. One of the ironies of his remarkable career is that he could easily have served on the Kennedy side in the bugging wars: as a young man he applied for a job with the CIA but was rejected. Though he is said to have worked both sides of the fence thereafter, Bernie Spindel spent the bulk of the rest of his days beating the government spooks at their own game. Spindel had been taping Robert Kennedy for his client Jimmy Hoffa since at least the late 1950s. According to Hollywood-based private eye Fred Otash, Spindel got the Marilyn Monroe assignment in the summer of 1961.
Otash has said Hoffa summoned him and Spindel to a meeting in Florida that summer. Hoffa wanted “to develop a derogatory profile of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and their relationships with Marilyn Monroe and with any other woman. The strategy … was to use electronic devices.” The first target was Peter Lawford’s home, where bugs were placed not only on the phone lines but “in the carpets … under chandeliers and in ceiling fixtures.” Otash says the tapes from the Lawford bugging contained conversations between both Kennedys and Marilyn, and phone conversation to arrange rendezvous between both Kennedys and Marilyn, and both Kennedys and other women.
Another private detective who worked on the assignment, John Danoff, has been more graphic in his description of the tapes from the Lawford house: it “was cuddly talk and taking off their clothes and the sex act in the bed—you could hear the springs squeaking and so on.”
If this was good stuff, maybe better stuff could be had at Marilyn’s home, the modest Spanish-style house in Brentwood in which she spent the last months of her life. Marilyn’s friend Arthur James says he was asked in the spring of 1962 to get Marilyn out of the house so that “people could come in there and bug … for the purpose of getting evidence on Bobby Kennedy.” James says he turned the request down, and never told Marilyn about it. The house was bugged anyway. Examination in later years turned up indications of eavesdropping devices both on the phones and on the premises.
Despite all these frightening developments, there are indications Marilyn had rebounded to some extent from her depressions during her last few days. The studio, with reluctance but with little choice in the matter, had rehired her on Something’s Got to Give, and shooting was set to resume before the end of 1962. She was negotiating on other film projects, giving interviews, enjoying setting up and landscaping the Brentwood house, the first home she had bought and lived in on her own. She had set several appointments for the week that would follow her death. Though never a model of stability, she did not appear to be a person who was contemplating suicide.
The Brentwood household included a housekeeper-companion, a sixty-year-old woman named Eunice Murray, who had been installed by Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson. Mrs Murray, who seems to have had some experience dealing with psychiatric patients, came on the scene after Marilyn had alienated a succession of nurses. It was Mrs Murray who had found the Brentwood house for Marilyn to buy, and Mrs Murray who brought her own son-in-law into the household as a salaried handyman. The housekeeper and the handyman were two of many links between the film star and the psychiatrist. During her final summer, Marilyn saw Dr Greenson in his professional capacity as often as twice a day. She also relied on him increasingly for advice and moral support, spent a great deal of time in his home, and became close to his children. Marilyn came to depend on Greenson so heavily that some of her friends observed that the doctor was
, in effect, running her life. It was a pattern she had lived through before with her acting coaches, and if it troubled her there is only one indication that she may have been trying to change it: a report that she made inquiries about replacing Mrs Murray with a housekeeper of her own choosing at the end of July, just before she died.
As it happens, Mrs Murray has become the enigma within the riddle of the Marilyn Monroe case. Her evidence is critical, because, according to the officially accepted version of events, she was the only other person in the house when Marilyn died. But beginning with her first statements to police that night, and stretching almost to the present day, her accounts have been so abstruse, ever-changing, and self-contradictory that they may be interpreted in any number of vastly different ways. In the impossible event that any party or parties were ever put on trial for the murder of Marilyn Monroe, one can imagine Mrs Murray in the role of witness for either the defense or the prosecution, depending on the story she chooses to tell on that particular day. It is hard to escape the conclusion that this kindly and soft-spoken old lady is either impossibly befuddled or is doggedly hiding a dangerous truth.
Mrs Murray is not alone in her capacity for confusion about the last hours of Marilyn’s life. In fact, virtually all of the small number of people who spent extended periods of time with Marilyn that weekend have shown an alarming tendency to forget or to offer contradictory stories, so much so that their testimony would seem highly suspicious even if there were no other reason to doubt the official suicide verdict. And there are plenty of other reasons.
Given all the fuzzy recollections, it is impossible to reconstruct with any certainty the last two days Marilyn Monroe spent on this earth. There are a few documented facts. One is that Robert Kennedy was in California that weekend. With his wife and four children in tow, he was to address the American Bar Association meeting in San Francisco, staying at the ranch of a lawyer named John Bates, about sixty miles south of the city. Marilyn knew Kennedy was coming, and was still desperately trying to contact him. Her phone records for the four days she lived in August were mysteriously confiscated, but an enterprising reporter established that she made several calls to the San Francisco hotel where the Bar Association had reserved rooms for Kennedy, and that the calls were not returned. Bit by bit, evidence has emerged that Kennedy left the San Francisco area to visit Marilyn that weekend. His host John Bates has steadfastly insisted that this could not have happened. A number of other witnesses, including Los Angeles police, claim otherwise.
The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes Page 49