At around this time, Marilyn did indeed tell certain people that she and Bobby were involved. These people, of course, believed her. It’s interesting in that many of them never believed anything she ever said about anything else, but this, they believed. Could she really be trusted, though? Was she a reliable source for this kind of information, especially in the last six months of her life when she was in such a desperate emotional state and also addicted to drugs? Remember, this is a woman who first began creating fictions about herself years earlier. In 1958, for instance, she made this statement to a reporter: “When I lived with the minister and his wife, they told me that if I went to a movie on a Sunday, God would strike me dead. The first time I dared to sneak away and go to a Sunday movie, I was scared stiff to come out. When I did, it was raining. There was thunder and lightning and I ran all the way home, expecting to be dead any minute. Even after I was home and in bed underneath the covers, I was terrified.” Marilyn never lived with a minister and his wife—she was obviously speaking of the Bolenders, with whom she lived during the first seven years of her life. If anyone believed Ida would have let her out of her sight at that age long enough for her to “sneak away” to the movies—about two miles from the Bolenders’ home—they did not know Ida very well. As we’ve seen time and time again, for a variety of reasons, Marilyn often embellished the truth, and not just to the press, which would have been an acceptable form of public relations, but to her friends as well. Her publicist Pat Newcomb put it this way: “Marilyn told several people a lot of things, but she never told anybody everything.” Indeed, just as recently as a few months earlier she had told many of her friends that she and Bobby Kennedy were about to go on “a date.” It turned out, of course, that it was a dinner party attended by many others, not a date.
Still, some people were very convinced that she was in love with Bobby, even Michael Selsman, who was another in a string of publicists. “Oh, please, of course it was true,” he says. “Everyone knew it even then, but the press was much more protective. It was our job to steer them away from it, anyway. But she couldn’t stop talking about it. With Bobby, it was more serious than with JFK.”
“Sometimes I think, yes, Bobby did end up with Marilyn Monroe,” says Andy Williams. “But then I think, wait. Based on what? I know he never told me. Ethel never told me, and she’s one of my best friends. Not that Bobby was a saint. He was like the Kennedys when it came to women. I know that Ethel was aware of it and, in some ways, maybe didn’t have a problem with it. She would call me and say, ‘Bobby is coming to town. Will you have him to dinner? And find the best-looking girl for him, as a dinner partner?’ But where Bobby and Marilyn are concerned, the only people I ever heard that from was from those who, I guess, heard it from Marilyn. And now, all of these years later, I have to say I don’t know… I never met the woman and wouldn’t want to be critical of her but I think she was telling tales.”
Then again, maybe she wasn’t the only one. Consider this very strange letter Marilyn received after meeting Bobby Kennedy, from his own sister, Jean Kennedy Smith:
Dear Marilyn,
Mother asked me to write and thank you for your sweet note to Daddy. He really enjoyed it and thought you were very cute to send it.
Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East.
Again, thanks for the note.
Love,
Jean Smith
This letter (which was found by Marilyn’s business manager, Inez Nelson, after Marilyn’s death) has been used several times over the years to support the claim of an affair between Marilyn and Bobby. There are a few problems with it, though. The way Kennedy women operated, they didn’t confirm the affairs had by the men in the family. They ignored them. They certainly didn’t cheerily write about them in correspondence, committing to paper what could one day be used against them. The family members were always cognizant of their place in history and knew that whatever they said, did, or wrote could one day become part of the historical record. That said, it is strange that Jean Smith would have written the note at all, knowing that it could be one day misinterpreted if read by someone other than Marilyn. She would have done it only if she truly thought the story was so absurd that no one would take it seriously, even with the passing of time. Of course, another possibility is that the letter is a forgery. Comparing the handwriting to that of Smith, it appears to be legitimate. The fact that it’s not dated, though, makes it impossible to place it in the proper time context. Whatever questions there are about this letter, its mere existence is a primary reason it’s so widely believed Marilyn and Bobby were “the new item!”
It’s clear that Bobby Kennedy regarded Marilyn with at least a little affection and that she felt the same way about him. The two did have telephone conversations. “He didn’t mind talking to her,” said George Smathers, a longtime Kennedy political ally and a former governor of Florida and U.S. senator from that state. “There was no harm in it. She was sad and lonely and she would call, so, yeah, he would talk to her and calm her down. There was no affair with Bobby, though. I can tell you that Ethel had her doubts at first, only because the rumors started right away. But Bobby told Ethel they were not true and she believed him. Marilyn had it in her head that she wanted to be First Lady—JFK’s wife—not Bobby’s. She wasn’t interested in Bobby that way. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Ed Guthman was a good friend of Robert Kennedy’s and was with him and Marilyn on at least two occasions. “I know there was no affair,” he maintains. “It’s not even a question in my mind. I was there. I saw what was going on. And I’m telling you that there was no affair.” Another close friend of RFK’s, Kenneth O’Donnell, said, “I knew this man as well as anybody. I was intimately associated with him for years and knew everything he ever did, and I know for a fact that this Marilyn Monroe story is absolute bullshit.” Pat Newcomb—admittedly not the most reliable source for information considering that her job as Monroe’s publicist was to protect her—also weighed in on journalists who have bought into the Marilyn-Bobby romance: “Are they crazy? I knew Bobby very well, better than Marilyn did in a lot of ways. However, you didn’t even have to know him well to know that he would never have left Ethel. And with all of those children? Come on!”
“Let me be clear,” added Milt Ebbins, who of course knew Marilyn and RFK. “Marilyn was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a slut. What kind of character would she have, going from one brother to the next? She was a sexual creature, yes, but she would not have done it. I’m certain it never happened.”
Peter Lawford’s friend Joseph Naar concluded, “When I hear Bobby Kennedy was her lover, I say, ‘bullshit.’ Absolute and complete bullshit.”
One more anecdote about Marilyn and Bobby comes from a Kennedy relative who requested anonymity, “because this is still such a sore subject with the family.” She was married to one of the family members, though—she will allow that much. She says that she called Pat Kennedy Lawford in the spring of 1962 to ask if she had heard the stories about Marilyn and Bobby. “Okay, this has got to stop right here,” Pat said, annoyed. “Either Marilyn is making up stories about Bobby in order to get Jack to change his mind about her, or she’s doing it to show Jack what he’s missing—or maybe both. Either way, it’s adolescent behavior and I will talk to her about it. I asked Bobby very specifically if something was going on with Marilyn and Jack,” she added. “He said he did not feel comfortable answering that question. I then asked him if anything was going on between him and Marilyn. He said absolutely not. And I believe him.”
Of course, it can be said that for every person who believes the affair didn’t happen, there are bound to be people who believe it did—including a number of FBI agents, it would seem.
Because of the ongoing contentious relationship between Bobby Kennedy, who as the attorney general was head of the Justice Department, and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI,
who considered the younger Kennedy an upstart and not someone he wanted to answer to, it is entirely possible that promulgating and perpetuating the “romance” between Bobby and Marilyn was a campaign of disinformation ordered by Hoover, a notorious lover of gossip, making it up and spreading it. Actually, some of the FBI’s files on Kennedy and Monroe sound as if they were written by a lovesick schoolgirl, especially in that the key players are described by their first names. One missive, released in October 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, notes that “Robert Kennedy was deeply involved emotionally with Marilyn Monroe.” The relationship is described as “a romance and sex affair.” The paperwork reports that Bobby “has repeatedly promised to divorce his wife to marry Marilyn. Eventually, Marilyn realized that Bobby had no intention of marrying her.” According to whom, though? The “former special agent” who wrote the report and whose name is deleted admits that he doesn’t know the source for the information, nor can he vouch for its authenticity. However that didn’t stop his report from being duly documented in the FBI’s files, on October 19, 1964.
Bobby: “The President Wants It and I Want It”
In May 1962, the relationship between Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers would take yet another strange twist. A celebration was being planned on May 19 for JFK’s forty-fifth birthday—a big, overblown, televised spectacle that was to take place at Madison Square Garden. (His actual birthday would be on May 29.) It had been Peter Lawford’s idea to have Marilyn Monroe sing “Happy Birthday” to the president. Of course, it was probably the height of arrogance that Peter felt he could get away with such a thing. It was almost as if everyone was so accustomed to getting away with so much where Marilyn was concerned, now they wanted to push the envelope and flaunt the relationship in front of the entire country—and on television!
One question that’s never asked in regard to Marilyn’s invitation to perform for the president is this: What in the world were Bobby and JFK thinking? “This manipulation of Marilyn, already so sick, was as low as it got,” said Jeanne Martin, wife of Dean Martin, who was costarring with Marilyn in the beleaguered Something’s Got to Give. Jeanne was not only still a very good friend of Marilyn’s but had also remained friendly with the Kennedys through the years. However, even she realized that the brothers had crossed a line. “This was shameful, it really was,” she said. “There was no excuse for it.”
Perhaps Marilyn needed the president in her life now more than ever. After all, she was rattled at this time by a series of events that had occurred just a month earlier.
In February, Marilyn had gone to Mexico to purchase furnishings for her new home. While she was there with Pat Newcomb and Eunice Murray, it again became clear that she was being followed by FBI agents. It couldn’t have been a more ludicrous pursuit. The agents had it in their heads that she was involved with someone named Fred Vanderbilt Field, who had apparently served nine months in prison for not naming Communist friends. He moved to Mexico in 1953. Now, all these years later, a friend of a friend introduced him and his wife to Marilyn and—voilà!—the FBI was tracking her every move in Mexico. For a woman who was already thought to be borderline paranoid schizophrenic by her doctor, such pursuit had to have been extremely frightening.
There are actually many allegations presented as fact in the FBI files concerning Monroe and Field, none of which appear to be true and none of which therefore are worth enumeration. In these same FBI files that detail her every move in Mexico, there is mention of her meeting with Bobby Kennedy in October 1961. She was definitely being watched—and she knew it.
At about this same time, Marilyn was in desperate trouble with 20th Century-Fox. In April and May 1962, as she continued to slip deeper into the darkest recesses of her mind, she placed the production of Something’s Got to Give in even greater jeopardy. It was impossible for her to begin rehearsals and camera tests for the film. She was constantly late, if she showed up at all. She always had an excuse, as she would for absences during the entire production, whether it was a cold, a sinus infection, or some other malady. All of it was true—she was a very sick woman. But she was also scared to death of George Cukor, and that didn’t help matters either. Moreover, it was thought by most observers that Paula Strasberg, Marilyn’s acting coach (who was being paid $5,000 a week), had become very intrusive. Sidney Guilaroff, who styled Marilyn’s hair for the film as he had for many others, put it this way: “Dressed all in black, including a black gypsy scarf and thick stockings, Paula haunted the set—sometimes directing Marilyn with hand signals behind Cukor’s back. Marilyn was so dependent upon her that she could barely read a line without Strasberg’s specific brand of coaching.”
Harvey Bernstein once recalled a meeting he had with Marilyn at her home to discuss the script. She answered the door in hair curlers. There was no furniture in her living room, just a chair on which he sat while she sat on the floor. “Many of her ideas [for the script] were good for her and not so good for the story,” he recalled. “But if I hinted at this, her face would go blank for a second, as though the current had been turned off, and when it was turned on again, she would continue as though I had said nothing.… Sometimes she would refer to herself in the third person, like Caesar. ‘Remember you’ve got Marilyn Monroe, you’ve got to use her,’ she told me.… I left feeling like a deckhand on a ship with no one at the helm and the water ahead full of rocks.” *
The last thing executives at 20th Century-Fox would approve of was Marilyn taking more time off to fly to New York City to sing for the president. Even though she had earlier been given permission, Peter Levathes reversed his position based on her poor attendance on the set of the film. He didn’t want her to be distracted. In fact, the studio threatened to sue her if she took off for New York (and actually would file suit against her). When Bobby Kennedy heard of the possibility of a lawsuit against Marilyn, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He called Levathes to appeal to him that Marilyn’s appearance for the president was very im portant and would mean a lot to JFK. Levathes stood firm that he would not approve it. Annoyed, Bobby went over Levathes’s head to his boss, Milton Gould. Gould has recalled that Bobby told him, “ ‘The president wants it, and I want it.’ He was very abusive. I was surprised at his total lack of class. I told him we were very much behind in our schedule and would not release her. He called me a ‘no-good Jew bastard,’ which I didn’t appreciate. Then he slammed down the phone. I have to say I was surprised that they wanted her so badly that he was willing to humiliate himself like that.”
As it would happen, it didn’t matter to Marilyn whether or not the studio approved of her going to New York. She’d made up her mind that she was going, and that was the end of it. Her priority was to be in New York with the Kennedy brothers. Twentieth Century-Fox could wait. At some point during this time, she apparently became melancholy about President Kennedy, because she painted a single red rose in watercolor on a sheet of paper. Then, in blue ink, she signed at the bottom left, “Happy Birthday Pres. Kennedy from Marilyn Monroe.” She additionally signed and inscribed below the first signature, in black ink, this time mysteriously signing her name twice, reading in full: “Happy Birthday June 1, 1962/My Best Wishes/Marilyn/Marilyn.” Of course, June 1, 1962, would be her last birthday, her thirty-sixth. (Decades later in 2005, this artwork would sell for $78,000 in a Julien’s auction of Marilyn’s possessions.)
Marilyn left Los Angeles for New York on May 17, telling the media, “I told the studio six weeks ago that I was going. I consider it an honor to appear before the President of the United States.” The cast and crew of Something’s Got to Give were stunned by her decision. “It was very surprising,” recalled her stand-in, Evelyn Moriarty. “We all just felt like things couldn’t get much worse. It was all so unpredictable and awful. But she did have permission, even if they took it away from her.”
Dean Martin’s manager, Mort Viner, said, “That was poor form on her part. It showed where her priorities were, anyway, didn’t it?
But Dean told me, ‘Hey, you can’t blame her, Mort. Look, if Jackie Kennedy had asked me to fly cross country and sing Happy Birthday to her, I woulda gone.’ ”
New research now establishes, however, that perhaps the decision wasn’t as easy for Marilyn as previously believed. She was conflicted, and she turned to her friend Pat Lawford for advice. According to people who knew Pat well, Pat told her that she now believed her brothers were being unfair to Marilyn, and maybe even trying to make a fool of her. This was likely not easy for Pat to admit. After all, she was a loyal Kennedy and almost always supported her brothers. However, as Marilyn’s friend, she may have felt compelled to tell her how she truly felt about the matter. It’s a testament to her, actually, that she was able to put aside her feelings of betrayal by Marilyn in order to help her friend achieve some clarity over the situation.
The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe Page 45