Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (23 page)

After this party, Bobby and Marilyn apparently began seeing one another socially whenever he was on the West Coast.

Peter Dye, a frequent guest at the Lawford home, recalls, “I know Marilyn was nuts about him because she told me as much. She was fascinated by him. I also think she was scared to death of him because he gave off an air about him- self.”

Max Block, a former president of the Meat Cutters Union, says that he and one of Bobby’s enemies, Jimmy Hoffa, were told about meetings between Bobby and Mar-

ilyn Monroe at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas by the manager of the hotel, Wilbur Clark. “He told me he checked them in every few weeks into a suite of rooms on the seventh floor,” says Max Block. “One day I was sitting with him, and Bobby passed by and said, ‘Hello, Wilbur.’ Clark said, ‘Hello, Bobby. This is my friend Max Block.’ Kennedy said, ‘Oh, I know Block from New York.’ And he kept going. I asked where he was going, and Clark said, ‘He’s going to see Marilyn upstairs.’ When I mentioned to Jimmy about Bobby and Marilyn Monroe, he said, ‘I know all about that.’ ”

“Life’s Too Short to Worry about Marilyn Monroe”

I
n the spring of 1962, the President of the United States would celebrate his forty-fifth birthday on May 29. Peter Lawford came up with the idea of having Marilyn sing “Happy Birthday” to Jack at a huge birthday salute being planned at Madison Square Garden. Many other celebrities would be performing at the gala, which was thrown by the Democratic Party to raise money for the next presidential campaign; performers would include singers such as Ella Fitzgerald, Maria Callas, and Peggy Lee. The notion of the sexy movie star serenading the President might have been an example of Lawford’s warped sense of humor; friends in- sist that having Marilyn as the show’s finale was his idea of an in-joke.

At this time, Marilyn Monroe was causing problems for her studio, 20th Century-Fox, during production of her latest film,
Something’s Got to Give
. Pleading illness, she had missed so many days of principal photography that the movie was behind schedule. Naturally, the studio heads were adamantly opposed to her taking more time off to at- tend the President’s birthday celebration.

On the other hand, Bobby Kennedy was just as deter- mined to have Monroe present. Upon learning that Fox was threatening a lawsuit if she left the set to attend the gala, Bobby personally telephoned studio head Peter Levathes in Hollywood to ask that Monroe be permitted to fly to New York without penalty. He explained that her performance would be “very important to the President of the United States.” When Levathes turned him down, Bobby became exasperated.

Bobby then went over Levathes’s head to the most pow- erful man at Fox at the time, financier Milton Gould, to whom he explained that Marilyn’s appearance was “of criti- cal importance to the current administration.” Gould recalls Bobby as having said, “The President wants it, and I want it.” When Gould’s answer was emphatically negative, the Attorney General threatened him, telling him that he would be “sorry for this” and reminding him that he was “dealing with the First Family in America.”

Bobby Kennedy needn’t have worried. With or without the studio’s permission, Marilyn Monroe was determined to perform at the event. She announced that she would not be available for work and then made plans to leave for New York. (Her decision would result in an eventual breach-of- contract lawsuit from Fox.)

Famous for her revealing wardrobe, Marilyn had designer

Jean Louis create what was probably the most daring gown of her entire career—one made of the sheerest flesh-colored netting. With the fabric covered by hundreds of rhinestones, Marilyn appeared to be wearing nothing but beads speckled over luscious flesh. (In October 1999, at an auction of Mar- ilyn’s belongings at Christie’s, in New York, this gown com- manded more than a million dollars.)

By her own choice, the First Lady would not be present for the Madison Square Garden birthday party. She had heard about Marilyn Monroe’s planned performance despite the fact that the chairman of the Democratic Party had called one of the show’s organizers, Richard Adler (who wrote the music to
The Pajama Game
and
Damn Yankees
), to demand that Marilyn be removed.

It would seem that Jackie suspected trouble ahead. “I’m not going to sit and watch
that
,” she told her Secret Service agent in an unusual moment of candor. “If you ask me, I think this administration is completely out of control with all of this Marilyn business.”

When the agent did not respond, Jackie may have realized the inappropriate nature of her comment, because she said, “Forget I ever said that, please.”

Nunziata Lisi, a friend of Lee Radziwill’s who lived in Italy at the time, says, “According to what Lee told me, Jackie did not have a fight with Jack about the Madison Square Garden matter, or even a discussion about it. Her po- sition, from what I gathered, was that if Jack actually ap- proved of such a thing, knowing full well that she would be unhappy about it—and maybe even humiliated by it—then it wasn’t worth a big brouhaha. It was just not worth going. Or, as Lee told me Jackie put it, ‘Life’s too short to worry about Marilyn Monroe.’ ”

As she always did when she wanted to get away, Jackie took the kids to Glen Ora, outside Middleburg, Virginia, two hours from Washington. She and Jack rented this four-hundred-acre, seven-bedroom estate as a weekend re- treat. Jackie always savored her time there, referring to Middleburg as “home” and Washington as “the White House.”

By 1962, Jackie was spending as many as four days a week at Glen Ora with her children, her horses, and other animals, living what she called “a good, clean life”—which, more often than not, did not include Jack. Jack hated Glen Ora. While Jackie had a strong affinity for horses, the Presi- dent was allergic to them.

While at Glen Ora during this particular May, Jackie participated in the Loudoun Hunt Horse Show, taking a third-place ribbon. “It was very simple there at Glen Ora,” Eve Fout, a friend of Jackie’s from Middleburg, recalled to First Lady historian Carl Anthony. “The press would poke around, usually when there was a big event going on. Sometimes, someone would call me and tell me more about what we had just done than even I knew. Jackie said, ‘Look, if I worried about what people said about me every day, I couldn’t get up in the morning. I learned very quickly.’ ”

Eve Fout further recalled that at Glen Ora, Jackie “lived like everyone else. Wait in line at the store, go right into any of the shops. She always had meals at home. Only four times in all those years did she go out to eat, two times at a restau- rant, two times at friends’ homes. She said that if that was antisocial, then that is what she was, and should be, at that period in her life.”

* * *

On May 19, 1962, approximately twenty thousand De- mocrats celebrated the President’s forty-fifth birthday at massive Madison Square Garden (even though Jack’s birth- day was still ten days away). Jack, Bobby, Ethel, Rose, Pat, and Eunice were all present.

Backstage, Monroe was buckling under the pressure and was jittery at the prospects of such an important appear- ance. Up close, her ivory face makeup and heavy eyeliner gave her an almost Kabuki-like appearance, adding to her aura of fragility. After all the other performers had done their numbers, Peter Lawford finally brought her onto the stage. A gasp from the audience greeted her as she trotted delicately out like an oriental empress. The $12,000 Jean Louis beaded gown was so tight, she could take only the tiniest of mincing steps at a time. Hugh Sidey of
Time
mag- azine, who was present at the gala, recalls, “There was a feeling of euphoria mixed with a sense of astonishment that this scene was actually taking place, and that it was for the benefit of the President of the United States, who seemed to go limp. When I say ‘limp,’ I mean that he was visibly affected. His mouth was wide open, as if he didn’t know whether to be shocked, excited, appalled, or what.”

After Lawford helped her remove her ermine stole, Mar- ilyn sang her little birthday song to the President and then another number, with special lyrics written for the occa- sion by Richard Adler, to the tune of “Thanks for the Mem- ories,” Bob Hope’s theme song. (“Thanks, Mr. President/For all the things you’ve done/The battles that you’ve won/The way you deal with U.S. Steel/And our problems by the ton/We thank you so much.”) While per- forming, she seductively ran her hands up her curvaceous

body and nearly cupped her breasts. It was an act that might have been more appropriate at a burlesque show than at a political fund-raiser.

After Marilyn had the audience join her in another rous- ing round of “Happy Birthday,” she brought Jack onto the stage. “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a wholesome way,” he joked from behind a podium emblazoned by the presidential seal.

A friend of Marilyn’s, Jeanne Martin—whose husband of twelve years, entertainer Dean Martin, was co-starring with Marilyn in
Something’s Got to Give
at this time—can still vividly recall the strong emotions she felt as she sat in the VIP section of the audience more than three decades ago. Of Monroe’s stage presence, she says, “That performance was beyond the pale. I squirmed in my seat, tried to look away. . . . It belittled the entire Presidency, as well as Jackie’s position as First Lady.”

Jeanne, who has remained close to the Kennedys through the years, put the blame on the President himself. “Certainly Marilyn couldn’t have done it without Jack’s approval,” she says. “I never believed it was a complete surprise to the President. Why would he allow her to do that?” (And in fact, Marilyn’s performance was not a surprise: Jack had been forewarned by Bobby.)

Beverly Brennan, an investment banker who met Pat Kennedy through Peter Lawford in 1954, recalls that Pat found the performance “hysterical and very good.” As for Jackie, Pat said, “She can take a joke. She has such a vicious sense of humor herself.” Pat Kennedy also told Beverly Brennan that she had telephoned Jackie at Glen Ora when she heard that the First Lady wasn’t going to be present at

the celebration, to assure her that the performance would be “just a harmless Marilyn Monroe prank.” She assured her that, as Marilyn’s close friend, she would never allow the screen star to do anything that would embarrass the First Lady, and she also advised Jackie that her absence would only focus more attention on the spectacle. Apparently, Jackie was not convinced.

The day after the President’s birthday party, Jackie, still at Glen Ora, saw a news broadcast of Marilyn’s breathless, sul- try rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Jackie’s right-hand man, Clint Hill, was with her at Glen Ora, as always. Hill, a former football star at Concordia College in North Dakota, was married to his high-school sweetheart, Gwen Brown. Much more than just a Secret Service agent to Jackie, he was now responsible for many aspects of her busy life. “I also dealt with her maid, I dealt with her nanny for the children, and her day-to-day opera- tions,” he recalls. “On a lot of things she would deal di- rectly with me instead of going to a social secretary or a press secretary.”

Jackie, appearing bewildered and frustrated, paced the living room. When the phone rang, she jumped for it. It was Ethel, calling to express her anger about Monroe’s act and the way Jack had responded to it. Ethel apparently felt, as had Jeanne Martin and others, that Marilyn’s performance was an insult to Jackie. Ethel said she was calling to make sure Jackie was not too upset, and to discuss with her how she might handle the matter with the President.

As Jackie spoke to Ethel, her voice rose. “My under- standing of it is that Bobby was the one who orchestrated the whole goddamn thing,” she said, blazing out the words in

Jackie’s Ultimatum to Jack
179

frustration. “The Attorney General is the troublemaker here, Ethel. Not the President. So it’s Bobby I’m angry at, not Jack.”

“It’s just all so exhausting,” a weary Jackie told Ethel. “And what about that poor woman?” she added, referring apparently to Marilyn. “Look at how they are exploiting her.”

As the conversation ended, Jackie thanked Ethel for her concern and asked where she could locate Bobby. Told that the Attorney General was in his office, she promptly called him. The two spoke angrily for about five minutes. Jackie’s terse, obscenity-laced end of the conversation was com- pletely uncharacteristic of the warm rapport she ordinarily shared with Bobby. However, she was clearly upset. After accusing Bobby of having sanctioned “a sick game” with a movie star, Jackie hung up on him, her hands visibly shak- ing.