Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (49 page)

“I told her I was privy to the same rumors as everybody else,” said Song. “She didn’t believe me, because she asked why I went out of my way to protect the Kennedys. Didn’t I feel used by them? They used everyone, she said, and I was no exception. I told her I didn’t feel used. On the contrary, they’d afforded me opportunities I wouldn’t otherwise
have had, such as a trip to the White House to cut the president’s hair before a state dinner when his regular barber was out of town. I had the impression that Marilyn felt emotionally abused by Jack and Bobby and was trying to dig up dirt on them. She interrogated me for an hour or so, then turned to Hank Jones and began interrogating him. After a while, he said to her, ‘I don’t know what the Kennedys did to you, but you ought to let it go. Life’s too short.’ ”

Neither Song nor Jones realized that Marilyn had secretly taped their conversation. “I learned that she’d hired a private investigator to install a hidden recording device in both her bedroom and living room. She’d amassed an entire inventory of tapes containing conversations with nearly everyone, including Bobby Kennedy. It’s illegal to do that in California. After she died, Peter Lawford got hold of the tapes and presumably destroyed them.”

Peter Lawford had been placed in an unwelcome and untenable position of middleman between Marilyn and the Kennedys. Related to the Kennedy clan by marriage, he also considered himself one of Monroe’s closest and most stalwart friends. Nevertheless, concerned about her threat to hold a press conference in which she planned to divulge details of her love affairs with the president and the attorney general, Lawford felt he had no choice but to call Bobby Kennedy and discuss the matter with him. “I didn’t know if my own phone was bugged,” said Lawford, “so I called from a public phone booth. Bobby was alarmed by what I told him. He finally realized the potential danger he and his brother faced having become involved with an exceedingly famous but thoroughly unstable woman. He advised me to phone her shrink, who would surely be able to quiet her down. So I called Dr. Greenson.

“Marilyn had already informed him as to her curt dismissal by RFK. She’d placed numerous phone calls to him at the Justice Department, none of which he’d returned. The problem was that she’d constructed an entire romantic fantasy in her mind, which initially involved the president; after Bobby entered the picture, she made him the focus of her fantasy. In her disoriented state, she had difficulty discerning the
difference between fantasy and reality. What worried Greenson was that in the past, Marilyn often made suicide threats and would fake a suicide attempt in order to gain sympathy. The one person Greenson felt could truly help Marilyn was Joe DiMaggio, but because the situation centered on Marilyn’s imagined desire to marry Bobby Kennedy, he couldn’t bring himself to involve DiMaggio.”

An event that ordinarily would have elevated Marilyn’s mood took place in July 1962. An exuberant Mickey Rudin contacted her with what he considered wonderful news: Peter Levathes had revived Monroe’s contract with Fox, offering to double her previous salary and agreeing to restart shooting on
Something’s Got to Give
. Rudin subsequently told Ralph Greenson about the offer, and Greenson relayed the information to Peter Lawford.

“I went to Marilyn’s house to congratulate her in person,” said Lawford. “She looked pretty grim. All she could talk about were the Kennedys. So I told her I was going to Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe for the weekend. I invited her along thinking some peace and quiet and a change in scenery might cheer her up. ‘We’ll celebrate your new contract,’ I said. She brightened a bit. ‘Thanks, Peter,’ she replied. ‘You’re a good man, and there aren’t many like you.’ ”

P
EACE AND QUIET WERE NOT
commodities in great supply at the Cal-Neva, a resort and gambling casino that attracted the Rat Pack, the Mafia and an assortment of high rollers and heavy drinkers. Before departing Los Angeles, Marilyn received a hypodermic injection courtesy of Dr. Hyman Engelberg and a fresh supply of barbiturates and sedatives as prescribed by Dr. Greenson. Besides the new supply, Marilyn had stocked her suitcase with an arsenal of pharmaceuticals taken from her medicine cabinet. She’d been taking pills for so long, she told a fellow resort guest, that only high doses had any effect.

Marilyn had spent a day at Cal-Neva with the Lawfords earlier in the month and had swallowed enough pills to knock herself out. She’d left her telephone line open to the resort switchboard, and when the operator heard her labored breathing, she located the Lawfords, who rushed to the room to find Marilyn unconscious on the floor next to the bed. Peter and Pat alternated cups of coffee with walks around the room until Monroe regained her senses. Frank Sinatra flew her back to Los Angeles that night in his private plane.

Joe DiMaggio had heard about the earlier Cal-Neva incident and blamed Sinatra and Skinny D’Amato, who’d left the 500 Club in Atlantic City to manage Cal-Neva, for plying Marilyn with alcohol. When Inez Melson, MM’s business manager, apprised Joe of Marilyn’s
departure for the Lake Tahoe gambling resort, he made immediate arrangements to follow her there. To avoid a confrontation with Sinatra, he checked into the nearby Silver Crest Motor Hotel and surprised Marilyn when he walked into the Cal-Neva dining room, where she was seated with the Lawfords.

“We were eating dinner, and in marched Joe DiMaggio,” said Peter Lawford. “It was the first time in a long time I’d seen Marilyn crack a big smile. She leaped out of her chair and embraced DiMaggio for what must have been a good five minutes. To be honest, Pat and I were delighted to see him because it took the onus of responsibility for her well-being out of our hands. DiMaggio spent the night with her in one of the bungalows on the property. He had some business to attend to on Saturday afternoon and disappeared for several hours, which was when Marilyn again became very despondent and testy. She started drinking and taking pills. She also renewed her threat to ‘get even’ with the Kennedys. I took this to mean she still planned to give a press conference. She quieted down only when DiMaggio returned. We spent Sunday morning, July 29, by the swimming pool. Sam Giancana came by with a few assistant hoods, if I can call them that. He knew DiMaggio, and the two of them chatted for a while. After they departed, Marilyn said something that in retrospect seemed rather prophetic. She talked about growing old and wasn’t sure she wanted to go through it. ‘What’s worse than an aging sex symbol?’ she asked. ‘Everything—breasts, belly, bottom—begins to sag.’ ”

That Sunday night, Joe DiMaggio accompanied Marilyn and the Lawfords back to Los Angeles before continuing on to San Francisco, still secure in his conviction that he and Marilyn would be remarried on August 8. “Marilyn never uttered a word to me concerning her intention to rewed Joe DiMaggio,” remarked Peter Lawford. “I heard about it after she died. I have to believe this was DiMaggio’s fantasy, not Marilyn’s. Her fantasy resided in the hope that Bobby Kennedy would change his mind, and
they
would walk down the aisle together. And if that didn’t happen, she intended to bring him down. To
preclude this eventuality, Pat and I were determined to stick as close to Marilyn as possible.”

On July 30 the Lawfords joined Marilyn and Pat Newcomb for dinner at La Scala. At another table, across the room, sat a New York publicist named Connie Stanville and Billy Travilla, Monroe’s former fashion designer. “Billy and I were good friends,” said Stanville. “We would have dinner together whenever I found myself on the coast. So we were dining at La Scala when I spotted this woman on the opposite side of the restaurant. She looked very thin and wore no makeup. ‘Isn’t that Marilyn Monroe?’ I asked. Billy gazed in the woman’s direction and said, ‘I think it is.’ When we finished our meal, we went over to her table. It was Marilyn, all right, but she didn’t look well. In fact, she looked stoned and glassy eyed. She stared at Billy but obviously didn’t recognize him. He asked her how she was doing, and she smiled but said nothing. After a minute or two, she asked, ‘Billy, is that you?’ We left the restaurant and headed for the street. Billy seemed hurt and upset. He couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him. They’d been very close at one point. In fact, they’d had a brief affair. He called me the next day and said he was going to write her a nasty letter. Marilyn died a few days later. Billy called me again. ‘Thank God I didn’t write that letter,’ he said. ‘Thank God!’ ”

•  •  •

In the late afternoon of August 1, Marilyn called Ralph Roberts and asked him to take her to Largo, a Los Angeles nightspot with a strip club on one side of the establishment and a gay bar on the other. “Largo was a bit sleazy,” said Roberts, “but it was unique in that it catered to both heterosexuals and gays. You had a lot of straight men watching the young female strippers on the club side, and a whole gay crowd—men and women—packed into an adjacent bar. The bar had a jukebox and a small dance floor. The men danced with men, the women with women. A soundproof wall separated the bar from the strip club.

“I picked up Marilyn at her house and learned that Jeanne Carmen would be joining us. Marilyn gave me a drink and poured herself one as well. We stepped outside into the garden, which was illuminated by a floodlight. She told me she’d been to a shop on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, where she’d acquired a few items of furniture and a wall hanging depicting Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. From her local nursery she’d also purchased three more citrus trees and a half dozen rose bushes that were supposed to be delivered on August 4. I found this a bit odd in light of the fact that she kept telling me she intended to leave Los Angeles and move back to New York.”

By this time, Jeanne Carmen had arrived, and the three of them set off for Largo. “En route,” continued Roberts, “Jeanne started talking about Robert Kennedy, which I didn’t think was a great idea. She said Bobby and Marilyn had frequently engaged in phone sex. ‘Can’t you just see the attorney general jerking his chain while Marilyn talked him through the sex act?’ To change the subject, I asked Marilyn about Joe DiMaggio. She said he and his brothers Vince and Dom had agreed to participate in an Old Timers’ charity baseball game in San Francisco on August 4 and that he’d be joining her again in Los Angeles a day later. To which Jeanne said, ‘Yeah, but he bugged your phone just like the rest of them.’ ‘If that’s true,’ responded Marilyn, ‘it’s because he wants to protect me. Listen, if it weren’t for Joe, I’d probably have killed myself years ago.’ ”

Those were Marilyn’s last coherent words that evening. When they reached Largo, Marilyn—in her usual disguise—headed straight for the bar, ordered three bottles of champagne, handed one each to Ralph and Jeanne, chugalugged the third herself, ordered another, grabbed Jeanne’s hand, and hit the dance floor.

“I spent the better part of the night,” said Roberts, “standing at the bar, declining offers to dance from a variety of men in leather and chains. When I drove Marilyn home at three in the morning, her eyes were vacant. She looked like a zombie. She was drunk and drugged. The sight of her in that woeful state, as she wobbled out of the car and
into her house, saddened and haunted me. After that night, we spoke on the phone once or twice, but I never saw Marilyn again.”

•  •  •

That summer, Marlon Brando and Marilyn communicated by telephone every few days. In his autobiography,
Songs My Mother Taught Me,
Brando claims they often spoke for hours. They frequently discussed the prospect of doing a film together. Another favorite subject was Lee Strasberg—both actors agreed he’d used them to further his own reputation. Brando and Monroe conversed for the last time in August, when she called to invite him over for dinner together with his great pal Wally Cox. Cox, a cast member of
Something’s Got to Give,
had established a separate friendship with Marilyn. Brando told her he and Wally had a previous engagement but that he would call her the following week to set something up. “Fine,” she said. He noted that she didn’t sound depressed. For that matter, she sounded healthier emotionally than she’d sounded in months.

She also called Dr. Leon Krohn, her gynecologist, and asked him over for dinner. He accepted, but after hanging up, she called him back and said she wanted to have him to dinner the same night as Marlon Brando—she wanted the two to meet. She told Krohn she’d call him back the following week.

That evening, she ate dinner by herself at La Scala. When she returned home, she called
Norman Rosten and Kurt Lamprecht, both in New York. She told each of them that she and Joe DiMaggio were probably going to marry again. “I wondered,” said Lamprecht, “if this was simply some passing romantic notion, or whether it would really come to pass. What was predictable about Marilyn Monroe is that she was totally unpredictable.”

Norman Rosten, with whom she spoke for more than thirty minutes, thought she sounded high on drugs. She prattled on and on, barely pausing for a breath, skipping from one subject to another, repeatedly returning to Joe DiMaggio and the topic of marriage. Monroe
and Rosten had once made a deal that if either one ever felt like jumping off a bridge, he or she would first notify the other. Rosten sensed no such urgency in Marilyn’s voice, only perhaps a bit of forced joy.