The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (16 page)

Kennedy was apparently so pleased she had attended the party that, later that evening, he excitedly phoned his father Joseph to tell him the news. Clearly an admirer of the Kennedy brothers, Monroe with equal excitement recalled that night’s events to friends for several days afterwards. ‘He was very nice,’ she told her friend Norman Rosten, ‘sort of boyish and likeable. Of course, he kept looking down my dress. But I’m used to that. I thought he was going to compliment me, but he asked me while dancing, who I thought was the most handsomest man in the room. I mean, how was I going to answer that? I said he was. Well, in a way, he
was
!’ In a conversation with Pat Newcomb, who had accompanied her that night, Marilyn remarked that the Attorney General ‘had such a wonderful sense of humour’. She reiterated this opinion the following day in a typed letter to her former father-in-law, Isidore Miller, in which she also gushingly described Bobby as being ‘rather mature and brilliant for his thirty-six years’.

Unsurprisingly, the sight of the Hollywood star and the Attorney General engaged in deep, secretive conversations and tied up in energetic dance routines soon made way for absurd conjecture and idle gossip about the pair. Many would cite the party as the start of their affair. Guthman was having none of it, vehemently declaring, ‘There was not even the
faintest
overtone of a romantic interest on his side or hers.’ During an interview for US TV show
Inside Edition
, he dismissed the allegations further by remarking, ‘I travelled with Bobby, day and night for five years and I never saw him pay attention to
anyone
but his wife.’

Following Bobby’s phone call to his father, however, news of a Kennedy brother twisting the night away with one of the world’s most famous movie stars naturally spread like wildfire throughout the family. The excitement prompted his sister, Jean, to elatedly put pen to paper on the matter. Written on the Kennedys’ Palm Beach house stationery, her humorous, sardonic letter to the actress read in part: ‘Dear Marilyn, I understand that you and Bobby are the hot item! We all think that he should bring you with him when he comes back East.’

Three decades on, in May 1994, the letter was rediscovered and (incorrectly advertised as originating from 1961) put up for sale as part of a private collection of Marilyn’s documents. But, unfortunately, it was misinterpreted and served only to give credence to the suggestion that Bobby and the actress were romantically involved. At the time of the sale, auctioneer Bill Miller, chairman of Odyssey Auctions, enthusiastically remarked to the press, ‘This letter really does put an end to decades of speculation as to whether a relationship [between Monroe and Kennedy] existed or not.’ However, an aide of Jean Kennedy Smith (who by then was US Ambassador to Ireland) insisted otherwise. When informed of Miller’s conclusion, the aide retorted, ‘This is
ridiculous
,’ before describing the letter as a ‘perfect example of Ambassador Smith’s tongue-in-cheek humour. This was friendly banter that demonstrates exactly the opposite of verification.’

The elucidation was spot on. Despite Bill Miller’s or anyone else’s attempts to show otherwise over the ensuing years, evidence produced in substantiation of an intense, long-term love affair between Marilyn and the Attorney General would always prove to be unfounded. While he obviously noticed every attractive woman who came his way, a relationship
with any female other than his wife Ethel would have been wildly out of keeping with his nature. ‘Bobby had a Calvinistic moral sense,’ Andrew Glass, the Washington-based news reporter and close friend of Kennedy, once remarked. ‘He really believed in absolute right and wrong and this strict code guided his moral life.’

Although it is safe to say that the Attorney General did grow closer to Marilyn than his brother, John, extensive research on my part involving their personal schedules proves that Bobby did not have a fully fledged affair with Marilyn. Moreover, details of Marilyn’s supposed encounters with Bobby’s charismatic brother, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, were subject to a similar level of gossip and misrepresentation.

For example, three years after the sale of Jean Kennedy Smith’s letter, in 1997, the world’s media was in a high state of excitement over a curious cache of recently discovered documents supposedly pertaining to the former President. Going by the apt title of ‘The JFK Papers’, the assortment consisted of over 700 handwritten letters, notes and index cards which, if proved to be authentic, would provide the strongest evidence yet of his links to the Mafia, organised crime, the Chicago gangster, Sam Giancana and, importantly, Marilyn Monroe.

It was claimed by 47-year-old Lawrence ‘Lex’ Cusack that he had found the documents in 1985 while cleaning out the files belonging to his recently deceased father, the prominent New York lawyer, Lawrence (Larry) X. Cusack. (Between 1959 and November 1963, Cusack apparently privately counselled JFK on matters of the utmost sensitivity. Interestingly, Marilyn’s mother, Gladys Baker, had also been one of Cusack’s clients; the lawyer had supposedly handled her affairs from 1980 until her death in 1984.)

Interest in Cusack’s collection was naturally huge. Although the majority of the papers in the collection focused on routine matters such as JFK’s business and tax, the highlight of the assortment was a neatly typed agreement between him and Marilyn Monroe, in which, in an attempt to buy her silence over their affair and knowledge of his dealings with the underworld, he agreed to pay $600,000 into a trust fund for her mother. (The four payments by instalment, ranging from $100,000 to $250,000, allegedly started on Saturday 1 October 1960 and concluded exactly one year later, on Sunday 1 October 1961.) A handwritten letter from the actress relating to this matter was also found among the papers. It read, ‘Dear Jack, I hope you understand. I only want to make sure that my mother is taken care of. This is difficult for me. I’m afraid she will not be cared for. I will be silent on this secret of yours about Sam G. and the others. Thanks M Monroe.’

Prior to the public announcement of ‘The JFK Papers’, Cusack’s collection was put up for sale and soon sold for over $6 million to a party of 140 investors. However, hastened by ABC TV’s quite damning verdict on the collection during its
20/20
programme (aired on Thursday 25 September), doubts soon grew about the papers’ authenticity. Cusack naturally fought back, insisting they were genuine. But well-known document experts and Kennedy specialists were equally assertive, claiming they were not.

In response to the ABC programme, one day later, Cusack and his wife Jennifer filed a $100 million libel lawsuit against the station and other people in the news media, accusing them of 16 civil violations including fraud, libel, breach of contract and ‘infliction of emotional stress’. In an attempt to prove the doubters wrong, Cusack then took his collection to rival network, CBS. It was a bad move. A special feature about the papers was aired by the station during its
60 Minutes
television show on Sunday 23 November. The true provenance of the documents became clear when, during the programme, respected handwriting expert Dr Duayne Dillon, a man recommended by the FBI, unreservedly declared that JFK’s notes in the collection were forged. So too were Marilyn’s tear-stained letters begging him not to cut off all contact with her.

The floodgates opened and further inaccuracies about the collection soon began to emerge. First, one of the letters in the collection had been typed on a model of typewriter not manufactured until 1971, nine years after Marilyn’s death. Secondly, one of the papers (dated 1962) possessed the newer, general system American ZIP code, a method not implemented by the USPOD (United States Post Office Department) until Monday 1 July 1963, and thirdly, the bank account allegedly set up to pay Marilyn off simply did not exist. On Monday 16 March 1998, Cusack was charged with falsifying documents and released on bail. On Friday 17 September 1999, following another trial and three months of incarceration, he was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to a further ten years, three months in prison. He was also ordered to pay $7 million in compensation to the manuscripts’ buyers.

Folklore has given us numerous other examples of supposed meetings between Monroe and John F. Kennedy. As I will explain, most of these prove on close examination to be logistically impossible. However, I can reveal that JFK’s very first encounter with Marilyn had actually taken place on Tuesday 15 May 1951, at a party in Beverly Hills at the home of legendary designer and decorator Elsie de Wolfe and her husband, diplomat Sir Charles Mendl. As was her tradition, Elsie would invite to dinner a mix of 16 top-rated Hollywood stars and emerging politicians; once the meal had been consumed, they would be joined by some of
Tinseltown’s budding, starry-eyed hopefuls. With her rise to film prominence, as Rose Loomis in the 1953 film
Niagara
, still some 20 months away, Marilyn was one of the latter.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer actress Arlene Dahl, a guest at the party that night, remembered she was sitting at the piano with the musician Cole Porter, singing ‘You’re The Top’, when suddenly the door opened and, in her own words, ‘in walked this blonde Venus in a white satin gown that was just fabulous. It hugged all her curves.’ In a 2002 interview for CNN’s
Larry King Live
show, she recalled that the actress ‘shimmered over to a group of gentlemen who were standing in the corner talking about Walt Whitman, the poet, and Marilyn, anxious to get into the conversation, heard Whitman and said, “Oh, I just love his chocolates.”’ (She was inadvertently thinking about Whitman’s, one of America’s largest and oldest chocolate manufacturers.) Congressman John Kennedy was standing near Dahl when Marilyn made her memorable entrance. ‘He couldn’t take his eyes off her,’ she recalled. ‘No man in the room could.’ Just 12 days prior to this encounter, at a dinner party hosted by their mutual friends Charles and Martha Buck Bartlett at their home in Georgetown, Washington DC on Thursday 3 May, Kennedy had met his future wife, the elegant 24-year-old
Washington Times-Herald
photographer Jacqueline Bouvier.

Monroe’s first encounter with the President-to-be was brief. There would, in fact, be no further meetings between them for another ten years. That did not, however, prevent various people, usually individuals who had either never met the actress or the President or could tell you only what they had been told had happened, from insisting that the pair met several times during the intervening period.

It is said, for instance, that on Monday 1 February 1960, the couple spent a night together at Lake Tahoe’s Cal-Neva Lodge. The story goes that Kennedy visited after stopping at Squaw Valley, the site of that year’s 8th Winter Olympics, which were set to start in just 17 days’ time. In fact, he did visit Nevada that day, but he certainly did
not
have time to visit or reside at the lodge. Following a talk to Nevada labour leaders in Reno and an address to the joint session of the Legislature that morning, he was quickly hustled on to a plane destined for San Francisco. His time in Nevada was just a few short hours. Furthermore, it was impossible that Marilyn was there to greet him since she was in Hollywood at the time, rehearsing and shooting scenes for
Let’s Make Love
(shooting of which had begun on Monday 18 January). There is nothing else on record at Boston’s JFK Presidential Library that identifies Kennedy, officially or unofficially, visiting Lake Tahoe or Nevada at any time before his assassination in Dallas, Texas on Friday 22 November 1963.

In fact, John F. Kennedy did not pay a single visit to the Cal-Neva Lodge. Marilyn’s occasional getaways there were more to do with her intermittent relationship with Frank Sinatra, the future co-owner of the establishment, than with Kennedy.

Some historians have also suggested that Monroe was having a fleeting affair with Kennedy in 1960 at the time he was campaigning in the Los Angeles area, and especially at the time of his historic Democratic Presidential nomination on Wednesday 13 July. We are reliably informed that she was introduced to the President-elect backstage at the venue by Peter Lawford. Other well-known Hollywood celebrities, such as Shelley Winters, Sammy Davis Jr, Shirley MacLaine, Danny Kaye and Edward G. Robinson,
were
present that evening (as proven in news film shot that night), but Marilyn was
not
. I can reveal that, on the night that JFK was at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena celebrating his appointment, the actress was in New York City undergoing make-up tests and hair restyling (by her personal beauty expert, George Masters) for her latest movie,
The Misfits
. Just prior to that, on Thursday 7 July, she was spotted at Idlewild Airport, in her Cadillac, sharing some caviar and a glass of Dom Perignon champagne with Yves Montand, her co-star in
Let’s Make Love
. (‘She bought a bottle of chilled champagne and we sat in the car and drank it and talked,’ the actor disclosed in 1961. ‘The reporters made it look like an affair. How ridiculous . . . The matter at the airport has been
so
misunderstood.’)

Marilyn remained in the Big Apple until Monday 18 July, and after several delays, most notably at Los Angeles International Airport, finally arrived in Nevada at Reno Municipal Airport in a United Airlines airplane during the afternoon of Wednesday 20 July. (Her plane touched down at 2.31 pm. She disembarked at precisely 3.16 pm.) She was there to begin filming
The Misfits
, the shooting of which had already been in progress for two days. Marilyn was met at the airport by her husband, Arthur Miller, and a welcoming committee comprising hotelier Charles Mapes (parts of the movie were shot in his establishment), Mrs Grant Sawyer, the wife of Nevada’s governor, and her daughter, Gail, who handed the actress a bouquet of flowers. The pleasantries continued when Marilyn was presented with a key to the City of Reno by Councilman Charles Cowen. Afterwards a motorcade escorted her to downtown Reno, where she posed for pictures under the city’s world-famous arch, ‘The Biggest Little City In The World’.