Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (48 page)

Bobby and Marilyn spent the night together. The following morning, Jeanne Carmen joined them for a hot breakfast of oatmeal and cheese omelets prepared by Eunice Murray. “I figured Mrs. Murray would report back to Dr. Greenson about Bobby, and all hell would
break loose,” said Carmen. “Then again, I don’t think Marilyn cared any longer what the sinister Dr. Greenson thought. As demonstrated by Marilyn’s reaction when he told her not to see Ralph Roberts, it seemed pretty evident he’d lost his hold over her. She saw him at this time primarily as an enabler, a supplier of drugs. Dr. Hyman Engelberg filled a similar role.

“Years after Marilyn’s death, I heard a rumor that she and Engelberg might have been romantically involved, which didn’t surprise me. She saw a great deal of him that summer. He gave her a series of what Marilyn claimed were multivitamin injections, though, frankly, I never bought that explanation. I believe he was giving her liquid Nembutal and Amytal intermingled with other substances. He reminded me of President Kennedy’s physician, Dr. Max Jacobson—Dr. Feelgood—who traveled everywhere with Kennedy and saw him regularly in the White House. Jacobson injected JFK with meta-amphetamines and porcupine piss, or something along that order. Engelberg had become Marilyn’s Dr. Feelgood. Dr. Lee Siegel, Fox’s Dr. Feelgood, supplemented Engelberg’s injections by giving Marilyn shots of his own.”

After breakfast, as Jeanne Carmen remembered it, an argument broke out between Bobby and Marilyn, when he came across a journal she’d been keeping, which contained notes on conversations she’d had with JFK and him. “It wasn’t the so-called little red diary that supposedly disappeared after Marilyn’s death,” said Carmen. “In fact, there was no little red diary. I’d been to Marilyn’s house dozens and dozens of times and never saw anything that even remotely resembled a little red diary. In 1963, with the press all abuzz about this supposed diary of Marilyn’s, I asked Ralph Roberts if he’d ever come across such an item. Nobody was closer to Monroe than Roberts. He assured me he’d seen lots of journals and notebooks in her possession but never a little red diary. And no single notebook was devoted only to the Kennedys. Her notebooks were filled with notations of all sorts: poems, aphorisms, fragmented thoughts, bits of conversation, lists of all kinds. Bobby saw one or two paragraphs on his brother and assumed the worst. He
grabbed the notebook and threw it on the floor. ‘Get rid of this!’ he shouted. I assume this was the moment Bobby started to realize just how dangerous the relationship might really be for him and his career.”

Despite Bobby’s sudden awareness that he was susceptible to the possibility of a scandal were he to be discovered in a compromising relationship with Marilyn (or anyone else, for that matter), he seemed determined to continue the affair, even to the extent that he was willing to falsify his logbook schedule in order to spend time with the movie star. His schedule for July 19, for example, has him back in Washington (and then Hyannis Port), whereas he actually spent the afternoon driving around Malibu with Marilyn and Jeanne Carmen.

“We put Marilyn in a black wig and baseball cap,” said Carmen. “She had a fake goatee that belonged to one of her actor friends, so we put it on Bobby and gave him a baseball cap as well. I don’t know how, but he somehow got rid of his Secret Service detail, after which we clambered into the Cadillac and drove to a nude beach, past Pepperdine [University]. Once there, we walked by the water. We kept our clothes on. Nobody recognized RFK or Marilyn. Later we drove back to Marilyn’s house. I left, and the two of them spent a few more hours together before Bobby returned to Peter and Pat Lawford’s place.”

One of the oddities of the RFK-MM fling was that while neither the press nor the public at large seemed aware of it, the Secret Service, the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, the FBI and even the CIA knew practically everything. The FBI reports of that period were rampant with references to Marilyn’s involvement with both Kennedys. At least some of the information on the two affairs was developed by way of multiple taps on Monroe’s phone. Several of the involved agencies also seem to have bugged Marilyn’s Brentwood home as well as Peter Lawford’s. The FBI reportedly used a surveillance operations expert Bernie Spindel to do its dirty work, aided by a former private investigator named Fred Otash. As a precaution against anyone breaking into her house to plant a hidden mic, Marilyn kept changing the locks on her doors. Other than Eunice Murray, the only person with keys to the
residence was Joe DiMaggio. One might wonder what would have become of Robert Kennedy had DiMaggio paid a surprise visit and found the attorney general in bed with the actress.

One of the more explicit FBI reports to wind up in J. Edgar Hoover’s hands was filed in October 1964, more than two years after Monroe’s death. The report, pertaining to an undated party that took place at Peter Lawford’s house, read as follows: “During the period of time that Robert Kennedy was having his sex affair with Marilyn Monroe, on one occasion a sex party was conducted at which several other persons were present. A tape recording was secretly made and is in the possession of a Los Angeles private detective agency. A certified copy of the recording has been made. All voices on the tape, including Kennedy’s and Monroe’s, are identifiable.”

Others who were well aware of Bobby’s fling with Monroe included select members of President Kennedy’s White House staff. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, a speechwriter for JFK, later wrote what has come to be regarded as Robert F. Kennedy’s definitive biography. When asked why the biography failed to mention RFK’s affair with Monroe, Schlesinger pointed out that as a loyal friend to the family, he didn’t wish to cause more anguish than they’d already endured. “That’s not to say that it didn’t happen,” Schlesinger added. “It did happen. Bobby was human. He enjoyed a stiff drink now and then, and he liked attractive women. He indulged that side of his personality primarily when he traveled—and in his position as attorney general, he had to travel a good deal.”

•  •  •

The evening of July 21, Joe DiMaggio drove Marilyn home from Cedars of Lebanon after yet another surgical procedure, performed by Dr. Leon Krohn, to alleviate some of the symptoms linked to her chronic endometriosis. Following the procedure, DiMaggio asked the physician if Marilyn could still have children. “It’s possible,” responded Krohn, “but not probable.”

For better or worse, children or no children, Joe was determined to do whatever it took to convince Marilyn to commit to a mutually convenient wedding date. Before returning to the East Coast to complete his obligation to Monette, he once again broached the subject of marriage. Less enthusiastic than she’d been in their previous discussion but probably not eager to argue with Joe, Marilyn suggested he pick the time and place. He told Marilyn he wanted to marry her at Los Angeles city hall on August 8. He ordered food and champagne for a small reception to be held at Marilyn’s house following the ceremony. Through his New York travel agent, he reserved two round-trip, first-class airplane tickets from Los Angeles to Rome. Besides Rome, they would honeymoon in Venice, Florence, and Sicily. Joe had always wanted to take Marilyn to Italy and show her the region of his parents’ birth—and now he finally could.

That, at any rate, might have been one ending to the saga. There were other possibilities as well. But the ending that finally did evolve may well have been inevitable and most probably had been set in motion long before Marilyn first met Joe DiMaggio in mid-March 1952. The seeds of her slowly developing self-destruction had originated in a traumatic and loveless childhood marked most profoundly by a schizophrenic mother, an endless stream of indifferent foster families, a prisonlike orphanage, and the uncertainty associated with a pattern of continuing and constant abandonment on the part of nearly everyone she’d ever known and cared about. Her heightened sense of abandonment would once again come back to haunt her. Following her latest rendezvous with Bobby Kennedy, it became clear to the actress that something was terribly wrong.

That summer, Pierre Salinger saw the attorney general at the Kennedy compound in Massachusetts. “After a family dinner,” said Salinger, “Bobby invited me into his study for coffee, cognac, and an illegally obtained Cuban cigar. He knew I was familiar with the entire Marilyn Monroe mess, starting with Jack, and he wanted my advice. He’d recently seen her and discovered a notebook in her house with
some scribblings in it on the Kennedys. And in addition, she was calling him all the time, at all hours of the day and night. He’d thought it over, and he realized he’d perhaps made a mistake, gone too far. Originally, he’d wanted to help her because of Jack, but now he wanted to bow out—gracefully, if possible.”

Salinger recommended that for starters Bobby would do well to change his private telephone number.

“I’ve already done that,” said RFK.

“Well, then, why not just call her up, and tell her the truth?”

“Why don’t you call her for me?” said Kennedy.

“If you’re not going to call her yourself,” said Salinger, “then your best bet has to be Peter Lawford. He and Marilyn are great pals. He’s known her for years. He’ll know what to say.”

It therefore fell on Peter Lawford, as it so often did, to clean up the mess left behind by one or another of the Kennedy brothers. “Pat invited Marilyn over for dinner,” Lawford recalled. “We plied her with booze to make it easier on everyone. We blamed the breakup on Ethel. We told Marilyn she knew about the affair, which she probably did, and that she’d threatened to divorce Bobby. ‘But then that’s perfect,’ Marilyn interjected. ‘Bobby promised he’d divorce Ethel and marry me. So it works out perfectly.’ I pointed out that Bobby was first and foremost a politician. After Jack, the presidential torch would be passed to Bobby, and a divorce would be the kiss of death. He’d never win the election. Marilyn blew up. ‘He asked me to marry him and have his children,’ she persisted. ‘If he and Jack think they can pass me around like a football and then jilt me, they’re sadly mistaken. I’m not one of those broads they bring into the White House for their daily swimming pool orgies.’ The more she drank, the angrier she became. ‘The Kennedys use you, and when they’re done, they dispose of you like so much rubbish. Your former buddy Francis Sinatra warned me about them, but I didn’t listen. He was right. And if the Kennedys think I’m going away, they’re wrong.’ ”

Because Marilyn had put away so much alcohol, Peter thought it
would be better for her to spend the night. He and Pat helped her into the guest bedroom. Peter woke up very early the next morning and found their guest in one of Pat’s robes perched on the balcony staring into the pool below. “Are you all right?” Lawford asked her. She was crying. He led her into the house and prepared breakfast, and then he and Pat consoled her for hours. She was, as Lawford noted, “completely down on herself, talked about how ugly she felt, how worthless, how used and abused.” Then she reiterated what she’d said the night before. She wasn’t going away. She wasn’t going to surrender. And then she said something that alarmed Peter.

Marilyn had decided to hold a press conference. She would tell the nation all about Jack and Bobby Kennedy—their extramarital affairs, their empty promises, and the way they used people and then discarded them. She had reams of documentation to support her charges, from correspondence to tape recordings. Jean Kennedy Smith had written to her, acknowledging the affair with her brother Bobby. She had all sorts of notes and letters on the same subject from Peter’s wife. And then she had tapes of herself with the attorney general that would prove more than a little embarrassing, were they to be played. When Peter warned her that such a scandal could possibly bring down the government and hurt the country, Marilyn told him it could only help the country to know what its leaders were up to in their spare time.

“They’re not going to fuck with me!” she vowed.

•  •  •

Back in Brentwood, Marilyn’s emotional tirade ran the gamut from hysterical weeping to uncontrollable rage. Like a child suffering a tantrum, she threw breakable objects against a wall—mirrors, plates, drinking glasses, anything she could lay her hands on. She spent hours spewing venom on the recording device she used for her free-association tapes for Dr. Greenson. Unable to sleep, she contacted Dr. Margaret Hohenberg, her former psychiatrist, currently residing in Haifa, Israel. They’d spoken several times earlier in the summer. In addition to the
Kennedys, Marilyn complained to Hohenberg about Dr. Greenson. He’d tried to control her, cut her off from everyone she knew. He was a possessive, tyrannical figure, who could succeed as a therapist only in a place like Hollywood. She’d barely finished talking to Dr. Hohenberg when the phone rang. It was Milton Greene, whom she hadn’t heard from in years. “I heard you’re going through some difficult times,” he said. “Do you want me to come out there?” “Yeah,” responded Marilyn. “I can only stay a few days,” said Greene, “because I have a photo assignment in Paris.” It was all arranged, but then Marilyn called him back. “Never mind, I’m okay for the moment,” she said. “You go to Paris and then fly to LA. We’ll be able to spend more time together.” She concluded the conversation by telling her former business partner that she planned on moving back to New York. “I’m sick of Hollywood, and Hollywood’s sick of me,” she said.

Surprisingly, Monroe now turned to Mickey Song, the hairstylist who’d been present at Madison Square Garden the evening of President Kennedy’s birthday gala. “I felt happy to hear from Marilyn, although I wasn’t quite sure what she wanted,” said Song. “She asked me over for a drink, and I thought maybe she wanted me to become her full-time hairstylist. Jazz musician Hank Jones happened to be visiting me, so I asked Marilyn if he could come as well. She didn’t mind. She knew him because he’d accompanied her on the piano when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to JFK. So we drove to her house and found her in a state of despair.”

Monroe wanted to talk about the Kennedys. As a member of their West Coast entourage, Song presumably knew where most of the bodies were buried. Marilyn asked for the names of other Hollywood actresses with whom the Kennedy brothers had been romantically linked.