The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (18 page)

For the better part of the month, therefore, Marilyn and Kennedy were preoccupied with extremely different schedules and simply had no time to meet. Their lives were still taking extremely different paths.

Thanksgiving Day, Thursday 23 November 1961, is another date often put forward for a supposed meeting between the actress and the President. According to John Danoff, a technician engaged by Fred Otash, the so-called ‘Mr. O, The King of Hollywood private eyes’, an audio-tape of the couple having sex in one of the bedrooms at Peter Lawford’s beach house on that day was recorded. On that day, the President was nonetheless with his family, ice-skating and relaxing with his ailing father, Joseph, at his home in Hyannis Port. He would not return to Washington until 10.11am on Monday 27 November.

So when precisely did they encounter each other again? I can reveal that the actress’s first genuine, one-to-one encounter with the 35th President of the United States took place during the weekend of 23 and 24 September 1961, when she was invited by Peter and Pat Lawford to spend two days at the Hyannis Port home of JFK’s father, Joseph. Aside from John and his wife, also in attendance that day were Marilyn’s assistant, Pat Newcomb, her current date, Frank Sinatra, JFK’s brother, Edward ‘Teddy’ Kennedy, and Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa and his wife, Odile. Marilyn asked Broadway stylist Ernie Adler to create a new, Egyptian-style hairdo especially for the occasion.

Marilyn, Newcomb, Sinatra and the President’s sister, Pat, had arrived by air on Friday evening (22 September), landing at New Bedford, about 50 miles away, when fog closed the airports on Cape Cod. They almost failed to get there. Their flight out of Los Angeles the previous day had run into serious trouble and was forced to return. In cable-speak, Marilyn outlined the events in a touching Western Union telegram sent to Joe DiMaggio at his room at New York’s Lexington Hotel. ‘Dear dad darling airplane developed engine trouble plus all oil ran out of same plane so we had to turn back and land in LA. Leaving again on another plane at 5pm arrive New York at 1pm. When plane was in trouble I thought about two
things you and changing my will. Love you I think more than ever.’ She signed it with one of her aliases, ‘Mrs Norman’.

Marilyn arrived at New Bedford in her obligatory disguise and was even able to outwit the usually astute waiting news-hounds. In their report of Sinatra’s arrival, the
Gazette-Mail
newspaper unwittingly described her as one of his ‘unidentified guests’. The party were forced to drive to the Kennedy compound by taxi. Another followed close behind, ferrying their luggage.

On the first day, Saturday 23 September, at precisely 12.40pm, the entourage took a three-and-a-half-hour cruise aboard the presidential motor-cruiser,
Marlin
, which had been anchored off the beach at Cotuit, Massachusetts. The highlight was the First Lady’s dazzling display of water-skiing. The trip concluded at 4pm. Ever the party man, Sinatra had been followed on to the boat by 12 pieces of luggage, which included a case of wine and a dozen bottles of carefully wrapped champagne. One day later, the entourage once more assembled for a jaunt on
Marlin
, but, due to the President’s 5.40pm trip to New York City with Peter Lawford later that day, the boat journey and in fact the entire weekend came to an abrupt end at just 2.55pm. (The guests naturally headed home. On the morning of Tuesday 26 September, Marilyn and Frank flew on to New York.)

The actress’s second genuine encounter with the President occurred on Sunday 19 November 1961. However seedy some previous Marilyn scholars may have tried to make it, the event was nothing more than a quite innocent, relaxed dinner party for specially invited close friends of both JFK and the Lawfords. Marilyn was of course a very good friend of Peter Lawford and of the Kennedys’ sister, Pat, and the chances of a quick liaison between the President and Monroe during the get-together were very slim indeed. The luncheon kicked off at 12 midday and ended just over three hours later at precisely 3.08pm. For the record, JFK was in town for a meeting with the West German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, which was set to take place at 4pm the following day.

Monroe’s next meeting with Kennedy took place two weeks later, on Tuesday 5 December. The locale was New York City. JFK was in the area for an address at the National Football Foundation and Hall of Fame banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. After his 20-minute speech, he attended a black-tie party thrown at the Park Avenue apartment belonging to socialite Mrs Fifi Fell, the widow of a prominent investment banker, and it was during this short gathering that the President encountered Monroe for the third time. In an appearance orchestrated by Lawford, she had flown in from Los Angeles especially. Pretending to be the actor’s personal secretary, clutching a legal pad and pen and sporting a dark-red
wig, dowdy clothes and dark glasses, she was apparently secreted into the building through a side entrance. Set to arrive at 8pm, she in fact arrived at approximately 10.15pm. Her obligatory New York stylist, Kenneth Battelle, had been preparing her hair at her Manhattan apartment.

Interestingly, on Monday 12 July 1965, almost four years after the event, the evening featured in an FBI report which, according to the file, said there was a ‘sex party’ that night, borne out of a Mafia plot to smear the Kennedys, ‘in which a number of persons participated at different times’. Among those apparently taking part were ‘Robert F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Peter Lawford and Marilyn Monroe’. However, the file was incorrect. The crowd at the Park Avenue event was a specially invited one, so the chances of the actress slipping away unnoticed with Kennedy were slim indeed. Furthermore, time was of the essence. Although widely regarded as a sex addict and a Lothario, the President was also an extremely conscientious man and was well aware that he had to prepare himself for another important address. His speech to members of the National Association of Manufacturers was scheduled for midday the following day, so a late night was never in the offing.

When JFK did return to his room at the Carlyle Hotel later that night, where the ‘sex party’ was alleged to have taken place, he did so alone. The FBI’s long-serving director, J. Edgar Hoover, the most powerful and feared man in the United States, clearly possessed an overwhelming interest in the President’s bedside manner and kept an ever-watchful eye on him both before and long after the 1960 presidential election. Regrettably, he, or his employees, would embellish many of their reports.

The fact is that Marilyn was intimate with John F. Kennedy only once, during the evening of Saturday 24 March 1962, when both he and the screen actress were guests at singer Bing Crosby’s three-bedroom house in Palm Springs and the adjoining, remote conclave home belonging to songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen and writer Bill Morrow.

The houses, situated in a tiny community 100 miles southeast of Los Angeles, stood against a mountain in Palm Desert at a place called Silver Spur and were situated up a single dirt thoroughfare called Van Heusen Road. They had been a favourite of former US President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his men during his tenure. Surprisingly, details that the President was about to spend the night there were leaked to the American press on Wednesday 14 March. When asked why, JFK simply replied, ‘I’ve been in both houses and they are not big mansions by any means but comfortable homes were built for sun, solitude and rest.’

As is well known, Frank Sinatra had been expecting JFK and his Secret Service man to stay with him at his Palm Springs home. Indeed, in readiness for the visit, extra land was purchased and an additional guest house was
built, an ultra-modern phone service installed and a new concrete helicopter landing pad constructed. Sinatra then learnt, probably through a small piece in
Variety
magazine, that Kennedy would be spending the night nearby at Crosby’s home instead. Fury immediately engulfed him and the focal point of his rage was Peter Lawford, the man who had given his word that the President would be residing with
him
that evening.

Lawford soon learnt that his friend was angry and he started to panic. In a desperate attempt to appease his Rat Pack buddy, he explained the situation to the President who immediately agreed to call Sinatra personally. He informed Frank it was a security decision and asked him not to blame his brother-in-law.

Moments after finishing his conversation with JFK, Sinatra rang Bobby at his desk at the White House. His suspicions that the Attorney General was indeed behind the excuse were confirmed when Bobby told Frank unreservedly that his brother could not be seen residing in a building where the Chicago Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, had slept. Sinatra argued and pleaded his case, but Bobby was uninterested and hung up. Frank was incensed. He saw this as treachery. In a fit of fury, he picked up an axe and started to attack the prized items strewn around his house, many of which were purchased especially for the presidential visit. Once back at the Cal-Neva, Sinatra armed himself with a sledgehammer and ran up the lodge’s stairs to the club’s roof where he vented his anger on another of his prized possessions: the recently modified concrete helicopter landing pad, on which JFK’s helicopter was one day expected to alight.

Legend has it that Sinatra’s anger at the covering-up of the Attorney General’s vendetta shifted from material items to individual people – namely Lawford and JFK – and that he never dealt or spoke to either of them again. However, at least with regard to the President, that is essentially incorrect. As surviving documentation proves, in June that year JFK penned a letter to the singer thanking him for the ‘floral rocking chair that you had thoughtfully sent me for my birthday’. Furthermore, despite what other biographers have told us, communication between the pair actually continued for many months after the incident. In late August, Sinatra obsequiously called Pierre Salinger, the President’s press secretary, informing him that he wished to send him a copy of his recently completed movie,
The Manchurian Candidate
. Sinatra added that ‘a print of it will be available any hour, night or day, for viewing by the President’.

For Lawford, however, the repercussions from Sinatra’s rebuff were catastrophic. The actor soon found out that he had been excised from the Rat Pack, their movies and any subsequent nightclub shows in which Sinatra, Dean Martin or Joey Bishop were set to appear.

Marilyn uncharacteristically rose at eight o’clock on the morning of the
get-together at Crosby’s home. Despite her strictest instructions that no workmen be allowed into her Fifth Helena premises that day, her plan to specially coiffure her hair for her latest meeting with JFK was dashed by a visit from the plumber, Roy Newell, who had arrived early to install a new, much-needed, large water heater in the garage. When she was informed that there would be a delay with the hot water, Marilyn flipped and dashed over to Ralph Greenson’s home to wash her hair. Later that afternoon, following several hours of setting and resetting her tresses, and numerous changes of clothing, the actress was finally ready to meet the President of the United States once again. (It would be their fourth encounter.) She had never hidden her admiration for him. He was, after all, the most powerful man on the planet, a man of whom she was once quoted as saying, ‘Jack Kennedy is much better than the old uglies with no brains or beauty.’

Sporting her mandatory dark-coloured wig, she climbed into Peter Lawford’s car and was driven to Los Angeles International Airport where the President’s Convair plane was waiting to fly them the 109 miles to Palm Springs Airport. There a car lingered to whisk them to Bing Crosby’s secluded home in the desert.

On a rare day off from presidential duties, JFK arrived at Crosby’s estate at precisely 12.03 on that Saturday afternoon, directly after a 55-minute meeting with Eisenhower. Amazingly, aside from just one member of the Secret Service, J. Walter Coughlin, he turned up alone. (First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy was away in India and Pakistan at the time, on an ambassadorial holiday.) Besides the President and his aforementioned man, there were just four others in Crosby’s house that day: Peter Lawford, his wife Pat, comedian Bob Hope and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.

According to quotes from reliable sources, including Ralph Roberts, that afternoon the President and the actress took a slow stroll around the swimming pool. Later that evening, during an exclusive dinner party in a secluded cottage on the property, JFK, now sporting a casual black turtle-neck sweater, sat and listened while the actress told torrid tales of Hollywood. As she did so, he slid his hand under the table and moved it across Marilyn’s thigh. Encountering no resistance, he continued but stopped when he discovered she was not wearing any underwear. (She never wore any.) Immediately, he withdrew his hand. ‘He hadn’t counted on going
that
far,’ Marilyn later joked. Later that night, and with the actress making an alcohol-induced move for him, the couple moved into a quiet room in the cottage and the inevitable happened.

Reliable evidence that the President and Marilyn shared a bed that night came in an interview with Ralph Roberts, the actress’s long-time confidant and masseur. He revealed that Marilyn innocently, but no doubt proudly, called him to enquire about the soleus muscle. (A powerful
muscle, this is situated in the back part of the lower leg and runs from just below the knee to the heel. It is involved in standing and walking.) Roberts was well aware that she had been invited to Crosby’s home that weekend and that the President would also be attending. So when the call came late on Saturday night, he knew instinctively that she had been discussing with Kennedy his well-known muscle and back problems. The phone was then passed to Kennedy himself, who asked Roberts for some advice on how to ease the incessant pains in his body.

In 1993, Roberts announced that Marilyn had told him that this night was the
only
time in their association with each other that they had spent the night together. ‘Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them,’ he remarked. ‘It happened once and that was that.’ In another exchange, the actress was known to have announced, ‘He may be a good President, but he doesn’t grab me sexually.’