Killing Lincoln/Killing Kennedy (46 page)

Finally, Lawford breaks the news by phone. Sinatra listens, but only for as long as it takes to realize that he is being cast out of the president’s circle of friends. The singer slams down the receiver and hurls the phone to the floor. “Do you want to know where he’s staying?” Sinatra screams to his valet. “Bing Crosby’s house. That’s where. And he’s a Republican!”

Sinatra will never forget this slight. He calls Bobby Kennedy every name in the book, then phones Lawford back and cuts him off from
his
inner circle. He races around his house and tears Kennedy photos from the walls, then finds a sledgehammer and storms outside to single-handedly destroy the concrete helipad.

*   *   *

John Kennedy stands just outside a back door watching the crowd drifting in and out of Bing Crosby’s home. Secret Service agents hover at the edges of the lawn and in the shadows of the palm trees and shrubbery ringing the grounds. Marilyn Monroe is already by the president’s side. There is an intimacy in their movements that leaves no doubt they will be sleeping together tonight.

Monroe has been drinking. A lot. Or so it appears.

The thirty-five-year-old movie star is not a stupid woman, although she often plays that role both on- and offscreen. “I thought you were dumb,” her character in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
is told. “I can be smart when it’s important,” she replies, “but most men don’t like it.”

It is a line that Norma Jean Baker herself suggested. After spending much of her youth in foster homes, she began modeling in her teens and landed a movie contract in 1946, changing her name to Marilyn Monroe. Born a brunette, she dyed her hair and began cultivating the “dumb blonde” persona that became her calling card. Her career path led her to a number of high-profile performances in movies such as
How to Marry a Millionaire
,
The Seven Year Itch
, and
Some Like It Hot
. She has been married and divorced three times, and has developed a reputation for abusing alcohol and prescription drugs. Substance abuse is slowly destroying her career. But she is still voluptuous, vivacious, and clever enough in her lucid moments that her true intelligence reveals itself.

Kennedy first met Monroe at a dinner party in the 1950s. Their relationship ramped up on July 15, 1960, the night he accepted the Democratic nomination for president. The two flirted that night, much to the dismay of Kennedy’s staff, who were immediately concerned the pair would be caught having an affair during the campaign. Patricia Kennedy Lawford went so far as to pull Marilyn aside and warn her not to have sex with her brother.

But that was almost two years ago—and ironically, it was Patricia who invited Marilyn and JFK to a dinner party at her New York home in late February 1962. Marilyn marched in late, as was her custom. She’d been drinking sherry. Her dress was a small beads-and-sequins affair. “It was the tightest goddam dress I ever saw on a woman,” the legendary show business manager Milt Ebbins would later remember of Monroe’s pre-party preparations—specifically of pulling the dress on over Monroe’s head: “We couldn’t get it past her hips. Of course, typical of Marilyn, she wasn’t wearing any underwear either. So there I was, on my knees in front of her … pulling down this dress with all my might, trying to get it [down] past her big ass.”

Ebbins was eventually successful with the dress, and JFK immediately gravitated to Monroe’s side as she sashayed into the party. A photographer attempted to take their picture, but the president quickly turned his back so they wouldn’t be photographed together. For good measure, the Secret Service demanded the film.

Before the night was over, JFK had casually invited Marilyn to meet him in Palm Springs on March 24. To close the deal, he confided that “Jackie won’t be there.”

*   *   *

Now Marilyn Monroe wears a loose robe as the party swirls at the Crosby estate. She is “calm and relaxed,” in the opinion of one partygoer.

The president is entranced by her wit and intellect and would be thrilled to add such a famous sex symbol to his list of conquests. He also finds her nurturing. After Kennedy complains of his chronic back pain, Monroe phones her friend Ralph Roberts, an actor and masseur knowledgeable about back issues. When she puts Kennedy on the phone, Roberts doesn’t know it’s the president he’s talking to, but he can’t help but think that the man on the other end sounds just like John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Roberts offers a quick diagnosis and hangs up after a few minutes, thinking to himself that Marilyn is once again up to no good.

In some ways, she can’t help herself. Monroe has been married to two very famous and powerful men—baseball player Joe DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller—but JFK eclipses them by far. “Marilyn Monroe is a soldier,” she later tells her therapist, speaking in the third person. “Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey the commander-in-chief. He says do that, you do it.” The attorney general has caught her attention, as well. “It’s like the Navy—the president is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer,” she will tell her therapist. “Bobby would do anything for his country, and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”

Yet despite her passion and beauty, Marilyn Monroe is damaged goods. Her three marriages aren’t socially acceptable in the Kennedys’ Catholic world, nor is her affair with Frank Sinatra. JFK knows that she broke up Arthur Miller’s previous marriage so that she could marry the playwright. More ominously, the president suspects that Monroe has visions of moving into the White House sometime soon. He has even made a point of telling her that she’s “not First Lady material.”

No, Marilyn is not going to replace Jackie, no matter what the movie star might believe during the two nights she spends with the president in Palm Springs. Marilyn gives JFK a chrome Ronson Adonis cigarette lighter as a gift to remind him of their special time together, although the president certainly needs no reminder of his time with the world’s leading sex symbol.

*   *   *

News of the Kennedy-Monroe liaison would be about as explosive as it gets. The question lingering in the minds of Kennedy’s Secret Service detail and the president’s close-knit Irish Mafia cronies is why the president continues to take such risks. Some believe it’s a carryover from the old days of the Kennedy heritage in Ireland, where the leader of a clan commonly had free rein to sleep with women outside of marriage. Until his recent stroke, the president’s father, Joseph Kennedy, behaved in just such a manner.

In addition, some believe that John Kennedy’s personal tragedies—the death of his brother and of his infant child, and his own brushes with death—have given him a fatalistic attitude. All the sex is his carpe diem way of living life to the utmost.

And then there is the issue of his chronic physical pain. John Kennedy’s appearance may be robust, but he suffers from a nervous stomach, back pain, and Addison’s disease. His physical activity is limited to walking, sailing, and the occasional nine holes of golf. He can barely ride a horse. And the Kennedy family’s legendary games of touch football don’t include him as much as they used to.

Sex is the president’s physical release of choice. He’s an adrenaline junkie, and his psyche requires illicit excitement. As he told a family friend, “The chase is more fun than the kill.”

*   *   *

“Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”

Two months after their weekend in Palm Springs, Marilyn Monroe stands before a dazzled crowd in New York’s Madison Square Garden, singing the traditional birthday song in the most salacious manner possible. Her skintight dress leaves little to the imagination, both front and back, even as her breathless words inspire a thousand questions. Marilyn, still stung by JFK’s blunt assessment that she is not First Lady material, is desperately trying to rekindle the Palm Springs nights of romance.

“Happy Birthday to you,” she purrs into the microphone.

The date is May 19, 1962, ten days before JFK’s actual birthday. Jackie, once again, is not in attendance, but she knows all about Marilyn. She’s not so much hurt as disgusted, correctly sensing that the president is taking advantage of an emotionally troubled woman who is easy prey for such a powerful man.

The president never comes in contact with the seemingly tipsy Marilyn as he climbs to the lectern at Madison Square Garden. But he does favor her with a lupine gaze that one journalist will later remember as “quite a sight to behold, and if I ever saw an appreciation of feminine beauty in the eyes of a man, it was in John F. Kennedy’s at that moment.”

Marilyn Monroe has become so obsessed with JFK that she calls the White House constantly, but her singing performance falls on deaf ears. The president has moved on, putting as much distance between himself and Marilyn as he did between himself and Frank Sinatra.

“Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” Marilyn Monroe serenaded JFK at his birthday gala in 1962.
(Getty Images)

Like Sinatra, Marilyn is a snare that could easily entangle Kennedy and bring down his presidency. This is where the pragmatist in JFK returns, overriding his libido. He is willing to take great personal risks to satisfy his sexual needs, but he does not gamble when it comes to remaining in power. Better to have Monroe and Sinatra and the Mafia as enemies whom he can view from a wary distance, rather than as friends who could drag him down.

At the lectern before the party faithful in New York City, the president adopts the chaste mien of an altar boy. “I can now retire from politics after having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet and wholesome way,” the president speaks into the microphone, his wry delivery suggesting that he is above such sexual shenanigans.

But the president hasn’t given up on extramarital affairs. He is just beginning a new long-term relationship with a nineteen-year-old virgin whom he deflowers on Jackie’s bed.

*   *   *

The presidency is a daunting and lonely job. Moments like the Madison Square Garden party offer a welcome respite from the pressure. JFK basks in the birthday appreciation, which comes in the midst of a campaign rally that raises more than $1 million for the Democratic Party.

The president has no way of knowing that he will celebrate this special day just one more time.

*   *   *

In the faraway Soviet city of Minsk, Lee Harvey Oswald has finally cleared the tangle of red tape that has prevented him from returning home.

The plan now is for him, Marina, and five-week-old June Lee to take the train to the American embassy in Moscow to pick up their travel documents.

On May 18, Oswald is discharged from his job at the Gorizont (Horizon) Electronics Factory. Few are sad to see him go. The plant director thinks Oswald is careless and oversensitive and lacks initiative. Even Marina thinks her new husband is lazy and knows he resents taking orders.

The Oswalds arrive in Moscow on May 24, 1962, the same day that navy test pilot Scott Carpenter becomes the second American astronaut to orbit the earth. President Kennedy is quick to commend Carpenter for his courage and skill, even as he grapples with Congress over the issue of affordable nationwide health care.

On June 1 the Oswalds board a train from Moscow to Holland. Lee Harvey carries a promissory note from the U.S. embassy for $435.71 to help start his life anew in America. On June 2, as Secretary of the Navy John Connally wins a runoff to become the Democratic nominee for governor of Texas, the Oswalds’ train crosses the Soviet border at Brest. Two days later they board the SS
Maasdam
, bound for America, where they stay belowdecks most of the journey. Oswald is ashamed of Marina’s cheap dresses and doesn’t want her to be seen in public. He passes the time in their small cabin writing rants about his growing disillusionment with governmental power.

Marina and Lee Harvey Oswald with their daughter, June Lee, in 1962.
(Getty Images)

The
Maasdam
docks in Hoboken, New Jersey—Frank Sinatra’s hometown—on June 13, 1962. The Oswalds pass through customs without incident and take a small room at New York City’s Times Square Hotel. The plan is to stay there until they can afford to fly to Texas, where Oswald’s brother Robert lives. There, Oswald can finally settle down and find work.