Marilyn Monroe: The Biography (82 page)

The second encounter occurred during February 1962, when Marilyn was again invited to a dinner party for the president, this time at the Manhattan home of Fifi Fell, the wealthy socialite widow of a famous industrialist. She was escorted from her New York apartment to the Fell residence by Milton Ebbins, who also saw her home.

The third meeting occurred on Saturday, March 24, 1962, when both the president and Marilyn were houseguests of Bing Crosby in Palm Springs. On that occasion, she telephoned Ralph Roberts from the bedroom she was sharing with Kennedy.

“She asked me about the solus muscle,” according to Ralph, “which she knew something about from the Mabel Ellsworth Todd book [
The Thinking Body
], and she had obviously been talking about this with the president, who was known to have all sorts of ailments, muscle and back trouble.” Ralph clearly recalled not only the origin and detail of Marilyn’s question but also the ease with which Kennedy himself then took the phone and thanked Roberts for his professional advice. “Later, once the rumor mill was grinding,” according to Ralph,

Marilyn told me that this night in March was the only time of her “affair” with JFK. Of course she was titillated beyond belief, because for a year he had been trying, through Lawford, to have an evening with her. A great many people thought, after that weekend, that there was more to it. But Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that.

The fourth and final meeting took place in May 1962, at the legendary birthday gala for Kennedy at Madison Square Garden, an event that included a party afterward at the home of movie executive Arthur Krim and his wife Mathilde, a scientist later renowned for her great work
against AIDS. This May meeting was the briefest of them all, as the president, his brother and his family were mobbed by friends, admirers and the press all evening.

Were Marilyn Monroe’s characteristic candor on such matters the only evidence—the fact that she never exaggerated nor minimized her romantic involvements—that would be weighty reason to accept her version of the one night of intimacy. There is, however, good external evidence to support her claim. Accounts of a more enduring affair with John Kennedy, stretching anywhere from a year to a decade, owe to fanciful supermarket journalists and tales told by those eager for quick cash or quicker notoriety: those who fail to check the facts of history and are thus easily dispatched as reliable sources.

In fact, there were at least two other famous blond actresses whose affairs with President Kennedy are far more easily established. One, Angie Dickinson, almost completed her autobiography—all details of her affair with the president intact—but then she decided to omit the Kennedy affair. But with that excision, her story apparently lacked drama. On third thought, she withdrew the typescript, returned the money paid as an advance against royalties and, having once entered the publishing kingdom, abandoned all hope forever. A second blond actress, whose autobiography was in fact published, simply omitted any mention of her brief affair with the president.

“Marilyn liked [President Kennedy] the man as well as the office,” according to Sidney Skolsky, among the first friends to be informed of the March tryst; he added that she also enjoyed the fantasy that this experience carried—“the little orphan waif indulging in free love with the leader of the free world.” And as she soon after told Earl Wilson, Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts, she found John Kennedy amusing, pleasant, interesting and enjoyable company, not to say immensely flattering. As for Mrs. Kennedy, as Skolsky added, “Marilyn did not regard [her] with envy or animosity,” and was aware that her own role in Kennedy’s life (like that of other women she knew) was limited to a necessarily shallow transiency.

The posthumous revelations of Kennedy’s philandering revealed the impossibility, for obvious reasons, of pursuing any serious romance with one woman. The exaggeration of his “affair” with Marilyn is part of the myth of King Arthur’s Camelot, an image subsequently grafted
onto his brief term. There was a need to believe in the tradition of courtly intrigues and infidelities—Lancelot and Guinevere, Charles II and Nell Gwynn, Edward VII and Lily Langtry; Nell and Lily were actresses in the bargain. John F. Kennedy was, he might have thought, exercising a benevolent
droit du seigneur
.

But in this case there was but one rendezvous between the attractive, princely president and the reigning movie queen; to follow the Arthurian simile: the mists of Avalon are easily dispersed by shining reality’s clear light onto the scene.

It is important to establish definitively the truth of this matter not only for the sake of historical accuracy but also because of a far more damaging rumor that began after Marilyn Monroe’s death. The unfounded and scurrilous accounts of a concomitant or subsequent sexual affair with Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s younger brother and attorney general, has been even more persistent than that of the presidential liaison. It has also led to the completely groundless assertion of a link between Robert Kennedy and Marilyn’s death—a connection so outrageous as to be hilarious were it not also injurious to the man’s reputation.
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The rumors of an affair with Robert Kennedy are based on the simple fact that he met Marilyn Monroe four times, as their schedules during 1961 and 1962 reveal, complementing the testimony of (among others close to Kennedy) Edwin Guthman, Kennedy’s closest associate during this time. But Robert Kennedy never shared a bed with Marilyn Monroe.

Guthman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative reporter and journalist, was Special Assistant for Public Information in the Kennedy administration as well as senior press officer for the Justice Department. The travel logs of the attorney general’s schedule for 1961–62 (preserved in the John F. Kennedy Library and in the National Archives) support the detailed accounts provided by Guthman. These, collectively, attest to the fact that Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe enjoyed a socially polite relationship—four meetings and several phone calls over a period of less than ten months. But their respective
whereabouts during this time made anything else impossible—even had they both been inclined to a dalliance, which is itself far from the truth on both counts.

Marilyn’s first meeting with Robert Kennedy occurred several weeks before her introduction to the president. “On either October 2 or 3, 1961,” said Guthman,

Kennedy and I were attending a series of meetings with United States attorneys and members of the FBI in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. The attorney general and I attended a dinner party at the Lawfords, and around midnight Marilyn decided to go home. But she had drunk too much champagne, and we were worried for her. Bobby and I would not let her drive her car, and we did so together, delivering her safely to her door.

The second meeting between the attorney general and Marilyn occurred on Wednesday evening, February 1, 1962, when he and his entourage dined at the Lawfords en route from Washington to the Far East on a month-long diplomatic journey. “That evening,” according to Guthman, “Marilyn was quite sober—a terrifically nice person, really—fun to talk with, warm and interested in serious issues.”

Pat Newcomb, also present at the dinner, remembered that Marilyn

really cared about learning. The day before [the dinner party], Marilyn told me, “I want to be in touch, Pat—I want to really know what’s going on in the country.” She was especially concerned about civil rights—she really cared about that. She had a list of questions prepared. When the press reported that Bobby was talking to her more than anyone else, that’s what they meant. I saw the questions and I knew what they were talking about. She identified with all the people who were denied civil rights.

The next day, February 2, Marilyn wrote two letters. To Isadore Miller, Marilyn sent a two-page letter in which she wrote to her “Dear Dad,”

Last night I attended a dinner in honor of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy. He seems rather mature and brilliant for his thirty-six years, but what I liked best about him, besides his Civil Rights program, is he’s got such a wonderful sense of humor.

That same day, she wrote to Arthur Miller’s son Bobby:

I had dinner last night with the Attorney General of the United States, Robert Kennedy, and I asked him what his department was going to do about Civil Rights and some other issues. He is very intelligent and besides all that, he’s got a terrific sense of humor. I think you would like him. I was mostly impressed with how serious he is about Civil Rights. He answered all of my questions and then he said he would write me a letter and put it on paper. So, I’ll send you a copy of the letter when I get it because there will be some very interesting things in it because I really asked many questions that I said the youth of America want answers to and want things done about.

The third and fourth meetings were the most casual of all: at the president’s birthday gala in New York on May 19 (among hundreds of other guests); and when Peter and Patricia Lawford invited Marilyn to attend a dinner party for Robert Kennedy on Wednesday, June 27. The Lawfords came for Marilyn early that evening, and with them was the attorney general—at Marilyn’s specific invitation, for she had invited them all to see her new home. From there, they proceeded to the Lawfords’ house for dinner; later, the attorney general’s driver delivered her back to Fifth Helena. “They all came over to see the house,” according to Eunice. “She certainly didn’t go sneaking around with Mr. Kennedy or have a love affair with him!”
⁴

All other accounts simply cannot be proven. Those who claim Robert Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had a tryst in Los Angeles on November 18, 1961, for example, fail to deal with the fact that on that date, Kennedy was in New York, addressing a convocation at Fordham University; Marilyn, who was preparing for her photographic sessions with Douglas Kirkland, dined in Los Angeles with the Greensons after a psychiatric session at the doctor’s home. Such tale-spinners are equalled only by those who place the lovers’ meetings on February 24 and March 14, 1962: on the first date, Kennedy was in Bonn, Germany, and Marilyn was in Mexico; on the second, he was in Washington addressing the American Business Council while she had just moved into her new home and had in her company Joe DiMaggio. And so it goes.

As long as he knew Robert Kennedy, said Edwin Guthman, he never had the remotest impression of an affair with Marilyn—much less any other woman.

Ethel was the woman in his life, and he seemed uninterested in any other except in the normal, socially acceptable and public way of such things. That summer, Marilyn did indeed call [Kennedy] several times at his Washington office. Bobby was a good listener, and he took an interest in her questions, her life, even her troubles. But the truth is that for me, for Bobby, and for Angie [Novello, Kennedy’s secretary], the calls became something of a joke, and certainly nothing secret or whispered. We would say to one another something like, ‘Oh, here she is again, with questions about this or that.’ But these were always brief conversations. He was not a man to spend a lot of time on small talk with anyone. And to have an affair? Well, frankly it wasn’t in his character.

To a person, Hollywood and New York reporters who knew Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy are unanimous in agreement. “The man [with whom she had the brief affair] was not Bobby Kennedy, but his brother John,” wrote Earl Wilson. “There was no doubt it was Jack and not Bobby,” according to Marilyn’s old friend Henry Rosenfeld. And Richard Goodwin, assistant special counsel to President Kennedy, a director of the subsequent Robert Kennedy campaigns and a leading scholar on the Kennedy family, put the matter simply: “Anyone who knew Bobby Kennedy knew that it was not in his temperament [to have an affair]. We had many intimate talks over the years, and Marilyn Monroe’s name never came up. Given Bobby’s relation to his brother, it would have been unthinkable for him to ‘take over’ the relationship, as some have claimed.”
⁵
As for Marilyn, she asked Rupert Allan and Ralph Roberts if they had heard rumors of a romance between her and Robert Kennedy; when they replied that indeed they had, she insisted they were false. (Furthermore, according to Ralph and Rupert, Marilyn did not find the younger Kennedy physically appealing.)
⁶

Four days after the February 1 dinner at the Lawford house, Marilyn was in New York, en route to visit Isadore Miller, then living in Florida, and from there she was going on for a shopping trip in Mexico. Her devotion to Miller in his lonely widowhood, like her affection and generosity to Arthur’s children, continued uninterrupted until her death,
even after Arthur’s marriage to Inge Morath early in 1962. After Marilyn moved into her new home that March she often sent Isadore, Bobby and Jane gifts, made frequent offers of airline tickets for them to visit her in California and asked what she might do for them as their friend.
⁷

In New York, Marilyn was first happily reunited with the Strasbergs. They attended the Old Vic’s production of
Macbeth
at the City Center with her on February 6. Marilyn then spent three days discussing with Paula the first, incomplete draft of the script for
Something’s Got to Give
, and she attended several open and private classes at the Actors Studio. At the same time, she received many messages from California each day—about her new home; about the starting date for the film (she had yet to meet Weinstein); about calls from Joe, who was surprised to locate her in New York when he had made a special journey to visit her in Los Angeles; from Greenson, who called at least once daily. All these messages were meticulously recorded, logged and preserved by Cherie Redmond.