Marilyn: Norma Jeane (14 page)

Perhaps Norma Jeane’s neglect started too early and was too complete. Perhaps Marilyn could not have gone back and accepted the child inside herself. But as a woman, she was rarely rewarded for being adult or independent, and often rewarded for being childlike, dependent, “feminine.” As an actress, she was applauded for portraying helplessness, innocence, incompetence. She was even rewarded for constantly seeking fatherly men as lovers. In
Let’s Make Love
with Yves Montand, critics raved over her sensual performance of Cole Porter’s “My Heart Belongs to Daddy,” just as they had once approved her “Every Baby Needs a Da Da Daddy” at the beginning of her career. (Can we imagine a male movie star being praised for acting helpless, looking for motherly sex partners, and singing sensuously, “My Heart Belongs to Mommy”?) Because she was a woman Marilyn was encouraged to remain a child.

Toward the end, she lost even the acting that allowed her a reward for playing the child-woman role. She lost the work for which she had learned mannerisms so extreme they were almost those of a female impersonator. She was a thirty-six-year-old woman who feared she had no future, who had no man to give her even the illusion of identity, and who felt like a failure as a woman for not having a child. In that state of weakness, she faced the glamour and strength of the Kennedy men.

Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe probably had met long before his election to the presidency. As early as 1951, there are memories of both the young senator and the starlet attending Hollywood parties given by Charles Feldman, who was Kennedy’s frequent host and Marilyn’s agent. During the waning months of Marilyn’s marriage to Joe DiMaggio, two of her friends claim that she was going out with Kennedy. One of these friends saw them together at a Malibu bar.

Whether those dates were sexual or not, they probably didn’t have great meaning, even to Marilyn. This promising young politician had married the year before, and his wife was Jacqueline Bouvier, exactly the kind of beautiful and well-educated woman to whom Marilyn would have felt most inferior. He had a reputation for being sexually—but
only
sexually—interested in other women. In the famous phrase of Nancy Dickerson, who went out with the bachelor Kennedy before she became a distinguished reporter: “Sex to Jack Kennedy was like another cup of coffee, or maybe dessert.” In other words, Kennedy was neither someone in Marilyn’s world who could help with her career, nor was he the sort of man she turned to as father and protector.

Another version of Jack Kennedy and Marilyn’s first encounter is given by Deborah Gould, the third wife of Peter Lawford. Lawford had married Jack’s sister Pat in 1954. “Peter told me that Jack—he always called him Jack—had always wanted to meet Marilyn Monroe,” Gould said. “It was one of his fantasies. Could Peter arrange for that? He did—he would do anything he was asked to do.” That would have been before Kennedy became president, in 1960, and Lawford said the affair continued afterward.

By early 1960, Marilyn was emerging from her marriage to Arthur Miller and feeling rejected because of the one-sided nature of her affair with Yves Montand. That was exactly the time that Kennedy’s campaign was getting under way. Here was a powerful, handsome man who had connections to people she knew both in New York and Hollywood, and who also stood for civil rights, a less warlike attitude toward the Soviets, and many of the other issues she instinctively cared about. She was seen at the Lawford beach house at campaign meetings and parties. In spite of her moods, insomnia, and insecurity, a Kennedy political strategist interviewed by Anthony Summers remembered Marilyn as functioning well with that group of a dozen or so that included Jack Kennedy. “They were very close friends” the aide, Pete Summers, recalled years later. “I would say she was a very special guest—the president was really very, very fond of Marilyn. She was delightful, a little bit nervous perhaps, but I think the nervousness was because she was in new territory with people who were political animals. She wasn’t totally at ease. I did feel that she was so impressed by Kennedy’s charm and charisma that she was almost starry-eyed… But she was totally able to hold her own conversationally; she was very bright.”

As July and the Democratic convention in Los Angeles neared, rumors of an affair between Marilyn and Jack Kennedy grew widespread enough to cause Freddy Karger to be “appalled” and to refuse to book his band at a convention ball, which Jack Kennedy planned to attend. According to Marilyn, and to a bartender who saw them together, Marilyn also met Kennedy after his “New Frontier” speech at the end of a convention that had made him its Democratic presidential nominee. She was not the only woman around whom such Kennedy rumors swirled, but she did seem both secretive about Kennedy and fiercely protective when he was criticized. That was true even at a time when she was despondent over the end of her marriage to Arthur Miller and her own problems were engulfing her.

The idea of an affair between them was public enough that in November, just after Kennedy’s election, humorist Art Buchwald wrote in his
Washington Post
column:

Let’s Be Firm on Monroe Doctrine

Who will be the next ambassador to Monroe? This is one of the many problems which President-elect Kennedy will have to work on in January. Obviously you can’t leave Monroe adrift. There are too many greedy people eyeing her, and now that Ambassador Miller has left she could flounder around without any direction.

If Buchwald was assuming that Jack Kennedy would have to change his ways once he was in the White House, he was wrong. Some women friends continued to meet him at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, the Peter Lawford beach house at Santa Monica, and even the White House. Marilyn was never said to have been at the White House itself, but there were witnesses who saw her at the Carlyle and other places being visited by the president. Accurately or not, Marilyn confided to a few friends the problems of seeing a man who was constantly surrounded with Secret Service agents and who had little time for the preliminaries of lovemaking, but she was exhilarated by what she hinted was a very intimate knowledge of this important and admired leader. She admired him, too. Whatever else may or may not have been going on, one can imagine Marilyn making President Kennedy laugh, and his making Marilyn feel important and serious—a fair and friendly exchange.

But the exchange was far from equal. With her work becoming more fearsome to her, and without a male anchor in her life, Marilyn was very needy and insecure. Whatever magic and childlike allure she may have brought to the cigar smoke and realism of political fund raisers and Kennedy dinners, she was far more replaceable for them than they were for her. Without a call from Pat and Peter Lawford for a dinner at their beach house in Santa Monica, without an invitation to presidential events, Marilyn would have felt—and sometimes been—alone.

But another member of the Kennedy family began to engage her interest. Jeanne Carmen, the actress who was Marilyn’s neighbor on Doheny Drive, remembered opening the door of Marilyn’s apartment in the summer or fall of 1961 and finding a surprised Robert Kennedy. “He had that expression of not knowing whether to run, walk, or stay,” explained Carmen. “I was stunned, and I kept saying, ‘Come in,’ but went on standing in his way. Finally, Marilyn came flying out of the bathroom… she kissed him openly, which was out of character for her…” Jeanne Carmen hadn’t been prepared for this. Marilyn had talked of seeing Jack Kennedy, not Bobby. But the shy awkwardness of this younger brother, his sympathy for the underdog, and his special connection with children, may have made him seem far more protective and appealing to Marilyn. The self-contained and sophisticated president was far from the people Marilyn had grown up with, but Bobby’s style was oddly working class. And, of all the Kennedy brothers, Bobby had the least reputation for womanizing (though his biographer, Arthur Schlesinger, also pointed out, “Bobby was human. He liked a drink and he liked young women. He indulged that liking when he traveled—and he had to travel a great deal”). Bobby was within a year of Marilyn’s age, but he had been married for more than a decade, had seven children, and had recently been named America’s Father of the Year. He, not Jack, became the focus of Marilyn’s fantasies.

“Her affair with the attorney general would turn out to be much more serious than Marilyn’s fling with the President,” as one of Marilyn’s major biographers, Fred Guiles, explained. “She was not drawn to Bobby physically, as he was to her. But he took a personal interest in her, while the President did not. This was far more dangerous to Marilyn than a strictly sexual attraction would have been.”

Bobby and Marilyn were rarely seen in public together, but when they were, there seemed to be some real connection. A New York film director remembered passing them at a party, and hearing a simple exchange from one to the other: “I like you.” “I like you, too.” Marilyn began to take notes in a small red book, as she explained to Bob Slatzer: “Because Bobby liked to talk about political things. He got mad at me one day because he said I didn’t remember anything he told me.” Anthony Summers, whose 1985 biography of Marilyn contains the best reporting on this period, quotes Peter Dye, a friend of the Lawfords who was present at their dinners with Bobby and Marilyn. He thought “there was certainly an affair… She was star-struck over him… I think she was turned on by the idea of mental genius. She liked the type, instead of being pushed around like a piece of meat. She was trying to get away from that.” Lena Pepitone told Summers of hour-long phone calls from Bobby Kennedy to Marilyn. So did her studio maid, Hazel Washington. Jeanne Carmen recounted an episode in which the two of them, Jeanne and Marilyn, dressed Bobby up in a false beard that belonged to Jack Benny, a baseball cap, and sunglasses, and dared him to go to a nearby nudist beach. In that getup, at that beach, they guaranteed him he wouldn’t be recognized. Even Marilyn had never been caught when she had gone to the same beach with a black wig over her blonde hair. Bobby couldn’t resist the dare. “We walked up and down, and sat on a blanket we brought from the car,” Carmen remembered. “Once we got out there we found nobody cared. Here were two famous people that nobody recognized—we just sort of lounged around. On the way back, we really laughed a lot.”

Others to whom Summers spoke were equally honest but urged caution in making sexual assumptions about the Kennedys and Marilyn. Jeanne Martin, who was then married to Dean Martin, had sometimes seen Marilyn at the Lawfords’ beach house, and was “quite sure” that Marilyn had an affair with both Robert and John Kennedy. But, she added, “Unless you’re in the bedroom, it’s unfair to presume.”

Whatever the nature and seriousness of this friendship, other members of the Kennedy family knew about and accepted the new connection between Marilyn and Bobby. After Marilyn’s death, this handwritten note on stationery from the Kennedy home in Florida was found among Marilyn’s papers:

Dear Marilyn—

Mother asked me to write and thank you for your sweet note to Daddy—He really enjoyed it and you were very cute to send it—

Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East! Again, thanks for the note—

Love, Jean Smith

Jean Smith, a Kennedy sister, told Summers through her husband, Stephen Smith, that she had “no recollection” of writing such a letter, but she didn’t really deny it. Though the note was undated, it might relate to Joe Kennedy and his stroke in December 1961, which would support other reports that Marilyn and Bobby had begun to see each other before that time. After all, the Kennedy family was one in which the men had public affairs as well as public marriages. It was not only part of a bargain in which divorce was unacceptable; but almost a family imperative (as Jack Kennedy once told Clare Boothe Luce, “Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible”). When Pat Lawford had seated a dinner in her home in early 1961, she put Bobby between Marilyn and Kim Novak, for his evident amusement. Preserving marriages and keeping the men entertained seemed to be a bargain that the women accepted, and one for which they had been trained by the many affairs of their father, Joseph Kennedy, who once took his wife, Rose, and his mistress, Gloria Swanson, to Europe on the same boat.

But the Marilyn who was always looking for a family may have mistaken this easy acceptance for a possibility of joining the Kennedys in a very different way. Certainly she was looking for a new man to anchor her drifting life. In the summer of 1961, she had told Lena Pepitone that she hoped to marry Frank Sinatra, with whom she was then having an affair. A few months later she was very upset by his brief engagement to Juliet Prowse. Soon Marilyn began to hint that she might marry again, this time a very important man in government. Friends who assumed she meant Bobby Kennedy were stunned by both her lack of discretion and her lack of realism.

On May 19, 1962, there was to be a “Birthday Salute” to President Kennedy at Madison Square Garden in New York. Though it featured singers from Ella Fitzgerald to Maria Callas, Peter Lawford had the idea of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday” to the president—perhaps as a kind of in-joke on his famous brother-in-law. Marilyn was flattered, but also very scared. She was less and less able to perform even short pieces of dialogue for
Something’s Got to Give.
She was more and more dependent on pills, on trips to her psychiatrist, and on fantasies. She was so frightened that Joan Greenson, the daughter of her psychiatrist, gave Marilyn the children’s book
The Little Engine That Could,
and Marilyn took it with her for confidence. In a transparent dress she had to be sewn into, with a psyche held together with a children’s book, pills, and champagne, Marilyn managed a brief, breathy, sexy rendition of “Thanks, Mr. President” (special lyrics had been written to the tune of “Thanks for the Memory”), and then led the crowd in a chorus of “Happy Birthday.”

Sitting in the presidential box, his feet on the railing and a cigar in his hand, President Kennedy seemed to enjoy all this immensely. “I can now retire from politics after having had, ah, ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way,” he said. It was a moment both of great vitality, with the crowd going crazy, and one of great embarrassment. Marilyn’s very fear and doped slowness had created long sexy pauses. Her voluptuous body was exposed, but her mind seemed to have receded, as Arthur Schlesinger wrote later, “into her own glittering mist.”