The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (65 page)

Hampered by the studios’ unfortunate choices of vehicles to showcase her talents, the on-screen Marilyn remained more a sexpot than a major star until her twentieth picture,
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
(1953). A succession of movie classics followed, among them
The Seven Year Itch
(1955),
Bus Stop
(1956), and
Some Like It Hot
(1959).

She was the movie star she had dreamed of being, lived to be. More than that, she had become a marvelous, if difficult, actress who worked long and seriously at her craft. She built these powers by a force of will, but the one thing she could never build was a complete and secure human being to occupy Marilyn’s—or Norma Jean’s—celebrated body. Take the time to sift through the recollections of those who knew her, and one word of description will occur more frequently than any other. The word is not “sex”—though the person described packaged and sold sex more powerfully than anyone. The word is “child”. Marilyn Monroe was a child, sometimes petulant and obnoxious, sometimes spontaneous and effervescent and living to charm and please, but more times than anything, afraid. Afraid of being unloved and alone.

Though lacking in formal education, this child-woman was not the dumb blonde she played in the movies. The saber wit and the insights into character were not created by the scriptwriters. One example. An attempt is made to blackmail the studio because Marilyn’s nude image has been discovered on a cheesecake calendar, which will make millions for its publishers but which was shot years before when Norma Jean needed the fifty bucks she was paid for the session. The time is the prudish early 1950s, but Marilyn skates through the thin ice to an enormous publicity advantage with a crowded press conference.

Reporter: Is it true you didn’t have
anything
on when these pictures were taken?

Marilyn: We had the radio on.

In January of 1954, just as she ascended to the heights of stardom, Marilyn married another star who had been longer and even more widely adored. He was Joltin’ Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, one of the greatest baseball players ever to swing a bat and the man who had held America in his grip during the entire summer of 1941, hitting in fifty-six straight games. The courtship had made good copy for a year and a half. The marriage lasted nine months. Joltin’ Joe, it seemed, wanted a wife more than a movie star. Still, Joe could “hit homes runs” in bed; but more than that, he was something Marilyn couldn’t find in Hollywood. He was “genuine” and he loved her as a woman. He would reemerge as a friend and protector in the last year of her life, and he would be the guardian of her violated body at the end.

In the summer of 1956, a second star from an entirely different constellation joined the goddess of love in marriage. Arthur Miller was—with Tennessee Williams—one of the two great living playwrights in America. For Marilyn, who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as an actress, the oh so serious playwright held all the fascination of the one who supplies the deathless words for the one who speaks them. In the media, it was the wedding of the Beauty and the Brain, the Egghead and the Hourglass. It proved to be a storybook romance that could not survive a prolonged reading by the eyes of the real world. After many difficulties, the divorce came at the beginning of 1961.

There was, or at least there may have been, another “marriage”. This marriage—if real—would have been the second, before DiMaggio and after Jim Dougherty. Though undocumented, this marriage is of great interest to those who believe Marilyn Monroe was murdered, for it was to the man who has maintained a single-minded crusade to expose the murder to the world, a man named Robert Slatzer. Slatzer is a writer and producer who met Marilyn in the summer of 1946, when he was a young fan-magazine reporter and she was the struggling model and would-be starlet Norma Jean Mortenson. Slatzer has subsequently claimed that he and Marilyn fell in love and were married in an alcoholic haze in Tijuana, on 4 October 1952. According to his account, the young couple lived together as man and wife “about three days”, until they were strong-armed by Darryl F. Zanuck—the head of 20th Century-Fox and Marilyn’s boss at the time—into annulling the marriage and having all records of it destroyed.

Monroe’s biographers are divided on the marriage story. It is well established that Robert Slatzer and Marilyn were certainly good friends, and that their friendship extended from the late 1940s until her death in 1962. In any case, Slatzer’s credibility is a crucial issue in the murder story, as much of the first-hand evidence in the case comes either directly from him or from his long and determined legwork.

To accompany the confirmed and could-be husbands there is a Homeric list of confirmed and could-be lovers. Marilyn could be ambivalent about how much she personally enjoyed the sex act, but there is no doubt she enjoyed attracting men. “If fifteen men were in the room with her,” said one Hollywood publicist, “each would be convinced he was the one she’d be waiting for after the others left.” Through personal magnetism, compulsion, or both, she raised the art of seduction to a new level. Not too surprisingly, a vast number of the men who had speaking acquaintances with her have claimed at one time or another to have shared her bed. But for our purposes the most interesting of the lovers are those who could not afford to brag. Of these there are two more interesting than all: the President of the United States and his brother, the Attorney General.

Some accounts trace the origin of Marilyn’s affair with John F. Kennedy to the early 1950s, when Kennedy was a rising star in the US Senate and Marilyn was an established sex symbol in Hollywood. Other sources say the romance began just before Kennedy received his party’s nomination for president in 1960. Whenever it may have started, the affair—judging by the independent testimony of several who witnessed it first-hand—seems to have reached its peak in the early, heady days of the Kennedy presidency, through the offices—and in the beachfront Santa Monica home—of the President’s brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford. The timing of the coupling is significant. Marilyn was at the end of a marriage and in a downward spiral both professionally and personally, due to heavy drug abuse and the endless drain of her own insecurities. John Kennedy was very much married and the most powerful man in the world. As a security risk, the unstable Marilyn was as risky as they come.

Not that John Kennedy was above taking risks where sexual adventure was concerned. The list of
his
confirmed and could-be liaisons rivals Marilyn’s in its proportions. For Kennedy—and his brother Robert—the indiscretions may have seemed a sort of family tradition. “Dad”, JFK revealed to Clare Boothe Luce, “told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.” Joe Kennedy had taken his own advice. He himself had reportedly enjoyed Hollywood girlfriends in his heyday, the most famous being Gloria Swanson.

Robert Kennedy’s fling with Marilyn is less well documented than his brother’s, and its beginnings are no less difficult to trace. There are those who claim Robert was the first Kennedy to date Monroe. At least one first-hand account, however, suggests that Robert’s affair began as the President’s was ending—in the summer and fall of 1961. The inference has been drawn that the younger Kennedy was enlisted to soften the blow of the end of the President’s dalliance, and that he, like so many others, found Marilyn’s temptations impossible to resist. However and whenever it started, this affair appears to have continued until just prior to Marilyn’s death in August of 1962. At least from Marilyn’s viewpoint, there was an important difference between the ways the two brothers conducted their affairs. From what she reportedly told others, it seems the love goddess took Robert Kennedy’s attentions more seriously than John’s. Speaking of the President, she could be lighthearted: “I think I made his back feel better” and “I made it with the Prez.” Of the Attorney General: “Bobby Kennedy promised to marry me.”

Again, the timing relative to Marilyn’s state of mind is important. Her life, never securely anchored, was becoming increasingly unraveled as the decade of the 1950s wore into the 1960s. Her attempted “suicides”—some or all of which were accidental overdoses—had recurred perhaps a dozen times, with increasing frequency in later years. Her tendency to keep whole, and enormously expensive, film production ensembles awaiting her appearance for hours and even days had increased to the point that she had been fired from her last film,
Something’s Got to Give
, on 8 June 1962, after showing up on the set only twelve times during thirty-three scheduled shooting days. Marilyn’s last day before the cameras had been 1 June, her thirty-sixth birthday. Her psychiatrist had noted an alarming disintegration beginning in the summer of 1961, including “severe depressive” reactions, suicidal tendencies, increased drug use, and random promiscuity. She may have been a goddess, but she was not a goddess to be trusted with anybody’s secrets. And the Attorney General of the United States may have trusted her with the most important secrets that he knew.

The source for this intriguing possibility is Robert Slatzer. Slatzer was one of a number of friends in whom Marilyn confided about her affairs with the Kennedy brothers, but he appears to be the only one she told about Robert Kennedy’s weakness for dangerously indiscreet pillow talk. Slatzer says Marilyn told him Bobby had become annoyed when she forgot things he had told her during previous visits, and that she had resorted—unbeknownst to the Attorney General—to making notes of their conversations in a red diary. Ten days before she died, Marilyn showed Slatzer the diary, as they sat on a beach at Point Dume, north of Malibu on the Pacific Coast Highway. Most of the entries, Slatzer says, began with “Bobby told me.” He remembers entries about Kennedy’s war with Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia, with Kennedy swearing to “put that SOB behind bars”. But most chillingly, he remembers an entry that read, “Bobby told me he was going to have . . . Castro murdered.”

The Kennedy administration’s bungling attempts to kill Fidel Castro—through the strangely combined efforts of the CIA, anti-Castro Cubans, and the American Mafia—first came to light during US Senate hearings in the mid 1970s, and have since become common knowledge. But in 1962, a revelation of this kind would have been the most dangerous political fiasco imaginable. It could certainly have done critical damage to the administration; it could feasibly have started a nuclear confrontation; it could even cause the assassination of the President of the United States—which, as matter of fact, it may well have.

According to Slatzer, Marilyn not only knew these state secrets, she was prepared to tell the world about them. He says she talked of plans to call a press conference and “blow the lid off this whole damn thing,” revealing her affairs with the two Kennedys and the broken “promises that had been made to her”. The date allegedly mentioned for the press conference was Monday, 6 August 1962—the day after she was pronounced dead. Slatzer says he asked if Marilyn had told anyone else of her plans for the press conference and she replied that she had told “a few people”. He claims to have warned her that what she knew was “like having a walking time bomb,” but that she said she “didn’t care at this point . . . these people had used her . . . and she was going to . . . tell the real story.”

Some confirmation of Slatzer’s story comes from Peter Lawford’s ex-wife Deborah Gould. Gould has said that—years after the fact—Lawford broke down and offered a tearful account of the end of Marilyn’s life. Taken as a whole, Lawford’s “confession” raises as many questions as it answers. But in this case Lawford’s alleged account echoes Slatzer’s: Marilyn tells Lawford, “I’ve been used . . . thrown from one man to another . . . and I’m going public with everything.” If Marilyn wanted word of this threat to get back to the Kennedys, she could have chosen no better vehicle than Peter Lawford.

There is no record that Marilyn notified anyone in the media about plans for a press conference. The fact remains that the mere suggestion of such an ultimatum could have been an extremely dangerous gambit. It appears Marilyn was desperate enough to play this card in hopes that it would force Robert Kennedy to contact her. She had told several friends that Robert had abruptly ended the affair, and no longer called her or returned her phone calls. He had gone so far, she said, as to disconnect the private number he had given her, and the Justice Department operators refused to put her calls to the main switchboard through. Marilyn’s frequent calls to Justice during July of 1962 are documented on her phone records. The last call for which records are available was placed 30 July, the Monday before her death.

Marilyn’s reasons for calling Robert Kennedy may have gone beyond the sting of the spurned lover. In late June, she told an interviewer, “A woman must have to love a man with all her heart to have his child . . . especially when she’s not married to him. And when a man leaves a woman when she tells him she’s going to have his baby, when he doesn’t marry her, that must hurt a woman very much, deep down inside.” Between late June and early July, she told several friends that she had lost a baby, without specifying abortion or miscarriage. To some friends she confided that the father had been John Kennedy, to others, Robert. At least two sources have reported that there was an abortion, performed in Tijuana by an American doctor. Depending on which authority you trust, this may have been the fourteenth abortion of Marilyn’s life, an especially sad count for a child-woman who spent her final interviews talking about how much she wanted a child of her own. During the same period, Marilyn told several friends—to universal disbelief—that she and the Attorney General would someday be married.

In the available accounts of these last scenes of her life, there is another word that crops up frequently in descriptions of Marilyn. The word is scared. One long-time friend, Arthur James, recalls that Marilyn was “frightened stiff”. Slatzer says she told him that “because of circumstances that led all the way to Washington”, she was “scared for her life”. James and others say she became convinced that she was being watched, that her phones were bugged, and that she resorted to making personal calls from a phone booth in a park near her home, lugging pocketfuls of change for this purpose.