The Secret Letters of Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy (3 page)

R
ICHARD
W
INCHESTER

Winchester Literistic

17 Sutton Place

New York, New York 10021

Thomas Dunne

Thomas Dunne Books

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, New York 10010

October 21, 2002

Dear Tom,

This entire project seems to be born under a lucky star (as opposed to those relatively unlucky stars … our heroines). Through an amazing series of coincidences, we have been able to obtain limited access to those pages of Jackie Kennedy’s Purple Diary, covering her correspondence with Marilyn.

The Purple Diary has hitherto been in the possession of Evangeline Auchincloss. As chance would have it, Evangeline and my first cousin Poppy Winchester roomed together at Vassar. And once I took the liberty of allowing Poppy to show Evangeline the Secret Letters, she became convinced that she owed it to history—and to Jackie’s memory—to allow Jackie’s diary comments on her correspondence with Marilyn to be published in tandem with the Secret Letters. The relevant pages will be messengered over to you forthwith.

Warm regards,

Richard

R
ICHARD
W
INCHESTER

Winchester Literistic

17 Sutton Place

New York, New York 10021

Patrice Renoir

Apartment 1

The Renaissance

1600 La Brea

Hollywood, California 90069

October 30, 2002

Dear Patty,

Just a note to let you know that
The Secret Letters
will be published on April 25, 2003! You are about to make history!

Warmest regards,

Richard

THE LETTERS

EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

By F. R. Lichtenstein, Director of the Yale Faculty Vanderbilt Foundation, Professor Emeritus of Modern Culture and English Literature, Downing College, Cambridge, and Freud Professor of Psychoanalysis, University of Graz, Austria

These priceless historical documents first came to light in 1998 when they were released by former Hollywood beautician and Marilyn confidante Patrice Renoir. Shortly before Marilyn’s death, Jackie returned her letters. Soon after receiving them, Marilyn bequeathed the entire correspondence between her and Jackie to Renoir.

However, due to legal strictures, the documents cannot be reprinted. Marilyn’s letters are written in different colored pens (navy, green, red, purple, orange, silver). The pale pink notepaper is tinged with the scent of violets. The writing is large, expansive, with complex curlicues, flourishes, and many of the
i
’s
are dotted with a large circle or a heart. The letters are in good condition, folded just once.

Jackie’s letters are written with a navy ink pen on thick cream paper. The corners are generally crumbled and it is clear the letters have been read repeatedly by Marilyn.

Marilyn tended to be a lamentable speller. Following her ear, she habitually made such slips as “definate” and “fantasize.” Proper names were her downfall, and she often transposed the
e
and the
i.
But given
the public perception of her innate dumb-blondeness, her occasional spelling mistakes have been retained in the text, if only to highlight how rare they were and the fact that, despite her rudimentary education, her strength of mind and purpose spurred her to improve her literacy level. Interestingly enough (and this is most apparent in Marilyn’s last long letters), her powers of description and her level of self-knowledge are often more well honed than Jackie’s.

These letters chart the course of the friendship between Marilyn and Jackie. In the process, they chronicle the inner lives of two unique, iconoclastic sirens. Friends and enemies, mirror images, fatherless girls, hostages to history, celluloid images, female role models, fashion queens, eternal legends, each living in her own kaleidoscopic universe, unique yet similar, they are two of the most famous and revered women of their time.

Artful seductresses, mistresses of enchantment, like Cleopatra, both Marilyn’s and Jackie’s charms cloaked sharp intellects. And it is clear that both women—each a female Machiavelli—relished the intellectual challenge inherent in the cat-and-mouse game played out in the Secret Letters.

The hallmark of the letters, which range from Jackie’s sharp observations on Washington to Marilyn’s revealing Hollywood gossip, is an exchange between both women of intimacies about life, love, loss, their hopes, and their fears. In the process, they also expose the deepest recesses of their hearts. Compared with the multitude of comments made by both women to the press, these letters are doubly interesting in that they graphically reveal subtle aspects of their individual natures.

Both women were prolific correspondents. Jackie’s propensity for writing letters is well known. Her most recent biographer, Sarah Bradford, confirmed that Jackie not only relished corresponding with famous people but kept their letters for many years and, just before her death, read a selection to her close friend Nancy Tuckerman.
According to Bradford, “Jackie was sitting before the fire, astrakhan thrown over her lap. On the table beside her were bunches of letters, all neatly bound with ribbons. These were the letters Jackie had received from famous people over the years. Jackie unbound the letters and read some of them to Nancy.”

Marilyn, too, was a prolific letter writer, often writing one letter with two or three different pens. According to Marilyn intimate James Haspiel, “Paula Strasberg told me that there existed personal letters written by John F. Kennedy to Marilyn, that Paula and Lee had placed ‘into a safe-deposit box, not to be opened for fifty years.’”

The fact that Jack Kennedy risked putting pen to paper to correspond with Marilyn indicates that her response was also worth receiving and that intellectually she was not dramatically inferior to Jack or, indeed, to Jackie.

For as much as Hillary Clinton might hate admitting this about Monica Lewinisky, Eleanor Roosevelt about Missy Le Hand, Queen Alexandra about Lillie Langtry, Lady Nelson about Emma Hamilton, or Jackie about Marilyn, the reality is that despite their intrinsic animosity toward each other, on a deep level, the wife and the mistress generally have far more in common than they might care to admit and could, had fate dealt them different cards, even have been true friends.

The historical value of the letters has been enhanced by the access to Jackie’s hitherto unpublished Purple Diary, which was bequeathed by her to her niece Evangeline Auchincloss.

I believe that I owe it to history to make Jackie Kennedy’s relevant Purple Diary entries available in tandem with the Secret Letters. For it is my belief that Jackie’s diary entries on Marilyn elucidate her state of mind during the correspondence, add dignity and resonance to the Secret Letters, and are thus a fitting memorial to her.

Above all, I would never have lent my name and reputation to this
enterprise had I not believed that the documents truthfully reflect Marilyn’s and Jackie’s mutuality of spirit, their deep intimacy, their similarity of soul, and their unrequited passion for a remarkable man. All of which I believe serves only to add to the final legacy, the historical importance, and the rich beauty of these Secret Letters.

WESTERN UNION TELEGRAM

Bel-Air Hotel

The Office of Senator John F. Kennedy

Washington, D.C.

November 5, 1952

Dearest Jack,

Congratulations on winning the Senate Race. Since we met last year in Hollywood, I’ve been rooting for you, so I’m glad.
^*

Love,

Marilyn

__________________________

*
“For nearly a decade, his [Kennedy’s] regular host on trips to Hollywood had been the prominent agent Charles Feldman. Feldman had represented Marilyn in the early fifties, and two witnesses suggest that Kennedy met Marilyn through him as early as 1951.” (Tony Summers, Goddess)

Marilyn kept a copy of this (rather indiscreet) greeting with all the subsequent correspondence.

M
ARILYN
M
ONROE

Apartment 3

882 North Doheny Drive

Beverly Hills, California

Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy

1095 North Ocean Boulevard

Palm Beach, Florida

September 13, 1953

Dear Senator and Mrs. Kennedy,

I am so sad that I couldn’t accept Ambassador Kennedy’s kind invitation to attend your wedding
^*
I was in Canada, making
River of No Return
.
^†
But when I saw your beautiful wedding photographs in the newspaper this morning, they brought tears to my eyes.

Mrs. Kennedy, you look just like a movie star, only better, which of course you are.

I wish you joy, happiness, and all that you desire and hope that this little music box will remind you that here in Hollywood, Marilyn Monroe is thinking of you both with love.
^‡

Marilyn

__________________________

*
On receipt of this letter, Jackie wrote in her diary, “Quel surprise! A wedding gift from none other than Marilyn Monroe … plus a cryptic note. Still, old Joe must know what he’s doing. … Or wants to do … As if the Swanson scenario hadn’t been sufficient. … Oh, well, les garçons always remain les garçons, don’t they? …”

In the above diary entry, Jackie is assuming that because Joe Kennedy invited Marilyn to Jack’s wedding, she and Joe were having an illicit affair. It is highly likely that Jack inveigled his father into inviting Marilyn to his wedding. As Sarah Bradford noted in America’s Queen (New York: Viking, 2000): “There was competition between Jack and his father over women: each got a thrill from sleeping where they knew the other had gone before. It was a totally amoral situation. There was something incestuous about the whole family.”

^†
Marilyn’s co-star in River of No Return was Robert Mitchum, a male star rippling with sex appeal. Yet according to Mitchum, he did not succumb to Marilyn’s charms. Instead, he and his cronies took pleasure in teasing her. “One day she yearningly remarked that she hadn’t seen her man Joe in some time, and Mitchum’s boisterous stand-in, Tim Wallace, supposedly suggested they take up the slack with ‘a round robin.’

‘“What’s that?’ Marilyn asked.

“‘You know, you and me and Mitch,’ Wallace said, leering.

“‘Ooh,’ said Marilyn, ‘that would kill me!’

“‘Well, nobody’s died from it yet,’ Wallace snickered.

“‘Ooh, I bet they have,’ Marilyn told him. ‘But in the papers they just say … the girl died from natural causes. …’” (from Lee Server’s
Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don’t Care
[New York: St. Martins Press, 2001])

Years later, Marilyn would say wistfully, “Mitchum is one of the most interesting, fascinating men I have ever known.”

In one of the many incidences in which Marilyn and Jackie were both attracted to the same man, Jackie also expressed an attraction to Robert Mitchum. “At one point in his career, he wanted Jackie to edit his autobiography and was surprised and flattered when the agent got back a few days later and said Mrs. Onassis would be delighted to do the book with him. Mitchum had always been her favorite movie star, she said to the startled agent, and had always reminded her very much of her own father.” (Ibid.)

^‡
The music box (listed as number 763 in the catalog of Kennedy/Bouvier wedding gifts lodged at the Rhode Island Bouvier Institute) plays “
Falling in Love Again,
” the song from
The Blue Angel.

After writing this letter, Marilyn consoled herself by watching the transmission of her television debut, aired on CBS that same evening, a sketch called “Honolulu Trip,” with Jack Benny, which she recorded at the Shrine Auditorium a few months previously. According to Jeannie La Riviere (
Marilyn, My Best Friend
[Honolulu: Baynards Press, 1968]), a starlet she’d befriended at the Fox commissary, the two of them watched the show together. Marilyn appeared mesmerized during her “Bye Bye Baby” number, then said to Jeannie, “Well, if I don’t have him, at least I’ve got this.”