The figures in the darkness were plainclothes officers of the Bureau of Investigation of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office. The mansion they were watching was the home of Peter Lawford, actor, and his wife Patricia Kennedy Lawford, sister of the Democratic presidential candidate. This was the week of Kennedy’s nomination by the Democratic party convention, and — as the noise from the house made obvious — the Lawfords were throwing a party.
Frank Hronek, the senior of the two officers, had gone from a wartime career in intelligence to become a legendary figure in California law enforcement. A top investigator for the Los Angeles District Attorney, he was a walking encyclopedia on all matters that concerned his profession — and some that did not — from organized crime and political corruption to the seamier side of show business. Hronek had asked his superior for clearance to observe the Lawford party for the possible presence of guests linked to the mob. When his superior, a Democrat, told him to stay away, Hronek went along anyway.
That night, as the two officers drew closer to peer over the fence, they were intercepted by private security guards armed with shotguns. Hronek kept the guards talking for a while, then walked away. There had been time enough to observe a wild party going on around the Lawfords’ pool, one that included a bevy of women, some familiar to the officers as call girls supplied by a known madame. Several of the girls were, as one of the officers put it, ‘stark-ass naked.’ Also present was John Kennedy.
The man shortly to be President departed soon afterward, according to a spokesman, because ‘the candidate needs some rest.’ The rest, an informant told the DA’s officers later, was in the company of Marilyn Monroe.
True or false? The revelry at the Lawford house was described to the author by Investigator Hronek’s colleague, and there is no good reason to doubt him. What, though, to make of the allegation about Kennedy and Marilyn? Was the informant in 1960 just passing on gossip, the sort to file and forget? Was there really a Kennedy in Marilyn’s love life? Finding the answers, two decades later, involved a major investigation.
Stories of an affair between Marilyn and President Kennedy, or with his brother Robert, or with both, circulated for years after her death. They were so numerous, so often the farfetched fodder for supermarket scandal sheets, that thinking people may reasonably have written them off as legend. Fresh research now establishes that the stories have a basis in truth.
This book is not the place to rehearse the full sexual history of the Kennedys. Some attempts to do so have established a mythology that throws dust in the eyes of the public as much as on the legend of Marilyn herself. Nevertheless, there has been sufficient responsible reporting, and firsthand recollection by contemporaries, to allow a measure of balanced judgment.
It is evident that the Kennedys, from their fortress of a family, with their vast wealth and power and with the arrogance that such a heritage endows, led sex lives that were, in ordinary mortals’ terms, outside the ordinary. To comprehend the Kennedys’ dealings with Marilyn we must glimpse, at least, the sexual tradition in which they thrived.
It began, for the children of John Kennedy’s generation, in the attitudes of their father. Joseph Kennedy, a growing body of literature confirms, was a man who, like some feudal Lord of the Manor, pursued anything in skirts, as though by right. He did this in front of his children, daughters as well as sons, and enlisted their help in arranging infidelities.
John Kennedy once confided to Clare Boothe Luce, former United States Ambassador and wife of the publisher of Time, ‘Dad told all the boys to get laid as often as possible.’ John, as is now well documented, more than followed the paternal advice. From his days in the Navy, when he was known to his pals as ‘Shafty,’ to his years in the White House, the future President never ceased womanizing.
Nancy Dickerson, a reporter who dated Kennedy, said, ‘You couldn’t help but be swept over by him. But sex to Jack Kennedy was like another cup of coffee, or maybe dessert.’ For this Kennedy, evidently, sex was not to be confused with love.
In contrast, the wheels of the rumor mill have been virtually still when it comes to Robert Kennedy — except where Marilyn is concerned. His brother John spoke of Robert’s ‘high moral standards … a puritan, absolutely incorruptible.’ By 1960, when Robert turned thirty-five, he had been married for ten years and had seven children. He had just been named America’s ‘Father of the Year.’
All this is fact, but it need not force the conclusion that Robert Kennedy was a saint in sexual matters. Historian Arthur Schlesinger, his biographer and a Kennedy loyalist, gave me a frank answer when we lunched together. ‘Bobby was human,’ he said. ‘He liked a drink and he liked young women. He indulged that liking when he traveled — and he had to travel a great deal.’
All the Kennedys were fascinated by the world of the movies. Joe, the father, had moved to California in the twenties to make films, and additional fortune, in Hollywood. Joe’s most highly publicized affair was with the actress Gloria Swanson.
John Kennedy, on the West Coast in the forties and fifties, more than followed suit, so far as Hollywood women were concerned. His targets over the years were names that now read like faded photographs: Gene Tierney, Sonja Henie, Angela Greene, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh, and Rhonda Fleming. During the presidency, Angie Dickinson was at least a close friend.
Judy Garland was befriended by Robert Kennedy. Greta Garbo was an honored guest at a White House dinner attended only by the President, his wife, and Kennedy’s friend, Lem Billings.
Film director Joshua Logan quoted Marlene Dietrich as having told him, ‘Jack Kennedy got me to the White House and tried a little hanky-panky. Then, as I was getting into the elevator, he asked with great concern, “Just one thing — did you ever sleep with my Dad?”’
The Kennedy brothers needed a base of operations in California, and by 1960 they had one — the beachfront home of their brother-in-law, Peter Lawford. In every scenario involving Marilyn and the Kennedys, Lawford is cast as the connection.
In the halcyon years of the Kennedy ascendancy, Peter and Pat Lawford lived the high life in the palatial mansion, complete with fifty-foot heated swimming pool and a movie projection room, that had originally been built for Louis B. Mayer, chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
Lawford was thirty-seven in 1960, the British-born son of a World War I general who had fallen on hard times after emigrating to Florida in the thirties. Lawford had departed for Hollywood a few years later, and his good looks whisked him from a job as an usher in a movie theater to starring roles in B-movies.
By the mid-fifties, Lawford’s acting career seemed to have peaked. His celebrity was based mostly on an incessant social whirl and an addiction to surfing. Then, in spring 1954, he married Patricia ‘Pat’ Kennedy, the sixth of Joseph Kennedy’s brood and the loveliest of his daughters. By 1960, on the eve of the Kennedy presidency, they had settled at Santa Monica with their three children.
As a couple the Lawfords seemed a rare and enviable combination, one of California’s Beautiful Beach People married into a great Eastern dynasty. One writer described Lawford as ‘sun-tanned, unruffled, with that peculiar impersonal friendliness of the overprivileged.’ Another wrote: ‘The problem with the Lawfords is that they seem to have no problems.’
In private the Lawfords were on the way to problems aplenty. The marriage would not last, and both, according to neighbors, were already heavy drinkers. Lawford, who was to die of liver disease in 1984, liked to drink till dawn in his own private bar. Friends and associates say he was an indiscriminate user of prohibited drugs.
Lawford liked bizarre sex. His mother, Lady Lawford, once confided to the press somewhat opaquely that her son had been spanked a good deal in his youth. She said, ‘I still insist, and Peter agrees, that the spankings did more than anything else to fit him for his present role.’
That curious judgment aside, two former female intimates said Lawford had outlandish tastes in sex. One recalled that, rather than making love,
‘he wanted me to bite his nipples till they bled.’ Another left him because he demanded that she take part in group sex.
It was this sad Sybarite who played host to the Kennedy brothers when they sought relaxation in California. Even years later, few would discuss what went on during those visits. In 1984, however, I spoke at length with Jeanne Martin, former wife of singer Dean Martin. She and her husband were frequent guests at the Lawford home, and were there when both John and Robert Kennedy were present. Her memories are unromantic.
‘I saw Peter in the role of pimp for Jack Kennedy,’ said Jeanne Martin. ‘It was a nasty business — they were just too gleeful about it, not discreet at all. Of course there was nothing discreet about either of the Kennedys, Bob or Jack. It was like high-school time, very sophomoric. The things that went on in that beach house were just mind-boggling.’
Martin continued, ‘Ethel* could be in one room and Bobby could be in another with this or that woman. Yes, Bobby was a grabber, but not in the terms that Jack was. Jack really was instinctive, you know, straight for the jugular — “Come upstairs, come in the bathroom, anything.” Bobby didn’t have eyes for me, but I do know this. I have a friend that was in the library with him, and before she knew it the door was locked and he threw her on the couch — amazing …! It was so blatant. Here was the President of the United States and the Attorney General.’
Jeanne Martin was sometimes present when Marilyn Monroe came to the Lawford beach house. She became ‘quite sure’ Marilyn was involved sexually with both Kennedy brothers but conceded, ‘Unless you’re in the bedroom, it’s unfair to presume.’
The story of Marilyn’s sexual connection with the Kennedys is covered by other witnesses. On the basis of the assembled information it must be considered beyond presumption.
*Wife of Robert Kennedy.
30
IN THE FALL OF 1954 John Kennedy, then a thirty-seven-year-old senator, had undergone major surgery in a New York hospital. He was suffering from spinal trouble complicated by Addison’s disease, a progressive malfunction of the adrenal glands. As he recovered, he amused himself playing checkers and firing a popgun at floating balloons.
A reporter who visited Kennedy, Priscilla McMillan, thought the atmosphere was ‘like that of a college dorm.’ She noticed a tank of tropical fish, a Howdy Doody doll on the bed, and — on the wall — a poster of Marilyn Monroe. The picture showed Marilyn in blue shorts standing with her legs spread apart. It had been fixed upside down so that her feet stuck up in the air.
It was, by then, two years since Marilyn’s nude calendar had become the talk of the nation, and thousands of males had her picture on the wall. The ailing Kennedy, though, may have gazed at his poster more knowingly than most. For nearly a decade his regular host on trips to Hollywood had been the prominent agent, Charles Feldman. Feldman had represented Marilyn in the early fifties, and two witnesses have suggested that Kennedy met Marilyn through him as early as 1951.
Feldman’s longtime secretary, Grace Dobish, believed there was such a meeting. Alain Bernheim, who worked with Feldman and knew Marilyn well, thought she was present at a dinner Feldman gave for Kennedy. Bernheim drove Kennedy home, however, and recalled that he left with another girl that night.
Two friends of Marilyn also referred to meetings with Kennedy in the fifties. Robert Slatzer, who knew her all her adult life, said she mentioned encountering Kennedy during the DiMaggio marriage — again at Charles Feldman’s home — and later, during the Miller marriage, in New York. Arthur James, who knew Marilyn from her liaison with Charlie Chaplin, Jr., in the late forties, offered specific memories of the earliest phase of her relationship with the Kennedys.
In the mid-fifties James was a prosperous real-estate agent spending most of his time in Malibu, where he lived. He said an affair of sorts with John Kennedy occurred as early as 1954, in the declining months of the DiMaggio marriage. James said Marilyn told him she saw Kennedy when he visited California, and James himself once observed them together.
‘Although Jack Kennedy was a Senator,’ said James, ‘he was unknown here, relatively speaking. He and Marilyn could get away with a great deal. They sometimes drank at the Malibu Cottage, which was the raunchiest place you’ve seen in your life. It was just a bar, with maybe eight stools, and sawdust on the floor, but in those days it was a hangout for some of the most famous names in Hollywood.’
James, still bemused by the fact that it was ‘all so damn open in a way,’ said he saw John Kennedy, then Senator, walking on the shore with Marilyn near the Malibu pier. Marilyn told James that she and Kennedy had quietly used rooms at the Holiday House Motel in Malibu, and at another hotel located where Sunset Boulevard meets the Pacific Coast Highway — one regularly used for illicit lovers’ rendezvous. (Its name has subsequently changed.)
‘I don’t think it was ever really important to Jack Kennedy,’ James said, ‘but Marilyn never got over it, least of all when he became President. In the end, though, their headquarters was Peter Lawford’s place, back at Santa Monica.’
Peter Lawford, whom I interviewed not long before his death in 1984, knew Marilyn as early as 1950, when she was twenty-four. They met first at the William Morris agency, then at a party, and Lawford took a shine to her.
‘I’ll never forget going to pick her up on our first date,’ Lawford said. ‘When I walked into the apartment I had to step around the dogshit. Marilyn just looked and said, “Oh, he’s done it again.” She just clammed up over dinner, but I saw her some more. We went down to Malibu in the jeep, to go surfboarding. I remember her shielding her skin under a big sun hat. We had a couple of dates, I guess.’
Lawford glossed over the fact that he fell for Marilyn in a big way and she failed to respond. She complained about him to Anne, mother of her former lover, Fred Karger. ‘Lawford was chasing her and calling her,’ recalled Anne’s close friend Vi Russell, ‘and she’d come over to our house at three in the morning to get away from him and try to get some sleep. I don’t think she had much love for Peter Lawford; she always talked about him giving her a hard time.’
Lawford and Marilyn continued to bump into each other as the years went by, though at a safe distance. Both were weekend guests at the home of Gene Kelly, who exhausted his famous friends with volleyball parties that tended to start after the party, when the sun was coming up. By that time Lawford was involved with Pat Kennedy, who became his wife.
Pat Lawford liked Marilyn and felt she needed help. It was her idea — according to Lawford — to start inviting Marilyn to the beach house in the months before John Kennedy’s presidency.
Lawford, whose lasting devotion to Kennedy was little short of idolatry, flatly denied there was ever any affair between Marilyn and either of the Kennedy brothers. He told a Los Angeles District Attorney’s investigator, during a fresh inquiry into Marilyn’s death in 1982, that Marilyn did not meet John Kennedy until 1961, when he was already President. That occasion, said Lawford, was a party at which Marilyn happened to be a guest. ‘The whole thing about an affair is balls,’ Lawford told me. The facts suggest otherwise.
In early 1960, as the Kennedy campaign went into high gear, the Lawford house at Santa Monica became a meeting place for the candidate’s advisers. One was Pete Summers, a Kennedy political strategist with the key job of handling relations with the television networks. Summers met Marilyn in Kennedy’s company several times, always at the Lawford house, and as one of a group of perhaps a dozen people.
‘They were very close friends,’ Summers recalled. ‘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 a 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.’
Given Marilyn??
?s psychological problems, and her abuse of alcohol and sleeping pills, one might wonder what attraction she held for a Kennedy. It is clear, however, that she never lost the ability to hide her miseries under a mask of dazzling beauty. That aside, she was by now more politically sophisticated than has ever been acknowledged.
For years, and especially during the Miller marriage, Marilyn had been mixing with people who talked politics a great deal. In New York she had cultivated a lasting friendship with the eminent journalist, Lester Markel.
Markel had been Assistant Managing Editor of the Herald Tribune at the age of twenty-five, and was Sunday Editor of the New York Times for nearly half a century. Marilyn had written to him in the mid-fifties, in one of her bursts of eagerness to widen her intellectual horizon. They had lunched at Sardi’s, and afterward the sixty-year-old Markel, himself a star in his own professional world, amazed his colleagues by giving Marilyn a guided tour of the Times newsroom.
A letter from Lester Markel, Sunday Editor of the New York Times. His worry was unfounded — correspondence shows that Marilyn stayed in touch with the legendary journalist.
After Markel’s death in the seventies, at the age of eighty-four, his daughter discovered — stuffed in the back of a desk drawer — a letter Markel had received from Marilyn in March 1960, while she was making Let’s Make Love. It provides a remarkable insight into Marilyn’s intelligence and political savvy. Marilyn wrote:
Lester dear,
Here I am still in bed. I’ve been lying here thinking — even of you. … About our political conversation the other day: I take it back that there isn’t anybody. What about Rockefeller? First of all he is a Republican like the New York Times, and secondly, and most interesting, he’s more liberal than many of the Democrats. Maybe he could be developed? At this time, however, Humphrey might be the only one. But who knows since it’s rather hard to find out anything about him. (I have no particular paper in mind!) Of course, Stevenson might have made it if he had been able to talk to people instead of professors. Of course, there hasn’t been anyone like Nixon before because the rest of them at least had souls! Ideally, Justice William Douglas would be the best President, but he has been divorced so he couldn’t make it — but I’ve got an idea — how about Douglas for President and Kennedy for Vice-President, then the Catholics who wouldn’t have voted for Douglas would vote because of Kennedy so it wouldn’t matter if he is so divorced! Then Stevenson could be Secretary of State! … It’s true I am in your building quite frequently to see my wonderful doctor* as your spies have already reported. I didn’t want you to get a glimpse of me though until I was wearing my Somali leopard. I want you to think of me as a predatory animal.