In the summer of 1961, according to Pepitone, Marilyn had started talking about marrying Sinatra. She became upset when he saw other women. In a few months Sinatra would announce his brief engagement — it lasted only six weeks — to actress Juliet Prowse. There is no evidence that he was ever passionately involved with Marilyn, yet he continued to see her till her death. By that time Marilyn had her reservations about Sinatra. She told a companion, as she glanced through photographs of the yacht cruise, ‘I don’t think I’ll give him copies. I think I’ve already given him enough.’
The troubling question mark over Marilyn’s relationship with Sinatra concerns not so much the singer himself as the potential opportunity it gave to others to hurt the Kennedys. The Sinatra association brought Marilyn into a milieu peopled by some of the Kennedys’ worst foes at a time when she was also seeing both Kennedy brothers. The question is — How much did the Mafia know?
33
NEW RESEARCH REVEALS THAT mobsters in California had taken an interest in Marilyn Monroe some time before the Kennedy presidency. It was a predatory interest, probably directed by Los Angeles gangster Mickey Cohen.
Cohen, a New Yorker by birth, cut a strange figure in the history of American organized crime. He was not a member of the Sicilian Mafia, and his proud boast was that he had triumphed in the gang warfare of the forties over who would run the Los Angeles rackets. The truth was more complex, but Cohen — the survivor of innumerable assassination attempts — murdered his way to an uneasy coexistence with the national crime families.
By 1959, after a spell in prison that weakened his power, Cohen was reasserting his strength. Publicly, he was a flamboyant figure, a man who had made it his business to hobnob with big Hollywood names, including Sinatra and those around him. Cohen had put up the money for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis to bring their show to California from the East Coast early in their careers. In 1951, asked by a Senate Committee on organized crime to explain how he came to have Sinatra’s private telephone number, Cohen replied, ‘Why, he’s a friend of mine.’ With his pet bulldog, which had a penchant for lasagna, Cohen liked to patronize the Villa Capri restaurant, where Sinatra and DiMaggio once discussed the ‘Wrong Door Raid’ against Marilyn Monroe.
In late 1959, as her marriage to Miller began to crumble, Marilyn was in Hollywood more than she had been for years. These were the months of the protracted filming of Let’s Make Love. It was also the time Marilyn featured, to the surprise of the investigators, in the investigation of Mickey Cohen.
All that year the Bureau of Investigation of the Los Angeles District Attorney kept permanent surveillance on Cohen and the Italians who were his closest henchmen. Cohen was out of jail, and the intention was to put him inside again as soon as possible. The DA’s men were taking a special interest in Cohen’s involvement in narcotics, and in his efforts to compromise film stars sexually for blackmail or commercial exploitation.
The method was old-fashioned and ruthless. One of Cohen’s men would work calculatedly on the seduction of a female star, then arrange for their lovemaking to be filmed and recorded. This was done, reportedly, during the affair between Lana Turner and Cohen’s accomplice, Johnny Stompanato, which ended in Stompanato’s killing at the hands of Turner’s teenage daughter. Recordings of Turner and Stompanato making love were peddled for hundreds of dollars each.
One night in late 1959, along with his colleague Frank Hronek, DA’s investigator Gary Wean was observing a restaurant — he believed it was the Plymouth House — on Sunset Boulevard. They saw Marilyn Monroe enter the restaurant, accompanied by a female companion and two men. Her escort, said Wean, was one of Cohen’s ‘good-looking Italian boys,’ twenty-eight-year-old George Piscitelle.
‘We sat out there till about two o’clock in the morning,’ Wean recalled, ‘then Piscitelle came out with Monroe. We followed their car over Coldwater Canyon to a motel on Van Nuys Boulevard. We saw them go in, but Frank and I split soon afterwards. We didn’t see them come out.’
According to former investigator Wean, Marilyn was trailed on other occasions, with less titillating results. Intelligence, however, revealed that Marilyn occasionally associated with both Piscitelle and Sam LoCigno, another Cohen henchman. Wean said he actually heard a bedroom recording of Marilyn, and assumed the purpose was extortion.
Frank Hronek, Wean’s colleague, was already dead during research for this book. The story, however, received some corroboration from Jack Tobin, former crack reporter on organized crime for the Los Angeles Times. He recalled Hronek telling him about the episode.
In addition, a senior law-enforcement source confirmed that the Cohen group were investigated for a ‘shakedown’ operation against leading stars. Piscitelle was involved, and Marilyn Monroe was identified as one of the Mafia’s targets.*
Cohen and his relevant associates are long dead, and cannot be questioned. The silence they leave behind them, though, concerning their purpose with Marilyn, is heavy with potential evil. Authorities on organized crime say that, long before the Kennedy era, Mickey Cohen had links to Sam Giancana. He also met with, and by 1960 probably toed the line for, Giancana’s Hollywood representative, Johnny Roselli. Roselli, in turn, knew Marilyn.
Before Marilyn set foot in Hollywood, Roselli was criminally close to two men who figured large in her career. Harry Cohn, who gave her one of her first contracts, had used mob money, procured by Roselli, to gain control of Columbia Pictures. He remained indebted to Roselli, and very close. The two men wore identical ruby rings, provided by Roselli, who said it was the nearest a mafioso could come to making a non-Italian into a ‘blood brother.’
Joe Schenck, the old Twentieth Century-Fox mogul, had served time in prison for perjury before the young Marilyn became his protégée and intimate guest at his dinner parties. He had been convicted because of his involvement in making payoffs to the Mafia — he had personally delivered the first cash payments, wrapped in brown paper. One of the mobsters convicted in that extortion racket was Johnny Roselli.
Roselli may have met Marilyn when he emerged from prison after the Schenck affair. Patti Karger, first wife of Marilyn’s lover Fred Karger, said Roselli was a familiar face at the Karger home. He used to come to pick up his girlfriend and her mother, who came to the Kargers’ to play poker.
Two other sources said Roselli knew Marilyn. One was Joseph Shimon, former police inspector in Washington, D.C., who sat in with a CIA representative on the Castro assassination plotting with Giancana and Roselli. Shimon was Roselli’s close confidant until he died. He said, ‘Roselli met Monroe. He met her socially, he knew a lot of her friends, and he knew her close business associates.’
In 1984 a senior former Treasury Department official recommended that I interview Harry Hall, who was long a ‘highly reliable’ informant for law enforcement authorities, especially on organized crime. He was also, incidentally, a trusted friend of Jo DiMaggio. Shortly after Marilyn’s death, Hall bumped into Roselli in the drugstore of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The two men discussed Marilyn and, said Hall, ‘Roselli made it clear that he knew Marilyn personally. He said he had liked her. … What personal things he had going with her, I don’t know. …’
As Giancana’s man in California, Roselli had had considerable contact with another woman now known to have been the mistress of President Kennedy — Judith Campbell. Campbell, as was revealed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, had a sporadic affair with John Kennedy from early 1960 till at least spring 1962. Within about six weeks of beginning that relationship, Campbell met Mafia boss Sam Giancana. He stayed in close touch with her during the affair with Kennedy.
There are striking points in common between the Campbell story and Marilyn’s. Though insignificant compared to Marilyn, the twenty-six-year-old Campbell was a creature of Hollywood. She was a starlet who had contracts with Warner Brothers, M-G-M, and Universal. She too had an affair with Frank Sinatra, who subsequently introduced her to John Kennedy. In that context, she encountered others wh
o were involved in Marilyn’s life.
Campbell met Gloria Lovell, Sinatra’s secretary, who became one of Marilyn’s few neighbors at the small Doheny apartment complex. Dr Red Krohn, a close friend of Sinatra, was to become Campbell’s gynecologist. He had long been Marilyn’s too, and a frantic Marilyn would call him a few days before she died.
Nobody has ever established Giancana’s motive in carrying on a liaison with Judith Campbell. He was murdered in 1975 before the Senate Intelligence Committee could question him. His henchman, Johnny Roselli, was killed in 1976. The Committee failed to press Judith Campbell on detail, and did not call Frank Sinatra to testify.
William Safire, of the New York Times, listed a number of questions Frank Sinatra should have been asked had he been summoned to testify. Did the mobsters discuss with Sinatra Judith Campbell’s affair with the President? Were any recordings made, or pictures taken, of Kennedy with Campbell that could have been used by organized crime for blackmail purposes? Did the mobsters ask Sinatra to introduce her or anyone else to the Kennedys?
Some of these same questions could usefully have been put to Sinatra and others regarding Marilyn Monroe and at least one other woman.* There are disturbing indications that the leaders of organized crime were indeed watching the Kennedys with predatory interest.
In early 1961 comedian Jerry Lewis was advised that he was going to be named as co-respondent in a divorce suit brought by the husband of a starlet named Judy Meredith. Lewis asked Judith Campbell, who was working for him at Paramount Studios, to get Mafia boss Sam Giancana to intervene with the detective handling the divorce investigation. Giancana obliged, according to Campbell, and the evidence of adultery was destroyed.
The detective in the Meredith case was the celebrated Hollywood private eye, Fred Otash. He confirmed the story, but added that a number of other men were due to be named in the Meredith divorce. An FBI document, scrutinized by congressional investigators looking into another matter, notes they included ‘Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, etc., etc., etc.’
One of the ‘et ceteras,’ Otash said, was John Kennedy. The detective said Kennedy’s name was removed from the divorce evidence, thanks to the intervention of the Mafia.
It happened, according to Otash, in spring 1961. He received a call from Johnny Roselli, Giancana’s lieutenant, requesting a meeting at the Brown Derby restaurant, ‘at the request of the Attorney General.’ Otash said Roselli virtually ordered him to remove the President’s name from the divorce evidence. After a meeting at which Giancana was present, Otash obeyed.
Judy Meredith, asked about this for this book, denied having slept with John Kennedy. The man who commissioned the divorce investigation on behalf of Meredith’s husband, Peter Fairchild, maintained that it did produce evidence of her adultery with Kennedy.
The issue, within this shabby subplot, is Roselli’s claim that he intervened in the Meredith case ‘at the request of the Attorney General.’ Of course nobody close to the President, let alone Robert Kennedy, personally asked a top mobster to hush up a sexual indiscretion. The Kennedy administration, under Robert’s impassioned leadership at the Justice Department, was committed as no other administration to fighting organized crime. Yet the Meredith case was fraught with the risks John Kennedy ran by associating with Sinatra and his friends.
If John Kennedy was about to be named in a divorce suit, along with Sinatra and friends, and if Sinatra and his group knew it, it could be that one of them mentioned the problem to Roselli. What Hollywood’s top mafioso had done for Jerry Lewis he would do for Kennedy, for his own reasons.
Sandy Smith, a veteran investigative reporter for Life and the Chicago Sun-Times, was an authority on the Justice Department and organized crime during the Kennedy era. Told about the Meredith case, he said of the Sinatra group, ‘They were very close to Jack Kennedy at the time, and it would be very easy for them to do a favor for the President and whisper into Roselli’s ear. And Roselli would be very eager to do a favor for the President.’
Sinatra was close to the President at this time. A man of catholic political tastes (he was to emerge as a staunch champion of Ronald Reagan), he and his ‘Clan’ had been a great boost to the Kennedy campaign. Sinatra’s songs, ‘All the Way’ and ‘High Hopes,’ were rerecorded as campaign jingles. He helped catapult Kennedy into the presidency, masterminded the inaugural gala, and was publicly seen as the President’s friend.
As for the mob, reporter Sandy Smith said, ‘It’s entirely in character for those guys to leap at the opportunity to do something for the government, or someone in a position in the government, just to have a marker or an IOU that they can call in at some future time. For Roselli it would be entirely in character.’
Thanks to the CIA, it was not surprising Roselli saw himself as a man who could notch up an IOU with those in government. It was just before Kennedy’s election, over drinks in the same Brown Derby where he later arranged the hushing up of the Judy Meredith divorce, that Roselli had been recruited by the CIA for the infamous series of plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. The Agency would not break off contact with the Mafia, and with Roselli and Giancana in particular, until 1963.
Early in the evening of July 12, 1961, many months after the beginning of the Kennedy connection with Marilyn, Giancana walked into a waiting room at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, on a routine stopover en route to New York. He was accompanied by Phyllis McGuire, the tallest and loveliest of the three McGuire Sisters, then one of the most popular female singing groups in the United States. The Mafia boss was head over heels in love with McGuire, who was by now his constant companion.
Waiting for the couple as they arrived at O’Hare was a team of FBI agents, acting on the orders of Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department. They were working full-time on the pursuit of Giancana, and this was an opportunity to get at him through his lover, Phyllis McGuire. Two of the agents offered McGuire the choice of accepting a subpoena or submitting to an interview then and there. She opted for the interview, and was whisked away from Giancana into a private room.
Giancana fumed impotently for a while, reboarded the plane, then walked back into the waiting room carrying McGuire’s handbag and hat. The FBI men hooted with laughter at the sight of the mafioso toting a woman’s handbag, and Giancana lost his temper. Today, knowing what we now do about the President’s sex life, part of his tirade seems to have been fraught with danger for the Kennedys. According to the FBI report:
Giancana then indicated that he was aware that the Agents intended to report the results of this interview of him to their ‘boss’, who in turn would report the results to their ‘super boss’ and ‘super super boss,’ and he said, ‘You know who I mean, I mean the Kennedys.’ He then said, ‘I know all about the Kennedys, and Phyllis knows a lot more about the Kennedys and one of these days we are going to tell all. [author’s italics]. … You lit a fire tonight that will never go out. You’ll rue the day. …’
What was the ‘all’ that the mafioso knew about the Kennedys? When the agents asked what he meant, Giancana refused to comment.
Did Giancana only know about the President’s affair with Judith Campbell? Or about the President and Judy Meredith? What was the ‘lot more’ that Phyllis McGuire knew?
In an interview, McGuire refused to discuss Sam Giancana. She was voluble, however — at first — about Marilyn Monroe. It turns out that McGuire knew Marilyn quite well. They had met in New York when Marilyn was married to Arthur Miller, and McGuire lived only four buildings away on East 57th Street. They did meet during the Kennedy presidency, though McGuire would not say exactly when or where. Joe DiMaggio, McGuire said, is still ‘a very dear friend of mine.’
Asked about Marilyn and the Kennedys, McGuire said at once, ‘The initial relationship was with John. And there definitely was a relationship with Bob. … They were seen together at their little hideaways. And, you know, that’s very like the Kennedys, just to pass it down from one to the other — Joe Kennedy to John, Jack t
o Bobby, Bobby to Ted. That’s just the way they did things.’
Of Robert Kennedy, McGuire recalled, apparently with firsthand knowledge, that Marilyn ‘was mysterious about it a lot. But when she had a few drinks, mainly when she was depressed, she would talk about it. At first it was really kept under the lid. Then she was pushing him to make a decision because she wanted to marry him. …’
At this point, in a telephone conversation with me, McGuire became nervous. Asked what Giancana had said about Marilyn, she replied, ‘I wouldn’t want to say anything. …’ She made an appointment to meet, then failed to respond further to calls or letters.
What Phyllis McGuire did reveal is hugely troubling, for what she knew, Sam Giancana surely knew too.
‘As in Greek tragedy,’ wrote Robert Blakey, former Chief Counsel of the congressional committee that investigated John Kennedy’s murder, ‘there was in the President’s character a fatal flaw, a hamartia, one that left him vulnerable to assassination by organized crime. …’
The fatal flaw in question was the President’s womanizing. In 1961 and the next year, the year of Marilyn’s death, womanizing — and their connection with Marilyn Monroe — left the Kennedys vulnerable to a different sort of assassination. They were wide open to pressure from the Mafia. The Kennedy brothers, it seems, did not take the threat seriously enough.
Senator Smathers, the President’s friend, did not think he worried much about the risks that came with his voracious sexual appetite. ‘He felt that he could walk on water so far as women were concerned,’ the Senator said in an interview. ‘He did not hold back.’
During the Kennedy presidency, former FBI supervisor William Kane was working on organized crime cases. He remembered Robert Kennedy with admiration, and treasured the cigarette case the Attorney General gave him. He still recalled, in a bemused sort of way, a remarkable episode that took place just before the Labor Day weekend in early September 1961.