Kennedy’s anger, the source claimed, was because he had learned that some form of bugging was taking place. ‘He was asking again and again, “Where is it? Where the fuck is it?” — apparently referring to a microphone or tape-recorder.’ Whether or not Marilyn knew — and the possibility adds a new element to the mystery — she failed to answer. The episode ended, said the source, with the sound of a door slamming.
The tape resumed — and the source had no way of knowing whether Spindel had edited the recording — with Kennedy’s return, this time accompanied by Peter Lawford. The source said he would not have been familiar with Lawford’s voice, but relied on Spindel’s identification. ‘There were these three distinct voices,’ he said, ‘at first echoey again. RFK was saying words to the effect, “We have to know. It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it” — apparently he was still looking for the recording device. Then they apparently came close to where the transmitter was.’
‘There was a clack, clack, clack on the tape,’ the source recalled, ‘which Bernie says he thought was hangers being pushed along a rail. They were still searching for whatever they were after. And there was a flopping sound — maybe books being turned over. Sometimes the tape was clear, sometimes not so clear. Kennedy was again screeching, and Lawford was saying, “Calm down, calm down. …”Monroe was screaming at them, ordering them out of the house.’
The next part of the recording was described by the source as containing, ‘thumping, bumping, noises, then muffled, calming sounds. It sounded as though she was being put on the bed.’
The source said the final portion of the recording included discussion between Kennedy and Lawford about Kennedy’s return to the San Francisco area. He said it was arranged that a call would be made to Marilyn’s number once Kennedy had left the area. The last sound on the tape was that of a telephone ringing, and being picked up. The person who did so, however, said nothing at all. As Spindel interpreted it, the purpose was to create a toll slip ‘establishing’ that Marilyn, still alive, had answered the phone at a time Robert Kennedy was provably somewhere else. Spindel’s implication was that Marilyn was dead by the time Kennedy left the house.
Some arrangement of this sort might explain the fact that, according to Dr Greenson, Marilyn had a phone ‘clutched fiercely’ in her hand when he discovered her dead. The matter of the telephone remains troubling.
Two pathologists, consulted on this point, felt that a person dying of a barbiturate overdose would be ‘far more likely’ to relax and let go of the telephone as they drifted into terminal sleep. One pathologist said that — if asked to speculate — he found it more likely that the phone had been placed in the hand after death. After death, with the onset of rigor mortis, the muscles of the hand would naturally contract around the instrument.
The source on the Spindel tape is the only person who claimed to have actually heard it in its entirety. Two others offered partial corroboration of its existence. One, Bill Holt, was an explosives and electronics expert who worked for Spindel’s company after his death in 1971. Now a security consultant, Holt confirmed Spindel’s association with the main source. He also said he was told about the tape by yet another Spindel employee, Michael Morrissey.*
Holt quoted Morrissey as saying Spindel played him the tape, and that it did reflect a visit to Marilyn’s house by Kennedy and Lawford. There was an argument, and sounds indicating that Marilyn had fallen down.
Morrissey, now a Washington lawyer, admitted Spindel played him a tape — but only for a few seconds. He said he remembers hearing only a bang or thump, as if someone was falling heavily.
Several other Spindel associates quote the wiretapper as having talked about the tapes. Richard Butterfield, now an executive for Fabergé, and his wife, said Spindel told them that Robert Kennedy was ‘with her when she died’. Dr Henry Kamin, Spindel’s doctor and friend, said Spindel told him of the tapes, and insisted that there had been some sort of violent incident. Earl Jaycox, the technician working for Spindel in 1962, said the same. Jaycox said his employer was ‘very nervous’ about it.
Whatever their true content, what became of the tapes? At dawn on December 15, 1966 — four years after Marilyn’s death — a posse of police and District Attorney’s investigators, armed with a search warrant, descended on Spindel’s home in New York State. They confiscated a great deal of material, mostly electronic equipment, and Spindel formally claimed that one purpose of the raid had been to remove evidence on Marilyn and Kennedy.
A Freedom of Information suit in 1985 obtained both CIA and FBI reports, heavily censored, dated soon after the raid on Spindel’s house. They show that both agencies were receiving information on Spindel and his alleged Monroe information.
Spindel’s lawyers quickly sued to recover the items seized from the wiretapper’s home. Specifically, they submitted an affidavit demanding the return of Spindel’s ‘confidential file containing tapes and evidence concerning circumstances surrounding and causes of death of Marilyn Monroe, which strongly suggests that the official reported circumstances of her death are erroneous.’
Spindel told John Neary, a Life reporter: ‘Hogan (the New York District Attorney) really did Kennedy a favor by pulling the raid. They stole my tapes on Marilyn Monroe and my complete file.’
Court records show that during the raid Spindel objected to the removal of certain files. They were sealed before being handed over, and appear on a signed inventory as ‘2 Sealed Folders — Confidential Communications.’
Research has failed to discover what officials did with the missing material. A suit by Spindel’s widow, including a demand for the return of the material, did not succeed. The FBI said its New York investigative file on Spindel had been routinely destroyed.
One of the lawyers who dealt with Spindel’s suit, Arnold Stream, said, ‘I cannot reveal what my client told me regarding the tapes. It is still privileged information even though he is dead. I believe he told me the truth, in general and on this specific matter. … I am satisfied the tapes did exist, and that copies were in the possession of the District Attorney.’ Stream explained that he was unable to pursue the matter further in court, as the judge ruled that the question of the tapes was irrelevant to the case as charged — a wiretapping unrelated to Marilyn Monroe.
FBI document on wiretapper Bernard Spindel. For the first time, both the FBI and the CIA have released part of their files, heavily censored, referring to Spindel and his allegations about Marilyn and Robert Kennedy.
The shadow of Marilyn pursued Robert Kennedy until his own death, also in Los Angeles, six years later. Two weeks after she died, Assistant Director Courtney Evans once again had to brief Kennedy, as Attorney General, on a Mafia allegation concerning ‘an affair with a girl.’
The reference to ‘a girl in El Paso’, as primed in the FBI memorandum of August 20, 1962, makes little sense. Robert Kennedy may, as he claimed, never have been to El Paso, Texas. In 1986, however, I obtained the surveillance information that had originally reached the FBI, as noted by a congressional committee. Meyer Lansky, the Mafia ‘finance minister’, had been overheard by an FBI microphone talking with his wife Teddy about:
Bobby Kennedy who has seven kids and is carrying on an affair with a girl in ??? (possibly El Paso) [author’s italics]. Teddy says it’s all Frank Sinatra’s fault and he is nothing but a procurer of women for those guys. Sinatra is the guy that gets them all together. Meyer says it’s not Sinatra’s fault and it starts with the President and goes right down the line.
As reproduced here, it seems that the FBI monitors, listening to a fuzzy recording, were not at all sure of the location of the woman linked to Robert Kennedy. Given their uncertainty, is it unreasonable to guess that the reference ‘El Paso’ was in fact to ‘Lake Tahoe’? This would make more sense of the second paragraph of the August 20 report referring to Marilyn.
Mafia boss Lansky was overheard on Wednesday, August 1, just three days bef
ore Marilyn’s death. Robert Kennedy had been in Los Angeles until the previous Friday, and the available record does not say where he spent the weekend. Marilyn, however, was reportedly at Lake Tahoe.
A fortnight after Marilyn’s death, a dry report by FBI Assistant Director Courtney Evans, after briefing Robert Kennedy on Mafia interest in the Kennedy’s womanizing. The latest intelligence, picked up by FBI surveillance microphones, had come from underworld ‘finance minister’ Meyer Lansky — just days before Marilyn’s death.
In his report to J. Edgar Hoover, on Kennedy’s response to the Lansky wiretap, Evans wrote: ‘He said he appreciated our informing him of it, that being in public life the gossip mongers just had to talk. He said he was aware there had been several allegations concerning his possibly being involved with Marilyn Monroe. He said he had at least met Marilyn Monroe, since she was a good friend of his sister, Pat Lawford, but these allegations just had a way of growing beyond any semblance of the truth.’
On the very day the Assistant Director wrote this memorandum, August 20, 1962, FBI surveillance microphones picked up an ominous conversation between three syndicate figures. They were discussing what one of them called ‘a dangerous situation’, in which he and his associates were likely to be prosecuted. He feared this was inevitable, but spoke of one tactic that might force the administration to hold off. It clearly involved pressure on the Kennedy brothers — and specifically on Attorney General Robert Kennedy — and the weapon to be used was scandal over Marilyn Monroe.
‘They will go for every name,’ the syndicate figure said. ‘Unless the brother — it’s big enough to cause a scandal against them. Would he like to see a headline about Marilyn Monroe come out? And him? How would he like it? Don’t you know? … he has been in there plenty of times. It’s been a hard affair — and this – – – – – – – – – – [female associate of Marilyn] used to be in all the time with him — do you think it’s a secret?’
Documents uncovered so far do not show whether there actually was an attempt to blackmail the Attorney General over Marilyn. His general assault on the Mafia, of course, continued as long as he remained in office, until 1964. In that year, however, the mystery surrounding his activity in her last days became dangerously public.
On July 8, 1964, J. Edgar Hoover wrote to Kennedy to tell him of the publication of a booklet by a right-wing activist, Frank Capell. ‘His book,’ Hoover wrote, ‘will make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Miss Marilyn Monroe. Mr Capell stated that he will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate, and that you were in Miss Monroe’s home at the time of her death.’
The record does not show whether or how the Attorney General responded to this news. Frank Capell was an extreme right-wing activist who began inquiries — with the overt aim of embarrassing Robert Kennedy — from the moment of Marilyn’s death. A look at Capell offers an insight into the dirty side of American politics in the early sixties — and a revelation about the policeman who was first on the scene when Marilyn died.
That policeman, former Sergeant Jack Clemmons, was a sometime Director of Fi-Po, the Fire and Police Research Association, an organization which had the stated aim of informing the public of ‘the subversive activities which threaten our American way of life’. Subversive activity, in 1962, referred to communism, the Red Menace. Clemmons agrees that he met Capell shortly before Marilyn’s death. Capell, a former sheriff’s investigator, that year founded the Herald of Freedom, a propaganda pamphlet which viciously attacked American liberals, and especially Robert Kennedy, for years to come.
A month after Marilyn’s death, said Clemmons, he went with Capell to visit Maurice Ries. Ries, an anthropologist who had previously worked for the State Department in some intelligence capacity, was associated with a Hollywood group called the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Its founders included, said Clemmons, John Wayne, writer Borden Chase, and Ginger Rogers’s mother. In the McCarthy era, the Alliance had been active in the persecution of Hollywood’s left-wingers.
Ries and Capell asked Clemmons to help them in exposing Robert Kennedy’s relationship with Marilyn, and his activity at the time of her death. The Sergeant agreed to pump police sources. Capell, meanwhile, enlisted the help of West Coast friends, including lawyer Helen Clay. Interviews with Clay, and a former colleague, show that they made some real discoveries. A policeman was sent in to ferret through Chief Parker’s papers on the case. A former Lawford security guard, and a man in the car hire business, gave information on Kennedy’s activity. A telephone company contact provided a detailed list of Marilyn’s calls — including ones to the Justice Department on August 3 and August 4, the day of her death.
Rightwing extremist Frank Capell was supplied with some of this material. In September 1964, when Robert Kennedy was running for election as Senator for New York, Capell published a poisonous little book called The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe. It cited Hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and of its equivalent in the California State Senate, to ‘identify’ Marilyn’s doctor, Hyman Engelberg, as a former Communist. Others close to Marilyn, like her coach Paula Strasberg and her friend Norman Rosten, were given similar labels. Robert Kennedy was portrayed as an Attorney General who let communism run rampant in the United States. Capell said, virtually in as many words, that Robert Kennedy had had Marilyn killed, with the help of the Communist Conspiracy, to protect his reputation.
Capell’s book, obviously politically motivated garbage, failed to hurt Robert Kennedy. Kennedy’s enemies, however, continued plotting to damage him because of Marilyn. When Capell’s book was published, Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa and wiretapper Bernard Spindel made contact with Fred Otash, the Hollywood detective who had been deeply involved in the bugging operations. As Otash’s correspondence shows, Hoffa wanted the detective to cooperate in preparing a public exposé.
Hoover’s warning to Kennedy about Capell almost certainly led to the bugging of Capell’s telephone. In their book The Final Days, Watergate reporters Woodward and Bernstein revealed that President Nixon, seeking to prove that the Kennedy administration had been as adept at skullduggery as his own, asked Legal Counsel Fred Buzhardt to obtain a list of past wiretap operations from the Justice Department. Frank Capell’s name appeared on a list of people whose phones had been bugged, apparently with Robert Kennedy’s approval.
During a 60 Minutes television interview in 1984, Richard Nixon said Robert Kennedy had ‘used the wiretaps for what I would say were questionable national security purposes. For example, they wiretapped one reporter that they found was writing a book on Marilyn Monroe that might have some derogatory comments about Kennedy in it. …’
The year after Capell’s book was published both he and Sergeant Clemmons fell foul of the law. With others, both were indicted by a grand jury for conspiring to libel California Senator Thomas Kuchel. Capell was found guilty and fined. The charge against Clemmons was dropped, but he resigned from the police force. An internal police report commented that ‘his outside political interests detracted from his job interest.’
It was, presumably, a fluke of history that gave Clemmons, a committed right-winger, the role of being the first police officer on the scene. That aside, his persistent trumpeting that Marilyn was murdered, based on his observations at the scene, is of little worth. Clemmons had no experience as a homicide detective.
Capell’s role as an investigator, given his right-wing zealotry, was hopelessly flawed. Bernard Spindel almost certainly did have compromising recordings. He played the “last hours” tape to his associate as late as 1967 — after the raid on his home. He said he had given copies to others for safekeeping. One set, he confided, had gone to the late George Ersham, an employee of the arms firm Smith and Wesson, a man with reported links to the CIA.
Perhaps rightly, Spindel felt himself persecuted by Robert Kennedy because of his affiliation with Teamsters’ leader Hoffa. However, that gave
the wiretapper strong motivation to use the taps to his own malicious ends.
The specter of scandal over Marilyn posed a threat to Robert Kennedy to the very end. Ralph de Toledano, Washington reporter and Kennedy critic, said he was approached in spring 1968 by a senior executive of the American automobile industry, looking for propaganda to use against Kennedy in the presidential campaign. He represented, said de Toledano, a ‘bipartisan group determined to stop Kennedy.’
The Company executive, whom de Toledano would not name, wished to purchase the Monroe tapes, if copies had survived. A retired Army Colonel, E. Dennis Harris, hired to locate them, reported that they did exist. He said they were authentic and could be purchased for the right price. ‘The plan,’ said de Toledano, ‘was that the tapes were to be transcribed and mailed to the editors of every newspaper in the country.’ Negotiations were in their final stage in June that year, when Robert Kennedy was killed.
The truth the tapes might have revealed may or may not have died with Spindel. A discovery in government archives, was to give the mysteries of her last days a new and serious dimension
Marilyn Monroe — Security Risk?
On the night of her death, in her phone call to Sydney Guilaroff, Marilyn had tearfully added: ‘You know, Sydney, I know a lot of secrets about what has gone on in Washington.’ Asked what sort of secrets she was referring to, she replied, ‘Dangerous ones.’
It sounded overblown, over-dramatic, and perhaps it was. There may have been a core of truth, though, to her talk of secrets.
One morning in early 1986, four men sat discussing Marilyn Monroe at FBI headquarters in Washington. Around the table were a Bureau team of three, a representative of the Office of Legal Counsel, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, and the Chief of the FBI’s Classification and Appeals Affidavits Unit, Robert Peterson. With them sat my attorney, James Lesar, a veteran of Freedom of Information suits designed to prise documents out of government archives.