Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers
Marilyn managed an ‘Adios, muchachos’ for the newsmen, then walked unsteadily to the plane that would take her back to Los Angeles. She was now on the last lap.
37
IT WAS MARCH WHEN Marilyn returned from Mexico, and it was in March that President Kennedy was confronted with the peril his womanizing had brought. The storm warnings had been sounding for months.
Nearly a year had passed since Mafia boss Giancana’s threat to ‘tell all’ about the Kennedys. As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy should have been fully briefed on the outburst. If he was not — and that would have been a dire omission — he certainly learned of the ominous developments during 1961.
Giancana was only one of the Kennedys’ dangerous foes. Jimmy Hoffa, President of the Teamsters’ Union, was also by now locked in a bitter personal struggle with Robert Kennedy. Kennedy’s work on Senate committees had persuaded him that the Union, as run by Hoffa, was ‘a conspiracy of evil.’ He had linked Hoffa indisputably to organized crime, and specifically to the Chicago syndicate led by Giancana.
Like Giancana, Hoffa was being remorselessly investigated. He struggled by every means, including jury tampering and intimidation of witnesses, to avoid going to jail. It was Robert Kennedy’s original initiative that would eventually — years later — put him there. Meanwhile, during Marilyn’s last year alive, Hoffa was fighting a battle against the Attorney General that involved her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox.
During 1961, Fox had announced plans for a movie based on Kennedy’s book The Enemy Within — the exposé of Hoffa and the mob that had been published during election year. The producer was Jerry Wald, who had produced two of Marilyn’s earlier films.
Within days of the announcement Wald was listening to an anonymous caller asking, ‘Are you the SOB who is going to photograph The Enemy Within?’ It was the first of many calls and letters menacing Wald and the studio. The film project would founder in the end, after blatant intimidation by one of Hoffa’s attorneys.
In 1962, though, the film was very much alive. Paul Newman was named as the star, and Robert Kennedy continued to attend script conferences. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers was pressing ahead with a movie about John Kennedy’s war exploits while in command of PT 109. Like Wald, Jack Warner also received anonymous mail. It contained the assertion that the President was ‘a sex pervert, with many mistresses,’ and the promise that ‘the scandals soon coming up for air will kill your picture and you.’
In November 1961 the FBI received a letter offering proof that the President was an adulterer, ‘including photographs.’ It would not have been hard to obtain pictures that were at least embarrassing. Within days of that letter being sent, President Kennedy had allowed himself to be seen, with Marilyn at his side, at a reception in the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
Robert Kennedy had also continued to take risks. Wald, the producer of Enemy Within, once arrived to meet Kennedy at a house in Malibu, and found him in the company of Marilyn.
Then danger signals began literally pouring in. On December 11, 1961, J. Edgar Hoover advised Robert Kennedy that FBI surveillance had picked up information that Sam Giancana hoped to use Sinatra to intercede on his behalf with the Kennedys. According to the information, there had been three contacts between Sinatra and the President’s father.
Justice Department lawyers were now complaining that they did not see how the administration could fight the Mafia while the Kennedys continued a friendship with Frank Sinatra, a man who reportedly had criminal associates. On the initiative of a young lawyer, Dougald McMillan, department staff began preparing a series of reports on Sinatra.
Just before Christmas 1961, FBI bugs overheard Johnny Roselli talking with Giancana on the telephone. He had just been at Romanoff’s restaurant with Marilyn’s friend, Peter Lawford — one of the Sinatra ‘Clan’ — and the two mafiosi now spoke of Sinatra with scorn. He had been useless to them as a hot line to the Kennedys. Roselli offered Giancana the politics of desperation: ‘You’ve got the right idea, Mo, go the other way. Fuck everybody. … Let them see the other side of you.’
In February 1962, while Marilyn was in Mexico, surveillance of Roselli had revealed the fact that another of the President’s mistresses, Judith Campbell, was simultaneously in touch with both the President and Giancana. One of the time bombs ticking away under the presidency had been detected, and the Director of the FBI moved to defuse it.
Hoover had lunch with the President within weeks, and it is assumed they discussed Judith Campbell. According to the White House phone log, there would thenceforth be no further contacts with Campbell. She, however, said the President continued to see her for months to come. John Kennedy, it seems, did not take Hoover’s warnings seriously. Kenneth O’Donnell, the Kennedy aide present when the FBI Director met the President, later quoted Kennedy as saying, ‘Get rid of that bastard. He’s the biggest bore.’
On March 23, the day after the Hoover lunch, both Kennedys were due to fly to California. John Kennedy had planned to stay with Frank Sinatra at Palm Springs, but switched at the last minute to Bing Crosby’s home in the same area. Peter Lawford later said the President asked him to organize the change because, ‘it was virtually a case of the President going to sleep in the same bed that Giancana, a man whom his brother is investigating, vacated only three weeks before. How could anyone blame the President?’ Sinatra, mightily offended, expressed his wrath partly by breaking off relations with Peter Lawford.
Marilyn herself provided the only other insider’s version of the worry over Sinatra. She told Sidney Skolsky that she had been present at a gathering in the Lawford house attended by at least one of the Kennedy brothers and Sinatra himself.
Robert Kennedy, said Marilyn, held forth on why the President could no longer be seen with Sinatra. According to Marilyn the Attorney General spoke with great emphasis, and even talked of resigning if the President continued to see Sinatra. The party broke up in an icy silence.
Danger did not deter John Kennedy from seeing Marilyn again. They met within three days of the lunch with Hoover, during the presidential trip to California.
On Saturday, March 24, 1962, as Kennedy awoke in the Crosby home near Palm Springs, Marilyn — now in her new home — rose early. The plumbing was temporarily disconnected during the remodeling, so she sped over to Dr Greenson’s house to wash her hair. Then she returned, had her hair done, and spent hours dressing, turning the aging Norma Jeane into ‘Marilyn.’
Peter Lawford, who came to drive her to the desert, paced up and down in the hall, waiting. ‘When Marilyn came out of the bedroom,’ said Eunice Murray, ‘she was wearing a black wig over the new hairdo.’
That weekend the President openly entertained famous show business guests, but Marilyn had a role not recorded in the newspapers. Two witnesses offered a glimpse of the weekend and an apparent presidential excursion from Bing Crosby’s home, where he was officially staying.
Former Los Angeles County Assessor Philip Watson, who had seen Marilyn with the President at the Hilton four months earlier, was now astonished to meet them together again. At the Hilton there had been no overt intimacy, but Watson now had no doubts about the relationship.
‘I was staying at a private home in Rancho Mirage,’ said Watson, ‘and I was invited to go to a party at a place that was represented to be the Sinatra compound. It was a cold desert evening, and there were, in a sense, two parties. There were a lot of people at the poolside, and some people were wandering in and out of a rambling Spanish-style house. I did not see Sinatra, but Marilyn was there and the President was there, and they were obviously together. There was no question in my mind that they were having a good time, doing what comes naturally.’
Watson said the President was with Marilyn at a cottage in the grounds, and was receiving a selected few guests. Watson was taken in, as he had been at the Hilton, by a friend keen to help his campaign to become Assessor. He spoke briefly to the President, who remembered him from their last meeting. ‘There were
The second witness corroborates Watson’s eyewitness impression of what was going on that weekend at Palm Springs. In her last months Marilyn often confided in Ralph Roberts, the actor and masseur she had first met at the Strasberg home in New York. In her darkened room, as Roberts tried to ease her insomnia with a long, relaxing massage, Marilyn would discuss the mechanics of the human anatomy, a subject on which she was herself well informed.
Marilyn had mentioned to Roberts that she expected to see the President shortly, and asked him to explain how, as the old song has it, the thigh bone connects to the hip bone. During the Palm Springs weekend, Roberts received a call from Marilyn. She sounded mischievous.
‘I’ve been arguing with my friend,’ she said, knowing that Roberts would know who she was talking about, ‘and he thinks I’m wrong about those muscles we discussed. I’m going to put him on the phone, and you can tell him.’
‘A moment later,’ Roberts recalled, ‘I was listening to those familiar Boston accents. I told him about the muscles, and he thanked me. Of course, I didn’t reveal that I knew who he was, and he didn’t say.’
Marilyn later told Roberts that she and Kennedy had started discussing the muscle system while she was massaging the President’s bad back. ‘I told him he should get a massage from you, Ralph,’ Marilyn said, ‘but he said that wouldn’t really be the same. I think I made his back feel better.’
Marilyn was dangerously talkative. She had by now discussed her relations with the Kennedy brothers with a whole string of friends. The President and the Attorney General, for their part, had behaved as though they were untouchable. In secret, others had been eavesdropping. Some were the Kennedys’ sworn enemies, and their activity placed the presidency itself in jeopardy.
38
SHORTLY AFTER MARILYN’S RETURN from Mexico the phone rang in the home of Art James; the real-estate agent who had known Marilyn for years, ever since her affairs with Charlie Chaplin, Jr., and Edward G. Robinson, Jr. James, Chaplin, and Robinson, long close friends, often saw Marilyn now that she was living in Los Angeles. People knew about James’s friendship with her, and that was why he received the troubling telephone call in March 1962.
The caller was a go-between, passing on a message from Carmine DeSapio, the corrupt Tammany Hall politician with links to the Mafia, and especially to Teamsters’ boss Jimmy Hoffa. ‘The request,’ said James, ‘was that I should get Marilyn away from her house for a while, perhaps for a weekend at my place in Laguna Beach. They wanted her place empty so they could install bugging equipment. I knew about Marilyn’s relations with Robert Kennedy — she had told me — and that was evidently the reason for wanting to bug her.’
‘I told them I wouldn’t do it,’ James said, ‘and I didn’t. To my great relief I never heard any more about it. But I did not warn Marilyn. I figured she worried about things enough, anyway. And if they wanted to bug the house, they would find a way.’
Marilyn’s new California home was indeed wide open to eavesdroppers. With the extensive remodeling going on throughout 1962, workmen were constantly coming and going. As for her New York apartment, it was empty a good deal of the time — an easy target.
Research for this book turned up a mass of information indicating that Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers were indeed the target of electronic eavesdropping, and that it began as early as 1961. Ironically, according to one source, it may have been commissioned initially, not by criminals at all, but by Marilyn’s former husband, Joe DiMaggio.
Whatever happened to Marilyn mattered to DiMaggio. He had hired private detectives to watch her years earlier, at the time of the ‘Wrong Door Raid.’ Now, in his role as Marilyn’s protector, he allegedly did so again.
John Danoff, a policeman at a Department of Defense facility, when interviewed, had once worked for Fred Otash, the private detective who had helped extricate Frank Sinatra from the embarrassments of the ‘Wrong Door Raid.’ Danoff had been involved in many surveillance operations for Otash, and claimed Marilyn was the target of several.
Danoff said Joe DiMaggio would often telephone Otash’s office, and sometimes came in for discussions. ‘I got the impression,’ he recalled, ‘that DiMaggio remained intensely interested in Marilyn, and wanted to be kept informed of all her movements.’
In 1961, according to Danoff, the Otash team succeeded in wiring the rooms and telephone lines at both Marilyn’s apartment and the Lawford beach house. They were also ‘hooked into’ Marilyn’s answering service.
Danoff’s main part in the operation, he says, was to sit in a vehicle monitoring receiver equipment. The bug at the Lawford house, he claimed, transmitted desultory conversation between the President and Marilyn, and the unmistakable sounds of lovemaking. Danoff’s recollection was that this occurred ‘around Thanksgiving’ in 1961. As we have seen, the President was in Los Angeles that November, and did meet Marilyn.
Danoff was described as ‘an honest informant’ by a Treasury Department intelligence agent who used him in the sixties. His former employer, Fred Otash, denied any personal involvement in bugging Marilyn and the President, but added, ‘You’re right, there was surveillance.’ Otash said, and a colleague confirmed, that government agents forced him to hand over files on both Kennedy brothers at mid-term in the Kennedy presidency.
John Dolan, the former boss of an East Coast detective agency, recalled visiting Los Angeles, shortly after Marilyn’s death, for a meeting of the Council of International Investigators. There, along with others, Dolan met Fred Otash. ‘Otash said,’ Dolan recalled, ‘that he had had a tap on Monroe’s phone, and supposedly did this tap for Joe DiMaggio.’ Victor Piscitello, a former president of the World Association of Detectives, was present at the same Los Angeles meeting. He too remembered the conversation with Otash.
If DiMaggio did commission a surveillance operation, however innocently, there was serious risk of a leak. Danoff, for example, said that he met mobsters Mickey Cohen and Johnny Roselli while working for Otash. DiMaggio himself, while doubtless interested in Marilyn for purely personal reasons, sometimes circulated in places and with people with disturbing associations.
Judith Campbell, who consorted with the President and Mafia boss Giancana at the same time, told how she once complained to Giancana that she could not get a reservation at the Plaza Hotel in New York. ‘Don’t worry,’ Giancana said. ‘When you get there, call Joe DiMaggio … he’ll get you into the Plaza.’
Marilyn’s former husband spent a good deal of time at Lake Tahoe, where he had an old friend in the gangster Skinny D’Amato, the manager of the Cal-Neva Lodge. D’Amato, interviewed in 1984, said he and DiMaggio had been close since the forties. He proudly pointed to numerous photographs of himself posing with DiMaggio.
Whatever their source, mobsters did learn at the time about the Kennedys and Marilyn. Phyllis McGuire, who was seeing Giancana all the time, said she knew about the affairs as they progressed. Skinny D’Amato told me, ‘I knew — we knew — about Monroe and the Kennedys, and about Robert especially, but I’m not going to be quoted on it. Imagine it, a friend of Frank Sinatra being quoted as saying what we knew about Marilyn.’ D’Amato, clearly a very sick man when interviewed, died soon afterward.
Arthur Balletti, a Florida wireman involved in another bugging operation commissioned by Giancana, said he learned in 1961 that Marilyn had met with the President at a house in Virginia, just outside Washington.
Teamsters’ leader Jimmy Hoffa is at the center of the most specific allegation that criminals obtained compromising information on Marilyn and Robert Kennedy. At the core of the story is Hoffa’s personal wireman, Bernard Spindel.
Spindel was a pioneer in the field of electronic eavesdropping. He saw war service with the
Spindel was a problem for Robert Kennedy. He was effective in protecting Hoffa, and expert at avoiding conviction himself. Kennedy had once tried to ‘turn’ Spindel, to get him to testify against Hoffa. The plan misfired, and from then on the two men detested each other.
Spindel is dead, but during research for this book I located Earl Jaycox, who was his assistant in 1962. A bluff man, who displayed no partisan feelings during extensive interviews, he appears to have been strictly a technician. ‘Some months before Marilyn Monroe died,’ Jaycox recalled, ‘Spindel showed me some tapes. I was in the dining room of his house at Holmes, New York. I remember he held up two tapes, and said, “I’ve got to give you copies of these, so you can keep a set.” He said they were tapes of conversations between Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy. There were two seven-inch reels, fifteen hundred feet of tape, which could contain twelve hours of conversation. … He said the tapes included conversations with both Kennedys.’
‘Spindel made it clear,’ said Jaycox, ‘that there had been a relationship with John Kennedy, and that there was a current one with Robert Kennedy.’
After Marilyn’s death, said Jaycox, he was working in New York on security inspections for Fabergé, the perfume company, which had premises not far from Marilyn’s old apartment on East 57th Street. He said, ‘Bernie made mention to me rather gleefully that he’d just received all the toll receipts for calls going from Marilyn’s apartment. …’ Jaycox said Spindel had originals of the toll receipts, and that they showed calls to Robert Kennedy in Washington. Though the toll receipts involved only Bobby Kennedy, Spindel’s tapes, as Jaycox understood it, covered conversations with the President as well.