frail. She was almost a little weighty. What was so striking about her was that she had Marilyn’s face. But more significantly, she had Marilyn’s laugh. I couldn’t get over the laughter.
“En route to her apartment, I decided that I would only call her daughter Norma Jeane, not Marilyn. So for the hour and a half I was there, I called her Norma Jeane. But she called her Marilyn. She was very intense on the subject of Christian Science. She gave me a bunch of pamphlets before we left. She asked me to call her back, and I did. Gladys’s displeasure with Marilyn’s profession was very evident to me. She called it the moving picture industry. In fact, she said her work, what she did as a Christian Scientist, was ‘diametrically opposed to what Marilyn was doing in the moving picture industry.’ She said that she never wanted Marilyn to be in that business, but, as she put it, ‘I never told her one way or the other. I never told her a word.’ ”
Gladys continued to live in Florida, spending infrequent time with her daughter Berniece—at her own decision—for many more years. She was known to ride a tricycle around town with a red flag on the handlebars that read, “Danger.” Around 1977, she finally began receiving money from the estate of Marilyn Monroe.
Gladys Baker Eley died of heart failure in Gainesville on March 11, 1984—almost twenty-two years after her famous daughter. She was eighty-three years old.
PERSPECTIVE: MARILYN AND THE KENNEDYS
Six months. That’s all it was, just six months. It would appear that Marilyn Monroe’s in-depth experiences with the Kennedys comprised just six months out of thirty-six years of her life. Despite such a brief span of time, a plethora of books and documentaries have resulted that have sought to stretch those months into many years and, thereby, make them the central focus of all sorts of romantic intrigue and FBI espionage. However, fresh research now establishes that it’s simply not true. Of course, it’s always possible that two people can slip away and have secret rendezvous that no one else could ever know about. That’s a little harder to do when the two people are as high-profile as Marilyn Monroe and either of the Kennedy brothers. That said, here is all we know with absolute certainty based on fresh research for this book:
Marilyn met JFK at a dinner party in the 1950s. She met him again at the Democratic Convention in July of 1960. Those meetings were passing and perfunctory.
A year and a half went by.
Then the six-month time clock began:
Marilyn met Bobby Kennedy on February 2, 1962, at Pat and Peter Lawford’s home.
She saw JFK in March 1962 at a dinner party in New York.
She slept with JFK on March 24 and possibly March 25, at Bing Crosby’s home.
She performed at JFK’s birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden in May 1962.
She saw Bobby at another dinner party at Pat and Peter Lawford’s in June 1962.
Other than telephone calls she placed to JFK—which he apparently did not take—and to Bobby—which he and his secretary apparently did take—that’s it. Anything else just cannot be proven. Of course, that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. JFK and Bobby could also have been secretly living in her guesthouse, too—and that can’t be proven or dis-proven either.
Over the years, so much has been said and written about these colorful characters, it’s become accepted wisdom that Marilyn was romantically involved with both brothers. However, this writer interviewed Peter Lawford in 1981—before most of the fiction about Marilyn and the Kennedys took root—and was told, “All of this business about Marilyn and JFK and Bobby is pure crap. I think maybe—and I’m saying
But then, of course, a number of years later, an ex-wife of Peter’s came forward and added to the confusion. She said that Peter finally confessed all to her “when he was kind of high.” The next day, Peter was so confused about what he may have said while up on his cloud, he called the ex-wife and told her to just forget about all of it. He was stoned and, he observed, “Who knows what I was talking about?” Of course, she didn’t forget. However, to take the secondhand recollection of someone who was “kind of high” as gospel truth is perhaps not the wisest course of action in matters so historical.
Sadly, Peter Lawford—a kindhearted even if conflicted man who many say would never have betrayed a friend—has been widely quoted about Marilyn and the Kennedys decades after his death. It’s as if the man couldn’t stop talking about them during the last months of his life. But did he really make all of those statements, especially to ex-wives? “If you knew Peter like I knew Peter,” Dean Martin told this writer when I wrote a book about Frank Sinatra, “you would know that he would never have said those things about Marilyn and the Kennedys—
Of course, it’s easy to see how Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers became eternally linked to so many sensational and lurid tales. The confluence of these powerful and historical men with one of the most legendary movie stars of her time has been too compelling to ignore. The Kennedy regime was viewed as a special time in history—Camelot, it was called after the fact—during which idealistic men came into power with an eye toward changing the way people thought of government. Both brothers were known philanderers, though it wasn’t reported at the time because, pre-Watergate, the press was much more protective of those in government. Marilyn’s publicist Michael Selsman recalls, “I spent a lot of time saying to reporters, ‘The president? What? You must be joking!’ Knowing all the while that it was true. I was also good with, ‘Pills? What pills?’ And, ‘Drinking? Of course not. Marilyn is just a social drinker.’ ”
Sometimes, though, JFK’s nature was at least suggested in the press, and as a result, innuendo about him and Marilyn can be traced all the way back to 1960. For instance, in July of that year, after learning that Marilyn had been asking questions to her friends about Kennedy’s policies, Art Buchwald wrote, “Let’s be firm on the Monroe Doctrine. Who will be the next ambassador to Monroe? This is one of the many problems which president-elect Kennedy will have to work on in January. Obviously, you can’t leave Monroe adrift. There are too many people eyeing her, and now that Ambassador Miller has left, she could flounder around without any direction.” Such wink- and-nod reporting was going on way back in 1960 where JFK and Marilyn were concerned, and she’d only met him twice by that time.
One of the major leaps toward national fascination where this subject is concerned happened in the 1970s with a lavish Marilyn Monroe biography by Norman Mailer that actually involved the Kennedys in her death and, for the first time, linked Marilyn with Bobby. Of course, rumors about whether or not Marilyn had been murdered didn’t begin in the 1970s. Michael Selsman put it this way: “The rumor that Marilyn had been murdered happened immediately after she died. Within five minutes of her body being found. The first thought was, ‘Is there a movie in this?’ That’s this town [Hollywood].” When this writer spoke to Mailer, though, he indicated that he wasn’t proud of his murder theory. “Not my best work,” he said of his book, “and not my best research. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have allowed its publication.” He’d also said that he “needed the money” and that this was why he allowed to be published details about Marilyn and the Kennedys that were not verified, and that have gone on to be considered fact. That’s difficult to believe of a gifted Pulitzer Prize winner, yet apparently true. After Mailer’s book was published another came forth from syndicated gossip columnist Earl Wilson, which was the first to formally reveal that Marilyn and JFK had been in a sexual relationship. That work opened the floodgates, and since that time there have been many, many books whose premise has been different variations on the Kennedy theme. Truly, stories involving Marilyn and the Kennedys have been circulating for many decades.
Also being written about for just about as long as Marilyn has been dead are the many different tapes that supposedly exist implicating people in her death. If one is to believe all that has been published in the last few decades—and entire books have been published based on these supposed recordings—poor Marilyn was being bugged by everyone from the Teamsters, the FBI, the CIA, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys, and the Mafia to her own movie studio, 20th Century-Fox. The woman must have had so many different wires and recording devices in her homes, it’s a wonder she was able to get a decent radio or TV signal. Even her answering service was supposedly tapped. She wasn’t the only one, of course. Peter and Pat Lawford, the Kennedys, Frank, Sammy, Dean… all of them were supposedly also the subject of wiretapping that resulted in audio documentation of a plethora of shocking secrets. There’s even supposed to be a tape recording of Marilyn and Bobby Kennedy having a violent argument just hours before her death over a diary in which she supposedly kept all of the secrets of state revealed to her by the Kennedy brothers. “I want that diary, Marilyn.
The fact of the matter is that no matter how many people claim to have heard these tapes—and there are dozens—until the rest of us have the opportunity to do so, they simply don’t matter. “You could hear the voices of
