The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“Well, we decided it would be best if Christopher had his own apartment across the street.”

“What? How old was he?”

“Well, he was about two months old, actually. So, anyway, we rented an apartment for him and the nanny and he slept over there. It was just a lot easier on everyone.”

Indeed, Pat Kennedy Lawford was of a rare breed. Her story about Christopher aside, she was the best mother she knew how to be to her children. Of course, the Lawfords had a live-in nanny, but when the brood was a little older Pat would give the nanny one week off a month so that she could be a full-time mom to them. She would turn the clocks ahead an hour so that the kids would go to sleep a little earlier—but after spending the day running after four small children she probably figured she deserved the break.

Then there was this story:

“You will never guess what my dad gave me when I turned twenty-five.”

“A new outfit?” Marilyn asked.

“No, guess again.”

“A car?

“Nope. Guess again.”

“What? What?

“One million dollars,” Pat said with an impish grin.

Again, Marilyn couldn’t believe her ears. “But why?” she asked.

Pat laughed. “Oh, who knows? I guess because he loved me. It was quite generous, wasn’t it?” ^*

Marilyn had to agree.

The friendship with Pat had an interesting dynamic in that Pat wanted to share it with others while Marilyn chose to keep it to herself. “She liked Pat, I know that much, but other than that, I don’t know a lot,” said Ralph Roberts. “She was not effusive when it came to Pat. I remember thinking that it was mostly a telephonic relationship. I think Marilyn began to call her when she had problems—as she did all of us. And I think Pat enjoyed that. I think she wanted to help Marilyn, though I’m not sure why except that, well… everyone wanted to help Marilyn. She had that kind of vulnerability that made you want to take care of her, and I think Pat Kennedy Lawford was struck by it, too.”

In July 1960, Pat invited Marilyn to be present when her brother, John F. Kennedy, accepted the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. Marilyn wasn’t sure she could make it. She said she had prior commitments with The Misfits. However, Pat told her that if she missed it she would be “missing something very historical.” So Marilyn agreed that she would be there. She would be out of town, she said, but she would fly in for the convention and fly right back out that night.

On the night of July 15, 1960, Marilyn and many other celebrities joined a packed house at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles and watched in rapt attention as John Kennedy spoke of his New Frontier. “The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises,” he intoned, “it is a set of challenges, it sums up not what I intend to offer of the American people but what I intend to ask them.” His aide Peter Summers, who was responsible for coordinating much of the television coverage of Kennedy’s campaign, recalled, “It was a magical moment like no other I can remember. When he came to the podium, the applause was thunderous but then, as he spoke, you could hear a pin drop. Chills were going up and down your spine. Yes, Marilyn was in the audience, along with many other stars. That night, I think a strong friendship began to develop between her and Jack Kennedy. She was free, but Jack Kennedy wasn’t.”

Marilyn did see Kennedy backstage after his speech. It was Pat who introduced them. Actually Marilyn and JFK had met once before, in the 1950s at a dinner party, but hadn’t had a chance to talk or get to know one another. They wouldn’t on this night, either. There was too much going on—the scene was chaotic and Marilyn had to fly out of Los Angeles that night anyway. However, something strange did happen as a result of that evening. It was clear to some observers that the two were flirtatious toward one another, and there was concern about it. Because Kennedy was known for his voracious sexual appetite, red flags went up in his campaign quarters anytime he flirted with a movie star. “Some people on staff said products are sold by star endorsement,” Peter Summers recalled, “and that maybe a closeness [between JFK and Monroe] of this nature will be a benefit to him getting elected. The other side was that you’re not going to elect someone president who is perhaps ignoring his wife or cheating on his family. So, yes there was concern. Marilyn was spoken to very frankly about it. The president was spoken to very frankly about it. There was great concern at the time. It could have destroyed him.”

In fact, Marilyn was spoken to—by Pat. One Kennedy relative recalled, “What happened was that someone from the Kennedy campaign told Peter Lawford that JFK had been flirting with Marilyn. They wanted to nip it in the bud before something happened. Would he talk to Marilyn about it? Peter thought it was unfair to approach Marilyn Monroe with a warning since nothing had even occurred. Still, he decided to ask Pat to at least mention to her that there was concern about it. So, from my understanding of it, Pat called Marilyn and said, ‘Look, I know this is ridiculous, but everyone is going nuts because they think my brother was flirting with you the other night. Do you think he was?’ Marilyn said, ‘Well, of course he was. And I was flirting back. But it meant nothing. It was just flirting.’ Pat said, ‘Fine. I just wanted you to know that they were worried about it.’ Marilyn asked, ‘About what?’ And Pat said, ‘Just that something might happen between you and my brother, that’s all. It’s very silly.’ Marilyn agreed. ‘Oh Pat, that is silly,’ she said. ‘It’s just ridiculous.’ ”

The Misfits

By the end of July 1960, Marilyn Monroe was in Reno, Nevada, for location shooting on The Misfits, which, as it happened, was the last movie she would complete. Entire books have been written about the various miseries surrounding the production of this film. Suffice it to say, not one thing seemed to be in balance, not the least of which was Marilyn’s mental and physical condition, which continued to deteriorate by the day.

“The Misfits should never have happened,” Marilyn’s makeup artist, Allan “Whitey” Snyder, once said to the “All About Marilyn” fan club. “She wasn’t feeling well when they insisted on starting shooting, and there were so many script changes in her part that Arthur made so often, she became less and less happy with her role and character.” In another interview, he added, “The drugs had pretty much taken over by this time. She was having a terrible time. Everything was going wrong. It was like a snowball going down a mountain, the problems just accumulating.

“Marilyn and Arthur so loathed each other, I’m not sure how either of them got through this movie. Everyone felt the pressure of it all. Marilyn was more paranoid than ever before. She believed Arthur was having an affair with someone on the set, a script supervisor I believe. He wasn’t. After what had happened with Yves Montand, though, it was surprising that she was so angry. Everything was out of whack. He had written a movie that seemed very personal, that drew from elements of the real Marilyn’s personality and her relationship with him, so that made it even more difficult for her. Honest to God, there were lines in that movie that were right out of her experience with Arthur Miller. Why he did that, I don’t know. To be mean, maybe? I don’t know. Then he would change the lines just before she had to film them. He kept her off balance the entire time. To me, it felt like a punishment. I have never said that before, but that’s how I feel. I have bad memories of this time. It was as if Marilyn was close to the edge, and her husband was the one pushing her over it.”

Can Marilyn Monroe be considered Arthur Miller’s muse? Or was she more like a wounded, unwitting victim of the playwright’s exploitation? An examination of two of Miller’s literary creations—a play and a movie script—would seem to point to his former wife as having been a bit of both. In Miller’s 1964 play After the Fall, which opened at New York’s ANTA Washington Square Theatre in January 1964, only eighteen months after Marilyn’s death on August 7, 1962, the protagonist is a middle-aged lawyer ruminating upon his relationships with the three women in his life and how the marriages to two of them ended, the first in divorce, the second in the suicide of his wife, an actress, and the third a work in progress. Though Miller always denied the genesis of the play, if he thought of it at all, he must have acknowledged to his private self the parallels with events in his own life, not only concerning his women but also his personal experiences in the mid-1950s with HUAC’s