The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

connections—and is there any doubt that a man as shrewd and savvy as Bobby knew about them, too? Still, in February 1962, his investigation of the underworld was completed and a report compiled by the Justice Department. Basically, it claimed that Sinatra was in so deep with the mob, he was practically running his own little syndicate.

Matters became even darker for Sinatra when, on February 27, 1962, FBI agents reported to J. Edgar Hoover that a woman named Judith Campbell Exner was sleeping with President Kennedy. Exner was one of the many girlfriends of leading Mafia kingpin Sam Giancana. It didn’t take long for Hoover to figure out that Sinatra was the one who had introduced all these notorious players to one another. Finally, the FBI got it right!

As JFK had mentioned to Marilyn, he was scheduled to stay with Sinatra at his Palm Springs home. As it happened, Sinatra idolized JFK (whom he referred to as TP—The President) just about as much as he did any mobster he knew. Sinatra had spanking new cottages built on the property for JFK’s visit. He also hung pictures of the Kennedys all over the main house, and even put up a gold plaque in the president’s bedroom that said, “John F. Kennedy Slept Here.” He had new phone lines installed for the Secret Service as well as a new helipad.

However, Sinatra was in for a rude awakening. Bobby told his brother Jack that due to the circumstances of Frank’s mob ties, there was no way the president of the United States could stay in his home. JFK concurred. Of course, this sanctimonious reasoning was the height of hypocrisy, since one of the reasons Bobby and JFK agreed that Sinatra should be ostracized was because he was friends with Sam Giancana and his girlfriend, Judith Exner—a woman with whom JFK was having sex! “President Kennedy liked to live on the edge and he liked to take chances,” observed retired Secret Service agent Lawrence Newman, “and I think he was walking on the edge of issues that were dark and dangerous.”

Poor Peter Lawford was the guy chosen by Bobby to break the news to Sinatra. Peter never had a chance, especially when he told Frank where JFK would be sleeping in Palm Springs. As expected, Sinatra hung up on him. Then Sinatra dropped the phone to the floor. Staring out at the hot desert, he said to his valet, George Jacobs, “You want to know where he’s staying? Bing Crosby’s house, that’s where—and he’s a Republican!” After that, Frank dropped Peter from two upcoming Rat Pack films, Robin and the 7 Hoods and 4 for Texas. As far as he was concerned, Peter Lawford was history.

Pat Kennedy Lawford was angry about this turn of events. Lately, Frank hadn’t been on her list of favorite people anyway. That hadn’t always been the case, though. In fact, it had been due to Pat that Sinatra and Peter Lawford reconciled after a spat in the 1950s over (Sinatra’s) ex-wife, Ava Gardner. That argument marked the first time Sinatra gave Lawford the heave-ho and didn’t speak to him for a couple of years. But then he met Pat one night at a dinner party at actor Gary Cooper’s home in Holmby Hills. Even though she was pregnant, she and Frank flirted a bit. Apparently, it then occurred to Sinatra that his former friend, Lawford, was actually married to one of the daughters of a family that had the potential to become one of the most powerful in the world. Sinatra always had his sights set on getting into politics and began to hope that the Kennedy family might assist him in that regard. The next thing everyone in his circle knew—voila!—he and Peter Lawford were best pals again. When Pat had the baby, sure enough, she and Peter named the girl Victoria Francis—after Francis Sinatra. Pat even put up her own Kennedy dollars to option the script of Ocean’s 11, thinking it would star Peter with Frank. But guess who ended up starring in it? Frank. With Dean, Sammy, oh, and… Peter. “But after what Sinatra did to Peter where JFK was concerned, she was done with him for good,” concluded her friend Pat Brennan.

Marilyn’s Weekend with the President

On Saturday morning, March 24, 1962, Marilyn prepared for her date with presidential destiny.

As the plumbing wasn’t functioning at her home, Marilyn had to race over to Dr. Greenson’s to wash her hair on the morning of the twenty-fourth. Then she returned to her own home and got dressed. Meanwhile, Peter Lawford paced back and forth in her living room waiting for her to finish so that he could drive her to the desert. That Peter was still involved in any of this business suggests he was hopelessly hooked to the Kennedy-Sinatra- Monroe story and really didn’t want it to end for him. Marilyn finally emerged from the bathroom with a black wig over her newly washed and styled hair. Lawford and Monroe then made the two-hour drive to Palm Springs.

In order to comprehend how Marilyn felt about this date with the president, one has to understand the woman Marilyn had become, and what she was accustomed to in her life. She had been much sought after for many years, the poster girl for human sexuality in this country since the mid-1950s. She was long used to being the center of attention, to being the one focused on anytime she showed up at a party. In fact, it usually wasn’t a party until she showed up! Also, she was used to being around smart and powerful men—such as Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller—and also used to them falling for her. So, while one might have thought she would be thunderstruck by the idea of meeting the president of the United States for a date while his wife, the First Lady, was not on-site, that wasn’t really true. To her, it was… interesting—just another mad day in the mad life of a mad actress. This attitude is borne out by a couple of credible sources.

Diane Stevens from the John Springer office recalled, “I telephoned her on March 22 to ask her a question about Something’s Got to Give and said, ‘So, what have you got planned for the weekend?’ Very casually, she said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Palm Springs to spend the weekend with Frank Sinatra and Jack Kennedy.’ [Apparently, at this time, Marilyn didn’t know that the locale for the party had been changed.] She was so casual about it, it was a little strange. I said, ‘Wow! Marilyn, that’s really something.’ And she said, ‘Really? Is it?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah!’ And her reaction was, ‘Well, you know, Bobby and I have had a couple of dates’—which was news to me—‘and I met Jack in New York recently. He’s a nice guy, so I’m just going to go and see what happens.’ I hung up thinking to myself, wow. What a life!”

Philip Watson, who was a former Los Angeles county assessor, actually met Marilyn while she was with Kennedy in Palm Springs, and he says she seemed quite calm and casual wearing what he described as “kind of a robe thing.” He further recalled, “There were a lot of people poolside, and some people were wandering in and out of a rambling Spanish-style house. 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.” He added, “She obviously had a lot to drink. It was obvious they were intimate, that they were staying there together for the night.”

While Marilyn was with JFK in Palm Springs—Jackie was in India—she telephoned her friend Ralph Roberts. The three had a conversation that suggests that she and the president either didn’t understand how troubling it could be to so many people if word of their tryst got out, or they just didn’t care. Marilyn told Roberts that she was with “a friend” who was having certain back problems. The two—she and Roberts—had previously discussed certain muscle groups and she believed these were the specific areas troubling her friend. She also wanted to ask him about the solus muscle, which she had read about in a book called The Thinking Body by Mabel Ellsworth Todd. She wanted Roberts to talk to him. He agreed. The next thing he knew, he was talking to a man who sounding exactly like the president. They had a few words and Roberts hung up thinking that his friend Marilyn was, once again, up to no good. Later, she told him that it had most certainly been Kennedy and that he appreciated Roberts’s quick diagnosis of his back problem.

Marilyn spent two nights with President Kennedy. It’s not known that they were intimate on even one of those nights, let alone both. It can be presumed that they were, though, if only because JFK was used to having relations with a variety of beautiful women—and Marilyn was, no doubt, on top of any man’s list of most desirable women, especially in 1962. Also, for her part, Marilyn would have found it hard to resist Kennedy. He was strong, powerful, and good-looking. Not only that, he was the president. Indeed, to think that these two passionate people did not find themselves in the throes of passion would be a little naive. Rather, the question is whether it was on one or on both nights. As it would happen, though, this assignation would be the first and last for Marilyn where Jack Kennedy was concerned. “That was really the end of it,” Ralph Roberts recalled many years later. “She told me very specifically that they were together that one weekend, and that it was the only time. It wasn’t until many years later that I had begun hearing rumors to the contrary, but I just didn’t believe them because she was so specific in what she said back then when it happened.” Indeed, according to Roberts and a number of other credible sources, including Secret Service agents whose job it was to keep track of the president’s