The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

said, grabbing a pen and paper. “I don’t want to have anything to do with this.” She wrote down a number and handed the paper to Marilyn. After taking it, Marilyn asked Pat if she were angry at her. Without specifically addressing what she now knew happened in Palm Springs between her friend and her brother, Pat was still able to be painfully clear. According to what she later recalled, Pat said, “I can get past it. You and I will be able to continue our friendship. But my family? My sisters and my sisters-in-law? I don’t know… I just don’t know.”

It’s not known if Marilyn used the number she got from Pat Kennedy Lawford to call President Kennedy’s private residence. However, something did occur at this same time that suggests that she may have done so, for it was in the spring of 1962 that Kennedy dispatched his attorney general, Bobby Kennedy, to inform Marilyn that she was not to call the White House. Also, he was told to make it clear that the relationship—or whatever it was she thought she had with him—was over, and that she should move on with her life. Bobby gave Marilyn the message.

An Overdose Because of JFK?

On April 10, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was scheduled to meet with the screenwriter of Something’s Got to Give, Henry Weinstein. The day before, while at Fox for makeup and costume tests, she looked absolutely beautiful and performed quite well for many hours. However, for her follow-up meeting with Weinstein, she was late. That wasn’t surprising. When he telephoned her to find out when she might be arriving, he was alarmed to find that there was no answer. After repeated attempts, she finally picked up the phone. “Oh, I’m just fine…” she told him. However, she didn’t sound “fine” to him at all. Her voice was slurred and she seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness. Alarmed, Weinstein told her that he would be right over and hung up. Then he called Dr. Greenson and the two rushed to Marilyn’s Brentwood home. There they found her in bed, out cold.

“She was almost naked,” Weinstein recalled. “And she was almost dead, as far as I could see. She was at least in a drug coma. I couldn’t imagine what it was that had happened, why she did this to herself. The fact that she had been so upbeat one day and then in this state the next day was very disconcerting. Somehow, Dr. Greenson revived her. I was so shaken, I could not get over it. He kept coming over to me and saying, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll be fine. She’ll be fine.’ It was as if he had seen this so many times, he was not alarmed by it. But for me, it was traumatic.”

Later, it was determined that Marilyn had taken what could have amounted to a deadly combination of Nembutal, Demerol, chloral hydrate, and Librium. “Immediately afterward, I tried to get Fox to delay the movie. I said, ‘Look, this girl is in no shape to make a movie. She needs time. She’s very sick. She has severe mental problems.’ The studio said, ‘No. The movie goes on. If we had stopped production of a film every time Marilyn Monroe had a crisis, we would never have gotten a single movie out of her.’

“I don’t think I ever got over the shock of finding her that way,” said Weinstein. “You don’t get past something like that easily. I spent hours trying to understand what had gone so wrong. I thought, well, [George] Cukor hadn’t shown up to direct the costume tests the day before and maybe she was unhappy about that. Maybe she thought it was a slap in the face, or a rejection. But… I don’t know… it had to be something more.”

It was something more. One source who was close to Marilyn Monroe at that time and who asked for anonymity rather than risk the possibility of retaliation from any member of the Kennedy family summed it up this way: “JFK. That’s what was wrong. She’d just been jilted by the president of the United States. Do you really think that after all she’d been through with moviemaking she was going to try to kill herself because a director hadn’t shown up for a day’s work at the studio? It was Kennedy. That’s why. Kennedy.”

Were Marilyn and Bobby “The New Item”?

It was clear to Marilyn that President John Kennedy was finished with her. There wasn’t much she could do about it, especially since he was not going to take her calls. However, a very popular story concerning Marilyn and the Kennedys claims the following: When Bobby told Marilyn Jack was done with her, he couldn’t help himself and he, too, ended up falling for her. The two then had a passionate affair and Marilyn felt more strongly about him than she had about his brother. This scenario has been repeated in countless books over the years by many respected historians. Could this have happened? Were these people just that capricious and, dare it be said, foolish? Well, actually, in many ways, they were… but, that said, it simply doesn’t appear to be true. New research now reveals that Bobby, who—at least at first—apparently decided to not be quite as coldhearted as his brother, felt sorry about the way Marilyn had been treated. He had enjoyed the times he met her, thought she was witty and intelligent as well as beautiful, and didn’t feel the need to be cruel to her. “I think he told her, look, don’t call the White House, call me,” said the veteran entertainer Andy Williams, who was one of RFK’s best friends. “Bob was that way. He was a compassionate person. He wasn’t a jerk. He had no reason to be mean to the poor woman. I mean, why would he do that? What was the harm in giving her a friendly shoulder to lean on when she was in so much trouble?”

At around this time, Marilyn did indeed tell certain people that she and Bobby were involved. These people, of course, believed her. It’s interesting in that many of them never believed anything she ever said about anything else, but this, they believed. Could she really be trusted, though? Was she a reliable source for this kind of information, especially in the last six months of her life when she was in such a desperate emotional state and also addicted to drugs? Remember, this is a woman who first began creating fictions about herself years earlier. In 1958, for instance, she made this statement to a reporter: “When I lived with the minister and his wife, they told me that if I went to a movie on a Sunday, God would strike me dead. The first time I dared to sneak away and go to a Sunday movie, I was scared stiff to come out. When I did, it was raining. There was thunder and lightning and I ran all the way home, expecting to be dead any minute. Even after I was home and in bed underneath the covers, I was terrified.” Marilyn never lived with a minister and his wife—she was obviously speaking of the Bolenders, with whom she lived during the first seven years of her life. If anyone believed Ida would have let her out of her sight at that age long enough for her to “sneak away” to the movies—about two miles from the Bolenders’ home—they did not know Ida very well. As we’ve seen time and time again, for a variety of reasons, Marilyn often embellished the truth, and not just to the press, which would have been an acceptable form of public relations, but to her friends as well. Her publicist Pat Newcomb put it this way: “Marilyn told several people a lot of things, but she never told anybody everything.” Indeed, just as recently as a few months earlier she had told many of her friends that she and Bobby Kennedy were about to go on “a date.” It turned out, of course, that it was a dinner party attended by many others, not a date.

Still, some people were very convinced that she was in love with Bobby, even Michael Selsman, who was another in a string of publicists. “Oh, please, of course it was true,” he says. “Everyone knew it even then, but the press was much more protective. It was our job to steer them away from it, anyway. But she couldn’t stop talking about it. With Bobby, it was more serious than with JFK.”

“Sometimes I think, yes, Bobby did end up with Marilyn Monroe,” says Andy Williams. “But then I think, wait. Based on what? I know he never told me. Ethel never told me, and she’s one of my best friends. Not that Bobby was a saint. He was like the Kennedys when it came to women. I know that Ethel was aware of it and, in some ways, maybe didn’t have a problem with it. She would call me and say, ‘Bobby is coming to town. Will you have him to dinner? And find the best-looking girl for him, as a dinner partner?’ But where Bobby and Marilyn are concerned, the only people I ever heard that from was from those who, I guess, heard it from Marilyn. And now, all of these years later, I have to say I don’t know… I never met the woman and wouldn’t want to be critical of her but I think she was telling tales.”

Then again, maybe she wasn’t the only one. Consider this very strange letter Marilyn received after meeting Bobby Kennedy, from his own sister, Jean Kennedy Smith: