This letter (which was found by Marilyn’s business manager, Inez Nelson, after Marilyn’s death) has been used several times over the years to support the claim of an affair between Marilyn and Bobby. There are a few problems with it, though. The way Kennedy women operated, they didn’t confirm the affairs had by the men in the family. They ignored them. They certainly didn’t cheerily write about them in correspondence, committing to paper what could one day be used against them. The family members were always cognizant of their place in history and knew that whatever they said, did, or wrote could one day become part of the historical record. That said, it is strange that Jean Smith would have written the note at all, knowing that it could be one day misinterpreted if read by someone other than Marilyn. She would have done it only if she truly thought the story was so absurd that no one would take it seriously, even with the passing of time. Of course, another possibility is that the letter is a forgery. Comparing the handwriting to that of Smith, it appears to be legitimate. The fact that it’s not dated, though, makes it impossible to place it in the proper time context. Whatever questions there are about this letter, its mere existence is a primary reason it’s so widely believed Marilyn and Bobby were “the new item!”
It’s clear that Bobby Kennedy regarded Marilyn with at least a little affection and that she felt the same way about him. The two did have telephone conversations. “He didn’t mind talking to her,” said George Smathers, a longtime Kennedy political ally and a former governor of Florida and U.S. senator from that state. “There was no harm in it. She was sad and lonely and she would call, so, yeah, he would talk to her and calm her down. There was no affair with Bobby, though. I can tell you that Ethel had her doubts at first, only because the rumors started right away. But Bobby told Ethel they were not true and she believed him. Marilyn had it in her head that she wanted to be First Lady—JFK’s wife—not Bobby’s. She wasn’t interested in Bobby that way. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Ed Guthman was a good friend of Robert Kennedy’s and was with him and Marilyn on at least two occasions. “I know there was no affair,” he maintains. “It’s not even a question in my mind. I was there. I saw what was going on. And I’m telling you that there was no affair.” Another close friend of RFK’s, Kenneth O’Donnell, said, “I knew this man as well as anybody. I was intimately associated with him for years and knew everything he ever did, and I know for a fact that this Marilyn Monroe story is absolute bullshit.” Pat Newcomb—admittedly not the most reliable source for information considering that her job as Monroe’s publicist was to protect her—also weighed in on journalists who have bought into the Marilyn-Bobby romance: “Are they crazy? I knew Bobby very well, better than Marilyn did in a lot of ways. However, you didn’t even have to know him well to know that he would never have left Ethel. And with all of those children? Come on!”
“Let me be clear,” added Milt Ebbins, who of course knew Marilyn and RFK. “Marilyn was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a slut. What kind of character would she have, going from one brother to the next? She was a sexual creature, yes, but she would not have done it. I’m certain it never happened.”
Peter Lawford’s friend Joseph Naar concluded, “When I hear Bobby Kennedy was her lover, I say, ‘bullshit.’ Absolute and complete bullshit.”
One more anecdote about Marilyn and Bobby comes from a Kennedy relative who requested anonymity, “because this is still such a sore subject with the family.” She was married to one of the family members, though— she will allow that much. She says that she called Pat Kennedy Lawford in the spring of 1962 to ask if she had heard the stories about Marilyn and Bobby. “Okay, this has got to stop right here,” Pat said, annoyed. “Either Marilyn is making up stories about Bobby in order to get Jack to change his mind about her, or she’s doing it to show Jack what he’s missing—or maybe both. Either way, it’s adolescent behavior and I will talk to her about it. I asked Bobby very specifically if something was going on with Marilyn and Jack,” she added. “He said he did not feel comfortable answering that question. I then asked him if anything was going on between him and Marilyn. He said absolutely not. And I believe him.”
Of course, it can be said that for every person who believes the affair didn’t happen, there are bound to be people who believe it did—including a number of FBI agents, it would seem.
Because of the ongoing contentious relationship between Bobby Kennedy, who as the attorney general was head of the Justice Department, and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, who considered the younger Kennedy an upstart and not someone he wanted to answer to, it is entirely possible that promulgating and perpetuating the “romance” between Bobby and Marilyn was a campaign of disinformation ordered by Hoover, a notorious lover of gossip, making it up and spreading it. Actually, some of the FBI’s files on Kennedy and Monroe sound as if they were written by a lovesick schoolgirl, especially in that the key players are described by their first names. One missive, released in October 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, notes that “Robert Kennedy was deeply involved emotionally with Marilyn Monroe.” The relationship is described as “a romance and sex affair.” The paperwork reports that Bobby “has repeatedly promised to divorce his wife to marry Marilyn. Eventually, Marilyn realized that Bobby had no intention of marrying her.” According to whom, though? The “former special agent” who wrote the report and whose name is deleted admits that he doesn’t know the source for the information, nor can he vouch for its authenticity. However that didn’t stop his report from being duly documented in the FBI’s files, on October 19, 1964.
One question that’s never asked in regard to Marilyn’s invitation to perform for the president is this:
Perhaps Marilyn needed the president in her life now more than ever. After all, she was rattled at this time by a series of events that had occurred just a month earlier.
In February, Marilyn had gone to Mexico to purchase furnishings for her new home. While she was there with Pat Newcomb and Eunice Murray, it again became clear that she was being followed by FBI agents. It couldn’t have been a more ludicrous pursuit. The agents had it in their heads that she was involved with someone named Fred Vanderbilt Field, who had apparently served nine months in prison for not naming Communist friends. He moved to Mexico in 1953. Now, all these years later, a friend of a friend introduced him and his wife to Marilyn and—voila!— the FBI was tracking her every move in Mexico. For a woman who was already thought to be borderline paranoid schizophrenic by her doctor, such pursuit had to have been extremely frightening.
There are actually many allegations presented as fact in the FBI files concerning Monroe and Field, none of which appear to be true and none of which therefore are worth enumeration. In these same FBI files that detail her every move in Mexico, there is mention of her meeting with Bobby Kennedy in October 1961. She was definitely being watched—and she knew it.
At about this same time, Marilyn was in desperate trouble with 20th Century-Fox. In April and May 1962, as
