The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

to-earth, especially when one considers how big a star she was at the time. Her home was quite modest, just a few rooms. It wasn’t any bigger than the house the Bolenders owned in which she was raised. In fact, it was smaller! Yet she had no reservations at all about showing it off to Bobby Kennedy, a wealthy man who lived in an absolute mansion in Virginia on a sprawling estate. Her home was her home, and she was proud of it—no matter how small and inconsequential it may have seemed to outsiders—and she was eager to show it off. There were bigger concerns, she felt, than how much money she had or how well she displayed it. And in terms of housing, she was working on a more important structure. “As a person, my work is important to me,” she said during an interview this very same month. “My work is the only ground I’ve ever had to stand on. Acting is very important. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation. But I’m working on the foundation.”

After just about a half hour, during which they sipped on glasses of sherry, the foursome got into Lawford’s car and then drove to their oceanfront home. At the end of the evening, Bobby Kennedy’s driver took back Marilyn Monroe back home—alone.

The Lost Weekend

Pat Kennedy Lawford didn’t know what to do about Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t know if the stories she had heard through the grapevine about her brothers and her friend were true. Marilyn had definitely been saying that she was dating Bobby. However, Pat knew that one of those “dates” had actually been a dinner party at her home in her brother’s honor, and that Marilyn had just been a guest. Whom could she believe? Certainly Marilyn had never been the most reliable source of information. She also couldn’t depend on her brothers to tell her the truth. After all, it wasn’t as if the Kennedy men were ever honest about their indiscretions. One thing seemed true, though. Bobby had told Marilyn to stop pestering his brother Jack, and she was very unhappy about it. Had she built up her in her mind her relationship with JFK to be something it wasn’t? And if so, maybe she did have the poor judgment to somehow end up sexually involved with Bobby. By this time, it was beginning to seem as if anything was possible, everyone’s reality was just that skewed. “It was as if we were all caught in Marilyn’s nightmare,” said one Kennedy relative. “Everything sort of satellited around Marilyn’s sickness and no one knew what was true and what wasn’t, who was lying and who wasn’t.”

Desperate for some direction, Pat Kennedy Lawford telephoned Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press aide. ^* “I told her, Pat, you should know better than to believe this nonsense,” he recalled years later. “She said, ‘Honest to God, Frank, I don’t know what to believe anymore between what I hear Marilyn is saying and what everyone else is saying.’ I said, ‘Well, hear what I’m saying, Pat. It’s not true. If it was, I would know and I don’t, so it’s not true.’ She was so grateful. She said, ‘Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much.’ ”

At this same time, Frank Sinatra called Pat—unusual, in that they seldom spoke—to say that he was sorry he had targeted her husband after President Kennedy decided not to stay at the Sinatra home in Palm Springs. He said that he wanted to invite the Lawfords to his resort, the Cal-Neva Lodge, for the weekend. (Though Frank and Peter were still not on good terms, for business reasons better left to a Peter Lawford biographer to explain, they tolerated each other from time to time.) Sinatra told Pat that he was performing in the main room and singers Buddy Greco and Roberta Linn were working in the lounge.

Cal-Neva, located exactly on the California–Nevada border, boasted a beautiful showroom (where the same performers who frequented Las Vegas—Frank’s friends, for the most part—appeared), an enormous dining room, plus about twenty furnished cottages that cost about fifty dollars a day. The luxurious gambling casinos were located on the Nevada side of the compound. It was advertised as “Heaven in the High Sierras.” Pat was against the idea of flying to Nevada to see Sinatra. However, she felt she had to at least mention the invitation to her husband. He, of course, couldn’t wait to go. If Frank wanted to mend fences, Peter was going to be at his side with a hammer and nails. “Pat and Peter had a bit of a disagreement about it,” said Milt Ebbins. “All I can tell you is that Pat didn’t want to go and Peter said, ‘We can not turn down an invitation by Frank Sinatra. If Frank wants us there, we have to go.’ Pat hated hearing that kind of stuff from Peter. But she buckled, and they went.” Marilyn also said she would like to go. Upset about something that had just occurred with her mother at Rock Haven—it’s unknown what, exactly—she said she could use a weekend away.

Therefore, against Pat’s better judgment, she, Peter, and Marilyn departed for Nevada on July 27, 1962, in a private plane provided by Sinatra and copiloted by Dan Arney. “She had no makeup on,” Arney recalled of Marilyn, “and I didn’t realize who she was until we got into the airport and George [Jacobs, Sinatra’s valet] came out in the station wagon and said, ‘You know, that’s Marilyn.’ ”

When the trio—Peter, Pat, and Marilyn—arrived, Sinatra greeted them and then installed Marilyn in Chalet 52, one of the quarters he always reserved for special guests. He then asked Peter and Pat to leave so that he could have some time with Marilyn. George Jacobs says that Frank had heard she was “having a crisis” in her life and wanted to know more about it. “He knew what was going on,” said Jacobs, “I think, with the Kennedy business. Or, at least he heard rumors. He knew she was upset. He wanted to know more.”

Mickey Rudin—who was both Marilyn’s and Frank’s attorney —said in 1996, “Frank is a very, very compassionate person. He brought Marilyn to Cal-Neva to give her a little fun, a little relief from her problems. If she was upset during the time, well, she could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung. She could have had an imagined crisis, in fact.”

However, Joe Langford, a Sinatra security employee at Cal-Neva, said that Marilyn’s crisis that weekend seemed to not be of the imagined variety suggested by Mickey Rudin. “When Frank saw her, he was pretty shocked at how depressed she was,” he recalled. “As soon as he got her settled in, he got on the phone with her psychiatrist [presumably Dr. Greenson] and started in on the guy. ‘What the hell kind of treatment are you giving her? She’s a mess. What is she paying you for? Why isn’t she in a sanitarium?’ He hadn’t seen her in a while and he couldn’t believe how broken-down she was.”

It’s true that Sinatra was known to have great concern for his friends. However, that said, one of the biggest problems with him was that he also had terrible judgment when it came to some of those friends—many of whom were underworld characters. Moreover, he didn’t seem to care whom he exposed his mob pals to, which was one of the big problems at Cal-Neva that weekend. About three hours after Pat and Peter Lawford arrived with Marilyn, they found a surprise waiting for them in the Cal-Neva lobby: Sam Giancana, one of the world’s leading gangsters, who was deeply involved in all sorts of underworld activity, some of it reputedly having to do with the Kennedy brothers. As it happened, Sinatra had sent his private jet back to Los Angeles to pick him up and bring him to Cal- Neva. For Sinatra to have invited him to the resort at the same time as the president’s sister and her husband made no sense. Naturally, Pat was upset. She wanted to turn around and fly right back to Los Angeles. In fact, according to a witness, as soon as she saw Giancana, she said, “That’s it. We have to go.”

Peter, who seemed embarrassed because Pat had spoken loudly enough to have been heard by Giancana, walked over to the mobster and shook his hand, then began conversing with him. The two repeatedly glanced at Marilyn while they spoke, as if they were taking about her. Because Marilyn just looked at Giancana with a dazed expression, it’s not known if she recognized him or not. “I don’t feel well,” she told Pat. “I can’t fly again. We can’t leave now.”

Pat put her arm around Marilyn’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear. However, whatever she said upset Marilyn. “I don’t care,” she said, now raising her voice. “I don’t care about any of it. I just need to go and lie down, right now. Take me to my room, Pat. Right now.”

With that, Peter walked quickly over to the two women and said something to them in an angry tone. Pat gave him a long, piercing look. Then, without saying a word to him, she led her friend away, her hand on the actress’s elbow.

Roberta Linn, who was entertaining at Cal-Neva along with Frank Sinatra and Buddy Greco, recalled, “I remember that her hair was in disarray the entire time, sometimes hidden under a scarf. She was very sad and she seemed out of it. She was at Sinatra’s show every night—he was performing in the main room, and she would sit in the back looking very unhappy. I thought it was such a shame, this girl who had everything in the world, yet nothing, really. It was very hard to see her in this condition.”

Sinatra’s friend Jim Whiting recalled, “Jilly [Rizzo, another close friend of Sinatra’s] told me that Marilyn had some kind of bad reaction to alcohol while she was at Cal-Neva. It sounded like alcohol poisoning to me. She was