The audience roars with laughter at Lawford’s unwitting double entendre, little guessing that less than three months later, she’ll be dead.
But tonight, Monroe takes geishalike steps to the podium mic, literally sewn into her skintight dress, a white mink wrap slipping from her bare shoulders. The audience gasps at her “beads and skin” gold rhinestone gown designed by Academy Award–nominated, French-born Jean Louis and said to have cost twelve thousand dollars, enough to buy a dozen tickets to the show. In 2016, the dress became the “world’s most expensive” when Ripley’s Believe It or Not! acquired it at auction for more than five million dollars.
“It had been a noisy night, a very ‘rah rah rah’ kind of atmosphere,” recalls Life magazine photographer Bill Ray. “Then boom, on comes this spotlight. There was no sound. No sound at all. It was like we were in outer space. There was this long, long pause and finally, she comes out with this unbelievably breathy, ‘Happy biiiiirthday to youuuu,’ and everybody just went into a swoon.”
Despite raised eyebrows, Jackie tells her sister, Lee, “Life’s too short to worry about Marilyn Monroe.” Instead of attending Jack’s fundraiser, Jackie and the children are at the First Family’s Glen Ora estate outside Middleburg, Virginia, enjoying what she calls “a good clean life.” As spectators, including her husband, ogle Monroe at Madison Square Garden, Jackie is winning a third-place ribbon at the Loudon Hunt Horse Show.
Onstage, a giant birthday cake is rolled out as the president addresses the crowd. “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way,” he says, with the same mischievous grin he’s worn since Monroe sang her first note.
Later that evening, United Artists studio head Arthur Krim hosts a private reception for seventy-five at his town house at 33 East Sixty-Ninth Street, where official White House photographer Cecil Stoughton captures the only known photo of Marilyn, Bobby, and Jack together. Bobby is looking at Monroe’s face while the president’s back is to the camera.
Jean Kennedy Smith and her husband, Stephen, are in attendance at the Madison Square Garden event as well as at Arthur Krim’s reception, where White House photographers also capture Stephen posing alongside Monroe.
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., special assistant to the president, recalls that night as the first he and Bobby met Marilyn Monroe. “I do not think I have seen anyone so beautiful,” he says. “But one felt a terrible unreality about her—as if talking to someone under water. Bobby and I engaged in mock competition for her; she was most agreeable to him and pleasant to me—but then she receded into her own glittering mist.”
The next day, Jackie is furious—not with the president, but with his brother. “My understanding of it is that Bobby was the one who orchestrated the whole goddamn thing,” Jackie tells her sister-in-law over the telephone. “The Attorney General is the troublemaker here, Ethel. Not the President. So it’s Bobby I’m angry at, not Jack.”
* * *
Not long afterward—perhaps to celebrate JFK’s birthday of May 29 and Monroe’s, June 1—Patricia Lawford hosts a gathering at her beachfront home in California. Bobby and Marilyn Monroe meet again. The actress has been fired by Twentieth Century Fox for “spectacular absenteeism” from George Cukor’s Something’s Gotta Give, the never-completed film whose production came to a costly halt (Fox claimed two million dollars in losses) when Monroe traveled to New York to perform for the president.
In a letter dated “the early 1960s” when it went to auction in 2017, Jean Kennedy Smith writes to Monroe, “Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East!” (According to Kennedy biographer Laurence Leamer, Jean’s unhappiness in her own marriage to Kennedy “fixer” and reputed philanderer Stephen Smith is lifted by none other than Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist of the musical Camelot. Though Jean vehemently denies the affair, the Baltimore Sun quotes Leamer as saying, “I stand by my story.”
A “very often distraught” Monroe takes to phoning Bobby in Washington, and rumors swirl that the attorney general tries but fails to persuade the studio to rehire her. Yet although struggling actor Robert Slatzer (who in 1991 claims, without evidence of a marriage certificate, that he and Monroe were married for five days in 1952) quotes her as saying “Robert Kennedy promised to marry [me],” the actress herself denies a sexual relationship with Bobby. “I like him,” she tells her masseur Ralph Roberts, “but not physically.”
According to Florida senator George Smathers, Monroe is also making “some demands” of the president, and there are fears she’ll call a press conference to reveal details of a secret relationship. Smathers tells Seymour Hersh that he sent “a mutual friend” to “go talk to Monroe about putting a bridle on herself and on her mouth and not talking too much because it was getting to be a story around the country.”
Monroe has become a dangerous liability, going so far as to phone Jackie with the declaration that she was to become the second Mrs. Kennedy. Journalist Christopher Andersen reports Jackie responding, “Marilyn, you’ll marry Jack, that’s great. And you’ll move into the White House and you’ll assume the responsibilities of first lady, and I’ll move out and you’ll have all the problems.”
* * *
Shortly after 7:00 p.m., on Saturday, August 4, 1962, Peter Lawford receives a call from a woozy Monroe at his and Patricia’s Santa Monica mansion. “Say good-bye to Pat,” she instructs Lawford to tell his wife. “Say good-bye to Jack and say good-bye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.”
This conversation is the closest thing pointing to Monroe’s state of mind or intentions that day, though there’s only Lawford’s word for it—for although Monroe was a lifelong diarist, no recent diaries are later found in her house. Earlier diary entries, though, give clues to her fearful state of mind. In 1956, she wrote in a green leather diary of “the feeling of violence I’ve had lately about being afraid of Peter [Lawford] he might harm me, poison me, etc. why—strange look in his eyes—strange behavior.”
Neither are any tape recordings of her phone calls found—yet there ought to have been. After all, she’d paid for it to be done.
According to medical records released on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, two months earlier, on June 7, 1962, Monroe had made an emergency visit to Michael Gurdin, a UCLA plastic surgeon. She’d seen him previously, in 1958, under the name “Miller” (she’d been then married to playwright Arthur Miller, her third husband, though they’d divorced in 1961). Now using the alias “Joan Newman,” she arrives at Dr. Gurdin’s office with her longtime psychiatrist, Ralph Greenson, seeking treatment for “an accidental fall.” But Dr. Gurdin is skeptical. He tells a colleague that he “thought she [Monroe] was beaten up,” and discussed his suspicions that her psychiatrist had committed the abuse. Modern X-rays confirm “a minute fracture of the tip of the nasal bone.”
After that, Monroe contacts Fred Otash and requests he install a bug on her phone so she can record her own phone calls—possibly as insurance against threats or blackmail.