Seymour Hersh - The Dark Side of Camelot

Jack Kennedy emerged from West Virginia as the man to beat, but there were still many dangers that threatened his drive for the presidency. At least four women could control his destiny. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, the American film goddess whose affair with Kennedy had begun sometime before the 1960 election and would continue after he went to the White House.

Like his father, Jack Kennedy had a special fondness for Hollywood celebrities. The celebrated and gifted Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, emerged as a sex symbol in the early 1950s and worked her way through husbands, lovers, pills, liquor, and psychiatric hospitals until her death, apparently by accidental suicide, in August 1962. Some published accounts place the beginning of the Kennedy-Monroe relationship in the mid-1950s, as Monroe’s second marriage, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was unraveling and she was beginning a romance with the playwright Arthur Miller, who would become her third husband. Her affair with Kennedy was by all accounts in full bloom as the presidential campaign was getting under way. Many of their rendezvous were at the Santa Monica home of Peter and Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and sister, who were Monroe’s close friends. There has been published speculation that Monroe became pregnant by Kennedy and had an abortion in Mexico; the full story may never be known, but accounts of her affair and abortion have been published again and again since her suicide and his murder.

In interviews for this book, longtime friends and associates of Monroe and Kennedy acknowledged that the two stars, who both enjoyed living on the edge, shared a powerful, and high-risk, attraction to each other. “She was a beautiful actress,” George Smathers, Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told me. “Probably as pretty a woman as ever lived. And Jack—everybody knew he liked pretty girls. When he had the opportunity to meet Marilyn Monroe, why, he took advantage of it, and got to know her a little bit.” The attraction went beyond sex. Monroe had a quirky sense of humor and a tenacious desire to learn. “Marilyn made Jack laugh,” Patricia Newcomb, who worked as a publicist for Monroe in the early 1960s, explained in an interview for this book. There was also a family connection that went beyond the Lawfords. Charles Spalding, who was a trusted intimate of Kennedy’s by the late 1940s and remained so until the president’s assassination, clearly recalled a private visit by Monroe to the family enclave at Hyannis Port, where she was welcomed enthusiastically as a friend of Jack’s—even though he was married.

Monroe’s repeated crack-ups did not diminish her looks or her ability to appeal to men. “Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate glamour girl,” Vernon Scott, a longtime Hollywood reporter for United Press International, told me in an interview. “She was gorgeous and she was funny. She had more sex appeal than any woman I ever saw, and I’ve seen lots of them. She was probably every man’s dream of the kind of woman he’d like to spend the rest of his life with on a desert island. She was much smarter than people gave her credit for. She never did or said anything by accident.”

Monroe was said to be deeply in love with Kennedy. After her death, John Miner, head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, a few weeks earlier; Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tape. After obtaining permission from the Greenson family, Miner ended thirty-five years of silence by making the transcript available for this book in 1997. Many of Monroe’s comments dealt with her sexuality; her extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm—in very blunt language—were meant only for the analyst’s couch, but her lavish admiration for Jack Kennedy could have been read from a podium:

Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. He says do that, you do it. This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can’t afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I’m not talking utopia—that’s an illusion. But he will transform America today like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the Thirties. I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as one of our great presidents. I’m glad he has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the President is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Show business people who worked behind the scenes with Monroe described a hard edge beneath the glamour. There were repeated breakdowns and repeated threats to tell the world about her relationship with Kennedy—threats that could have damaged his candidacy, and threats that only increased after he got to the White House. “What happened,” George Smathers told me, “was that she, [like] naturally all women, would like to be close to the president. And then after he had been associated with her some, she began to ask for an opportunity to come to Washington and come to the White House and that sort of thing. That’s when Jack asked me to see what I could do to help him in that respect by talking to her.” Monroe, Smathers said without amplification, had “made some demands.” Smathers said he arranged for a mutual friend to “go talk to Marilyn 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.” It had happened before. Charles Spalding recalled that at one point during the 1960 campaign, when Monroe was on a liquor and pill binge, Kennedy asked him to fly from New York to Los Angeles to make sure that she was okay—that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn. “I got out there, and she was really sick,” Spalding told me. With Lawford’s help, “I got her to the hospital.”

Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to Kennedy. Michael Selsman, one of Monroe’s publicists in the early 1960s, depicted her as “a loose cannon” who toggled between high-spirited charm and mean-spirited cruelty. “Sometimes she had to put on this costume of Marilyn Monroe. Otherwise, she was this other person, Norma Jean, who felt abused, put-upon, and unintelligent. As Marilyn Monroe, she had enormous power. As Norma Jean, she was a drug addict who wasn’t physically clean.”

Vernon Scott told me that the other, insecure Monroe “made herself known to me one night” after he had concluded a newspaper interview with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Scott had a date with his wife-to-be and, as he and Monroe continued to chat over two bottles of champagne, he began looking at his watch. Monroe noticed and asked if he was going out. Scott said yes. “And she said,” Scott recounted, “sniffling a little bit and feeling sorry for herself, that everybody had somebody else to go to, everybody had dates, except her. She said, ‘I’m Marilyn Monroe. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time with men asking me out. Well, everybody’s afraid to date Marilyn Monroe or ask her for a date.’ And she began crying, with mascara running down her face. And her eyes were red and she looked like kind of a clown. Her nose was red. She began sobbing. I tried to cheer her up and told her that I was sure most men would be delighted to take her out. She said, ‘Well, they don’t have the nerve to call me, not the right ones. And once in a while I meet a nice guy, a really nice guy, and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have to be from Hollywood; he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a few drinks and we go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: “Oh, my God. I’m going to fuck Marilyn Monroe,” and he can’t get it up.’ Then she started howling with misery over this. I just bent over double laughing. And she began pounding on me—‘It’s not funny.’