The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (19 page)

As we can gather, Marilyn’s night of passion with Kennedy was far from satisfying. She later complained to at least two friends that he was far too perfunctory. With regard to his premature ejaculation, the actress also remarked to Roberts that the President ‘made love like an adolescent’. The other confidant was her former, short-term lover, newspaper columnist James Bacon. When she informed him about how disappointing Kennedy was in the sack, he screamed, ‘But Marilyn. He’s too busy running the country to be bothered about being good in bed.’

In truth, due to his excruciating back pains, intercourse and lengthy periods of foreplay were, regrettably, nigh-on impossible for Kennedy. The only time he could successfully carry out interaction with a female was when he was in the White House pool. The movement in the water was beneficial for the muscles in his back and groin. But during encounters in other locations, of which there were many, he was only able to partake in kissing and oral sex, of which he was frequently the receiver. To him, sex, as Marilyn would testify, was mechanical. Foreplay was too painful, he reached an orgasm too quickly and, since his desire for intimacy with a woman was borne more out of need than choice, he wanted the act to be terminated at the earliest opportunity.

Marilyn wasn’t alone in feeling carnally unsatisfied after a night in the boudoir with the President of the United States. Stories corroborating his inadequacy in the sack are easy to find. In Sally Smith’s book
Grace And Power
, the President’s wife, Jacqueline, was quoted as saying he ‘goes too fast and falls asleep’. Mob moll Judith Campbell was another to publicly testify, in both books and magazine articles, about Kennedy’s sexual inadequacy in the bedroom. But perhaps the most humorous recollection came from film and television actress Angie Dickinson, who, when discussing JFK’s extremely hasty lovemaking style, was apparently once
quoted as saying it was ‘the best 20 seconds of my life’. (She even wrote about it in her still unpublished memoirs.)

Fundamental to Kennedy’s sexual inefficiencies were the persistent and well-attested problems with both his back and the rest of body. He suffered from osteoporosis, which seriously affected his spine and, from the age of just 20, forced him to permanently wear a brace. His back was damaged further when, on Monday 2 August 1943, during the Second World War, his torpedo boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer in the South Pacific. For 16 straight hours, Kennedy heroically managed to rescue his fellow seamen, but his bravery only managed to put more pressure on his already damaged spine.

By his early 30s, the cocktail of steroids he had been consuming for colitis had accelerated his osteoporosis. His thinning bones, which had been supporting his spinal column, were now collapsing and he was now unable to perform even the simplest of tasks. Due to the fact that his left leg was three-quarters of an inch shorter than his right (an obvious mechanical aggravation of the weakness along his spine), he even had sometimes to turn sideways just to ascend a standard flight of stairs.

In an endeavour to ease his incessant back pain, surgeons cut open Kennedy’s back and inserted into either side of his lower spine two thin metal plates. Called Wilson plates, these were meant to hold his spine in place, reduce the amount of movement and subsequently reduce the amount of pain he endured. But just three days after the operation, Kennedy developed a staphylococcus infection. It spiralled out of control and he went into a coma. The last rites were administered by the church but he pulled through. Nevertheless within months, the back pain returned, tragically more severe than before. Doctors decided to remove the plates but, as a result, he was left with two gaping holes in his back, the size of an average-sized fist. Thanks to the operations, his back was weaker than ever.

When JFK moved into the White House in January 1961, he took with him eight personal physicians; doctors who would cater for his every medical whim and help keep alive the public persona of a young, vibrant, robust President. He basked in his image of vitality and extreme good heath. But in truth, it was a façade. His body was a crumbling wreck. Even the most menial of tasks would cause him great distress. By the one and only time he was intimate with Marilyn, in March 1962, President Kennedy, the most powerful man in the world, was in such disrepair that he had trouble even getting out of bed in the morning. Bending down to pull on his shoes and socks caused him immense discomfort. With his body in such disorder, the thoughts of any kind of sexual intercourse outside the realms of the highly therapeutic White House pool were a complete non-starter.

Marilyn and JFK would never share a bed or a sexually charged session again, and Marilyn never pursued it. Before they parted, however, on the morning of Sunday 25 March, knowing his penchant for cigars, Marilyn handed the President a gift, a Ronson Adonis chrome cigarette lighter. Produced by the company between 1949 and 1964, she’d had the initials ‘J.F.K.’ engraved on it. Kennedy handed her something too, a verbal invite to sing at his forthcoming birthday gala. Naturally, she accepted.

She soon brushed off the Kennedy bedroom disappointment. That afternoon, she arrived back at her Brentwood home to find Joe DiMaggio waiting. During the following week, the pair were regularly seen out together. On Tuesday 27 March, they were spotted at the nearby Brentwood Country Mart shopping for rotisserie chickens. The actress did so in her obligatory disguise, a wig, scarf and dowdy polo coat, and bereft of make-up. Ever the gentleman, DiMaggio refused to stay each night in Marilyn’s home, preferring instead to sleep in his room at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. However, there
was
an exception.

At 7.30pm on Saturday 31 March, at a cost of $900, the actress clandestinely arranged for a limousine to pick her up from her Fifth Helena home and drive her to where Joe was staying. Once the totally surprised DiMaggio had climbed aboard, the car escorted the couple back to the actress’s home. The limousine remained on standby throughout the night and was not required again until 10.30 the following morning, when the chauffeur drove DiMaggio back to his hotel. It was abundantly clear that the couple were immensely enjoying each other’s company again, in more ways than one.

It seems astonishing now, but at the time of Marilyn’s death in August 1962, only the select Hollywood clique knew that the actress might have been romantically involved with either of the Kennedy brothers or that they might have had a hand in her death. Frank A. Capell’s
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe
was the first to change this. His 1964 booklet brought the knowledge to a new, albeit small audience. In his scant 70-page publication, costing a mere $2, he noted that, after announcing that she was going to make public details of her affair with the Attorney General, Marilyn was murdered on the orders of the Communist Party, with which Kennedy was closely associated.

His motive for producing such a booklet became clear from his ‘About the Author’ introduction. Aside from his abundantly clear anti-Communist credentials, we also discover that Mr Capell had been fighting the ‘reds’ since long before the Second World War and, at the time of writing, was still fighting. Unsurprisingly, the publishers of this glorified pamphlet, New York’s Herald of Freedom, were, besides being right-wing Kennedy haters,
also responsible for a national, anti-Communist, bi-weekly educational newspaper. It is also worth remembering that, at the time of
The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe
’s publication, it was American election year and Bobby was running for the Senate. The book certainly worried those at the top.

On Wednesday 8 July 1964, the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover even drafted a letter to Bobby to inform him of the publication and warn him that the publication would ‘make reference to your alleged friendship with the late Miss Marilyn Monroe’, adding that Mr Capell had stated ‘he will indicate in his book that you and Miss Monroe were intimate and that you were in Miss Monroe’s home at the time of her death.’ Now discredited for its right-wing bias, the book does nevertheless deserve some credit. The amount of ‘insider’ information in the publication – the reproductions of Marilyn’s autopsy forms, drug prescriptions and doctors’ invoices – is nothing short of remarkable and a godsend for researchers desperate to piece together an honest account of the actress’s final months.

It wasn’t until 1969, almost seven years after her death, and the publication of the book
Norma Jean: Life of Marilyn Monroe
by Fred Lawrence Guiles, that the general public became slightly more knowledgeable about the Kennedy rumours. Even then, the publishers, McGraw-Hill, fell short of directly naming either JFK or Bobby as a prominent romantic figure in Marilyn’s life, instead cryptically referring to him as ‘an unnamed leading political figure’, ‘a married man’ and ‘an Easterner with few ties on the coast’. Interestingly, Guiles’s original manuscript had named the Kennedy brother with whom Marilyn was romantically involved as Bobby, but the publishers decided to remove it on the grounds of bad taste. The Attorney General had been assassinated just one year prior to the book’s release.

By September 1972, ten years after Marilyn’s passing, and the time of the publication of
Sincerely, Marilyn Monroe
, a book by her alleged second husband, Robert Slatzer, the public were left in no doubt that Bobby was the Kennedy brother with whom Monroe had been, apparently, sexually active . . . and not John. With the end of censorship came a flood of erroneous speculation, in documentaries, articles and books about the actress, that if she had slept with Bobby then surely she
must
have bedded his brother, John, too – and on more than one occasion.

And so, with the grainy footage of the actress singing a sexually tinged version of ‘Happy Birthday’ to JFK at his birthday gala in 1962 seemingly always to hand whenever programme makers wished to press home the point, Marilyn’s disappointing one-night stand with President Kennedy suddenly escalated into one of the greatest, immensely illicit, extremely exciting, highly glamorous love affairs of the 20th century. Sadly, it seemed
that the public had become preoccupied with credibility rather than with the truth; with the believable rather than the true.

Just ten years after her tragic death, it seemed that almost every low-life even remotely associated with the actress was queuing up to cash in on her memory and play their part in cruelly rewriting her story. In fact, the aforementioned Robert Slatzer was a classic example: with two books and numerous appearances in various reports and television programmes about Marilyn, just like the actress Jeanne Carmen he was able to turn a passing acquaintance with Monroe into a profitable, lifetime career.

According to Slatzer, he and Marilyn met at 20th Century-Fox in July 1946, dated for the next six years and got married, in Tijuana, Mexico on Saturday 4 October 1952. But, following an objection by her boss at the studio, Darryl F. Zanuck, their 72-hour wedding was annulled and their marriage certificate destroyed. Many have poured scorn on his allegations; unsurprising really, since the only evidence he could provide showing him with the actress, were five photographs taken of them together on the set of the movie
Niagara
in late 1952. So was this former newspaper reporter really Marilyn’s second husband? And did he really spend the weekend of 3 to 5 October with her in Mexico, getting married to her on the day in between, as he so often testified?

The simple answer is no. He was just a fantasist. After meeting Marilyn just once, at Niagara Falls, he became totally besotted with her. Soon after, in August 1952, news of an alleged romance between the pair managed to find its way into one of Dorothy Kilgallen’s gossip columns. As Kilgallen wrote, ‘A dark horse in the Marilyn Monroe romance derby is Bob Slatzer, from Columbus, Ohio, literary critic. He’s been wooing her by phone and mail and improving her mind with gifts of the world’s greatest books.’ However, the tip-off about it came from Slatzer himself.

Then, in a May 1957 interview for
Confidential
magazine, Slatzer unashamedly gave fabricated details of his sexual affair with the actress, claiming he had slept with her in between her dates with DiMaggio. And his connection to the actress went up another echelon four years later when, in his 1961 book
The Agony of Marilyn Monroe
, author George Carpozi Jr inadvertently reiterated Kilgallen’s tale about Slatzer’s fruitless attempts to woo Monroe with phone calls and gifts. Slatzer’s fixation was incessant. In June 1968, with the real Marilyn no longer around to chase, he began dating lookalike Paula Lane, who had impersonated the actress in Jerry Lewis’s 1961 comedy
The Ladies’ Man
and appeared in the 1964 movie
What a Way to Go
, ironically a vehicle once earmarked for Monroe herself.

In a desperate need of help to finish his own book about Monroe, on Monday 2 October 1972 Slatzer approached journalist Will Fowler with a
theory that her death had been the result of a political cover-up. But Fowler was unconvinced. In his 1991 book
Reporters: Memoirs Of A Young Newspaper Man
, he disclosed that he remarked to Slatzer, ‘Too bad you weren’t married to Monroe. Now that would really make a good book.’ Days after Fowler had started work on the first draft, Slatzer reappeared, declaring that he had indeed been married to Marilyn, but only ‘for a weekend’. Fowler naturally became apprehensive and requested his name to be removed from the subsequent June 1974 publication,
The Life And Curious Death Of Marilyn Monroe
. In 1991, Slatzer’s lies even formed the basis of the American movie
Marilyn and Me
, starring Susan Griffiths and Jesse Dobson. He died in Los Angeles on Monday 28 March 2005 after a long illness.

So where exactly was Marilyn during that first week of October 1952? The answer: in Los Angeles, shopping, socialising, giving interviews and spending time with Joe DiMaggio. I can reveal that, on Wednesday 1 October, she was in Hollywood being introduced to both his family and his close pal, comedian Lou Costello. Two days later, on Friday 3 October, the day that Slatzer claimed she eloped with him to Mexico, she was actually in the 20th Century-Fox Commissary, being interviewed – as we have already seen – by Lydia Lane. Moreover, one day later, on Saturday 4 October, the actress was seen out shopping on Wilshire Boulevard with her drama coach, Natasha Lytess.