The Final Years of Marilyn Monroe: The Shocking True Story (39 page)

However, Stern recalled Marilyn did show with an entourage during the second day of shooting, humorously describing Snyder as a ‘husky guy who looked like a bodyguard’. Surprisingly, the actress’s regular Los Angeles hair stylist, Agnes M. Flanagan, was not hired for the shoot. She had been employed by the actress to help her prepare for almost every major (or minor) engagement she attended, such as her meetings with Fox, her forthcoming photographic session with George Barris (due to start the following Friday) and the dinner parties at Peter Lawford’s house. But not today.

When Marilyn reached the suite, she greeted her chosen hair stylist for the day, George Masters. Having been introduced to Stern’s 22-year-old, Swedish-born assistant, Leif-Erik Nygards, she walked into the bedroom, her makeshift make-up room, to prepare. She sat down in front of the mirror, removed her shawl and started to comb out her hair. ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked Stern.

‘Are you in a hurry?’ he enquired.

‘No, why?’ she responded.

‘I thought you were going to have just minutes,’ he insisted.

‘Are you kidding?’ she responded.

‘How much time have you got?’ he asked.

‘All the time we want,’ she solemnly replied. She had plenty to kill. She had no other plans. She had no social life in Los Angeles. As she made it quite clear, she had all the time in the world.

As the shoot unfolded, glasses of champagne were poured and albums by the Everly Brothers were spun. (Stern had inadvertently failed to bring any by Sinatra, much to Marilyn’s umbrage.) Against a white paper backdrop, the actress began by posing in dresses and even in a dark wig. Then, once the champagne had taken effect, Marilyn mellowed to posing almost nude. She walked into the bedroom, stripped off her clothes and enacted a sort of fan dance with various diaphanous scarves which exposed nearly all of her body. At one point, she attempted to cover her breast with two chiffon cloth roses.

‘I’m not going to take my pants off,’ she firmly stated. More alcohol was consumed. Further persuasions to pose without the scarves ensued. As dawn broke, she relented. Although the resulting shots could never be described as explicit, Marilyn did display more than she had intended. The session had lasted almost 12 hours and at 7am, after bidding their fond farewells, Stern caught his flight back to New York and rushed to develop his pictures. Colour shots were sent out for processing, black and white he printed himself.
Vogue
’s Ukrainian-born art director, Alexander
Liberman, was elated with the results and wanted more, particularly in monochrome. Stern agreed. An offer to do another shoot was immediately made to Marilyn. She too concurred.

So, just hours after concluding their first session, Stern was heading back to California to prepare for another. A much larger, three-roomed bungalow (number 96) at the Bel Air was hastily rehired and further bottles of Dom Perignon plus a case of 1955 Chateau Lafitte-Rothschild were hurriedly purchased. Due to arrive at 2pm, Marilyn arrived at the hotel at 4.30. But this time, Pat Newcomb and Allan Snyder were in tow. Such was the excitement over the session that
Vogue
even flew in their picture editor, Babs Sampson, and America’s premier hair stylist, Marilyn’s obligatory New York stylist Kenneth Battelle.

Vogue
felt the only elements missing from the first day’s shoot were images that focused on fashion, an integral ingredient of a magazine which was, of course, a leader in the field. To make good the deficiency, stacks of furs, robes and diamonds as well as a floor-length chinchilla coat and a brunette wig were sent along. But after six hours of posing and several changes of costume, at precisely midnight Marilyn grew tired. The idea of being a fashion model and posing in this kind of attire had started to bore her. In an attempt to goad a smile, Newcomb started taunting her about her transitory Mexican acquaintance, José Bolaños. Despite its promising start, the manipulation soon waned. With the session beginning to flag, Stern decided to lace Monroe’s champagne with neat vodka and naturally, the actress soon became intoxicated. It was around midnight when he asked her, ‘How about if we went to bed?’

The room was cleared of all personnel. As his camera kept clicking, Marilyn lay across the bed and romped with erotic playfulness on a bed of white linens. Stern soon joined her. He slid his hands below the bed sheets and attempted to kiss her, but she turned away and Stern was deflated. He did not pursue intimacy and he withdrew his hand. In
The Last Sitting
, he explained why. ‘I think the real reason was that I cared too much for her. My desire for Marilyn was pure, it bordered on awe.’ Stern left the recumbent actress as she woozily attempted to descend into a deep, alcohol-induced sleep. A couple of empty champagne bottles and a half-empty glass of Dom Perignon lay strewn on the floor beside the bed. As he ventured into the outside world again, he caught sight of two Japanese cooks in their tall hats peering through the crack of one of the window’s shades.

However, for Stern’s assistant, Leif-Erik Nygards, the shoot still had one small surprise in store. ‘At the end of the session, I was alone in the studio with Marilyn,’ he recalled in 2006 for the PBS
American Masters
television show,
Still Life
. ‘She [got up and] sat on the bed, wrapped in a sheet. Her
head stuck out of the sheet. She looked like she was a mummy. I thought, “I must have a picture of Marilyn.” My friends in Sweden would just laugh at me because if I said I had met her . . . they’d say, “Tell us another story.” So I asked Marilyn, “Can I take just one frame of you?” She said, “Of course,” and when I turned round, she had unwrapped herself from the sheet and [was] lying totally nude on the bed. The first thing I thought was, “Jesus! I can’t show this to my mother.” I acted like it was nothing, took the picture and when the flash went off, she lifted up her head and smiled. I should have taken two pictures. I was very stupid. I asked for one picture, got it and I should be very grateful.’

Stern’s third day with the actress was decidedly subdued. He took black and white images of her lying down on purpose-built scaffolding made from a table and chairs, wearing a necklace and covered with sprinkle, as well as shots of her holding one of his Nikon cameras. Stern also managed to obtain the one shot of Marilyn he truly wanted; a close-up of the actress looking straight up into the eyes of the beholder, as if he was making love to her.

Three days after the session, Newcomb called Stern to enquire about the pictures. (In total, 2,571 were taken during the three-day shoot.) He told her he was pleased with the results. To this, she reminded him of Marilyn’s rights to approve each and every one of the pictures he had taken.
Vogue
did not usually grant such a wish. But at once, with the magazine’s publishing deadline fast approaching, contact prints of the photos and a third of the colour ones were sent over to Marilyn for her endorsement.

Three weeks later, she returned them, but more than half had been defaced. She demonstrated her dislike of some of them by either scratching them with a hairpin or defacing them with a large ‘X’, made by a red magic marker pen. This act of vandalism took the photographer by surprise and he was naturally furious. ‘Not that she didn’t like the pictures,’ he announced in 1982, ‘but [because] she’d been so destructive about it. Why couldn’t she have picked up the phone and said, “Let’s go over these together?”’

‘I never expected her to destroy them or do anything to them,’ he remarked in 1992. ‘She said she just wanted to see them. As she could not express her rage to others, she took it out on herself . . . I don’t think it was because she really disliked the pictures, but the mutilation was just because she was terribly angry at the time.’

Thankfully, through the wonders of modern technology, the damaged images were later restored. It seemed that the only images Marilyn objected to were the ones in which she disliked her facial expressions.

Vogue
featured a selection of her approved images in an eight-page
spread in September 1962, while a selection of the nude photos was published in the quarterly art magazine
Eros
, before it went out of business, having been banned by many postal authorities due to its often salacious contents. Stern’s pictures would become known as ‘The Last Sitting’, even though her last session, or at least her last poses before the camera, would not take place for another two weeks.

The final day of Stern’s shoot, 25 June, coincided with Marilyn’s very first call to Bobby Kennedy at the Justice Department in Washington, during which she was informed by his secretary, Angie Novello, that he was in Chicago and on his way to Los Angeles as part of a nationwide tour to fight organised crime. (Bobby’s arrival in the city, during the afternoon of Tuesday 26 June, on United Airlines flight no. 737 B-720, would be delayed by 2 hours 10 minutes. After disembarking at 4.25pm, he was met by a colleague, William G. Simon, and the US Attorney for the Southern District of California, Francis C. Whelan. Immediately afterwards, Kennedy was escorted to the Beverly Hills Hotel, a journey which lasted approximately 35 minutes.)

In all probability, she rang the Attorney General to impart to him how pleased she was with Stern’s session and to confirm his presence at Peter Lawford’s beachside home the following evening. Due to her recovered telephone records, we discover that she dialled the general switchboard (Republic 7-8200) and was transferred, via the operator, to Bobby’s secretary. The actress would repeat this scenario right up until her death. Between the aforementioned date and Monday 30 July 1962, she would dial that number eight times. This information indicates that, despite claims to the contrary, Bobby never passed on his private number to the actress. Why would she call the switchboard, after all, if she had Bobby’s private number? Reports suggesting that, prior to their first date, Marilyn had been using that line to contact him are therefore unsubstantiated. This is corroborated by her personal telephone book (which was sold by the Heritage Auction Galleries for $11,950 on Friday 13 April 2007).

On the evening of Tuesday 26 June, Marilyn was due to attend Peter Lawford’s latest dinner party. During the afternoon, therefore, she once again called on the services of Agnes M. Flanagan and Allan ‘Whitey’ Snyder, who both visited the actress at her Fifth Helena home. President Kennedy was not in attendance at the 7.30pm party. (He spent the day in discussion with the Oregon Senator, Wayne Morse, and in meetings with the National Security Council and the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.) But, as Monroe anticipated, his brother
was
there. At the gathering, according to FBI reports filed on Thursday 26 July 1962, the actress ‘asked the President (
sic
) a lot of socially significant questions
concerning the morality of atomic testing and the future of the youth of America’. Informants at the party described her questions and views as ‘positively and concisely leftist’.

During the course of the evening, those in attendance also discussed a number of government secrets, including the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, civil rights, the Peace Corps and organised crime. Their most significant topic of conversation, however, concerned recent Mafia attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, of which Bobby had just learnt via a secret CIA memo prepared on Monday 14 May by Colonel Sheffield Edwards, the director of its office of security.

While Kennedy spoke, Marilyn innocently took notes of his utterances in her small red pocket book. It was during this evening that Bobby’s friendship with the actress, albeit brief, began to develop. Instead of retreating from the Kennedys’ lives, as the President had wanted, Marilyn had successfully managed to substitute one Kennedy brother for another. But rather than becoming social intimates, their alliance would be – excluding his visit to her on Thursday 27 June – entirely based on exceedingly short, infrequent phone conversations.

Bobby was an easy target for someone wanting favours from the President. He was more emotional, self-conscious and serious than his brother. Marilyn meanwhile was a brilliant seductress. She wanted him because he was the closest to JFK. Their relationship, however, was entirely platonic. Though she would soon regard him as a friend, he wasn’t her sort. ‘He’s not my type,’ she told her masseur friend, Ralph Roberts. ‘I think the word she used was “puny”,’ he recalled.

When we examine closely the information about Marilyn’s alleged sexual relationship with Bobby, it becomes clear that, as I touched upon in Chapter 4, those tales began life as a political smear against him when he was running for the United States Senate in 1964. Four years later, in 1968, the rumours were given a new lease of life when he was tragically assassinated. By that time, no doubt emboldened by the fact that families of the deceased cannot sue for libel, those with axes to grind felt free to begin embellishing their tales about the two legends. For instance, there was the occasion when, on Wednesday 27 June 1962, a day after Lawford’s dinner party, the Attorney General accepted an invitation to peruse the actress’s new home.

As surviving documents testify, seeing Marilyn that day was not high on Bobby’s list of priorities. The Attorney General’s first appointment was an 11am meeting at Fox, with producer Jerry Wald and writer Budd Schulberg, to discuss again the big-screen version of his book
The Enemy Within
. This meeting was an integral reason for Monroe to invite Kennedy to her home. Since her position with Fox was still decidedly precarious
and Jerry Wald was a long-time, close personal friend, by summoning Bobby she was able to obtain the very latest gossip about both her and the studio.

Bobby’s itinerary for the remainder of Wednesday 27 June was as follows. At 12.30, immediately after his conference at Fox, he had a cold-food luncheon at the Federal Judge’s court house. He faced a press conference at the United States attorney’s office one hour later, met his staff at 2pm and the heads of investigative agencies at 3pm. When his duties for the day were concluded, he and his assistant, Edwin Guthman, decided to drive over to Marilyn’s home in Brentwood, arriving there at precisely 4.30pm. Neighbours remembered seeing him driving up Fifth Helena in his white, open-topped Cadillac convertible.