Joe and Marilyn: Legends in Love (44 page)

Describing her aspirations and current state of mind for the benefit of photographer George Barris, a recent friend, Marilyn said, “I’m going to live in my new house all alone with my snowball, my little white poodle . . . Oh, sure, I’d rather be married and have children and a man to love—but you can’t always have everything in life the way you want it. You have to accept what comes your way.”

Of the house itself, she noted, “It’s small, but I find it rather comfortable . . . It’s quiet and peaceful—just what I need right now . . . There are fourteen red stone squares leading to my front door, where there is a ceramic tile coat of arms with the motto
Cursum Perficio
, meaning ‘end of my journey.’ I hope it’s true.”

•  •  •

On February 1, 1962, two weeks before she departed Los Angeles on a furniture shopping expedition to New York and Mexico, Marilyn attended a dinner party at the home of Peter and Pat Lawford. Their guest of honor that evening was Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general of the United States and President Kennedy’s younger brother. Marilyn had attended a party for JFK at the Lawfords only ten weeks earlier. Obviously, the president had mentioned Monroe to his brother because when Lawford asked Bobby if there was anyone in Hollywood he wanted to meet, he immediately named Marilyn Monroe. As JFK’s
former campaign manager, Bobby had encountered her briefly at the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1960. No doubt aware of the extent of his brother’s relationship with Monroe, Bobby eagerly anticipated the dinner, as did Marilyn.

Peter Lawford sat them next to each other and watched with amusement as Bobby’s eyes more than once traveled the distance between Marilyn’s visage and her more than ample (yet very firm) bustline. “He wasn’t exactly subtle about it, but then the Kennedy men never were very subtle when it came to women and sex. She bombarded him with questions related to civil rights, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and J. Edgar Hoover. She asked him if he and his brother planned on firing Hoover, and he said they wanted to but wouldn’t. Marilyn told me later that Dan Greenson, her psychiatrist’s son, had helped her frame the queries. However, I don’t think her purpose was simply to impress Bobby. Politics truly interested her. Bobby must have been pleasantly surprised because he called the following day and said, ‘Jack’s got good taste. I didn’t realize Marilyn Monroe was as bright as she is. And she also has a terrific sense of humor.’ ”

Joan Braden, whose husband, Tom Braden, had been a top operative with the CIA, attended the party and noted that Bobby was “enthralled with Marilyn to the point where he ignored everyone else, including Kim Novak, who sat to the attorney general’s right while Marilyn sat to his left. We were all but invisible to him. Kim suffered in silence. Ethel, Bobby’s wife, was there as well, but the Lawfords had seated her at another table near Gene Kelly and Judy Garland. Ethel seemed oblivious to Bobby’s very intense interest in Marilyn.”

Marilyn was taken with Bobby. “The General,” as she later came to call him, struck her as vibrant and authentic, unusual traits in a profession abundant with egocentric phonies. Then again, Bobby was thirty-six—young for a full-fledged politico, and only a year older than Marilyn. She was still “the president’s girl,” but she liked Bobby. He was fun, and he wasn’t a bad dancer either, as she discovered after dinner. Before the evening ended, Bobby gave her his private line at the
Department of Justice and told her to call whenever she wanted. “You might come to regret that offer,” Marilyn warned him.

•  •  •

When Marilyn arrived in New York, she invited Norman and Hedda Rosten to spend an evening with her and Frank Sinatra. Rosten described Marilyn, in a simple green print dress, as looking
“like a young girl—sixteen or eighteen—going to a school dance.” She was “giddy, high spirited, and nervous.” Sinatra still excited Marilyn. She saw him several evenings and shopped for furniture (for the Brentwood house) during the day. Another evening she attended a party for President Kennedy at socialite Fifi Fell’s Park Avenue penthouse apartment, then (according to FBI and Secret Service files) stayed with JFK at the Carlyle. Following her stopover in New York, she spent a weekend in Miami Beach with Joe DiMaggio, rewarding him for his generous and frequent financial loans by giving him a formal portrait of herself by artist Jon Whitcomb, which Joe later hung in the bedroom of his San Francisco house. DiMaggio gave Marilyn several self-help books, among them a guide to finding happiness in a difficult world. During their weekend together, Marilyn introduced DiMaggio to Isidore Miller, who was again wintering in Florida. Joe and Marilyn ate dinner in a small Italian restaurant on Collins Avenue. DiMaggio evidently made no mention of his competition; by this point, he no doubt knew of Marilyn’s romances with both Sinatra and JFK but probably convinced himself that being Monroe’s part-time lover represented a happier circumstance than not having access to her at all.

On February 21 Marilyn flew from Miami International Airport to Mexico City on the second leg of her furniture treasure hunt. Eunice Murray had visited Mexico a week earlier and had returned with names of dealers, galleries, collectors, and shops for Monroe to visit in the course of her trip. With Marilyn in Mexico were hairdressers Sydney Guilaroff and George Masters, Pat Newcomb, and Eunice Churchill, the medical secretary to both Ralph Greenson and Hyman Engelberg.
Marilyn’s therapist and personal physician currently shared office space at a medical facility at 436 North Roxbury Drive in Beverly Hills. Eunice Churchill’s function on the Mexican junket was to pose as an interior decorator, enabling Marilyn to gain reductions on the purchase of furniture and furnishings, including ceramic tile for the bathrooms of her Brentwood property.

“Our first stop in Mexico City was a Catholic orphanage,” recalled Sydney Guilaroff. “Marilyn had brought along all sorts of gifts for the kids: clothes, toys, candy bars, the works. They loved her for it. These children were among the poorest of the poor. And Marilyn, of course, understood their hopelessness, what it meant to be locked away in an orphanage. She filled out papers to be able to adopt one or more of the orphans.

In Mexico City, the group stayed at the Continental Hotel, where they were greeted each morning by hundreds of fans chanting “Maraleen! Maraleen!” A pair of security guards had been hired to protect the actress. Pat Newcomb arranged a press conference for her in the hotel’s grand ballroom. Two days into the trip, Marilyn and her entourage visited the Byrna Gallery, where Monroe bought three paintings by prominent Mexican artists. At a fine-arts shop, she ordered glass and metal sconces for the light fixtures, a silver-framed mirror for the dining room, and two large rectangular mirrors for her bedroom. She acquired a hand-carved chess set and ordered several art deco chairs. “She also bought clothing and jewelry,” said Sydney Guilaroff, “but instead of placing the jewelry in her hotel room safe, she wrapped it in tissue paper and kept the packet in a pair of her shoes. There had been several recent robberies in the hotel, and I guess Marilyn figured her jewelry would be more secure in a shoe than in a safe.”

Marilyn traveled around Mexico with Fred Vanderbilt Field, a disinherited member of the prominent American family and a longtime associate of the Greensons, whose pro-Marxist and Communist leanings made Field a major FBI target. He and his wife, Nieves, took Marilyn on a tour of Mexico, driving her to Cuernavaca, Taxco, and Borda. The actress’s brief association with Field led to a flurry of FBI reports, one
of which (sent by an official of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division) clearly demonstrated that Eunice Murray had become a bureau informant. “According to Eunice Murray,” read an FBI memorandum to J. Edgar Hoover, dated March 2, 1962, “the subject (Marilyn Monroe) still reflects the political views of Arthur Miller. Her views are very positively and concisely leftist. However, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.”

And then there was José Bolaños, the thirty-five-year old actor/screenwriter/film producer from Mexico City, who spotted Monroe in a restaurant and sent a dozen roses to her table. Dark, intense, masculine, and moody, Bolaños had once been a matador, a bullfighter. Passionate and romantic, he was, Monroe told Lena Pepitone, “the greatest lover in the world.” The only problem was his jealousy. “He’s worse than Joe,” she said, referring to the DiMaggio of old.

Bolaños and Monroe spent a night in Acapulco. The next day, he took her into the dense forests on the outskirts of the city to the Pancho Villa House, a shrine to the famous Mexican Robin Hood who lived at the turn of the century. A hero to some, a villain to others, Pancho Villa remained a mythic figure whose army of lovers—females of all ages—had purportedly numbered in the thousands. Visitors to the shrine paid $25 each to watch women lie on a bed and make love to the spirit of Pancho Villa. They would go through all the motions of lovemaking. They would writhe, thrash, moan, groan, tremble, and gyrate, while the paying spectators watched in stunned silence. They would call out Pancho’s name as they reached climax. It didn’t occur to Marilyn until she’d returned to the States that Pancho Villa’s “lovers” were nothing more than a bunch of performers being paid to put on an exhibition. And that the so-called Acapulco shrine to Pancho was only one of many scattered around Mexico and run by a band of enterprising operators.

When Marilyn’s eleven-day Mexican sojourn ended, she returned to Los Angeles via New York. She told Lena Pepitone that José Bolaños had proposed to her. On March 5 Bolanos joined Marilyn in
Hollywood and accompanied her to the annual Golden Globe Awards. Once again the Hollywood Foreign Press Association found a reason to give Marilyn a statuette, this time naming her the World’s Favorite Female Star. It wasn’t an Oscar, but it would have to do.
The Hollywood Reporter
noted that her acceptance speech was slurred, suggesting she’d downed too many pills or too much booze—or both. Joe DiMaggio, in New York, read about José Bolaños and hopped the next plane for Los Angeles. By the time he arrived, Bolaños was on his way back to Mexico. Marilyn had checked him into the Beverly Hills Hotel, and then, in his words,
“she never came back.” Without funds to pay for his lodging, Bolaños had no choice but to check out.

•  •  •

With Joe DiMaggio’s newfound acceptance of psychotherapy, he’d taken steps to forge a peaceful relationship with Dr. Ralph Greenson. But when Joe arrived in Los Angeles in early March, an event transpired that affected both his attitude and his budding friendship with the therapist. Opposed to Marilyn’s fleeting romance with José Bolaños, Greenson suggested that she stay at his house until the screenwriter left town. Having brought over a toothbrush and little else, she was still there when DiMaggio showed up to drive her home. Greenson told DiMaggio that he’d sedated Monroe and that she was asleep in one of the upstairs bedrooms. He said it would be best if she remained in his home until further notice. Evidently awake, Marilyn heard DiMaggio’s voice and began yelling his name. The ballplayer bolted past Greenson, ran up the stairs, found Marilyn, and brought her back downstairs. She complained that Greenson had forced her to stay against her will, that she’d planned on spending a single night but that he hadn’t permitted her to leave. Joe ushered her out of the house and into his car, and they drove off. Marilyn told Joe that not only had Greenson imprisoned her, he’d also encouraged her to break off many of her personal ties, DiMaggio included.

By the time DiMaggio left Los Angeles, having helped Marilyn move some of her new furniture into her Brentwood house, he’d come
to thoroughly distrust her psychiatrist. “Even Marilyn began to wonder about Greenson,” recalled Joe DiMaggio Jr. “She told me as early as mid-March that she planned to make one more picture and then move back to New York. She’d finally come to share my father’s opinion regarding Hollywood—he called it ‘a cesspool,’ and she termed it ‘the first circle of hell.’ ”

Ongoing surveillance of Monroe by both the Secret Service and the FBI revealed that on March 24, 1962, Monroe and John F. Kennedy spent the night together at Bing Crosby’s Palm Desert residence. A photograph of them, located in the FBI files, shows JFK attired in a turtleneck sweater and slacks, while Marilyn has on only a white terry cloth bathrobe. Peter Lawford originally asked Frank Sinatra to host Marilyn and the president at his Palm Springs home. In anticipation of their arrival, Sinatra had spent some $500,000 transforming his estate into the West Coast White House, constructing a series of bungalows for the Secret Service and a heliport to accommodate the executive chopper that would be used to transport Kennedy from the Palm Springs airport to the property.

“A month before the visit,” said Peter Lawford, “J. Edgar Hoover informed Bobby Kennedy that the FBI had been made aware of Frank Sinatra’s ongoing dealings with leading Mob figures, such as Sam Giancana. I received a phone call from Bobby informing me that they’d decided to have the president stay at Bing Crosby’s house rather than Sinatra’s. Bobby asked me to pass on this information to Sinatra, which I did. From that day forward Sinatra was
persona non grata
at the Kennedy White House. He blamed me for what happened, and it ended our friendship. He was furious. He got hold of a jackhammer and tore up the heliport outside his property. His last words to me were, ‘Why would he stay at Crosby’s place? Crosby’s a fucking Republican.’ ”

•  •  •

Despite his growing animosity toward Marilyn’s psychiatrist, the month of April turned out relatively well for Joe DiMaggio. He spent several days with Marilyn at her Brentwood house, met with his son one
weekend in San Francisco, was paid handsomely to appear at a baseball memorabilia show in Boston, and was invited to lunch at the United Nations with UN Undersecretary General Ralph Bunche. Although the working press had to provide UN security guards with proper identification, when DiMaggio reached the dining room entrance, the guards instantly recognized him.
“Come on in, Joe,” said one of them, “Dr. Bunche is waiting for you.”