The House of Kennedy Read online

  Bobby doesn’t care about which one’s higher. He is on a quest to become the first Kennedy to name a mountain.

  After reaching Base Camp by Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter, Bobby acclimates to the nearly eighty-seven-hundred-foot altitude and proves a quick study in the basic mountaineering techniques he’ll need to pass through High Camp at twelve thousand feet on the way to the summit, estimated at just under fourteen thousand.

  “I’m getting braver now,” he jokes, after surviving a blizzard at High Camp. “I’ve been up Everest three times in my mind.”

  Roped between Whittaker and Prather and carrying a forty-five-pound pack, Bobby has a headache from breathing reduced oxygen. Rose’s parting words—“Don’t slip, dear”—come to pass as Bobby makes a misstep and falls into a crevasse up to his shoulders, unable to see the bottom.

  He extracts himself, resuming careful work with ice ax and crampons until the men reach the final approach about two hundred feet from the peak. Whittaker turns to the thirty-nine-year-old senator. “It’s all yours, Bob.”

  In Kennedy tradition, he is the first to win the peak.

  “I was so delighted because I had wanted him to get up there,” Jim Whittaker later tells documentarians. He was eager for Bobby to be “the first human being to stand on the peak named for his brother,” adding, “We were bawling, it was really emotional.”

  “I planted President Kennedy’s family flag”—three gold helmets on a black background, which the Chief Herald of Ireland had presented to JFK in March of 1961—“on the summit,” Bobby writes of that triumphant moment. “It was done with mixed emotion. It was a feeling of pain that the events of sixteen months and two days before had made it necessary. It was a feeling of relief and exhilaration that we had accomplished what we set out to do.”

  Bobby describes the peak he’s newly named Mount Kennedy as a “magnificent mountain…lonely, stark, forbidding.”

  In the snow, Bobby places Jack’s inaugural address and medallion, sealed in a metal container, as well as several of his brother’s beloved tie-clip replicas of PT-109.

  He is not only memorializing his brother but also burying the secrets they shared.

  Chapter 24

  On May 19, 1962, a star-studded, forty-fifth birthday salute to President Kennedy is under way at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Top-tier tickets to the Democratic fundraiser cost one thousand dollars—nearly eighty-five hundred today.

  Peter Lawford, married to the president’s sister Patricia, is facing a demanding crowd and seems to be having an anxious moment as emcee. He’s trying—and failing—to call to the stage Marilyn Monroe, the entertainment headliner. The thirty-five-year-old platinum blonde Hollywood screen siren is as notorious for pill-popping as she is for her chronic lateness to call times on set.

  But Lawford is a very good actor. Tonight the joke is on the president, and the crowd of more than fifteen thousand is in on the gag. Finally, in the midst of Lawford’s third introduction, Monroe emerges from the wings. “Mr. President,” Lawford chuckles, “the late Marilyn Monroe.”

  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 dan
gerous 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.

  “Marilyn wanted a mini–phone listening device,” Otash reveals in records his daughter, Colleen, later shares with the Hollywood Reporter. “You could hide it in your bra.”

  The irony is that inside the walls and in the roof of Monroe’s 2,624-square-foot, four-bedroom, three-bath hacienda-style home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive—which the star had purchased only six months earlier for $90,000 (a 2010 sale fetched $3.85 million)—recording devices have already been installed by…Fred Otash.

  Otash knows his way around Hollywood, first as a vice detective—he left the LAPD in the mid-1950s after wrangling with Chief William H. Parker—and then as head of the Fred Otash Detective Bureau, until he lost his state license following a 1959 conviction in a Santa Anita Race Track conspiracy. According to the Los Angeles Times, he drinks a quart of Scotch and smokes four packs of cigarettes a day.

  As a paid “fact verifier” for gossip magazines, who also “find[s] out what the Democrats were up to on behalf of Howard Hughes and Nixon,” Otash keeps copious notes on the intimate lives of celebrities, many of whom travel in Kennedy circles. James Ellroy tells The Hollywood Reporter that Otash “was always talking about bugging [JFK brother-in-law] Peter Lawford’s beach pad and getting the goods on Kennedy. He told me Jack [sexually] was a two-minute man. But I did not trust him not to dissemble.” (On that topic, columnist Earl Wilson quotes Marilyn as describing her encounters with the president this way: “Well, I think I made his back feel better.”)

  Otash’s extensive, and only partially authorized, access to her home leads to his eventual bombshell declaration: “I listened to Marilyn Monroe die.”

  On that Saturday afternoon in August before Marilyn Monroe called Peter Lawford, Otash places both Lawford and Bobby at her Brentwood bungalow, deep in conflict with a highly emotional Monroe.

  “She said she was passed around like a piece of meat,” Otash writes. “It was a violent argument about their relationship and the commitment and promises he [Bobby] made to her. She was really screaming…Bobby gets the pillow and he muffles her on the bed to keep the neighbors from hearing. She finally quieted down and then he was looking to get out of there.”

  Otash should also have been able to hear Monroe’s call to Lawford, though the former PI also never acknowledges another, later call, from her second husband’s son, Joe DiMaggio Jr. (his mother was starlet Dorothy Arnold). Monroe and her ex-stepson, a twenty-one-year-old marine private, had remained close. “If anything was amiss, I wasn’t aware of it,” DiMaggio Jr. says. “She sounded like Marilyn.”

  Hours later, Marilyn Monroe is dead.

  Chapter 25

  In the early hours of Sunday, August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe’s live-in housekeeper wakes with a sinking feeling. She knocks loudly at her employer’s locked bedroom door, and when there is no answer, she calls Ralph Greenson.

  Greenson comes over, breaking into Monroe’s bedroom via the window. He finds a horrifying scene: the thirty-six-year-old movie star lying naked, lifeless, facedown on her bed, still clutching the telephone receiver.

  At 4:20 a.m., Greenson alerts the LAPD.

  According to a 1985 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Fred Otash quotes Peter Lawford as instructing him to “do anything to remove anything incriminating” at Monroe’s house that could connect her to Jack and Bobby. Biographer James Spada argues that “the cover-up that was designed to prevent anyone from finding out that Marilyn was involved intimately with the Kennedy family has been misinterpreted as a cover-up of their having murdered her.” But Sergeant Jack Clemmons, a homicide detective and the first LAPD officer to arrive at Monroe’s home, states, “It was the most obviously staged death scene I had ever seen. The pill bottles on her bedside table had been arranged in neat order and the body was deliberately positioned.” One of the bottles—found empty—originally contained fifty Nembutal capsules, prescribed only two or three days earlier.

  In a 1983 interview for the BBC, the “cover-up” concept resurfaces. Biographer Anthony Murray recalls his exchange with Marilyn’s former housekeeper: “There was a moment where she put her head in her hands and said words to the effect of, ‘Oh, why do I have to keep covering this up?’ I said, ‘Covering what up, Mrs. Murray?’ She said, ‘Well of course Bobby Kennedy was there [on August 4], and of course there was an affair with Bobby Kennedy.”

  Yet the housekeeper’s recollections may not be entirely reliable. She changes her story, first saying she called Greenson just after midnight, and then around 3:00 a.m., leaving hours unaccounted for between Monroe’s time of death and the initial call to the police. Also, she was on the verge of losing her job. “I can’t flat out fire her,” Monroe had told the psychiatrist. “Next thing would be a book—Secrets of Marilyn Monroe by Her Housekeeper. She’d make a fortune spilling what she knows and she knows too damn much.”

  At the autopsy, John Miner, who heads the medical-legal section in the Los Angeles DA’s office, wants to know more.

  It is established protocol for the chief medical examiner to conduct celebrity autopsies, but inexplicably, junior medical examiner Dr. Thomas Noguchi performs the procedure on the five-four, 118-pound actress.

  Dr. Noguchi’s examination is meticulous, and his subject clearly makes an impression, stirring the pathologist (who would later become known as “Coroner to the Stars” and inspire the title character on the hit television series Quincy) to quote the Latin poet Petrarch: “It’s folly to shrink in fear if this is dying. For death looked lovely in her lovely face.”

  Bearing in mind that “when you are a coroner, you start from the assumption that every body you examine might be a murder victim,” Dr. Noguchi examines Monroe and detects neither needle marks indicating a drug injection nor signs of physical violence beyond a fresh bruise just above her left hip. The autopsy confirms blood tox
ic with barbiturates, and also a stomach empty of food particles, even the yellow dye that coats Nembutal capsules. But Dr. Noguchi never performs the full range of organ tests, stopping short after analyzing the blood and the liver. “I am sure that this could have cleared up a lot of the subsequent controversy, but I didn’t follow through as I should have.”

  The forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht interprets the autopsy results for People magazine as “acute combined drug toxicity, chloral hydrate and Nembutal.”

  But Miner holds a differing opinion. He is convinced that the actress was administered an enema (a routine Hollywood weight-loss technique, though due to months of health issues, Monroe’s body was already at its lowest weight of her adult life) containing the lethal combination of Nembutal and the sedative chloral hydrate.

  Though Dr. Gurdin’s suspicions about the psychiatrist’s involvement with Monroe’s broken nose will not become known for another half century, Ralph Greenson is also an unofficial “suspect.” Miner proposes that Greenson allow him to listen to recently taped sessions with the actress as a way for the psychiatrist to clear his name. Greenson (whose 1978 essay “Special Problems in Psychotherapy with the Rich and Famous” would bring him further dubious notoriety) agrees, on the condition that Miner not reveal the contents, a promise he keeps until after Greenson’s death. The tapes reveal a woman willing to examine what mistakes she’s made in previous relationships, and filled with conflicting references to a hopeful future and unresolved feelings for both of the Kennedy brothers.