Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.

MARILYN & BOBBY & JACK

I CANNOT understand why Anthony Summers's book Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Macmillan, 1985; NAL paperback, with important postscript added, 1986 --this is the edition I am quoting from) has not had a greater impact upon the informed political sensibility. And this in turn raises questions about the forming of our public perceptions --that is, about why some material is admitted into our sense of a famous man while some other information, no matter how persuasive, is excluded. Perhaps, in this case, the legends of John and Robert Kennedy, shaped by that wintry inauguration in January 1961, by the proclaimed "New Frontier," by notions of "Camelot," and by the assassinations, is so compelling as to resist modification. We prefer those images to disturbing realities. And as far as the Kennedy myth is concerned, Anthony Summers's book is disturbing indeed.

It presents the evidence that John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe as early as 1951 and had a long sexual relationship with her that lasted well into his Presidency; that Robert Kennedy, while Attorney General, commenced an affair that overlapped with his brother's; that both men left themselves open to blackmail by the numerous people who had bugged Monroe's residence (there was apparently at least one tape of Robert Kennedy in flagrante delicto); that while Marilyn Monroe was intimate with the Kennedy brothers she was simultaneously intimate with members of a far-left group in Mexico City, with whom she discussed national-security matters, to the infinite alarm of J. Edgar Hoover; that Marilyn Monroe believed Robert Kennedy to have promised to leave his wife and marry her, and dreamed of becoming First Lady; that she was threatening to reveal this to the public; that on the day of her death (August 5, 1962) she was visited clandestinely twice by Robert Kennedy, once in the company of Peter Lawford; that Kennedy knew by then that her house was bugged, and searched frantically for the devices; that there are serious reasons to believe that Monroe may not have committed suicide; and that FBI agents and probably members of the Los Angeles Police Department obstructed the official inquiry in order to cover up evidence of her liaisons with the Kennedys.

To say that Summers's thesis has not become entrenched in the national consciousness is not to say that his book has been ignored. It was a bestseller and received excellent reviews in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, Newsday, the Los Angeles Weekly, and the New York Times. And yet I myself had paid no attention to this book; I suppose I wrote it off as just another biography of Marilyn Monroe, unlikely to shed new light on the Kennedys. After all, the memoir by Judith Exner (whom Kennedy shared with mobster Sam Giancana), Garry Wills's The Kennedy Imprisonment, and The Kennedys, by Peter Collier and David Horowitz, had done much to bring out JFK's promiscuity and his mob connections. But those books cannot compare with this bombshell.

John Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe early in her career and began with her one of his many casual affairs, meeting her at hotels in New York and Los Angeles and at Peter Lawford's beach house in Santa Monica. He slept with her after his 1960 acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, and on into his Presidency, despite her close connection with various gangsters, until he was warned by J. Edgar Hoover. Then the John Kennedy-Marilyn Monroe relationship ended.

The Bobby-Marilyn affair seems to have begun in February 1962 after they met at a dinner party at the Lawford home. Bobby was at first amused by her attempts at political conversation, then outraged at her pro-Castro, anti-nuclear criticisms of the Kennedy Administration. There were arguments (taped) at her home in which Bobby yelled that she was "going Communist." She called him on a special number at the Justice Department to arrange trysts, while at the same time frequenting the left-wing circle of the expatriate "silver-spoon Communist," Fred Vanderbilt Field, in Mexico City.

Let us go to Summers's painstaking investigation of this whole sordid mess. Summers spent over three years on the book, with the help of several assistants, including a lawyer specializing in Freedom of Information Act requests. His 62 pages of bibliography, notes, and index are reasonably scholarly for a book of this type. The evidence for the Kennedy connection is overpowering, confirmed by Peter Lawford's wives, Marilyn Monroe's maid, psychiatrists from the Suicide Prevention Team who counseled Monroe's psychoanalyst after her death, various detectives involved in wiretapping and bugging her home, and many others.

This book abounds with circumstantial detail. Take, for example, Summers's account of an evening in July 1960. The Lawfords were throwing a party; it was the week of JFK's nomination in San Francisco, and the atmostphere is right out of Norman Mailer's The Deer Park. Two officers from the Los Angeles District Attorney's office approached the beach house and were blocked by armed guards. "There had been enough time to observe a wild party going on around the Lawfords' pool, one that included a bevy of women, some familiar to the officer as call girls supplied by a known madam.... Also present was John Kennedy."

Summers has also located a letter apparently from Jean Kennedy Smith, Jack and Bobby's younger sister, to Marilyn Monroe: "Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East!"

The mob, under serious pressure from the Kennedys' vigorous anti-crime drive, knew all about these goings-on. One of Jimmy Hoffa's private investigators, Bernard Spindel--who may in this case have been freelancing for someone else--had thoroughly bugged the Monroe home and had tapes of "pillow talk" between her and the Attorney General. (The FBI and other private eyes also had the house bugged; the reader comes to feel that there must at times have been quite a traffic jam in Monroe's driveway.)

The events of August 5 are murky. Against the official verdict that Monroe swallowed a lethal dose of sleeping pills, there are the following objections: When the police arrived, they found no drinking glass and no water, suggesting that the dose may not have been self-administered. They found a telephone receiver clasped in Monroe's hand, which would have been unlikely under the circumstances officially inferred--if she drifted off into unconsciousness, the receiver would most probably have slipped from her hand; the tight grip she had on it is what one would expect if it had been placed there after rigor mortis had begun to set in. The autopsy was hurried and incomplete; Bernard Spindel's tapes were seized by "a posse of police and District Attorney's investigators," and disappeared; Monroe's maid tells vague and conflicting stories about the events of that fatal day.

By 1962 Marilyn Monroe was a depressed, disintegrating personality who visited her psychoanalyst daily. She certainly might have killed herself, as officially claimed. But Summers's massive documentation allows us to entertain a chilling possibility.

Who had something to gain from Monroe's silence? Cui bono? The Kennedy brothers were vulnerable to blackmail from at least two directions.

During the later part of her relationship with Robert Kennedy, Monroe sometimes talked with friends about "starting a whole new life." At other times, despondent, she complained vociferously about Robert, saying that she was wanted "only as a plaything," passed around "like a piece of meat." She showed a friend a diary she had kept, saying, "Maybe his wife would like to know some of the things he told me." One private detective told Summers that Marilyn had been desperate enough to call Bobby at his home in Virginia, enraging him. "Robert Kennedy became incommunicado," said the detective, "and she wasn't going to settle for that."

Meanwhile, mobster Sam Giancana, who had helped John Kennedy win the Presidency in the first place by vote-stealing in Chicago, knew all about the Kennedy womanizing, as well as about the plots to kill Castro. Mob influence had removed the President's name from the divorce suit against starlet Judy Meredith. John Kennedy and Giancana had shared Judith Exner. Both Giancana and Jimmy Hoffa knew all about the Kennedys and Monroe.

A publicly testifying Marilyn Monroe could have given devastating validation to the evidence (photographs, tapes, and more) possessed by Hoffa and Giancana about two politicians who had exploited their public image as "family men."

If the overall tendency of Summers's argument is correct, then Chappaquiddick and its coverup looks to be only one installment in a venerable Kennedy tradition.

THERE REMAINS the question posed at the beginning. Why is this book not now decisive in all informed consideration of the Kennedy Presidency? Is it because the myth of JFK and RFK has been so assiduously established that nothing can break in upon it? Perhaps that myth is too satisfying to yield easily: the dashing young President, cut off in his prime; the "existential" Attorney General, who moved from young McCarthyite to New Leftist and was gunned down in full promise of--something. The "aristocratic liberals."

Compare this with their longtime enemy and target, Jimmy Hoffa. Summers writes: "Hoffa himself was asked directly, in the Seventies, what he had known about the Kennedy brothers' sex lives. He reacted with a series of violent denials when asked if he had Marilyn bugged, adding, 'I already had a tape on Bobby Kennedy and Jack Kennedy, which was so filthy and nasty--given to me by a girl--that though my people encouraged me to do it, I wouldn't do it. I put it away and said the hell with it. . . .' Asked whether he might have wanted to use such a tape against Robert Kennedy, Hoffa declared, 'I would not embarrass his wife and family.'"

If we credit this--and it sounds authentic; the big gangsters often have a kind of honor--then it's a bit like The Beggar's Opera, where Macheath comes off far better than Peachum and Lock-it.