That weekend-the one I’d spent helping Flo Kilgore put together an article that would be quashed, chatting with Dr. Ralph Greenson about his famous client, and evicting Roger Pryor from the A-1 Detective Agency safe house-had been a festive one for the Kennedy clan and their circle.
President Kennedy, his brother Robert, his wife Ethel, their many children, Peter and Pat Lawford, and their new best friend Pat Newcomb enjoyed a relaxing weekend at Hyannis Port. Much of Sunday (my really eventful day), they spent on the Manitou, a sixty-two-foot Coast Guard yacht. Photos reveal a smiling, happy clan, basking in the wind, spray, and sun.
On Monday afternoon I called the Justice Department and left my name and my number at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Bobby returned the call the next day, about that same time. Our conversation was brief.
“I need to see you,” I said. “It’s private and it’s personal.”
“Ethel and the kids are still at Hyannis Port,” he said. “They will be next weekend, too. But I’ll be at Hickory Hill, batching it. Can you join me for lunch Saturday?”
McClean, Virginia, was a labyrinth of macadam roads. I had been to Hickory Hill, the Robert F. Kennedy estate, a number of times, but it was one of those places you always thought you’d missed. Then there it was, up a steep incline back from the road, a big whitewashed brick house in a lush setting of trees and landscaped lawn. The house, dating back to the mid-1800s, had a pool and tennis court. Also horses with the grooms to go with them, gardeners, cooks, nurses, and a butler.
Apparently, like the family, much of the retinue was absent. The dogs that usually roamed the place must have been in kennels, and certainly the butler had the weekend off, because Bobby himself-in a pale pink short-sleeve shirt and tan chinos-met me at the red front door. I was in a polo and slacks, equally casual.
He gave me a big, vaguely embarrassed smile, offered his hand for me to shake, which I did, smiling back at him, perhaps not with as much warmth as before. He led me through the formally furnished home out onto the back terrace. That’s where we had lunch-at least one cook was on duty-open-faced steak sandwiches with hash browns. Steaks cooked to order, of course. We both had ours medium rare.
“Pretty strange, isn’t it?” he said, with that embarrassed smile, after touching his mouth with a linen napkin. “I feel like a ghost haunting my own house.”
“I’ve seen it livelier.”
And, the half dozen times I’d been there, also usually on the weekend, it was. During the day, Bobby roughhousing with his kids, engaging them in touch football, tree-climbing and swimming. At night, social gatherings and outright parties with an eclectic mix, from Harry Belafonte teaching guests the Twist to Kremlin contact Georgi Bolshakov arm-wrestling with Bobby (and losing). Assorted Kennedy hangers-on like Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers in push-up contests with Bobby (and losing).
Neither of us wanted dessert, and we had cold bottles of Coke instead of coffee. The sun was high and hot and the bottles sweated and so did we.
The luncheon talk remained small, but after, when he walked with me-Cokes in hand, down past the big hickory with its tree house, usually inhabited by one of the countless kids-he brought up Marilyn, if obliquely.
“Pat is a wreck,” he said. “Peter, too.”
“Is their marriage going to make it?”
He flashed me a look that said perhaps I’d overstepped. But he answered it, frankly: “Until Jack’s been reelected, it will… I think Peter and his friend Sinatra had words.” He shook his head. “I’ve never shared their fascination with that man.”
He meant Jack and Peter with Sinatra.
“Frank’s one of the few performers on a par with Marilyn,” I said. “What they call superstars.”
“He’s a bully. Little would-be thug.”
Coming from the diminutive Bobby, thought by many to be worthy of a similar appellation, this might have been comical. Neither of us, however, was in a light mood. We settled at a white metal table with matching chairs by the swimming pool, the massive white rectangular poolhouse looming nearby like another D.C. monument. Not much breeze, the pool’s aqua surface mirror-like, barely rippling.
He twitched the tiniest sad smile. “I don’t know what I can say, Nate. I liked Marilyn very much. I’m sorry she’s gone.”
“She thought the world of you and your brother. Figured you were going to change everything. That they’d have to carve one or maybe two more heads onto Mount Rushmore.”
He broadened his smile, in that endearing bucktoothed way, looking out at the glassy pool. His brown bangs were uncombed, his eyes somewhat bloodshot.
Finally he said, “If you think I’m responsible, you’re wrong.”
“You’re responsible for the cover-up.”
“I didn’t initiate it.” His blue eyes swung earnestly to mine. “Man to man? I accept responsibility for it. People looking after my interests took care of it.” He shrugged. “But I had no knowledge.”
“You don’t disagree with their actions? Your protectors?”
The eyes tensed. “We are talking about what happened after Marilyn’s death? The search of her house for damaging documents? Of course I don’t disagree. It’s a national security matter.”
“Maybe you should have thought of that before bragging in the bedroom.”
He might have taken offense, but instead he just sighed. Stared out at the pool. “I’m not proud of it. Any of it.”
I sipped the Coke; warm already. “Maybe I should tell you why I’m here.”
Another look, this time sharp. “ This is why you’re here. Unloading recriminations on me.” And now a nasty smile. “But, Nate, you make an unlikely conscience.”
I almost laughed.
“You know, Eliot Ness was my friend,” I said.
“I know he was.”
“He wasn’t without flaws, none of us is, but he had a kind of ethical authority, a kind of moral vision, the likes of which I never saw in any other man. Half the time I thought he was a fool. The other half I admired him.”
Bobby shook his head, brushed bangs away from his eyes. “Pity he didn’t live to enjoy his fame.”
I nodded. “My point is, when I met you, not ten years ago? I thought I’d met another Eliot Ness.”
He grunted a laugh and waved that off.
“No, Bob-really. You took on these Outfit bastards, and were able to withstand whatever they threw at you. You were too rich to be bribed, too stubborn to be scared off, too Irish to give up. I admired that.”
He was smiling again, just a little, eyes back on the water. “You were a big help in those days, Nate. You’ve been a big help since.”
“Nice of you to say. Thing about Eliot is, I used to give him hell for appointing himself my personal Jiminy Cricket. It was a running gag with us-the idiot tried to be my conscience.”
That amused Bob. “Good luck to him.”
I grunted a laugh. “So it’s funny, ironic, and not a little screwed-up that I, of all fucking people, am sitting here playing your conscience.”
“I already have a conscience, thanks. Plenty of guilt to deal with. Haven’t you noticed I’m Catholic?”
“Without your mess of kids climbing the walls, it’s not as obvious. Anyway. The real reason I’m here.”
“Which is?”
I grinned at him, swigged some Coke. Then: “I’m turning myself in.”
“You’re what?”
“You’re the attorney general of these United States, right? Number one law enforcement official? Toppest top cop? Well, I’m turning myself in. I killed the son of a bitch who murdered Marilyn.”
He sighed, and looked away. “That black sense of humor of yours will get you in trouble someday.”
“No joke. He was a guy who worked for me, but he also worked for various other clients, doing surveillance, bugging Marilyn’s house. He was at his post when he got a call to go in and take care of the Marilyn Monroe problem.”
Now he looked at me. “And you killed him.”
“I shot him full of poison, just like he did Marilyn. I’m not going to tell you where the body is. Well, okay, it’s in an ocean. Here’s a hint. Not this one.” I jerked a thumb in the general direction of the Atlantic.
“I don’t believe you,” he said, but his expression said he was pretty sure he did.
“I wouldn’t burden you with this, Bob, but who else can I talk to about it, in a frank, open way? See, I pumped the guy for information before I…” I drew a finger across my throat. “… And to loosen him up, I said I wasn’t interested in small fry like him. That what I wanted were the big fish. But the truth is, I can’t go after the big fish. It’s vaguely possible I could get close enough to Giancana to put his lights out, but I figure he’s living on borrowed time, anyway. And your CIA pals, what’s my best course of action there? Go to D.C. and start popping guys in dark sunglasses and black suits?”
“This is lunacy.” He was frowning, and sitting on the edge of his chair, as if about to rise. “You should go, Nate. I’m disappointed in you.”
“Disappointed in me? Now there’s a laugh. Wouldn’t you like to know, just out of a sense of history, how this went down, Bob?”
“No.”
“Thought you would.” I shifted on the chair. “Peter Lawford calls Marilyn, knowing how she flipped out after you came over and started yelling at her-my God, did you slap her, and push her or…? She was bruised, Bob.”
He said nothing. His head swiveled toward the water.
“Calls her once late afternoon, then again around seven thirty, stepping away from his little Saturday night party to make sure she’s all right. But she isn’t all right-she’s saying things that sound like a verbal suicide note. As it happens, she wasn’t trying to commit suicide, and she hadn’t OD’d-just took a little too much of either chloral hydrate or Nembutal, enough to pass out, which she did on the phone. And scared the shit out of Peter.”
“This isn’t helpful.”
“Now, I’m not sure whether you headed right back to the Bates ranch, or whether you hid out at the Beverly Hilton. My guys couldn’t find evidence you’d stayed around town, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t. And Lawford called you either at the ranch or at that hotel, but in any event told you that Marilyn was in a very, very bad way. Maybe dying or dead, and there might even be a suicide note-and God knows what she may have written about you and Jack. And what did you tell your brother-in-law, Bob?”
He didn’t fill in that blank.
So I did: “You told him to take care of it. To get off his lazy ass and take fucking care of it.”
Not the faintest flicker of denial.
“And that’s all you gave him. That simple order. Vague but not to be ignored. You may have thought Peter would drive over there himself, and deal with it. Take care of it. Get her stomach pumped if she’d OD’d, destroy any suicide note if it was too late. And if the latter, put a general cleanup and cover-up in motion, much as what later did take place.”
“I didn’t initiate anything, Nate.”
“But you did, Bob-you said, ‘Take care of it.’ Only Peter couldn’t get off his lazy ass because he was drunk on his lazy ass. He could hardly navigate his way across the living room, if his guests that night are to be believed. So what did he do? Rosselli was out of town, in Vegas. Might have called him there, but you know who I think Peter called?”
He didn’t ask.
“I think he called Frank,” I said. “I think Peter called Frank, the superstar who helped elect your brother, remember? Who gave your brother-in-law a new lease on show business life. As he had so many times before, Peter asked Frank for help.”
Bobby offered up a skeptical smile. “This is silly guesswork, Nate. Please. Let’s not go any further with this kind of speculation.”
“Actually, it isn’t speculation. Sinatra came into Sherry’s last week. That’s the restaurant Fred Rubinski and I own, on Sunset. Frank’s a fairly regular customer. He was by himself. That’s unusual-he’s social, there’s usually at least one good-looking woman with him, often a whole group of people. He doesn’t like being alone. Nobody worships you, when you’re alone.”
Bobby was frowning. Openly unhappy. His tone grew clipped: “What does that have to do with anything?”
“I sat down with Frank. He gave me this really sad look. He looked like he’d been crying, Bob. Funny guy, Sinatra. Part heartless prick, part hopeless romantic. He didn’t order food. Just Jack Daniel’s. Sat in that booth drinking Jack Daniel’s, and when I sat down, he said, ‘I didn’t know, Charlie. I had no way of knowing.’ All I said was, ‘So that’s how it went-Lawford called you, and you called Mooney.’ He shook his head, Bob, but he wasn’t saying no. He told me he had no idea it would go that way. No idea anybody would ‘hurt that girl.’ And he said he was finished with Giancana, ‘fucking finished.’ Never wanted anything to do with that son of a bitch again.”
Bobby said nothing. A mild breeze was stirring. His hair ruffled, the pool rippled, the sun glided under a cloud. We sat in cool blue light.
“Giancana gave the order,” I said. “ He made the call. But your CIA friends had anticipated the need, and had provided the means. This was all part of that unholy marriage you officiated, between the Outfit and the Spooks. All to kill Castro, and how’s that going, by the way?”
His eyes were closed.
“Once Peter was informed she was dead, he began making his series of alarmed phone calls, to get people to check up on her-so somebody, anybody but him, would find the body. Poor bastard. If ever anybody was in over his head… Still, it was one of his more convincing performances.”
Bobby turned to me. He seemed much older than I remembered. Grooves, lines, shadows. His eyes were moist.
“What do you want from me, Nate?”
“Nothing. I guess I wanted to make sure Marilyn dying meant something to you. As your conscience, I like to think you learned something more than just, well, that you’d gotten away with it.”
“Goddamnit, Nate, I didn’t-”
“Sort that out any way you choose.” I waved it off. “The real reason I’m here, all kidding aside, is to ask you to mark me off in your address book. I’m retired from government service. Pass the word to Jack, too, would you? I’ve allowed myself to get involved with your various ill-advised crusades, from playing double agent with Jimmy Hoffa to your goddamn Operation Mongoose, and I am not available for future fun. Understood?”
“… Understood. I’m sorry it’s… Nate, I’m just sorry.”
I stood, and he did, too.
As we were trudging up the hill, I said, “Just so you know, that red notebook of Marilyn’s? It’s safely tucked away.”
“Safely tucked away where?”
“Where as long as nothing suspiciously fatal happens to me, it stays tucked away.” Those oldies but goodies. “So is a set of the tapes of that last night, too, though you can bet the killer turned his machines off before going inside and doing the deed.”
“You have the tapes?”
“Yeah. Somebody else may, too. Somebody in your camp, maybe.”
I stopped. We were on the terrace now.
“What the hell was Giancana after, anyway?” I asked him. “I mean, I understand the national security implications of Marilyn maybe running her mouth, and how unkindly the spooks might view that. But what good does taking Marilyn out of the equation do that wop bastard?”
The wind was kicking in. The sun had stayed under the clouds and it was cool.
Bobby said, “He doesn’t want Operation Mongoose exposed any more than we do. Hiring his people out as killers on the one hand, and consorting with the enemy, which is to say me and Jack, on the other.” He shrugged. “Maybe he thinks he has something on us now, and I’ll give him a free ride.” His eyes grew colder than the day had turned. “One thing I can promise you, Nate…”
“Oh?”
“He’s going to be disappointed.”
Maybe there was a little Eliot Ness left in him, after all.
The bulk of Marilyn’s estate went to Lee Strasberg, but the actress had died less than well-off. She would of course generate much income in the future, for the Strasberg family, and a squabble arose with Inez Melson and lawyers descended. Word got out that Marilyn had already set an appointment with a lawyer to remove Lee and Paula from her will, but that didn’t matter: the Strasbergs prevailed.
The police had closed its file by year’s end, and only a few items about the unusual, suspicious circumstances surrounding MM’s passing even made it into Hollywood columns, most prominently Winchell’s and Flo Kilgore’s.
By most accounts, Marilyn’s passing destroyed Dr. Ralph Greenson. “The fire went out,” one colleague said. “He never really recovered. He went on, but turned inward after that, and became a bit strange.” Unlike certain friends and associates of the actress, Greenson did not capitalize on his famous patient, and refused any interviews on her life and death. The 1963 film Captain Newman, M.D., which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Sinatra’s young rival Bobby Darin, depicted Greenson’s wartime psychiatric care of battle-traumatized patients. Two textbooks he wrote in the 1960s are highly regarded and still much-used, but for all of this, he is remembered most for having been Marilyn Monroe’s final analyst. He died in 1979.
Though she spent her later life in a series of small Santa Monica apartments, Eunice Murray took three European tours in the 1960s. She cowrote a book about Marilyn, and gave numerous interviews (on and off camera), with a story that changed substantially over the years, ultimately admitting Bobby Kennedy’s afternoon visit and the post-murder cleanup by his protectors. She died in 1995.
Mrs. Murray’s son-in-law, Norman Jefferies, ducked interviewers (the police never bothered with him) until 1993, when, terminally ill and in a wheelchair in a nursing home, he told an interviewer the story he’d shared with me on the Santa Monica pier.
After her sojourn at the Kennedy compound, Pat Newcomb went on an extended European vacation. In 1963 she took a position with the United States Information Agency, headed by Bobby Kennedy’s friend George Stevens, Jr. She served as liaison between the Capitol and Hollywood, involved with film festivals internationally and arranging for movie stars to travel abroad and promote America and its film industry. She often socialized with the Kennedy family and was a frequent guest at Hickory Hill. When Bobby ran for New York State Senator, Pat joined his staff. She is now valued as one of Hollywood’s most successful and discreet public relations consultants, representing the likes of Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford, and Jane Fonda. She, too, refused most interviews and has turned down repeated lucrative offers to write a book about her time with Marilyn.
Arthur Jacobs became a producer at Twentieth Century-Fox; some have called it his reward from the studio. Among his first projects was What a Way to Go! in 1964, with Shirley MacLaine stepping in for Marilyn. He is most famous for producing the original Dr. Dolittle and the hit Planet of the Apes movies, all of which featured his wife, Natalie. He, too, remained silent about the circumstances of Marilyn’s death. He died in 1972.
In 1963, Captain James Hamilton left the LAPD to become head of security for the National Football League, a high-paying job arranged by Bobby Kennedy. Hamilton died a year later of a brain tumor. Intel’s renowned secret files were eventually destroyed.
Chief Parker never got J. Edgar Hoover’s job, as the FBI director’s own secret files continued to protect his job. Parker died in 1966 at a testimonial in his own honor-the Police Administration Building was renamed Parker Center, but everybody still calls it the Glass House. (Upon his death in 1972, Hoover’s files were burned by his longtime companion, Associate Director Clyde Tolson).
Upon Parker’s passing, Thad Brown finally became chief, but served only briefly. When he passed away in 1972, Brown left behind a Marilyn Monroe file he had secretly assembled, including the impounded phone records and seven hundred pages of suppressed interviews, depositions, photographs, reports, and other pertinent documents. Despite this, two subsequent official inquiries-in 1982 and 1985-rubber-stamped previous questionable findings.
In 1975 Sam Giancana was shot once in the back of the head and six times in the face in the kitchen of his finished basement at his Oak Park, Illinois, home. He was frying sausage and peppers, and I had an alibi.
That same year, Jimmy Hoffa disappeared.
In 1976, Johnny Rosselli was strangled and shot and partially dismembered before being stuffed into a fifty-five-gallon steel fuel drum, which was found floating in Biscayne Bay.
Frank Sinatra became a Republican.
Joe DiMaggio never remarried. For twenty years, he had half a dozen red roses delivered three times a week to his former wife’s crypt at Westwood Cemetery. He died of lung cancer in 1999, and his last words were: “I’ll finally get to see Marilyn.” I still don’t like him.
Dr. Hyman Engelberg, who gave very few interviews about his famous patient, practiced for many decades in Beverly Hills and passed away in December 2005. Rumors that he’d been paid substantial hush money were never substantiated.
Milton “Mickey” Rubin-whose clients included not just Marilyn and Sinatra but Liza Minnelli, the Jackson 5, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lucille Ball-never gave interviews about MM; he died in 1999, protecting his clients to the end.
Until his death in 1998, Sergeant Jack Clemmons was an outspoken voice, much quoted and interviewed, on the subject of Marilyn’s murder.
Walter Schaefer, whose ambulance service continues very successfully, has gone public in recent years, confirming that one of his ambulances was indeed dispatched to pick up Marilyn Monroe.
As for Bobby and Jack, I won’t insult your intelligence-you surely know the broad outlines of their sad fates. For now, I’ll add only that JFK’s murder brought me back in touch with both Flo Kilgore and Bobby Kennedy.
After her 1966 divorce from Peter, Pat Kennedy Lawford battled both alcoholism and cancer. She worked with the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, and the National Center on Addiction, and helped found the National Committee for the Literary Arts. She died in 2006.
Peter Lawford gave numerous interviews about Marilyn over the years, his story changing as if the ravings of a drug-addled mind, which was the case. After Sinatra banished him, Lawford saw his show business career ebb and flow, mostly ebb. He died in 1984, and for a time his ashes were in a crypt fifty feet from Marilyn’s. In 1988, however, his ashes were evicted for nonpayment of funeral bills, only to be scattered at sea by his third wife, for a National Enquirer photo op.
In 1966, a raid on the home of Bernard Spindel turned up (as Spindel later charged in an affidavit) “tapes and evidence concerning the circumstances surrounding the causes and death of Marilyn Monroe which strongly suggest that the officially reported circumstances of her demise were erroneous.” Spindel was a well-known wiretapper, though the A-1 had never used him. But I will wager Roger Pryor had, as Spindel-a known Hoffa crony who died in prison in 1972-apparently aided him in a non-radio-transmitted, hardwired bugging of Fifth Helena.
An incident involving actress Veronica Hamel seemed to confirm that. When the Hill Street Blues TV star bought Marilyn’s house, she got rid of the bougainvillea vine Marilyn had planted along the master bedroom wall. Something else had been planted, it turned out, as Hamel’s efforts uncovered a nasty tangle of cables extending from roof tiles. She called the phone company to remove the old cables, and was told, “These aren’t phone lines, ma’am-they’re surveillance lines.”
As for me, in the several official inquiries and the many more launched by authors and documentary filmmakers, I routinely declined to be interviewed. Most everything I knew could be had elsewhere, and the things that only I knew were still risky to talk about. No statute of limitations on murder, for example.
Anyway, I always told them, I might write my own book some-day.
By the way, Fred Rubinski and I finally made some real money off Sherry’s, by selling it. The restaurant became the famous rock club Gazzarri’s, running from 1963 to 1993. Fred retired in the 1980s and passed away in 1990. My son, Sam, still runs the A-1 Detective Agency, with offices in half a dozen cities. I’m officially a consultant, not that I remember ever being consulted.
Marilyn? Well, I don’t have to tell you. She didn’t make that many movies, with only a handful that could be called good, and one or two that might be great (for me, Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, both Billy Wilder). And yet she’s the biggest superstar of all, leaving Liz and Cleopatra in the dust. The gold standard of female beauty, worldwide, how many years later? But if one thing makes me sad about her luminous, enduring fame, it’s the focus on her death. And now here I am adding to it.
Of course, Marilyn gets the last giddy laugh. Over the years, to make itself look better, the Fox studio had always portrayed her work on Something’s Got to Give as a drug-addled, unusable embarrassment. Many authors to this day routinely accept that assessment.
But in 1988 master tapes of the lost footage were smuggled out for a group of fans to enjoy. What they saw was a radiant, glowing Marilyn, funny and displaying fine comic timing. Not missing a cue, only rarely flubbing a line, and-between takes-professional and easy to work with. In addition, she seemed sleeker, and more modern, keenly attuned to the 1960s, poised to leave the pinup fifties behind, exhibiting a natural delivery that bore only the faintest hints of her famous dumb-blonde hesitancy.
Eventually the studio realized what they had, and in 1990 a documentary-including an edited version of the existing material, to show what the movie would have been-showcased Marilyn’s beauty and her talent, along the way becoming the highest-rated news program in the history of the Fox Broadcasting Network. With Marilyn, their most underpaid star, again making Fox a pot of money.
What it came down to was, the studio had tried to kill her reputation. But the film she shot had told the truth.
You see, the camera had something in common with the rest of us.
It loved her.