The Dark Side of Camelot

8 THREATENED CANDIDACY

Jack Kennedy emerged from West Virginia as the man to beat, but there were still many dangers that threatened his drive for the presidency. At least four women could control his destiny. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, the American film goddess whose affair with Kennedy had begun sometime before the 1960 election and would continue after he went to the White House.

Like his father, Jack Kennedy had a special fondness for Hollywood celebrities. The celebrated and gifted Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, emerged as a sex symbol in the early 1950s and worked her way through husbands, lovers, pills, liquor, and psychiatric hospitals until her death, apparently by accidental suicide, in August 1962. Some published accounts place the beginning of the Kennedy-Monroe relationship in the mid-1950s, as Monroe’s second marriage, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was unraveling and she was beginning a romance with the playwright Arthur Miller, who would become her third husband. Her affair with Kennedy was by all accounts in full bloom as the presidential campaign was getting under way. Many of their rendezvous were at the Santa Monica home of Peter and Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and sister, who were Monroe’s close friends. There has been published speculation that Monroe became pregnant by Kennedy and had an abortion in Mexico; the full story may never be known, but accounts of her affair and abortion have been published again and again since her suicide and his murder.

In interviews for this book, longtime friends and associates of Monroe and Kennedy acknowledged that the two stars, who both enjoyed living on the edge, shared a powerful, and high-risk, attraction to each other. “She was a beautiful actress,” George Smathers, Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told me. “Probably as pretty a woman as ever lived. And Jack—everybody knew he liked pretty girls. When he had the opportunity to meet Marilyn Monroe, why, he took advantage of it, and got to know her a little bit.” The attraction went beyond sex. Monroe had a quirky sense of humor and a tenacious desire to learn. “Marilyn made Jack laugh,” Patricia Newcomb, who worked as a publicist for Monroe in the early 1960s, explained in an interview for this book. There was also a family connection that went beyond the Lawfords. Charles Spalding, who was a trusted intimate of Kennedy’s by the late 1940s and remained so until the president’s assassination, clearly recalled a private visit by Monroe to the family enclave at Hyannis Port, where she was welcomed enthusiastically as a friend of Jack’s—even though he was married.

Monroe’s repeated crack-ups did not diminish her looks or her ability to appeal to men. “Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate glamour girl,” Vernon Scott, a longtime Hollywood reporter for United Press International, told me in an interview. “She was gorgeous and she was funny. She had more sex appeal than any woman I ever saw, and I’ve seen lots of them. She was probably every man’s dream of the kind of woman he’d like to spend the rest of his life with on a desert island. She was much smarter than people gave her credit for. She never did or said anything by accident.”

Monroe was said to be deeply in love with Kennedy. After her death, John Miner, head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, a few weeks earlier; Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tape. After obtaining permission from the Greenson family, Miner ended thirty-five years of silence by making the transcript available for this book in 1997. Many of Monroe’s comments dealt with her sexuality; her extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm—in very blunt language—were meant only for the analyst’s couch, but her lavish admiration for Jack Kennedy could have been read from a podium:

Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. He says do that, you do it. This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can’t afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I’m not talking utopia—that’s an illusion. But he will transform America today like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the Thirties. I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as one of our great presidents. I’m glad he has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the President is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Show business people who worked behind the scenes with Monroe described a hard edge beneath the glamour. There were repeated breakdowns and repeated threats to tell the world about her relationship with Kennedy—threats that could have damaged his candidacy, and threats that only increased after he got to the White House. “What happened,” George Smathers told me, “was that she, [like] naturally all women, would like to be close to the president. And then after he had been associated with her some, she began to ask for an opportunity to come to Washington and come to the White House and that sort of thing. That’s when Jack asked me to see what I could do to help him in that respect by talking to her.” Monroe, Smathers said without amplification, had “made some demands.” Smathers said he arranged for a mutual friend to “go talk to Marilyn 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.” It had happened before. Charles Spalding recalled that at one point during the 1960 campaign, when Monroe was on a liquor and pill binge, Kennedy asked him to fly from New York to Los Angeles to make sure that she was okay—that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn. “I got out there, and she was really sick,” Spalding told me. With Lawford’s help, “I got her to the hospital.”

Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to Kennedy. Michael Selsman, one of Monroe’s publicists in the early 1960s, depicted her as “a loose cannon” who toggled between high-spirited charm and mean-spirited cruelty. “Sometimes she had to put on this costume of Marilyn Monroe. Otherwise, she was this other person, Norma Jean, who felt abused, put-upon, and unintelligent. As Marilyn Monroe, she had enormous power. As Norma Jean, she was a drug addict who wasn’t physically clean.”

Vernon Scott told me that the other, insecure Monroe “made herself known to me one night” after he had concluded a newspaper interview with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Scott had a date with his wife-to-be and, as he and Monroe continued to chat over two bottles of champagne, he began looking at his watch. Monroe noticed and asked if he was going out. Scott said yes. “And she said,” Scott recounted, “sniffling a little bit and feeling sorry for herself, that everybody had somebody else to go to, everybody had dates, except her. She said, ‘I’m Marilyn Monroe. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time with men asking me out. Well, everybody’s afraid to date Marilyn Monroe or ask her for a date.’ And she began crying, with mascara running down her face. And her eyes were red and she looked like kind of a clown. Her nose was red. She began sobbing. I tried to cheer her up and told her that I was sure most men would be delighted to take her out. She said, ‘Well, they don’t have the nerve to call me, not the right ones. And once in a while I meet a nice guy, a really nice guy, and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have to be from Hollywood; he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a few drinks and we go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: “Oh, my God. I’m going to fuck Marilyn Monroe,” and he can’t get it up.’ Then she started howling with misery over this. I just bent over double laughing. And she began pounding on me—‘It’s not funny.’

“But,” Scott told me, “this was not Marilyn Monroe. Norma Jean would never have allowed Marilyn to look like that, but she did this one time. So I saw [Norma Jean] as a frightened, insecure, young puppeteer that was running this machine known as Marilyn Monroe. It was very touching and somewhat sad. And I liked her all the more for it.”

Monroe’s affair with Kennedy was no secret in Hollywood. In early January 1961, before the inauguration, Michael Selsman was informed about the relationship. “It was the first thing I was told,” Selsman said. “We had to be careful with this. We had to protect her, we had to keep her [private life] out of print. It’d be disastrous for me. It wasn’t hard in those days. It was a different era. Today it would be impossible to keep anything resembling that a secret.” Patricia Newcomb, who worked in the same public relations office with Selsman, also recalled knowing that her client “had been with the president,” and added: “It never occurred to me to talk about it. I couldn’t do it.”

James Bacon, who spent much of his career covering Hollywood for the Associated Press, said in an interview for this book that Monroe, whom he had befriended early in her career, had given him a firsthand account of her relationship with Kennedy as early as the campaign. “She was very open about her affair with JFK,” Bacon told me. “In fact, I think Marilyn was in love with JFK.” Asked why he didn’t file a story about the affair, Bacon said that in those days, “before Watergate, reporters just didn’t go into that sort of thing. I’d have to have been under the bed in order to put it on the wire for the AP. There was no pact. It was just a matter of judgment on the part of the reporters.”

Bacon added that he understood Kennedy’s “fascination with Hollywood. This is where the beautiful girls are, you know, and that’s why JFK loved it out here. He was a man who was addicted to sex, and if you want sex, this is the place to come.”

Kennedy was placing his political well-being in the hands of a group of Hollywood actresses, reporters, and publicists. His confidence that the affair with Monroe would remain secret was all the more perplexing because he was, even before he declared his candidacy, the target of a letter-writing campaign by a middle-aged housewife named Florence M. Kater, who decided in 1959 that her mission in life would be to force the Washington press corps to deal with Kennedy’s womanizing. Kater learned more than she wanted to know about the senator’s personal life after renting an upstairs apartment in her Georgetown home to Pamela Turnure, an attractive aide in Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy and Turnure were conducting an indiscreet affair that involved many late-night and early-morning comings and goings, to Kater’s consternation. Turnure moved to another apartment a few blocks away. In late 1958 Kater ambushed Kennedy leaving the new apartment at three A.M. and took a photograph of the unhappy senator attempting to shield his face with a handkerchief.

The encounter rattled Kennedy, and he struck back. A few weeks later, Kater alleged, she and her husband were accosted on the street in front of her home by the angry Kennedy, who, waving his fore-finger, warned her “to stop bothering me. If you do it again,” Kater quoted Kennedy as saying, “or if either of you spread any lies about me, you will find yourself without a job.” Kennedy eventually asked James McInerney, the former Justice Department attorney who had been retained in 1953 by Joe Kennedy, to try to muzzle Kater; the loyal McInerney spent dozens of hours in an attempt to convince her to stop her campaign.

McInerney met seven times with Kater, she later wrote, but for once the usual Kennedy mix of glamour, power, and money didn’t work. In May of 1959, Kater mailed a copy of the photograph and an articulate letter describing her encounter with Kennedy to fifty prominent citizens in Washington and New York, including editors, syndicated columnists, and politicians. Her letter and photograph also ended up on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, as similar letters would over the next four years. The FBI, of course, began keeping a file on Kater, one obtained under the Freedom of Information Act for this book. In the letter Kater explained that, as an Irish Catholic, she had been a “warm supporter” of Kennedy; she had taken the photograph in the belief that “shock treatment” was needed. “But Senator Kennedy thought his behavior was none of our business,” Kater wrote. “We think he’s wrong there; it’s part of the package when you’re a public figure running for the Presidency.”

Kater became even more obsessed as Kennedy neared the Democratic nomination, and she continued sending out scores of letters complaining that the senator was a hypocritical womanizer who was morally unfit to be president. Kater was not taken seriously by the national press corps, but she came close to attracting media attention. On May 14, 1960, just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, she approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure’s apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon’s Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler. Kennedy’s aides denounced the photograph on her placard as a fake, Kater later wrote, and no questions were ever asked of the candidate, although Kennedy’s ongoing relationship with Turnure was no secret to the reporters covering his campaign or to campaign aides.

For all his apparent anger at Kater, Kennedy seemed to enjoy the added tension. Spalding told me of his concern at the time about the immense political liabilities posed by his friend’s constant womanizing. “I used to think he was crazy to do this stuff.” The risks were obvious: Kennedy’s campaign stance as a practicing Catholic and a responsible husband and father would be fatally undercut by a sex scandal. Steeling his courage, Spalding raised the issue at one point with Kennedy. “Well, if you’re worried about this,” Kennedy responded, “let me show you these pictures.” The candidate then pulled out a series of photographs—those mailed by Kater—showing him leaving the Turnure apartment.

Kennedy came much closer to exposure than he knew. Kater’s photograph in the Star stimulated an editor’s curiosity, and Bob Clark, a former White House reporter, was assigned to interview her. “I found her interesting and a little flaky,” Clark, now with ABC News, said in a 1997 interview for this book. “I believed her story.”

That story was complicated, Clark said, by the fact that Kater was a collector of Impressionist paintings and casually admitted that she had initially offered to drop her protests over Kennedy’s involvement with Turnure if the Kennedy family would buy her a Modigliani. Jack Kennedy was a “good Catholic” and so was she, Kater told Clark, and she’d “let it go” for the art. It was that request, among others, Kater told Clark, that was being negotiated with James McInerney. “The family said no,” Clark quoted Kater as saying, but only after protracted negotiations.

Kater’s story was credible, Clark told me, because it was not just a question of her word against Kennedy’s: Kater told Clark that she and her husband had secretly planted two tape recorders in the upstairs apartment while Turnure was spending nights there with Kennedy. The landlords overheard the senator in both the living room and the bedroom. Kater invited Clark to return later to listen to the recordings.

Despite her obvious eccentricity, Clark told me, he was persuaded that it was one hell of a story. He telephoned his editor, Charles Seib, and—as all reporters do—told him what he had, including the fact that Kater had been refused a painting. He was put on hold, while Seib checked with his superiors. A few moments later, Seib returned to the telephone and ordered him “to drop the story,” Clark said. “He wouldn’t even let me go back to listen to the tapes.”

Clark did as instructed, but not without regret. “If the Star, a highly respected paper, had gone public with the [Kater] story,” he said, “it could have blown Kennedy out of the water. There never would have been a President Kennedy. Today, with the same information, any of fifty newspapers would have gone after the story.”

No responsible journalist touched the story. According to her FBI file, the outraged Kater carried her protest and her placard to the Democratic convention, and spent the final weeks of the 1960 campaign marching in front of the White House. She was not only ignored, as usual, by the press but also urged by passersby to go back “to the nuthouse.” After his election Kennedy showed his disdain for Kater by appointing Pamela Turnure press secretary to his wife.

Kater, remarkably, picketed in front of the White House after Kennedy’s inaugural, to no avail, and continued to send a stream of well-written protest letters to public officials and newspapers about the president’s lack of morality, also to no avail. In one such letter, she wrote:

In 1960 the vast, vast majority of American women were hoaxed by the press, by television and by many influential people into believing that John Kennedy was the same clean-living man they read about or listened to on the air. That wasn’t just everyday political cynicism; it was a brutal combination of power that could and did enforce total censorship of the truth about John Kennedy’s well-known lecheries and his penchant to ruin anyone who dared criticize him for them. And I went out, all alone, to fight it with my little windbattered sign! But, far from being a fool, I was the one woman in America who wasn’t fooled by John Kennedy.

The obsessed Georgetown housewife was a campaign-damaging bomb that did not explode. There were others, equally dangerous.

Senator Kennedy’s scramble to protect his future presidential reputation began in earnest in late 1959, when a political opponent discovered that he was carrying on an affair with a nineteen-year-old student, the woman interviewed in Chapter Two. She was studying at Radcliffe College, the woman’s college of Harvard University, on whose board of overseers Kennedy then served. His indiscretion was known to many: Kennedy’s car and driver had been seen picking up and dropping off the student at her dormitory.

In this instance, Kennedy’s biggest worries came not from Republicans but from his fellow Democrats, who were eager to find ways to discredit their competition. Word of the liaison reached Charles W. Engelhard, a South African diamond merchant and investor with corporate offices in New Jersey. Engelhard had endorsed Robert B. Meyner, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who had presidential ambitions of his own; he and Meyner could not resist a chance to get rid of Kennedy. The two men arranged for one of Engelhard’s aides to approach a former New York City policeman, then a private investigator, and offer him $10,000 to fly to Boston and take incriminating photographs of Kennedy with the Radcliffe student. However, the former policeman was a staunch Kennedy supporter. He turned down the job and, through a mutual friend, brought the plan to the attention of a politically connected Democratic lawyer in Washington. The lawyer, who had spent many years as a Senate aide, immediately arranged to see Jack Kennedy.