That President John F Kennedy had a torrid affair with Marilyn Monroe before passing her on to his little brother Bobby is the rather seedy stuff of Camelot legend.
But now a respected Kennedy historian has made the bombshell claim that the storied affair between JFK and the actress was a figment of a fragile Marilyn’s fevered imagination.
In a new memoir, JFK: Public, Private, Secret, J Randy Taraborrelli says the evidence that they were lovers is sketchy at best – despite what Marilyn’s breathily seductive birthday performance at Madison Square Garden in May 1962 may have suggested.
As the story – oft told in numerous books, TV dramas and movies over the years – goes, Marilyn and the president had sex for the first, and possibly only, time during a stay at Bing Crosby’s California home in March 1962.
Other guests of the Hollywood star that weekend were comedian Bob Hope and the president’s brother, Robert ‘Bobby’ Kennedy. However, the same three or four people are always quoted as witnesses to the affair – one of whom was Marilyn herself.
Under closer scrutiny, writes Taraborrelli, their accounts are riddled with holes.
He starts with Marilyn, who, he writes, ‘was never the best narrator of her life, known for her sometimes wild imagination.’
The story goes that Marilyn and the President had sex for the first, and possibly only, time during a weekend stay at Bing Crosby’s California home in March of 1962
Marilyn with Bobby (left) and Jack Kennedy following her infamous performance for the president’s 45th birthday
‘We can’t know what was going through Marilyn Monroe’s head,’ he adds, ‘but we do know she had emotional problems that sometimes caused her to imagine things that weren’t true. Even her closest friends and staunchest defenders acknowledge it.’
But if Marilyn was an unreliable witness, what about the other sources that have fueled tales of an affair for the past six decades?
One person who is most often quoted in those stories is Marilyn’s masseuse, Ralph Roberts. He alleged that the actress had called him from her room at Crosby’s Rancho Mirage estate and put Kennedy on the line to speak with him.
Plausible?
‘Would the President of the United States hop on the phone with a total stranger while having what was supposed to be a secret rendezvous with Marilyn Monroe?’ writes Taraborrelli.
‘That scenario has always seemed suspect.’
Having summarily dispatched Roberts, the bestselling author then takes aim at Philip Watson, present at Crosby’s home in his capacity as Los Angeles County assessor, whose observations of Marilyn and JFK that weekend have been quoted in various books.
‘There was no question in my mind that Marilyn and the president were together,’ Watson reportedly said. ‘They were having a good time. She’d had a lot to drink. It was obvious they were intimate and that they were staying there together for the night.’
The president paid a courtesy call to Dwight D Eisenhower on the same weekend he was staying at Crosby’s in California
In a new memoir, JFK: Public, Private, Secret , J Randy Taraborrelli says the evidence that they were lovers is sketchy at best – despite what Marilyn’s breathily seductive birthday performance at Madison Square Garden in May 1962 might have suggested.
However, Watson’s daughter, Paula McBride Moskal, whom Taraborrelli interviewed last year for the book, was adamant that her father would have said something to his family had he seen the President of the United States with the most famous starlet of the day.
And yet he made no mention of it.
‘Never came up, ever,’ she told Taraborrelli.
He continues: ‘Similar holes can be found in the stories of other sources, inconsistencies galore.
‘Shedding the most doubt on the rendezvous, though, is the publicist and producer Pat Newcomb. As one of Marilyn’s closest intimates, she was present for nearly every major event in the actress’s life from 1960 through 1962.’
Newcomb told Taraborrelli: ‘I don’t know anything about Marilyn ever being at Bing Crosby’s home for any reason whatsoever, let alone to be with the President.
‘I certainly never heard about it at the time. I only heard about it years later from all the books and movies about Marilyn, but definitely not at the time it supposedly happened.’
The author concedes that Newcomb is known for her discretion on the subject of her former friend, and could be withholding juicy information out of a sense of loyalty. But he adds: ‘One might imagine she’d simply decline to comment on the Crosby weekend if she wanted to hide something.’
What is known for a fact is that Marilyn began bombarding Kennedy with calls, all of which were logged in official records, in April 1962. She never got through to the president, and legend has it that Jack soon dispatched his brother to make her stop.
That, allegedly, is when Bobby began his own affair with the actress.
But this account, too, is called into question by Taraborrelli, who found no evidence of a fling with RFK. In fact, George Smathers, former senator and friend of the Kennedys, told previous interviewers that it was ‘all a bunch of junk.’
Even if neither Kennedy had sex with Marilyn, Taraborrelli believes that they still treated the emotionally spiraling actress in an appalling manner.
Marilyn began bombarding Kennedy with calls, once getting through to his wife Jackie – who begged the brothers to stop exploiting the actress
The book reports Jackie as saying: ‘I think she’s a suicide waiting to happen’
Pat Newcombe – photographed with Marilyn after she separated from Arthur Miller in 1960 – told Taraborrelli: ‘I don’t know anything about Marilyn ever being at Bing Crosby’s home for any reason whatsoever’
He claims that even JFK’s wife Jackie confronted the brothers about their exploitation of her – enjoying an association with the glamorous star one minute, then ghosting her the next – and begged them to stop.
‘Marilyn had obviously been trying to reach out to them, she pointed out, and they had continually rebuffed her,’ Taraborrelli says. ‘Either they wanted her in their lives, or they didn’t.’
In the book, he quotes Jackie as having said to her husband: ‘I think she’s a suicide waiting to happen. How would you feel if someone treated Caroline [their daughter] the way you are treating Marilyn? Think about that.’
Taraborrelli’s verdict? He acknowledges that, after decades of accepting that JFK and Marilyn did, indeed, have a doomed love affair, it is hard to believe the liaison never happened.
However, the book concludes that there is simply no convincing evidence of the pair being intimate at any time between the Crosby weekend and Marilyn’s death in the August of that same year.
‘If the rendezvous at Crosby’s never actually happened, it stands to reason that perhaps these two celebrated people were never alone together, ever!’ he writes.
‘Of course, it may still be true that Jack Kennedy had sex with Marilyn Monroe – absence of evidence is, as they say, not evidence of absence. We may never know for sure what the truth of the matter is. Based on our present knowledge of the situation, though, it’s certainly not a proven fact.’
JFK: Public, Private, Secret, by J Randy Taraborrelli, is published by St Martin’s Press
