The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn’s Weekend with the President

On Saturday morning, March 24, 1962, Marilyn prepared for her date with presidential destiny.

As the plumbing wasn’t functioning at her home, Marilyn had to race over to Dr. Greenson’s to wash her hair on the morning of the twenty-fourth. Then she returned to her own home and got dressed. Meanwhile, Peter Lawford paced back and forth in her living room waiting for her to finish so that he could drive her to the desert. That Peter was still involved in any of this business suggests he was hopelessly hooked to the Kennedy-Sinatra-Monroe story and really didn’t want it to end for him. Marilyn finally emerged from the bathroom with a black wig over her newly washed and styled hair. Lawford and Monroe then made the two-hour drive to Palm Springs.

In order to comprehend how Marilyn felt about this date with the president, one has to understand the woman Marilyn had become, and what she was accustomed to in her life. She had been much sought after for many years, the poster girl for human sexuality in this country since the mid-1950s. She was long used to being the center of attention, to being the one focused on anytime she showed up at a party. In fact, it usually wasn’t a party until she showed up! Also, she was used to being around smart and powerful men—such as Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller—and also used to them falling for her. So, while one might have thought she would be thunderstruck by the idea of meeting the president of the United States for a date while his wife, the First Lady, was not on-site, that wasn’t really true. To her, it was… interesting—just another mad day in the mad life of a mad actress. This attitude is borne out by a couple of credible sources.

Diane Stevens from the John Springer office recalled, “I telephoned her on March 22 to ask her a question about Something’s Got to Give and said, ‘So, what have you got planned for the weekend?’ Very casually, she said, ‘Oh, I’m going to Palm Springs to spend the weekend with Frank Sinatra and Jack Kennedy.’ [Apparently, at this time, Marilyn didn’t know that the locale for the party had been changed.] She was so casual about it, it was a little strange. I said, ‘Wow! Marilyn, that’s really something.’ And she said, ‘Really? Is it?’ I said, ‘Well, yeah!’ And her reaction was, ‘Well, you know, Bobby and I have had a couple of dates’—which was news to me—‘and I met Jack in New York recently. He’s a nice guy, so I’m just going to go and see what happens.’ I hung up thinking to myself, wow. What a life!”

Philip Watson, who was a former Los Angeles county assessor, actually met Marilyn while she was with Kennedy in Palm Springs, and he says she seemed quite calm and casual wearing what he described as “kind of a robe thing.” He further recalled, “There were a lot of people poolside, and some people were wandering in and out of a rambling Spanish-style house. Marilyn was there and the president was there and they were obviously together. There was no question in my mind that they were having a good time.” He added, “She obviously had a lot to drink. It was obvious they were intimate, that they were staying there together for the night.”

While Marilyn was with JFK in Palm Springs—Jackie was in India—she telephoned her friend Ralph Roberts. The three had a conversation that suggests that she and the president either didn’t understand how troubling it could be to so many people if word of their tryst got out, or they just didn’t care. Marilyn told Roberts that she was with “a friend” who was having certain back problems. The two—she and Roberts—had previously discussed certain muscle groups and she believed these were the specific areas troubling her friend. She also wanted to ask him about the solus muscle, which she had read about in a book called The Thinking Body by Mabel Ellsworth Todd. She wanted Roberts to talk to him. He agreed. The next thing he knew, he was talking to a man who sounding exactly like the president. They had a few words and Roberts hung up thinking that his friend Marilyn was, once again, up to no good. Later, she told him that it had most certainly been Kennedy and that he appreciated Roberts’s quick diagnosis of his back problem.

Marilyn spent two nights with President Kennedy. It’s not known that they were intimate on even one of those nights, let alone both. It can be presumed that they were, though, if only because JFK was used to having relations with a variety of beautiful women—and Marilyn was, no doubt, on top of any man’s list of most desirable women, especially in 1962. Also, for her part, Marilyn would have found it hard to resist Kennedy. He was strong, powerful, and good-looking. Not only that, he was the president. Indeed, to think that these two passionate people did not find themselves in the throes of passion would be a little naïve. Rather, the question is whether it was on one or on both nights. As it would happen, though, this assignation would be the first and last for Marilyn where Jack Kennedy was concerned. “That was really the end of it,” Ralph Roberts recalled many years later. “She told me very specifically that they were together that one weekend, and that it was the only time. It wasn’t until many years later that I had begun hearing rumors to the contrary, but I just didn’t believe them because she was so specific in what she said back then when it happened.” Indeed, according to Roberts and a number of other credible sources, including Secret Service agents whose job it was to keep track of the president’s activities, this weekend was the only one ever shared by the movie star and commander in chief. One agent who asked for anonymity put it this way: “If there had been an affair, I would have known about it. There was no affair. Sorry. There just wasn’t. It was one weekend, and that’s it.” Another agent further stated, “At the time [1962], we all knew about the weekend. It wasn’t until she [Monroe] and the president were both dead that people started talking about an affair. Trust me, no one was saying anything about an affair in 1962. What we knew was that JFK and Marilyn had sex at Bing Crosby’s, and that’s it. We didn’t think it was a big deal. He had sex with a lot of women. At the time, looking back on it now, she was just one of many and it wasn’t that noteworthy. If there was more to it between them, they [Kennedy and Monroe] somehow managed to keep it from us—and I don’t think you can keep something like that from the Secret Service.”

Indeed, contrary to decades of speculative reports of a long, protracted relationship with him, what Marilyn really shared with JFK was either one or two nights of—maybe—passion. Of course, it’s always possible there was more. Obviously, anything is possible. However, there’s just no credible evidence to support the existence of a long affair between them. Anything more to tell about it would be strictly the product of many an overworked imagination.