The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Were Marilyn and Bobby “The New Item”?

It was clear to Marilyn that President John Kennedy was finished with her. There wasn’t much she could do about it, especially since he was not going to take her calls. However, a very popular story concerning Marilyn and the Kennedys claims the following: When Bobby told Marilyn Jack was done with her, he couldn’t help himself and he, too, ended up falling for her. The two then had a passionate affair and Marilyn felt more strongly about him than she had about his brother. This scenario has been repeated in countless books over the years by many respected historians. Could this have happened? Were these people just that capricious and, dare it be said, foolish? Well, actually, in many ways, they were… but, that said, it simply doesn’t appear to be true. New research now reveals that Bobby, who—at least at first—apparently decided to not be quite as coldhearted as his brother, felt sorry about the way Marilyn had been treated. He had enjoyed the times he met her, thought she was witty and intelligent as well as beautiful, and didn’t feel the need to be cruel to her. “I think he told her, look, don’t call the White House, call me,” said the veteran entertainer Andy Williams, who was one of RFK’s best friends. “Bob was that way. He was a compassionate person. He wasn’t a jerk. He had no reason to be mean to the poor woman. I mean, why would he do that? What was the harm in giving her a friendly shoulder to lean on when she was in so much trouble?”

At around this time, Marilyn did indeed tell certain people that she and Bobby were involved. These people, of course, believed her. It’s interesting in that many of them never believed anything she ever said about anything else, but this, they believed. Could she really be trusted, though? Was she a reliable source for this kind of information, especially in the last six months of her life when she was in such a desperate emotional state and also addicted to drugs? Remember, this is a woman who first began creating fictions about herself years earlier. In 1958, for instance, she made this statement to a reporter: “When I lived with the minister and his wife, they told me that if I went to a movie on a Sunday, God would strike me dead. The first time I dared to sneak away and go to a Sunday movie, I was scared stiff to come out. When I did, it was raining. There was thunder and lightning and I ran all the way home, expecting to be dead any minute. Even after I was home and in bed underneath the covers, I was terrified.” Marilyn never lived with a minister and his wife—she was obviously speaking of the Bolenders, with whom she lived during the first seven years of her life. If anyone believed Ida would have let her out of her sight at that age long enough for her to “sneak away” to the movies—about two miles from the Bolenders’ home—they did not know Ida very well. As we’ve seen time and time again, for a variety of reasons, Marilyn often embellished the truth, and not just to the press, which would have been an acceptable form of public relations, but to her friends as well. Her publicist Pat Newcomb put it this way: “Marilyn told several people a lot of things, but she never told anybody everything.” Indeed, just as recently as a few months earlier she had told many of her friends that she and Bobby Kennedy were about to go on “a date.” It turned out, of course, that it was a dinner party attended by many others, not a date.

Still, some people were very convinced that she was in love with Bobby, even Michael Selsman, who was another in a string of publicists. “Oh, please, of course it was true,” he says. “Everyone knew it even then, but the press was much more protective. It was our job to steer them away from it, anyway. But she couldn’t stop talking about it. With Bobby, it was more serious than with JFK.”

“Sometimes I think, yes, Bobby did end up with Marilyn Monroe,” says Andy Williams. “But then I think, wait. Based on what? I know he never told me. Ethel never told me, and she’s one of my best friends. Not that Bobby was a saint. He was like the Kennedys when it came to women. I know that Ethel was aware of it and, in some ways, maybe didn’t have a problem with it. She would call me and say, ‘Bobby is coming to town. Will you have him to dinner? And find the best-looking girl for him, as a dinner partner?’ But where Bobby and Marilyn are concerned, the only people I ever heard that from was from those who, I guess, heard it from Marilyn. And now, all of these years later, I have to say I don’t know… I never met the woman and wouldn’t want to be critical of her but I think she was telling tales.”

Then again, maybe she wasn’t the only one. Consider this very strange letter Marilyn received after meeting Bobby Kennedy, from his own sister, Jean Kennedy Smith:

Dear Marilyn,

Mother asked me to write and thank you for your sweet note to Daddy. He really enjoyed it and thought you were very cute to send it.

Understand that you and Bobby are the new item! We all think you should come with him when he comes back East.

Again, thanks for the note.

Love,

Jean Smith

This letter (which was found by Marilyn’s business manager, Inez Nelson, after Marilyn’s death) has been used several times over the years to support the claim of an affair between Marilyn and Bobby. There are a few problems with it, though. The way Kennedy women operated, they didn’t confirm the affairs had by the men in the family. They ignored them. They certainly didn’t cheerily write about them in correspondence, committing to paper what could one day be used against them. The family members were always cognizant of their place in history and knew that whatever they said, did, or wrote could one day become part of the historical record. That said, it is strange that Jean Smith would have written the note at all, knowing that it could be one day misinterpreted if read by someone other than Marilyn. She would have done it only if she truly thought the story was so absurd that no one would take it seriously, even with the passing of time. Of course, another possibility is that the letter is a forgery. Comparing the handwriting to that of Smith, it appears to be legitimate. The fact that it’s not dated, though, makes it impossible to place it in the proper time context. Whatever questions there are about this letter, its mere existence is a primary reason it’s so widely believed Marilyn and Bobby were “the new item!”

It’s clear that Bobby Kennedy regarded Marilyn with at least a little affection and that she felt the same way about him. The two did have telephone conversations. “He didn’t mind talking to her,” said George Smathers, a longtime Kennedy political ally and a former governor of Florida and U.S. senator from that state. “There was no harm in it. She was sad and lonely and she would call, so, yeah, he would talk to her and calm her down. There was no affair with Bobby, though. I can tell you that Ethel had her doubts at first, only because the rumors started right away. But Bobby told Ethel they were not true and she believed him. Marilyn had it in her head that she wanted to be First Lady—JFK’s wife—not Bobby’s. She wasn’t interested in Bobby that way. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Ed Guthman was a good friend of Robert Kennedy’s and was with him and Marilyn on at least two occasions. “I know there was no affair,” he maintains. “It’s not even a question in my mind. I was there. I saw what was going on. And I’m telling you that there was no affair.” Another close friend of RFK’s, Kenneth O’Donnell, said, “I knew this man as well as anybody. I was intimately associated with him for years and knew everything he ever did, and I know for a fact that this Marilyn Monroe story is absolute bullshit.” Pat Newcomb—admittedly not the most reliable source for information considering that her job as Monroe’s publicist was to protect her—also weighed in on journalists who have bought into the Marilyn-Bobby romance: “Are they crazy? I knew Bobby very well, better than Marilyn did in a lot of ways. However, you didn’t even have to know him well to know that he would never have left Ethel. And with all of those children? Come on!”

“Let me be clear,” added Milt Ebbins, who of course knew Marilyn and RFK. “Marilyn was a lot of things, but she wasn’t a slut. What kind of character would she have, going from one brother to the next? She was a sexual creature, yes, but she would not have done it. I’m certain it never happened.”

Peter Lawford’s friend Joseph Naar concluded, “When I hear Bobby Kennedy was her lover, I say, ‘bullshit.’ Absolute and complete bullshit.”

One more anecdote about Marilyn and Bobby comes from a Kennedy relative who requested anonymity, “because this is still such a sore subject with the family.” She was married to one of the family members, though—she will allow that much. She says that she called Pat Kennedy Lawford in the spring of 1962 to ask if she had heard the stories about Marilyn and Bobby. “Okay, this has got to stop right here,” Pat said, annoyed. “Either Marilyn is making up stories about Bobby in order to get Jack to change his mind about her, or she’s doing it to show Jack what he’s missing—or maybe both. Either way, it’s adolescent behavior and I will talk to her about it. I asked Bobby very specifically if something was going on with Marilyn and Jack,” she added. “He said he did not feel comfortable answering that question. I then asked him if anything was going on between him and Marilyn. He said absolutely not. And I believe him.”

Of course, it can be said that for every person who believes the affair didn’t happen, there are bound to be people who believe it did—including a number of FBI agents, it would seem.

Because of the ongoing contentious relationship between Bobby Kennedy, who as the attorney general was head of the Justice Department, and J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, who considered the younger Kennedy an upstart and not someone he wanted to answer to, it is entirely possible that promulgating and perpetuating the “romance” between Bobby and Marilyn was a campaign of disinformation ordered by Hoover, a notorious lover of gossip, making it up and spreading it. Actually, some of the FBI’s files on Kennedy and Monroe sound as if they were written by a lovesick schoolgirl, especially in that the key players are described by their first names. One missive, released in October 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, notes that “Robert Kennedy was deeply involved emotionally with Marilyn Monroe.” The relationship is described as “a romance and sex affair.” The paperwork reports that Bobby “has repeatedly promised to divorce his wife to marry Marilyn. Eventually, Marilyn realized that Bobby had no intention of marrying her.” According to whom, though? The “former special agent” who wrote the report and whose name is deleted admits that he doesn’t know the source for the information, nor can he vouch for its authenticity. However that didn’t stop his report from being duly documented in the FBI’s files, on October 19, 1964.