The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“Happy Birthday, Mr. President”

Backstage at Madison Square Garden in New York City on May 19, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was extremely anxious, and with good reason. No doubt the gravity of the situation finally hit her. She was about to honor someone who had just rejected her, and he was the president of the United States. She had left Los Angeles against the wishes of her bosses at Fox, risking her starring role in a movie. Complexities most people could never imagine, yet this was Marilyn’s life, for better or worse (and, lately, it would seem, mostly for worse).

Earlier in the month, producer Richard Adler expressed concern over what Marilyn might decide to wear to such an important, televised event. She told him not to fret. She said she planned to wear a sophisticated black satin dress with a high neckline that had already been designed for her by couturier Norman Norell. However, she secretly had other plans. She asked designer Jean Louis to design a dress “that only Marilyn Monroe could wear,” and that’s exactly what he did. “Marilyn had a totally charming way of boldly displaying her body and remaining elegant at the same time,” he later recalled. “So, I designed an apparently nude dress—the nudest dress—relieved only by sequins and beading.” Incidentally, the gown was not lined, and Marilyn did not wear undergarments—of course! She was actually stitched into the dress by its designer. (This is the gown that sold at auction in 2007 for $1.27 million.)

After she was introduced by Peter Lawford, he took her ermine stole from her and Marilyn went on to breathlessly sing “Happy Birthday” to the president. “She handled the lyrics well enough,” said producer Richard Adler, “but you couldn’t hear them anyway. For the crowd was yelling and screaming for her. It was like a mass seduction.” Most people with even a passing interest in Marilyn Monroe have seen footage of Marilyn singing “Happy Birthday” on this evening. Less seen was the rest of her number, a special tribute to JFK written by Adler and performed by Monroe to the melody of “Thanks for the Memories.” Afterward, Marilyn had the audience join her for another round of “Happy Birthday.”

“I was honored when they asked me to appear,” Marilyn later told Richard Merryman of Life. “There was like a hush over the whole place when I came on to sing Happy Birthday—like if I had been wearing a slip, I would have thought it was showing, or something. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, what if no sound comes out…’ I remember when I turned to the microphone, I looked all the way up and back and I thought, ‘That’s where I’d be—way up there under one of those rafters, close to the ceiling, after I paid my $2 to come into the place.’”

Making her performance that night as provocative as possible was definitely an odd choice for Marilyn, especially if one considers her career up until that point. How many years had she spent complaining about her dumb-blonde image? How many fights had she waged against 20th Century-Fox for roles that would break her from the mold? How many years had she spent studying acting so that she could be revealed as a different kind of performer? Why, one has to wonder, did she decide to throw away any chance she would ever have of being thought of in a different way and appear on this very important, high-profile night as the very character she had worked so hard to bury? She certainly wasn’t doing the “dumb, sexy blonde” act in Something’s Got to Give, the movie she was currently making, so we know she was doing serious work. It was a choice. Most people in her circle were unhappy about it. During a rehearsal of her song, Paula Strasberg said, “It keeps getting sexier and sexier. If she doesn’t stop, it will be a parody.” In fact, Richard Adler, who had written the special lyrics for the “Thanks for the Memories” part of the medley, was so uncomfortable about Marilyn’s presentation, he called Peter Lawford about it. Lawford called JFK and told him, “Marilyn’s going to be over-the-top sexy.” JFK’s reaction? “Sounds good to me.” There was nothing anyone could say to Marilyn that would encourage her to tone it down.

Based on the footage we’ve all seen over the years from this evening, it would appear that Marilyn is extremely far from the president as she performs for him. Engulfed in blackness, she seems to be gazing into a great void. We’ve never actually seen whatever was in front of her. Actually, less than a foot away from her was the orchestra pit with about twelve musicians in it, all in tuxes and looking up at her with big smiles on their faces. Behind them was a walkway that was about two feet wide. Then, directly behind that, was the first row with the president sitting directly in front of Marilyn. In all, he’s not more than about twelve feet away from her. According to people who were present, he at first seemed a bit thunderstruck by Marilyn’s appearance, but then quite happy—not embarrassed, as other accounts have had it. For his part, Bobby—in the third row—grinned like a Cheshire cat. Ethel—in the second row sitting in front of her husband—also looked happy. In fact, judging from photos of her as she watched Marilyn, she seems as if she couldn’t have been enjoying it more. However, Pat, in these same photos, looks more concerned than anything else.

Jeanne Martin, seated in the VIP section of Madison Square Garden, says she watched with horrified fascination. “To be really honest, as much as I loved Marilyn, I thought it was the height of distastefulness,” she said. “Nothing against Marilyn. She was being Marilyn, doing what Marilyn does. She couldn’t be blamed for being herself.

“I remember squirming in my seat and turning away, but you also couldn’t help but watch,” said Martin. “It was such a spectacle. The footage we’ve all seen doesn’t do it justice. In person, it was pretty shocking, especially for the times. For Bobby to organize this thing and for the president to sit there and allow it, well, I must say, I thought at the time that it was very disrespectful to the presidency, and also to the First Lady. I remember thinking, ‘My God, what if Jackie sees this? What will she think?’ ”

Jackie was not present. Her absence made quite a statement. After all, she was the First Lady, it was the president’s birthday celebration, and the event would be broadcast on television. That she decided to absent herself spoke volumes about how she felt about the situation regarding her husband and the movie star. She knew about it, and was annoyed by it. In fact, she told her Secret Service agent Clinton Hill, “I’m not going to sit and watch that. If you ask me, I think this administration is completely out of control with all of this Marilyn business.” Hill had no opinion on the matter, or at least not one that he would think to tell the First Lady. After an awkward silence, Jackie may have realized that she’d gone too far by expressing her own view of the matter because she told him, “Forget I ever said that, please.” ^*

“I can now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way,” Kennedy said when taking the podium after Marilyn. Was he joking? Or being sarcastic?

“I hurt for her,” Susan Strasberg said of Marilyn that night. “From what she’d told me, each time she caricatured herself, she chipped a piece out of her own dream.” Susan’s father, Lee—Marilyn’s acting coach—must have known it would be difficult to sit through such a performance because he refused to attend.

After the performance, there was a small party hosted by Arthur Krim, president of United Artists, and his wife, Mathilde, a scientist who would later be known for her work in the fight against AIDS. Marilyn, Bobby, and JFK were in attendance. Anthony Sherman was one of the Secret Service agents at work that night. He recalled, “Oh, boy! I’ll never forget that night. I was assigned at the checkpoint at the private home where the party took place. I remember the car pulling up very vividly and the door opened and out walked this unbelievably beautiful woman, Marilyn Monroe, with this older man [Isadore Miller, Arthur’s father and Marilyn’s “date” for the evening—a man she adored and called “Dad”]. She had on this dress—or whatever it was—it was more like a see-through thing—that she, apparently, had worn on stage. What a knockout. Everyone was stopped dead in their tracks as she got out of the car and walked toward the entrance. She walked up to me, I had a list of people who had been invited, and she said, ‘Hello, sir. I’m Marilyn Monroe.’ And I stood there thinking, you’re Marilyn Monroe, all right. We smiled and as I let her pass, I thought, wow. I was working for the president of the United States so every moment was history. But this? This, for me, was history.”

At the party, Marilyn walked up to the president and said, “This is my former father-in-law, Isadore Miller.” Then, embarrassed for a second, she said, “I’m so sorry. I should have said, ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President,’ but I was so excited about Dad, I introduced him first.” It was an odd encounter. It was that impersonal, as though Marilyn and Jack didn’t really know each other at all. Marilyn spent maybe five minutes with JFK and Bobby, if that long. For the rest of the party, she doted on her former father-in-law. Seventy-seven years old, he was tired; she managed to get him a chair. “Sit down, Dad, please,” she begged him. Then she knelt beside him to talk. He later recalled, “She was very beautiful.”

“It’s certainly her beauty I remember most,” recalled Diahann Carroll, who performed at the Krim party. “As I sang, I distinctly remember being somewhat distracted by her gaze. Her tragic beauty, so vulnerable… so lost.”

It has been reported numerous times over the years—thanks to the FBI’s report of the evening in its files—that Marilyn spent the night with JFK at the Carlyle Hotel after the show. Even more sensationally, it’s also been even reported that after JFK was finished with her, he sent her over to the room next door where she then had sex with Bobby. Marilyn’s actual itinerary that night was as follows: The show started at 8 p.m. Marilyn didn’t get onstage until at least one o’clock, being the thirty-fifth of thirty-nine appearances made onstage that night. Then she went to the Krim party with Isadore Miller. Afterward, she accompanied him to his home in Brooklyn. She kissed him goodbye at the elevator and began to walk away. He recalled that just before he got into the elevator, she turned around and said, “Dad, come back to the coast with me tomorrow.” He smiled. “Later, Marilyn,” he promised. “Maybe in November.” She blew him a kiss and walked away—and that would be the last time he would ever see her. She got home at about four in the morning, where she was met by her friend James Haspiel, who had earlier attended the performance. He recalled, “I looked at Marilyn, not knowing that this would be our last time together. Now she wasn’t on stage, she was here just at arm’s length away from me, and I could touch her. Her face was incredibly beautiful, movingly vulnerable. Her hair looked like white spun gold. My eyes descended to the rhinestone-like gems sewn onto her dazzling gown, now eliciting flickers of light, those beams bouncing off the flesh colored material encasing her magnificent body.”

One might argue that somewhere between dropping off Isadore Miller and meeting up with James Haspiel, Marilyn could have slipped off for a quick interlude at the Carlyle with JFK… but all of my years of research indicate that this did not happen.

That said, Marilyn did not do a very good job of hiding her feelings for the commander in chief. Rupert Allan, who was present at the after-party, recalled, “When Marilyn finally moved close to the president, I suddenly realized that she had fallen in love with him. It frightened me because I knew Marilyn never did anything by halves.”

Neither did Jackie Kennedy, apparently. In fact, multiple sources now report that Jackie made it clear to JFK that she was unhappy about the Madison Square Garden performance and that if he didn’t assure her that it was truly over with Marilyn, she would take action. She threatened to file for divorce immediately before the next presidential campaign, thereby jeopardizing his chances of being reelected. “Oh, and she meant business,” said George Smathers. “She wasn’t fooling around. But Jack was already done with Marilyn, anyway, by that time. He had this other girl named Mary Meyer he was playing around with, and there was always Judith Exner… and there were others, one of whom was rumored to be [actress] Angie Dickinson. His view of Marilyn was that she was a very sweet girl, but to him sweet girls were a dime a dozen. There was no shortage of sweet girls in his life, and Marilyn was trouble. She began to ask for opportunities to come to Washington, come to the White House, that sort of thing. So, he told Jackie, ‘Look, it really is over. It was nothing, anyway.’ I don’t know if she believed him.”