The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

The Lost Weekend

Pat Kennedy Lawford didn’t know what to do about Marilyn Monroe. She didn’t know if the stories she had heard through the grapevine about her brothers and her friend were true. Marilyn had definitely been saying that she was dating Bobby. However, Pat knew that one of those “dates” had actually been a dinner party at her home in her brother’s honor, and that Marilyn had just been a guest. Whom could she believe? Certainly Marilyn had never been the most reliable source of information. She also couldn’t depend on her brothers to tell her the truth. After all, it wasn’t as if the Kennedy men were ever honest about their indiscretions. One thing seemed true, though. Bobby had told Marilyn to stop pestering his brother Jack, and she was very unhappy about it. Had she built up her in her mind her relationship with JFK to be something it wasn’t? And if so, maybe she did have the poor judgment to somehow end up sexually involved with Bobby. By this time, it was beginning to seem as if anything was possible, everyone’s reality was just that skewed. “It was as if we were all caught in Marilyn’s nightmare,” said one Kennedy relative. “Everything sort of satellited around Marilyn’s sickness and no one knew what was true and what wasn’t, who was lying and who wasn’t.”

Desperate for some direction, Pat Kennedy Lawford telephoned Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby’s press aide. ^* “I told her, Pat, you should know better than to believe this nonsense,” he recalled years later. “She said, ‘Honest to God, Frank, I don’t know what to believe anymore between what I hear Marilyn is saying and what everyone else is saying.’ I said, ‘Well, hear what I’m saying, Pat. It’s not true. If it was, I would know and I don’t, so it’s not true.’ She was so grateful. She said, ‘Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much.’ ”

At this same time, Frank Sinatra called Pat—unusual, in that they seldom spoke—to say that he was sorry he had targeted her husband after President Kennedy decided not to stay at the Sinatra home in Palm Springs. He said that he wanted to invite the Lawfords to his resort, the Cal-Neva Lodge, for the weekend. (Though Frank and Peter were still not on good terms, for business reasons better left to a Peter Lawford biographer to explain, they tolerated each other from time to time.) Sinatra told Pat that he was performing in the main room and singers Buddy Greco and Roberta Linn were working in the lounge.

Cal-Neva, located exactly on the California–Nevada border, boasted a beautiful showroom (where the same performers who frequented Las Vegas—Frank’s friends, for the most part—appeared), an enormous dining room, plus about twenty furnished cottages that cost about fifty dollars a day. The luxurious gambling casinos were located on the Nevada side of the compound. It was advertised as “Heaven in the High Sierras.” Pat was against the idea of flying to Nevada to see Sinatra. However, she felt she had to at least mention the invitation to her husband. He, of course, couldn’t wait to go. If Frank wanted to mend fences, Peter was going to be at his side with a hammer and nails. “Pat and Peter had a bit of a disagreement about it,” said Milt Ebbins. “All I can tell you is that Pat didn’t want to go and Peter said, ‘We can not turn down an invitation by Frank Sinatra. If Frank wants us there, we have to go.’ Pat hated hearing that kind of stuff from Peter. But she buckled, and they went.” Marilyn also said she would like to go. Upset about something that had just occurred with her mother at Rock Haven—it’s unknown what, exactly—she said she could use a weekend away.

Therefore, against Pat’s better judgment, she, Peter, and Marilyn departed for Nevada on July 27, 1962, in a private plane provided by Sinatra and copiloted by Dan Arney. “She had no makeup on,” Arney recalled of Marilyn, “and I didn’t realize who she was until we got into the airport and George [Jacobs, Sinatra’s valet] came out in the station wagon and said, ‘You know, that’s Marilyn.’ ”

When the trio—Peter, Pat, and Marilyn—arrived, Sinatra greeted them and then installed Marilyn in Chalet 52, one of the quarters he always reserved for special guests. He then asked Peter and Pat to leave so that he could have some time with Marilyn. George Jacobs says that Frank had heard she was “having a crisis” in her life and wanted to know more about it. “He knew what was going on,” said Jacobs, “I think, with the Kennedy business. Or, at least he heard rumors. He knew she was upset. He wanted to know more.”

Mickey Rudin—who was both Marilyn’s and Frank’s attorney —said in 1996, “Frank is a very, very compassionate person. He brought Marilyn to Cal-Neva to give her a little fun, a little relief from her problems. If she was upset during the time, well, she could have a crisis over what she was having for lunch, she was that emotional and high-strung. She could have had an imagined crisis, in fact.”

However, Joe Langford, a Sinatra security employee at Cal-Neva, said that Marilyn’s crisis that weekend seemed to not be of the imagined variety suggested by Mickey Rudin. “When Frank saw her, he was pretty shocked at how depressed she was,” he recalled. “As soon as he got her settled in, he got on the phone with her psychiatrist [presumably Dr. Greenson] and started in on the guy. ‘What the hell kind of treatment are you giving her? She’s a mess. What is she paying you for? Why isn’t she in a sanitarium?’ He hadn’t seen her in a while and he couldn’t believe how broken-down she was.”

It’s true that Sinatra was known to have great concern for his friends. However, that said, one of the biggest problems with him was that he also had terrible judgment when it came to some of those friends—many of whom were underworld characters. Moreover, he didn’t seem to care whom he exposed his mob pals to, which was one of the big problems at Cal-Neva that weekend. About three hours after Pat and Peter Lawford arrived with Marilyn, they found a surprise waiting for them in the Cal-Neva lobby: Sam Giancana, one of the world’s leading gangsters, who was deeply involved in all sorts of underworld activity, some of it reputedly having to do with the Kennedy brothers. As it happened, Sinatra had sent his private jet back to Los Angeles to pick him up and bring him to Cal-Neva. For Sinatra to have invited him to the resort at the same time as the president’s sister and her husband made no sense. Naturally, Pat was upset. She wanted to turn around and fly right back to Los Angeles. In fact, according to a witness, as soon as she saw Giancana, she said, “That’s it. We have to go.”

Peter, who seemed embarrassed because Pat had spoken loudly enough to have been heard by Giancana, walked over to the mobster and shook his hand, then began conversing with him. The two repeatedly glanced at Marilyn while they spoke, as if they were taking about her. Because Marilyn just looked at Giancana with a dazed expression, it’s not known if she recognized him or not. “I don’t feel well,” she told Pat. “I can’t fly again. We can’t leave now.”

Pat put her arm around Marilyn’s shoulder and whispered something in her ear. However, whatever she said upset Marilyn. “I don’t care,” she said, now raising her voice. “I don’t care about any of it. I just need to go and lie down, right now. Take me to my room, Pat. Right now.”

With that, Peter walked quickly over to the two women and said something to them in an angry tone. Pat gave him a long, piercing look. Then, without saying a word to him, she led her friend away, her hand on the actress’s elbow.

Roberta Linn, who was entertaining at Cal-Neva along with Frank Sinatra and Buddy Greco, recalled, “I remember that her hair was in disarray the entire time, sometimes hidden under a scarf. She was very sad and she seemed out of it. She was at Sinatra’s show every night—he was performing in the main room, and she would sit in the back looking very unhappy. I thought it was such a shame, this girl who had everything in the world, yet nothing, really. It was very hard to see her in this condition.”

Sinatra’s friend Jim Whiting recalled, “Jilly [Rizzo, another close friend of Sinatra’s] told me that Marilyn had some kind of bad reaction to alcohol while she was at Cal-Neva. It sounded like alcohol poisoning to me. She was also having stomach problems then and the booze along with the pills was, I guess, having a bad effect on her.”

There was more to it than just pills and “booze,” though. As earlier stated, Marilyn had developed the alarming habit of giving herself injections of phenobarbital, Nembutal, and Seconal—which she referred to as “a vitamin shot.” Joe Langford confirmed, “On the day she opened her purse and pulled out those syringes, I was standing right there with Mr. Sinatra and Pat Kennedy Lawford. Marilyn was very casual about it. She was looking for something else and just pulled them out and put them on the table. Sinatra went white, like a sheet. He said, ‘Marilyn. Jesus Christ. What are they for?’ She said, ‘Oh, those are for my vitamin shots.’ She was very nonchalant about it. Pat looked like she was going to faint. ‘Oh my God, Marilyn,’ she said. ‘Oh my God.’ Then Marilyn said, ‘It’s all right Pat. I know what I’m doing.’

“[Marilyn] was still going through her purse until, finally, she found what she was looking for: a pin. As we all stood there with our mouths open, she opened a bottle of pills and picked one out. Then—and I had never seen anything like this before—she put a small hole at the end of the capsule, and swallowed it. ‘Gets into your bloodstream faster that way,’ she said. She turned back to Pat and said, ‘See, I told you I knew what I was doing.’ ”

Later that night, after Sinatra’s performance in the main showroom at Cal-Neva, the Lawfords and friends shared a few cocktails. Marilyn had only one drink. Still, she excused herself from the group, saying that she wasn’t feeling well and needed to rest in her room. Sometime later Pat went to check on her. According to a later recollection, Pat knocked on Marilyn’s door for a while before a wobbly Monroe let her in, then flopped back down on her bed. She was nauseous, she said. Pat grew concerned and asked Marilyn if she had taken another of her “vitamin shots.” At some point, Marilyn became violently ill. Pat later said she knelt next to her, holding her friend’s hair back as she threw up into the toilet. After this episode, Pat helped Marilyn change into a different outfit because the white blouse Marilyn had been wearing was stained with vomit. Marilyn then asked Pat to throw the top away in a trash can on the premises, claiming that “people will be going through the garbage in my room later.”

Obviously, it turned out to be a very difficult weekend for all concerned at Cal-Neva, made even more so by the swarms of FBI agents due to Sam Giancana’s presence. As a result of Sinatra’s poor judgment, much fiction has been spun from the stories that have circulated—most of which are not true—about those couple of days in July 1962. Place Sinatra in a room with a Kennedy, a mobster, and a movie star, and what else can one expect but rumors, gossip, and innuendo? Add the FBI to the mix—with its theories presented as “fact” in its files—and it’s a sure recipe for confusion. In fact, Marilyn Monroe aficionados refer to this brief period as “The Lost Weekend,” because there have been so many conflicting stories about it.

What we do know is this: Marilyn Monroe was dreadfully sick, emotionally and physically, the entire time she was at Cal-Neva. Whenever she was left alone for even fifteen minutes, she would pop a couple more pills, take another “vitamin shot,” and make herself even sicker. At one point during the weekend, Pat Kennedy Lawford raided Marilyn’s purse and got rid of all of the syringes. “She’s a very sick woman,” Pat told Peter. That was an understatement. In fact, between July 1 and August 9, Marilyn had twenty-seven appointments with her psychiatrist, Greenson, and thirteen with her internist, Engelberg.

“Frank Sinatra didn’t know what to think about any of it,” said his valet, George Jacobs. “He was upset, though. He loved Marilyn, yes. But this was pushing it. For her to maybe die at Cal-Neva while he was there? That would have been terrible. So, after he’d seen enough, he said, ‘Get her out of here and get her out of here now.’ And that was it. We had to do what he said, get her out of there. You know, you felt bad about it, yeah. I mean, the woman was sick. But as compassionate as Sinatra was, he had a line and she crossed it. He didn’t want her dying at Cal-Neva, and that’s just the truth of it.”

Ken Rotcop, who was a guest at Cal-Neva, recalled seeing Marilyn leave the resort. “She was shaking, she had chills, she looked very very sick.” Stacy Baron, another guest of the hotel, recalled, “I was in the lobby and I saw Peter Lawford on one side of her and Pat on the other side and they were practically carrying this woman out of there. I recognized the two of them but I couldn’t figure out who the woman was because she had her head down and was just sort of groggy. Then she raised her head and I got a real shock. It was Marilyn Monroe. I was stunned. And as I was standing there with my mouth open, I heard Pat say to Peter, ‘This is all your fault, Peter. This is all your fault.’ And Peter said, ‘Not now, Pat. Jesus Christ, not now.’ ” I just watched them leave, thinking, my God! Marilyn Monroe looks like death.”