The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn and Pat

In the spring of 1960, while Marilyn was in Los Angeles, she met a woman who would not only go on to become a good and trusted friend but would actually alter the course of her life, even if inadvertently—Pat Kennedy Lawford. In some ways, Pat may be the consistently missing link in all accounts of Marilyn’s relationship with the Kennedy family. While she is referred to in many biographies as having been Monroe’s “best friend” during the 1960s, this might be overstating their relationship a bit—and little concrete information has ever been reported. In some ways, it was an unlikely alliance between the two women.

As we have seen, Marilyn had been the unwanted love child of a woman who had gone insane. She’d spent her childhood being passed from foster home to foster home, never knowing what it felt like to belong, to be loved. Despite her fame, she never had much money; she always lived beyond her means. Privately, she longed to know the comfort and protection of a real family. In stark contrast, Patricia Kennedy Lawford—“Pat”—was the sixth of Joe and Rose Kennedy’s nine children, a member of the closely bound and influential Kennedy family. Her privileged background allowed her to live an affluent lifestyle, educated in the finest convent schools and graduating from Rosemont College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Pennsylvania. She traveled the world over and wanted for nothing, always under the protective and watchful eye of her wealthy family.

Pat, who was thirty-six when she and Marilyn became friends, was outgoing and friendly. She wouldn’t have been considered beautiful, but she was arresting just the same. She had a resolute-looking face that was a bit longish, with deep blue eyes, a sharp nose, and, of course, that toothy Kennedy smile. She was athletic, again like her relatives, her tall, slender body moving with easy grace as she tossed the pigskin about with her brothers. Always eager to forge an identity separate and apart from her famous family, she was a TV producer for a while before having her children. She had loved being in show business and wished it could have continued, but a Kennedy woman’s first responsibility was always to family, not career. Still, Pat was a very independent person. In fact, she was known in the family as “the Hollywood Kennedy,” the least politically motivated of the Kennedy sisters, the one who—as Jeanne Martin, Dean’s widow, put it—“loved a good time, loved show business, was a lot of fun and well liked by the stars she had met through her husband: Judy Garland, Jackie Cooper, Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, Martha Raye, Jimmy Durante, and dozens of others. You could depend on Pat. She was an absolutely fabulous person. She could be a great friend. She was, to Marilyn.” (Note: Pat was godmother to Jeanne and Dean’s daughter, Gina Caroline.)

When Peter Lawford first introduced Marilyn to Pat, two words came to mind: Grace Goddard. “She reminds me of my Aunt Grace so much I can’t even believe it,” Marilyn said at the time. “She has the exact same personality. When she laughs, it’s Grace’s laugh.” Any similarity Pat had with Grace may have been one of the reasons Marilyn felt so close to her so quickly. Definitely, Pat had Grace’s energy. She was always busy, always moving—always on the go and excited about going there. She was also wisecracking and had a sarcastic sense of humor. For those to whom the memory of Pat Kennedy doesn’t strike an image, think Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. That was Pat Kennedy.

Pat had met her husband, the British actor Peter Lawford, in 1949 in London. They married in 1954. By this time, Pat was thirty and had a personal fortune of $10 million. Peter, at thirty-one, was worth about $100,000 and was accused by some Kennedy loyalists of being a gold digger. Kennedy patriarch Joe certainly did not approve of him. “If there’s anything I’d hate more for a son-in-law than an actor, it’s a British actor,” he said. That Peter was Protestant didn’t help matters. Christopher Lawford, Pat’s son, recalls his mother saying that Joe Kennedy sent her on a trip around the world in order that she might forget Peter. “It didn’t work,” she told her son. I got to Japan and turned right around.” Joe Kennedy called J. Edgar Hoover and asked him to check out Peter’s background. Imagine it. Your potential father-in-law has the pull to have you investigated by J. Edgar Hoover. “He found out that I wasn’t homosexual and that I wasn’t a Communist, so I guess I was okay in those respects,” Peter would later say. “Still, Joe Kennedy wasn’t a fan of mine. It took Pat a lot of courage to marry me when her old man disapproved so much. I think she was very brave to do it, actually.”

Though Pat loved Peter, the marriage was troubled almost from the start, partly because of Peter’s personal demons, his drinking habits, and, later, his obsession with trying to fit in with Frank Sinatra’s notorious Rat Pack, but also because he never felt that he fit in the Kennedy fold, either. Whereas the husbands of Pat’s sisters, Eunice and Jean, both became involved in the Kennedys’ financial empire, Peter never did; he simply wasn’t interested. It may sound absurd in retrospect, but the fact that he couldn’t play football made things worse for him with the family. After all, he was unable to participate in the family’s greatest free-time ritual. “Never played in my life,” he said in 1981, “and that was bad news to the Kennedys. I was an outcast from the start.”

Immediately after they married, Peter began seeing other women—even during Pat’s pregnancies. However, Pat was accustomed to the idea of the philandering husband; her father and brothers had long ago exposed her to the notion of the unfaithful spouse, and of course, her mother, Rose, had endured a roaming husband in Joe. Pat did, too, but she was angry about it, not collected. She didn’t even try to fake it. Much like her sister-in-law, Jackie, she felt that the best she could do was to make sure her husband didn’t think she was a complete idiot, and then go about the business of making a good life for herself. She took it a step further. She insisted that she and Peter have separate bedrooms. She decided early on that she’d just as soon not sleep next to someone she knew was having sex with someone else. An oft-told “inside story” among Marilyn’s and Pat’s friends was that shortly after they met, Marilyn was at the house having lunch when Peter walked into the room. Pat took a sandwich from a platter in the middle of the table and handed it to Peter. “Ham and cheese,” she said. Then, in the next breath and very nonchalantly, “And that little brunette you were [expletive deleted] last night? I want her out of the picture. She called the house. And that’s where I draw the line. You got it?” She met Peter’s stunned expression with a stern one of her own. He just nodded and left the room, embarrassed. Then Pat went back to her conversation with Marilyn as if the scene had never happened. Later, Marilyn said, “She’s probably the strongest, most confident woman I have ever met. I wish I had her balls.”

In the spring of 1960, these two very different women—Marilyn and Pat—became close friends. It was an ironic meeting in the sense that Marilyn had dated Peter for a short time back in 1950. Peter was crazy about her, Marilyn not so much him. In some ways, the friendship between Marilyn and Pat made sense, though. Pat was drawn to the glamour and glitz that was all Marilyn’s, whereas Marilyn had always longed for the security and financial stability enjoyed by Pat. In other ways, the friendship seemed surprising. For instance, Pat was puritanical. While Pat was rather plain and ordinary in appearance, Marilyn was… well, Marilyn. While it was said that Pat made the sign of the cross whenever she had to have sex with Peter, Marilyn was… well, Marilyn.

“I don’t know when it happened exactly, but I know that Pat started to become very, I don’t know what the word is for it, really—infatuated, I guess, with the idea of knowing Marilyn Monroe,” says Pat Brennan, who met Pat in 1954 and remained friends with her through the 1960s and 1970s. “I think it’s safe to say that she was starstruck by her. Suddenly, everything was ‘I just spoke to Marilyn and she said that…’ It was as if she had a best friend overnight. I found it strange.

“I remember calling Pat once in the spring of 1960 and she said, ‘I’d like for you to speak to someone here.’ The next thing I knew, I was hearing this breathy voice on the other end of the phone. Marilyn. ‘Pat says you are her dear friend,’ she told me. ‘Well, I am, too. Maybe we’ll meet one day.’ I said, ‘Fine, let’s do.’ Finally Pat came back on the line. ‘So what do you think of that?’ Pat said. She was definitely impressed by Marilyn and wanted to impress others that she knew her.”

Very quickly, the two women became close. Pat’s son Christopher recalled of his mom and Marilyn, “[Marilyn] had a quiet voice and she would smile at me and head out to walk on the sand with my mom. My mother told me Marilyn was like her ‘little sister.’ It surprised her that Marilyn was so open with her. My mom didn’t come from an environment where emotions and feelings were openly shared. Marilyn Monroe trusted my mother’s love for her.”

As they got to know each other, they began to share details of each other’s life while commiserating about their joys and sadnesses. For instance, Pat had three children—Christopher, Sydney, and Victoria. In a year, she would have a fourth, Robin. Marilyn, of course, desperately longed for children. Sometimes the stories Pat told Marilyn about her family would leave her with her mouth wide open, such as this one:

“After Peter and I had Christopher, Peter was very unhappy because the baby cried all the time and the house smelled like shit,” Pat told Marilyn in front of other friends.

“Oh, well, I guess that’s what happens when you have a baby,” Marilyn said. “So what did you do?”

“Well, we decided it would be best if Christopher had his own apartment across the street.”

“What? How old was he?”

“Well, he was about two months old, actually. So, anyway, we rented an apartment for him and the nanny and he slept over there. It was just a lot easier on everyone.”

Indeed, Pat Kennedy Lawford was of a rare breed. Her story about Christopher aside, she was the best mother she knew how to be to her children. Of course, the Lawfords had a live-in nanny, but when the brood was a little older Pat would give the nanny one week off a month so that she could be a full-time mom to them. She would turn the clocks ahead an hour so that the kids would go to sleep a little earlier—but after spending the day running after four small children she probably figured she deserved the break.

Then there was this story:

“You will never guess what my dad gave me when I turned twenty-five.”

“A new outfit?” Marilyn asked.

“No, guess again.”

“A car?

“Nope. Guess again.”

“What? What?

“One million dollars,” Pat said with an impish grin.

Again, Marilyn couldn’t believe her ears. “But why?” she asked.

Pat laughed. “Oh, who knows? I guess because he loved me. It was quite generous, wasn’t it?” ^*

Marilyn had to agree.

The friendship with Pat had an interesting dynamic in that Pat wanted to share it with others while Marilyn chose to keep it to herself. “She liked Pat, I know that much, but other than that, I don’t know a lot,” said Ralph Roberts. “She was not effusive when it came to Pat. I remember thinking that it was mostly a telephonic relationship. I think Marilyn began to call her when she had problems—as she did all of us. And I think Pat enjoyed that. I think she wanted to help Marilyn, though I’m not sure why except that, well… everyone wanted to help Marilyn. She had that kind of vulnerability that made you want to take care of her, and I think Pat Kennedy Lawford was struck by it, too.”

In July 1960, Pat invited Marilyn to be present when her brother, John F. Kennedy, accepted the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States. Marilyn wasn’t sure she could make it. She said she had prior commitments with The Misfits. However, Pat told her that if she missed it she would be “missing something very historical.” So Marilyn agreed that she would be there. She would be out of town, she said, but she would fly in for the convention and fly right back out that night.

On the night of July 15, 1960, Marilyn and many other celebrities joined a packed house at the Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles and watched in rapt attention as John Kennedy spoke of his New Frontier. “The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises,” he intoned, “it is a set of challenges, it sums up not what I intend to offer of the American people but what I intend to ask them.” His aide Peter Summers, who was responsible for coordinating much of the television coverage of Kennedy’s campaign, recalled, “It was a magical moment like no other I can remember. When he came to the podium, the applause was thunderous but then, as he spoke, you could hear a pin drop. Chills were going up and down your spine. Yes, Marilyn was in the audience, along with many other stars. That night, I think a strong friendship began to develop between her and Jack Kennedy. She was free, but Jack Kennedy wasn’t.”

Marilyn did see Kennedy backstage after his speech. It was Pat who introduced them. Actually Marilyn and JFK had met once before, in the 1950s at a dinner party, but hadn’t had a chance to talk or get to know one another. They wouldn’t on this night, either. There was too much going on—the scene was chaotic and Marilyn had to fly out of Los Angeles that night anyway. However, something strange did happen as a result of that evening. It was clear to some observers that the two were flirtatious toward one another, and there was concern about it. Because Kennedy was known for his voracious sexual appetite, red flags went up in his campaign quarters anytime he flirted with a movie star. “Some people on staff said products are sold by star endorsement,” Peter Summers recalled, “and that maybe a closeness [between JFK and Monroe] of this nature will be a benefit to him getting elected. The other side was that you’re not going to elect someone president who is perhaps ignoring his wife or cheating on his family. So, yes there was concern. Marilyn was spoken to very frankly about it. The president was spoken to very frankly about it. There was great concern at the time. It could have destroyed him.”

In fact, Marilyn was spoken to—by Pat. One Kennedy relative recalled, “What happened was that someone from the Kennedy campaign told Peter Lawford that JFK had been flirting with Marilyn. They wanted to nip it in the bud before something happened. Would he talk to Marilyn about it? Peter thought it was unfair to approach Marilyn Monroe with a warning since nothing had even occurred. Still, he decided to ask Pat to at least mention to her that there was concern about it. So, from my understanding of it, Pat called Marilyn and said, ‘Look, I know this is ridiculous, but everyone is going nuts because they think my brother was flirting with you the other night. Do you think he was?’ Marilyn said, ‘Well, of course he was. And I was flirting back. But it meant nothing. It was just flirting.’ Pat said, ‘Fine. I just wanted you to know that they were worried about it.’ Marilyn asked, ‘About what?’ And Pat said, ‘Just that something might happen between you and my brother, that’s all. It’s very silly.’ Marilyn agreed. ‘Oh Pat, that is silly,’ she said. ‘It’s just ridiculous.’ ”