Oh, what is the answer?
what is the answer?
what is the answer?
what is the answer?
what is the question?
—Gertrude Stein
Several days after the funeral, Sergeant Robert Byron of the West Los Angeles Division sought to interview Peter Lawford. He was told by the actor’s secretary that Lawford was out of town and would return to the city in several weeks. The day after the funeral, Peter and Pat Lawford along with Pat Newcomb flew to Hyannisport, where they stayed as guests in Robert Kennedy’s residence. On Friday, August 10, Peter Lawford gave an interview to Hearst Washington correspondent Marianne Means:
“I can’t believe her death was anything but an accident,” Lawford insisted as he leaned back in the soft overstuffed chair and propped mocassined feet on the coffee table in the empty living room of Attorney General Robert Kennedy…. “I just can’t believe she’s not around,” he sighed….
It seemed a bit strange that the close friend of America’s most famous sex goddess should be detailing his first-hand impressions of her in a room so linked with another kind of fame. In this house where Bobby Kennedy ran the Kennedy “Intelligence Center” on election night 1960.
Jacqueline Kennedy had departed with Caroline on Tuesday, August 7, for an extended holiday in Europe. On August 11 and 12, President Kennedy, the Lawfords, Pat Newcomb, and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger spent the weekend in Maine at the retreat of former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney on John’s Island. Sunday the group spent the day on board the sixty-two-foot coast guard yacht Manitou.
Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, reporter Joe Hyams learned that Lawford’s neighbors were upset that a helicopter had touched down on the Santa Monica shore behind the Lawford residence in the early hours of Sunday morning, August 5, blowing sand into their swimming pools. Ward Wood, another neighbor, had told a police department contact that he saw Bobby Kennedy arrive in a Mercedes at the Lawford mansion “late Saturday afternoon or in the early evening.”
This information led Hyams to contact Billy Woodfield, who had recently been commissioned by Frank Sinatra to take photos of his private jet from a helicopter rented from the Conners Helicopter Service of Santa Monica. Woodfield knew that Sinatra’s pal Peter Lawford used the same services, as did many other Hollywood celebrities. Under the pretext of doing an article on the helicopter service to the stars, Woodfield asked to review the Conners flight logs listing all of their famous customers. Turning to the pages dated August 4 and 5, he discovered that a helicopter had been hired to pick up a passenger at the Lawford beach house early Sunday morning. Woodfield recently recalled, “The time in the log was approximately two o’clock Sunday morning. It confirmed what the neighbors had told us.”
Attempting to piece together Monroe’s last hours, Woodfield then called Dr. Ralph Greenson. According to Woodfield, the psychiatrist wouldn’t discuss what had occurred, ending the call with, “Look, I cannot explain myself without revealing things I don’t want to reveal. You can’t draw a line and say, ‘I’ll tell you this, but I won’t tell you that.’ I can’t talk about it, because I can’t tell you the whole story…. Listen, talk to Bobby Kennedy.”
Woodfield recalls, “Hyams knew he had a powerful news item.” “He called the attorney general’s office and asked if Robert Kennedy would comment on our information. They called back and said, ‘The attorney general would appreciate it if we didn’t file the story.’”
Hyams stated, “I filed the article about Bobby and Marilyn with the Herald Tribune on the Monday or Tuesday after the funeral, but they killed it. It never ran.”
On Thursday, August 9, Robert Slatzer met with executrix Inez Melson and Eunice Murray at Monroe’s house. “Inez was going through what remained of Marilyn’s papers in the file cabinet kept in the guest cottage,” Slatzer recalled, “She told me that when she arrived at the house early Sunday morning she discovered the cabinet had been broken into and many of Marilyn’s things were missing. It was obvious that the lock had been forcibly broken.”
Slatzer remembered Marilyn’s concern over the security of her papers. When she had given him a tour of her new house the previous April, she mentioned that things kept disappearing from her files, and she had ordered the lock changed and bars installed on the guest cottage windows. A bill to the Monroe estate from the A-l Lock and Safe Company of Santa Monica indicates that the locks were changed on March 15, 1962. When Slatzer asked Melson if she had found Marilyn’s red diary, Melson said she didn’t know anything about the diary. She hadn’t seen it.
Before leaving, Slatzer went with Murray to the bedroom where Marilyn’s body had been discovered. Though Murray said she had called Norman Jefferies early Sunday morning to repair the broken window, Slatzer noticed that the window was boarded up and hadn’t been repaired. He found shards of broken glass lying outside in the dirt of the flower bed, rather than inside where they logically would have fallen.
Slatzer recalls that the last time he had seen Marilyn was just before he left for Ohio in mid-July. She had called from a public phone, and he remembered the unusual urgency to her voice: “Pick me up at six,” Marilyn had asked; “I’ll meet you at San Vicente and Carmelina.” Slatzer remembers driving to the Brentwood corner near her home. Expecting to wait, he was surprised to find her standing on the corner, a lonely figure who went unrecognized—without makeup and wearing large sunglasses, her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail under a scarf. “Hi,” she called out as he pulled up to the curb. She hopped in beside him with a big smile, placing her oversize pocketbook on the floor of his Cadillac.
Though she seemed her effervescent self, as they drove north toward Point Dume just beyond Malibu Beach, Slatzer recalls becoming aware of the emotional difficulties she was going through. Shortly after the president’s birthday gala in May, Marilyn was suddenly cut off from communication with Jack Kennedy, and the phone number she had to his private line was disconnected. She had been told in a brutal fashion by Peter Lawford that she was never to speak to the president again.
“It was a devastating emotional blow that led to her breakdown on the set of Something’s Got to Give at 20th Century-Fox,” Slatzer recalled. “In her rage and despondency she placed numerous calls to the White House demanding an explanation. Bobby became the emissary to soothe the fury of the woman scorned. I hadn’t realized the extent of her involvement with Bobby until she told me that day. When I last saw her she confided to me that Bobby had only recently tried to sever their relationship as well. Like Jack, Bobby offered no explanation.” Slatzer perceived that the Kennedys’ rejection had touched a raw nerve in Marilyn, and her devastation was turning to anger.
“What Marilyn revealed to me that day on the beach, I found deeply disturbing,” Slatzer confides. She removed her small red diary from her bag and showed Slatzer her “book of secrets.”
“What is it?” Slatzer asked.
“It’s my diary,” she replied, “I want you to look through it.”
Slatzer remembers thumbing through the pages and finding notes of her conversations with the Kennedys. Some of the topics included government plans to use mobsters to assassinate Fidel Castro, atomic testing, Sinatra’s ties to the underworld, civil rights, Bobby Kennedy’s efforts to jail Jimmy Hoffa, and a note indicating that Bobby Kennedy had persuaded the president to withdraw American air cover in the Bay of Pigs disaster. Slatzer said he asked her why she had made the notations.
“Mostly because Bobby liked to talk about political things,” she replied. “I wanted to be able to talk about things he was interested in. So I’d make notes after our conversations, and then I’d learn as much as I could about the subjects so that I could talk about them intelligently.”
“Has anybody else seen this book?” Slatzer asked.
“Nobody.” she answered. “But I’m so angry I may just call a press conference and show it to the whole world and let everybody know what the Kennedys are really like!”
Slatzer recalls trying to persuade her to forget about the Kennedys and concentrate on her career—to put away her diary and not show it to anybody. “Obviously Bobby doesn’t want anything more to do with you, and for your own good, you’d better forget about him,” he advised.
“It’s not that easy,” she replied.
Several days later, Slatzer left for Ohio, where he received a series of disturbing calls from Marilyn—ending with the one on Friday, August 3, when it seemed so important for her to locate Robert Kennedy.