Jose Bolaños, the Mexican screenwriter, is sometimes known as “the last lover of Marilyn Monroe.” He later claimed that Marilyn and he planned to get married, although it appears that she was also promising a remarriage to the Yankee slugger, Joe DiMaggio.
Bolaños was one of the last people to talk to Marilyn on the night of her death on August 4, 1962. In contrast to Peter Lawford’s report about her voice being slurred, Bolaños claimed that she was exuberant and making plans for the future.
What has tantalized reporters for years is one of Bolaños’ statements: “Marilyn told me something that, if true, would rock the world.” At the time, he chose not to reveal what that awesome secret was.
In October of 1963, Bolaños was working in Mexico on a commercial for the New York City-based television production company, TV Graphics, which was shooting a beach scene near Puerto Val arta.
Also near Puerto Val arta, Richard Burton and Ava Gardner were filming the movie version of Tennessee Williams’ play, The Night of the Iguana. Elizabeth Taylor had flown to Puerto Val arta to stay with Burton during the filming.
Tennessee arrived unannounced on the scene with his lover du jour. He met Bolaños on the beach, and invited him as the guest of honor at a Mexican dinner he was hosting for a few select friends. Williams had read about Bolaños in accounts of Marilyn’s death the previous year, and was most intrigued.
It evolved into a drunken night of revelry, and Tennessee exercised his talent for zeroing in on his subject. “And exactly what did our dear friend Marilyn tell you that was so shocking?”
Before he answered, Bolaños had to fill in some background, explaining that Marilyn had developed a friendship with Fred Vanderbilt Field, an avowed Communist and the leading American expatriate in Mexico City. Bolaños said that he’d introduced Marilyn not only to Field, but also to E. Howard Hunt, who, as he claimed, “has CIA connections.”
“I talked to Marilyn on the phone right before she died,” Bolaños said. “She’d received this terribly disturbing call from Field in Mexico City. According to him, he’d just learned that Hunt, who was my friend, was plotting the assassination of President Kennedy.”
Coming a month or so before the actual assassination of the President, his comment did not cause any undue alarm, at least for the moment. Tennessee said that it was his understanding that a sittting U.S. President gets death threats every day. “I get death threats for suggesting homosexuality in my plays.”
None of the guests at the party that night paid much at ention to the comment, and no one tried to reach the Associated Press on the phone. Perhaps no one at the time knew who E. Howard Hunt was.
But with the passage of time, it appears that Field was definitely onto a plot to assassinate the President.
E. Howard Hunt died on January 23, 2007. His own son, Saint John Hunt, said that his father, on his deathbed, asserted that he was involved in a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy on that November day in Dallas in 1963.
As ironic as it seemed, Marilyn may have known of that. The President might have lived many more years if he’d answered Marilyn’s final call to him at the White House. Hunt’s son reported that his father admitted his guilt in JFK’s assassination. The alleged fellow conspirators even had a code name. Their operation was call ed, “The Big Event.”
Although Marilyn learned of the President’s upcoming assassination, she remained unaware of her own impending doom. Forces were already heading for her new home in Brentwood, on that hot summer night in August of 1962.