PROLOGUE

“Say good-bye to the President.”

— Marilyn Monroe to Peter Lawford, August 4, 1962

Saturday, August 4, 1962, had been so hot in Los Angeles that by one in the morning the temperature still hovered in the upper seventies. At 1342 North Laurel Avenue, a quiet palm- tree-lined street in West Hollywood, private investigator Fred Otash, sleeping fitfully in the heat, awakened to the insistent jangle of his telephone. A man used to late-night summonings, Otash snapped alert and picked up the receiver. “Fred,” the voice on the line said, “this is Peter Lawford. I have a big problem. I need to come and see you.”

“What is it, Peter?” Otash asked.

“I can’t talk now. I’ll be over in a few minutes.”

Otash mumbled his assent, got out of bed, and put on his robe. Uneasy, he telephoned an associate and asked him to come over so that someone else would be present when Lawford got there. He put on a pot of coffee and waited for the actor’s arrival.

Peter Lawford and Fred Otash had had a long, if sporadic, relationship. As a vice cop in the Los Angeles Police Department, Otash had first met Lawford in the late 1940s when the handsome Englishman was one of MGM’s biggest stars. That meeting had been at Otash’s insistence — he wanted to give Peter a warning. “I told him to cool it,” Otash later recalled. “Every time we busted a bunch of hookers, his name was always in their trick books. Every hooker in LA had him down as a fifty-dollar trick.”

Otash had then left the police department and gone into private practice as an investigator. He had become known as the “PI to the stars,” handling the likes of Sheilah Graham, Rock Hudson’s wife Phyllis Gates, Frank Sinatra, and Marilyn Monroe. One of his regular clients was Confidential magazine, a leering, sensationalistic monthly that often got the goods on celebrities.

In 1954, Peter Lawford had married Patricia Kennedy, the daughter of Joseph P. Kennedy, the former American ambassador to Great Britain, and sister of Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy. This had put Lawford in a vulnerable position. Confidential had damaged or destroyed the careers of dozens of stars with exposés of their sexual peccadilloes, drinking, or drug use. The magazine, Peter had learned, knew about his frequent forays to brothels, and he was worried. A scandal could destroy his marriage and career, and might seriously tarnish the fast-rising political star of his brother-in-law, already being touted as a prospect for higher office.

So Peter had gone to see Otash. “Fred,” he told him, “I know Confidential has got something coming out on me. Now that I’m married to Pat Kennedy, I really can’t afford this horseshit.”

Otash had helped Lawford out of that scrape and got the story killed. In 1959, Lawford had called on the investigator again, this time to lend him electronic eavesdropping equipment so that Lawford could bug his own telephone. Peter hadn’t said why he wanted to do this, but Otash knew the Lawfords were having marital problems and he assumed that Peter suspected Pat was cheating on him.

Fred Otash was a man for hire, one with few personal loyalties. Before long he had helped bug the Lawford house again, but not for Peter. This time it was for a variety of parties who had wanted to develop a “derogatory profile” of Jack Kennedy in anticipation of his nomination for president by the Democrats in 1960.

In 1962, Peter Lawford was the brother-in-law of the president and the attorney general of the United States, two men with enemies ranging from their political adversaries to the corrupt Teamsters to mob members whom Attorney General Robert Kennedy had targeted for investigation. All of these factions, according to Otash, were expressing great interest in what the wiretaps in Lawford’s home would reveal.

As Otash and other of the Hollywood cognoscenti knew, both Jack and Bobby Kennedy had been sexually involved with Marilyn Monroe, the world’s reigning movie sex goddess, and their trysts — sometimes at Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house — were of particular interest to Otash’s clients. The situation was explosive. A scandal involving the sex lives of these two Catholic family men could topple the Kennedy administration, and there were many who would welcome the fall.

Now, in the early morning hours of August 5, when Otash opened his door to Lawford, he was struck by the fact that the actor was “half crocked or half doped.” At the very least, he looked a nervous wreck — “squirming like a worm in a frying pan,” as Otash’s associate later described him.

“Marilyn’s dead” were Lawford’s first words. As Otash recalled it: “He told me that Bobby Kennedy had broken off the affair with Marilyn and that she was hysterical and calling the White House and the Justice Department and Hyannis Port, insisting that Bobby get in touch with her. And that the Department of Justice had called Bobby in San Francisco and told him, ‘You’d better get your ass down to LA because she’s out of control.’”

Lawford told Otash he was terrified that an investigation of Marilyn’s death would reveal her affairs with the Kennedy brothers. He had already been to her house to “clean up,” and had removed what incriminating evidence he could find. But he was afraid he’d missed things. He wanted Otash to return to the scene and finish the job.

“Me?” Otash responded. “You gotta be fucking nuts! If I went within four miles of that place — I mean, I’m too well-known. I want no part of it.”

But Otash did send over his associate — the same man who had installed surveillance wires in Marilyn’s house several months earlier. “He knew the place very well,” Otash said. “He finished the job that Lawford started, and he found things that Lawford had left behind.”

MARILYN MONROE’S DEATH sent shock waves around the world. Editorial-page writers raged against the heartless exploitation by the Hollywood star factories. Millions were saddened by the descriptions they read of the private Marilyn: her crippling lack of self- esteem that stemmed from a loveless childhood and uncertain parentage, her sexual molestation as a child, her frequent affairs as an adult that had brought her little fulfillment. It was reported that she could be charming, giving, and thoughtful one minute, vicious and hurtful the next. She had abused alcohol and drugs to the impairment of her health; her death was a result of that abuse. And she took a great many provocative secrets about equally famous people with her to the grave.

No one could have anticipated that twenty-two years later the same description, in every particular, would apply as well to Peter Lawford.