Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [165]
‘Hoover’s intermediary told me that, as Attorney General, Robert Kennedy had given strict orders that the house was not to be bugged. But it was covered, on Hoover’s personal instructions. Jimmy Hoffa did get one of the Kennedy-Monroe tapes, but only because it was leaked to him by one of the operatives. He wanted to make a buck and Hoffa’s people paid $100,000 – a lot of money back then. But that surveillance was commissioned by the FBI, and almost all the tapes went to the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover had access to every goddamned thing that happened at the beach house, including what happened when the Kennedys were there, for nearly a year. Draw your own conclusion.’
One of the men who monitored the bugs at the Lawford house was private investigator John Danoff. He told how, during a presidential visit in November 1961, he listened in on a tryst between Kennedy and Monroe. ‘To my amazement,’ Danoff recalled, ‘I started to recognize the voices – because of the President’s distinct Bostonian accent and Marilyn Monroe’s voice … Then you heard them talking and they were going about disrobing and going into the sex act on the bed …’
For Edgar, tapes of scenes like this were just the beginning of the harvest. On February 1, 1962, Monroe met Robert Kennedy for the first time, at a dinner party in the Lawford house. Later that night, the actress was to tell a friend, the two of them talked alone in the den. In characteristic fashion, she had prepared questions of topical interest and asked whether it was true that J. Edgar Hoover might soon be fired. Robert replied that ‘he and the President didn’t feel strong enough to do so, though they wanted to.’
According to the man who installed the bugs, that conversation would have been picked up by the hidden microphones. For Edgar, reading the transcript in Washington, Kennedy’s words must have held some comfort. He now knew, for sure, from the mouth of one of the brothers, that the Kennedys were afraid to dismiss him – for the time being. That gave him all the more reason to go on watching, to keep on piling up compromising information.
Edgar would have known about Robert’s comments on his future, and about the sex session with Monroe at the Lawford house, well in time for the lunch at the White House in March 1962. Yet whether or not he mentioned Monroe that day – along with Judith Campbell – John Kennedy blithely saw the actress again within forty-eight hours, on a trip to California. ‘It was obvious,’ said Philip Watson, a Los Angeles County official who saw them together, ‘that they were intimate, that they were staying together for the night.’
In Washington in the weeks that followed, the tension between Edgar and the Kennedys continued. Robert Kennedy and Edgar now rarely cooperated with each other about anything. Formal courtesies continued, with the President telephoning Edgar to congratulate him on his thirty-eighth anniversary as Director. Edgar sent a pleasant acknowledgment. Then, the same day, he refused to show up at a cake-cutting ceremony organized by Robert.
The Monroe saga, meanwhile, took a strange turn. John Kennedy saw the actress once more, on May 19 in New York, but apparently never again. According to Peter Lawford, Edgar had warned him off, saying the Lawford beach house ‘had very likely been bugged by the Mafia.’ He did not, one may be sure, say it had been bugged on his own orders.
Unfortunately for the Kennedys, Monroe would not accept that the affair was over. Back on the Coast, she plunged into black despair, losing herself in drugs and barbiturates. ‘Marilyn,’ Lawford reportedly recalled, ‘began writing these rather pathetic letters to Jack and continued calling. She threatened to go to the press. He finally sent Bobby