The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [394]
Sinatra had introduced Exner to the president. Bobby had all kinds of memos about Sinatra’s contacts with organized crime, and it was hardly wise that his brother intended to spend a weekend at Sinatra’s Palm Springs house. Kennedy, however, did not think of Sinatra as a political operative, but as a fellow sexual swordsman and bon vivant who offered him beautiful women and good times. Bobby realized that his brother would have to seek his pleasures elsewhere. The onerous task fell to him of calling Sinatra and telling him that in late March 1962 the president would be staying elsewhere.
Sinatra, like the president, was a man who thought he could have it all, a friendly greeting at the White House and a seat at the head table of the mob, accolades for his noble liberal politics and a personal life of excess. He had already built a helicopter pad for the president and lined up a weekend of assorted entertainments. He raged at Bobby, screaming at him into the phone, infuriated as much over the embarrassment as the insult itself. After hanging up, he went out to the helicopter pad and broke the concrete slab into pieces with a sledgehammer.
Just before Kennedy set off for his West Coast trip, he had lunch with Hoover. Neither man left a record of what was said that day. Although Exner claimed that Kennedy saw her later, by all documentary evidence he did not. He seems to have ended the relationship the way it began, as just another of his occasional trysts to be dismissed and forgotten.
In Palm Springs, Kennedy may not have had Sinatra to gather a bouquet of Hollywood’s rosebuds for his pleasure, but he had an even sweeter treat in store. Marilyn Monroe arrived to spend the evening with the president. The blonde actress was the benchmark of American sexual fantasy. Even the president was not immune to the dream of sleeping with her, and for months he had been pestering his brother-in-law Peter Lawford to set up an assignation.
Monroe appears to have viewed Kennedy not only as a political star in a firmament far above Hollywood but as an epic hero. In talking to her analyst, she spoke about him as a man who walked in the shoes of Jefferson and Lincoln. “This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans.” As for Kennedy, he may have suffered from the common male failure of taking almost as much pleasure in having his male cohorts know about his conquest as in the act itself. “Well, she loved him, and she was a beautiful girl,” Smathers reflected. “He took her down the Potomac on the presidential yacht two times. And God she loved Jack. After he was president. She was all over him, of course, he liked her very much. But he was already married and everything. So he had to be reasonably discreet. But he’d take a lot of guys, take a lot of his old buddies out when he had someone like Marilyn, and they’d all be around, five of us, or a bunch of us, where he could blame it on any one of his friends.”
On August 3, 1962, Bobby and his family flew to San Francisco for the start of a summer vacation. He was not one for sedate excursions, and he spent the weekend at the ranch of John Bates in northern California, driving back into the city Sunday evening to stay at Red Fay’s home.
Early in the morning on Sunday, August 5, Sergeant Jack Clemmons was led into Monroe’s bedroom in her home on Helena Drive. The actress’s nude body lay under a sheet. Beside her corpse stood her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, and Dr. Hyman Engelberg, her physician. An autopsy revealed that the body of the troubled actress was full of Nembutal.
Two years later Frank A. Capell, a right-wing journalist, published a book in which he alleged that Bobby was having an affair with the actress, who “believe[d] his intentions were serious.” To cover up her murder, Bobby had used “the Communist Conspiracy which is expert in the scientific elimination of its enemies” by employing Dr. Engelberg, who