Investigative journalist, gossip columnist and panelist on the popular fifties television program, What’s My Line, Dorothy Kilgallen reinforced a sudden belief by many, as a result of Marilyn’s sultry and sexy rendition of happy birthday, that she and President John Kennedy were romantically involved. Kilgallen considered Marilyn’s performance that May evening to be a sexual event, tantamount to Marilyn making love to John Kennedy while a large audience of admirers observed. Dorothy also wrote for the New York Journal American on the 3rd of August, the day before Marilyn’s tragic death:

Marilyn Monroe’s health must be improving. She’s been attending select Hollywood parties and has become the talk of the town again. […] And she’s cooking in the sex-appeal department, too; she’s proved vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman who is a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday. So don’t write off Marilyn as finished. (“Dorothy Kilgallen.” Spartacus Educational. John Simkin. <http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKkilgallen.htm>)

Even though the public believed that Kilgallen’s gossip column and her handsome gentleman referred to John Fitzgerald, she later revealed that she was actually referring to his brother, Robert Francis; and, at the time, she did not reveal her source for that tidbit of gossip about Marilyn: Howard Perry Rothberg, a friend of Kilgallen’s and a New York City interior designer with no connection whatsoever to Marilyn or her inner coterie of friends (Spoto 683). Both Rothberg and Kilgallen appear prominently later in the section featuring some secret things from outer space.

Thus, with innuendo, rumor and an apparent falsehood which generated the public’s misperception, the legend of a romantic affair involving Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy began. Dorothy Kilgallen’s arranged bed of potent kindling, featuring sex and intrigue, awaited its famous literary igniter for one decade plus one year; but before his arrival, a Red Scare arrived, along with paranoia and political rancor.