Marilyn's Haunting Chat with Jacqueline Kennedy

I am constantly amazed at the way anecdotes pertaining to the life of Marilyn Monroe are manipulated, even forged by the sensationalist authors that are inappropriately labeled her biographers. The narratives forged by many of those writers are not only pathographies; most of them are nothing but fictitious extrusions, novels. As early as 1964, a mere two years after her tragic suicide, the far right wing zealot, Frank Capell, wrote and published a thin pamphlet, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe. Capell’s publication, a political diatribe designed to pollute Robert Kennedy’s reputation and impede the former attorney general’s then political aspira­tions, can easily fit into each category: the pamphlet was both a pathography and a novel starring MM and RFK. The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe also began what Donald Spoto correctly designated an ava­lanche of slapdash, dishonest memoirs in which Marilyn was the sexual door prize; but arguably of more significance is this: Frank Capell’s philippic, used by Norman Mailer and the corrupt, dishonest Robert F. Slatzer, ushered in decades of Marilyn Monroe literature which cast her in the mediocre role of a dimwitted cutout, a cardboard pawn that was being used in a political chess game that she was incapable of understanding. Moreover, along with the assassinations of the middle Ken­nedy brothers, and the passing of time, John and Robert Kennedy’s biog­raphers, along with Marilyn’s biographers, a descriptive term that I employee with a certain dubiety, used their literary pulpits as a means to smear and discolor, essentially condemn all three. Why is that? I have searched for years, but I have yet to discover a satisfactory explanation for all the rancor and animus.

I have already written an article about the most recent publication starring Marilyn Monroe, a book declared by its authors to be a product of their imagina­tions, declared to be a fic­tional true crime thriller. Please, at the author’s request, ignore the apparent contradiction. Written by James Patterson with Imogen Edwards-Jones, The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe appeared late last year; and in Chapter 58, the authors presented the follow­ing anecdote:

In April [of 1962], Marilyn places a call to the Kennedy Compound at Hyan­nis Port, Massachusetts. When she reaches First Lady Jackie Kennedy, she doesn’t identify herself but says only that she’s “looking for Jack.”

Alone in her bedroom, Jackie recognizes the voice of the woman who’s look­ing to take her place. Jackie has heard that Marilyn’s a bit troubled, so she keeps it light.

“Marilyn, you’ll marry Jack, that’s great,” she says, “And you’ll move into the White House, and you’ll assume the responsibilities of the First Lady. And I’ll move out, and you’ll have all the problems” (Patterson 334: emphasis mine, to be explained later).

The preceding three unusually brief paragraphs, and the italicized quotations, are remarkable, considering the absence of any verifiable proof or evidence that this purported telephone conversation between the reigning Queen of Hollywood and the reigning First Lady of the United States ever transpired; but then, disregarding the requirement for providing verifiable proof or evidence is the disencumbering bonus of purposely writing a biography that is a fiction, a product of the author’s imagination.

Since the narrators of Marilyn’s last days did not offer any evidence that substantiated their telephone anecdote and they did not provide a source—our literary narrators could not have interviewed the conversation’s participants—should we, the readers, accept the verity of their anecdote on faith; or should we relegate what they asserted to the category of a fiction, a created yarn included among the other created yarns based solely on its sensationalistic appeal? What could be more sensational than a telephone conversation between Marilyn Monroe and Jacqueline Kennedy during which the two women discussed a sexual dalliance between the former’s paramour and the latter’s husband, the Chief Executive of the United States? Well, in fact, the only conversa­tion between those two iconic women offering more sensational electricity would be a conversation about an affair between the two women engaged in the conversation, the world’s most famous blonde and the brunette occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC. Someday, I wager, that very assertion will appear.

Even so, absent any evidence of it, absent a source for it and absent any interviews with the partici­pants engaged in it, from where did the telephone chat derive?

In her 2004 Marilyn publication, author Sarah Churchwell offered the following astute observation about her subject: If nothing else, the many lives of Marilyn Monroe show that belief precedes “the facts” (Churchwell KE:2). The many lives to which Sarah re­ferred are the many and invaria­bly disparate accounts, the written descriptions of the many lives lived by the movie star—that is, the many lives she lived as magically unspooled in biographical literature. Sarah’s observation is an axiom that can be applied essentially to any aspect of Mari­lyn’s many lives; but the cultural historian’s para­mount intimation is this: those who com­pose biographies are not always interested in the facts. Or, Like Othello turning a handker­chief into what he will call proof of an adultery in which he already believes, Sarah added, so too can biography build a framework upon evi­dence whose very flimsiness demonstrates the firm­ness of the opinions it already holds (Churchwell KE:2).

Ahhhh, yes … the opinions already held, formed without any facts, formed without any evidence, the foregone conclusions contained in the many words written about Marilyn Monroe’s many lived lives. That existential situation loudly begs for an answer to this question: which written about Marilyn Monroe life originally unveiled the telephone anecdote, the haunting telephone chat?

Beginning in 1964, with the publication of Frank Capell’s Robert-Kennedy-Hatchet-Job, al­ready herein referenced above, over the ensuing twenty-five years, various publishing outfits, some well-known, some not so well-known, released thirty books, all of which featured Marilyn Monroe as their subject. Not all of those books were classified as biographies: some were picture books while some were simply anthologies of magazine articles which focused on Marilyn’s film career; some were trashy and apocryphal, indecently sexualized memoirs, like the awful one written by Eddie Friedman, AKA Ted Jordan, who competed with Robert Slatzer for the spotlight of claiming to be Marilyn’s best friend and lover.1Evidently Slatzer sued Jordan and obtained a court order restraining Jordan from being around Slatzer and even talking or answering question about Marilyn’s faux second hubbie.
Based on the documents that I have seen from the “William Randolph Fowler Collection,” that is, the archives of journalist Will Fowler, exactly what prompted the lawsuit, the threat of administering a bloody nose, or something worse, remains unclear.

In 1965, Edwin P. Hoyt published the blonde movie star’s first authentic biography, Marilyn: The Tragic Venus, a book lauded by a famous Marilyn Monroe historian, Sir Markus Shaw. In fact, Sir Markus asserted that Ed Hoyt’s biography was the only reliable biography ever written about the blonde actress. Other notable books among the thirty published, those declared to be biographies, included these, their publication years in parenthesis: Norma Jean: The Life of Marilyn Monroe, Fred Lawrence Guiles (1969); Marilyn: A Biography, Norman Mailer (1973); Marilyn Monroe, Joan Mellen (1974); Marilyn Monroe, Tom Hutchinson (1982); Mari­lyn Monroe, Janice Anderson (1983); Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Summers (1985); Marilyn, Gloria Steinem (1986); Marilyn Monroe, Graham McCann (1988). Not one of the biographies enumerated in the preceding paragraph mentioned a telephone conversation between Jacqueline Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, a fact that leads me directly to the year of 1989, Clemens Claude Oscar Heymann, known to the literary world as C. David Heymann, and his vulgar publication: A Woman Named Jackie: An Intimate Biography of Jacqueline Bou­vier Kennedy Onassis, released by Lyle Stuart Incorporated on June the 1st in 1989. Even though the purported biography did not actually concern Mari­lyn, she was a prominent character in the intimate prevarication.

With the arrival of Chapter 22, beginning on page 364 of his Jackie Kennedy biography, a salacious and tiresome contrivance, Heymann wrote the following about Marilyn:

She was crazy about Jack, said Peter Lawford. She devised all sorts of madcap fantasies with herself in the starring role, She would have his children. She would take Jackie’s place as First Lady. The fact that he was President allowed her to attach a lot of symbolic meaning to the affair. It was only a lark for him, but she really fell for the guy, for what he represented. In her depressive and doped-out state, she began to fall in love with him—or she convinced herself she was in love, which is basically the same thing.

Besides telephoning Jack at the White House, she used to send him copies of her love poetry, most of it written early in her career. Then one day she told me she had telephoned Jackie at the White House. For all her romanticism and masochism, Marilyn could also be a mean little bitch. Everybody wrote her up as being the poor helpless victim, but that wasn’t always the case.

According to Marilyn, Jackie wasn’t shaken by the call. Not outwardly. She agreed to step aside. She would divorce Jack and Marilyn could marry him, but she would have to move into the White House. If Marilyn wasn’t prepared to live openly in the White House, she might as well forget about it.

Actually Jackie was infuriated by the call, and for some reason, blamed Frank Sinatra for it. She couldn’t easily blame me because I was family, so she took it out on him (Heymann: AWNJ: 364-365).2In his publication about Robert Kennedy, Heymann repeated the preceding account virtually verbatim in Chapter 18, “Marilyn,” pages 305-306.

There are so many outrageous assertions and implications contained in the preceding two-hundred and fifty-two words that they stagger a fellow’s imagination, despite just how wild a fellow’s imagination might be. The entire premise is preposterous. Not even in a distorted but parallel universe would Marilyn Monroe telephone the wife of the sitting US president, admit to a love affair with him and then discuss a sort of peaceful transition of wifely power. Still, the preceding quotation was the first time that any author, dishonest or otherwise who contributed to a Marilyn Monroe orthodoxy, mentioned a telephone call and a conversation between the actress and First Lady.

Please note the curious absence of any direct quotations and Heymann’s attribution to Peter Lawford—said Peter Lawford, an implication that the English actor communicated the anecdote directly to Heymann, possibly during an interview, a topic to which I will return later, or at least a face to face conversa­tion. That certainly was not the case, as will become crystal clear.

Clem Heymann never let the actual facts or what could be called the truth encumber his biographies. The author often ex­pressed an odd pride or satisfaction with, a feeling of success that he derived from his writings, apocryphal writings that Nor­man Mailer would, without an apology, brand creative non­fic­tion or factoidal or faction, a com­bina­tion of fact and fiction, or maybe simply an exciting form of Hunter Thompson’s gonzo journalism. Using literary techniques to create nonfiction biographies, techniques that are usually reserved for the creation of novels, is not acceptable. That type of journalism represents the type of con­doned prevarication that has led directly to the type of audacious, even insolent and dishonest journalism prevalent in our contemporary world. I am not alone in my denunciation of those journalistic proclivities; and I share my position regarding Clem Heymann with all of his detractors.

Using the remarkable investigations and research conducted by Donna Morel—with whom I have com­mu­nicated many, many times—David Cay Johnston wrote an article for Newsweek in which the journalist criticized Clem Heymann’s fraudulent works and criticized the publish­ing behemoth CBS for printing them. When Johnston began to question CBS’s Simon and Schuster publishing division, a representative told Johnston that he did not want to hear what Newsweek had found about any of the books by Heymann CBS had published. Johnston then commented:

It’s too bad CBS didn’t want to hear more, because all the celebrity bios Hey­mann wrote for them and other publishers—dealing with JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe—are riddled with errors and fabrications. An exhaustive cataloging of those mistakes would fill a book […].

Also, writing for Justia.com, a website that provides legal analysis and commentary, the attorney John Dean pegged C. David Heymann as a fraud and then noted that the fraud’s

[…]  biographies of high profile people are filled with sensationalized falsehoods and flat-out lies. Newsweek’s account seeks to pound a few nails into his coffin, but try as it might, it can’t manage to drive a stake through the heart of his body of work. Rather, Heymann’s vicious and malicious gossip-mongering lives on; his big-money trash-for-cash scam from which he profited handsomely while alive is now providing residuals for his estate.

David Johnston and John Dean are not the only journalists who have objected to Clem Heymann’s dishonesty and fraudulence, objected to the various publishers that have printed and promoted his trash-for-cash scams. I have written many words regarding Heymann’s dis­gusting literary practices, some of which I have already repeated herein; but there is no reason to repeat the long litany of his literary sins. If you want to read the lengthy subsec­tion dedicated to C. David Heymann, that is a part of this website, follow this direct link. I hope you will. Here’s the link: A Serial Fabulist, Marilyn and the Kennedys.