Norman Mailer began the legend of Robert Kennedy’s 1962 August the 4th visit to Fifth Helena; and Mailer implanted the idea that Robert Kennedy employed a helicopter to effect his getaway, kept himself above the fray and out of the carnage after Marilyn was gone. In his 1973 faux biography about Marilyn, Mailer opined, even if Robert Kennedy never visited his actress lover that eventful August Saturday, this won’t prove the Easterner’s most shining hour. On Sunday morning following, the attorney general appeared with his family in San Francisco, Mailer alleged, after a Marine helicopter landed on and then departed from the helipad adjacent to Peter Lawford’s beach side mansion earlier that same Sunday morning. The obvious implication: the Marine helicopter was the Easterner’s escape and deliverance vehicle that arrived during the dead morning hours after Marilyn was gone, had departed from Mother Earth, that is, after her murder (Mailer KE:VIII). Do you find Mailer’s use of the word dead as an adjective to describe those early morning hours of August the 5th as contrived, curious and spurious as I do?

Most certainly the preceding is a complete and unmitigated corruption of history and reality, one of Mailer’s many whirligig flights into factoidal fantasy. On Sunday morning Robert Kennedy was in Gilroy, California, southeast of San Jose, attending Mass with at least a portion of his family and the family of John Bates. Robert Kennedy was not in San Francisco, not unless The Gilroy Dispatch and Gilroy’s parish priest were also involved in the monstrous conspiracy to conceal the murder of Marilyn Monroe and protect Robert Kennedy. The Gilroy Evening Dispatch published an article entitled “Robert Kennedys Visit Local Ranch.“

Kennedy, his wife and four oldest children, have been the guests of Mr. and Mrs. Jack Bates of Piedmont at their Gilroy ranch on Sanders Road. They are expected to leave tonight when they fly on to the Seattle World’s Fair. Sunday morning the Kennedys attended 9 o’clock mass at St. Mary’s Church in Gilroy.1Gilroy Evening Dispatch, “Robert Kennedys Visit Local Ranch.“ Staff writers, Monday, August 6, 1962.

But then, the Robert Kennedy’s visit to John and Nancy Bates’ Gilroy ranch and their attendance at St. Mary’s 9 AM mass did not receive a mention in Mailer’s faux biography and factoidal novel.

A year later, in his 1974 publication, Robert Slatzer expanded the Pulitzer prize winning novelist’s factoidal flight. Slatzer even quoted from Mailer’s biographical novel and used those quotations to verify what I’ve learned about Bobby Kennedy’s whereabouts on the morning Marilyn was found dead (Slatzer 20). Slatzer placed Robert Kennedy in San Francisco on August the 3rd, part of the attorney general’s two- or three-week tour of the Northwest. He checked into the St. Francis Hotel, in San Francisco, on Friday, August 3, 1962. That day the San Francisco newspapers ran stories of his arrival with his wife, Ethel, and a few of their children (Slatzer 19). Like Mailer, Slatzer did not mention the Kennedy’s visit to the Bates Ranch in Gilroy, California or their attendance at mass early Sunday morning. Obviously both Mailer and Slatzer were either ignorant of the attorney general’s actual movements during the weekend of August the 4th in 1962 or simply ignored the troublesome reality and historical fact of the Kennedy family’s trip to Gilroy with John and Nancy Bates, an accounting of which appears later in this section. Additionally, both Slatzer and Mailer simply ignored the following troublesome reality and historical fact as well: Peter Lawford’s beach house was not equipped with a helipad. Lawford’s beach house was crowded into a relatively narrow lot flanked both left and right by either other beach houses or California foliage. To the west was Santa Monica Beach and to the east, Pacific Coast Highway (Palisades Beach Road), which was flanked further to the east by a steep and rocky, tall and dangerous cliff.

Still, conspiracists embraced Mailer’s insinuation along with Slatzer’s tarradiddle; and Mailer’s insinuation that Robert Kennedy used a helicopter to escape from Los Angeles grew to include his trip to Los Angeles from Gilroy, despite testimony from John Bates and his family that the attorney general never left the ranch that weekend; but in order not to give the impression of a foregone or a concluded mind, suffer me to review a few of the travel scenarios offered by conspiracists Speriglio, Wolfe, Summers, Heymann and Wright.