FEELING depressed after being used and then dumped by the two most powerful US figures in politics – President John F Kennedy and his Attorney General brother, Robert – Marilyn Monroe rang her friend and the most powerful entertainer of the time, Frank Sinatra.
The pair had also been on-off lovers and he invited her to his glamorous resort and casino in Nevada, the Cal-Neva Lodge, which became known as an infamous weekend of hedonism.
Marilyn Monroe was the top Hollywood actress during the 1950s and she would’ve turned 100 this JuneCredit: Getty
Marilyn talks to Frank as Maurice Chevalier looks on during a party on the set of the musical “Can-Can” in this 1960 file photoCredit: Columbia Pictures
Marilyn had stayed at Sinatra’s resort, the Cal-Neva Lodge, just five days prior to her 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 deathCredit: Getty
Sinatra co-owned it with the notorious mob boss, Sam Giancana and the place attracted a heady mix of celebrities, beautiful women and gangsters. The log cabins were linked by secret underground tunnels where guests could move from one to the other without being seen.
But by bringing her here, at her lowest ebb, had Sinatra tipped her over the edge? Just what happened that saw her sink into a mind-numbing cocktail of barbiturates and champagne in which she passed out and had to be taken to bed, remains unclear.
Had she been assaulted or threatened or had Sinatra’s attempt to take her mind off things just reminded her how powerful older men had used and abused her throughout her life? Just five days later, she was found dead in her bed, at the age of 36, having flown home, distressed and bare footed.
A new, two-part documentary, Marilyn and the Mob, revisits the Hollywood icon’s final weeks focusing on her dangerous connections with notorious mobsters that saw her at the centre of an increasingly volatile network of influence and secrecy in which entertainment, crime and politics came together in the darkest of ways.
Although her death was officially ruled to be likely a suicide caused by a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 overdose, the circumstances surrounding it have fuelled decades of speculation and conspiracy theories.
Was Marilyn, who would have been 100 year old on 1 June, a tragic casualty of fame and addiction or did she know too much about the powerful figures around her and needed to be permanently silenced?
Right from the start of her life, Norma Jeane Mortenson, as she was then, struggled against the odds and was manipulated by controlling men. She never knew her father and her mother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was institutionalised.
Norma was put into foster care with various families and, as she got older, found escapism in spending most of her days watching movies at the cinema. After a short-lived marriage in her teens, she set her sights on Hollywood.
Re-inventing herself as the alluring, platinum blonde, Marilyn Monroe, she was to find the captivating glamour of the silver screen hid a murky industry where influential studio bosses had long had ties with mobsters and the casting couch was a way of life for starlets.
“It was a very misogynistic environment,” says author and journalist Douglas Thompson, co-author of Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra and the Mafia Murders.
“The casting couch was rife where girls were asked for 𝒔𝒆𝒙𝒖𝒂𝒍 favours in return for parts in movies. You’ve got Marilyn Monroe coming into this world, as a hugely attractive girl, willing to help everybody, troubled by her upbringing, wanting to get on and seeing how others do it.
“She sees the casting couch for what it is and is quite willing to lie on it and move up through the ranks through her connections with studio bosses.”
In 1949, she had a contract with 20th Century Fox run by Joseph Schenck. He was 73 and she 23 when they had a relationship beneficial to both – he would help her career and she would sleep with him. He also invited her to his poker parties where the Hollywood elite rubbed shoulders with notorious underworld figures such as Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli.
“Marilyn would be there and other starlets and they were all sitting on the knees of these men and there were 𝒔𝒆𝒙𝒖𝒂𝒍 favours,” says Douglas.
Her next Studio, Columbia Pictures, was also deeply immersed in the underworld.
“The mob invested so much money in Columbia Pictures that they were able to control who appeared in movies and who didn’t and even in some cases, what movies were made,” says Jeffrey Sussman, author of Tinseltown Gangsters: The Rise and Decline of the Mob in Hollywood.
Such was Roselli’s closeness to Columbia boss, Harry Cohn that he had matching sapphire rings made for both of them.
“Actresses who wanted to star in a movie at Columbia Pictures often had to sleep with Harry,” says Jeffrey.
Roles in the movies All About Eve and The Asphalt Jungle launched Marilyn’s career and by the early 1950s she was a star, depicted on the cover of Life magazine with the headline – The Talk of Hollywood.
She made a much-publicised trip to Korea to entertain the US troops and in 1953, alone, starred in in three of her most famous films – Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, How to Marry a Millionaire and Niagra.
In 1954 she married former baseball star, Joe DiMaggio but he grew jealous and suspicious of her, believing she was having an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇. He even asked his friend, Frank Sinatra, to hire a private eye to bust in on her and her lover. But they arrived at the wrong home and busted open the door of a startled woman before fleeing.
Her marriage to DiMaggio ended after nine months. Struggling to cope with her stardom and nerves in front of the camera, she increasingly took to barbiturates and champagne, to help her relax. But it was to get out of control.
Feeling suffocated by Hollywood, she escaped to New York, where she met playwright of The Crucible, Arthur Miller, who became her third husband.
In 1960, she starred in The Misfits, a powerful 𝒹𝓇𝒶𝓂𝒶 penned by Miller. Although hailed as one of her finest performances, the shoot had to stop for a while because Marilyn’s addiction to sleeping pills made her woozy and unable to focus.
The Hollywood bombshell was found dead in her at the age of 36Credit: Getty
Archive image of Cal-Neva Lodge Casino, now closed. The resort was owned by Frank Sinatra, as well as the notorious mob boss, Sam GiancanaCredit: Alamy
After breaking up with Miller, she spiralled further downhill and spent some time in a psychiatric institution in New York. When she got out, she found comfort in the arms of Frank Sinatra.
While gangsters enjoyed the glamour of showbiz, many celebrities mutually liked being seen with the likes of Sam Giancana at parties. It added a glimmer of dangerous excitement. The elevation of charismatic senator, John F Kennedy, with Presidential ambitions, was a new potent ingredient in this heady mix.
It is widely believed that Giancana played a role in JFK’s election victory by leaning on mob-controlled unions to deliver votes, with Sinatra acting as the middle-man between the Kennedys and the gangsters.
Kennedy’s appetite for womanising was assisted by his friend and brother-in-law, the English actor Peter Lawford, who married Patricia Kennedy, sister of JFK. A big friend of Sinatra’s, Lawford had huge pool parties at his house in Santa Monaca, where celebrities, mobsters, politicians and starlets would mingle.
But Giancana was to become a dangerous enemy to the Kennedys when John appointed his brother, Robert, as Attorney General. Robert, or Bobby, as he was commonly known, took it as his mission to go after organised crime.
Giancana was publicly humiliated when grilled by Bobby before a US Select Committee, where Kennedy chided, “I thought only little girls giggle, Mr Giancana.”
Meanwhile, Marilyn and JFK embarked on a clandestine 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with many of their meetings taking place at Lawford’s home. But rumours grew until it was quite well known in social circles about that and the fact that she was also having an 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 with Bobby at the same time.
The Kennedys, who liked to promote themselves as loving, family men, found themselves in a difficult position where they were vulnerable to blackmail from mobsters who, of course, also knew about their connection to Marilyn. When they backed away from her, she was devastated and threatened to arrange a press conference to tell all.
She once again sought solace in Frank Sinatra and it was at this moment in her short life, that he invited her to his Cal-Neva Lodge in the last weekend of July 1962.
Here, she drank and took too many drugs, walking around the swimming pool in a dishevelled state, wearing nothing but a robe, breaking down in tears at a cocktail table and passing out. She left here, in an even worse state than she arrived.
The pilot of the plane that took her home said she was slurring her words and looked in a bad way. Retreating to the house she had recently purchased in Brentwood, LA, she took yet more prescription drugs and in the early hours of 5 August, 1962, her housekeeper, Eunice Murray, found her lying naked in her bed, holding the receiver of the telephone, apparently having died from an overdose of sleeping pills.
She died between 8:30pm. and 10:30pm. the night before. News of her death caused a sensation and it wasn’t long before the conspiracy theories began to circulate.
There has been speculation that the Kennedys had the house cleaned up to remove any association she had with them before an ambulance was called.
An alleged fiery confrontation between Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn on the day of her death was said to have been 𝒄𝒂𝓊𝓰𝒉𝓉 on surveillance 𝓉𝒶𝓅𝑒 by private investigator, Fred Otash.
Bobby Kennedy denied being in Los Angles on the day of her death but former LAPD Chief of Police, Daryl Gates, later admitted that he was. In 1985 Eunice Murray, revealed on the BBC documentary Say Goodbye to the President that Robert Kennedy had visited the film star’s house in the hours before she died, where they had quarrelled.
Peter Lawford’s fourth wife, Deborah Gould, was married to the actor for only a few weeks in 1976. She said it was then that he told her that he was on the phone to Marilyn on the night of her death and said to her, “My God, Marilyn, don’t leave any note behind!”
Gould said that Lawford went to her house that night and destroyed a note he had found. She explained that Lawford was to “cover up all the dirty work and take care of everything”.
Fred Otash, it has to be said, is an unreliable source with claims of working for the mob, the FBI and CIA, and changed his stories over the years but he once said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times: “He (Lawford) said he had just left Monroe and she was dead and that Bobby had been there earlier. He said they got Bobby out of the city and back to Northern California and would I go on out there and arrange to do anything to remove anything incriminating from the house.”
A year later, JFK was assassinated in Dallas and Robert was too, in 1968 in Los Angeles. Both were rumoured to have had the hand of the mob behind them.
The gangsters closest to Marilyn, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, who were allegedly involved with the Kennedy’s in an assassination plot to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Fidel Castro, were also wiped out.
On 19 June, 1975, shortly before Giancana was due to testify before a Senate committee investigating CIA and Mafia collusion, a gunman entered his house and shot him in the head and neck in his basement kitchen.
Roselli, who had already testified about being part of a CIA plan to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 Castro was due to be questioned about JFK’s assassination when he was found dead, floating in an oil drum off the coast of Florida in 1976, his body having been cut in half.
“The Kennedys had been using the mob to be hit men, in effect,” says Jeffrey Sussman. “But they never succeeded in their plot.”
Marilyn and the Mob airs on Channel 4, Wednesday at 9pm.
Douglas Thompson is the co-author of Bombshell: The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra and the Mafia MurdersCredit: Sphere Abacus
