Page 82 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Among the twenty-five guests is Arlene Dahl, a former MGM contract player who now runs her beauty company Arlene Dahl Enterprises from the Upper East Side.

Dahl instantly notices the president’s attraction to Marilyn. She’s not alone.

“Marilyn walked in and everything stopped, everyone stopped. It was magical, really. I’ve never seen anyone stop a room like that.”

“Finally! You’re here,” the president says. “There are some people here who are dying to meet you.”

They talk and flirt all night long. Kennedy ends the nightwith a whisper in her ear. Would she like to join him for a weekend in Palm Springs? Frank Sinatra’s invited him for March 24.

Marilyn doesn’t answer right away.

“Jackie won’t be there,” he adds.

Sinatra spends over half a million dollars doing up his Palm Springs estate for the presidential visit. On the grounds, he builds a helicopter pad along with several guest cottages. The presidential flag will fly from a giant flagpole. Portraits of the Kennedys are newly hung on the interior walls, and twenty-five extra telephone lines put in for the security detail. Sinatra even installs a gold plaque in the bedroom where “TP”—Sinatra’s shorthand for “the president”—will sleep, announcingJOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE.

Except he doesn’t.

In the Justice Department, Bobby Kennedy calls a meeting on the proliferation of organized crime. One lawyer blurts out, “We are out front fighting organized crime on every level and here the president is associating with Sinatra, who is associating with all those guys.”

The room falls silent, and everyone looks at the attorney general.

“Give me the facts,” Kennedy says. “I can’t do anything without the facts.”

A few days later, the file that arrives on his desk makes for enlightening reading. Sinatra, the report alleges, “has a long and wide association with hoodlums and racketeers,” including the cousin of Al Capone.

Scanning further down the document, he reads that Sam Giancana has made numerous visits to Sinatra’s estate in PalmSprings. The president and the Don of Dons, actual bedfellows? Absolutely not.

Bobby calls the president and tells him that the optics are terrible. Doesn’t Bing Crosby have a house nearby? He’s nearly as famous as Sinatra, and he won an Oscar forGoing My Way.

“You can handle it, Peter!” President Kennedy tells his brother-in-law, assigning him to break the bad news to Sinatra.

The scorned host is furious.

Lawford listens as Sinatra calls Bobby “every name in the book.”

Revenge will come quickly. It’s too late for Sinatra to cut Lawford fromSergeants 3,last month’s Rat Pack release, but he’ll make sure that Lawford has made his last appearance with the group, on film or in person.

Lawford is stunned to learn what happens next. “When he got off the phone Frank went outside with a sledgehammer and started chopping up the concrete landing pad of his heliport. He was in a frenzy.”

Sinatra’s wounds are personal and political. How could the president choose to spend the weekend with Bing Crosby? A Republican!

At the White House, J. Edgar Hoover has a private lunch with the president, during which he bluntly informs his boss that his private life risks going dangerously public. He must keep his trousers zipped.

Kennedy cuts the lunch short, telling aide Kenneth O’Donnell, “Get rid of that bastard. He’s the biggest bore.”

“I’m going on a trip,” Marilyn tells Mrs. Murray.

When Peter Lawford arrives to pick her up, Marilyn keeps him waiting until she perfects a disguise that includes a writing pad and a fistful of sharpened pencils. Dressed in a sharp black suit, a brunette wig, and a pair of spectacles, Kennedy’s “new secretary” is ready to drive the hundred or so miles to an important presidential meeting in Palm Springs.

Bing Crosby’s estate is in Silver Spur, a mountainous area that was once a ranch. Marilyn wears a flowing, robe-like dress to dinner and at the after-party is casually intimate with Kennedy, linking her arm through his.

She’s promised him a private massage later. He has constant back pain, incurable even after four surgeries. Recovering from a 1954 spinal fusion procedure, Kennedy, then a senator, chose a color poster of Marilyn posing in blue shorts, legs planted in a wide V, and hung it upside down above his hospital bed.

Tonight, Marilyn pauses her ministrations to telephone an expert.

It’s 3 a.m. in New York and Marilyn’s masseur Ralph Roberts is half asleep. “I’ve been arguing with my friend about the major muscles of the back. I’m going to put him on the phone, so you can tell him.”

Roberts jolts awake at the sound of the famous voice with its unmistakable accent. Suddenly, he finds himself discussing anatomy with the President of the United States.

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