When Marilyn Monroe died, 60 years ago, people all over the world asked questions. How could it be that the gifted and phenomenally beautiful actress was dead—at just 36? The Los Angeles coroner’s verdict was “probable suicide,” but the nagging questions have never gone away. “Who killed Marilyn Monroe? That’s a question,” the dramatist Sean O’Casey mused soon after. Conspiracy theories have flourished ever since. Hollywood’s George Cukor, who had directed Monroe in two of her movies—including the last, unfinished one—had his own view. Her death, he said, was “a nasty business. Her worst rejection. Power and money. In the end she was too innocent.”

The author Anthony Summers has just updated GODDESS, his bestselling biography of the actress, for which he interviewed some 650 people. Publication coincides with the launch next month of a Netflix special that draws largely on his work. Inevitably, both book and film probe deeply into Monroe’s relationships with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy—relationships that came close to destroying them politically.

‘Do you know who I’ve always depended on?’ Marilyn Monroe asked the British journalist W.J. Weatherby not long before she died. “Not strangers, not friends. The telephone! That’s my best friend.” Marilyn worked her phone hard in early August 1962, the final week of her life.

She was in a whirl of planning future projects, making arrangements to fly to New York for discussions about a new musical. Most of the people Monroe spoke with thought she seemed in good spirits. But there were glimpses of another mood. Kenny Kingston, a California psychic she had consulted over the months, remembered Monroe talking moodily about love. “Love,” she said, “is the one immortal thing about us. Without it, what can life mean?”

Out of the blue, she called a Hollywood gynecologist, Dr. Leon Krohn, to ask whether he was still angry with her. Years earlier, when she was pregnant, she had ignored Krohn’s advice to stay away from drugs and alcohol—then suffered a miscarriage. But why was she calling now? The doctor did not know what Monroe had claimed to others, that weeks earlier one of the Kennedy brothers had impregnated her. She had, she told them, “lost a baby.” Sources differed on whether she had miscarried or had an illegal abortion.

Early in the week she was to die, Marilyn phoned her longtime friend, estate agent Arthur James—one of those she had told about the baby. “What,” she asked him, “can I do about ‘He’?” As James understood it, “He” was code for President Kennedy. She went on to complain that Robert Kennedy had “cut her off cold.” But it was the president she could not get out of her mind.

On Friday, August 3, the day before she died, Marilyn phoned Anne Karger, a longtime loyal confidante. She said she was “very much in love and was going to marry Bobby Kennedy”—but sounded depressed. Mrs. Karger told her she was deluding herself. The same day—several people would remember the call—she phoned Robert Slatzer, another friend, to say she had been trying in vain to reach Robert Kennedy in Washington. She would, she said, call the Kennedys’ brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, to get information. (Lawford confirmed that she did call him.)

Press reports and F.B.I. documents show that Kennedy flew to California that day—accompanied by his wife and four of their children. He arrived, it was reported, “without his usual flashing smile,” and shook hands “woodenly” with those who greeted him. New York Daily News columnist Florabel Muir would later establish that Marilyn tried several times to call Kennedy at the hotel where he was due to stay and left messages, but “the calls were not returned.”

Marilyn was not only preoccupied with Robert. She had told the columnist Sidney Skolsky—in whom she had confided only about her relationship with John Kennedy—that she expected to “be with him” during a forthcoming visit.

Early on Saturday August 4, Marilyn apparently called the actress Jeanne Carmen, a former neighbor, sounding distressed. “She said some woman had been calling all night, harassing her and calling her names,” Carmen recalled, “The voice sounded familiar, but she couldn’t put a name to it.” The anonymous caller had said words to the effect, “Leave Bobby alone, you tramp. Leave Bobby alone.” Marilyn asked Carmen to come “drink some wine”—and bring sleeping pills. Pleading a busy day, Carmen begged off.

Marilyn had two telephones: one pink, with a number provided to ordinary callers; one white, with a number she gave only to special friends. Both had long extension cords, so that Marilyn could wander about the house as she talked. From his home across the city, Skolsky made one of his regular weekend calls that day. This time, alarmed by her recent confidences about the Kennedys, he had his daughter Steffi listen in on an extension. As Steffi remembered it, Marilyn said she expected to be seeing one of the Kennedys that very evening.

Late that morning, Marilyn was visited by Agnes Flanagan, one of her hairdressers and a longtime friend. While she was at the house, a delivery man arrived with a package. Marilyn opened it, then walked out to the pool carrying its contents—a stuffed toy tiger. She then sat glumly holding the toy, looking—Flanagan said —“terribly, terribly depressed.” At a loss, Flanagan eventually got up and left.

Photographs of the back of Marilyn’s house, taken the following day, show two stuffed animals abandoned near the pool. One of them could be a tiger. Had some devastating note arrived with the toy animal? Or was the tiger itself the message? It may or may not be relevant that a real-life stuffed tiger had pride of place in Robert Kennedy’s office at the Justice Department in Washington. At all events, Marilyn seemed now to lose control.

Around 4:30 p.m. that final day she phoned her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, She seemed, he thought, “somewhat depressed and somewhat drugged.” He came around to see her, then left around 7:00 PM—he had a dinner appointment. Later, after his patient had died, he would tell members of the Los Angeles Suicide Prevention Team, in confidence, why his patient had been upset that last day.

Marilyn, he told the doctors, had “had calls that morning and by the time I saw her she was in a rage.” She had recently had sexual relationships with “extremely important men in government...at the highest level.” When he saw her that last afternoon, she “expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the fact that here she was, the most beautiful woman in the world, and she did not have a date for Saturday night.” According to one Suicide Team doctor, Norman Tabachnick, Greenson said Marilyn had been expecting to see one of the “very important people” that night. She had called him after being told that the meeting was off.

She was to die hours later, Greenson said, “feeling rejected by some of the people she had been close to.”

Between 8 and 9 that evening, a longtime close friend, dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld, phoned Marilyn from New York. He thought she sounded perhaps a little “groggy,” but that was not unusual.

At 9:30 PM, the actress called Sydney Guilaroff, the prominent hairdresser who had styled her hair in eight of her movies and had become an intimate friend. He made it a rule not to discuss his clients with the press, and resisted my attempts to get him to talk—even off the record—about the call from Marilyn that last night. Only in 1996, when he was preparing his autobiography—shortly before his own death—did Guilaroff finally open up.

What he had to say makes it clear that Marilyn’s involvement with the Kennedys was uppermost in her mind in the final hours of her life. “Marilyn telephoned me in despair,” Guilaroff wrote. “She rambled on about being surrounded by danger, about betrayals by ‘men in high places,’ about clandestine love affairs.” Sounding frantic, she told Guilaroff that Robert Kennedy had been at the house that very day, “threatening me, yelling at me.” She said that, reneging on what she claimed was a promise to marry her, Robert was now telling her their relationship was over.

According to Guilaroff, Marilyn said she had responded to being dumped by the President’s brother with a threat of her own. She would “go public” and hold a tell-all press conference. The lover’s quarrel aside, she added, she knew “secrets about what has gone on in Washington.” What sort of secrets? “Dangerous ones,” she told Guilaroff, then hung up without saying goodbye.

One other person reported a conversation with Marilyn that evening. Jose Bolaños, a Mexican screenwriter who had been pursuing her, said he phoned Marilyn between 9:30 and 10:00 PM. She told him, he claimed, something that “will one day shock the whole world.” Even years later, however, he would not reveal what it was. Marilyn ended the conversation by simply laying down the phone—she did not hang up while Bolaños was on the line.

Marilyn’s masseur Ralph Roberts, who was out and about that evening, would learn the next morning from his answering service that a woman with a “slurred” voice had called his number around 10:00 PM. He had given his number to only two people other than Marilyn, and they were business contacts. He believed the caller had been Marilyn.

There were no more known calls. Very soon—at an hour long disputed but very probably before midnight—Marilyn would die. The press conference she had threatened to hold would never take place. But what “dangerous secrets”, the scandal of her affairs with the Kennedy brothers aside, might she have revealed? The very concept seems far-fetched. Perhaps, though, there was a measure of truth to Marilyn’s claim that she was privy to secrets.

Investigators for the Los Angeles district attorney, reviewing the circumstances of Marilyn’s death in the 1980s, found themselves blocked when they asked to see certain material held by the F.B.I. My lawyer, using the Freedom of Information Act, elicited the fact that the Bureau had kept a “105” file on Marilyn. The “105” designation served as a pretext to investigate anyone who did anything remotely political—which, especially under Director J. Edgar Hoover, meant leftist.

Parts of the 105 file on Marilyn were marked “SM-C” for “Security Matter – Communist.” They were withheld under category B1, used to cover foreign affairs matters and national security. Some documents released to me, on first publication of my book, were entirely blacked out by the censor’s pen – except for their subject headings. More recently, they have been released with only minor deletions. A report dated July 13, 1962, less than a month before Marilyn’s death, would certainly have been seen as troubling.

According to the F.B.I.’s source, not named in the document, Marilyn had talked of having “lunched at the Peter Lawfords with President Kennedy just a few days previously. She was very pleased, as she had asked the President a lot of socially significant questions concerning the morality of atomic testing...Subject’s [Marilyn’s] views are very positively and concisely leftist; however, if she is being actively used by the Communist Party, it is not general knowledge among those working with the movement in Los Angeles.”

The report was inaccurate in one important respect. President Kennedy was not in California that July. It is entirely possible, however, that Marilyn had lunched with Robert Kennedy in the timeframe indicated—“a few days” before July 13. The Attorney General had been in Los Angeles from the afternoon of June 26 till the morning of June 28. He did see Marilyn during that visit. He would fly West again two weeks later, to Nevada, with the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor. His purpose: to witness an atomic test.

The possibility of nuclear war—and extreme tension over Fidel Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union—was the dominating issue in 1962. In late June and early July—when, according to the F.B.I. report, one of the Kennedy brothers discussed nuclear matters with Marilyn—Castro was expecting a U.S. invasion and was making urgent appeals to Moscow for help. In early July, U.S.S.R. Premier Nikita Khrushchev made the fateful decision to ship ballistic missiles to Cuba. The Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world came closer to nuclear war than at any time in history, was only a few months away.

There is no suggestion in the released F.B.I. documents that either Kennedy brother blurted out state secrets to Marilyn. The point, rather, is that any private conversation with the attorney general or the president on the subject of nuclear weapons would have been of the utmost interest to Soviet intelligence – at any time.

On a July evening in 1961, the year before the death of Marilyn Monroe, Sam Giancana, “boss of bosses” of the Chicago Mafia, master of an organized crime network reaching across huge swathes of the United States, had walked into an airport waiting room to be confronted by a team of F.B.I. agents. The pressure from the Kennedy Justice Department was by now constant, and he lost his temper. The agents reported:

Giancana indicated that he was aware that the Agents intended to report the results of this interview to their boss, who in turn would report the results to their ‘super-boss’ and ‘super super boss’, and he said, ‘You know who I mean, I mean the Kennedys.’ He then said, ‘I know all about the Kennedys...and one of these days we are going to tell all.’ You lit a fire tonight that will never go out. You’ll rue the day.’”

Six months later, the F.B.I. recorded a conversation between Giancana and Johnny Roselli, the mafioso who ran the extortion rackets in Hollywood. The mobsters had been hoping Frank Sinatra might prove useful as a sort of hotline to the Kennedys, but they had been disappointed. Roselli now advised Giancana, “Go the other way. Fuck everybody…. Let them see the other side of you.” Then the two mobsters compared notes on bugging devices:

Giancana: “What I want is something really small.

Roselli: Alright...I got a guy out there...A guy in L.A. who’s got an electronic cap kind of a thing, and showed me that...so I got to find out what the smallest thing is. You got a receiver?...How big was your receiver?

Giancana: The box was only this big, maybe three inches by three inches. We were talking ‘blah, blah, blah’. It picked it up. Think about it.

Roselli: Yeah. I’ll work on it. Bobby is in Washington....”

A fellow enemy of the Kennedys—an ally of Giancana—was already using electronic surveillance to entrap the Kennedys. Jimmy Hoffa, the crooked Teamsters Union leader, had summoned Fred Otash, a celebrated Hollywood private eye, to a meeting. “What they wanted,” Otash recalled, “was for me to start developing a real, in-depth, derogatory report file on Jack and Bobby Kennedy.” He agreed, and reached out for specialist technical help.

He found it in the person of Reed Wilson, an electronics wizard who for years served politicians, Las Vegas casino operators, and government agencies. To obtain information on the Kennedys in California, the grand Santa Monica home of Peter and Pat Lawford—the place both brothers visited when they flew West—was an obvious prime target. Wilson personally installed eavesdropping devices there, he said in an interview, during a social occasion—when the house was crowded with guests. There were four or five devices, to be activated whenever Otash had information that one or other of the Kennedy brothers were coming to Los Angeles.

A former security man Otash employed, John Danoff, played a key part in the operation. The team, he said, succeeded in wiring rooms and phones not only at the Lawford beach house but also at the apartment Marilyn Monroe used until the final months of her life—when she bought a house of her own.

Stationed in a vehicle parked not far from the Lawford house, Danoff monitored the recording equipment picking up transmissions from the bugs planted there. Around Thanksgiving 1961, he remembered, he “located the strongest signal about 500 yards from the house.” At first he heard only desultory conversation. Then, “To my amazement I started to recognize the voices—because of the President’s distinct Bostonian accent, and Marilyn Monroe’s voice…. Then you heard them talking, and they were going about disrobing and going into the sex act on the bed.”

The president was indeed in Los Angeles that November and did meet Monroe. Reed Wilson, for his part, recalled that he and Otash reviewed a tape of the president having sex with Monroe. Over time, Otash told me, “twenty-five or thirty” tapes were shipped East to the electronics consultant Bernard Spindel, who had links to both Hoffa and Giancana.

In Washington, the F.B.I. had been receiving troubling reports about the president’s sex life—with women other than Monroe. At a lunch at the White House in early 1962, F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover warned Kennedy of the risks he was taking. The lunch was apparently cut short. The Kennedy aide present, Kenneth O’Donnell, would recall the president saying of Hoover, “Get rid of that bastard. He’s the biggest bore.” The president would be with Monroe, at Frank Sinatra’s estate in California, within days. Los Angeles County Assessor Philip Watson, who saw them together there, recalled “There was no question in my mind that they were having a good time, doing what comes naturally.”

Weeks earlier, a real-estate agent whom Marilyn had known for years, Art James, received an unexpected phone call. It was a request, James remembered, “that I should get Marilyn away from her house—perhaps for a weekend at my place in Laguna Beach. They wanted her place empty so that they could install bugging equipment. I told them I wouldn’t do it. I didn’t warn Marilyn. I figured she worried about things enough anyway. If they wanted to bug the house they would find a way.”

Monroe had just moved into the house and extensive remodeling was underway. The coming and going of workmen made the place especially vulnerable. Fred Otash, the detective who had organized the bugging at the Lawford house, now helped out again. “Bernard Spindel came out to the Coast and hit the phones,” he said in an interview, “There was a room bug too. It wasn’t just the phones.” Several sources corroborated the fact that Monroe was bugged in her new house. Teamsters leader Hoffa’s foster son and trusted aide, Chuck O’Brien, said Spindel “was working on the Monroe thing for the old man and some political people. He did obtain tapes.”

A Spindel associate named Paris Theodore recalled the most detail. The equipment used, he said, included a minute “grain of rice” microphone—almost invisible when installed in a wall or woodwork. The take, which Spindel let him hear, included a tape—about 40 minutes long—of events at Marilyn’s home on the day she died. It reflected two visits to the house that day by Robert Kennedy.

“First,” Theodore recalled, “you could hear Marilyn and Kennedy talking. It was kind of echoey, as though the sound was in a room next to the site of the transmitter.” (Monroe’s bedroom was, in fact, around a corner from a large vestibule opening off the front door.) There had been a heated argument, with Monroe demanding “an explanation as to why Kennedy was not going to marry her. As they argued, the voices got shriller. If I had not recognised RFK’s voice already, I am not sure I would have known it was him…. He was screeching, high-pitched.”

Kennedy, Theodore said, was evidently looking for something. Perhaps, it is fair to speculate, for one of the actress’s diaries, in which she had long had the habit of making notes. “Where is it? Where the fuck is it?,” Theodore recalled the president’s brother asking. Monroe did not answer, and that part of the tape ended with the sound of a door slamming. Kennedy apparently left, then—the tape indicated—returned accompanied by Peter Lawford. Kennedy said words to the effect of: “We have to know. It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it.” Monroe, meanwhile, was screaming at them, ordering them out of the house.

The next part of the recording contained “thumping, bumping noises, then muffled, calming sounds.” It sounded, Theodore said, “as though the actress was being put on the bed.” There was discussion between Kennedy and Lawford about Kennedy getting out of town. It was arranged that a call would be made to Monroe’s number once Kennedy had left the area. The final sound on the tape was that of a telephone ringing, and being picked up. The person who did so, however, said nothing at all. Marilyn’s psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, who hours later was to find her dead, would say he found her face down on her bed—a phone “clutched fiercely” in her hand.

Right after Marilyn’s death, action was taken to remove certain records of in and out-going phone calls from the actress’ phone company. “We were on the scene immediately,” said James Doyle, a former senior F.B.I. agent. As Doyle understood it, the orders to remove the records had come from either the attorney general or the president himself.

If the compromising tape recordings remained a threat to the Kennedys, steps were taken to neutralize the menace. Four years after Marilyn’s death, District Attorney’s investigators armed with a search warrant would descend on wiretapper Spindel’s home in New York State. Items seized, Spindel’s lawyers would assert in a subsequent lawsuit, included “tapes and evidence concerning circumstances surrounding and causes of death of Marilyn Monroe, which strongly suggest that the official reported circumstances of her death are erroneous.” One of the attorneys involved, Arnold Stream, told me he was “satisfied the tapes did exist, and that copies were in possession of the District Attorney.”

Although the alleged recordings have never surfaced, a copy may have survived until 1968, when Robert Kennedy was running for president. The conservative writer Ralph de Toledano recalled being approached by a senior executive of a major corporation who was “gathering information for a “bipartisan group determined to stop Kennedy.” Retired Army colonel Dennis Harris, hired to locate the tapes, reported that copies had survived and—for the right price—could be purchased.

The plan, de Toledano said, was that “the tapes were to be transcribed and mailed to the editors of every newspaper in the country.” Negotiations were at an advanced stage in June that year when Robert Kennedy was assassinated.

Two decades later, ABC Television’s 20/20 program delved into the story for a planned documentary. That the Kennedy brothers had had affairs with Marilyn Monroe, Emmy award-winning producer Stanhope Gould said later, would not astonish Americans. However, that “the President and Attorney General of the United States had put themselves in a position to have the nation’s most powerful criminals eavesdrop on their affairs with the nation’s most famous actress and were exposed to blackmail,” was “one hell of a story.”

The ABC team worked the story for months, criss-crossing the United States, spending a quarter of a million dollars, and concluding that events had occurred as reported here. Then, in the days before transmission, top ABC executives intervened. At the last minute, at 6:00 PM on the evening of the planned broadcast, the program was canceled.

All newspapers reported the cancellation. Two of the 20/20 program’s most celebrated names, Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs, came out publicly in support of the journalists involved. Downs was quoted as saying: “A dead President belongs to history, and he belongs to accurate history.” 20/20 Executive Producer Av Westin told me, “The piece was sourced well. The journalism in it was first-rate, and it should have run.”

It did not escape note that the decision to cancel the program was made by Roone Arledge, the President of ABC News. Arledge was a longtime close friend of Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel. His assistant, David Burke, was a former Kennedy strategist. Jeff Ruhe, another Arledge aide, was married to one of Robert Kennedy’s children.

Arledge denied that the Kennedy connection had influenced his decision to take the program off the air. “I wouldn’t censor anything because it would offend a friend,” he said, “I’ve already offended half the friends I have.”

Gould, the producer of the 20/20 report, offered the most generous explanation. “The program would have been heavily scrutinized,” he said, “even without Roone’s connections. It’s as though, in England, the BBC got the goods on the Queen.”

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