Page 62 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Being Marilyn Monroe is becoming increasingly expensive and time-consuming. The hair takes longer to style and the makeup takes longer to apply. But when she makes the effort, the effect is as hypnotically beautiful as always.

She hasn’t had a bite to eat today, reminding herself, I have to be skinny for Frankie. Instead, she sips champagne.

Frank Sinatra, in the apartment next door, has promised to come see her new dress before she leaves for the ceremony at the Beverly Hilton. He says he has a surprise for her.

“Hi, baby,” she whispers breathlessly.

Sinatra is beguiled by the platinum hair, the sparkling sequins.

“Close your eyes.”

From his dinner jacket, Sinatra removes a leather box, saying, “Now you can look!”

Resting on a velvet cushion is not the large, hoped-for engagement ring but a pair of emerald earrings to match her bright green dress. Emeralds and diamonds. He clips one to each ear.

“Thank you, Frankie,” she whispers. “They’re very beautiful.”

“I should hope so,” he replies. “They cost me thirty-five thousand dollars.”

Nearly half the price of her new house .

Marilyn’s red-carpet look is among the most elegant at the Golden Globes. Reporters buzz about her emerald gown and matching earrings. Photographers can’t take enough pictures.

Marilyn and her screenwriter escort, José Bolanos, exchange intimate glances, and, as the A-list crowd celebrates with champagne and cocktails, they dance as close as they did in Mexico City.

Peter Lawford invites Marilyn to New York City, where a dinner is to be held in President Kennedy’s honor in a private apartment on Park Avenue.

At 9 p.m., Marilyn is already an hour late and still not quite ready. Milt Ebbins, Peter Lawford’s talent manager, has been waiting outside her room for almost two hours. Finally, he bursts through the door to find Marilyn sitting at her dressing table, applying makeup to her famous beauty mark.

“Please, Marilyn! We can’t keep the president waiting!”

“Oh,” she greets Ebbins. “Can you help me with this dress?”

She pulls a black beaded sheath from its hanger.

“It just needs a little tug!”

So I’m watching this giant international movie star standing there stark naked in her high heels, Milt thinks. She puts a scarf over her hair so it won’t get mussed and pulls this beaded dress over her head. This dress was so tight it took me ten minutes to pull it down over her ass!

“Take it easy,” Marilyn says. “Don’t tear the beads.”

When Marilyn is finally ready, Ebbins is astonished at the transformation, enthusing, “Jesus Christ, you sure are pretty.”

“Thank you,” she replies, coolly, disguising her famous blond hair in a red wig for the drive uptown.

The Secret Service clears them into the party that’s already well underway.

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 night with 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, announcing JOHN 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 Palm Springs. 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 for Going 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 from Sergeants 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.

“I think I made his back feel better,” Marilyn laughs.