Page 64 of The Last Days of Marilyn Monroe

Even after practicing her number for weeks, she can never quite shake the inevitable stage fright, especially when she’ll be performing among musical greats Ella Fitzgerald, Peggy Lee, Harry Belafonte, and Maria Callas.

“Life’s too short to worry about Marilyn Monroe,” Jackie Kennedy says to her sister, Leigh.

In Marilyn’s dressing room backstage at Madison Square Garden, Mickey Song is styling her hair with a flip curl.

It’s the first time Marilyn is meeting Song, a hairdresser for the Kennedys. He’s cut Jack and Bobby Kennedy’s hair for tonight’s event. “She didn’t want me to work on her, because she didn’t know me,” Song says. “But Bobby convinced her.”

Song is excited to work with the movie star, but he senses that she’s “extremely nervous and uptight.”

That might be because Bobby Kennedy is pacing back and forth outside her dressing room.

“Would you step out for a minute?” the attorney general asks Song.

The hairdresser waits in the corridor. From what he can hear, Marilyn and Kennedy are arguing. Voices are raised. The exchange is growing more intense.

Fifteen minutes later, Kennedy emerges. He looks at Song. “Do you like her?” he demands.

When Song nods his head yes, the attorney general declares, “Well, I think she’s a rude fucking bitch.”

Kennedy stalks off and Song returns to Marilyn.

She’s all disheveled but giggles and says, “Could you help me get myself back together?”

Twelve feet from the stage, the president steps into his private box, signaling the start of the show to be emceed by his brother-in-law Peter Lawford.

Bobby and Ethel Kennedy are sitting nearby. So are Marilyn’s good friend Pat Kennedy Lawford and her publicist, Pat Newcomb. Harry Belafonte sings a moving interpretation of “Michael Row the Boat Ashore.”

Marilyn is scheduled to perform next, but she misses her first cue.

Lawford jokes into the microphone, “Mr. President, on this occasion of your birthday, this young lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual.”

A spotlight pans to the corner of the stage. It’s empty.

Laughing, Lawford gives her a second cue. “A woman about whom it truly may be said, ‘She needs no introduction.’ Let me just say, ‘Here she is.’”

From the band, a drumroll. Again, the flash of the spotlight to reveal blank space.

The audience laughs along. It’s all part of the show, isn’t it?

Lawford is riffing now but gears up for a final introduction. “In the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who has meant so much … who has done more … Mr. President, the late Marilyn Monroe!”

To thunderous applause, the famously “late” Marilyn finally appears. She crosses the stage in tiny, geisha-like steps, the top of her magnificent dress concealed by a hip-length short-sleeved white ermine coat.

As Lawford helps Marilyn out of her wrap, the audience inhales sharply, and neither Jack nor Bobby can take his eyes off her. No one can.

Marilyn flicks the microphone with her finger. It pops. She’s had nightmares that she’d start to sing but no sound would come out.

“Happy biiiiiirthday to youuuu …”

She performs a breathy rendition of the classic song, with the gentlest hint of innuendo that is smartly judged and perfectly knowing. It’s just as she rehearsed it.

After the briefest of pauses, she launches into a familiar tune. “Thanks for the Memory” may be best known as Bob Hope’s theme song, but tonight the lyrics have been cleverly rearranged. Leo Robin, who wrote “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” for Marilyn, has created “Thanks, Mr. President.”

She sings the lines through, and then exhorts the audience, “Everybody! Happy Birthday!”

The band once again strikes up the song as Marilyn bounces to the beat, waving her arms in time to the music and encouraging the audience to join in the serenade as two men in chef’s toques carry a litter bearing an enormous multitiered birthday cake.

Watching from the wings is Isidore Miller, Marilyn’s former father-in-law. He and Marilyn have remained close since the divorce. Bringing the Austrian-born Miller as her proud escort to this All-American gala, Marilyn thinks, will be “one of the biggest things of his life.”

She’s right.

After the show, President Kennedy takes the microphone to thank all the performers. “We’re grateful to Miss Monroe, who left a picture to come all the way east,” he says, “and I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

The president, the attorney general, and Marilyn all sign the guestbook at the Upper East Side townhouse where Arthur Krim, chairman of United Artists, is hosting a private after-party for leading Democrats and celebrities who performed at the gala.

Marilyn arrives on the arm of Isidore Miller.

Her one-of-a-kind rhinestone dress continues to attract attention. “She was wearing skin and beads,” says Adlai Stevenson. “I didn’t see the beads!”

As White House photographer Cecil Stoughton snaps candids, he captures the two Kennedy brothers listening intently as Marilyn speaks.

“There was something at once magical and desperate about her,” historian and Kennedy campaign aide Arthur Schlesinger Jr. observes from across the room.

“Robert Kennedy, with his curiosity, his sympathy, his absolute directness of response to distress, in some way got through the glittering mist as few did.”

The next day, Jackie Kennedy is furious—not with the president, but with his brother.

“My understanding of it is that Bobby was the one who orchestrated the whole goddamn thing,” Jackie tells her sister-in-law over the telephone.

“The attorney general is the troublemaker here, Ethel. Not the president. So it’s Bobby I’m angry at, not Jack. ”