In her just-published The Wall of Life: Pictures and Stories from this Marvelous Lifetime, Shirley MacLaine is making some claims about President John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby. Both men, long since assassinated (and I was just wondering,…when I hear Donald Trump described as ‘President Trump’ how long does a man-and so far it has only been men elected to the US highest office, don’t #MeToo me, ok?-get to wear the moniker “President,” when really shouldn’t we be calling them “ex-President?”) have been called out by Warren Beatty’s sister who says she saw then President Kennedy (maybe the “then” is better than the “ex”?) leave a bedroom that Marilyn Monroe was in, then she saw his brother Bobby walk into that same bedroom after his brother had left and close the door.
This all supposedly occurred at a party finance chairman for the Democratic Party Arthur Krim was giving after the infamous John F. Kennedy’s 45th birthday at Madison Square Garden. This was the event where Marilyn Monroe sang that breathy, equally infamous, “Happy Birthday” to the ‘then’ President, wearing what has been described as a dress so tight it seemed painted on.
Jimmy Durante and MacLaine performed at the same event in 1962, so that’s how good old man-life Shirley got to see what she claims she saw.
In her new book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, Maureen Callahan claims that a half hour before Marilyn sang to JFK, she had sex with Robert in her dressing room at Madison Square Garden. Surely, not the first or last time something naughty happened in a dressing room at MSG.
“They spent 15 minutes alone together,” Callahan writes in her book, alleging that Monroe then arrived on stage to sing Happy Birthday “drunk and flush with the transgressive sex she’d just had with Bobby [Robert], her dress so tight she could hardly walk.”
Well, the part about the dress is true, as I mentioned above.
Is any of the sex stuff true, even a part of it? Probably? Maybe. No. Yes. Surely, these rumors about the Kennedy bros and Marilyn, as well as their affairs with lots of other ladies, have been circling for years. And while I’m not one for one for lauding the mythic-like legend John Kennedy has in some circles, revered as he is by Democrats as much as Republicans evoke the same kind of fervor over Ronald Regan, I also don’t know what any of this mudslinging does for us this many years on, save to give Misses Callahan and MacLaine a boost up on their books.
I don’t really care who was diddling poor M.M. (it seems many men were taking advantage of her). My only takeaway from what Miss MacLaine and Callahan are saying is that I wish guys like JFK and his brother had not been assassinated (I don’t think anybody should be assassinated, whatever their political views) and that Marilyn Monroe had lived a nice long natural life.
