The best-documented meeting between Marilyn Monroe and John F. Kennedy took place on May 19, 1962, at a birthday fundraiser in New York. Afterward, at a private reception in a townhouse, White House photographer Cecil Stoughton captured her standing with the president and his brother, Robert. It is the only known photograph of the three of them together, and it was not widely published until decades had passed.
Nearly everything else said about the two of them in biographies, interviews, and films rests on the memory of other people. Most of that material was gathered 15 to 25 years after the events it describes.
Before that evening, there were two lives that began nine years apart and a continent apart.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in Brookline, Massachusetts, the second of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy. Summers were spent at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod, where competition among the children was part of ordinary life. His father, a man of large ambition, was already thinking about what his sons might become.
On June 1, 1926, a girl was born at Los Angeles General Hospital, a charity hospital where the city's poor patients were treated. Her birth was recorded under the surname Mortenson, and she was baptized Norma Jeane Baker. Her mother, Gladys Pearl Baker, worked as a film cutter at a Hollywood laboratory, splicing and trimming negatives of pictures that other people would star in. Who her father was cannot be stated with certainty from surviving records.
Gladys could not keep the child with her. From infancy until she was about seven, Norma Jeane lived in Hawthorne, south of the film studios, with a foster family, Albert and Ida Bolender, in the only stable household she knew in those years. She lived briefly with her mother afterward, but Gladys was then hospitalized with mental illness and remained in and out of institutional care for much of her life. A friend of Gladys's, Grace McKee, later Grace Goddard, took on the role of guardian.
Kennedy's childhood moved in a very different direction. He attended Choate, the boarding school in Connecticut, and then Harvard, where he graduated in 1940. By then his father had spent two years in London as American ambassador, from 1938 to 1940, and the son had seen Europe moving toward war at close range. His senior thesis on British unpreparedness was published as a book, "Why England Slept," so that a young man of 23 had become an author before holding any office.
For the girl in Los Angeles, the next stage had none of that shelter. From 1935 until 1937, almost two years, she lived in the Los Angeles Orphans Home on El Centro Avenue in Hollywood, only a short distance from the studios where her mother had worked. She left it for a series of foster homes and the houses of relatives. Grace Goddard remained the guardian of record through those years.
War changed the course of both lives. Kennedy joined the Navy and commanded a patrol torpedo boat, PT-109, in the Solomon Islands. In August 1943, a Japanese destroyer, the Amagiri, rammed the boat and sank it. Kennedy led the survivors to a nearby island. The episode became the foundation of his public reputation.
In the same war years, Norma Jeane's life took an ordinary domestic turn that would not last. On June 19, 1942, when she was 16, she married James Dougherty, the 21-year-old son of a neighbor. Dougherty soon joined the merchant marine, and she went to work at the Radioplane company plant in Van Nuys, where the factory floor was given over to the war effort and women worked on assembly lines for military aircraft.
In 1944 and 1945, a photographer with the Army's First Motion Picture Unit, David Conover, visited the plant to take pictures of women workers for a morale piece. He photographed her among them, and those photographs were the beginning of her modeling career.
By then the war had also reached the Kennedy household. Joseph Kennedy Jr., the eldest son and the one their father had marked out for public life, was killed in August 1944 on a bombing mission. The place he had been expected to fill fell to his brother. When a seat in the House of Representatives from Massachusetts opened in 1946, John Kennedy ran for it. He was 29, a war hero with a published book and a surname that carried weight in the state, and he won.
The modeling work led further. Norma Jeane signed with the Blue Book Model Agency, and her hair was lightened, a change that altered how photographers and in time the public saw her. Her marriage to Dougherty ended in divorce in 1946, four years after it began. In August of that year she signed a short contract with 20th Century Fox, and it was there that the name Marilyn Monroe was chosen for her. Monroe had been her mother's maiden name.
The first years at Fox did not go as the contract had suggested. In 1947 the studio let her go, and she spent the following months looking for work. In 1948 she appeared in "Ladies of the Chorus" for Columbia, a small picture in which she had a part of some size but which did little to change her prospects. It was a period of short engagements and uncertain money.
The turn came in 1950, through roles that were small but noticed. In "The Asphalt Jungle," directed by John Huston, and in "All About Eve," she appeared in only a few scenes, yet critics and audiences remembered her. The studio that had dismissed her three years earlier offered her a new contract, this time for seven years.
A calendar photograph then changed the terms of her public life. In 1952 it emerged that she had posed for photographer Tom Kelley in 1949 when she needed the money, and the image was now hanging in shops and garages around the country. Fox had reason to fear the story, and reporters waited for her reaction. She acknowledged the photograph without evasion, and her popularity grew rather than shrank.
In 1953 the studio released three films in which she had leading parts. "Niagara" was followed by "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," in which she appeared with Jane Russell, and by "How to Marry a Millionaire." In June of that year she and Russell pressed their hands and feet into the cement in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater, and the slabs remained there for the tourists who came after. The girl who had spent two years in an orphanage in Hollywood was now, by any measure of ticket sales, one of the most recognized faces in the country.
Kennedy, meanwhile, had been making his way through the Massachusetts political machinery. In 1952 he was elected to the Senate and took his seat in January 1953. That September, on the 12th, he married Jacqueline Bouvier in Newport, Rhode Island, in a ceremony that drew a crowd to the town and considerable press attention.
His younger brother, Robert, born in November 1925, had married Ethel Skakel in 1950. Through the early years of the decade he worked as counsel to Senate committees. Among the most prominent was the rackets committee, whose hearings on organized crime and the Teamsters union brought him into public view and gave him a reputation of his own.
Another marriage joined the two worlds of which these lives were part, though at a distance from both. Peter Lawford, born in London in 1923, had spent the 1940s as an actor under contract to MGM. On April 24, 1954, he married Patricia Kennedy in New York, and a Hollywood contract player became the brother-in-law of a Massachusetts senator. Whatever it meant to the Kennedy family at the time, it created a link between their world and the film colony that would carry considerable weight later.
Monroe's own marriage that year was more public. Joe DiMaggio, the retired center fielder of the New York Yankees, married her at San Francisco City Hall on January 14, 1954. The couple traveled to Japan afterward, and in February she flew on to Korea to perform for American troops stationed there. She sang for the soldiers, and by many accounts it was among the experiences she valued most from those years.
The image of her most widely reproduced that year was made on a New York street. In September, on Lexington Avenue, the studio filmed the scene in "The Seven Year Itch" in which the wind from a subway grating lifted her skirt. It was shot at night before a crowd gathered along the pavement, and the noise of onlookers could be heard around the crew.
The number that mattered in the autumn of that year, however, was not on the film's title. It was nine. From the morning at City Hall in January to the filing of divorce papers in October, only about nine months had passed. The decree was granted in 1955. DiMaggio did not disappear from her life after it, and in her last years he remained close to her, as would become clear when the time came to arrange the end of it.
While the divorce was still being filed, she left Hollywood. At the end of 1954 she moved east and, with photographer Milton Greene, formed Marilyn Monroe Productions, a company that gave her a measure of control she had never had under the studio contract system. In New York she studied at the Actors Studio with Lee Strasberg and privately with his wife Paula Strasberg, the mother of Susan Strasberg, who would later write about her in a memoir. The move was widely noticed and often described as a rebellion against the studio.
At the end of 1955, Fox came to terms with her, and the new contract gave her approval over the director and the script. "Bus Stop," released in 1956, was the first film made under it.
In these same years, Kennedy was in and out of hospitals. He underwent spinal operations in 1954 and 1955, and the recovery took months. It was in this period, according to the usual account of his career, that the work that became "Profiles in Courage" was written, a book about American senators who had risked their careers on matters of conscience. It appeared in 1956 and won the Pulitzer Prize the following year. That summer he made a bid for the vice presidential nomination at the Democratic convention in 1956 and lost. The defeat was public and brief, and it left him better known across the country than he had been before it.
Monroe's second marriage and its complications belong to the same summer. Arthur Miller, the playwright of "Death of a Salesman," married her on June 29, 1956, at White Plains, New York, and a Jewish ceremony followed a few days later. That same year, Miller was summoned to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which wanted from him the names of people he had known in left-wing circles. He refused to give them. He was held in contempt of Congress, and the conviction was overturned on appeal in 1958. Her own association with him and with the people around him would later attract the attention of the FBI, as files released decades afterward showed.
By the end of 1956, the two lives stood at different points on separate roads. She was a film star who had left the studio system and been taken up by New York's theater world, married to one of the country's best-known playwrights, and at the center of a public curiosity that grew with every picture. He was a senator who had lost a convention vote and won a literary prize, whose brother sat as counsel to a committee investigating the underworld, and whose sister's husband was an actor at MGM. No record shows that they had yet met.
Her work in the years after that wedding carried her first across the Atlantic. "The Prince and the Showgirl" had been filmed in England in 1956 with Laurence Olivier directing and playing opposite her, and it reached audiences in 1957. It was followed in 1959 by "Some Like It Hot," directed by Billy Wilder, a comedy that earned her a Golden Globe for best actress in that category and that has been shown in cinemas and on television ever since. "Let's Make Love" came in 1960. By then she was not only a famous face but a woman whose absences, delays, and quarrels with directors were reported in the newspapers almost as closely as her performances.
The picture she made next was written for her by her husband. Arthur Miller's "The Misfits" was filmed in the Nevada desert in the summer and autumn of 1960 on a dry lake bed where the heat and glare made the work slow. Its cast included Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift alongside her. Gable died in November, only days after filming ended. The picture would be remembered afterward as the last completed film for both him and her, though she had one more unfinished project ahead of her. The marriage that had produced its script did not survive it.
Her divorce from Miller was obtained in Juarez, Mexico, on January 20, 1961. That was also the day John F. Kennedy took the oath of office in Washington. The two events are both documented, and they are recorded here as a matter of the calendar only, since nothing in the record connects the one to the other.
The road to that Washington ceremony had begun a year earlier. Kennedy announced his candidacy for president in January 1960, and through the winter and spring he traveled from primary to primary in a campaign that his brother Robert managed and that drew on the whole Kennedy family. In July the Democratic convention met in Los Angeles, and Kennedy was nominated on the first ballot.
Los Angeles mattered to that summer for another reason, because it was where Peter Lawford lived. His house on Palisades Beach Road in Santa Monica stood on the shoreline, and it was reported that the Kennedys stayed there on their visits to the city. Lawford had campaigned for his brother-in-law, and he was also a member of the circle around Frank Sinatra, a group of entertainers that included Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and Joey Bishop and that appeared together on screen in "Ocean's 11" in 1960. Sinatra threw himself into the campaign as well, recording a reworked version of his song "High Hopes" for the candidate. The circle that gathered on the beach and in the Las Vegas casinos served for a season as a bridge between the film colony and a presidential campaign.
That circle is also where the acquaintance between Monroe and Kennedy begins to appear in the biographies, and it is where the record becomes uncertain. Several biographers placed their first meetings at the Lawfords' house or at gatherings around it in the late 1950s or the start of the 1960s, but they do not agree on the dates, and no letter, diary entry, or dated document has been produced that fixes any of them. What can be said is that she knew Peter Lawford and his wife Patricia Kennedy, and that the future president moved in and out of the Lawfords' orbit. The rest depends on recollection.
That recollection came late. The books in which most of it appears were published in the 1980s and 1990s, and their authors were speaking with people who had been present or who claimed to have heard from those who were, 15 to 25 years after the events they described. Peter Lawford himself gave different versions of his own knowledge at different times, and several of the stories credited to him reached print through biographers after his death in 1984. A reader who moves from one such book to the next finds accounts that overlap in some places and diverge sharply in others. The differences do not come from a lack of effort by the writers. They come from the fact that the underlying evidence consists almost entirely of memory.
Back in the autumn of 1960, the campaign moved toward its televised climax. Kennedy and Richard Nixon met in a series of debates before a national audience, the first time American voters had been able to watch two presidential candidates argue in their own living rooms. Kennedy appeared composed under the studio lights, and the debates became one of the fixed points of the year. On November 8 he was elected by a narrow margin. On January 20, 1961, he was sworn in on the steps of the Capitol in snow, with a cold so sharp that the ceremony has been remembered as much for the weather as for the words. That evening's inaugural gala had been organized by Sinatra.
Robert Kennedy, who had directed the campaign, entered the government as attorney general the same month, and the office he took over at the Justice Department had been closely watched during his years of committee work on organized crime. The Lawfords, Sinatra, and their friends had gone from fundraising for a candidate to celebrating a president. For a time, the beach house on the Pacific and the White House were spoken of in the same sentence in Washington and Hollywood alike.
Monroe's winter was very different. Within weeks of the divorce decree, she was in New York, and in February 1961 she was admitted to the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic there. She was moved afterward to Columbia Presbyterian, a transfer in which Joe DiMaggio helped. The fact that he did so only a few years after their own divorce was noticed by those who knew both of them. He was, in the language of her friends, the person who had come when it mattered. The reasons behind her admission were her own and her doctors', and the surviving accounts of it are brief.
She spent the rest of that year gathering herself. In 1961 she underwent gallbladder surgery, and later in the year she left New York and returned to Los Angeles, the city where she had been born in a charity hospital 35 years before. She had been away from it, in the sense that mattered to her career, since the end of 1954. Much had changed in the meantime for the studio that had once dismissed her, for the friends she had left behind, and for the political and social circle that now included her acquaintance Peter Lawford.
She returned, too, to the question of where to live. For years her homes had been hotel suites, rented apartments, and the houses of her husbands, and she now began to look for a place that would be entirely her own, one she could furnish and arrange as she chose. Her search was still underway as the year turned in the first weeks of 1962. She found it in Brentwood, a single-story Spanish-style house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, set behind a wall on a quiet street, and she bought it early in 1962. It is widely described as the only house she ever bought on her own. At the entrance, set into the floor of the porch, was a tile bearing two Latin words, "cursum perficio," usually translated as "I am finishing my journey" or "I finish my course." Nothing in the record says whether she chose the tile or inherited it with the property.
In February she traveled to Mexico to buy furnishings for the new rooms. In March she was in Los Angeles to accept a Golden Globe as the world's favorite film actress. Both events were ordinary enough at the time, but the Mexican trip later took on a second life in the files of the FBI. The bureau kept a file on her, and it has since been released in part under freedom of information requests. Much of it concerned her left-wing acquaintances, among them people from the circle around Arthur Miller, and her visit to Mexico. It also contains reports from informants that have never been verified. None of its contents is used here, because a claim written down by an informant is a record of what was said to the bureau and not of what happened.
Government files of a different kind belong to the same month. On March 22, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had lunch with the president at the White House. According to the Senate Select Committee chaired by Frank Church, which reported in 1975, the bureau had learned that Judith Campbell, later known as Judith Campbell Exner, had been in contact with both John Kennedy and Sam Giancana, a figure of organized crime. The committee added that White House telephone logs showed the last recorded call between her and the White House hours after the lunch. She confirmed the relationship publicly in later years. That is the whole of what the public record supplies, and it says nothing about Marilyn Monroe.
Two days later, on the weekend of March 24 and 25, the president was in Palm Springs, where the desert town was in its mild spring season and the streets were lined with palms. He stayed at the house of Bing Crosby. Several biographers report that the arrangement was made at a late stage and that he had originally been expected to stay with Frank Sinatra, whose house in the area had been prepared for a presidential visit. As those biographers tell it, concern about Sinatra's associations and Robert Kennedy's unease over them led to the change of plan, and Peter Lawford was the one who had to deliver the news. They describe Sinatra's fury and a rift between him and Lawford that followed. These are the accounts of writers working from interviews, and they agree in outline more than in detail.
Monroe was also in Palm Springs that weekend, according to several biographers, and it is here that the disputed accounts begin. Ralph Roberts, her friend, told Donald Spoto, who published his version in "Marilyn Monroe: The Biography" in 1993, that she telephoned him from the house that weekend and that the president came briefly on the line. Roberts said she later described the encounter to him as a single occasion that had meant little. Susan Strasberg, the daughter of her acting teacher, wrote in her memoir "Marilyn and Me," published in 1992, that Monroe did not see a future with Kennedy. On this evidence, Spoto concluded that there had been no sustained affair.
Other writers reached a very different picture. Anthony Summers, in "Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe," published in 1985, gave a much larger account of her involvement with both Kennedy brothers, built on interviews collected years after the fact. James Spada, in "Peter Lawford: The Man Who Kept the Secrets," published in 1991, told the story along similar lines. J. Randy Taraborrelli, whose "The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe" appeared in 2009, weighed many of the same witnesses and set out where their recollections agreed and where they did not.
Peter Lawford is the source behind much of this material, but he gave different versions at different times, and several of the stories attributed to him reached print through biographers after his death in 1984. No letter, log, or recording has settled the matter. The testimony on each side was collected 15 to 25 years after the events, from people whose memories, loyalties, and reasons for speaking varied, and the accounts of a single occasion and of a long involvement cannot both be right. What the record does establish is that the two knew each other through the circle around Peter and Patricia Kennedy Lawford. How far the acquaintance went and for how long is exactly what the surviving evidence does not say.
In April she went back to work. "Something's Got to Give," directed by George Cukor and co-starring Dean Martin, began shooting that month at 20th Century Fox, and the production was troubled almost from the first days. She missed many of the scheduled days, which the studio's own reports attributed to illness, and the cost of the delays mounted while the schedule slipped. It was against this background that she agreed to sing at a birthday fundraiser for the president in New York, and she flew east against the wishes of the studio, which had not wanted her to leave the picture at that point.
The event took place on May 19, 1962, at the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue, where the marquee outside announced a Democratic Party fundraiser for the president's 45th birthday. It was held 10 days before that birthday, which fell on May 29, and the record gives no other reason for the date. Some 15,000 people filled the arena, and the bill included, as widely reported, Ella Fitzgerald, Jack Benny, Peggy Lee, Maria Callas, and Henry Fonda. Jacqueline Kennedy was not there, and reports placed her at a horse show in Virginia that day.
Monroe's dress had been designed by Jean Louis and sketched by his young assistant, Bob Mackie. It was made of flesh-colored fabric covered with thousands of hand-sewn rhinestones, and it was fitted to her so closely that, by the widely repeated account, she had to be sewn into it. When the moment came, Peter Lawford stood at the microphone and introduced her as "the late Marilyn Monroe," a phrase that survives in the film record and that drew laughter from the hall. She then sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" under a single spotlight and followed it with an additional verse set to the melody of "Thanks for the Memory."
As the audience listened and at the end applauded, the president himself came to the stage and spoke lightly of what he had just heard. He said on film that he could now retire from politics after having "Happy Birthday" sung to him in such a sweet, wholesome way. It was a public remark in a public setting, made to a crowd that had come to raise money and to be entertained, and it is one of the few exchanges between the two that survives in any form.
The evening continued in private after the gala. There was a reception at the townhouse of Arthur Krim on East 69th Street, the United Artists executive who had chaired the event, and the guests arrived in the small hours of the morning. Cecil Stoughton, a White House photographer, took a picture there in which Monroe stands with John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. It is the only known photograph of the three together. It was not widely published for decades.
Nine days later she was back on the sound stage in Los Angeles. At the end of May she filmed the poolside scene of "Something's Got to Give," the last work she did for that picture. Her own birthday came on June 1, three days after the president's, and she turned 36.
The studio's patience ran out within days of that scene. On June 8, 1962, 20th Century Fox dismissed her from "Something's Got to Give" and filed suit against her, citing the absences that had accumulated since April. Dean Martin declined to go on with a replacement, and without its two leads the production was shut down. Later reports said Fox had begun to negotiate a return for her, but nothing had been settled when the summer ended. The picture was left unfinished, with the poolside footage among the last she ever shot.
She was not without company in those weeks. Ralph Greenson, her psychiatrist, saw her almost every day. The housekeeper Eunice Murray was in the house at Fifth Helena Drive, and press agent Pat Newcomb remained close to her work. Photographers came as well. In June, Bert Stern photographed her for Vogue at the Hotel Bel-Air. In July, George Barris made a series of pictures of her on the beach at Santa Monica, in the same light and near the same shoreline where the Lawfords' house stood a little farther along.
On August 3, Life magazine published an interview with her by Richard Meryman in which she spoke about fame and about the way she believed the public regarded her. It appeared in the last days of her life, and it has been quoted more often since than almost anything else she said for print.
The last weekend of July took her to Lake Tahoe. Cal Neva Lodge stood on the shore with the state line between California and Nevada running through it, and Frank Sinatra held an interest in the place. She was there on July 28 and 29, as reported, and photographs show her at the lodge. Beyond that, the accounts of the weekend are contested, and none of the versions in print rests on a document. The lodge itself had a later history that is better recorded. In 1963, Nevada gaming regulators moved against Sinatra's license after Sam Giancana was reported to have been a guest there, and Sinatra gave up his casino interests.
The claims about Robert Kennedy belong to the same summer, and they are unproven. Anthony Summers and others assembled witnesses who placed him at her house in those weeks, while people close to her and people close to him denied it, and the question has never been resolved. Summers also reported that her calls to the White House went unanswered and that Peter Lawford was asked to look after her, though others who have studied the period dispute both points. The private investigator Fred Otash later claimed to hold recordings made at her house. No such recording has ever been produced, and nothing that could be examined has emerged in the decades since he said so.
What the record does hold begins on the evening of Saturday, August 4. Peter Lawford said afterward that he had spoken to her by telephone that evening, that she sounded drowsy, and that she seemed to him to be saying goodbye. It was an account he gave more than once, and the details changed from one telling to the next. He divorced Patricia Kennedy in 1966 and died in 1984, and much of what is attributed to him reached readers through the books of others.
In the early hours of Sunday, August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead at her home at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive in Brentwood. She was 36. Eunice Murray and Ralph Greenson described the discovery to the police, and their account included a window that had been broken to gain entry. The timeline those present gave was questioned later and shifted in some retellings, a discrepancy that the review of 1982 would note in calm terms without suggesting what it meant.
The Los Angeles County Coroner's office took charge of the case, and the autopsy was performed by Thomas Noguchi, then a deputy medical examiner for the county. At a press conference, the county coroner, Theodore Curphey, announced the finding: acute barbiturate poisoning and a probable suicide. He reached it after a panel of specialists, the group that came to be called the psychological autopsy, had reviewed her state of mind in the weeks before her death. The sedatives involved had been prescribed to her. That is what the official record says, and it says no more than that.
Her funeral took place on August 8 at Westwood Village Memorial Park, in a small chapel, and it was private. Joe DiMaggio arranged it, the man who had married her at San Francisco City Hall eight and a half years before and who had helped move her from the Payne Whitney clinic in 1961. Lee Strasberg gave the eulogy. Few of the people who had photographed her, worked with her, or written about her were among the mourners, and the arrangements reflected a wish to keep the service quiet. For the next 20 years, according to widely repeated reports, DiMaggio had roses delivered to her crypt several times a week.
The public did not accept the finding as settled, and the country's attention was soon pulled a long way from that chapel. Fifteen months after her funeral, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and the nation stopped in front of television sets and in the streets in a grief that newspapers of the time described as unlike anything that had come before it. In June 1968, Robert Kennedy was killed in Los Angeles, the city where his brother had been nominated eight years earlier. Both events belong to a larger history than hers, and they are recorded here only because the people at the center of the story had by then all gone.
The theories arrived in books and articles over the following decades. Some proposed that she had been killed, others that her death had been covered up, and in one version or another they named the Kennedys, organized crime, or the intelligence services. Summers's "Goddess" was the most widely read of them. They remain theories, and they stand beside the official findings, which reached a different conclusion and which no later investigation has overturned.
In August 1982, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office under John Van de Kamp opened a review of the case because the public theories had persisted. It reported in December of that year and concluded that there was no credible evidence of foul play. The report did not claim to have answered everything. It acknowledged that some discrepancies and unanswered questions remained, among them the times and sequence given by those who were present in the house.
The gown she wore in New York went through other hands in the years that followed. In 2016 it was sold at Julien's Auctions to Ripley's Believe It or Not for about $4.8 million, a figure that says something about what people have wanted from her memory and nothing about what took place in her life.
The record leaves two matters open, and they have remained open for more than 60 years. It has not been established whether her acquaintance with John Kennedy was a single occasion that meant little, as Ralph Roberts told Spoto and as Susan Strasberg's memoir suggests, or an extended involvement, as Anthony Summers and James Spada described. Nor has it been established whether Robert Kennedy came to her house in the summer of 1962, as some witnesses said and others firmly denied. No document decides either matter. The recording that was said to exist has never been produced. And the people who might have answered are gone, most of them having left behind only what they were later asked to remember.
At Fifth Helena Drive, the house stood behind its wall, a single story of white stucco under a tiled roof. Beyond the gate on the porch, the tile was still set into the floor at the entrance, with its two Latin words: "cursum perficio."