Both JFK and Bobby Kennedy are known to have had simultaneous affairs with Marilyn Monroe.
But in her new book, veteran actress Shirley MacLaine has revealed that the two brothers were even closer than previously thought – they brought the blonde beauty into the same bed, one after the other, on the same night.
The night in question turned out to be Jack’s birthday, after Monroe serenaded him with her infamous rendition of ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President.’
In his newly published coffee table book, The wall of lifeMacLaine, 90 years old, writes: ‘In 1962, at John F Kennedy’s famous 45th birthday celebration at Madison Square Garden, Jimmy Durante and I performed for the president and the crowd, but what most people remember is Marilyn Monroe singing to him.’ Happy Birthday”.
“Afterwards there was a private party at Arthur Krim’s house…”
‘Jack Kennedy had just left the bedroom… and Bobby Kennedy had just entered. Marilyn was in the bedroom…’
Arthur Krim was then finance chairman of the Democratic Party.
In the caption of a black-and-white photograph, in which she and JFK are in the background, she writes: “Jack Kennedy had just left the bedroom behind me, and Bobby Kennedy had just entered.
‘Marilyn was in the bedroom…’
MacLaine also hints that this was not the first time the “revolving door” to Marilyn’s bedroom had opened.
In a later photograph, from 1984, she writes: “Here I’m telling that story to Teddy Kennedy… and he’s laughing about how the boys got away with it all the time.”
In her best-selling book Ask Not: The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, Dailymail.com columnist Maureen Callahan described the cross-relationships between JFK and his brother as an “incestuous sexual competition” between the two.
In fact, she reveals that, just 30 minutes before Marilyn appeared on stage to sing ‘Happy Birthday’, she had sex with Bobby in her dressing room.
“They spent 15 minutes alone together,” Callahan writes.
The marriage made her late to the stage, where she arrived “drunk and blushing from the transgressive sex she had just had with Bobby, with her dress so tight she could barely walk.”
Both John (right) and Robert (left) chat with Marilyn on the night of her infamous performance.
Marilyn had simultaneous affairs with both Kennedy brothers.
“Jack Kennedy had just left the bedroom behind me and Bobby Kennedy had just entered,” MacLaine writes. ‘Marilyn was in the bedroom’
Jackie Kennedy was “furious” after the performance, leaving JFK “jawed” in the audience. And so, Callahan writes, Jackie gave her husband an “ultimatum,” telling him he could no longer see Marilyn, or “she would divorce him, taking the children and costing him a second term.”
JFK agreed and never slept with Marilyn again.
However, according to MacLaine, he made that promise after one last encounter in the bedroom, before handing the tortured actress over to her brother.
According to Callahan, the affair with Bobby continued; Bobby even visited her the night she died at her home in Los Angeles on August 4, 1962.
“Bobby and Jack discovered that the FBI and CIA had bugged Marilyn’s home and phone line without her knowledge…Bobby wouldn’t leave without the recordings,” he writes.
‘Where the hell is he?’ Bobby asked. But Marilyn “had no idea” what he was talking about.
Bobby left empty-handed and his housekeeper found Marilyn’s body early the next morning. “She was face down on her bed, naked, with her phone still in her hand,” Callahan writes.
Marilyn’s revelation isn’t the only surprising tidbit to emerge from MacLaine’s Hollywood scrapbook.
He also remembers the time he managed to escape from Donald Trump after a “terrifying” interaction with the former president.
“Probably back in the ’80s, I interacted with Donald Trump,” he writes. “I was at a function and when he walked in, he saw me and straightened up.
‘He started pulling at his tie, and I realized immediately that in his mind he was starting to take off my clothes… and his own.
MacLaine’s on-screen chemistry with Jack Nicholson was electric, but she said he would make her laugh too much to be her real-life lover.
John, Robert and Teddy Kennedy. Kennedy later jokes that the boys ‘got their way all the time’
‘It was terrifying how obvious I was being. He even found a way to try to stop me from leaving, but I had to get out of there.’
The Oscar-winning actress also reveals why she and her Terms of Endearment star Jack Nicholson were never together, despite their on-screen chemistry.
‘He just made me laugh all the time. He was one of my favorite people. she says.
‘I don’t think he would have been my type to have an affair anyway. I’d laugh too much.’
And it reveals that, in a romantic history that included adventures with Robert Mitchum, Danny Kaye and Yves Montand, there was one iconic actor who remained immune to her charms.
Beneath a photograph of her with Morgan Freeman, she writes tantalizingly: “I propositioned him and he turned me down.”
Shirley MacLaine had an open marriage to producer and alleged spy Steve Parker for 28 years, whom she described as the love of her life.
The wall of life: Images and stories of this wonderful life band Shirley MacLaine is published by Crown