“No details,” Margaret said, “just that bad men exist and worse men carry out their orders.”

Sinatra raised a glass to her. “Bad men exist and worse men carry out their orders—and the rest of us avert our eyes,” he said. “Everyone comes out here to dance with the devil, and the devil may dance. That’s what they should have up there on that hill, instead of fucking Hollywood.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

New York City

May 1962

Sitting among the other fifteen thousand Democratic fat cats, a freshly coiffed President Kennedy beamed as he was feted on the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday.

Maria Callas sang from Carmen. Members of Jerome Robbins’s Ballets USA dance company performed. Shirley MacLaine and Jimmy Durante, Harry Belafonte, Bobby Darin. Mike Nichols and Elaine May made the thousand-dollar-a-seat crowd roar by reading fake telegrams, one of which was addressed to a “Mr. Francis X. Kennedy” on the occasion of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary. The punch line—it had been sent by the CIA.

What a thing, to have an intelligence agency mocked for unintelligence, Charlie thought as he and Margaret watched the festivities from backstage. Sinatra’s absence from the event was stunning, though no one talked about it.

They had been given this special access by Lawford, who said that his brother-in-law the attorney general wanted to talk while in town.

And now here was Lawford, onstage, presenting the president with his present.

“Mr. President, on this occasion of your birthday, this lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual,” Lawford boomed. “Mr. President…Marilyn Monroe!”

A rowdy applause filled the Garden; a spotlight hit the stage. But Marilyn did not appear.

She was backstage, looking nowhere near able to perform.

Charlie and Margaret were yards away, feeling a mix of sorrow and revulsion. Whether because of pills or booze or both, Marilyn could barely stand. She had literally been sewn into her Jean Louis gown—flesh-colored, festooned with rhinestones—and she was obviously wearing nothing underneath. Her beauty was ethereal but she reeked of desperation.

Lawford returned to the microphone and coughed, embracing the awkwardness. “A woman about whom,” he said to laughter, “it truly may be said she needs no introduction. Let me just say—here she is!”

A bass drum solo began and then quickly ended as the spotlight again highlighted only her absence.

“But I’ll give her an introduction anyway, Mr. President,” Lawford said to more laughter, “because in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who meant so much, who has done more—”

Lawford was surprised by the men and women in the audience applauding before he had cued them to do so; he turned to his left and saw Monroe had strode out and in fact was already almost at the lectern.

“Mr. President!” Lawford quickly said, “the ‘late’ Marilyn Monroe!”