Marilyn stood in the darkness at the edge of the Madison Square Garden stage. In the centre was Peter Lawford, teasing the political crowd with an in-joke about a secret many of them knew---that Monroe was the President's lover.

She entered, dancing through circles of light. She coyly clasped an ermine wrap about her, covering her $12,000 Jean Louis beaded gown, paused until the frenzy quieted, then let the fur fall backwards into Lawford's hands. As she began singing, "It was like mass seduction," the event's producer, composer Richard Adler, recalled. "With Marilyn whispering 'Happy Birthday' and the crowd yelling and screaming."

After the seven-minute performance, a feverish, dizzy Monroe collapsed in her dressing room. She was carefully snipped out of the designer dress, then bathed with cool hand towels in an attempt to lower her temperature. Two hours later, Monroe made her entrance at a party given by theatre magnate Arthur Krim. After an hour, President Kennedy pulled the actress away from the other guests and into a corner, where they were soon joined by Robert Kennedy. The three stood talking for approximately 15 minutes.

Later the Attorney General appeared uneasy as White House journalist Merriman Smith chatted with Monroe while writing in a small notebook. When Bobby was informed by a Secret Service agent that a candid photo had been taken of Marilyn and the Kennedy brothers, his face grew stormy.

Shortly after 1A.M., Secret Service agents escorted the President and Marilyn to the basement of Krim's apartment house and through a series of tunnels that led to the Carlyle Hotel, where JFK maintained a penthouse. "I learned from an FBI agent that they remained in the suite for several hours," said columnist Earl Wilson in an interview. "It was the last prolonged encounter between them."

What kept them locked inside the bedroom wasn't just sex. Monroe complained to at least two friends that Kennedy was perfunctory in bed. "She insisted that he made love like an adolescent," recalled Monroe's longtime friend and former lover Robert Slatzer. Monroe and the President would gossip for hours---on the phone, at Lawford's Santa Monica mansion and in the Carlyle.

At 2:30 A.M. Merriman Smith was awakened by banging on his apartment door and was confronted by two Secret Service agents, who grilled him for an hour about his appearance at the private affair. "They wanted to make sure I didn't write about Marilyn and Bobby," he told Richard Adler. Her masseur, Ralph Roberts, was waiting. As they chatted about the birthday party, Monroe had enthusiastic praise for Robert Kennedy. She had never mentioned the Attorney General until that night. He had startled her by discussing politics, an acknowledgment that there was more to Monroe than her glossy image. But she told Roberts there was no chance of an affair with RFK. "He's not my type," Roberts recalled her saying. "I think the word she used was 'puny.'"

Monroe returned to filming on the Fox lot two days later with a severe sinus infection masked by amphetamines and painkillers. The following weekend, she learned that the President was about to end their affair, at the urging of advisers who believed his public flirtation could harm his political future. JFK needed to end the affair, due to Marilyn's unpredictability and phonecalls to Jackie. Lawford, the official Kennedy bearer of bad news to the Hollywood community, called Monroe and told her that she was out, that Kennedy was done with her. "Marilyn, let's face it," he told her, "You're just another of Jack's f***s, so forget about it." Word of the brush-off left the actress shattered, and filming was delayed again. Shortly afterward, Monroe was bedridden with a bronchial infection and missed two more days on the set.

When she was working, director George Cukor would often punish his fragile star by insisting on dozens of unnecessary retakes, undermining her confidence. On June 8 executives at the financially troubled film company fired Monroe. To justify the studio's actions, Fox press agents launched a negative publicity blitz labeling Marilyn mentally ill.

Shortly after she was dismissed, Robert Kennedy arrived at her Brentwood home for a visit that was both personal and political. The President had changed the private Oval Office phone number he had given Monroe, so she had begun calling the main White House switchboard, angrily giving her name when operators would not put her through.

Sometime during their walk around her pool, the Attorney General sternly told Monroe to "stop calling the White House." To compensate for the loss of the secret line, Bobby gave her his own private number at the Justice Department. "He was a wonderful person to tell your troubles to," remembered his press aide, Ed Guthman.

When it came to keeping the Kennedy family name clean, Robert Kennedy must have seemed almost invincible that summer. By seeing to it that scores of documents and phone logs were given top-secret classifications, the Attorney General had hidden all traces of JFK's affair with alleged Mafia party girl Judith Campbell Exner.

Bobby even functioned as a marriage counselor to control the fights and hide the infidelities within the Kennedy family. Columnist Walter Winchell privately described him as the family's "sexual policeman." When RFK heard from the Secret Service that JFK had asked for an introduction to a young German socialite in Washington, Bobby launched an FBI investigation. Discovering that she had a previous affair with a Soviet attache, he saw to it that she was summarily deported. At this point, some believe the Attorney General became the careless brother as he embarked on a blazing love affair with the most famous woman in the world.

Their 90-minute meeting in the garden of her house two months before her death led to a long-distance relationship so intense and passionate that Monroe's maid Hazel Washington described it as "making love over the phone. And I do mean making love." Within a few days, she was able to reach him anywhere---from Hyannis Port to Europe.

They saw one another often during the next few weeks, giving RFK's frequent visits to L.A. to oversee filming of "The Enemy Within," adapted from his best-seller about his crusade against organized crime. Neighbours claim to have seen couple strolling along the beach in front of the 14-bedroom oceanfront compound of Bobby's brother-in-law Peter Lawford. The mansion, according to some, offered Monroe privacy for her trysts with both Kennedy brothers.

They may have talked of Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs, of civil rights, the Peace Corps and of organized crime among other topics. Monroe borrowed books on current events and took notes about their political conversations. Evelyn Moriarity, the star's stand-in, recalled the "stacks of notebooks" that appeared at Monroe's house and in her dressing room. As her phone calls to Washington proliferated, so did the notebooks---a powerful record of her probable affairs with the President and his brother.

Then in mid-July Monroe found that her lover had suddenly disconnected himself from her life. Frantic for Bobby's advice about returning to the set of "Something's Got to Give," she dialed her private line and later told several that it had been disconnected. A receptionist in Bobby's Washington office told her Mr. Kennedy was in conference all afternoon. Thus Bobby ended her romance with the Kennedy family, like a rich college boy dumping a girlfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, which sent her into a deep depression.

Most of Monroe's so-called suicide attempts were actually mild overdoses, according to close friends, who insist she had an experts knowledge of pharmacology and knew precisely how many pills it took to get asleep. Because her speech became slurred and she seemed confused, friends often overreacted and summoned doctors.

She was looking wan and exhausted. Many of her confidantes hinted that she had checked into Cedars of Lebanon Hospital under an assumed name and aborted President Kennedy's baby, rather than giving birth to it, as she has been rumoured to have done with the first pregnancy to JFK. It is rumoured that Marilyn herself said that they had a baby girl, that was given to a Sicilian family to raise under the name of Nancy Maniscalco. Still others insisted it was Bobby's child. As days passed and Bobby remained elusive, Monroe spread bitter tales about her pregnancy. She told hairdresser Agnes Flanagan, Laguna Beach Realtor Arthur James and her publicist, Rupert Allan, about it ---though Allan and James understood that she had a miscarriage.

A rumoured bugging operation believed to have been ordered by Jimmy Hoffa and the Mafia at her home threatened to confirm her relationships with the Kennedys. The Attorney General apparently decided to let his brother-in-law handle this latest emergency. Just as Jack had dispatched Bobby to sever the President's ties with the actress, now Lawford was ordered to cut his longtime friend off from all contact with the First Family.

Monroe was already heartbroken by her treatment at the hands of the Kennedys. According to several friends, she began threatening to hold a press conference to talk about her relationship with the Kennedy brothers. She wasn't going to be shoved aside just because she had become inconvenient.

Did her attitude of defiance, toward the rich and powerful Kennedys, lead to her death? Her death appeared to be a suicide resulting from an overdose of sleeping pills. However, there were many who believed that she was murdered because she simply knew too much as there are witnesses that put Peter and RFK at her home the day of her death. The day she died, neighbours saw Bobby and "a man with a doctor's bag" enter her house together. Within four hours she was found dead. Until his own dying day in 1968, Bobby had denied ever having been in Los Angeles on that fateful day, insisting he was 400 miles away in Gilroy CA. staying with friend John Bates. However, Eunice Murray Marilyn's companion/housekeeper has admitted that Bobby was at her home that day. Employee interviews and records from that day also show that Bobby Kennedy was in fact registered as a guest at the nearby St. Francis Hotel. Monroe was killed with a barbiturate suppository, but a bottle of oral pills was left at the scene to make it look like a possible suicide. This “man with a doctor’s bag” is believed to have injected Marilynwith the fatal drug that killed her, meaning that RFK was definitely involved in her death, if this theory is true.