President Kennedy

President Kennedy is portrayed as a figure whose political stature intensifies his personal power over Marilyn Monroe. Their relationship begins in the novel’s account not with an introduction between them, but with his recognition of her at a gathering in Rancho Mirage, near Palm Springs, in March 1962.

Recognition and Introduction

At the gathering, President Kennedy notices a blonde woman and asks Peter Lawford whether she is Marilyn Monroe. Lawford confirms that she is, describing her as a friend of a friend and adding that she is somewhat unstable. The exchange makes Monroe’s fame the first fact through which the President encounters her: her public image precedes any personal acquaintance. When she looks nervously toward the two men and gives a hesitant smile, the President is immediately captivated. He tells Lawford to arrange an introduction, setting in motion the private meeting that becomes central to their relationship.

The Pool-House Encounter

Introduced to Marilyn by the President’s brother-in-law as an admirer, President Kennedy soon slipped away with her from the gathering at the glass house and pool. They lay close together on towels and bathrobes in a shed behind the pool, laughing while other guests moved between the house and terrace. The secluded encounter sharply changed Marilyn’s mood: she had arrived regretting that she had left her new home on Fifth Helena Drive, but now she felt delighted, describing him in her thoughts as a man who made her feel like a real woman and as her Prince.

The scene is narrated through Marilyn’s intoxicated, romanticized perception of the President. She dwells on his historical importance and wartime heroism, and treats the pain in his back and cervical vertebrae as a wound of war rather than a reason for concern. They drank scotch together despite her awareness that alcohol was dangerous with the pills she had taken, and the encounter became sexual and was repeated. A brief, unexpected flicker of pleasure interrupts her sense of the episode as a performance of desire, but the narration does not turn that moment into a broader claim about their relationship.

The President’s public authority and Marilyn’s private fantasy converge in her image of him as a Prince: a powerful, celebrated man whose attention seems to promise intimacy and importance. Yet the scene also makes the imbalance visible. She is drawn to his status and desire, while her own account registers the alcohol and medication that weaken her ability to resist either. Their meeting therefore appears both as an episode of intense attraction and as part of the novel’s wider portrayal of Marilyn’s vulnerability to men whose power magnifies her hopes.

The Scheduled Call and the Appointment

After the pool-house encounter, the novel presents intimacy not as a settled relationship but as an interval Marilyn waits to have renewed. The telephone rings punctually at 10:25, and President Kennedy’s deep, unmistakable voice reaches her with the assurance that he is thinking of her. The call turns waiting into exhilaration: rather than feeling depleted or humiliated, Marilyn feels happy and radiant, as though anticipation itself were proof that the connection continues. Her playful naming of him as her Prince gives this brief exchange the emotional scale of a romance, even as its regular timing suggests a private arrangement governed by someone else’s schedule.

The novel then gives that private expectation a concrete consequence: in the week after Easter in 1962, a summons arrives for an appointment with President Kennedy. It marks a further step beyond the chance introduction at the Rancho Mirage gathering, but the passage establishes the summons rather than narrating what follows. The distinction matters: Marilyn’s conviction that he will return to her is dramatized through a phone call and then an official-seeming invitation, while the President remains a powerful presence whose access to her is arranged and timed from outside her control.

Access, Secrecy, and Political Power

The novel sharpens the difference between President Kennedy’s public authority and his private arrangements through the role of Peter Lawford, who acts as intermediary. When Kennedy asks whether he has already been out with Marilyn Monroe, Lawford says he has not. Yet after Monroe’s tentative smile draws Kennedy’s attention, the President immediately orders Lawford to arrange matters. His coded word, “Prontissimo,” means that the meeting is to happen within an hour. The speed of the instruction makes access seem less like courtship than an exercise of power: a desire expressed by the President becomes an appointment for others to organize.

Lawford’s caution also exposes the cloud of scandal surrounding the encounter. He invokes tabloid gossip about Monroe, including an allegation that she had slept with Senator McCarthy in an effort to ease the House Un-American Activities Committee’s pressure on her communist husband, the Playwright. The passage presents this as rumor, not established fact; its importance lies in the way sexual gossip becomes a warning exchanged among powerful men. Kennedy proceeds despite the warning, while Monroe’s imagined romance gives the encounter a very different meaning. That disparity—between an appointment arranged through political access and a private fantasy of being chosen by a Prince—defines the relationship’s uneasy mixture of intimacy, celebrity, and unequal power.