It was one of the most hyper-sexualized moments in American political history in 1962 when President John F. Kennedy attended a party celebrating his 45th birthday at New York City’s Madison Square Garden when something unexpected happened.
Actress Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to JFK in the most sexualized way you could possibly imagine and also while he was married to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Afterwards JFK joked, “I can now retire from politics after having had Happy Birthday sung to me in such a sweet way.”
And now there’s a new explosive accusation in a Mike Nichols biography that just hit shelves about the relationship between President John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.
Mike Nichols was one of the most prolific stage directors in America when he jumped over into film where he dominated that profession as well.
Nichols’ first feature was “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” which garnered 13 Academy Award nominations and won five including Best Actress Elizabeth Taylor and Best Supporting Actress Sandy Dennis. A director’s first feature had never been so widely celebrated.
He followed that up with the critically acclaimed “The Graduate” starring Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft and Katharine Ross, which solidified him as one of America’s most gifted film directors.
Over the years he helmed such hits as “Catch-22,” “Working Girl,” “The Birdcage” and “Charlie Wilson’s War” until his death 2014.
A new oral history entitled “Life isn’t everything: Mike Nichols, as remembered by 150 of his closest friends,” which includes celebrities like Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Lorne Michaels and New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd who recalled what the public didn’t know about that surprise “Happy Birthday” song to JFK.
Dowd said, “When Marilyn sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Jack Kennedy in the famous dress she had to be sewn into, the sequined Jean Louis gown, Mike was there that night. He told me, ‘I was standing right behind Marilyn, completely invisible, when she sang ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President,’ and indeed, the corny thing happened.”
Dowd claims Nichols said, “‘Her dress split for my benefit, and there was Marilyn, and yes, indeed, she didn’t wear any underwear.’”
Monroe’s infamous flesh-toned curve-hugging dress with an 18-inch slit in the back for “wiggle room” was obviously intentionally seductive. In 2016, it was sold for $4.8 million at an auction by the television show “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.”
Of course, following Monroe’s “performance,” it speculated rumors the two were having an affair but it was never proven to be true.
But there was one moment in the film “The Misfits” where Marilyn in a scene with Clark Gable – a moment where he’s supposed to go into the bedroom to kiss her – decided on her own to expose herself to him and used her physicality to heat things up.
That scene ended up on the cutting room floor but it’s out there. Apparently she was incredibly insecure despite being one of the most famous women in America at that time.
Apparently in 2011, a pornographic short film of Marilyn Monroe will be auctioned off in August at an international film collectors’ convention for a starting price of $500,000 and it was bought anonymously for $1.5 million. That person bought it specifically to shelve it so nobody would ever see it.
The alleged six minute black and white film, which dates from 1946, shows the American actress, then known as Norma Jean Baker, and an unknown male.
Monroe not wearing underwear wouldn’t be so shocking but when you do that in front of the President of the United States, then it becomes a wild story.