Jackie Kennedy Allegedly Confronted JFK About Marilyn Monroe: New Book

What exactly did Jackie Kennedy think about JFK’s long-rumored relationship with Marilyn Monroe? A new biography of the 35th president, JFK: Public, Private, Secret has some surprising answers.

According to author J. Randy Taraborrelli, Jackie once said to her husband of Monroe, “This one’s different Jack. This one worries me.”

“That’s from somebody who was right there in the White House who overheard that conversation,” Taraborrelli tells PEOPLE. “It was reported to me 25 years ago, when I was writing an earlier book, Jackie, Ethel and Joan.”

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According to Taraborrelli, “She [Jackie] didn’t know the nature of the relationship but knew him well enough to suspect something was going on. What’s really important is her use of the language: ‘This one’s different,’ suggesting very strongly she was okay with the other [women] but this one was different.”

The conversation took place before JFK’s birthday party on May 19, 1962 at Madison Square Garden, he says. “She didn’t want anything to do with it. She had a barbecue with the Auchinclosses [her mother Janet Auchincloss and stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss] rather than go because she did not want to endorse it.”

As for the long-rumored affair between JFK and the star, Taraborrelli says, “I don’t have enough evidence to support it,” especially when it comes to a weekend in early 1962 when it’s long been claimed the President and the star both stayed at the home of Bing Crosby. 

Taraborrelli spoke to Pat Newcomb, now 96, who was Monroe’s publicist — and a close friend — who told him the star was not there that weekend. 

“Pat said ‘I’ve been reading about this for 60 years and I can tell you that this did not happen,’ “ says Taraborrelli of the specific meeting. “If that didn’t happen then, I don’t know when they were together because then it was a clear shot to Madison Square Garden, where she sang Happy Birthday Mr. President and then she was gone.” Monroe died on Aug. 4, 1962.

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“I, along with other authors, have said the only thing we can really count on was that they were together at Bing Crosby’s house that weekend,” says Taraborrelli. “Now I’m saying we can’t count on that.”

“People could sneak off,” he adds, “but as I wrote in the book, we don’t have enough evidence to support that they had an affair.”

“The confusion is that Marilyn had a lot of emotional problems,” he explains. “I wrote about them in The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe, and the problem that historians have faced over generations is that Marilyn told her friends that she and JFK, and she and Bobby, were having affairs. She told people who were close to her this, who then told authors like me. And then you come to realize, Marilyn was not the best narrator of her life.”

As for Jackie, he concludes, ”What’s interesting is she didn’t know if JFK was involved with her or not. She just assumed it. What I do know is after Marilyn died, Jackie was bereft.”

He recounts a story told to him by a friend of Janet Rutherford Auchincloss [Jackie’s half sister] about a conversation [Janet] and Jackie had after Marilyn’s death.

Janet, who was quite upset, told her sister and her mother, “The world destroyed ­ Marilyn,” he writes. But Jackie didn’t agree. “No, Janet,” she said. “The world didn’t destroy Marilyn. The world built Marilyn up. It was the men in her life who destroyed Marilyn.”

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JFK: Public, Private, Secret comes out July 15 and is available now for preorder, wherever books are sold.