Writing for the Reno Gazette-Journal, Nevada state archivist Guy Rocha investigates one of the more dubious rumours about Marilyn’s links to the region.
“The biggest mystery — more likely myth — associated with her Nevada connection is that Marilyn Monroe’s now well-known affair with President John F. Kennedy included a tryst at the Cal-Neva Lodge.
One documented account of Kennedy visiting Lake Tahoe was as a Massachusetts U.S. senator seeking the Democratic presidential nomination. Gov. Grant Sawyer had arranged for Kennedy to address a joint session of the Nevada Legislature in Carson City on Feb. 1, 1960. A reception was scheduled for Sunday evening at the Governor’s Mansion, followed by a talk at the civic auditorium.
‘When Kennedy and Pierre Salinger and their party got to Reno, they eluded the press and sneaked off in a car and went up to Lake Tahoe and looked it over before coming to Carson City,’ according to Gov. Sawyer in his oral history, Hang Tough.
Richard Ham, a Sawyer aide, stated in an interview that Kennedy was briefly staying at the Riverside Hotel and asked Ham to provide him with a car that he could drive alone to Lake Tahoe before going to Carson City. Kennedy apparently visited the Cal-Neva Lodge after a stop at Squaw Valley, the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics.
However, it was virtually impossible that Marilyn Monroe was at Lake Tahoe to greet the aspiring presidential candidate. Monroe, by all accounts, was in Hollywood at the time, rehearsing scenes for the movie Let’s Make Love.
Filming of The Misfits in Nevada began in July 1960 in Reno and concluded in October after scenes had been shot in and around Pyramid Lake and Dayton. At long last, Monroe worked with her childhood film idol, Clark Gable. Both Monroe and Gable had earlier been divorced in Las Vegas — Gable from his second wife, Ria Langham, in 1939 and Monroe from first husband, James Dougherty, in 1946.
Meanwhile, in the summer and fall of 1960, John Kennedy was busy campaigning for the presidency after winning the Democratic nomination at the Los Angeles convention in July.
There is nothing on record at the JFK Presidential Library in Boston that identifies Kennedy, officially or unofficially, visiting Lake Tahoe or Northern Nevada during his presidency. Monroe is known to have made her last visit to Lake Tahoe at the invitation of the Lawfords during the weekend of July 27-29, 1962, just prior to her apparent suicide.
The events surrounding Marilyn’s short stay at Sinatra’s Cal-Neva Lodge are controversial, confusing and contested, making it very hard to separate fact from fiction … However, the stories about a liaison between Kennedy and Monroe at Lake Tahoe are unsupported and may well represent a titillating, modern-day presidential version of the ‘George Washington slept here’ myth.”
The Marilyn Report 