Moncton man claimed he hosted first meeting of JFK and Marilyn Monroe
Awindow of opportunity presents itself to tell what you might call a tall tale, although I believe it to be true. Marilyn Monroe died 60 years ago last week. That anniversary, and the looming release of a new Netflix movie, Blonde, about the stormy life of Norma Jean Mortenson, have spiked attention on a story that has never faded from the headlines since her passing.
Monroe’s death by drug overdose came about 15 months before her secret lover, president John F. Kennedy, died by gunfire.
With the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s killing coming up in the fall of 2013, I traveled to Riverside, New Brunswick, to do an interview for a radio documentary with the man who claimed to have been the first to introduce MM and JFK.
Charles Basil Foster first came to my attention via a book I picked up at a local book fair. Its title was Once Upon a Time in Paradise: Canadians in the Golden Age of Hollywood. The author bio mentioned that Foster had been a publicist for Marilyn Monroe.
I tracked down Foster’s collection of personal memoirs, From Old Hollywood to New Brunswick, which, indeed, had the story of his experience in 1957 as MM’S publicist on The Prince and the Showgirl, being shot in London.
His gig with Monroe turned out to be one of the lesser amazing tales of the 38 in the book, all of which were initially published in a New Brunswick seniors magazine. Foster and his former London showgirl turned banker wife Irene had fetched up in Moncton in 1970.
His incredible life of meeting and befriending a who’s who of famous people from Charlie Chaplin to Greta Garbo to Shirley Temple to Charles Lindbergh, actually got its start during the Second World War when Foster, a young British recruit, signed up for the Commonwealth pilot training program in Calgary, Alberta.
His instructor and subsequently close friend was Peter Middleton, the grandfather of Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge. It was Middleton who arranged for Foster to visit Hollywood in 1943 while on leave recovering from scarlet fever.
Back to MM and JFK. Foster was working as a scriptwriter in Los Angeles The Beverly Hillbillies was just one of the shows he wrote for - when on a June 1960 evening he glanced out his apartment window and saw a man exiting from the window of an adjacent building.
The man waved to Foster and asked “would you be kind enough to let me into your apartment? I need to get away from this place for a while.”
It was Jack Kennedy, who at that time was about to be chosen as the nominee for president at the Democratic convention taking place in Los Angeles.
To condense a story Charlie Foster told at length and with precise detail, Kennedy and he took Foster’s car to Santa Monica where the future president took a contemplative stroll on the beach. Back at Foster’s apartment, while he and Kennedy were chatting, the doorbell rang.
It was Marilyn Monroe, for whom Foster had been a confidant in Hollywood following their time together in London. Kennedy and Monroe greeted each other gingerly, Foster saying, “you haven’t met before?” Monroe saying, “Oh no, we’ve wanted to but we’ve never been able to. This is the first time.”
Foster said “I wasn’t in the conversation much after Marilyn arrived” although Kennedy asked him to stick around. “I have a wife back in Washington, you know.”
In our interview Foster recounted what he had never mentioned before in more than 50 years, that by the end of the evening, MM and JFK were holding hands.
“It was very obvious this was going somewhere.”
Kennedy had earlier invited Foster to his inauguration, which he attended, and says he kept in touch with the president, with Marilyn being a topic of conversation.
As for Marilyn, Foster said her death struck him like the loss of a sister.
“I really do know what happened to Marilyn on that sad day she was murdered. Yes, it was unquestionably murder, but it isn’t Jack Kennedy who was to blame.” He says he knows who did it, but wasn’t willing to say the name. Charlie Foster died in 2017 at age 94. About the meeting in his apartment of such star-crossed lovers: “I don’t know why it happened, but it happened.” Something Charlie Foster would say about most of his remarkable life.