Some Like It Hot

By Richard Zoglin

SHOW: MARILYN & BOBBY: HER FINAL AFFAIR

TIME: AUG. 4, 9 P.M. EDT, USA

THE BOTTOM LINE: The final insult.

The California sun sparkles through the palm trees. The movie star, her platinum hair shielded from the wind by a scarf, drives up in a turquoise convertible. Her boyfriend, dressed incongruously in suit and tie, leaps into the car with a boyish bounce. "Let's go, Monroe," he chirps. She replies: "Yes, sir, Mr. Attorney General."

Oliver Stone was attacked for stretching the facts about the Kennedy assassination in JFK. Author Joe McGinniss is getting slammed for inventing thoughts and dialogue for his new biography of Ted Kennedy. If no similar outcry greets Marilyn & Bobby: Her Final Affair, it is because tawdry "fact- based" TV movies have become too common to get riled over. This one, moreover, inoculates itself with a disclaimer at the outset: "A fictionalized account inspired by the public lives of Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy." None of which can entirely excuse this USA Network movie from responsibility for breaking new ground in docudrama shamelessness.

The film cobbles together its story line from every half-baked rumor that ever surfaced about the famous pair. Bobby and Marilyn had a torrid affair, we learn, that was witnessed almost every step of the way by surveillance men hired by Jimmy Hoffa. The Teamsters boss even orders Bobby killed, but the would-be assassin, after training his telescopic sight on the couple smooching in a park, chickens out. Good thing, since Mafia boss Sam Giancana shortly thereafter tells Hoffa to lay off because the Mob is "doing a little business" with the Kennedy brothers.

Hoffa isn't the only one monitoring the affair. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (whose phone is answered in the middle of the night by the fellow sharing his bed) blackmails Bobby with damaging photos. That forces Kennedy to break off the affair, which leaves Marilyn so distraught that she takes a fatal overdose of sleeping pills. The suicide scene is the film's lunatic climax: so many people scurry in and out of Marilyn's house as the actress lies dying (among them Peter Lawford, Bobby himself and an ambulance team that rushes her to the hospital and then back again, under orders from the FBI) that it looks like the stateroom sequence from A Night at the Opera.

The psychological portraits are no less ludicrous. Marilyn loves Bobby for his mind. "It must be so exciting," she coos. "You have all the right answers before anybody else even has the questions!" Bobby loves Marilyn for her . . . mind too: "How as an actor can you get inside someone's mind? I read somewhere it's called Method acting. What is that?" Any complications to this storybook romance -- Bobby's wife and kids, for example -- are kept safely offstage.

For all its bubbleheadedness, Marilyn & Bobby is slickly mounted. Melody Anderson and James F. Kelly (who played R.F.K. in three previous TV movies) do passable impersonations, and director Bradford May keeps the close-ups tight and the action fast; the re-created Senate-hearing clashes between Kennedy and Hoffa are more convincing than anything Danny DeVito managed in Hoffa. If Marilyn & Bobby were not about two historical figures whose actual lives -- as opposed to the fantasies people continue to build around them -- still matter to us, Marilyn & Bobby could possibly be dismissed as harmless fun. But it is, and it can't.