Jack Kennedy - the American hero. Marilyn Monroe - the love goddess. Their affair has been whispered about for thirty years. Now, at last, the story we have only been able to imagine is brought to vibrant, stunning life - a passionate, tragic romance played out against a backgroundof deadly intrigue, power politics, and Hollywood glamour on a grand scale. Only Michael Korda, best-selling author of Queenie and The Fortune could so convincingly portray characters already larger than life, and a story more complex, more resonantly true than any rumor or speculation. At the center of this extraordinary novel is Marilyn - not the "dumb blonde" of Hollywood legend, but a woman who explodes from the page with great strength - deeply passionate, funny, outrageous, often life-loving, but witha fatal inability to hold on to happiness even when it is within her grasp. When she meets the young Senator John F.Kennedy at a Beverly Hills party, it is, for both of them, love at first sight - the beginning of an affair that will become political dynamite in the hands of a rogues' gallery of politicians and criminals. The cast of characters is dazzling, fascinating, audaciously imagined. Jack Kennedy, charming, fatally ambitious, capable at once of great passion and cold political calculation; Bobby Kennedy, whose reputation forruthlessness conceals a sensitive and tender nature, and who finally (and with fatal consequences) replaces his brother in Marilyn's life; J. Edgar Hoover, who uses his knowledge of the affair for hisown purposes; Jimmy Hoffa, the Teamster leader, whose taping of the lovers' most intimate erotic moments sets off a chain of events that ends in Marilyn's death and Jack Kennedy's assassination; crime bosses Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Sam Giancana, all of them in on the secret.... Michael Korda has written the story behind the myth that has become the fabric of our national imagination, holding nothing back, revealing at last the missing element in three legendary lives, the one thing we have always wantedto know - the truth about Marilyn, Jack and Bobby.