The Kennedy Brothers: The Rise and Fall of Jack and Bobby (10 page)

To be sure, Senator Kennedy had heard countervailing opinions about the wisdom of a showdown with Castro. One such, at least in the realm of spoof, came from spy novelist (and James Bond creator) Ian Fleming, who told Kennedy over dinner in Georgetown:

The United States should send some planes over Cuba dropping pamphlets, with the compliments of the Soviet Union, to the effect that owing to American atom-bomb tests the atmosphere over the island had become radioactive; and that radioactivity is held longest in beards; and that radioactivity makes men impotent. As a consequence, the Cubans would shave off their beards, and without bearded Cubans, there would be no revolution.
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The Republican nominee, Vice President Nixon, was meanwhile pushing hard in secret councils for Castro to be forcibly removed, either by invasion or “executive action.” He was eagerly supported (and financially underwritten in his campaign for the presidency) by Miami multimillionaire William Pawley, former ambassador to Peru and Brazil and organizer (along with Claire Chennault) of the Flying Tigers during World War Two. Pawley was a trusted member of Eisenhower’s kitchen cabinet and later claimed that the president had wanted to give him command of the secret war against Castro.
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By midsummer 1960 the drive to eliminate Castro countenanced assassination.

It was for this reason that Johnny Rosselli was approached in Los Angeles in August 1960 and asked to fly to New York for a meeting with CIA officials in September. The morning of Rosselli’s meeting with CIA officials at the Plaza Hotel, the New
York
Times reported that Castro too would be flying to New York. His ostensible purpose was to attend the opening of the UN General Assembly, but the real reason for entering what he called
la cueva del lobo
(the wolf’s den) was to attack the Americans on their own turf, to ambush them diplomatically in the manner of a
guerrillero
.
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His plan was bold and dangerous — and, at least initially, successful.

July 16, 1960

Santa Monica, California

D
emocratic presidential nominee John F. Kennedy was stretched out on a lounge chair on the deck of Peter and Pat Lawford’s 50-yard pool at their huge, rambling beachfront home at 625 Ocean Front Avenue in Santa Monica. He was wearing navy blue trunks and sporting square dark glasses as he angled his body and face toward the murky, tawny-colored sun. Presently, he rose stiffly and walked out the back gate of the compound and onto the long, flat Santa Monica beach.
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For a forty-three-year-old who had spent most of his adult life in a state of pain, Kennedy seemed unusually fit. But his appearance was misleading. The fact that Jack could even swim — much less run for president — was nothing less than remarkable. For all of his pain and multiple infirmities, his high intake of cortisone had at least the secondary effects of a heightened sense of well-being and an enhanced appetite for sex.
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During the 1960 campaign, rumors about Jack’s health abounded, as they had before. But Joe and Bobby Kennedy threw up a barrier between the press and Jack’s battery of physicians, and publicly sourced his difficulties to “war-related injuries.” The truth was that he was living on borrowed time. In the weeks before the Democratic convention in Los Angeles, the offices of two of Jack’s doctors, Eugene Cohen and Janet Travell, were broken into and ransacked for records. Bobby was convinced it was the work of Lyndon Johnson, who, along with his lieutenant, John Connally, was spreading the rumor that Kennedy had an incurable disease.
⁴⁹
But the story never quite took in the press, which in that era tended to give politicians the benefit of the doubt in matters considered to be private. As Jack stood to address the crowd of eighty thousand in the Los Angeles Coliseum to accept his party’s nomination the previous day, few there knew that he had just received a heavy booster shot of novocaine in his lower back and was wearing an aluminum back brace. Those who knew only admired him more for his debonair stoicism.

As it had for Franklin Roosevelt, the daily struggle against infirmities somehow imparted a certain intensity of being and sparkle to Jack. He crossed the Santa Monica beach, nodding in his contained way at those who recognized him. He waded and then lowered himself into the surf and began to swim freestyle through the brownish water to a point two hundred yards away, where the sludgy coastal band turned a deep dark blue. From there, Kennedy began swimming parallel to the beach in a slow-cadenced stroke. By the time he swam back to his point of entry, a crowd of people had gathered to watch him emerge. When he did, with a broad grin on his darkly tanned face (due as much to a side effect of Addison’s disease as to any sustained exposure to the sun), the small crowd began to cheer. Jack resembled not so much a politician as a Hollywood leading man.

But there was more to Kennedy than matinee idol at the dawn of the age of mass political merchandising. Beyond his looks — the recently disciplined shock of chestnut hair, the smiling stand of teeth, the gray, calculating eyes — the matrix of the man was unusual. He had an open, inquiring mind, a passion for ideas that was largely undulled by the neurotic and atomized practice of politics, and an experiencing nature that bordered on the Dionysian. Despite the chaos and exposure of the previous week, he had found the time and motivation to consort sexually with Judy Campbell, Marilyn Monroe, and the former wife of a diplomat.

Norman Mailer, who covered the Los Angeles convention and was to interview Kennedy in Hyannis Port three weeks later, did not know all this but he sensed that Jack had “the wisdom of a man who senses death within him and gambles that he can cure it by risking his life.” It was fitting, Mailer wrote, that Kennedy should secure the nomination in a place such as Los Angeles, which combined “packaged commodities and ranch homes, interchangeable, geographically unrecognizable” with the cinematic dream factory of Hollywood. The title of the
Esquire
article, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” suggested that Jack Kennedy could bridge cultural and political opposites and satisfy a deep yearning in the body politic.
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He could be Nietzsche’s superman (
ubermensch
), a “world historical individual” who would enter the undifferentiated commercial uniformity of the supermarket and impart heroic meaning to national, and even individual, life:

It was a hero America needed, a hero central to his time, a man whose personality might suggest contradictions and mysteries, which could reach into the alienated circuits of the underground, because only a hero can capture the secret imagination of a people, and so be good for the vitality of his nation; a hero embodied the fantasy and so allows each private mind the liberty to consider its fantasy and find a way to grow.
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Peter Lawford remembered that by the time Kennedy had walked through the back gate of the Ocean Front Avenue compound, his partying pal and chief supporter in Hollywood, Frank Sinatra, was sitting poolside making some last-minute calls for the reception that evening. Toweling off, Kennedy heard Sinatra close a deal with another associate for a $10,000 contribution. Sinatra would later repeat to anyone who was listening what Kennedy had said when he hung up the phone:

“Frank, I’m going to tell my Dad that you’re better at raising money than he is.”
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The truth was that Sinatra, perhaps Hollywood’s hottest star in 1960, had personally raised several hundred thousand dollars from the entertainment community, not counting whatever he had gotten from his friends in the mob. The person who had delivered the $500,000 to Joe Kennedy’s office after that famous lunch was his boyhood friend from Hoboken, Skinny D’Amato.
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In addition to appreciating Sinatra’s role of rainmaker, Kennedy liked the man’s style. There was a will there, a cunning that most of the kept, soft-edged leading men in Hollywood lacked. There was also a temper that, so Jack had heard, manifested itself in incendiary tantrums in which Sinatra broke things and attacked people. Sinatra was also unusually gifted, having remade himself from a choirboy crooner who ignited several hundred thousand bobby soxers in the late ’40s, to an Academy Award-winning actor by the mid-’50s. For all his talent, at nearly every critical juncture in his meteoric rise to stardom he had depended on the ruthless intercession of his syndicate friends, chiefly Johnny Rosselli.

One such intercession occurred in May 1952. Sinatra, desperate to revive his declining career, asked Rosselli to go directly to movie mogul Harry Cohn to get him the role Cohn had already turned him down for in
From Here to Eternity
. Rosselli was able to get Cohn alone for a little chat. “Harry. I need your help. Either give Frank the role or I will have you killed.”
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Sinatra got the role and won an Academy Award.

By 1960, Sinatra was starting to call his own shots in Hollywood as a producer and actor. He had also created a hip, roguish cult of pals called the Rat Pack, who hung out in Las Vegas, making films like
Ocean’s 11
and chasing women with brash aplomb. Through it all, the thing that didn’t change for the skinny son of immigrants with pop-out ears and pool-water-blue eyes was that he continued to be the mob’s best man in Hollywood and Las Vegas. He lent them glamour and legitimacy as well as access to the loftiest places in the entertainment industry.

By the time Peter Lawford joined Jack and Frank out near the pool that Saturday afternoon, Sinatra was cautiously, almost apologetically, explaining that among his guests tonight might be “some friends from Chicago.”

“Well, Frank,” Kennedy with mock sobriety, “just make sure they leave their shades in the car.”

“Jack grinned,” Lawford later said, “and Frank looked tremendously relieved.”
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Sinatra proposed that Kennedy ask the stars at the reception that evening to barnstorm on his behalf. “What if Juliet Prowse or Angie Dickinson, or Judy Garland or Janet Leigh were to fly to Kennedy events around the country?” Sinatra asked.

Kennedy beamed and said it was a great idea. “I might even attend myself and do an overnight.”

They subsequently talked about the wisdom of putting Lyndon Johnson on the ticket as vice president, a choice Bobby had at first angrily opposed. (Johnson later communicated to Clare Booth Luce his own justification for taking the number two spot: “I looked it up. One out of every four presidents has died in office. I’m a gamblin’ man, darlin’, and this is the only chance I got.”)
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A half-hour later, Kennedy retired to one of Lawford’s five bedrooms to read and take a nap while Sinatra and Lawford continued to talk about the evening’s guests. Built by Louis B. Mayer in 1926, the house was the crown jewel of the so-called Gold Coast. Its two-story, ocher-tiled rotunda rose out of a glistening white Spanish Riviera structure. The huge round living room, with a fifteen-foot-high ceiling with exposed dark beams, had a full stage under the floorboards that could be made to rise with a push of the button. During the 1940s, according to Meredith Harless, who then served as Mayer’s chief assistant, it was the most important residence in Hollywood and became a mecca for the leading stars, directors, and producers associated with MGM.
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Lawford bought the house in 1956 after marrying Patricia Kennedy. It was thereafter converted into a rambling, lavish getaway for his Kennedy in-laws as well as his Hollywood pals and gals.
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Sinatra was as nervous as a bridegroom that evening. In his usual prepossessing style, he advised Lawford to dress in a dark suit with Washington in mind. When Lawford walked into the living room in a cerise bow tie and a silk shirt, Sinatra, who was wearing a dark suit and a thin black tie, ordered him to change. Lawford refused and Sinatra erupted. Only the shoeless entry of Jack Kennedy, who emerged from his nap at around five, calmed matters. “I like the way Peter dresses, Frank, even though my life’s ambition is to be like you.”
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The ambition of the Kennedys for a good thirty years had been to exploit Hollywood. In the late ’20s and early ’30s, Joe Kennedy had invested in and at certain points managed three studios. He thereby established lifelong relationships with most of the established power brokers and studio heads. Jack’s association with Hollywood, which had begun in the late ’40s, was largely social, with Sinatra serving as his conduit to new stars and entertainment players. That evening at the Lawford home both generations were represented among the fifty or so guests, who included comedian Milton Berle, studio head Arthur Krim, filmmakers Otto Preminger and Darryl F. Zanuck, actors Tony Curtis and Pat O’Brien. Meredith Harless concluded that of all the actresses assembled, the leggy Angie Dickinson won the prize (as well as the attention of Jack Kennedy, who thereafter began a year-long affair with her).

As the sun went down, Sinatra asked the guests to gather in the garden near the children’s playground for a short introduction of the presidential nominee. He didn’t get very far. After Milton Berle interjected a wisecrack, the introduction turned into repartee between Sinatra and some of the more irreverent in the group. Someone suggested Sinatra sing instead of trying to talk.
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Kennedy’s own remarks were brief. He thanked his brother-in-law for “lending us your house. I can assure you it will not be the last time.” He then turned to Sinatra and, after a jocular aside about having the leadership of “someone who drives women wild,” he plaintively thanked him for all his enthusiasm and energy. The guests’ response was heartfelt and enthusiastic. As the party broke up, Kennedy and Sinatra stood near the front door to thank those attending. The next day Kennedy flew home to Hyannis Port to rest up for the long run ahead.
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