"Patsy!": The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald (35 page)

Bev played Bev Woods, a typical American teenager who can't grasp why her boyfriend would ditch her to run off and join the Cuban revolution. She follows and, shortly after arrival, meets a Vodka-guzzling American movie-star-turned-war correspondent, Flynn as Flynn in a script written by Flynn, he starring in a project produced by Flynn. The old rogue raises the nymph's political consciousness as together the two trek off into the hills. She strips down to short-shorts, whacking away at jungle foliage and fascistic forces with a machete.

Flynn planned to end his story with a fictional projection of he, Bev, and Castro making ready for the invasion of Havana. Then he would rush home, edit the film, and release it so the American public might see the event before it could occur.

Instead, the New Year's Eve attack took place while Flynn and Bev were still shooting. Improvising, Flynn filmed Castro's motorcade entering Havana, Bev sitting up on a tank, waving a red victory banner. Bev playing Bev while, adjacent to her, Fidel embodied himself, fact and fiction mingling, blurring, coming together as never before on celluloid.

The image cut away to Flynn, happily glancing down from his hotel room window. In a voice-over, he explains:

Well, I guess that winds up another stage in the fight to rid Latin America of tyrants and dictators. The spirit started by this wonderful band of rebels is speedy and growing stronger every day. And all you young men and women fighting for political freedom, your beliefs?

I wish you good luck!

Shortly after returning home, having tried but failed on several occasions to shoot Batista, carrying several cans of film under each arm, Flynn was dead.

He and Bev had on October 9, 1959 flown to Vancouver where Errol hoped to lease his much loved yacht, the
Zaca
, on which he had spent so many happy days with his underage mistress. Now he desperately needed money so that he and Bev could continue to lead ‘the sweet life': that emergent 1960s fast-lane style.

On October 14, the two attended a party at the West End apartment of Dr. Grant Gould. Errol knocked down drink after drink. Shouting “I shall return!” an unbalanced Flynn waved bye-bye and stepped into the adjoining bedroom to crash.

After an hour or so, Bev—who had spent that sixty minutes conversing with an Adonis-like suited Latin named Johnny—began to worry. She excused herself, rose, and headed into the bedroom to check on her lover.

Flynn's face, red as a beet, stared up at her from the bed, his wide-open eyes utterly devoid of life.

“Oh, my God,” she wailed. “Johnny, I think he's dead!”

Johnny, who had followed Bev, leaned over Flynn's body to check. “Yep,” he said, cradling Bev under his arm. “Errol is with the angels now. Or, heaven forbid, down below.”

That struck her as a strange comment. Still, Bev needed to be held that night. She went home with Johnny, who made love to her almost as fiercely as her legendary paramour had often done.

Shortly, all known prints of
Cuban Rebel Girls
disappeared. Until one eventually surfaced at a rural Texas Drive-In.

*

“Hey,” Johnny suavely said, swinging back to the table where Bev held court, Lee gazing at her adoringly. “Shall we go back to my place and pick up where we left off in Vancouver?”

The heartbreaking blonde considered Rosselli long and hard. “No,” she finally quipped, rising. “I think I'll go home with Lee. Thank you anyway, though, for a lovely evening.”

The following morning, after Lee and Bev shared coffee together on his balcony, she prepared to leave.

“One last question. You said early in the evening that you believe Errol was ... murdered?”

“I don't believe. I know! Look, Lee, he took Mob money to make a movie they believed would work to their benefit. Then he went and shot precisely the opposite.”

“They'd actually kill a guy for making a pro-Castro movie?”

“Never in a million years. Live and let live. So long as someone does something on his own, that's his business. This was different. He lied to them. Took their dough and then betrayed their trust. It wasn't the movie so much ... as ...”

“I get your drift.”

“Do you? Then always keep this in mind, particularly if you're going to hang out with Johnny Rosselli, whom I now hold responsible for the poisoning of Errol's drink. I never would have gone to bed with him that night if I'd had any inkling—“

“As you were saying?”

“Oh, right. Listen to me, Lee, and listen good. You don't want to play ball with the Mob, you don't have to. That's up to you. On the other hand, don't ever fuck ‘em over.”

“I hear you.”

“Good! Because no one can get away that. Understand? And when I say no one, I mean
no one
!”

*

When Johnny swung by to pick Lee up the next evening, the Mafioso found his unlikely pal reading yet another James Bond paperback. Unconsciously, Lee crammed it into his jacket pocket and they took off. Lee felt a little nervous there might be some friction with Bev choosing him the previous night. Rosselli laughed at the idea. He'd spent the night with the Muse, and few women could compare to her. Matter of fact—
hey, this is quite a coincidence!—
her CIA codename used to be
Lolita.

“Okay. So where we headed for tonight?”

“Guess you could call it a party. More like what the kids these days call ‘a happening.' Pretty cool. You'll see.”

They cruised down The Strip, that stretch of high-rent property where enormous hotels and glitzy bars awaited the arriving upscale visitors. At least those who hadn‘t yet abandoned Miami for Vegas, where gambling, the final necessary ingredient in such an adult entertainment mix, was legal.

Feeling like a million bucks, Lee observed in passing ‘The Big Five,' as the prime resorts were known: The Americana, Carrillon, Deauville, Eden Rock, and Fountainbleau. Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald and Sammy Davis all put in regular appearances. Johnny pointed out another attraction: a houseboat docked at the canal. This was used for all the exterior shots on Warner Bros.' TV series
Surfside Six
. Twice a year, sandy-haired youth-idol Troy Donahue would show up and film here for two weeks.

As to what transpired next? When Lee thought back on it later he could not tell what had actually happened and how much must be relegated to a fantasy concocted by his brain. They arrived at one of The Big Five. As an attendant parked Johnny's car the two were ushered by a pair of beautiful women in elegant satin sheaths into a large, crowded private hall.

Before he knew what was happening, Lee had been handed a drink. He sipped it. A double-scotch, of the highest quality. As soon as the glass' level had diminished, yet another gorgeous hostess appeared, refilling his glass.

Within minutes Lee felt under the influence. Johnny stood beside him, for the moment. The crowd grew ever thicker.

“How do you like it?” the man Lee was supposed to address as ‘James Stewart' while in the Sunshine State asked.

“Excellent Scotch.”

Johnny laughed. “I meant the L.S.D. it's spiked with.”

Now Lee understood why his head felt as if screwed on backwards. He'd read about the experimental drug known to alter and intensify one's perceptions. The room appeared to whirl around him, though a strobe up above in the semi-darkness, projecting harsh rays of white light onto each of the partygoers, added to that effect.

Lee's rational mind told him to stop drinking. But there was nothing at all rational about the situation he found himself in: a phantasmagoria of lights and shadows, time and space now dissolving; everyone before him moving, as if in a film, in slow-motion one moment, terribly speeded up the next.

Any final sense of reality dissipated when Lee stumbled into ... himself. For a second, he thought he was about to walk into a mirror and, perhaps Alice-like, pass into a Wonderland.

There was no mirror. The image facing Lee, a man with his face, sported a different jacket. Unlike lee, he wore no tie.

“Hi, guy. What d‘ya know?” Lee's twin joked.

Lee couldn't speak, partly out of the shock of confronting his double, also as he'd momentarily lost the ability to do so. His tongue felt frozen, yet dry.

“The sneer was the most difficult part to master,” the twin explained. “Took me many hours of practice to perfect
that
.” He broke out in the snide, cynical grin Lee had developed as his shield against the world. “You have quite a surprise waiting when you get back, Lee Harvey Oswald,” the twin continued.

Before Lee could respond, another voice pierced the lights and colors from behind them. “Which of you is which?”

Lee turned and found himself face to face with Robert Kennedy, the president's younger brother and Attorney General of the United States. Or did he? Was this real or only imagined?

“I'm ... me,” Lee gasped. He tried to imagine how they three might appear to others: Robert Kennedy, with a Lee Harvey Oswald standing on either side. Then Lee recalled everyone else in the room must be as spaced-out as himself, hallucinating in Technicolor.

“Good to finally meet you in person, Lee. George has been telling me great things about your devoted service.”

One thing that couldn't be denied: When all of this was over, Lee's copy of
From Russia With Love
was nowhere to be found. Only a recollection of, during the time Lee spent with Robert Kennedy and the other Lee—seconds, minutes, hours—wanting more than anything to give the great man a present.

But here, in the crowded room, what could he offer ...

“Mr. Kennedy, I've heard that you and your brother love the 007 novels.” Lee pulled out the paperback, handing it to Bobby Kennedy. “Have you had a chance yet to read this one yet?”

“Yes, Lee, I have. Been recommending it to Jack, though he's been too busy to get around to it. Maybe someday.”

Ecstatically, Lee responded: “Take my copy, sir. Please pass it on to the president.” Then Lee realized he also had a ball-point pen in the same pocket.

He drew it out and on the first page wrote:

 

To President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

From your greatest fan!

Lee Harvey Oswald

 

“Thank you,” Bobby graciously responded, sticking the book into his inner jacket pocket. “I'm flying back to D.C. tomorrow. Jack will have it later in the day.”

“Wow! From Lee to Jack, me to the president.”

Bobby nodded, then mentioned he had to be moving on, greet other guests. Before doing so, he shook hands with Lee, who later recalled this as the greatest single moment in his life.

If, that is, it ever actually happened.

*

“Hey, I see you finally met Bobby,” Johnny Rosselli said, joining them as Lee's twin soon disappeared in the crowd.

“He and his brother are my heroes. Civil rights—”

“That's all well and good.” A frown lined Johnny's brow as a dark cloud passed over his face. “Let them do whatever they want for the niggers. They'd best not fuck with
us
.”

Lee mulled that over, recalling something on the radio or TV about Bobby possibly employing his office to finally go after organized crime in America.

Lee was on his fourth drink when a hush fell over the room. The strobe light whirled across to a stage on the far side. A woman stepped into view there. Apparently, someone played a record of “Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,” the number Marilyn Monroe had sung in
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
.

Then there she was: Monroe, under the stultifying white light, wrapped from neck to toes in that hot pink dress she'd worn. The diamond tiara, clasped chokingly tight against her chin, with matching elbow bracelets; waving the jet-black fan that reflected the outfit's dark borders. A white fur trim completed the illusion.

A Marilyn impersonator! And talk about a twin! This blonde looks as much like the real thing as my own double resembles me. She's even lip-synching the words to the song with perfection.

The proverbial pin could have been heard dropping as the blonde went through the precise motions of choreography Lee and everyone else in the room had seen in the movie. It was as if that sequence now came to life in front of their eyes, a dream from Hollywood transcending into actuality ...

“She's so beautiful,” Lee whispered to Johnny.

“I know,” Johnny grumbled, “but I'm worried for her.”

“Huh?” However swiftly the room had been whirring earlier, this latest drink caused Lee to feel as if he'd lost all touch with gravity, free-floating through an alternative universe.

“Too brazen about ‘doing' Jack and Bobby. The girl's a loose cannon. That's dangerous. To her, unless she shuts up.”

Lee tried to take that in but nothing made sense anymore. Johnny was talking about the impersonator as if she were ...

The infamous number finally reached its climax. To ecstatic applause, The Blonde stepped down, into the crowd. Like Moses leading the way through the Red Sea, she parted the human waters as awestruck partygoers stepped aside, allowing the fantasy-come-to life to drift by, eyes half closed, her mouth smiling dazzlingly.

As she swept past Lee, it suddenly occurred to him that this might be the girl he had bedded during the Twinning. She had struck him as Marilyn-like. Could it be ... ?

“Honey?” he called out as she breezed by.

“My name's Norma Jean,” she cooed over her shoulder, “but you can call me ‘Honey' if you like.”

*

When Lee woke on the couch of his suite at the New Yorker, he had no idea what day it might be or how he had come to be there. The last thing he recalled was a sense of free-falling.