The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (74 page)

Jack was no out-of-control Lothario ready to sacrifice his political future on the sweaty altar of sexuality. He was after the greatest prize in American political life, and there were days, even weeks, when he had no time or interest in yet another momentary dalliance. But he had one favored way to relax, and nothing was going to change that.

As for his wife, Jack may not have been sexually loyal to Jackie, but he deeply appreciated her wry, mocking quality. If not for the exigencies of politics in a democracy, he probably would have enjoyed standing aloof with his wife and looking with her in disdainful amusement at what passed as humanity. He dictated a letter to her after a visit to Newport, probably in the summer of 1959, that exhibited those qualities in full measure, especially in his description of a dinner party. “I was taken into the kitchen and introduced to all the help who were just over from Ireland,” he said into the Dictaphone. “I find them more attractive than the guests.” He shared with Jackie an overwhelming concern for the sheer physical attractiveness of humans, wincing at the sight of ugliness. “Jenny Ryan was there with her rather squinty-eyed children for a five-week period,” he said. “Mrs. Shaw [the nanny] is the loveliest figure actually on the beach and has a beautiful red-brown bathing suit that goes with her hair. She has let herself go however slightly around the middle.”

Shortly after Jack formally announced his candidacy on January 2, 1960, Jack and Jackie flew to the Half Moon Hotel and Cottage Colony in Jamaica for their last vacation before the onslaught of the campaign. Jackie had at times been desperately unhappy with her marriage. She had recoiled from the heat and fire of publicity, but what she had faced until now was no more than a match compared to the bonfire of attention that would greet her in the next months. She had a strange premonition that Jack and she might die on this Caribbean island. She wrote a last will and testament and mailed it to Evelyn Lincoln. “If we don’t arrive back from Jamaica will you please send whats
[sic]
below to Jack’s lawyer—Jim McInerney—my will! Otherwise just tear it up!!”

I Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy wish to make provision for my daughter Caroline—that in the event of her parents deaths she should go to live with her fathers youngest brother Edward J. Kennedy and his wife Joan—to be raised as one of their own children…. Everything I have should be left to her—money, furniture, jewelry, etc—

Signed
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Jan 11, 1960

Even after announcing his candidacy, Jack continued unabated in his pursuit of women. He seemed heedless of the risk, taking chances in circumstances in which he should have been more circumspect, and with the kinds of women whom he once had considered beneath him even for an evening.

Hoover’s FBI began receiving unsubstantiated reports about Jack’s conduct. A guard in the Old Senate Office Building told an informant that in July 1959

he was checking offices in the Senate Building one night and noted on the top of Kennedy’s desk a photograph openly displayed. This photo included Senator Kennedy and other men, as well as several girls in the nude. It was taken aboard a yacht or some type of pleasure cruiser … the thing that disturbed him most was that the senator would show such poor judgment in leaving this photo openly displayed and said that other members of the guard and cleaning forces were aware of the photograph and that Kennedy’s “extracurricular activities” were a standard joke around the Senate Office Building.

Far more seriously, on March 23, 1960, Hoover received a memo containing allegations from an informant friendly with various hoodlums, including Meyer Lanksy, whom Jack had probably met in Havana in 1957. The man said that he had been told that when Jack was in Miami, an airline stewardess had been sent to his room. He also said that

in Miami he had occasion to overhear a conversation which indicated that Senator Kennedy had been compromised with a woman in Las Vegas, Nevada. He stated that he knows that Senator Kennedy was staying at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas about 6 or 8 weeks ago during the filming of a movie entitled “Ocean 11,” starring Dean Martin. He stated that he observed Senator Kennedy in the nightclub of the Sands Hotel, during this period, but has no idea as to the identity of any possible female companion.

Jack had been in Las Vegas precisely when the informant said he had. There he met Judith Immoor Campbell, a stunning, twenty-six-year-old woman known now as Judith Exner. Fare takes strange shapes: a Japanese destroyer cutting through the Blackett Strait, thrusting a PT-boat captain into a hero’s role; a brother blown up in the skies of England, leaving his sibling a wealth of obligations; an occasional lover scrawling her name in bold letters into the history of our time. Jack’s life had no larger ironies than this—that he should be first toppled from his pedestal of public virtue not by some terrible act of misfeasance, but in large part by a woman with whom he had one of his myriad liaisons.

Jack had flown in from New Mexico on February 7, 1960, to attend Frank Sinatra’s show at the Sands Hotel that evening. Sinatra, one of the biggest names in show business, was a liberal Democrat and one of Jack’s most fervent supporters. The singer also had an ever-changing entourage of available women, and they were there that evening in ample supply at Jack’s table. One of the other guests, the journalist Blair Clark, recalled the women sitting there as a collection of “some bimbos and some show girls,” hardly the type of woman whom he and Jack had generally associated with when they had been together at Harvard, and none of them notable enough to stay in Blair’s memory.

Sinatra had invited Exner to fly in from Los Angeles for the weekend, or so she claimed. The singer had ample reason to believe that Exner might well provide a midnight treat for Jack. Three months before, Sinatra had met Exner at Puccino’s, one of his favorite restaurants. The next day he called and invited her to join him that day on a Hawaiian vacation. Exner flew out of Los Angeles that night and by the following evening was in the entertainer’s bed. The affair was short-lived, largely, according to Exner, because Sinatra tried to involve her in a sexual threesome, an invitation that she declined. She was not distressed enough, however, to turn down Sinatra’s invitation to come to Las Vegas to see his show at the Sands.

Exner recalled that it was Teddy, not Jack, who made a pass at her that evening, inviting her to fly to Denver with him. Jack, for his part, supposedly called and invited Exner to lunch the next day in Sinatra’s suite. Exner asserted later that no sexual encounter took place that long afternoon. Instead, for three hours “the main topic of conversation, once I had given him my family history, was religion.”

Jack was not given to lengthy dialogues about religion and may never have had a three-hour discussion with a woman in his life. Exner, moreover, was largely uneducated. She had the mascara-thin layer of culture acquired by many Hollywood actresses and would-be actresses; it largely consisted of
the judicious application of a few multisyllable words and an accent suggesting that its speaker had at one time passed through London.

Jack had no way of knowing that much of what Exner said about her family history was simply not true. She fancied that she, like Jack, came from a wealthy, privileged family. She described her childhood home as an elegant, twenty-four-room mansion in Pacific Palisades so enormous that she found it “kind of spooky.” There is no evidence that Exner’s father, Frederick Immoor, a project architect, ever owned the house or that the family lived in it for an extensive time. The family may have stayed there for a period while Immoor was renovating the mansion, or in partial payment for his services. In any event, a more realistic version of her childhood would be painted in far more modest hues. The family traveled from rented house to rented house, in Pacific Palisades, Chicago, New Jersey, Phoenix, North Hollywood, L.A., sometimes living well, other times only a few steps from insolvency.

Exner never finished high school and says that she was privately tutored to get her degree. As a teenager, she became one of those young women who hang around the studios with vague dreams of becoming a star, a singer, a notable, somebody. She was stunningly beautiful, her face set off by thick eyebrows that another woman would have plucked but that emphasized her exquisite, dramatic features. She met Bill Campbell, an actor in his midtwenties, who married her when she was only eighteen. The marriage was a disaster from the beginning, and by 1958 Exner was a single woman again with alimony of $433.33 a month.

Exner said she was “financially independent,” with “family money [that] kept her in furs and steak Diane.” That was simply another illusion. In her 1958 divorce proceedings, she presented to the court a signed statement that she was “without sufficient funds or income to maintain or support herself either permanently or during the pendency of this action.” Shortly after separating from Campbell, she moved in with another man, Travis Kleefeld, but left him in the fall of 1959. By then she owed $2,784 on a $3,145.50 time-plan loan at the Bank of America and was behind in her car payments. She called herself an artist and an interior decorator, though she never made a cent from either profession. In her entire life, her only daily employment was a two-month-long “public relations” position, working for the comedian Jerry Lewis at about $100 a week.

When Jack met Exner, she was living off and on with her parents. Her father, who was earning $866 a month, was in such financial straits that he took out a number of loans that year, the last one in December for $2,032 to consolidate his debts and pay for Christmas gifts.

Exner called herself an artist, but her primary creation was the illusion of affluence. She was shrewd, not smart, with an affinity for older gentlemen
whose major virtues were their money and their largess. Just two weeks before meeting Jack, she had been in Las Vegas staying at the Sands as the guest of Richard Ellwood, a middle-aged businessman who later became publicly known as a “boyfriend.”

Another of her friends was John Rosselli, a dapper fifty-four-year-old gangster with close connections to the film industry who frequented the same nightclubs that Exner did. Rosselli was one of the top Mafia figures on the West Coast, and his biographers have speculated that “almost certainly it was Rosselli who produced his friend to meet Kennedy.” Another proponent of that position is Fred Otash, a private detective with a propensity for wiretapping. It was from Otash, who had friends in low and high places, that the FBI may first have learned that Jack and Exner were having an affair when he suggested to the agency that she was “shacking up with John Kennedy in the East.”

“It was common for Sinatra and his various friends to ‘pass a girl around,’ that is, members of the clique were expected to introduce comrades to sexually satisfying young women of their acquaintance,” Otash told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. “He stated his belief that this was how Rosselli ‘planted’ Judith Exner on John F. Kennedy.”

Sinatra had his mob connections too, and it is possible that he invited Exner to Las Vegas to compromise Jack. But the singer was devoted to Jack, considering it a high honor to be in his company. Moreover, if Sinatra had done so, he probably would have given Exner a room at the Sands Hotel, where he was performing. Instead, she stayed at the Tropicana Hotel for three nights.

F
rom this weekend on, Exner traveled for the next three years at the highest level of luxury, crisscrossing the country again and again. She invariably flew first-class, wearing high fashion and fur and apparently paying cash for tickets and accommodations. She had so much luggage that she paid for as much as one hundred pounds of overweight luggage. When she arrived at her destination, limousines took her to the finest hotels.

Exner simply did not have the resources herself to travel this way. As generous as her gentlemen friends in Los Angeles may have been, they did not provide her with enough to support so extravagant a lifestyle during much of her time away from California. Clearly her journeys were bankrolled by individuals who had more in mind than simply bedding the beautiful young woman.

When Jack invited Exner to meet him at the Plaza Hotel on March 7, 1960, she said that he offered to pay for her ticket. She claimed that she refused, yet flew first-class to New York City to stay at the exclusive hotel
where Jack was also staying. Exner had just received a $6,000 final settlement from her former husband in lieu of further alimony. At this moment, then, she knew that she would no longer have that regular monthly stipend. The $6,000 was undoubtedly the most money she had ever had at one time, a golden nest egg that she could use to advance her fortunes in the world.

Exner arrived in Jack’s room that evening looking like a privileged young woman of wealth and bearing. “It was a wonderful night of lovemaking,” Exner recalled. “Jack couldn’t have been more loving, more concerned about my feelings, more considerate, more gentle…. The next morning he sent me a dozen red roses with a card that said, ‘Thinking of you … J.’”

A week later Exner flew to Miami, where she said Sinatra had invited her to attend his performance at the Fontainebleau Hotel. Although her host had supposedly viciously insulted her, that did not prevent her from attending the farewell party for the last evening of Sinatra’s show. It was there that she says Sinatra introduced her to “a good friend of mine, Sam Flood,” one of the many aliases of Sam Giancana, the leader of the Chicago mob. The next evening Exner said that she had dinner with a group that included Giancana, still, by her admission, knowing neither Flood’s real name nor his profession.

Exner may have known far more about Giancana than she admitted. Jeanne Humphreys, the wife of Murray “the Camel” Humphreys, a leading mobster associated with Giancana, tells a different story in her unpublished memoirs. “Johnnie Rosselli
[sic]
who had been taken back into the fold was becoming a frequent visitor to Chicago bringing gossip about Mooney [Giancana] and his reveling with the ‘ratpack.’ He [Rosselli] said he had fixed [Giancana] up with a party girl that he’d taken to Florida when [his mistress] Phyllis [McGuire] wasn’t looking. I said the last girl I’d seen him [Giancana] with was named Judy and she was from Chicago. He said he meant Judy from California.”