Читать книгу The Dark Side of Camelot - Seymour Hersh - Страница 12

Jack Kennedy emerged from West Virginia as the man to beat, but there were still many dangers that threatened his drive for the presidency. At least four women could control his destiny. One of them was Marilyn Monroe, the American film goddess whose affair with Kennedy had begun sometime before the 1960 election and would continue after he went to the White House.

Like his father, Jack Kennedy had a special fondness for Hollywood celebrities. The celebrated and gifted Monroe, born Norma Jean Mortenson, emerged as a sex symbol in the early 1950s and worked her way through husbands, lovers, pills, liquor, and psychiatric hospitals until her death, apparently by accidental suicide, in August 1962. Some published accounts place the beginning of the Kennedy-Monroe relationship in the mid-1950s, as Monroe’s second marriage, to the baseball star Joe DiMaggio, was unraveling and she was beginning a romance with the playwright Arthur Miller, who would become her third husband. Her affair with Kennedy was by all accounts in full bloom as the presidential campaign was getting under way. Many of their rendezvous were at the Santa Monica home of Peter and Patricia Lawford, Kennedy’s brother-in-law and sister, who were Monroe’s close friends. There has been published speculation that Monroe became pregnant by Kennedy and had an abortion in Mexico; the full story may never be known, but accounts of her affair and abortion have been published again and again since her suicide and his murder.

In interviews for this book, longtime friends and associates of Monroe and Kennedy acknowledged that the two stars, who both enjoyed living on the edge, shared a powerful, and high-risk, attraction to each other. “She was a beautiful actress,” George Smathers, Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate, told me. “Probably as pretty a woman as ever lived. And Jack—everybody knew he liked pretty girls. When he had the opportunity to meet Marilyn Monroe, why, he took advantage of it, and got to know her a little bit.” The attraction went beyond sex. Monroe had a quirky sense of humor and a tenacious desire to learn. “Marilyn made Jack laugh,” Patricia Newcomb, who worked as a publicist for Monroe in the early 1960s, explained in an interview for this book. There was also a family connection that went beyond the Lawfords. Charles Spalding, who was a trusted intimate of Kennedy’s by the late 1940s and remained so until the president’s assassination, clearly recalled a private visit by Monroe to the family enclave at Hyannis Port, where she was welcomed enthusiastically as a friend of Jack’s—even though he was married.

Monroe’s repeated crack-ups did not diminish her looks or her ability to appeal to men. “Marilyn Monroe was the ultimate glamour girl,” Vernon Scott, a longtime Hollywood reporter for United Press International, told me in an interview. “She was gorgeous and she was funny. She had more sex appeal than any woman I ever saw, and I’ve seen lots of them. She was probably every man’s dream of the kind of woman he’d like to spend the rest of his life with on a desert island. She was much smarter than people gave her credit for. She never did or said anything by accident.”

Monroe was said to be deeply in love with Kennedy. After her death, John Miner, head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, was given confidential access to a stream-of-consciousness tape recording Monroe made at the recommendation of her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson, a few weeks earlier; Miner put together what he considered to be a near-verbatim transcript of the tape. After obtaining permission from the Greenson family, Miner ended thirty-five years of silence by making the transcript available for this book in 1997. Many of Monroe’s comments dealt with her sexuality; her extensive comments about her problems achieving orgasm—in very blunt language—were meant only for the analyst’s couch, but her lavish admiration for Jack Kennedy could have been read from a podium:

Marilyn Monroe is a soldier. Her commander-in-chief is the greatest and most powerful man in the world. The first duty of a soldier is to obey her commander-in-chief. He says do this, you do it. He says do that, you do it. This man is going to change our country. No child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans. People who can’t afford it will get good medical care. Industrial products will be the best in the world. No, I’m not talking utopia—that’s an illusion. But he will transform America today like Franklin Delano Roosevelt did in the Thirties. I tell you, Doctor, when he has finished his achievements he will take his place with Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as one of our great presidents. I’m glad he has Bobby. It’s like the Navy—the President is the captain and Bobby is his executive officer. Bobby would do absolutely anything for his brother and so would I. I will never embarrass him. As long as I have memory, I have John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Show business people who worked behind the scenes with Monroe described a hard edge beneath the glamour. There were repeated breakdowns and repeated threats to tell the world about her relationship with Kennedy—threats that could have damaged his candidacy, and threats that only increased after he got to the White House. “What happened,” George Smathers told me, “was that she, [like] naturally all women, would like to be close to the president. And then after he had been associated with her some, she began to ask for an opportunity to come to Washington and come to the White House and that sort of thing. That’s when Jack asked me to see what I could do to help him in that respect by talking to her.” Monroe, Smathers said without amplification, had “made some demands.” Smathers said he arranged for a mutual friend to “go talk to Marilyn Monroe about putting a bridle on herself and on her mouth and not talking too much, because it was getting to be a story around the country.” It had happened before. Charles Spalding recalled that at one point during the 1960 campaign, when Monroe was on a liquor and pill binge, Kennedy asked him to fly from New York to Los Angeles to make sure that she was okay—that is, to make sure that Monroe did not speak out of turn. “I got out there, and she was really sick,” Spalding told me. With Lawford’s help, “I got her to the hospital.”

Monroe’s instability posed a constant threat to Kennedy. Michael Selsman, one of Monroe’s publicists in the early 1960s, depicted her as “a loose cannon” who toggled between high-spirited charm and mean-spirited cruelty. “Sometimes she had to put on this costume of Marilyn Monroe. Otherwise, she was this other person, Norma Jean, who felt abused, put-upon, and unintelligent. As Marilyn Monroe, she had enormous power. As Norma Jean, she was a drug addict who wasn’t physically clean.”

Vernon Scott told me that the other, insecure Monroe “made herself known to me one night” after he had concluded a newspaper interview with her at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Scott had a date with his wife-to-be and, as he and Monroe continued to chat over two bottles of champagne, he began looking at his watch. Monroe noticed and asked if he was going out. Scott said yes. “And she said,” Scott recounted, “sniffling a little bit and feeling sorry for herself, that everybody had somebody else to go to, everybody had dates, except her. She said, ‘I’m Marilyn Monroe. Everybody thinks the phone rings all the time with men asking me out. Well, everybody’s afraid to date Marilyn Monroe or ask her for a date.’ And she began crying, with mascara running down her face. And her eyes were red and she looked like kind of a clown. Her nose was red. She began sobbing. I tried to cheer her up and told her that I was sure most men would be delighted to take her out. She said, ‘Well, they don’t have the nerve to call me, not the right ones. And once in a while I meet a nice guy, a really nice guy, and I know it’s going to work. He doesn’t have to be from Hollywood; he doesn’t have to be an actor. And we have a few drinks and we go to bed. Then I see his eyes glaze over and I can see it going through his mind: “Oh, my God. I’m going to fuck Marilyn Monroe,” and he can’t get it up.’ Then she started howling with misery over this. I just bent over double laughing. And she began pounding on me—‘It’s not funny.’

“But,” Scott told me, “this was not Marilyn Monroe. Norma Jean would never have allowed Marilyn to look like that, but she did this one time. So I saw [Norma Jean] as a frightened, insecure, young puppeteer that was running this machine known as Marilyn Monroe. It was very touching and somewhat sad. And I liked her all the more for it.”

Monroe’s affair with Kennedy was no secret in Hollywood. In early January 1961, before the inauguration, Michael Selsman was informed about the relationship. “It was the first thing I was told,” Selsman said. “We had to be careful with this. We had to protect her, we had to keep her [private life] out of print. It’d be disastrous for me. It wasn’t hard in those days. It was a different era. Today it would be impossible to keep anything resembling that a secret.” Patricia Newcomb, who worked in the same public relations office with Selsman, also recalled knowing that her client “had been with the president,” and added: “It never occurred to me to talk about it. I couldn’t do it.”

James Bacon, who spent much of his career covering Hollywood for the Associated Press, said in an interview for this book that Monroe, whom he had befriended early in her career, had given him a firsthand account of her relationship with Kennedy as early as the campaign. “She was very open about her affair with JFK,” Bacon told me. “In fact, I think Marilyn was in love with JFK.” Asked why he didn’t file a story about the affair, Bacon said that in those days, “before Watergate, reporters just didn’t go into that sort of thing. I’d have to have been under the bed in order to put it on the wire for the AP. There was no pact. It was just a matter of judgment on the part of the reporters.”

Bacon added that he understood Kennedy’s “fascination with Hollywood. This is where the beautiful girls are, you know, and that’s why JFK loved it out here. He was a man who was addicted to sex, and if you want sex, this is the place to come.”

Kennedy was placing his political well-being in the hands of a group of Hollywood actresses, reporters, and publicists. His confidence that the affair with Monroe would remain secret was all the more perplexing because he was, even before he declared his candidacy, the target of a letter-writing campaign by a middle-aged housewife named Florence M. Kater, who decided in 1959 that her mission in life would be to force the Washington press corps to deal with Kennedy’s womanizing. Kater learned more than she wanted to know about the senator’s personal life after renting an upstairs apartment in her Georgetown home to Pamela Turnure, an attractive aide in Kennedy’s Senate office. Kennedy and Turnure were conducting an indiscreet affair that involved many late-night and early-morning comings and goings, to Kater’s consternation. Turnure moved to another apartment a few blocks away. In late 1958 Kater ambushed Kennedy leaving the new apartment at three A.M. and took a photograph of the unhappy senator attempting to shield his face with a handkerchief.

The encounter rattled Kennedy, and he struck back. A few weeks later, Kater alleged, she and her husband were accosted on the street in front of her home by the angry Kennedy, who, waving his fore-finger, warned her “to stop bothering me. If you do it again,” Kater quoted Kennedy as saying, “or if either of you spread any lies about me, you will find yourself without a job.” Kennedy eventually asked James McInerney, the former Justice Department attorney who had been retained in 1953 by Joe Kennedy, to try to muzzle Kater; the loyal McInerney spent dozens of hours in an attempt to convince her to stop her campaign.

McInerney met seven times with Kater, she later wrote, but for once the usual Kennedy mix of glamour, power, and money didn’t work. In May of 1959, Kater mailed a copy of the photograph and an articulate letter describing her encounter with Kennedy to fifty prominent citizens in Washington and New York, including editors, syndicated columnists, and politicians. Her letter and photograph also ended up on the desk of J. Edgar Hoover, as similar letters would over the next four years. The FBI, of course, began keeping a file on Kater, one obtained under the Freedom of Information Act for this book. In the letter Kater explained that, as an Irish Catholic, she had been a “warm supporter” of Kennedy; she had taken the photograph in the belief that “shock treatment” was needed. “But Senator Kennedy thought his behavior was none of our business,” Kater wrote. “We think he’s wrong there; it’s part of the package when you’re a public figure running for the Presidency.”

Kater became even more obsessed as Kennedy neared the Democratic nomination, and she continued sending out scores of letters complaining that the senator was a hypocritical womanizer who was morally unfit to be president. Kater was not taken seriously by the national press corps, but she came close to attracting media attention. On May 14, 1960, just four days after Kennedy won the West Virginia primary, she approached him at a political rally at the University of Maryland carrying a placard with an enlarged snapshot of the early-morning scene outside Pamela Turnure’s apartment. Kennedy ignored her, but a photograph of the encounter was published in the next afternoon’s Washington Star, along with a brief story describing her as a heckler. Kennedy’s aides denounced the photograph on her placard as a fake, Kater later wrote, and no questions were ever asked of the candidate, although Kennedy’s ongoing relationship with Turnure was no secret to the reporters covering his campaign or to campaign aides.

For all his apparent anger at Kater, Kennedy seemed to enjoy the added tension. Spalding told me of his concern at the time about the immense political liabilities posed by his friend’s constant womanizing. “I used to think he was crazy to do this stuff.” The risks were obvious: Kennedy’s campaign stance as a practicing Catholic and a responsible husband and father would be fatally undercut by a sex scandal. Steeling his courage, Spalding raised the issue at one point with Kennedy. “Well, if you’re worried about this,” Kennedy responded, “let me show you these pictures.” The candidate then pulled out a series of photographs—those mailed by Kater—showing him leaving the Turnure apartment.

Kennedy came much closer to exposure than he knew. Kater’s photograph in the Star stimulated an editor’s curiosity, and Bob Clark, a former White House reporter, was assigned to interview her. “I found her interesting and a little flaky,” Clark, now with ABC News, said in a 1997 interview for this book. “I believed her story.”

That story was complicated, Clark said, by the fact that Kater was a collector of Impressionist paintings and casually admitted that she had initially offered to drop her protests over Kennedy’s involvement with Turnure if the Kennedy family would buy her a Modigliani. Jack Kennedy was a “good Catholic” and so was she, Kater told Clark, and she’d “let it go” for the art. It was that request, among others, Kater told Clark, that was being negotiated with James McInerney. “The family said no,” Clark quoted Kater as saying, but only after protracted negotiations.

Kater’s story was credible, Clark told me, because it was not just a question of her word against Kennedy’s: Kater told Clark that she and her husband had secretly planted two tape recorders in the upstairs apartment while Turnure was spending nights there with Kennedy. The landlords overheard the senator in both the living room and the bedroom. Kater invited Clark to return later to listen to the recordings.

Despite her obvious eccentricity, Clark told me, he was persuaded that it was one hell of a story. He telephoned his editor, Charles Seib, and—as all reporters do—told him what he had, including the fact that Kater had been refused a painting. He was put on hold, while Seib checked with his superiors. A few moments later, Seib returned to the telephone and ordered him “to drop the story,” Clark said. “He wouldn’t even let me go back to listen to the tapes.”

Clark did as instructed, but not without regret. “If the Star, a highly respected paper, had gone public with the [Kater] story,” he said, “it could have blown Kennedy out of the water. There never would have been a President Kennedy. Today, with the same information, any of fifty newspapers would have gone after the story.”

No responsible journalist touched the story. According to her FBI file, the outraged Kater carried her protest and her placard to the Democratic convention, and spent the final weeks of the 1960 campaign marching in front of the White House. She was not only ignored, as usual, by the press but also urged by passersby to go back “to the nuthouse.” After his election Kennedy showed his disdain for Kater by appointing Pamela Turnure press secretary to his wife.

Kater, remarkably, picketed in front of the White House after Kennedy’s inaugural, to no avail, and continued to send a stream of well-written protest letters to public officials and newspapers about the president’s lack of morality, also to no avail. In one such letter, she wrote:

In 1960 the vast, vast majority of American women were hoaxed by the press, by television and by many influential people into believing that John Kennedy was the same clean-living man they read about or listened to on the air. That wasn’t just everyday political cynicism; it was a brutal combination of power that could and did enforce total censorship of the truth about John Kennedy’s well-known lecheries and his penchant to ruin anyone who dared criticize him for them. And I went out, all alone, to fight it with my little windbattered sign! But, far from being a fool, I was the one woman in America who wasn’t fooled by John Kennedy.

The obsessed Georgetown housewife was a campaign-damaging bomb that did not explode. There were others, equally dangerous.

Senator Kennedy’s scramble to protect his future presidential reputation began in earnest in late 1959, when a political opponent discovered that he was carrying on an affair with a nineteen-year-old student, the woman interviewed in Chapter Two. She was studying at Radcliffe College, the woman’s college of Harvard University, on whose board of overseers Kennedy then served. His indiscretion was known to many: Kennedy’s car and driver had been seen picking up and dropping off the student at her dormitory.

In this instance, Kennedy’s biggest worries came not from Republicans but from his fellow Democrats, who were eager to find ways to discredit their competition. Word of the liaison reached Charles W. Engelhard, a South African diamond merchant and investor with corporate offices in New Jersey. Engelhard had endorsed Robert B. Meyner, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who had presidential ambitions of his own; he and Meyner could not resist a chance to get rid of Kennedy. The two men arranged for one of Engelhard’s aides to approach a former New York City policeman, then a private investigator, and offer him $10,000 to fly to Boston and take incriminating photographs of Kennedy with the Radcliffe student. However, the former policeman was a staunch Kennedy supporter. He turned down the job and, through a mutual friend, brought the plan to the attention of a politically connected Democratic lawyer in Washington. The lawyer, who had spent many years as a Senate aide, immediately arranged to see Jack Kennedy.

“Evelyn Lincoln shows me in,” the lawyer, who did not wish to be identified, recalled in a 1996 interview for this book, “and I show him the name of the girl. He says, ‘My God! They got her name.’ He started to explain—some bullshit—and I said, ‘I’m not really interested. I just wanted to let you know.’ He was so appreciative that I’d tipped him off.”

It was clear, the lawyer said, that “Charley Engelhard was trying to get the goods on Kennedy to knock him out of the running. They were going to set him up.” Senator Kennedy, in the meeting, had exclaimed, “That goddamned Charley Engelhard. I’m going to give it to him up to there”—drawing his hand across his neck. Changing the subject, the lawyer asked Kennedy what he could do to help him win the Democratic nomination. He vividly recalled the answer: “I need money. I can’t ask my father to pay for everything. Raise money.”

Months later, during the campaign, the lawyer bumped into Kennedy and was thanked anew for his timely information. Kennedy told the lawyer he had assigned Carmine Bellino, one of his longtime assistants, to find out what was going on. Bellino, he said, had “put in a wire” on the Engelhard Industries official who had tried to hire the former New York City policeman. The lawyer raised an objection to the use of wiretaps and Kennedy reassured him, explaining, “We’re not tapping his phone—just recording who he called.”

In a meeting with the lawyer after the election, Kennedy reported that he was being urged by many ranking Democrat members of the Senate to name Engelhard ambassador to a high-profile embassy. “I’m going to fuck him,” Kennedy said, with a laugh. “I’m going to send him to one of the boogie republics in Central Africa.” Engelhard, who died in 1971 one of the world’s richest men, never got his embassy, but the Kennedy administration did name him as the American representative to the Independence Day ceremonies in Gabon and Zambia. Kennedy, as we have seen, continued his relationship with the student. After his inauguration, he arranged for her to be named a special assistant to McGeorge Bundy, who had been dean of faculty at Harvard. She remained on Bundy’s White House staff until late 1962. “It was very embarrassing,” the woman recalled in one of our interviews. “It put McGeorge in a very creepy situation.”

The fourth woman, and the one who, in the spring of 1960, posed the most direct threat to Kennedy’s presidential aspirations, was a self-proclaimed artist named Barbara Maria Kopszynska, who had emigrated with her mother from Poland to Boston as a displaced person after World War II. According to heavily censored FBI files made public under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977, Kopszynska began telling reporters after the 1960 election that in 1951 she had become engaged to marry Jack Kennedy, then a member of the House, only to have the engagement broken up by Joe Kennedy because she was half Jewish. In March 1957 the blond and beautiful Kopszynska, who had changed her name to Alicia Darr, married Edmund Purdom, a British actor and playboy, and moved to Rome with him. The marriage quickly fell apart, and by early 1960 the Purdoms were in an Italian state court filing charges against each other.

Alicia Darr’s FBI file created a brief stir when it was released in 1977. It included a summary of an interview in the issue dated January 31, 1961, of Le Ore, an Italian weekly magazine, in which Darr described her early relationship with Jack Kennedy and declared, according to a translation made for this book, that she “could have been the first lady.” The FBI attaché in Rome told J. Edgar Hoover on January 30, ten days after Kennedy took office, that the article indicated that Darr “was considering the release of further information.” The U.S. media paid no attention to the interview in 1961.

But a second FBI document in Darr’s file, dated June 4, 1963, and sent at that time to Bobby Kennedy by J. Edgar Hoover (as the Le Ore summary had been two years earlier), made headlines in 1977, when America’s newspapers, no longer in awe of the presidency after Watergate, were eager to publish any account of Kennedy’s womanizing. Hoover warned the attorney general that the president’s name had come up in connection with a disciplinary proceeding in New York against two Darr attorneys, Simon Metrik and Jacob W. Friedman. Metrik and Friedman, Hoover reported, had filed documents in court describing Kennedy’s relationship with Darr and claiming that “just prior to the President’s assuming office you”—Bobby Kennedy—“went to New York and arranged a settlement of the case out of court for $500,000.” Reporters found Darr, by 1977 remarried and living in the Bahamas, and she denied having received any money from the Kennedys. The Hoover memoranda, even though heavily censored when released, produced the kind of stories that, if they had been published during JFK’s days in office, would have seriously damaged his reputation and his chances for reelection. Most newspapers, citing the FBI documents, flatly reported that Kennedy had paid $500,000 to quash a lawsuit filed by Darr.

Those newspaper stories were wrong. The full story—that is, as much as could be obtained for this book—is far more dramatic.

The uncensored versions of Hoover’s reports to Bobby Kennedy, made available in full for this book, reveal that Alicia Darr posed an extreme danger to Jack Kennedy in 1960, a danger that was hidden by deletions FBI censors made in the documents released in 1977. The uncensored versions reveal that Darr was well known to federal authorities and the New York police as a high-priced Manhattan prostitute and madam. The documents Hoover forwarded to Bobby Kennedy reported that in 1951, the year she first met Jack Kennedy, Darr was operating a “house of prostitution” in Boston. She moved to New York City a year later, where she turned again to prostitution, the FBI said, and also “was blackmailing people involved in the ‘Jelke case’”—a highly publicized 1952 sex scandal involving New York’s café society. The scandal led to a three-to-six-year jail term for Minot Frazier Jelke III, the twenty-three-year-old heir to an oleomargarine fortune, who was found guilty of procuring.^* By 1953 Darr, described as a “talented prostitute,” was operating “a call girl service” in midtown New York, the unexpurgated FBI report said. Another of the FBI documents depicted her as “a notorious, albeit high-class, ‘hustler.’”

Darr’s marriage to Purdom was in shambles by December of 1959, when she sued him in Rome for assault, battery, and nonmaintenance. She was out of money by early 1960 and, according to contemporary European newspaper accounts, began writing bad checks, for which she was eventually arrested and briefly jailed. In September 1961, a month after she was granted a divorce, in Mexico, Darr’s finances improved dramatically: she married Alfred Corning Clark, a millionaire heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. It was her second and his sixth marriage. Alfred Clark died of a heart attack in upstate New York thirteen days later, leaving her the bulk of his $10 million estate.

Alfred Clark’s other surviving heirs quickly challenged his state of mind at the time he wrote the will. Simon Metrik, who had since 1958 been Alicia Darr’s lawyer and media adviser, throughout her marriage to and divorce from Purdom, was retained on her behalf to handle the Clark family’s protests. (He later said that he also twice kept her from getting arrested for prostitution, following two New York City vice raids.) Darr and Metrik eventually quarreled, according to court documents, and she dismissed him in December 1961, whereupon Metrik submitted a bill for $1.2 million. Darr, outraged, refused to pay. During the legal skirmishing over his fees, Metrik filed a bill of particulars against Darr, which described what a New York court would later characterize as “the commission of a contemplated crime.” Darr’s new attorneys argued that Metrik, in his papers, had violated the rules of attorney-client confidentiality; they asked the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court to initiate disciplinary proceedings against him and against his partner, Jacob Friedman, who was acting for Metrik in the fee dispute with Darr.

The Appellate Division found in favor of Darr’s new lawyers: Metrik and Friedman, it ruled, had breached the attorney-client privilege in their bill of particulars against Darr. On June 4, 1963, the two attorneys were publicly censured, and the file in the case was sealed. Metrik and Friedman were subsequently disciplined by the New York Bar Association. The two attorneys are deceased, and their firm disbanded; their file remains sealed today.^* In its ruling, the Appellate Division noted that Metrik and Friedman’s “disclosure here on the intended crime was not made to prevent the act or to protect those against whom it was threatened. It was made long after the alleged occurrence” and was “not connected, even remotely,” with issues arising out of the Clark inheritance. Alicia Darr Clark kept her inheritance, and Metrik did not receive his $1.2 million fee.

What was the “contemplated crime” cited by Metrik and Friedman? Hoover’s memorandum to Bobby Kennedy—in the version released in 1977—provided some clues; Kennedy received it on June 4, 1963, the same day the New York court announced its censure of Metrik and Friedman for their bill of particulars. Hoover reported that his sources had been told that Alicia Darr had in her possession letters signed by John F. Kennedy and photographs proving that the two had had a relationship. Hoover, as the press reported in 1977, wrote that Darr had initiated a lawsuit against Kennedy before the inauguration and that Bobby Kennedy had allegedly gone to New York and settled the matter for $500,000.

Hoover’s information was apparently wrong. No record of a Darr lawsuit against Kennedy has been found, nor is there any evidence that the Kennedys paid anything to quash such a suit. A number of Jack and Robert Kennedy’s former associates, contacted by reporters in 1977, denied any knowledge of a $500,000 payoff and expressed doubt about the accuracy of the FBI report. Hoover may have been wrong about the lawsuit, but there is much evidence that Darr tried for years to extort money from the Kennedy family.

Alicia Darr did have money problems in early 1960, at exactly the time the presidential campaign was in full bloom, and she did worry the candidate. On April 8, 1960, three days after the disappointing Wisconsin primary, Kennedy drafted in pencil a two-page memorandum for the record—made public for the first time in this book—summarizing a conversation with Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Democratic membership of the Senate and a proétgé of Lyndon Johnson. Baker met secretly with Kennedy and warned him that he had been approached by a New Jersey lawyer named Mickey Weiner and had been told that the wife of “a well-known movie actor”—Darr had not yet obtained her Mexican divorce—was willing to give Johnson an affidavit acknowledging an affair with Kennedy in return for $150,000. “Baker,” Kennedy wrote, “said he thought it was blackmail, and did not inform Johnson of the matter.” Baker may have been a Johnson protégé, but he was also a sometime playmate of Jack Kennedy; his loyalty to that part of Senate life and not to his mentor Johnson carried the day. Kennedy, obviously aware of the political danger posed by Alicia Darr, treated his memorandum as if it were a legal document; it was countersigned on the same day by Pierre Salinger, his press secretary, placed in an envelope, and sealed three days later by Salinger, as Salinger noted on the front of the envelope. The handwritten memorandum, still sealed, was found among the papers of Evelyn Lincoln, Kennedy’s personal secretary, after her death in 1995.

In a 1995 interview for this book, Bobby Baker said he did not recall the blackmail threat or the conversation with Kennedy about it, but he did have a sharp memory of Mickey Weiner: “He was a whorehound, a percentager. He was trying to get defense contracts.” Salinger said in an interview that he did not recall the document, or signing and sealing it.

Although there is no evidence of any blackmail payments to Alicia Darr, the Kennedy family did turn to Clark M. Clifford, the high-powered Washington lawyer, for help in a matter that may have been the same one Bobby Baker reported to Kennedy.^* Clifford recalled in an interview for this book being asked by Kennedy to handle what he depicted as an “extraordinarily dangerous” situation in the spring of 1960, a few months before the Democratic convention. It involved a woman “who could destroy him,” Clifford told me. “I had a conversation with Jack Kennedy that was so dramatic that if I could live to be a million years old, I could never forget it.” The senator had gotten involved in a “very sensitive matter,” Clifford said. “Public knowledge [of it] could have blown the Kennedy nomination out of the water.”

At the time of Kennedy’s request, Clifford was working for the presidential campaign of Stuart Symington, a fact he immediately mentioned to Kennedy. “I thought he’d say that I can’t place you in the position of having this explosive information. He didn’t say that. He said, ‘I want you to go on representing me on this matter. Go ahead and work for Symington, but please continue on. If it becomes known, I’ve had it.’” Clifford added that he handled the incident until it got “to the point where I could turn it over to the Old Man [Joe Kennedy].” Clifford refused to say more about the matter, but did note that he made it a practice to have nothing to do with cash payoffs to women. “When it got into this area, I was never involved.” The issue did arise in one case, the lawyer added: “I told Jack that I was not the right fellow to handle it. And they turned to [James] McInerney.” Nothing more could be learned about the possible role of McInerney, who died in an automobile collision in 1963.

Further evidence of the threat posed by Alicia Darr emerged in yet another document in the FBI files, this one dated August 9, 1963, but not released in any form in 1977. Hoover warned Bobby Kennedy that some of the sealed documents in the Metrik disciplinary case were beginning to make the rounds of Kennedy enemies, who were depicting the documents as “dynamite” and an “H-bomb.” In July, Hoover wrote, the documents were offered by a “private detective” going by the name “Robert Garden” to Senator John G. Tower of Texas, a Republican who was on the Armed Services Committee and a strong supporter of Barry Goldwater for the Republican presidential nomination in 1964; Tower was told that the materials dealt with a vital national security matter. Tower sent his administrative assistant, H. Edward Munden, to New York to visit Garden and take a look. Munden told the FBI in an interview soon afterward that the papers dealt with an affair in the 1950s between Kennedy and a woman named Clark who had become pregnant sometime before Kennedy’s campaign for the presidency. There was also a letter from Clark to her attorney, the FBI summary said, that stated that “now that Mr. Kennedy had been elected President, ‘their’ position”—that is, Clark and Metrik’s position—“was much better.” Munden was told further during his New York visit to the private detective that there were additional documents and compromising pictures.

Munden, interviewed for this book in 1995, recalled that the subject of the meeting with Garden, which was obviously not his real name, was the 1964 election; the alleged detective, who made it clear that he wanted a large sum of money for the documents, was eager for Senator Tower’s help in getting information to the Republican Party for use in the presidential campaign. The documents, Munden told me, included “legal papers concerning an illegitimate child of President Kennedy. The mother was one of the Singers.” Munden, who had anticipated that the materials would deal with national defense or military issues, said he handed the materials back to Garden and told him that “it had nothing to do with the security of the United States.” Munden returned to Washington and described the bizarre meeting to Tower, who immediately telephoned the attorney general. “He told him that we had nothing to do with the information,” Munden told me. “Bobby thanked him and said he knew the rumor was out there.” He heard nothing further, Munden recalled in our interview, but there was no question in his mind that somebody wanted Barry Goldwater “to buy this material to blackmail Kennedy” before he ran for reelection in 1964. There was also no doubt, Munden told me, that Robert Garden, whoever he may have been, was convinced that his documents proved “that Kennedy had an illegitimate child” sometime in the late 1950s, although the documents he saw said nothing about a baby being born.

Alicia Darr Clark insisted in one of her interviews for this book that she had had no child out of wedlock by Jack Kennedy and would never have sought money from him. But in a 1997 telephone interview from Rome, Edmund Purdom, her former husband, said that the talk of a baby had a familiar ring. “She told me she was pregnant,” he said. “That’s why I married her [in 1957]. Of course,” Purdom added, “she never had any children.” Purdom, still involved in the entertainment business, was exceedingly bitter about his ex-wife, who is, he said, “a very dangerous woman” who has misrepresented many facts about her life and was always avaricious. He learned after their marriage, Purdom added, that his wife had been well known as a call girl among his friends in New York. Purdom said that in the early 1960s Simon Metrik told him, among other details, that he had “saved her from two police raids.” At the time of the rescue, Metrik told Purdom, Darr was actively running a call-girl ring in partnership with a woman from West Germany. “I’m not out to get her,” Purdom said, in concluding our conversation. “I’m out to forget her.”

Alicia Darr, known today as Mrs. Alicia Clark, breezily refused to discuss her past in detail in interviews for this book in 1996 and 1997, but she remained eager to talk about her relationship with the “beautiful and charming” Jack Kennedy. “I was one of his pals,” she said of John Kennedy, who was a congressman when they met. “I didn’t want to be a first lady. Believe me, he loved me. He knew me as a kid and loved me to the day he died. But I preferred to be married to a movie star. Why marry Jack and be stuck with Old Joe, and having to please him? John Kennedy,” she added, “was a spender. He’d buy you flowers, gifts. He told me he’d like to buy me diamonds, but he had trouble with his father, who was telling him he was spending too much money.” Darr insisted that he was willing to marry her, but she said no. “He was looking for me,” she told me. “I wasn’t looking for him. He was calling Rome. He wanted to run away from it all with me—to Europe, just to skip town. But I’d say, ‘Jack, you don’t have enough money.’”

Once safely in the White House, the young president did seem to be more than ever intrigued by her—or by the danger of being with her. Maxwell Raab, a Boston attorney who was secretary of the cabinet in the Eisenhower administration, found himself dancing with Clark at a British Embassy party in the early 1960s. President Kennedy suddenly entered the room, and Clark whispered to Raab: “I’d like to see the president. Dance me over to him. I know him very well.” Raab, recalling the incident in a 1995 interview, said he understood what “very well” meant.

The president was indeed delighted to see Clark, Raab said, and whisked her off. “I saw that I was not to be in this,” Raab said, “and so I walked away.”^*

^* The case attracted front-page attention even in the staid New York Times, which reported in August 1952 that Jelke, now deceased, had provided call girls to society figures and businessmen for fees ranging from $50 to $500. Alicia Darr’s name did not show up in newspaper accounts; it is impossible to determine what role she had, if any, in the scandal, or how the FBI concluded that she had been blackmailing some of the participants.

^* In March 1996, the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division denied my request to unseal the Metrik and Friedman file. The request was initially opposed by Richard M. Maltz, the deputy chief counsel to the disciplinary committee of the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department. In a memorandum dated April 11, 1995, Maltz noted that my argument had a “superficial appeal” because “there may very well be public interest in the type of information the applicant is seeking to uncover.” However, Maltz said he could not determine from the available files why “the Court sealed a record that would otherwise, as a public censure, be public.” Without such information, he added, the disciplinary committee had no choice but to oppose any proposed unsealing. As an alternative, he urged the justices of the Appellate Division to review the record, in camera, to determine whether the public interest would be served by unsealing. A year later, on March 8, 1996, the Appellate Division reviewed the files, deliberated on the issues, and denied my request in a one-page ruling.

^* Clifford had performed valiantly for Kennedy in 1957, after questions were raised about the authorship of his Profiles in Courage, a series of case studies of senators who chose the greater good over narrow party interests. In an interview televised on ABC in December of that year, Kennedy was described by the columnist Drew Pearson as being “the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him, which indicates the kind of public relations buildup he’s had.” A few days later, a distraught Kennedy came to see him, Clifford wrote in his 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, and sought his guidance. “I cannot let this stand,” Clifford quoted Kennedy as saying. “It is a direct attack on my integrity and my honesty.” At that point the telephone rang. It was Joe Kennedy. “Before I could even say hello,” Clifford wrote, “Joe Kennedy said: ‘I want you to sue the bastards for fifty million dollars. Get it started right away. It’s dishonest and they know it. My boy wrote the book. This is a plot against us.’ ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ I said, ‘I am preparing at this moment to go to New York and sit down with the people at ABC.’ ‘Sit down with them, hell! Sue them, that is what you have to do. Sue!’ he shouted in my ear. His son watched me with a faint air of amusement.” Clifford eventually compelled an ABC vice president to state on the air that Pearson’s charges were unfounded and that “the book in question was written by Senator Kennedy.” In his diary, published years later, Pearson wrote that Kennedy “got a whale of a lot of help on his book” and expressed doubt that Kennedy “wrote too much of the final draft himself.” But, he added, he met for an hour with Kennedy after their skirmish and concluded that he showed enough knowledge of the book to enable him to conclude that “basically it is his book.”

^* Raab, who served with distinction as ambassador to Italy during the Reagan administration, had been used by Senator Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. He left the White House in 1959 and was working as an aide to Senator Kenneth Keating, Republican of New York, when Kennedy, very agitated, sought him out. The two men had known each other since the late 1940s, Raab told me in our interview. “I gotta talk to you,” Kennedy said. “Nixon and the Republican National Committee are doing a job on me. They’re trying to destroy me and they’ve got Jackie all upset. It’s created havoc in my home. It’s got to be stopped.” Kennedy asked Raab to approach Nixon and his fellow Republicans and tell them “to stop spreading the word that I’m philandering.” “It wasn’t rage,” Raab said of Kennedy’s demeanor, but “the nearest thing.” Raab dutifully brought up the matter with Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and with Nixon. “Nixon said, ‘I’m not doing it,’ but he”—referring to Hall—“was.” Raab, who admits he was very naive about Jack Kennedy at the time, subsequently reported back to the senator, assuring him that “there will be no more talk from the White House or Republican National Committee.” Kennedy thanked him.