book-26.html

TWENTY-ONE

On January 2, 1960, forty-two-year-old Jack Kennedy stood under television and newsreel lights in the Senate Caucus Room and declared, “I am announcing today my candidacy for the presidency of the United States.”

He had spent most of his life preparing for that moment, wearing the mantle of presumption to greatness that had been his since the death of his brother Joe. But Kennedy found that presumption and reality were two different things when he began his campaign for the Democratic nomination. He was the youngest man ever to seek the presidency; many observers viewed him as callow and inexperienced. Moreover, Catholicism had proved an insurmountable barrier to winning the nation’s highest office.

Jack Kennedy had been fascinated with the entertainers he’d met in Hollywood, and he became convinced that they could make a real difference to his prospects. They were, of course, extraordinarily wealthy and thus highly attractive from a purely fund-raising point of view. More important, Kennedy sensed that the charisma he’d found so magnetic in them, their popularity and larger-than-life images, could be used to enhance his own appeal.

Kennedy wasn’t the first presidential candidate to attempt to woo Hollywood stars to his cause. But he was the first to do it to such an extent — and, as Peter Lawford’s brother-in-law, the first to do so from an insider’s vantage point. One of Jack’s earliest campaign strategies was to utilize Hollywood celebrities, not just to raise money behind the scenes but to campaign publicly to get out the Kennedy vote.

Two years before he announced his candidacy, he had made his first overture to a celebrity for support. Visiting the set of The Thin Man, he had spent several hours in discussion with Phyllis Kirk. Director Don Weis thought that Kennedy was “really in heat for Phyllis,” but she recalled their discussions as purely political: “My theory at the time was that actors should not stump for candidates, because it was unfair. There are a lot of people in this country who are very influenced by their idols saying jump through this hoop or vote for Genghis Khan. I felt you could work behind the scenes, but you don’t have to go out and hogwash the country into thinking that they should vote for the candidate you’re voting for.”

Kennedy listened to Phyllis’s argument and said, “I disagree. I think someone like you should become very actively involved.” After hours of discussion, Kennedy swayed her to his way of thinking, and four months later she decided to lend her name to an advertisement — for Adlai Stevenson for president. The day the full-page newspaper ad appeared, Kirk got a phone call from Senator Kennedy. “I want to congratulate you for joining the fray,” he said. “I think it’s wonderful that you’re putting your name on the line. This, however, is not exactly what I had in mind.”

Phyllis Kirk eventually came around to Kennedy, as did almost all of Peter’s Hollywood friends. Sammy Cahn remembered running into Jack at a party before he’d announced his candidacy. Kennedy asked him, “Could you write me a campaign song?” Cahn replied, “What are you running for?” When Kennedy told him, he offered to write new lyrics for his Oscar-winning song “High Hopes,” which Frank Sinatra had sung in the 1959 film A Hole in the Head. The reworked ditty became the Democrats’ 1960 theme song:

A series of Los Angeles fund-raisers, at which contributors were entertained by Frank Sinatra or Sammy Davis or Judy Garland and then heard the candidate speak about his vision for America, netted hundreds of thousands of dollars for the primary campaign. Evie Johnson remembered one at the Lawfords’ beach house: “Peter had rounded up quite a good group, and they entertained. Judy sang.

Teddy Kennedy was there, and he did a belly dance for us, kind of like a hula. We all got sort of crazy.”

Frank Sinatra committed himself totally to the goal of making John F. Kennedy the next president of the United States. He rechristened his group of followers the “Jack Pack,” sang about “that old Jack magic,” and worked tirelessly to raise money for the Kennedy campaign. “Frank snapped his fingers, and people fell into line,” Milt Ebbins recalled. “He’d get on the phone to somebody and before you knew it he’d be saying, ‘Gotcha down for ten thousand,’ and that would be the end of it. Frank was fantastic. Peter didn’t do as much for Jack’s campaign as Frank did, but it was Peter who brought Frank to Jack in the first place.”

Sinatra offered to round up the Rat Pack and sweep into West Virginia to do the same thing for the Kennedy primary campaign there that he’d done in Hollywood. But Jack Kennedy was nothing if not a savvy politician. He knew that Sinatra’s personality and manner would go over far less well in a small, parochial state than it did in Beverly Hills and Las Vegas, and he’d heard stories about the last time Sinatra and his band of merrymakers had descended on a small town.

Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Shirley MacLaine had spent several months in Madison, Indiana, for the filming of Some Came Kunning in 1958. Martin and Sinatra were rarely without a drink in their hand, and on one occasion Sinatra roughed up a sixty-six-year-old hotel clerk for getting a hamburger order wrong. Another time, riding a bus, Sinatra smiled and returned the townspeoples’ waves of greeting through a window — all the while muttering things under his breath like “Hello there, hillbilly!” . . . “Drop dead, jerk”! . . . “Hey, where’d you get that big fat behind?”

And so Sinatra was kept out of the West Virginia campaign — but only in person. FBI wiretaps reveal that he apparently disbursed large mob donations in West Virginia that were used to pay off election officials. And in a more indirect but no less important contribution, Sinatra introduced Jack to one of Frank’s recent conquests, Judith Campbell, a vivacious twenty-five-year-old Irish brunette with limpid blue eyes — a “nicer” Liz Taylor, as Jimmy “the Weasel”, a Los Angeles mafioso, called her.

A recent divorcée, Judy Campbell had run into Sinatra at Puccini one night in November 1959. They’d met once before, but this time Frank showed strong interest in the young woman. He invited her to join him on a trip to Hawaii a few days later with Peter and Pat, and it was in Honolulu on November 10 that their affair began. At first Judy found Frank charming and attentive, but his mercurial temperament soon gave her second thoughts. She called off the romance when Sinatra invited her to his Beverly Hills home and expected her to participate in a ménage a trois with him and another woman.

They remained friends, however, and Frank invited her to Vegas to see some of the “summit” shows during the filming of Ocean’s 11. It was there that Sinatra introduced her to Jack Kennedy and his twenty-eight-year-old brother Teddy, who was western states coordinator for the campaign.

Teddy Kennedy made a pass at Campbell, which she rejected, but one month later, on the night before the New Hampshire primary, she began a sexual affair with the candidate. “It was amazing to me that he could be so relaxed on the eve of the first primary of his presidential campaign,” Campbell later said, “but unbelievably, he didn’t mention New Hampshire once during our entire night together.”

Jack Kennedy was certain he’d win New Hampshire, but he was deeply concerned about his chances in West Virginia, and when Campbell told him that Sinatra had just introduced her to Sam Giancana, Kennedy asked if she would arrange a meeting between them. When Judy asked why, Jack replied, “I think I may need his help in the campaign.”

Kennedy and Giancana met at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, and although the subject of their conversation remains unrecorded, Giancana apparently agreed to use his “influence” with West Virginia officials in order to ensure a Kennedy victory there. Kennedy may or may not have offered anything concrete in return, but it soon became clear that Giancana expected that if Jack won the presidency, the federal government would “go easy” on organized crime. It wasn’t an unreasonable assumption.

Giancana sent one of his cronies, Paul “Skinny” D’Amato, into West Virginia to “convince” the sheriffs who controlled the state’s political machine to “get out the vote for Kennedy.” D’Amato did so by agreeing to forgive gambling debts many of the men had incurred at his 500 Club in Atlantic City, and he handed others cash from a fifty-thousand-dollar war chest set up for the purpose with Mafia donations.

Jack Kennedy beat Hubert Humphrey handily in West Virginia, ending the Minnesotan’s candidacy and defusing the religion issue once and for all by winning in an overwhelmingly Protestant state. In July he came into the Democratic National Convention with victories in all seven of the primaries he had entered, and he was just sixty-one votes short of the nomination. Serendipitously, the convention was held in the Los Angeles Sports Arena, putting Kennedy’s show business supporters smack in the middle of the action. The night before the convention’s July 11 opening, the Democratic party staged a hundred- dollar-a-plate fund-raiser at the Beverly Hilton Hotel attended by twenty- eight hundred people. The Rat Pack and other of Hollywood’s biggest names were present — Judy Garland, Angie Dickinson, Milton Berle, Joe E. Lewis, George Jessel, Mort Sahl, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis among them.

Judy Garland sat at the head table next to the candidate; Frank Sinatra sat a few chairs down with some of the other presidential hopefuls — Senators Lyndon Johnson of Texas and Stuart Symington of Missouri, and the potential draftee Adlai Stevenson.

The next day, Frank, Sammy, Dean, Peter, Janet Leigh, and Tony Curtis led the hundred thousand people jammed into the Sports Arena in a rousing rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” to open the convention. A few bars into the song, members of the Alabama delegation, seated close to the stage, began to heckle Sammy Davis with vicious racial epithets. His face burning with hurt and anger, Davis forced back tears. Sinatra tried to buck him up, whispering, “Those dirty sons of bitches. Don’t let them get to you, Charlie!” Davis finished the song, but he didn’t take his seat with the others once the convention was gaveled to order.

Alabama was one of the uncommitted delegations that Jack needed to guarantee a first-ballot victory. It was left to Peter to swallow his anger two days later and try to charm a group of men he considered bigots. “I will leave the speechmaking to the politicians,” Peter said on air as TV cameras followed him into the delegation, “but I did want to shake hands with all these people and talk to them as friends.”

Throughout the week, Sinatra and the Rat Pack roamed the convention floor, ignoring barriers and restrictions, and cajoled recalcitrant delegates to join the Kennedy cause. Conscious of the cameras, Sinatra painted his bald pate black so it wouldn’t be obvious under the TV lights.

After the first convention session, Jack Kennedy retired to his suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and spent some time with Judy Campbell. (Jackie had stayed home because she was six months pregnant and had a history of problem pregnancies.) Apparently Jack had never compared notes with Sinatra about Judy, because he tried, as Sinatra had, to talk her into a three-way — “with a secretarial type in her late twenties,” as Campbell recalled it. “I know you,” Jack told her. “I know you’ll like it.” Just as she had with Sinatra, Judy refused.

For the rest of the convention, Jack Kennedy’s sexual amusement was provided by Marilyn Monroe, who was preparing to begin work in Reno on The Misfits, written by her husband, the playwright Arthur Miller, and costarring Clark Gable. Miller and Monroe, dubbed “the Egghead and the Hourglass,” had wed in 1956, but the marriage had been in trouble for several years, and Marilyn was just emerging from an affair with the French singer and actor Yves Montand, the costar of her most recent film Let’s Make Love.

Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe had continued to rendezvous occasionally in New York throughout the 1950s. Whenever a rift developed between Monroe and Miller, she would drive into Manhattan from their Connecticut farmhouse and stay at her East Fifty-seventh Street apartment. If Jack was in town, she would meet him in his suite at the Carlyle Hotel. Now, with her marriage on the rocks, Marilyn was in Los Angeles without Miller, and Kennedy’s large contingent of Hollywood supporters made her far less conspicuous in Kennedy’s company than she might have been. The second night of the convention, Marilyn dined with Jack, Peter, and Kennedy aide Kenneth O’Donnell at Puccini.

Before dinner, Marilyn and Jack had apparently been intimate, because Marilyn giggled to Peter that Jack’s performance earlier had been “very democratic” and “very penetrating.” According to Marilyn’s long-time maid, Lena Pepitone, Kennedy was “always telling her dirty jokes, pinching her, and squeezing her. . . . She told me that [he] was always putting his hand on her thigh.” This evening at Puccini, apparently, he continued northward, running his hand farther under Marilyn’s dress. “He hadn’t counted on going that far,” Marilyn laughed to Lena. When he discovered she wasn’t wearing any panties, “he pulled back and turned red.”

If the candidate seemed confident and at ease, his advisers and family were less tranquil. He was within reach of the nomination, but until it was officially his, anything could happen. The greatest threat was the tremendous emotional attachment many of the delegates — even those pledged to Kennedy — still felt for Adlai Stevenson. When Stevenson said he would allow his name to be placed in nomination, the Kennedy camp verged on panic. Iowa delegate Arthur Thompson recalled seeing Pat Lawford just outside the convention hall during a thunderous demonstration for Stevenson. “She was walking back and forth in what I would describe as a very nervous manner, smoking a cigarette, and with further evidence of nervousness. She walked [into the hall] several times to take a look at the proceedings, then back out again to catch some of it, as I was, on the loudspeaker. I’ve called that since the ‘Kennedy faction’s moment of uncertainty.’”

Jack Kennedy seemed unfazed. “Don’t worry, Dad,” he told his father. “Stevenson has everything but the votes.” He was right. By the time the roll call reached Wyoming, Jack was within a few votes of a first-ballot victory. Ted Kennedy pushed his way through the crowd to the chairman of the Wyoming delegation and shouted above the din, “You have in your grasp the opportunity to nominate the next president of the United States. Such support can never be forgotten by a president.” The gambit worked — the chairman announced all fifteen of Wyoming’s votes for John F. Kennedy.

The hall erupted once again, this time in acclamation for the nominee of the Democratic Party. Frank Sinatra and the Rat Pack celebrated wildly, patted each other on the back, glad-handed strangers. “We’re on our way to the White House, buddy boy,” Sinatra yelled to Peter, a smile beaming from his face like a sunburst. “We’re on our way to the White House.”