Kennedy loved gossip about Hollywood women, and Frank provided it—as well as the real thing. “I know that when Jack Kennedy was running for President and stayed with Sinatra,” Richard Burton noted in his journal, “the place was like a whorehouse, with Kennedy as chief customer.” That sort of thing, of course, was spoken of only in whispers. The cascade of positive publicity about the senator was the envy of more experienced politicians.
In late 1958, after Kennedy won reelection to the Senate, Frank let it be known for the first time that they were close. “Senator Kennedy,” he told reporters, “is a friend of mine.”
To the dancer Juliet Prowse, who began an affair with Frank months later, he and Kennedy appeared to be bosom pals. “It was a mutual admiration thing,” she said. “Of course, Frank loves the power of politics, the power of those things that make things happen.”
JOE KENNEDY REMAINED INVOLVED, though behind the scenes, and he, too, visited Frank in Palm Springs. According to Jacobs he bad-mouthed the help with racist comments, and burned one of the prostitutes Frank provided with his cigar. “Mr. S.,” the valet recalled, “said he’d ‘earned the right.’ . . . Sinatra respected his arrogance.”
“We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes,” Joe told a friend, and he did just that. He manipulated the press, ensuring that his son’s face was on the cover of magazines with influence, and he supplied seemingly limitless amounts of money. When there was criticism, John Kennedy laughed it off. “I have just received the following wire from my generous daddy,” he announced at the annual Gridiron Club dinner, a lighthearted press affair in Washington. “ ‘Dear Jack—Don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary—I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.’ ”
Sprawled on the floor with a map of the United States, Joe had amazed a companion with his encyclopedic knowledge of key contacts across the nation. He knew “who the bosses were behind the scenes,” said Democratic congressman Eugene Keogh. “He was in contact with them by phone, presenting Jack’s case.” He also kept open a line of communication to the Mafia.
In the winter of 1959, he sent an intermediary to talk with a representative of Joe Bonanno. “Joe Kennedy had been involved with us from the beginning,” Bill Bonanno said. “He asked for a favor and it was granted.” The meeting, he added, led to fund-raising and systematic consultation with other national crime figures.
The old Mafia order was in a state of flux and bloody upheaval. Top men in the old Luciano network were dead or in decline. In New York there had been a failed attempt to kill Frank Costello, and a successful one to assassinate Albert Anastasia. In Italy, there had been two attempts on the life of Luciano himself. Luciano then met in Sicily with American mafiosi, including Joe Bonanno, to discuss the way forward.
For all the divisions, the criminal empire was flourishing. In Havana and Las Vegas, gambling thrived. Narcotics trafficking was on the increase. The mob was diversifying, penetrating the legitimate business world as never before. As the Mafia prospered, though, there was growing congressional pressure to curb its power. To counter it, just as some politicians sought support from criminals, shrewd criminals eyed potentially compliant politicians.
Bill Bonanno is the only mob source to have talked of the early phase of the Kennedys’ dalliance with the mafiosi. “I was instructed to go back [from Tucson] to New York and sound out other leaders about a concerted effort to back JFK,” he recalled. “The divisions over Kennedy were deep. Joe Profaci [a New York mob boss], for example, said he just didn’t trust Kennedy. Midwestern leaders—in Cleveland and Michigan—had let it be known that we should get behind someone who was more rooted in the unions, where we had more influence.”
Younger mob leaders were divided, according to Bill Bonanno. Santo Trafficante, from Tampa, was hesitant about backing Kennedy. Carlos Marcello of New Orleans was vehemently opposed. Giancana, on the other hand, appeared to be in favor, and Joe Kennedy needed a way to reach out to him.
The elder Bonanno was of little use in that regard because he had recently suffered a heart attack and because he and Giancana did not get along. Joe Kennedy turned instead to “Jimmy Blue Eyes” Alo. “Joe came to me early,” Alo said. “Kennedy and I had a mutual friend, Phil Regan, the actor and singer from Brooklyn. I got a call from an old friend I’d known since Detroit, from the casino. He said, ‘Phil Regan’s in town, he wants to talk with you.’ . . . Joe Kennedy had sent Phil to see me.”
Regan, a former New York City policeman who had become an entertainer, acknowledged in an interview that he had known the Kennedy family since the early 1930s. He said, too, “Back in ’59 I worked for Jack’s father. . . . I traveled with Jack all through 1959.” He was also close to New Jersey mobsters, and would eventually go to prison in California for trying to bribe a county official.
Alo recalled the approach by Regan. “We met in Bal Harbor, Florida, and we talked. He said, ‘Well, you know Jack Kennedy’s going for the nomination for president? The old man has delegated me to see you, because he’s got everything figured out. . . .’ He said, ‘Do you know Sam Giancana?’ . . .
“I said, ‘Oh yeah.’ He said, ‘Would you talk with him?’ . . . Joe Kennedy wanted me to talk to him about helping Jack in Chicago. . . . I said, ‘Leave me alone with these politicians! . . . Phil, don’t mix me up with politics ’cause I don’t want no part of it.’ . . . I turned him down. . . . The next thing I hear is that they went to Sinatra.”
Politicians and crime bosses had long been using and abusing the democratic process. Two decades earlier, according to Lucky Luciano, he and Costello had met secretly with the 1928 Democratic presidential candidate, Al Smith, to trade support for the promise of future favors. Four years later, when Smith fought Roosevelt for the nomination, the mob covered their bets. Luciano shared a hotel suite at the Democratic convention with a key Smith supporter, while Costello huddled with a top Roosevelt aide in another. Roosevelt proved no patron, but the Mafia bosses continued to believe they could influence politics.
Llewella Humphreys, daughter of Giancana’s associate Murray “The Camel” Humphreys, said she was received at the White House by President Harry Truman. She claimed, too, to have met Dwight Eisenhower at a syndicate meeting in Chicago convened to “decide who would be the next president of the United States.” “Father,” she said, “didn’t have a great respect for politicians . . . he knew he could control them.”
As an apprentice gangster in Chicago, Giancana had been a “floater” during the Republican primary of 1928, one of dozens of hoodlums who rushed from precinct to precinct casting phony votes. When gangsters committed the ultimate electoral abuse that year—they shot dead one candidate to ensure the election of another—he had been one of those questioned.
By the end of the 1950s, as head of the Chicago mob, Giancana had two congressmen, several state representatives, and numerous ward committeemen in his pocket. Mayor Richard Daley rarely opposed his will. Now, the stakes were about to be raised.
Organized crime has always sought ways to corrupt public officials by compromising them, by exploiting their weakness, and John Kennedy had made it easy for the mobsters to identify his Achilles’ heel. On a junket to Havana in the 1950s, as a senator, Meyer Lansky’s widow said, Kennedy had asked her husband’s advice on where to find the best girls. “Throw him a broad,” Giancana said in 1959, “and he’ll do anything.”
Giancana was especially well placed to have such knowledge. One summer night in 1958 the FBI learned that Pat and Peter Lawford were out socializing at the Mocambo with Bea Korshak. Mrs. Korshak’s husband, Sidney, was a powerful mob attorney close to Giancana—and to Frank—with proven expertise in compromising his foes. He had avoided having to testify to the Kefauver Committee by obtaining compromising photographs of Senator Kefauver in a hotel bedroom with two women, then confronting Kefauver with them.
Frank, as Peter Lawford put it long afterward, was currently “Jack’s pimp.” He could both effect introductions t
o desirable women in Hollywood and arrange assignations with hookers. There were what the FBI called “indiscreet parties in Palm Springs, Las Vegas, and New York City” involving Kennedy, Lawford, Frank, and prostitutes. There was also what William Safire has called “the most startling dual relationship in the history of crime and politics.”
FOR A COUPLE OF NIGHTS in the first week of November 1959, after a fund-raiser in Los Angeles, Kennedy and his aide Dave Powers were Frank’s guests at his house in Palm Springs. Powers remembered how each morning “music filled the house, even the bathrooms.” Frank took pride in the visit, christened the quarters Kennedy had used the “Kennedy Room,” and eventually had a plaque reading “JOHN F. KENNEDY SLEPT HERE” mounted on the door. The decision to stay over, which had been made at the last minute, was evidently considered a good one. “We had a great time,” Powers said.
Before Frank and Kennedy left Los Angeles for Palm Springs, they had dined at Puccini’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Nick Sevano, who was there that evening, remembered that Kennedy and Frank took a great interest in two women seated at another table—the actress Angie Dickinson and a dark-haired beauty named Judith Campbell. “Frank sent a note to me saying ‘Bring the broads over,’ ” Sevano said. “I brought them over, and we wound up at Frank’s house until three in the morning, watching movies. [The girls] didn’t stay there—just watched the movies.”
Judith Campbell—best known now by her later married name, Judith Exner—was the daughter of a well-to-do architect and a former Bonwit’s model. She had grown up in New Jersey and Southern California and in her teens had socialized on the fringes of Hollywood society. She had briefly dated Robert Wagner, married an actor, William Campbell, when she was eighteen, and then divorced him— after a two-year separation—in early 1959, when she was twenty-five. She first met Frank “at parties,” she said, just months before the encounter at Puccini’s.
Campbell was to remain unknown to the public until, sixteen years later, a Senate committee turned up evidence that during the Kennedy presidency she had been in regular contact not only with Kennedy but also with Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. The relevant passage of the committee’s report established nothing about the nature of those relationships, and did not mention Sinatra. Campbell’s memoir, My Story, published in 1977, said nothing about Kennedy having been present at Puccini’s, or about the foursome having gone from the restaurant to Frank’s house.
By her account Frank had sent Sevano over to ask if she would “like to go out with him.” She had agreed, and Frank followed up by phoning and then buttonholing her, again at Puccini’s, for a conversation. Soon after, as best one can calculate while Kennedy was staying with him at Palm Springs, he called to ask Campbell to join him on a trip to Honolulu. She flew out two days later, on November 9, and found Frank ensconced in the penthouse of the Surfrider Hotel with Peter and Pat Lawford and others.
There was heavy drinking, inconsequential talk, and a shopping expedition. Campbell made a point, she said, of paying for her purchases herself. She went to bed with Frank that night, an experience she described as “idyllic.” The romantic mood was broken on the third day, however, when Frank and Lawford went off to a bedroom with two Japanese women for a “massage.” Lawford later made a play for Campbell, which she said she rebuffed. On two successive nights, Frank sank into an ugly mood and pursued another woman.
Karen Dynan, a tourist who was vacationing in Hawaii that week, recalled Frank, in an orange bathing suit, having flirted with her. She saw Campbell taking leave of Sinatra, and it looked to Dynan as though she were being dismissed. “We were having drinks, and this woman walked out, a beautiful dark-haired woman, dressed in a suit and ready to travel, fully made-up. Lawford said, ‘Well goodbye Judy.’ Sinatra didn’t look at her or say anything. We thought she must have been some kind of hooker or something.”
When Campbell got back to Los Angeles, a local gossip columnist asked whether she and Frank had been dating in Hawaii. “Hardly,” she responded. Frank, however, got back in touch at once, eager to pursue the relationship. They saw each other again two weeks before Christmas at his house in Palm Springs. Peter and Pat Lawford were again present, along with Jack Entratter and Johnny Formosa, a close associate of Giancana. Campbell, who gathered that Formosa had “some connection with the Chicago underworld,” thought Frank “walked very carefully around him.”
The conversation at dinner was dominated by politics. Frank seemed “subdued” during the discussion, and in bed that night talked on and on about Kennedy. “I’ll bet even money,” he told Campbell, “Jack gets the nomination. . . . He’s my friend. I know how to help my friends.”
The following month, Frank went into a studio to record a special version of “High Hopes,” a song he had recorded the previous year for the movie A Hole in the Head. The new version, with Nelson Riddle conducting and special lyrics by Sammy Cahn, was called “High Hopes with Jack Kennedy”:
Everyone wants to back Jack Jack is on the right track.
It was to be the campaign theme song, blared from loudspeakers as the candidate made his way from city to city and town to town in the months that followed. “I’m Jack Kennedy,” he would say as he shook another hand. Then: “I come from a thousand miles from here. I am not your neighbor, but I don’t think that has anything to do with it. What counts is the quality of a man and his good judgment.”
Frank was to have more impact on the Kennedy campaign than any entertainer has had on any presidential campaign before or since. Frank is said to have shown guests framed notes he claimed Kennedy had sent him during the campaign. “Frank,” one of them read, “what can we count on the boys from Vegas for?”
In January 1960, Kennedy began working the primary states aboard the Caroline, the airplane his family had acquired months earlier. Frank, meanwhile, shuttled between Los Angeles, Palm Springs, and Las Vegas, where he was making Ocean’s 11 and performing at the Sands in the Rat Pack shows. It was then, at the Sands, according to Judith Campbell, that she met Kennedy.
KENNEDY FLEW INTO LAS VEGAS on Sunday, February 7, 1960. “There was no goddamn reason for stopping there,” said Blair Clark, a CBS reporter traveling aboard the Caroline, “except fun and games. We all figured, ‘How bad can it be to catch Sinatra at the Sands?’ ” As Kennedy watched the shows that weekend, he became part of the entertainment.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Frank announced that first night, “Senator John F. Kennedy, from the great state of Massachusetts. . . . The next president of the United States!” Kennedy rose, bowed, and got a standing ovation. “You son of a gun,” cried Bishop. “You’ve got the Jewish vote!” “What,” Dean Martin asked, “did you say his name was? Frank, if he gets in, you’ll be ambassador to Italy.”
Cradling Sammy Davis in his arms, Frank voiced thanks for the “trophy” that had “arrived from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” It was a gag they often used, but on this occasion Frank walked over and dropped Davis in Kennedy’s lap. “It’s perfectly all right with me,” Davis told him, “as long as I’m not being donated to [prominent segregationists] George Wallace or James Eastland.”
Kennedy was the center of attention that night and the next when, in the wee hours, he reboarded the Caroline to resume campaigning. After the shows, Davis recalled in his memoirs, everyone sat up talking about politics and how to rally show business support. Within weeks of the Kennedy visit, though, the FBI heard that Kennedy, Sinatra, and Lawford had been “involved in some sort of indiscreet party.” The owner of El Rancho Vegas, an informant claimed, had told of “showgirls” running in and out of Kennedy’s suite. The candidate’s campaign manager had “bewailed Kennedy’s association with Sinatra” and “certain sex activities by Kennedy that he hopes never are publicized.”
Blair Clark, who had been a classmate of Kennedy at Harvard, sat at Sinatra’s table in the lounge of the Sands and was invited to join the senator in Frank’s suite upstairs. There had been �
�bimbos and showgirls” around the table, Clark remembered, and two women present in the suite. He and Mary McGrory of the Washington Star had excused themselves, Clark said, “because we sensed that Jack and Frank and a couple of the girls were about to have a party.” A former senior IRS investigator learned from an actress working on Ocean’s 11 that Kennedy was provided with women and “sampled the goodies.”
Sands pit boss Ed Walters heard from fellow hotel staff, including those involved in cleaning the senator’s rooms, not only about Kennedy’s womanizing but also that he was using cocaine. Campaign workers even tried to buy cocaine on his behalf. Others in the Kennedy camp, however, were concerned. “With the old-style PBX system we had,” Walters said, “the phone operators knew who was calling who and heard things. Kennedy’s family back east worried about him, about it getting out that he was being seduced by Sinatra and the girls, and about his medical problems—he had a doctor with him when he came. We wondered, if he was running for president, about how close he was getting to Sinatra.”
When Clark and McGrory decided it was prudent to leave Sinatra’s suite, Clark recalled, one of the women with Frank and Kennedy had been Judith Campbell.
“ I WAS AT A TABLE at the Sands with Peter and Pat and Jack,” Lawford’s agent Milt Ebbins said years afterward. “The lights were low but I sensed a lady come and sit down beside me—maybe it was her perfume. And she said, ‘I’m Judith Campbell, I’m a guest of Mr. Sinatra’s. He asked me to sit at this table.’ ”
When the show ended, Ebbins said, he introduced her around the table. She subsequently went “upstairs” with Kennedy. “I went to Peter later and said, ‘Who is this girl?’ And Peter said, ‘She’s a hooker. Frank gave her $200 to stop at our table . . . to go to bed with Jack.” Sands dealer Count Deiro said Campbell was one of three such women around Kennedy that weekend.
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