A couple had entered and sat behind Lee. The man clearly was familiar with the Richard Connell novel on which this movie was based. He whispered to the woman beside him: “In the book the relationship between Raymond and mother is more extreme. The reason he’s the way he is? They slept in the same bed until he was sixteen. That’s what made him such an intense nut case.”
Until the age of sixteen? Longer even than Marguerite and me. It seemed so nourishing then. My mother consumed me in ways that I can’t even begin to comprehend. Just like Raymond.
Both of us tragic figures, like Oedipus of old. What would I have done in life without that seventh grade English teacher?
During the party, Joslyn arrives wearing a Queen of Diamonds costume. Raymond crumbles into her arms, unable to resist her. As if he had found a socially acceptable way to sleep with Eleanor, the two women inseparable in his mind.
Is that true of me as well? Marguerite, Marina ...
Then, at his mother’s command, Raymond Shaw, not realizing what he’s doing, calmly kills Joslyn and her gentle father.
Now, the deceased liberal senator’s words make sense, as does the film’s title. Johnny, the right-wing crazy, is a plant by the communists. How better to destroy the U.S. than from the inside out, the McCarthy figure a tool of the Reds? They believe if such a man is elected president, after assuming the murdered nominee’s place, the country will grow so dissatisfied with him, far to the right of, say, Batista, that America must experience a revolution in response, even as in Cuba. Then, communism wins.
“They can’t make me doing anything, Ben. Can’t they? Anything!?” Meaning that which is repellant to his human nature.
“We’ll see, kid. We’ll see what they can do and what they can’t do.” Marco knows what Raymond does not; Eleanor and Johnny want Raymond to kill the presidential nominee when he addresses the convention in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Precisely as this middle-of-the-road hopeful delivers his key line: “Nor would I ask my fellow Americans, in defense of our freedom, that which I would not gladly give myself—my life. My very life.”
A great statement. A Kennedy kind of statement.
Raymond is to hide above, shoot down with a rifle fitted with a telescopic sight. He became a marksman in the service.
Just like me! How complex the political game of chess can be. Only by supporting one’s arch enemy can the checkmate move occur. I ought to know; I’m in this up to my neck.
Spotting the streak of light from his place in the vast auditorium, Marco rushed through the building’s inner workings, hoping to arrive in time to stop Raymond.
What do I do now? Watch the rest of the film and find out.
When the major yanks open the door to that small booth, out of breath, Raymond brings the presidential candidate into his sights ... then swerves to the right, shooting his mother and father-in-law. Clearly, the Red Chinese agent was wrong. Raymond broke beyond bounds of brainwashing, turning the gun on them.
Yes. Now I understand what I must do ...
“You couldn’t have stopped them,” Raymond wept to Marco before taking his life. “The army couldn’t have stopped her. I had to!”
Suicide; which I have so often considered. Perhaps I’ll do that as well, take my own life, once my purpose in life is, like Raymond’s, fulfilled ...
*
Minutes later, Lee stumbled out of the louse-ridden movie house. This can only be fate, bringing me around to where it all began. Sinatra again instructing me, reversing the message of Suddenly. If that were one bookend, this is its opposite.
I feel like all four Karamazov brothers rolled up into one. So lost was I after George’s call. Do I still have any semblance left of free will? Am I fated to follow his command or might I, like Raymond, do precisely the opposite?
This wasn’t only a movie. Like Raymond, I’ll agree to go through with it, as George requested. Then, at the last minute, I’ll take out the true enemies of the people.
Half an hour later, Lee called George and apologized for his earlier hesitancy, agreeing to kill JFK on 11/22/63.
*
“Lee called me,” George informed the committee members. “He apologized for his hesitation and has now accepted.”
“So?” the FBI man said, shrugging. “It’s settled.”
“Not if I know Lee. Remember, I mentored him. Beyond that, you might even say ... I created him.”
“Like Frankenstein with his monster?” the blonde suggested.
“As you’ll recall from that old story, the creature was supposed to carry out the doctor’s orders. Instead, he turned on the man who had created him and destroyed Dr. Frankenstein.”
“As you now believe Oswald will?” The pro-Castro Cuban asked, his voice riddled with concern.
“I know him better than anyone else. Better than his wife, his mother. Perhaps I know Lee Harvey Oswald better even than Lee Harvey Oswald knows himself.”
“What’s your concern?” the brunette chimed in. “Do you think he’ll get cold feet at the last minute?”
“That’s not Lee. The problem is more serious. Lately, He’s been talking a lot about Kennedy, particularly the Civil Rights initiatives. Lee has always considered himself ... I think the term he employs is ‘a white Negro.’ Any friend of the colored people is, therefore, ipso facto Lee’s friend as well.”
“And any enemy ...” the anti-Castro Cuban added.
“... his enemy,” the State Department man concluded.
“My worry is that Lee agreed to carry out the assassination only after deciding against doing so.”
“Meaning,” the Mafioso in turn responded, “he’s taking the job to make certain it doesn’t get accomplished.”
“Lee once told me that, as a kid, his favorite TV show was called I Led Three Lives. I believe that’s what he’s doing now. Or at least attempting to achieve.”
“Meaning he’ll double cross us?” the general asked.
“Not as Lee sees it. He’ll do anything, including sacrifice himself if need be, to stop what he believes is wrong. It’s more on the order of, I‘d say, a triple-cross.”
“But we’re not wrong,” the former vice-president insisted.
“In our minds. Just as Lee, in his, is absolutely right. The point is, Lee is playing a kind of chess game. Well, I’ve played with him on occasion. Good as he is, I’m better. I know the strategies he always relies on to create a check, allowing me to checkmate him. I’ve come up with a way this can further benefit us.”
George then explained his plan. They would take Lee up on his offer while also assigning several other shooters to take down Kennedy. If George’s guess as to Lee’s reasoning proved inaccurate, no problem: with three marksmen firing from three different positions, chances of success were that much better. If Lee came through, he’d escape with the rest of the team.
If Lee refused to take a shot, likely one of the others would bring the president down. Then, when the moment of truth came around, George had a plan to pin the assassination on Lee.
“If Lee betrays us,” George concluded, “then he’ll be our fall guy, making it easier for the team to escape.”
Everyone agreed on this course of action. They mapped out plans. Lee should be told that he was now one of three separate shooters. That would insure he arrived at the scene, to aid or try and avoid the assassination. When push came to shove, Lee revealing his true colors, George would take it from there.
“Is everyone agreed on this course of action?”
“Agreed,” the others chanted in unison.
*
It was late evening when the meeting let out. George bid his fellow conspirators goodnight and stepped into darkness. He needed to wind down. Most men would head for a bar but he didn’t drink while on a major operation. A film was better. That was one of the things he and Lee did have in common: both loved to escape from reality by taking in a movie. The difference was, at least in George’s mind, George knew Hollywood films to only be fanta
sies. Lee foolishly took them far too seriously.
Perhaps that’s what distinguishes Lee the most in my mind. I’ve never met a man who can be so deeply touched by a film!
Still, when George walked three blocks northward to the nearest theatre, he couldn’t control himself from laughing at the irony. Playing there was PT-109, starring Cliff Robertson as a heroic, lionized, larger-than-life John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
CHAPTER NINETEEN:
HE DID IT HIS WAY
“America’s politics will now also be America’s favorite movie.”
—Norman Mailer, commenting on the election
of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1960
On July 6, 1963, James Stewart received a phone call in his Miami office from Santo Trafficante, Jr. in Tampa. As 'Jimmy' happened to be alone at the time, he shifted to the name Santo had previously addressed him by: Johnny Rosselli.
Ordinarily, they’d make a date to meet somewhere between their two Florida cities to talk business in the privacy of some mob-owned club. This time, Santo mentioned that he had preview tickets for a movie to be screened in Tampa the following week. He wanted Johnny to drive up and join him for the event.
Nobody’s fool, Rosselli sensed this had to be something big. From the neutral quality of Santo’s tone, Rosselli couldn’t guess if he’d landed in trouble or if his unique talents were about to be called into play once more for The Organization.
According to the rules of the game, Johnny Handsome knew he was not allowed to ask questions. Cordially, seemingly calm, he accepted. They met in a Tampa theatre lobby, Santo looking as always like a city-clerk in his thick glasses and rumpled suit.
They entered the auditorium and took seats midway down the main aisle. The house was packed. Theatre lights dimmed, a projector’s bulb blasted on behind them, and Rosselli watched as the title appeared: P.T. 109.
Johnny sighed with relief, knowing it was not he who had landed in hot water but the film’s subject. JFK was played, at the president’s request, by a handsome leading man, Cliff Robertson. He didn’t resemble JFK at all. This, rather, was how JFK saw himself and wanted the world to perceive him, now and forever.
Young JFK, or his fictionalized persona, turned disaster into the stuff of legend, leading his crew on a swim to safety. When one sailor couldn’t keep up, JFK, refusing to let a single man die, grabbed the fellow by the collar and dragged him along.
How exciting for an audience to see their current president depicted as a man of action worthy of their current fictional favorite, James Bond. No matter that JFK might well have been court marshaled for allowing his P.T. boat to be rammed by an enemy sub, something no officer had ever before let happen.
Santo and Johnny exchanged glances, each aware that it had been incompetence on JFK's part that caused the P.T. 109 to unnecessarily sink; those reports of courage under fire were drastically overstated.
At one point JFK swam away from his men, marooned on an island; Robertson made this seem a courageous gesture in the Hollywood version. Anyone with knowledge of military process understood that this was dereliction of an officer’s duty.
“He fucked up, Johnny. And they’re cheering him for it.”
“He’s the hero of a Hollywood movie now. People always cheer for whatever that kind of guy does, right or wrong.”
From now on, no one in the world would believe that JFK had screwed up royally. For they’d seen the truth, if only in the sense that seeing is believing. Powerfully depicted in a film that put an official seal on the past. Whether what they witnessed had any bearing on reality no longer mattered.
This version of events was the one that had now been immortalized on celluloid. It would be seen everywhere and for years, decades even, be repeated on TV.
An hour later, the Mafiosos sat opposite one another in a quiet corner of a spaghetti house owned by Trafficante. Clams and linguini, the rich smell of choice garlic rising from two steaming plates, lay untouched. After what they’d experienced, neither man had an appetite. Thanks to them and their contacts, JFK had been elected to the presidency of the United States. As an Irish Catholic, he could not have reached that top plateau without such help. A deal had been cut. Now? With Jack’s go-ahead, Attorney General Bobby had declared war on The Mob.
“When ‘the brothers’ wanted to fuck Marilyn Monroe, we went an’ arranged that for ‘em,” Santo muttered bitterly.
“Then they wanted her shut up. We fixed that, too.”
“It’s time to start seriously talking about fixing them.”
They tried to relax. As always, this meant Sinatra on the juke-box, one classic cut after another.
*
Following his big comeback in the mid-1950s, Sinatra soared up the entertainment-biz ladder from star to superstar. If at that point there seemed nowhere higher to go, an even greater status awaited. Until Humphrey Bogart’s death in 1957, that actor reigned as uncrowned king of what was known as The Rat Pack, insiders even among Hollywood A listers. Following Bogie's passing, the clique might have floundered had not Sinatra stepped up to accept the mantle.
Immediately, his best buddies became the new power elite: fellow saloon singer/actor Dean Martin, British-born leading man Peter Lawford, the multi-talented African-American singer/dancer/actor Sammy Davis Jr., and the wry/dry Jewish comic Joey Bishop. By the early 1960s they were co-starring by day in the Vegas-shot movie Ocean’s 11, headlining together at a casino by night.
“Ring-a-ding-ding,” they chimed. The crowds went wild.
Sinatra garnered a reputation as a man with two distinct personalities. He could be mean-spirited beyond all conception if the liquor rushed too swiftly through his system. Feeling guilty the morning after he’d become a sentimentalist, over-tipping valets who happened to smile brightly at him.
Vegas became a new wild west, they a gang terrorizing the town, no one willing to try and stop them. Women were broads to be bedded. The more out of control they became, the more extreme the public’s fascination with it all. Yet, despite shallowness and insensitivity, there was another side to Frank, who fiercely dedicated himself to the then-burgeoning Civil Rights movement.
“It’s time to turn this thing around. Let’s do it!”
Among the Rat Packers, Davis had grown closest with Peter Lawford, a mediocre contract-player at MGM who owed his sudden stardom to Sinatra’s friendship. As it happened, Lawford was married to Patricia Kennedy, JFK’s sister. During a fund-raiser for the senator, Lawford introduced Sammy to JFK.
When these two enthusiastically explained JFK’s position on civil rights to Frank, the leader of the pack expressed interest in meeting the man and possibly campaigning for him.
This, despite enmities between the Italian-Sicilian crime organization and the Irish, so often in the past cast in the life-theatre of crime as their police antagonists.
“You gotta meet Jack, Frank. You just gotta!”
“Alright, Sammy. If you’re so enthused, I will be too.”
The young politician and the suave singer were already emerging as key icons for the upcoming decade. Why shouldn’t they team up? Sinatra had “High Hopes” rewritten as the JFK theme song during his 1960 presidential face-off with Richard Nixon. JFK introduced Frankie to the fashionable set, people with power and prestige in the political arena. Sinatra helped Kennedy slip off for his secret walks on the wild side.
“You actually know Marilyn Monroe, Frankie?”
“Do I know her? That’s putting it mildly, kid.”
“Well ... I’d love to ‘know’ her, too.”
There were those in the Rat Pack, particularly Dean Martin, who didn’t approve. To Dino’s way of thinking JFK seduced Sinatra into becoming the Bostonian’s pimp. When he attempted, treading with caution, to broach the subject, Frank waved Dean away.
“I trust him like a brother. Once he’s in the White House, we’ll all be invited. Now, ain’t that a kick in the head?”
*
Meanwhile, things were changing
in the Mob. Charles Luciano had long since been deported from Cuba to Italy. Certain that drugs would be the next big thing, he set up a Sicilian-U.S. connection, hoping to flood America with heroin, providing a similar source of illegal funds as whiskey and beer had during Prohibition. Charley would follow this up with cocaine.
This ‘connection’ would be headquartered in Palermo, where Luciano, his health rapidly fading, lived out his final years. Meyer Lansky, who had retired to Miami Beach to play the role of a kindly grandfather, had to hurry off to Israel when the T-Men came after him once again. This left a new set of young turks fighting for Mob dominance. Vito Genovese and his crime family made a major power grab one month later. Several of his boys whacked Frank Costello, Lucky’s last significant representative. This eliminated the final stateside representative of the old days.
At Vito’s invitation, sixty-six mobsters descended on the small-town of Apalachin, New York for a summit meeting in which Genovese planned to stake out his dominance over all organized crime. Things went south when the isolated farmhouse was raided by police, sending mobsters running off in all directions. This November disaster allowed Sam Giancana to make his own influence felt. Having reached the top of the ladder in Chicago, he made the point that if that big meeting had taken place in the Windy City, no such travesty would have occurred.
As Mob members were dragged before grand juries, Gold’s words echoed in their ears. By 1959, he had become The Man. Gold was God, to Mafiosos and their small circle of friends.
Among those accepted into his sphere of influence was Frank Sinatra. However warmly Frank felt about Charley, who would pass away at age sixty-two in 1962, no question Frankie’s immediate loyalty shifted during this period. Before long, Frank would broach a subject of great seriousness and much controversy.
“Sam, can we set up a conference? This could be a biggie!”
Word had reached Sinatra, indirectly through JFK’s aged father Joseph, that his son needed a favor. Frankie’s support had been appreciated. That might not be enough to put Jack over the top. The final decision would come down to two states and, more specifically, two areas within those states. In Illinois, key districts of Chicago. Likewise, West Virginia territories.
Patsy! : The Life and Times of Lee Harvey Oswald Page 39
