Peter Lawford

by James Spada

  Without missing a beat, Pat replied, “And I’m the million dollar baby.”

  12 Lee Remick denied having had an affair with Peter Lawford.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Early in the evening of April 28, 1961, Judy Campbell sat on the edge of the bathtub in her suite at the Ambassador East Hotel in Chicago and waited. In the next room, the President of the United States was meeting with Sam Giancana, and Judy wanted to give them some privacy. She stayed in the bathroom for about twenty minutes; when the meeting was over and both men were preparing to leave, Jack Kennedy apologized to Judy for not being able to remain with her. He was on his way, he said, to address a Democratic Party dinner.

  After Kennedy’s election as President, he had continued both his sporadic affair with Judy Campbell and his business association with Sam Giancana. Now, the assistance that the Mafia capo di tutti capi (boss of all bosses) could offer Kennedy was far more sinister than a few stolen votes. The April 28 meeting in Judy Campbell’s hotel room followed by just eleven days a major humiliation for the young Kennedy administration: the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion, a botched attempt by CIA-backed Cuban nationalists to oust the tiny country’s Communist dictator, Fidel Castro. President Kennedy told the nation that he took full responsibility for the failure of the operation.

  He didn’t intend to fail the next time. Ridding America of the threat of a Soviet-controlled government ninety miles from Miami Beach became a major priority of the Kennedy White House. To achieve that goal, Operation Mongoose was put into effect: a White House-directed undercover effort to oust Castro by any means available. These included sabotage, the fomentation of dissent, guerrilla warfare, propaganda — even assassination.

  Testimony before the Senate Committee on Intelligence in 1975 by a number of Kennedy administration officials, including White House aide Richard Goodwin and two former directors of the CIA, John McCone and Richard Helms, confirmed that “liquidation” of Fidel Castro had been discussed at top-secret meetings about Operation Mongoose. CIA attempts to kill Castro, his brother Raul, and Che Guevara by poison pills and exploding cigars had failed or been aborted by April 1961. In June, Los Angeles-Las Vegas capo mafioso Johnny Roselli organized an assassination team to ambush the Cuban dictator. That effort also failed.

  Whether the President had direct knowledge of these attempts on Castro’s life has been a matter of speculation for years. The Intelligence Committee’s hearings, while revealing that a lax moral climate prevailed in the Kennedy administration, were not able to say definitively whether the U.S. government’s murderous exercises were directly sanctioned by the President. But John F. Kennedy was not a leader who distanced himself from his administration’s activities. It is likely that he was aware of the CIA efforts to kill Castro and of the recruitment of mob figures to carry out the plans. Now, with the revelations of Judy Campbell, it appears that Kennedy personally orchestrated at least some aspects of both these elements of Operation Mongoose.

  Campbell, in a People magazine interview in 1988, said that she arranged ten meetings between Kennedy and Giancana and acted as their courier, carrying plain manila nine-by-twelve envelopes among Kennedy, Giancana, and Roselli: “There was no writing on them . . . nothing. They were sealed but not taped. They weighed about as much as a weekly magazine and felt as if they contained papers.” Campbell said she never considered opening them to see what was inside.

  Campbell, who had solid documentation of her travels and was well represented on White House telephone logs, claimed never to have pondered the implications of what she was doing. She was, she said, a naive twenty-six-year-old who didn’t know exactly what business Sam Giancana was in. “Sam was one of the nicest, kindest people I knew,” she said. “I didn’t know he was a murderer. I wouldn’t have believed it.” She added that she didn’t figure out what she had gotten herself involved with until she was called before the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975. “It finally dawned on me that I was probably helping Jack orchestrate the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro with the help of the Mafia.”

  It is clear that Jack Kennedy, who was gaining a reputation for recklessness, was playing a particularly dangerous game. And his utilization of mob figures didn’t stop with international intrigue; on at least one occasion he accepted their help in extricating himself from a potential scandal.

  Early in 1961, Peter Fairchild, a restaurateur, set out to sue his wife, a starlet named Judy Meredith, for divorce, citing adultery. Fairchild hired Fred Otash to assemble evidence that Judy had had sexual affairs with a number of men in Hollywood. When the complaint was prepared for submission to the court, the men were listed as “Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, Frank Sinatra, etc. etc. etc.”

  Word got out that one of the et ceteras was President Kennedy, and before long Otash got a call from Johnny Roselli. He wanted to meet with Otash at the Brown Derby restaurant in Hollywood — “at the request of the attorney general.” Warily, Otash agreed.

  “I’m sitting there with Johnny Roselli,” Otash recalled, “and two FBI men are covering the meeting. Roselli says to me, ‘Listen, Otash, you’ve got yourself a problem. You’re in trouble. You’re fucking around with the White House here. What’s this shit that you’re gonna name Jack Kennedy as a correspondent in Judy Meredith’s divorce case? How can you name the President of the United States in a divorce case?’

  “I said to him, ‘He fucked my client’s wife, that’s how! Who the fuck is that cocksucker! Who are you representing, anyway?’13

  “He said to me, ‘I’m representing the Kennedys.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I couldn’t believe my ears — here’s Roselli, a guy who’s a fucking mobster, intervening on behalf of the White House. I used to have the prick under surveillance. I used to put guys like him in jail, and now he’s representing the President. I’m sitting there thinking, Wait a minute. What is this bullshit?”

  There were other meetings, at least one of which Sam Giancana attended. Roselli asked Otash what it would take to “straighten things out.” Otash replied, “Very simple. Judy wants a hundred thousand dollars. My client isn’t gonna give her shit, because I’m gonna name Frank Sinatra as a guy who was fucking her, Sammy Davis as a guy who was fucking her, Dean Martin as a guy who was fucking her, Jerry Lewis, Jack Kennedy. My client has a real case for divorce, and he ain’t giving her a dime. Why don’t you have the Rat Pack throw a charity show, give Judy the money, and the case will go away.”

  By the morning of the court hearing on the Fairchild divorce, nothing had been resolved. “I went into that courtroom,” Otash says, “prepared with the documents to have the complaint amended and name John Kennedy. I’m in the judge’s chambers and I’ve got all the papers and all of a sudden somebody hands a check to Judy’s lawyers. And the matter is settled. She got what she wanted. She sure as hell didn’t get it from her husband, my client. She got it from somebody else.” Giancana, Roselli, and their fellow mobsters understandably expected that with their various assistances to the Kennedy administration, the FBI would turn a blind eye to their illegalities. Bureau wiretaps in December 1961 recorded this exchange between Giancana and Roselli concerning the mob donations to the Kennedy campaign:

  ROSELLI: Sinatra’s got it in his head that they [the Kennedys] are going to be faithful to him [and, by extension, the mob].

  GIANCANA: In other words then, the donation that was made . . .

  ROSELLI: That’s what I was talking about.

  GIANCANA: In other words, if I ever get a speeding ticket, none of those fuckers would know me?

  ROSELLI: You told that right, buddy.

  Giancana hadn’t told it right at all. Not only did J. Edgar Hoover’s men not lessen their campaign against the Mafia, they dramatically increased it. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had set as one of the highest priorities of his department the destruction of what he called “the enemy within,” and said, “I’d like to be remembered as the guy who broke the Mafia.” Kennedy authorized surveillance, harass
ment, and wiretaps of Giancana, Roselli, and dozens of other mob figures.

  On February 27, 1962, Hoover sent Robert Kennedy a memorandum that outlined some of the information the Bureau’s surveillance had revealed: Judy Campbell had made phone calls to both Sam Giancana and the White House. The White House calls, Hoover told Bobby, were apparently being made to the President’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln. Bobby undoubtedly told his brother about the memo, but the relationship between Jack, Judy, and Giancana didn’t stop. Hoover, informed that Campbell’s calls to the White House had not ceased since his memo to Bobby Kennedy, met with the President on March 22 to tell him that his department was aware of his affair with Campbell and of her relationship with Giancana.

  Kennedy was furious. He intensely disliked Hoover, the sixty-six- year-old, staunchly right-wing self-styled protector of American values who had been entrenched as either assistant director or director of the FBI for forty years. Jack looked upon Hoover as a dangerous personal foe; when Judy Campbell told Jack that she was being followed by FBI men, he told her, “Ignore them. It’s just part of Hoover’s vendetta against me.” Now, the director had information he could use as an ace in the hole if Jack and Bobby tried to oust him as head of the Bureau. Still, the President did not sever his relationship with either Judy Campbell or Sam Giancana. When Judy expressed concern about the FBI surveillance of Giancana, Jack told her, “Don’t worry. Sam works for us.”

  The stepped-up FBI campaign against organized crime infuriated mob leaders across the country, who accused Jack Kennedy of betrayal — he had accepted their help and then allowed them to be harassed. They made repeated attempts to convince the administration to “lay off,” often through Frank Sinatra, who begged Peter to “convince Bobby to lay off Sam.” Eager to please Sinatra, Peter agreed. He flew to Washington and met with Bobby in his Justice Department office.

  The attorney general listened stonily as his brother-in-law pleaded Giancana’s and Sinatra’s case. Peter reminded Bobby of their contributions to the Kennedy campaign and asked if he couldn’t just ease up a little bit. To no avail. By now his anticrime campaign had become an obsession with the attorney general, whether or not his brother was in bed with the mob. And Peter Lawford may have been the worst choice to plead the mob’s case — Bobby and Peter had little use for each other, and both of them knew it. The essence of Bobby’s response was that Peter should mind his own business.

  Peter went back to Sinatra, and Sinatra went back to Giancana, with a wholly unsatisfying report. The mob gradually came to realize that Sinatra was not as tight with the Kennedys as he had boasted he was. An FBI wiretap of a December 6, 1961, conversation between Giancana and Roselli revealed their growing anger with Frank’s unfulfilled promises.

  GIANCANA: One minute he tells me this and then he tells me that and then the last time I talked to him was at the hotel in Florida a month before he left, and he said, “Don’t worry about it. If I can’t talk to the old man [Joe Kennedy], I’m gonna talk to the man [President Kennedy].” One minute he says he’s talked to Robert, the next minute he says he hasn’t talked to him. So, he never did talk to him. It’s a lot of shit. . . . Why lie to me? I haven’t got that coming.

  ROSELLI: I can imagine. . . . Tsk, tsk, tsk . . . if he can’t deliver, I want him to tell me: “John, the load’s too heavy.”

  GIANCANA: That’s all right. At least then you know how to work. You won’t let your guard down then, know what I mean? . . . When he says he’s gonna do a guy a little favor, I don’t give a shit how long it takes. He’s got to give you a little favor.

  With Sinatra failing to come through for them, the mob’s pressure on Peter became more direct. It was around this time that Milt Ebbins was sitting with Peter in Jimmy Durante’s dressing room at the Copacabana, where Jimmy and Peter were appearing together. “In walks Jimmy,” Ebbins recalled, “with two of the meanest-looking guys you’ve ever seen in your life. With these big-brimmed hats. Jimmy said, ‘Peter, I want you to meet my friends, Louie and Joe.’

  “Peter looked up at them. I thought they were going to kill us. Poor Jimmy was scared to death. One guy says, ‘Hey, Lawford! Can’t you get Bobby Kennedy to lay off us, for crissakes? You’re his brother- in-law. Tell him to lay off!’

  “Peter started to stammer and I told them that Bobby would probably work twice as hard against them if Peter went to plead their case. The guy said, ‘Maybe he’s right,’ and they left.

  “Peter said, ‘What was that?’ Then he got tough and said, ‘Boy, I was watching those guys!’ I said, ‘You were watching them? They’d chew you up and spit you out.’

  “Jimmy Durante said, ‘I’m really sorry. When those guys come in, forget it, you do what they want. I’m sorry.’”

  The feeling on Ebbins’s part that “they were going to kill us” wasn’t that far off the mark. In another wiretapped conversation, Johnny Formosa, one of Giancana’s henchmen, told his boss, “Let’s show ’em. Let’s show those asshole Hollywood fruitcakes that they can’t get away with it as if nothing’s happened. Let’s hit Sinatra. Or I could whack out a couple of those other guys. Lawford and that Martin, and I could take the nigger and put his other eye out.”

  Other mafiosi, the FBI discovered, had made threats on the life of the President as well, a fact that J. Edgar Hoover never revealed to the Kennedy brothers. But both Bobby and Jack did feel the heat of possible public disclosure of the administration’s ties to organized crime in March 1962. Rather than end those ties, however, Bobby decided that the best course of action was to distance the presidency from the most visible link between the government and the mob: Frank Sinatra.

  SINATRA HAD REVELED IN his relationship with the Kennedy White House. For months after the inauguration, he had insisted that friends listen — over and over again — to a recording of John Kennedy’s tribute to him at the gala. He loved it when Hollywood moguls asked him, “What do you hear from the White House?” Like Peter, if the President called him while he had influential visitors, Frank would feign nonchalance and boast that the President always sought his advice.

  Just as he had in Paris when he thought Peter and Pierre Salinger had excluded him from a conversation, Sinatra would become enraged whenever he felt slighted by the Kennedys. Again and again he renounced his friendship with the President’s family, then curried favor to get back in their good graces. Early in 1961, Bill Asher was preparing a tape of the inaugural gala for presentation on NBC television. “It was never aired,” Asher related, “because of equal-time considerations or something, but in the process of editing it we decided to put a frame around it, and Frank agreed to have us shoot some new footage of him to include at the beginning and the end.

  “Then there was some rift between Frank and the Kennedys, and Joe Kennedy called me and said, ‘I want you to take Frank Sinatra out of every inch of that show — I don’t want his face anywhere in it.’ It wasn’t easy — Frank was a big part of that show — but I managed to do it.”

  Ten days later Joe Kennedy called Asher and told him to put Frank back in. Asher did. Then he called again and told the director to take Frank out. Finally, Asher had had it, and told Joe: “Mr. Kennedy, you might not be aware of this, but I work for a living, and I can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry.”

  Finally the souvenir tape of the gala was complete — with Sinatra in it — and Joe Kennedy asked Peter to bring it to Palm Beach so that he could see it. Peter and Milt Ebbins flew down and showed Joe the film, and when Sinatra found out about it he exploded.

  “Frank went crazy,” Ebbins recalled. “He thought this was some kind of big premiere for the film of the inaugural, and that he should have been invited. I tried to explain that it was a spur-of-the-moment private showing for Joe Kennedy. He screamed at me, ‘Then why the fuck were you there, Ebbins?’ I said, ‘I go everywhere with Peter, Frank; you know that.’ Well, he stayed mad a long time over that one.”

  Frank got over it when he was invited aboard the Kennedy yacht Honey F
itz in September. He arrived in Hyannis Port with a case of wine, a dozen bottles of champagne, and two loaves of Italian bread. The presidential flag flying over the Kennedy compound revealed that John F. Kennedy was there. Frank regaled the other guests, who included Peter and Pat, Ted Kennedy, and the Rubirosas, with stories of his audience with Pope John XXIII in Rome. “All your friends in Chicago are Italian, too,” Peter said, laughing.

  It wasn’t just Sinatra’s ego that thrived on his association with the First Family; his pocketbook benefited too. In 1957, Frank had signed a three-million-dollar deal with ABC for a television series (one that was occasionally aired opposite The Thin Man). To save Frank money on his taxes, the fee was to be deferred over several years. When the show was canceled, the Internal Revenue Service disallowed the deferral and insisted that Sinatra pay taxes on the money as though it had all been paid to him in the first year.

  The IRS hit Frank hard, assessing daily penalties and interest on the additional amount they were demanding, and Frank was unable to pay the taxes. Frantic, he asked for Joe Kennedy’s help. Peter set up an appointment with his father-in-law for Frank and his attorney, Mickey Rudin. Joe knew how to bend, work with, and circumvent many of the tax laws, and he gave Sinatra advice that reduced the tax bill to sixty-five thousand dollars, saving him over a million dollars.

  But by 1962 Sinatra’s friendship with the President’s family had become a public embarrassment for the administration. Above and beyond Frank’s mob ties, which might explode in the Kennedys’ faces at any minute, they soon came to realize that Sinatra was a lightning rod for criticism. There was so much negative publicity about the yacht trip that Pierre Salinger felt compelled to deny that Frank had been in Hyannis Port as a guest of the President. Rather, he said, Frank had come to review Bill Asher’s souvenir recording of the inaugural gala with Joe Kennedy.