The Dark Side of Camelot
Page 14
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 i
s 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."