Dish: The Inside Story on the World of Gossip

by Jeannette Walls

  In addition to Bradlee, Kennedy also befriended New York Times publisher Orvil Dryfoos and the Times’s Washington bureau chief, James “Scotty” Reston. As a result, neither the Times nor the Washington Post would print Kennedy’s dirty little secrets—and in the early 1960s, those two newspapers set the tone for the rest of the establishment media. In early 1963, when a New York Times reporter told his editor that he had observed Angie Dickinson repeatedly visiting President Kennedy’s New York hotel suite, the editor said, “No story there.” Once, when a reporter suggested looking into the Durie Malcolm story, Reston declared, “I won’t have the New York Times muckraking the President of the United States!”

  “Even if we had written about the girlfriends, our editors would never have published the information,” observed Maxine Cheshire, the society writer for the Washington Post, who was as close as the paper had to a gossip columnist. “That simply was not the way one covered the presidency at that time.”*

  The Kennedys’ sex life was not the only topic off limits. On occasion, the journalists whom Kennedy had befriended refrained from printing information they’d learned about questions of national security. The New York Times’s Reston would tell a story about how once, while covering the summit conference in Vienna in 1961, Kennedy came into his hotel room after a meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. The President sat down on his couch. “Khrushchev raped me,” the President told Reston. Kennedy felt that the Soviet leader didn’t respect him because of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. “I have to show him we’re not gutless,” Kennedy said to the journalist. “The only way to do it is to send troops into Vietnam…. I’ve got to do it, Scotty, it’s the only way.”

  “Reston told me this story at a dinner party hosted by [Times writer] Steve Roberts,” says former Times reporter Sidney Zion. “I couldn’t believe my ears. I said, ‘You’ve got to write that story, dammit.’ There were all sorts of wild conspiracies going on as to why we were in Vietnam—that it was Johnson’s fault, that it was all started by the arms manufacturers—and here was the simple, pure truth as told by the President himself. I was shocked. I said, ‘You’ve got to write that story. You owe it to the readers.’ There were other reporters from the Times at the dinner, and they were kicking me under the table trying to make me shut up. Kennedy was so popular among the press that betraying him by printing the truth was absolutely unthinkable.”

  The same held true for the President’s wife. When Cheshire was working on a series of articles about how Jacqueline Kennedy was putting pressure on people to donate money toward redecorating the White House, the president called Post publisher Phil Graham. “Maxine Cheshire is making my wife cry,” he complained. “Listen, just listen. Jackie is on the extension!” The President’s wife got on the phone and, sure enough, she was sobbing so loudly that Graham could plainly hear her. Several subsequent pieces in the series were killed, including a well-documented story on illegal kickbacks that the Kennedys had given one of their suppliers.

  Jackie Kennedy was openly disdainful of reporters like Cheshire. “My relationship with Jackie Kennedy was never one of even strained civility,” Cheshire later wrote. “In my opinion, she seemed to be acting as if she lived in a monarchy rather than a democracy.” Nonetheless, her editors refused to allow her to portray the first lady’s darker side. Once, when a reporter for another paper was interviewing the First Lady, who was hugely pregnant at the time, Mrs. Kennedy nonchalantly stripped down to nothing but her maternity panties in the reporter’s presence. “The woman’s own paper had cut the item from her story and stashed the deleted material in a vault,” according to Cheshire. She confirmed the incident and wrote it up, but Washington Post editors killed her story. The only stories they would publish were so relentlessly flattering that some of her competitors scolded her for doting on the First Lady.

  When the Kennedys couldn’t count on the loyalty of journalists, they regularly resorted to the tactics they had used against Mike Wallace.

  At times, however, they did more than merely apply pressure to reporters’ publishers. In June 1963, for example, the New York Journal-American ran a story by Don Frasca and James Horan saying that one of the “biggest names in American politics” had an affair with Suzy Chang, the British model and actress. People in political and media circles knew that the unnamed politician was John Kennedy; writers Frasca and Horan also told colleagues that they had proof he had had group sex with a nineteen-year-old London call girl named Marie Novotny and two other prostitutes. After the article appeared, Robert Kennedy told executives at the Journal that they could expect to be hit with an antitrust suit—which, as Attorney General, was under his jurisdiction—if the paper printed any more stories that could embarrass the President. The editors told their reporters to back off.

  Anyone who tried to expose such heavy-handed tactics was also punished. While Look was preparing a story on Kennedy’s manipulation of the press, Robert Kennedy and two burly associates showed up unannounced at editor William Arthur’s office. “They sought to suppress the article by making a series of threats,” according to journalist Herman Klurfield who for years worked as Walter Winchell’s ghostwriter. The editor went ahead with the article, but after it appeared, anyone who cooperated with the story was denied access to the White House.

  Then there was the peculiar fate of Igor Cassini. When Kennedy took office, Igor Cassini was one of the nation’s best-read gossip columnists, with an estimated audience of 20 million. He wrote for the Hearst newspapers under the pseudonym Cholly Knickerbocker, which he took from the famed Maury Paul after Paul died in 1942. Cassini had long been close to the Kennedys. His wife, Charlene, had grown up near the Kennedy’s Palm Beach house. He was Jackie Kennedy’s favorite gossip columnist, his brother, Oleg Cassini, was Jackie’s dress designer, and both brothers were friends with patriarch Joe Kennedy.* When Kennedy was elected, Cassini was at the top of his profession and, he thought, invincible. “The world was my oyster,” he said. He had hired a diligent young assistant from Texas named Liz Smith, who often wrote much of his column. He opened an exclusive night spot, Le Club, the Jet Setters version of the Stork Club.* He had his own TV show on NBC, and hired as an assistant, a woman who was dating his friend, Roy Cohn. Her name was Barbara Walters.

  Oleg was trusted by the Kennedys for his discretion and devotion. Igor, however, wasn’t discreet. “My dilemma was that private lives were my stock in trade,” Igor said. The President constantly complained to Oleg about what his “damned brother” had written. “He’s basically a newspaperman,” Kennedy fumed. “He can’t keep a secret.”

  “It was my problem,” Cassini later wrote. “I wrote about my friends and crowd. I always wrote everything I knew. It got me into trouble.” His trouble with the First Family began in September 1962, when he wrote a revealing article for Good Housekeeping, “How the Kennedy Marriage Has Fared.” Although the article ostensibly praised Jack and Jackie’s devotion to each other, it also included some details that at the time were quite shocking, including tidbits about how lonely Jackie was during John’s frequent absences, how Jackie didn’t mix well with the Kennedy clan, and how her sisters-in-law teased and called her “The Queen”—mimicking her breathy, little-girl voice. It also reported a rumor—which Igor later said had been told to him as fact by Joe Kennedy—that a fed-up Jackie was ready to leave her philandering husband but that Joe Kennedy offered her $1 million to stay married. The Kennedys were so infuriated by the article and by Igor’s other lapses that the columnist was temporarily banned from the White House. But the punishment didn’t end there. Robert Kennedy began investigating him.

  Cassini had a sideline business—he ran a public relations firm, Martial, and would regularly plug its clients in his column. Cassini insisted that his bosses knew about his double dealing and that it was even sanctioned by tradition. “My predecessor Maury Paul— and he is not the only one to have done so—used to take checks from socialites,” according to Cassini, “aspiring or real,
in payment either for what he wrote or for what he knew but graciously did not say.”

  Cassini’s blatantly biased plugs may have represented unethical journalism, but they weren’t illegal. The incident for which Robert Kennedy indicted him—acting as an unregistered agent of the Dominican Republic—was illegal. It was also arranged by the Kennedys themselves.

  It began one day when Cassini mentioned to Joseph Kennedy that a friend—playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, who had been the ambassador to the Dominican Republic—was worried that the country was on the brink of a Cubalike coup. Joe Kennedy passed the information along to his son John Kennedy, and the President asked Cassini to make a diplomatic trip to the Dominican Republic. “With all the billions this country spends on its State Department and Central Intelligence Agency,” noted the New York Times, “it will be interesting to learn why the White House turned to a society columnist as the initiator of a special mission to the Dominican Republic.”

  The incident was also seized on by reporter Peter Maas, who wrote an exposé of Cassini in the Saturday Evening Post. A month later, Attorney General Robert Kennedy indicted Igor Cassini as an unregistered agent of the Dominican Republic.* “I was prepared to fight the charges, but the legal bills were very high and I was running out of money,” Igor later explained. “Robert Kennedy sent word through my brother that I should plead no contest. He said, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine.’ I had done nothing illegal. He promised everything would go back to being the way it was.”

  Igor was forced to resign the Cholly Knickerbocker column—it was taken over by Aileen “Suzy Knickerbocker” Mehle. As a result, he lost most of his public relations clients. He also lost his status in society. Igor’s brother Oleg was still invited to the White House, where he was teased by the Kennedy sisters who would say, “Bobby’s going to put your brother in jail.”

  “They’ve got everything on you,” Oleg once told his brother in a frantic phone call. “They don’t care whether you’re innocent or not. Bobby Kennedy has told me he’ll put you in jail for ten years!

  “That self-righteous bastard!” Igor replied. “I know the redhead he’s sleeping with!” Igor claimed that he later discovered that Bobby Kennedy was taping the call.

  Igor’s wife, Charlene Wrightsman, had been a longtime friend of the Kennedys, but she had become increasingly depressed over her husband’s indictment. The couple became such pariahs that her socially prominent father, Charles, and his wife Jayne Wrightsman, wouldn’t let Charlene or Igor visit when they were entertaining the Kennedys. On March 31, 1963, Charlene wrote a desperate letter to her former friend and neighbor John Kennedy:

  Dear Mr. President:

  I have hesitated writing you before, but now I feel I must appeal to you…. We always considered ourselves good friends of the Kennedys and [Igor] still cannot understand why the son of a man whom he considered one of his closest friends for 17 years, and who so often advised him in all matters, should now be determined to bringing him down to total ruin…. I hope, Jack, that you will not resent my writing you this letter. We’ve been friends for so many years, and now in this terrible moment in which our family needs help, I appeal to you.

  Charlene waited for a reply, but it never came. Several months later, at age thirty-eight, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.* “I was ruined,” Cassini said. “I lost my job. I lost my wife. Nothing was ever the same again. The Kennedys, who were supposed to be my friends, ruined me because I became an embarrassment to them.”

  Such tactics help explain why Jack Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe was left untouched by the press. The relationship was common knowledge among gossip columnists. In early 1962, Monroe confided to her good friend and confidante, gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, that she was having an affair with “The Prez.”

  “Are you surprised?” Marilyn giggled.

  “No, nothing you do surprises me,” Skolsky sighed. Skolsky, who wrote a Hollywood column for Hearst, had been friends with Monroe for more than fifteen years. The actress complained to him how difficult it was to have private time with Kennedy—when they got together at Peter Lawford’s beach house, she said, they had to leave the light on or the Secret Service men took it as a signal to burst in and “rescue” the President. Monroe told the gossip columnist that she expected to be able to spend more time with him in the White House sometime soon. Skolsky, however, never mentioned the affair in his column. “In a society that boasts of freedom of the press, no reporter, including myself, dared to write about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with John F. Kennedy,” Skolsky once admitted. “I accept my share of the blame. I also confess that I still find it grim to speculate on what might have happened to me if I had tried to write about this romance in my column.”

  Skolsky wasn’t the only reporter afraid to print what he knew. “If I dared print but one-half of one percent of all I know about these people, I’d be run out of Hollywood on a rail in five minutes flat!” said Hollywood columnist Ruth Waterbuy. Peter Lawford’s mother gave Hedda Hopper an interview in which she complained about Kennedy and his extramarital affairs. Hopper never published it.

  Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was among the most fearless writers in the country, was getting increasingly obsessed about Kennedy’s relationship with Monroe. She used to regale her friends with tales of Kennedy’s indiscretions.

  “Why don’t you write that?” one asked.

  “I couldn’t possibly,” Dorothy said. “Nobody would.” But as Kennedy’s philandering started getting more brazen, Kilgallen took to hinting at it in her column. When Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to the President in May 1962, the two danced together five times. “Marilyn Monroe is cooking in the sex appeal department,” Kilgallen wrote not long afterward. “She has appeared vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman. A handsome gentleman with a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday—so don’t write her off.”

  After the item appeared, Kennedy, deciding that on this occasion flattery would work better than intimidation, invited Kilgallen and her eight-year-old son Kerry, for a private tour of the White House. The President personally greeted Dorothy and her son, and fussed shamelessly over young Kerry: gave him a ballpoint pen with the Presidential seal on it, and pinned a gold PT-109 pin on the school tie of the beaming boy. Kilgallen stopped writing blind items about Kennedy.

  But the Kennedys did persecute and discredit one news source whom they were afraid might disclose Jack’s affair with Monroe and Bobby’s unofficial, and secret, trip to her apartment in the wake of her suicide: Fred Otash, the private investigator and former Confidential informer.

  Early in the morning on August 4, 1962, Fred Otash was jolted by a call from Peter Lawford. The actor was upset, Otash remembered, he seemed nervous or drunk, maybe. “I have a big problem,” Lawford said. “I need to come over and see you.” Otash invited the Kennedy in-law to drop by his Laurel Avenue office.

  Otash had once been the most powerful, feared private detective in Hollywood, but business had never been quite the same for him since Confidential had folded. Otash had known Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, when he was a vice cop for the L.A.P.D. (Lawford’s name, according to Otash, was in the black book of almost every high-class prostitute in Los Angeles.) When Otash became a private detective and started working as a source for Confidential, he would get new clients—his list included Howard Hughes, Judy Garland, Edward G. Robinson, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis—by promising to keep them out of the scandal magazine. One day, Lawford called him. “Fred, I know Confidential has something coming out on me,” Lawford told him. “Now that I’m married to Pat Kennedy, I really can’t afford this horse-shit.” If Otash would get the story killed, Lawford would become a source for him. The story was duly killed and Lawford duly began passing Otash information on other Hollywood celebrities.

  Coincidentally, another Otash client was Marilyn Monroe. According to Otash, the actress thought she could protect herself from any possible retali
ation from the Kennedy family over her affair with Jack if she had her own evidence of her conversations with him and his associates. So, according to Otash, at the recommendation of their mutual friend gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, Monroe hired him to bug her. Otash not only tapped Marilyn’s phone for her, he gave her a recording device for her purse, as well as one that could be hidden in her wristwatch.

  Then in 1961, according to Otash, he was approached by the Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, an old client, who said he was being investigated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and according to Otash, the union boss wanted a little something to use to fight back. Otash knew that Jack Kennedy had seen Monroe at Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house. With Lawford’s approval, according to Otash, he arranged for the actor’s sound man, Bernie Spindel, to wire the house where Kennedy and Monroe would meet. According to Otash, he actually acquired several tapes of these sessions. He passed them on to Hoffa but they disappeared.

  Lawford arrived about 2 A.M., “half crocked and half nervous,” Otash recalled. “[Lawford] said he had just left Monroe and she was dead and that Bobby had been there earlier,” Otash later told the Los Angeles Times. “He said they got Bobby out of the city and back to Northern California and would I go on out there and arrange to do anything to remove anything incriminating from the house.”*

  According to Otash, Lawford said Bobby Kennedy, who was also reportedly sleeping with Monroe, had been to her house the previous evening and the two fought over their relationship. “According to Lawford, he had called [Monroe] and she had said to him that she was passed around like a piece of meat,” Otash said. “She’d had it. She didn’t want Bobby to use her anymore.”