Dish (9 page)

The gossip industry has always involved a struggle between journalists and the wealthy and powerful—be they politicians or movie stars—for control of information about their private lives. During the sixties, the Kennedy family, through a variety of tactics,
prevailed in that struggle. While it’s true that politicians have always tried to control what is said and written about them, the Kennedys’ success in doing so was unparalleled before or since. In fact, their willingness to retaliate against reporters who tried to probe behind the mediagenic family myth goes a great distance in explaining why the gossip industry—which had thrived in the 1930s and 1940s with several gossip columns in most major newspapers and during the 1950s with the aggressive tabloid magazines like
Confidential, Hush-Hush,
and
On The QT
—withered in the sixties. During the Kennedy administration, gossip largely disappeared from the establishment press.

The mood of the times played an important role in this development. The national optimism of the early 1960s made the public reluctant to read unflattering details of the lives of political leaders. The decline of the print media and the rise of television during the late 1950s and early 1960s—particularly in its scandal-shy early years as experienced by Mike Wallace—were also factors in the suppression of gossip published about the family. But the power of the Kennedy family and the Kennedy charisma cannot be underestimated.

It wasn’t that John Kennedy disliked gossip; to the contrary, he was obsessed with it, a connoisseur of gossip. He understood its power to make or to destroy people. He pumped his Hollywood contacts for the lowdown on celebrities; he quizzed his society friends for the latest scandals; and he regularly debriefed his friends in the press for inside information on the news business. He knew individual reporters’ strengths and weaknesses, their jealousies, even their salaries. “It is unbelievable to an outsider how interested Kennedy was in journalists and how clued in he was to their characters, their office politics, their petty rivalries,” Kennedy’s friend,
Washington Post
executive editor Ben Bradlee once wrote. “He soaked up newspaper gossip like a blotter.”

Kennedy used his knowledge of journalists to court, seduce, and co-opt them. He granted access in exchange for what amounted to partisan loyalty, and no journalist had more access or was more loyal than Bradlee. Bradlee had lived in Europe from 1951 until 1957; when he moved back to the United States and became the Washington bureau chief of
Newsweek,
he felt like
an outsider in a city in which contacts meant everything. “I had fewer politicians as friends than most of my colleagues and all of my competitors,” Bradlee admitted, “and I worried about it.”

So when Jack Kennedy and his glamorous wife Jacqueline befriended Bradlee, who with his wife Toni Meyer Bradlee lived near the young Senator in Georgetown, the journalist latched on to the politicians and clung to the relationship at the expense of his own integrity. He wrote only flattering things about Kennedy and ignored anything potentially damaging or embarrassing. Bradlee, for example, was the only journalist allowed to spend the evening of the West Virginia primary with Kennedy, which they spent watching a pornographic movie called
Private Property
about a housewife who is seduced and then raped by hoodlums. Bradlee didn’t mention the film in the otherwise highly detailed account of Kennedy’s West Virginia campaign that he wrote for
Newsweek.
He wouldn’t have written anything, he has admitted, that would have hurt Kennedy’s chances of getting into the White House. “I wanted Kennedy to win,” Bradlee once wrote. “I wanted my friend and neighbor to be President.”

After Kennedy was elected, Bradlee became the envy of the Washington media world because of his access to the President. The President had weekly dinners with Bradlee, telling him what subjects
Newsweek
should cover and which reporters it should hire. They went sailing together, and Kennedy had highly personal conversations with the journalist, confessing, for example, that he had always been embarrassed by his rather pronounced mammaries, which he called the “Fitzgerald breasts.” Bradlee told Kennedy what was in upcoming issues of
Newsweek,
and Kennedy would let Bradlee know what was going to be in future issues of
Time
magazine, where he also had contacts. Kennedy was often an off-the-record source for Bradlee—and the President even gave Bradlee items for the magazine’s gossipy “Periscope” section and would advise him on tactics for his political coverage. When Bradlee told Kennedy that
Newsweek
was working on a profile of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, whom the president expected to be his opponent in the next election, Kennedy said, “You ought to cut Rocky’s ass open a little.”

In addition to rewarding Bradlee when he was obedient, Kennedy
would punish him when he was disobedient. The journalist temporarily lost his treasured position in Kennedy’s inner circle, for example, when he was quoted in
Look
magazine discussing Kennedy’s manipulation of the press. Bradlee insisted that his comments to
Look
were supposed to have been off the record, but Kennedy banned him from the White House and refused to speak to him for months.

In the fall of 1962, however, Kennedy needed Bradlee’s services again. At the time, a story was making the rounds—and had appeared in print in some disreputable publications—that before John Kennedy married Jackie, he had been wed to a socialite named Durie Malcolm. The “other wife” story wouldn’t go away—largely because the White House refused to directly deny it. Kennedy’s spokesman, Pierre Salinger, made Bradlee a proposition: The administration would give Bradlee access to classified government documents if he would write an article for
Newsweek
discrediting the “other wife” story. But Bradlee was presented with a remarkably restrictive set of conditions: He could not copy the government papers, he could not say he saw them, and if he or
Newsweek
was sued, they would not have access to the documents again. What’s more, Salinger insisted that Kennedy would have the right to edit or kill Bradlee’s story before it ran. Bradlee—eager to get back into Kennedy’s graces—agreed. After the article appeared, when any reporters pursued the story, the White House referred them to
Newsweek.
Bradlee’s article, Kennedy later told him, essentially killed the “other wife” story.
*

Bradlee later insisted that he—unlike just about every other reporter in Washington—was unaware of Kennedy’s infidelities. He even claimed that he didn’t know that Kennedy was having an affair with his sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer. “Extracurricular screwing was one of the few subjects that never came up” in his conversations with Kennedy, Bradlee later wrote, “and in those days reporters did not feel compelled to conduct full FBI field investigations about a politician friend.”

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.