Mr. S (16 page)

I also sat, or babysat, him many times when he got high. He talked about sex, about celebrity body parts, almost as much as his brother-in-law. To Jack’s delight, Peter had actually
been
with some of the stars he described, hence tales of Lana Turner’s perfect breasts, Judy Garland’s perfect blow jobs, Judy Holliday’s perfect ass, before she got fat. For all his stars, however, Peter said flat-out that he preferred whores. I can see how he and JFK bonded, over pussy. Peter had a special thing for black girls, not mulattos like Lena Horne but jet-black pure African types, who were not seen on the silver screen in those days nor were readily available through Hollywood madams. It was often back to Watts for this sex safari, and again, I was Peter’s guide to the jungle. Call me Bwana. Sometimes Peter would get paranoid that I would “rat him out” to Mr. S. I wasn’t that stupid. For Mr. S hookers were a way of life, but drugs were a guaranteed way of death. My job was to keep Mr. S’s friends happy, not to pass judgment, and never, ever to spy. In all my years with him, Frank Sinatra never once asked me any gossipy questions about guests of his I was supposedly looking after, other than Ava Gardner. And that wasn’t really gossip, that was endless love. Even though Peter would have a catty remark about everybody, he never spoke ill either about any
Kennedy or about Mr. S. I guess he was smart enough to know where his bread was buttered.

On the subject of hookers, on his visits to Palm Springs, Joe Kennedy, who expected to be serviced
gratis
courtesy of his host, took a liking to one of Mr. S’s favorite call girls of the time, a wholesomely suburban Irish Catholic dark beauty named Judy Campbell. She was the perfect Eisenhower era pinup of the girl next door. That she charged for her wholesomeness was beside the point. Money was incidental to Mr. S and friends. Judy would go on to American infamy as the fourth corner of a quadrangle that included Sinatra, Giancana, and JFK. But before the son took a bite of this poison apple, the father was there first. Talk about chips off the old block. In her memoirs, Judy Campbell was one lady who did protest way too much. She insisted that she never took a penny from either JFK or Mr. Sam, that she traveled to Washington, Chicago, Vegas, Miami, wherever they were, planes, trains, luxury hotels, all at her own expense, because she
cared
so much about them. Barbara Hutton or Doris Duke could have barely afforded Judy’s travel bills. No, Judy was a major player. What made her so special is that she was a brilliant actress in not seeming in any way like what she really was.

Frank Sinatra had a terrible weakness for sweet Irish rose, convent-school types. I think those were the girls from the right side of the tracks in Hoboken who would never stoop to Italian hoods like he was thrown in with. Mia Farrow was precisely the type, minus the right amount of skin on her bones. Ava Gardner was a voluptuous, glamorized version of the type, too. She had Scotch-Irish blood, and would have been raised in her father’s Catholicism had the local Carolina bigots not equated “papists,” as the Catholics were reviled, with blacks and Jews on their hate parade. How did Judy Campbell go from the convent to Sinatra’s den of iniquity? It wasn’t that unusual. Although she was in her early twenties, she was running from a bad
marriage to a failed actor (What else is new in L.A.?) and, before that had run from a broken family that used to have some money, had given her the taste for the good life, and then lost it. So, as with so many other newly poor, downwardly mobile girls next door in a city that makes you crazy for all the material goodies you can’t afford, Judy found herself a secret-agent madam and began turning some discreet tricks. If there was a new trickster on the block, Jimmy Van Heusen would sniff her out. That’s how she got to Mr. S.

Aside from her looks, which combined a little Liz Taylor with a little Jackie Kennedy (a little Jackie would be a dangerous thing, as we would soon see), Judy had grown up in New Jersey and had thwarted dreams of being a singer. She knew all Frank’s songs, and she knew a lot more about music than the typical call girl. Mr. S liked to
talk
to his hookers, and Judy spoke his language. He may have been one of the best johns in history, because he treated his whores like ladies. I’d feed them, buy gifts for them on his orders, pick them up, drive them home, take care of the money for him (a top girl would get a hundred dollars a night back then). And, if they were good, and Judy was supposed to be very good, he’d invite them back and pass them through to his special friends. It was like a hot tip on an undiscovered restaurant or hidden resort. I may have given the money, typically inside a Hallmark “thank you” greeting card, to Judy at the beginning, but once she graduated to the inner circle, she stopped charging Frank as a commission for the introductions. Sometimes Mr. S would treat his call girls so well that they forgot, as they would love to forget, how they met him to begin with. Judy may have been that way at first. But when she started making the rounds, to Eddie Fisher, and Sammy Davis, and “Cheap Pete” Lawford, who I’m sure was the one guy who got away without paying, then Mr. Ambassador and Mr. Sam and Mr. President, she knew damn well that she was not the innocent “goodtime girl” she later pretended to have been at the time.

Given that Old Joe had had a long, famous affair with Gloria Swanson and that Young Jack would have a short, famous one with Marilyn Monroe, as well as flings with other stars, I was surprised that either guy would have bothered for more than a session or two with Judy Campbell. But I guess the Irish boys liked coming home to roost. Mr. Sam’s “official” girlfriend, singer Phyllis McGuire, was a similar wholesome type. Her father was a minister in Ohio. Phyllis, who with her sisters had the huge hit “Sugartime,” was definitely a girl-next-door type in the Judy mold, though according to Sammy Cahn, who had the best way with words of all the Sinatra friends, Judy’s mold was penicillin.

As much as I disliked his father, that’s how much I was crazy about John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He was handsome and funny and naughty and as irreverent as Dean Martin. “What do colored people want, George?” he asked me the first time he visited Palm Springs, not long after Mr. S and Peter Lawford became bosom buddies.

“I don’t know, Mr. Senator.”

“Jack, George. Jack.”

“What do
you
want? Jack?” I asked.

“I want to fuck every woman in Hollywood,” he said with a big leering grin.

“With a campaign promise like that you can’t lose, sir.”

“You’re my man. Jack.”

“No, it’s George, sir.”

“Who’s on third?”

“Pardon me, sir?

“Jack, goddamn it. Call me Jack. Or I’ll send you back to Mississippi.”

“Louisiana, Jack. They eat Catholics in Mississippi. They hate you worse than me.”

And that was the way we’d go on, giving each other shit all the
time, no master-servant games. He and Mr. S got along great. They had everything in common, charisma, talent, power. They were about the same age, but JFK seemed much younger. He was handsomer, sportier, wittier, vastly more cultured. After all, like his dad, he was a Harvard Man.
And
a war hero.
And
a Pulitzer Prize-winning author.
And
a senator. Mr. S, dropout 4-F Hoboken Man that he was, stood in awe of JFK and his Ivy slickness, his heroics, his national acclaim. Yet JFK was far more in awe of Mr. S than Mr. S was of him. Because Frank Sinatra controlled the one thing JFK wanted more than anything else: Pussy! Mr. S was the Pope of Pussy, and JFK was honored to kiss his ring. The pontiff could bestow a Judy Campbell, or, if he was feeling magnanimous, he could bestow a Marilyn Monroe, such was his beneficence. Marilyn was actually Mr. S’s celebrity version of Judy. He had brokered assignations not only between her and JFK, but also Giancana and Johnny Rosselli. I saw father Joe pinch her ass many times, but that may have been as far as it went, though with Marilyn it was hard to tell. She was the ultimate Girl Who Can’t Say No. In view of a deeply unloved childhood, if a man showed interest (it was rarely mere interest; it was usually rabid passion) she was so flattered that she thought it would be terribly rude to turn him down. Marilyn was nothing if not polite. So here was Mr. S, the big Hollywood matchmaker, the Hello Dolly of Sunset Boulevard. As far as he was concerned, he was just as happy to fix his friends up with the girls of Hollywood than have them himself. It was a case of been there, fucked that. Ironically, while Jack Kennedy had his horny eyes on Mr. S’s girls, Mr. S had his ambitious eyes on Jack’s sister Pat. He felt it was a matter of time until she and Uncle Scrooge Lawford would self-destruct.

“Do you find Pat attractive, George?” Mr. S asked me.

“She’s a lovely lady, Mr. S.”

“Are you saying she’s a dog, George?”

“No way, Mr. S. How can a Kennedy be a dog?”

“Be honest, George. Don’t shit me.”

“If she wore some makeup, did her hair…”

“You wouldn’t fuck her, would you, George?”

“I’m a married man, Mr. S.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t fuck Gina [Lollobrigida] either?” Mr. S gave me a gotcha smirk.

“What do you want from Pat, Mr. S? She’s crazy about you.”

“That’s the rub, George.”

I couldn’t believe Mr. S was asking my opinion of Pat, but sometimes he would if he was totally confused about a situation. Pat was an outdoor girl, a far less pretty version of Rocky Cooper. Sports were her thing, a Kennedy thing, but somehow I didn’t see Mr. S playing touch football in Hyannisport.

I don’t think Jack had a clue about Frank’s potential interest in his sister. Jack didn’t worry about things like that. For all his charm, he was one of the most self-centered guys I had met. He focused on what was essential to him. That, I suppose, is how he got the job done. I am, however, fairly amazed he got anything done politically, given his endless obsession with sex and gossip. In the latter category, he was like the women at the beauty salon. He wanted to know all the Hollywood dirt, who was a drunk, who was a junkie, who had black lovers, all that jazz. Maybe it was because being with Sinatra was a holiday for him that he showed so little enthusiasm for politics. I would ask him about Castro or Khrushchev, but he wanted to know if Janet Leigh was cheating on Tony Curtis or what was going on with Eddie and Debbie. He read every issue of
Confidential
magazine. To him, that scandal sheet was a lot better than
Foreign Affairs.
He would have been a terrific talk show host, with all his
Entertainment Tonight
-type questions. But the world wasn’t ready for prime time dirt. Instead he became president.

Aside from gossip and scandal, JFK was obsessed with Mr. S’s love
life, past and present. Because Mr. S wasn’t a kiss-and-teller, JFK figured he could get the real skinny out of me. He loved massages when we talked, and he claimed I gave the best rubdowns outside of the Senate gym. JFK did live with enormous pain. He wore a kind of stiff girdle to support his bad back, which must have been hell to get in and out of for all the quickies he was supposed to have gotten. I would work on his back for a good hour, all the while being peppered with prurient questions about his favorite topic, celebrity “poon-tang,” as he liked to call it.

“George, does Shirley MacLaine have a red pussy?”

“I’ve never seen her pussy, Jack.”

“Come on. Isn’t she here [Palm Springs] all the time?”

“She’s never here. Why would she be here?” I asked JFK.

“To fuck your boss.”

“They’re not doing anything.”

“Can’t be. They were in
Some Came Running,
they’ve got
Can-Can,
” JFK puzzled, trying to figure it out.

“It’s not happening, Senator. No red puss from Old Shirl.”

“Then why in blazes did he cast her, for Dean?”

“Her acting, Jack.”

JFK roared. “You kill me, George. George, tell me something.”

“What?” I asked.

“If she’s not doing Frank, and she’s not doing Dean, who
is
she doing? Korshak?”

“Maybe she’s doing herself, Senator.”

“I like that, George. I like those legs of hers, don’t you?”

“They are good, yes sir.”

“As good as Cyd Charisse’s?”

“Never saw them up close, Jack.”

“What about Dietrich?”

“Hard to beat, even now,” I answered.

“She stroked my dick once, George.”

“Good for you, man.”

“It was in the South of France. Hotel du Cap. I was visiting my father for the summer from boarding school. I think she may have been fucking him. He may have put her up to it.”

“Where did she do it, Senator?”

“The whole thing. Up and down…”

“I mean, in your room, the pool?”

“Grand ballroom. I think it was Cole Porter. Begin the Beguine. It was dark and hot, lots of candles. She smelled like a French whore, George, this terrific perfume. She was leading me, holding me so tight and then she slipped her hand down my trousers,” JFK was getting into some heavy nostalgia. “Can you imagine what that was like for a goddamn teenager?”

By the time I rolled him over to do his trunk and thighs he had an enormous erection. He turned beet red, but he didn’t ask me to stop, or to stop talking. “We better get you laid, Jack.”

“You darn well better,” he insisted. “There’s something about this desert air.”

Even after John F. Kennedy declared for the Democratic presidential nomination I never heard him talk about government or the plans for his New Frontier. I didn’t expect him to talk this stuff with me, except maybe as an ear to the black community, of which I was not really a part. I did, however, assume that he and Mr. S would have a lot of politics to talk about. After all, Mr. S did have that framed and signed photo of FDR in a place of honor on the wall, and I figured that once he agreed to board the Kennedy campaign train, he would get deeply versed in politics. But, no. Here Mr. S was with the man who was en route to becoming the great leader of our time and what do I hear them talk about? Juliet Prowse’s shaved
mons veneris,
what we now call a bikini wax. A lot of dancers and showgirls were shaved,
but few normal women were, and JFK was intrigued by the whole thing, pushing Mr. S to arrange for him to meet some dancers, for the sake “of scientific curiosity,” as the senator put it. “Naked lunch,” was what he said he wanted. Mr. S didn’t get the joke. JFK had to explain his reference to the title of the hip heroin novel by William Burroughs. Mr. S said he’d never heard of it. Why the hell would a guy like the senator be reading about heroin? Sometimes Mr. S could be incredibly funny, usually at someone else’s expense, and sometimes he could be square as a Dubuque Rotarian. Where the pop culture was concerned, if
he
himself wasn’t the culture, he didn’t want to know about it.