“All right. Come on, man. Out with it.”
I met his eyes and held them. “I’ve heard the rumors about your brother-in-law and Marilyn.”
“Jack, you mean?”
Well, I didn’t mean Bobby.
He was shrugging and saying lightly, “You know this town, Nathan. The rumor mill. Half of it is nonsense.”
“This is part of that other half. I have it on reliable authority that Jack and Marilyn have been intimate. In fact, that they’ve been intimate”-I jerked a thumb toward the nearby sprawl of Spanish beach mansion-“in one or more of those four bedroom suites of yours.”
His smile was a little too broad, and he seemed about to wave it off, but finally my unchanging deadpan got to him.
“People do things,” he said, with a different kind of shrug. What he said next came with a twinkle in the eye and the lilt of a British accent that made it no less crude: “If you were the president, wouldn’t you fuck Marilyn Monroe, if you had the chance?”
“Me being president,” I said, “doesn’t come up that often.”
“I suppose not,” he granted.
“Peter, I don’t know if you know it, but from time to time, I’ve done jobs for your wife’s family. For Jack, and his father. And Bobby and me, we go way back. To Rackets Committee days. All the way back to that asshole McCarthy. That fucking far.”
“I’m aware, Nathan. Why do you think you’re sitting here?”
“Why do you think I’m sitting here?”
That threw him off balance. His chuckle got mixed up with a cigarette cough. “Well… I, uh… assume it’s to be of help.”
“Marilyn is a friend of mine. I really like the girl.”
“So do I! She and Pat are tight-they’re like schoolgirls together.”
That sent a disturbing if not entirely unappealing image flashing through my mind, but never mind.
“So was it a fling?” I asked. “Was Jack just putting another notch in the Kennedy boys’ belt?”
Lawford’s smile crinkled, then curdled. He was looking for words and not finding them. Actors, especially mediocre ones like Peter, need somebody to provide lines.
“Those two together just once,” I said, “is plenty to make a lot of this administration’s enemies happy. I know for a fact, from my own very special point of view, that certain friends of your friend Frank are not thrilled with Bobby making a hobby out of them at the Justice Department.”
Frank was, of course, Sinatra, and those “friends” included Sam Giancana and James Riddle Hoffa.
His smile almost disappeared. “Frank and I aren’t as close as we once were.”
“Yeah. I heard about Palm Springs.”
That seemed to goose him, mildly. His eyes tightened. “ What have you heard?”
“Just that Frank remodeled his place there, hung up a ‘President Kennedy Slept Here’ plaque in advance and everything, spending a small fortune turning it into a kind of Camp David, Hollywood-style.”
Lawford’s expression turned melancholy. “That is true.”
“And Bobby put the brakes on with Jack, told him no matter how hard Sinatra’d worked for him, the president of the United States could not be seen hanging out with a known associate of gangsters.”
“… Also true.”
I sat forward. “But, Christ, Peter-did Jack have to stay with Bing Crosby instead? The only competition in Frank’s class?”
Lawford reached for the martini glass, saying, “And a Republican, old boy.”
A Republican old boy was right.
“Sometimes,” I said, “I think Bobby gets carried away with this do-gooder nonsense. Where does he think Old Joe’s money came from?”
Lawford grunted something that was not quite a laugh. “That is the point, Nathan. One must purge one’s self of the sins of the father.”
“Tell that to Jack before he picks out his next movie actress to bang. Or at least tell him to pick one less famous, and less temperamental, than Marilyn.”
Lawford sighed. “Bobby was right, and you’re right, too, Nathan. It wasn’t so much Sinatra himself, you see, or even his associates. Hell, in our nightclub act-you’ve seen it?”
I nodded.
He was smiling, remembering. “Joey would say, ‘Tell them about the good things the Mafia’s been doing, Frank.’ And the audience would roar, and Frank would, too. I mean, it’s a joke. It’s kind of… sexy. Naughty fun.”
I’d been around gangsters in Chicago since I was a kid. And I admit I never thought of them as “naughty fun.”
“Something made Bobby put the kibosh on it,” I said.
“ Giancana had stayed there-there in Palm Springs at Frank’s place. Old J. Edgar has the photos in a file. And one could not have the president bedding down where the boss of the Chicago Outfit once slumbered. Could one?”
“Frank could always get a bigger plaque and put both names on.”
He gave that the raspy laugh it deserved, and pressed on: “Jack is a great man. He has a huge heart, and a mind that to me is unfathomable in its brilliance. And the pain he’s in-do you know, Nathan, that he almost always wears a back brace?”
“Yeah. Except when he’s fucking, which is a good deal of the time. I also know he’s got Addison’s disease, and was given the last rites four times before he ran for Congress. Public has no idea of the state of his health. The VD, for example.”
Lawford looked pale despite the tan. “How do you know these things, Nathan?”
“Hell, who do you think covered them up? Answer me, Peter-is it a fling, or is this affair ongoing, Marilyn and Jack?”
“It, uh… was ongoing. It’s either over, or tapering off. Fling doesn’t quite cover it. It goes back farther than you might imagine, Nathan-unless you already know that.”
“No. Nobody hired me to cover this up. Yet.”
Lawford was staring, but not at me. “Started back in the fifties. I was at the party where she flirted with Jack and Jack flirted with her and DiMaggio just fumed.” He sipped the martini and smiled. “I’ll tell you something funny, Nathan… about Palm Springs?”
“Sure. I can always use a laugh.”
“At Bing Crosby’s? Marilyn was there. Openly with Jack. Playing goddamn hostess. My God, how the word hasn’t gotten out, I’ll never know.”
I didn’t shock easily, but I admit this news threw me. “Bobby forbids him to sleep at Sinatra’s, but it’s okay to screw Marilyn at Der Bingle’s? You have any aspirin, Pete?”
“I keep myself well-supplied in painkillers.”
“Maybe Crosby should put a plaque over that bed.” I shifted on the metal chair. The sun was setting fire to the ocean. “Why is Sinatra pissed at you?”
“You know Frank and his temper.”
“I know Frank and his temper, but I also know Frank sees you as his entree to the Kennedys.”
He winced. “I’m afraid that relationship is strained at the moment, as well-not over, merely strained. Anyway, I was finally elected for something in this family.”
“What?”
His expression was wry. “To deliver the bad news to Frank.”
My eyebrows went up. “That Jack was going to stay with Crosby, not him?”
“Yes.”
“And he took it well.”
Lawford studied the remains of his martini as if reading tea leaves. “I understand he took a sledgehammer out to the cement helicopter pad he’d had constructed for the president, and broke it up into little pieces.”
