“Got it,” Sinatra said. “I shall pass it along.”
They sat there for a few minutes as the sun started to duck behind Mount San Jacinto to the west.
“Frank?” Margaret said meekly. “I want to ask you—and I don’t want to seem at all unappreciative, but I want to ask…”
“Go ahead, baby doll,” said the singer.
“What I don’t get is, if you know about all of these crimes, blackmail or murders or the girls or what have you, why didn’t—why don’t you go to the police?” she asked.
Sinatra looked at her incredulously. “You think the police don’t know?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You think that, say, Detective Meehan isn’t part of this?” Sinatra asked. “Why do you think he had such a hard-on for you and Lola? If Bobby hadn’t vouched for you, you’d be in Alcatraz by now.”
“Jesus, really?” Margaret asked. “Meehan?”
Sinatra laughed. “This whole system stinks, girlie. You think the police have no idea about Les Wolff’s bobby-soxer parties?”
“They do? But—”
“Come on,” Sinatra said. “You think all these powerful men do whatever the fuck they want with whatever girl they want and law enforcement doesn’t know? C’mon!”
Sinatra looked at Charlie and Margaret as if he were the serpent in the Garden of Eden. They were worse than naive; they were stupid.
“That’s the grand hypocrisy of me being tagged by Bobby as some bad boy because I’ve stayed friends with some guys from the old neighborhood,” Sinatra said. “The fact that gossip kept TP away from here, so instead he went to Bing’s, where he shlonged Marilyn. And don’t get me started on Cuba!”
Charlie looked at the aging crooner. At first, Sinatra had reminded him of his father at his apex, savvy and charismatic, a man of action and energy who made things happen, someone whom he wanted to impress. But five months into this adventure, Sinatra looked defeated and deflated as he floated in the pool. He still reminded Charlie of his father, but in his later, sadder years, when the weight of all that he had done and accepted was taking its toll whether or not he understood why.
“So the cops are in on it?” Charlie asked. “All of it?”
“Depends what you mean by ‘in on it,’” Sinatra said. “Some of them know. Hubbard’s group and the Mob helped Les Wolff. But beyond that, I have no details. I don’t know who did what and what was illegal and what was just sleazy.”
“No details,” Margaret said, “just that bad men exist and worse men carry out their orders.”
Sinatra raised a glass to her. “Bad men exist and worse men carry out their orders—and the rest of us avert our eyes,” he said. “Everyone comes out here to dance with the devil, and the devil may dance. That’s what they should have up there on that hill, instead of fucking Hollywood.”
Chapter Thirty-ThreeNew York City
May 1962
Sitting among the other fifteen thousand Democratic fat cats, a freshly coiffed President Kennedy beamed as he was feted on the occasion of his forty-fifth birthday.
Maria Callas sang from Carmen. Members of Jerome Robbins’s Ballets USA dance company performed. Shirley MacLaine and Jimmy Durante, Harry Belafonte, Bobby Darin. Mike Nichols and Elaine May made the thousand-dollar-a-seat crowd roar by reading fake telegrams, one of which was addressed to a “Mr. Francis X. Kennedy” on the occasion of his forty-fifth wedding anniversary. The punch line—it had been sent by the CIA.
What a thing, to have an intelligence agency mocked for unintelligence, Charlie thought as he and Margaret watched the festivities from backstage. Sinatra’s absence from the event was stunning, though no one talked about it.
They had been given this special access by Lawford, who said that his brother-in-law the attorney general wanted to talk while in town.
And now here was Lawford, onstage, presenting the president with his present.
“Mr. President, on this occasion of your birthday, this lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous but punctual,” Lawford boomed. “Mr. President…Marilyn Monroe!”
A rowdy applause filled the Garden; a spotlight hit the stage. But Marilyn did not appear.
She was backstage, looking nowhere near able to perform.
Charlie and Margaret were yards away, feeling a mix of sorrow and revulsion. Whether because of pills or booze or both, Marilyn could barely stand. She had literally been sewn into her Jean Louis gown—flesh-colored, festooned with rhinestones—and she was obviously wearing nothing underneath. Her beauty was ethereal but she reeked of desperation.
Lawford returned to the microphone and coughed, embracing the awkwardness. “A woman about whom,” he said to laughter, “it truly may be said she needs no introduction. Let me just say—here she is!”
A bass drum solo began and then quickly ended as the spotlight again highlighted only her absence.
“But I’ll give her an introduction anyway, Mr. President,” Lawford said to more laughter, “because in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who meant so much, who has done more—”
Lawford was surprised by the men and women in the audience applauding before he had cued them to do so; he turned to his left and saw Monroe had strode out and in fact was already almost at the lectern.
“Mr. President!” Lawford quickly said, “the ‘late’ Marilyn Monroe!”
Sporting an enormous helmet of blond hair and blindingly white teeth, Marilyn slunk to the microphone. For a few seconds it wasn’t clear that she knew what to do.
Margaret grabbed Charlie’s hand and gripped it tight as if somehow she could squeeze wherewithal into Marilyn’s brain by twisting Charlie’s fingers. Soon, however, the starlet began her breathless cooing into the microphone.
“Haaaa-pee…birth…day…tooo…youuuu,” she sang. “Haaaa-pee birthdayyyy…tooo-oooo-oooo yooooouuuu—”
The crowd ate it up, hooting and grunting as if she were a burlesque dancer at a stag party.
“They think it’s sexy,” Margaret said to Charlie, “but she’s about to pass out.”
After the performance, Lawford offered Charlie and Margaret a ride in his limo
