The Summer I Met Jack

by Michelle Gable

  “Yes, my life’s been nothing but luck. And ‘piss off the Kennedys’? What have I done? Nothing!”

  “Except have a baby. The FBI is following you. Did you know that?”

  “The FBI?” Alicia said, and blinked hard.

  It wasn’t the mob, it wasn’t a dead cat, but, according to Jack, Hoover wasn’t exactly a choirboy.

  “The FBI,” Fred repeated. “They’ve alerted the attachés in Paris, and in Rome, that you’re on your way.”

  “But how do they—”

  “Forget the feds, this family is ruthless. They’ve gone to bed with so many wiseguys I’m surprised Hoffa’s not knocked up. But now Bobby Kennedy’s given up the romance and is straight trying to fuck Hoffa in the ass. That is, when he’s not attempting to rid the world of Hoover. These people are not afraid to go after their own government, they’re not afraid of the mob.”

  Alicia inhaled on her cigarette, the smoke hot and rough on the way down.

  “I’m shocked Jack has time to think about me,” she said, “when he has a country to run. His ratings are in the toilet and he just got all those poor people killed in Cuba. Why would he care about old loves or Edmund Purdom?”

  “Sweetie, you wouldn’t believe the shit they care about.”

  Fred leaned over the table, candlelight flickering against his face. He ran a stubby finger along his hairline.

  “See this? The hair loss? The goddamned streaks of silver? That’s sprung up in the last six weeks, thanks to them.”

  Fred pulled away and took a swig of scotch, sucking it through his teeth.

  “Jack doesn’t scare me,” Alicia said. “And he’s the one calling the shots.”

  Alicia didn’t mean by virtue of his office. Joe had a stroke in December, the same night as her party at the Four Seasons. When Alicia heard the news, she felt a familiar ping of hope. Finally! Jack was free from his father’s will! Then she remembered that of all the plans Joe laid out for his son, Jack achieved every goal. He wasn’t going to jeopardize that now.

  “Jack might not scare you,” Fred said. “But he and Bobby have pissed off so many people, they have targets on their backs, and on their big, fat heads. You, my friend, are at the center of it all between the bastard baby—”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “And the fact your phone book could take down half the government.”

  “My phone book? What’s that have to do with anything?”

  “Bobby’s convinced everyone you ran a whorehouse in Los Angeles.”

  “Oh my God!” Alicia said, and laughed. “Bobby would say anything to make me look bad.”

  “I dunno, Alicia. Have you forgotten about your cozy place, way up in the Hollywood Hills? Don Class’s bungalow, the cutest cathouse around?”

  “Fred,” she gasped, eyes welling. “Did you just call me a whore? I thought we were friends. I thought you cared about me.”

  “Why do you think I’m sitting here right now? Come on, don’t play innocent. Everyone knows Don Class is the biggest gigolo in town.”

  “Lies,” Alicia said, between her teeth.

  “Did you, or did you not, get paid to go on dates?”

  “That’s different. We were actresses, and ‘starlet companion’ was merely a role.”

  “In other words, you were an escort.”

  “We didn’t have to put out.”

  “Yeah. I’ll bet you girls kept your virtues intact.” Fred rolled his eyes. “How many times did you set up Jack’s friends and family with one of your roommates? A dozen? Two dozen? More?”

  Alicia dropped her chin. Her head throbbed. She wasn’t a madam, or a workaday whore for that matter, but she could see how Bobby might paint it as such. It didn’t help that her roommates had been so loose.

  “Christ,” she said.

  “People would kill for dirt on the Kennedys, literally kill, and the Kennedys would do anything to stop that dirt from coming out. Between Don Class and the baby … Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “Should I talk to law enforcement?” Alicia asked. “I don’t mind calling. I’m—er—no longer on their radar.”

  There were no longer warrants for her unpaid bills was what she meant.

  “The police?” Fred snickered. “You’re cute. Peter Lawford’s name is in every goddamned trick book of every whore ever busted by the L.A. and N.Y. PDs. Yet, he’s never been picked up. Have you ever asked yourself why?”

  “What do you suggest, Fred? You seem to be giving me a lot of problems and no answers. Can’t you tell whomever it is…” She waved a hand. “… whatever shifty person you’re doing business with, that I just want to live my life, and be left alone? I’d never do anything to hurt Jack. I wish him the best.”

  “But, you see, you’ve already proven that you’re willing to talk.”

  “Last year I needed the money,” Alicia said. “I don’t anymore. And that article was far more damaging to me than it was to him.”

  “I can’t disagree. The problem is, you still have information. And anyone can be bought, or otherwise coerced to spill the beans.”

  Fred polished off his whisky, his third since Alicia had arrived.

  “Here’s my suggestion,” he said. “Don’t go to Rome.”

  “Don’t go to Rome?” she said, raising her voice. “Are you kidding me? I have to get—”

  “Shhh!” he said, and smacked his glass on the table. “Keep it the fuck down.”

  “I’ll keep it the fuck down when you start being helpful.”

  “I’d be careful,” he said. “Very careful. The word is out that you and Jack were engaged, but if you show up talking about your baby, then you’re good as dead.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a stitch dramatic?”

  “Nope. You’re good as dead. And so is she.”

  Alicia Corning Clark, once married to Edmund Purdom before she was briefly wed to the late sewing machine heir, wants to adopt Benedetta, the small daughter of the Italian artist Novella Palmisano, in Rome, where she’s recently resumed residence.

  Keeping Up with Hollywood, by Louella Parsons, October 4, 1962

  ROME

  In Paris, Alicia rented a full floor at the Lancaster and dined, traveled, and sunbathed through the summer. She dated heirs, and painted gardens, and said yes to everything at Givenchy. Her days were glorious, her nights passionate, but mostly Alicia was passing time until she could return to Rome.

  In mid-September her lawyer called. The time had come.

  “You are permitted to travel worldwide,” he said. “No more risk of arrest.”

  Just like that, Alicia was free, liberated from her old debts and past mistakes, even her biggest mistake, Edmund Purdom. He’d married Linda Christian several months before.

  “That’s the nicest thing he could have done for me,” Alicia told the papers.

  Now, Alicia was in Rome, in a suite at the Excelsior Hotel. She’d spent the past three days decorating for Benny, assisted by the hotel’s chief concierge.

  “Why are you wasting time?” Nova asked over the phone. “Bambina does not need zee fancy zings.”

  “A few more days,” Alicia said, “and I’ll be ready.”

  She was racked with nerves, positively riddled with jumps and jitters. It’d been so long since she’d seen Benny. Would the girl remember her? Would she willingly fall into Alicia’s arms?

  There was another hesitation, too. Alicia didn’t think she was being followed—there’d been no signs, no strange vans, no hairs lifting on her neck—but Fred’s words were ominous and his information a very faithful definition of “inside.” He had bugs in multiple Kennedy homes.

  Alas, the world had changed since their spring meeting at Sardi’s. Soviet missiles were parked in Cuba, China was developing an atomic device, and, on a landing strip between East and West Berlin, Allied planes sat, armed with nukes. Potential world collapse was a much scarier prospect than a supposed madam and her love child. Alicia decided: s
he couldn’t hesitate a second later. Too much time had passed.

  With a fluttering heart, she dressed in a shirred-waist, sleeveless wool shift and a pair of knee-high cavalry boots. After throwing on a suede trench and fox stole, she ventured down to the lobby and then past the bright pink chrysanthemums outside the Excelsior’s polished brass doors.

  Via Veneto was lively that time of night—ten o’clock—and Alicia could hear the revelers long after the clubs and restaurants disappeared from sight. She wondered what it was like these days, without Novella holding court.

  She wound her way toward Margutta, the crowd thinning as she went. Looping around a corner, Alicia heard footsteps but found nothing behind her but the dark, chilled night. She picked up her pace. Margutta sat dead ahead.

  Again, footsteps. She whipped back, this time to see a large figure move into an alley. Her heart raced. No. This couldn’t be, not seconds from Benny. She broke into a light jog, wishing she’d taken time to develop an exercise regime. Apparently, Jackie Kennedy bounced on a trampoline, up to three hours per day.

  With no other choice, Alicia rushed past the turn to Margutta and leapt through the front door of the first café she reached.

  “I’m being followed,” Alicia said to the hostess, hunched over, pain shooting through her stomach.

  The woman patted her back haltingly.

  “Va bene, va bene,” she said.

  Suddenly, the woman stopped.

  “There is a man,” she whispered. Then she called out, “Can I help you, sir?”

  The hostess’s voice sounded far off, drowned out by the pounding of Alicia’s heart. The fox began to smell like the animal it’d once been.

  “I’m here for her,” said a gruff voice.

  Alicia lifted her gaze.

  “Jesus Christ,” Fred said, “I thought I told you, don’t fuckin’ go to Rome.”

  * * *

  The hostess seated them at a table in the corner. She asked several times if Alicia was okay.

  “Yes, fine,” she insisted, though she understood the woman’s confusion.

  Alicia had sprinted into the restaurant in a panic, and Fred was sweaty, poorly dressed, and looking as though he’d recently committed a crime. In other words, his usual self.

  “Next time, ring why don’t ya?” Alicia said, sipping Pernod, waiting for her pulse to normalize.

  “I did call. Thirty fucking times.”

  Alicia shrugged. He left a few messages at the hotel, but not thirty. Three, at most. She’d been too busy to answer his calls.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said for the tenth or eleventh time. “I cannot fuckin’ deal with this. I told myself, ‘Fred, you don’t need to babysit Alicia, she’ll be okay.’ Then I read that you are in Rome, and you’re making noises about adopting Novella’s baby. Seriously, what the fuck? Do you listen to a word I say?”

  “I listen to every word. That’s why I made sure, in the papers, to specify Novella’s baby, so people wouldn’t think she’s mine.”

  “Oh, smart. Real slick.”

  “Can we hurry this up?” Alicia said. “I have somewhere to be.”

  She glanced out the window and imagined Novella and Benny in the studio. She pictured Benny standing by the door, in bobby socks, a suitcase at her feet.

  “Half the time, I can’t tell if you’re smart as a fox or plain moronic,” Fred said. “If you don’t care about your own life, that’s fine, but how can you bring a kid into it? A kid who, it must be said, looks dangerously like a certain politician, especially with that mop of hair.”

  “You’ve seen her?” Alicia gulped.

  “I can’t believe you put it in the damned paper,” Fred ranted on. “I can’t fuckin’ believe it. Or maybe I can. You’re a piece of work.”

  “No one bothered me in Paris,” she said. “Who cares about a baby girl? Aren’t we on the verge of nuclear annihilation?”

  “Only for Alicia Darr would a nuclear war be a positive scenario.”

  He snorted and shook his head.

  “Alicia Corning Clark,” she corrected him. “And that’s not what I meant. Things have been calmer. I haven’t felt the heat.”

  “Bully for you. If only Marilyn Monroe were alive to offer congratulations.”

  “Marilyn? What does she—”

  “Fuckin’ hell!” Fred pounded his fist on the table. “Do not pull this naive bullshit on me. You know they killed Marilyn. You have to understand that.”

  “Shhhh!” Alicia hissed, eyes darting about the restaurant.

  The hostess stared nervously from her station.

  “Zip it,” she said. “Marilyn died of an overdose, no news there. The woman was constantly high on pills.”

  “Very convenient for her murderers.”

  “Fred, I say this with affection.” She reached for his meaty hand. “Maybe you should dry out somewhere? I think the scotch is making you paranoid.”

  He yanked his hand away.

  “They killed her,” he said.

  “Why would anyone kill her? She’s harmless. Incapable of having an orgasm, apparently, but harmless.”

  “You know she was screwing both of them, right? Bobby and Jack?”

  “What?” Alicia said, her lungs feeling like they might collapse. “That can’t be right. Bobby is too religious. And Jack? Marilyn is—was—a drip. She’d bore him in two seconds flat.”

  “I don’t think her noggin is what ol’ J. F. Kennedy was after. You saw that birthday song, did you not?”

  Alicia nodded, head swimming.

  “Do you have any proof?” she said, evenly. “Or is it just some wild theory?”

  “I don’t know, Alicia. Do you count audio recordings as ‘proof’? The Kennedys murdered Marilyn Monroe, and I have it all on tape.”

  * * *

  “About a year ago,” Fred explained, “the FBI hired me to wiretap Marilyn’s house, and Peter Lawford’s beach pad, too. Jimmy Hoffa called with the same request. Hoffa planned to use Marilyn to blackmail Bobby, and get the Justice Department off his back. I took both jobs, which was pretty fuckin’ convenient since all of these jokers were surveilling each other already, and I was the person running the tapes.

  “Two days before Marilyn died, mobster Johnny Roselli showed up at my door, claiming to be a ‘representative’ of the Kennedys. He—shall we say—physically encouraged me to cancel the FBI contract. I agreed, but all other arrangements remained intact.”

  “You kept the bugs?” Alicia said. “And you think I’m the risk taker?”

  “I did exactly what Roselli asked: cut loose the FBI.”

  Then, Fred told Alicia what was on the tape the night Marilyn died, when she drank too much and decided she’d finally had enough. First, she called the Justice Department, and Bobby’s San Francisco hotel. After fifteen attempts to reach Bobby, Marilyn called her psychiatrist, and the White House, and then Peter Lawford, growing more unhinged with each dial. Thirty minutes after she rang Peter, there was a knock on the door. It was Peter and Bobby.

  “People began to yell,” Fred explained. “Marilyn screamed that she was tired of being passed around the group like a piece of meat.”

  She threatened Bobby with the information she had: written records, photographs, tapes.

  “Where is it?” Bobby demanded. “Where the fuck is it?”

  Next came doors slamming, papers ruffling, and clothes hangers being slid and thrown as Bobby ransacked the house for bugs.

  “Calm down, calm down,” Peter called out impotently.

  “We have to know,” Bobby said. “It’s important to the family. We can make any arrangements you want, but we must find it.”

  Marilyn started yelling again, louder this time. Now Bobby was the one saying, “Calm down, calm down.”

  Then, there was a large thump, like the sound of a body being thrown onto a bed. Marilyn screamed out again. Then her voice was diminished, muffled, until it finally stopped. The tape went silent for seventy seconds.

&
nbsp; Then one word: “Fuck.”

  There was more, but Fred stopped there.

  “Now do you believe me?” he asked.

  Alicia rubbed her eyes. She should probably hear the tapes before she took Fred’s word. He’d been on the payroll of the FBI, the mob, and a family he deemed more unscrupulous than both. But although Fred could be sleazy and sordid, Alicia had never known him to lie. Plus, she wasn’t keen to listen to a woman’s death firsthand.

  “I don’t know what to say,” she told Fred.

  “Later that night,” he continued, “Peter asked me to clean up the mess. I told him that it sure as hell sounded like somebody was suffocated. He confessed that Bobby smothered Marilyn with a pillow, to get her to calm down. She died later, he claimed.”

  Alicia couldn’t take it anymore. She stood, her legs tottering. She tucked her purse under her arm.

  “Leaving already?” he asked with an arched brow.

  “I’m expected somewhere,” she answered in a weak voice, a whisper almost.

  “Jesus, woman! Have you not listened to a damned thing I’ve said?” He put up both hands. “I’m done giving a shit. What can I do with a person who insists on making the same fuckin’ mistakes over and over again?”

  Alicia gently rubbed his hand.

  “I wasn’t sure what to think of you when we first met,” she said, “but now I regard you as a dear friend.”

  “I don’t do friends,” he said.

  Alicia smiled sadly. She thought of what Novella always insisted, that Fred was in love with her.

  “I care for you deeply,” she said. “And I value your advice. But this is a risk I have to take. I must do right by Benny. Anyhow, I feel braver knowing that you’re on my trail.”

  “Braver?! That’s rich. Stupider, more like.”

  “Good-bye, sweet friend. Thank you for trying to keep me safe.”

  She gave Fred one last blue smile, then turned and walked away.

  * * *

  The studio was ablaze with light. Nova was splattered in pinks and greens and purples, from her mussed hair to her petite, childlike feet. Benny looked just like her.

  “Oh, Benedetta,” Alicia said, and fell to her knees, sobbing.

  Nova said nothing and took to stroking Alicia’s hair. When Alicia glanced up, she saw that Benny was focused on Novella, searching for answers from the person she trusted most.