Jet Set : The People, the Planes, the Glamour, and the Romance in Aviation's Glory Years (9780345536976)

by Stadiem, William

  And so it went. The article was entitled “Case of Eddie Gilbert Versus Himself.” Capa shot Eddie alone, a man in black walking the white sands of Copacabana Beach, with Rio’s iconic mountain on the shore, the Sugar Loaf, looming over the wall of white art deco high-rise apartments on some of the most fabled beachfront property on earth. Kerouac, who saw himself as “a New England athlete boy” lost and adrift in a sea of Ivy Jews, lauded Eddie as the most “fantastic wit” among the “incunabular Milton Berles” of Horace Mann. The great writer viewed Eddie’s Wall Street maneuvers as a giant caper, a “last fantastic joke to tear the funny guys of Horace Mann apart for once and for all.”

  The Life editors recounted all of Eddie’s fiscal triumphs, his good deeds supporting Korean and Italian orphans, his donations to Harvard. There were pictures of his properties, the East Side Tudor castle, the Villa Zamir—which Life noted was bigger and more expensive than Joe Kennedy’s nearby rented Riviera estate—and pictures of Eddie at the Monte Carlo casino with Helmut Newton blondes a head taller than he. It was an ad for Eddie Gilbert. He couldn’t have dreamed of bigger, better coverage. It was also an ad for Pan Am, something that Temple Fielding might have concocted in his own Madison Avenue days. It made people want to fly down to Rio. It pleased, mightily, the Brazilian tourist board. It made Igor Cassini proud.

  Via Igor’s relentless efforts, even bigger coverage soon materialized in the person of Charles Kuralt, who came to Rio to produce a CBS TV Eyewitness Reports special on Eddie. “Refuge in Rio” aired in late July 1962, a month after the Life layout. The distinguished correspondent Charles Collingwood played host, introducing Eddie as “an American financier who, after some confusion in his accounts, recently found asylum in Brazil.” In order to have Eddie on the air, the normally tough Collingwood was playing softball, letting Eddie speak his piece: “I want to prove to everyone, as well as to myself, that what I did was not a criminal act. I want to remake my life, my career … I want to repay everybody that I owe money to, that lost money in this horrible catastrophe.”

  Igor Cassini had worked his PR magic on his friend the CBS network boss, William Paley, to run the special. Chafing at the constraints of being a behind-the-scenes manipulator, this time an emboldened Igor took to the small screen with Collingwood to limn Eddie’s high life, of course without disclosing that Gilbert was one of his biggest clients. On the special, Igor was in exalted company, the company he had wanted to keep before his dreams of Kennedy diplomacy were shattered in the Trujillo fiasco.

  Following Igor on the small screen was none other than Robert Kennedy. The attorney general was interviewed by Roger Mudd about the proposed treaty that could lead to the extradition of Eddie, if Brazilian courts judged it to be retroactive, which sounded very ex post facto and un-American. Attorney General Bobby seemed skeptical about ever getting Eddie back, especially if his fiscal wrongs on Wall Street weren’t seen as crimes in the much wilder world of finance in Brazil, a country that had rewarded Cage, Belle, and Birrell with new successes.

  Bobby Kennedy turned out to be the worst adversary Eddie Gilbert, and soon Igor Cassini, would ever have. Bobby had become a changed man, his own man, after the devastating stroke that had befallen Joseph Kennedy in December 1961, just after Ramfis Trujillo had fled the Dominican Republic. After the stroke, the all-powerful paterfamilias lost all of his influence. He couldn’t walk. He couldn’t speak. And for once he couldn’t control his son Bobby, who, as the attorney general suddenly imbued with a new puritanism, became America’s Holy Roller.

  No sooner was his father silenced than RFK ended his brother’s obsessive friendship with Frank Sinatra, ostensibly because of his ties to Sam Giancana and to the Mob. Many have speculated that Bobby’s “purification” drive may have been a reaction to his own impure lust for his brother’s (and Sinatra’s) consort Marilyn Monroe, particularly in light of her mysterious death in the summer of 1962. In Bobby’s mind, the whole Jet Set—Cassini, Gilbert, Rubirosa, the whole damned lot—was tarred with the same glamour-is-evil brush, and without his father to restrain him, he considered going after any of them if one ever crossed the line. Eddie Gilbert had crossed it big-time. On television, a subdued Kennedy was simply underplaying his hand.

  The TV special came across as another massive advertisement for Eddie Gilbert and for the glories of Rio. But Igor didn’t want Eddie to seem so seduced by Rio that he was going native there. Although it was in fact the case, Cassini could not afford to let his client seem like a fugitive from justice. On the special, Eddie therefore carefully refused to apply the “f-word” to himself. As he told Charles Kuralt, “Well, Charlie … I came here basically to solve some serious personal problems … and I felt that if I stayed in New York I wouldn’t be given the chance … to have the peace and quiet … I wouldn’t have a minute’s peace.” The image of Rio as think tank, ashram, spa for high rollers who may have rolled too high couldn’t have been more seductive.

  Rio was an appealing place for Eddie’s friends and colleagues to come spend time with him. One caller who had ridden the wave of high times with Eddie’s largesse was London gambling king John Aspinall, who, on Eddie’s hot tips, had invested heavily in E. L. Bruce stock. Now that the stock had cratered, Aspinall had his own margin calls, of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to contend with. Aspinall wasn’t liquid. Everything he owned was tied up in his Berkeley Square Clermont Club, which would soon house Annabel’s, the private Burke’s Peerage–populated disco that opened in 1963 and was inspired by the Gilbert/Cassini Le Club. But Aspinall was a gambler who took the long view. He stuck by Eddie and jetted to see him with a suitcase of cash for his friend raised from his Brit aristo circle. He sincerely believed Eddie would rise again.

  As much as Eddie appreciated the money, the visit he savored the most was that of his fiancée, Turid, who took a leave of absence from Pan Am and used her stewardess’s deep discount to fly to Rio several times. Some of her visits coincided with those of Arnold Bauman, the high-powered attorney whom Eddie’s father had hired to bring his boy back to him in Sulka linens, not prison stripes. In a longer version of the Washington, D.C., shuttle, Bauman kept bringing SEC and Justice Department officials down to Rio to negotiate a plea deal with Eddie, who had begun playing the Brazilian stock market with the great results that had accrued to his fellow capitalists in exile. He took a penthouse apartment, hired a Cadillac and a chauffeur, began to entertain. He even partied with soccer god Pelé and with visiting literary god John Dos Passos, who was interested in constructing an à clef novel about Eddie.

  With his wife and son to attend to, Igor Cassini had been making an uncharacteristic commitment to being a family man and limiting his jetting about. He stayed out of Rio during Eddie’s residence. Nonetheless, Eddie initiated a telephone and mail dialogue between his publicist and both Pelé and “Girl from Ipanema” composer Antonio Carlos Jobim in which the Brazilians would hire Martial to raise their profile in America. It wasn’t quite the Villa Zamir, with feijoada instead of bouillia-baisse, but for the moment, Eddie wasn’t homesick.

  Bauman finally worked out a deal, and on October 28, 1962, Eddie Gilbert jetted back to New York. Dozens of reporters were waiting at Idlewild. But the federal marshals greeted him first, boarding the plane and taking him into custody. A caravan of cars transported him directly to Manhattan’s federal courthouse, where, with Bauman by his side and his father behind him, Eddie pleaded not guilty to a fifteen-count indictment that included wire and mail fraud and filing false SEC reports. He was released on $15,000 bail, posted by Harry, who added another $10,000 to the bail amount for further charges filed by the New York district attorney’s office for twelve counts of grand larceny. Then Eddie went home with Daddy.

  Given the high crimes he was charged with, the low bail was a quid pro quo for Eddie’s voluntary return to face American justice. He had made over $100,000 in his fewer than five months in Rio. He was still a wizard. He could have stayed in Carioca splendor, and America neve
r could have touched him. But he wanted to come home, and thanks in large part to Igor’s mythmaking, Eddie Gilbert got exactly what he wanted. It would be five long years of freedom and high living before Eddie Gilbert would stand trial on those twenty-seven charges, proof of the kind of time and justice his money could buy.

  Meanwhile, Eddie basked in the front-page splendor of every paper in New York, with Igor Cassini beaming in the wings at his handiwork. The prodigal son was being received like a favorite son. The press described Eddie Gilbert not as an accused felon but as “the playboy-financier.” All the reports made prominent note of his deep Rio suntan. He was here to face the music, but the main music in his head was the disco siren call of Le Club. Eddie couldn’t make quite the grand entrances he used to before his flight. His chauffeured Rollses were gone, his Seventieth Street Tudor castle foreclosed, his Fifth Avenue apartment abandoned by the abandoned Rhoda, who refused to speak to Eddie and tried to keep their children from him. He still was crazy for Turid, but he couldn’t give her a wedding date without a divorce decree in hand. The Riviera was off-limits; his bail agreement forbade him to leave the New York metropolitan area. So at thirty-nine, Eddie moved back in with his parents, who now lived in a spectacular duplex aerie in the Carlyle Hotel.

  The Carlyle wasn’t a bad place to hole up and get restarted, which Eddie, with his father’s help, immediately did, creating a new hardwood wholesale operation called the Northerlin Company. Soon he was back in the game, with offices on Madison and Fifty-seventh Street. The little wizard, the “floor man,” proved his touch by turning an instant profit. In three years, the company would have sales of $10 million. Even without Dos Passos, who passed on the project, a major publisher gave Eddie an advance to write a book about himself and enlisted a top New York Times business writer to be his ghost. Eddie Gilbert, pure adrenaline and pure confidence, sincerely believed he would eventually beat the rap that he was a crook.

  But within weeks of Eddie’s return in the fall of 1962, the spotlight unexpectedly shifted to Igor Cassini as the man with the crook rap to beat. The man who called Igor on the carpet was a young reporter from The Saturday Evening Post named Peter Maas, who would go on to fame for writing The Valachi Papers, Serpico, and other true-crime books. That most wholesome of American magazines, famous for its Norman Rockwell covers, had fallen on the hard times occasioned by losing its audience to television and more sophisticated, more sensational journals. The Post, desperate to survive, decided to fight fire with fire by basically publishing a new exposé in every issue. Igor Cassini had been selected to be the flavor of the week in the upcoming January 19, 1963, publication.

  Initially, Maas’s brief was to nail Cassini for conflict of interest, that is, writing in his column about his PR firm’s clients. But because gossip columns were not expected to have the highest of journalistic standards, Maas’s exposé wasn’t going to be particularly shocking. Things changed when the Trujillo connection came into Maas’s purview by way of a canceled check made out to Martial by the Dominican government when Trujillo was alive and dictating. Until then, no one outside the White House had known of the Joe Kennedy–initiated Cassini-Murphy mission, and not even the White House knew the extent of Cassini’s contractual labors for the Trujillo regime. Just as Cassini wanted to go to Washington, so did Maas. Now he had a government scandal to work with, and he went to work as hard as he could.

  The best thing Maas had to work with was the appearance that Igor Cassini, confidant of the president, was a “foreign agent” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The idea of foreign agents sounded more menacing than it was. It wasn’t cloak and dagger at all. The legal definition included any lobbyist, American or foreign, working in America for a foreign government. FARA required them to register with the Justice Department and disclose their earnings and other activities that might have an impact on national security. Japan and Russia had the most agents registered under FARA. Japan had a world war to apologize for; Russia had a Cold War it was fighting, even in America. The country with the third largest number of agents was the Dominican Republic. Obviously, because the Trujillos had been so bad, the Dominicans needed all the lobbying they could get. But the law was that all such agents had to register, and the big reveal was that Igor Cassini had never done so and thus had broken the law, giving Bobby Kennedy a chance for another major Jet Setter.

  In 1938, on the eve of World War II, Congress had enacted FARA. The obvious idea was to smoke out Axis spies, and since war’s end in 1945, there had been only nine convictions under the act for failure to register. The act was pretty much an anachronism until the Trujillos became a cause célèbre. In 1959, Alexander Guterma, a Siberian-born Wall Street financial wheeler-dealer in the Eddie Gilbert mode, was sentenced to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine for failing to register under FARA. Guterma, who was closely involved with two of the bad boys from Brazil, Earle Belle and Ben Jack Cage, had made a fortune in commissions buying American airtime for Trujillo to tout the glories of the Dominican Republic. But he didn’t register, and to prison he went.

  The successful Guterma prosecution revitalized FARA and became a sort of flypaper for catching lobbyists who worked sub rosa for Central American and Carribean strongmen. Igor had registered as an agent for Mexico and Brazil, even for Cuba, when Battista had given him a brief commission before Castro took over, but not for the Dominican Republic. The aspiring diplomat in him knew that playing with Trujillo was playing with fire, and he wanted to keep the connection under wraps to protect Martial’s reputation and his own.

  Igor Cassini may have wanted to be famous, but not like this. Maas’s profile marked the first time in Cassini’s charmed life that he would ever be scrutinized in depth by the press, his press. The hunter had become the game, the reporter the subject, and all America would soon want to know just who this secret agent really was. Maas’s long-anticipated article hit the stands in the second week of 1963. For once, the increasingly irrelevant, anemic Saturday Evening Post sold out. Entitled “Boswell of the Jet Set,” the article opened by turning a raised eyebrow on Igor’s own definition of this exclusive new class of high fliers: “people who live fast, move fast, know the latest thing and do the unusual and the unorthodox.”

  “Unorthodox,” Maas riposted, “is a mild word for some of Igor Cassini’s activities, which might surprise the millions of readers who savor Cholly Knickerbocker’s tidbits about the jet set. The strange relationship between Cholly Knickerbocker and the Martial public relations firm … alone is enough to justify some angry questions from anyone who believes in a free and independent American press.” Maas’s material supporting such enraged inquiry over Igor’s conflict of interest was extremely underwhelming, consisting mostly of mentions of sightings at balls and resorts of the owners of companies that Martial represented.

  For Lanvin, a Martial client, Maas enumerated the products Igor had mentioned in one of his many Igor (not Cholly)-bylined magazine articles: “Lanvin Salon, Arpège, My Sin, Crescendo and Spanish Geranium.” It was hardly a smoking gun. If Lanvin didn’t smoke enough, Maas served up the currently incendiary Eddie Gilbert, noting the countless Cholly features on Rhoda, and trying to serve up something sinister in the fact that Gilbert was one of the main investors of Le Club, which Igor constantly plugged in his column. It was old-fashioned logrolling, but there was nothing illegal about it, no worse than if Vogue did an editorial photo spread on a big advertiser like Chanel or Dior.

  Maas’s only truly big scoop was that Igor had been working, for pay, for Trujillo as far back as 1959, not just starting with his 1961 Joe Kennedy–inspired diplomatic mission. Igor, who had met with Maas for the article to prove he had nothing to hide, made his one mistake by denying it. “When I saw Cassini in his office at Martial,” Maas reported, “he said Rubirosa had tried ‘once or twice’ to get him to take the Dominican account but that he had refused. Other than that he denied he had any dealings with the Dominican Republic or Trujillo before 1961.
”

  That was Igor’s equivalent of Bill Clinton’s “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” Maas presented a statement from a disgruntled ex-Martial exec that Igor had been on the dictator’s payroll since ’59. Igor had fired him, the man claimed, when he balked at any association with Trujillo. Maas waded through a morass of shell corporations to find the links to Inter-American Public Relations, the contractor with Trujillo, which had been incorporated in Nassau, the Bahamas, but had its home office in Rio. Its president was João de Rezende, a gossip columnist who fancied himself the Igor Cassini of Rio and had written at length about Eddie Gilbert when he was residing there. Maas discovered that Cassini had attended Rezende’s wedding.

  These were ties that bound but were bound to frustrate and deceive a less dogged sleuth. Maas kept searching and finally tracked down the man who paid Inter-American’s Rio bills, a seventy-five-year-old lawyer named Paul Englander who worked in an apartment across the street from Martial whose lessor was Oleg Cassini. The Sherlockian Maas tracked down Englander, who admitted he had signed the contract with Trujillo, acknowledging that Igor “just tossed it my way,” then boasted that he had done “a damn good public-relations job for them.” Maas ascertained that Englander, like Cassini, had not registered as a foreign agent, then confronted him with the fact. He reported Englander’s irate response: “You’re not acting like a reporter; you’re more like a private detective or a member of the FBI or worse.” To Maas, the attack was the highest form of flattery.