The Dark Side of Camelot
Page 39
Judith Exner would have understood his fear. She is, she says, still sleeping with a gun under her pillow.
* * *
* In My Story, Exner gave a different account, indicating that she knew about Kennedy's aspirations before she met him. She described a December 1959 dinner in Palm Springs with Sinatra and Peter and Pat Lawford at which Pat Lawford analyzed her brother's chances in the coming primaries. "This was the first time I remember the name of Jack Kennedy coming up in the conversation," Exner wrote. In interviews for this book, Exner acknowledged that many of the specific incidents and dates in the memoir are not correct. Some details were deliberately fudged, she said, out of fear; other mistakes were the inevitable result of collaboration. The book was written by Demaris, she said, who relied solely on her memory and her recollection. When she first met Jack Kennedy in Las Vegas in early 1960, she said, "I knew him as Pat's brother rather than as a senator."
* Another member of the gang was Torbert Macdonald, a Kennedy college roommate who was a congressman from Massachusetts. On one occasion at least, in the 1950s, the presence of a buddy seemed to provoke Kennedy to rare coarseness. A former Senate secretary told of a distressing encounter with the two men in front of a Senate office building. Kennedy, while crossing the street with Macdonald, flagged down her automobile as she drove past and asked her to "come out" with him and Macdonald. "I was scared," the secretary (who did not wish to be named) recalled in an interview for this book. But she did not want to risk offending Kennedy by flatly rejecting the offer. She made a weak joke, but Kennedy persisted. At that point, the secretary realized that the new edition of Life magazine was on the car seat next to her, with a photograph of Jacqueline Kennedy on the cover. She showed Kennedy the magazine and remarked that his wife looked beautiful. Kennedy "got angry," the secretary said, "slammed his hand on the car fender, and walked away."
* But see below, page 323.
* Kennedy, still reeling from the disaster in Cuba, began his speech at the dinner by taking note of the strong support he got from the Democratic Party faithful. He added, "I do not know whether to thank you or not, but I am here and I expect to do my duty." He added that "if all of you had voted the other way---there's about 5,500 of you here tonight---I would not be the president of the United States." The remark, given what really happened on election day in Chicago, might have been tongue-in-cheek.
* I mailed Tommy Hale some of the FBI documentation dealing with the 1962 break-in; he did get a chance, he told me, to show it to his brother Billy when Billy made a brief visit to Fort Worth in mid-1997. Billy looked at the materials, Tommy said, but "wouldn't talk to me about it. He wasn't interested."
19
FIRST MARRIAGE
President Kennedy's involvement with Judith Exner and Sam Giancana was the most dangerous issue that he and Bobby had to deal with in mid-1962, but that potential scandal wasn't the one that got their attention. The biggest family worry that summer had nothing to do with organized crime or getting rid of troublesome leaders, but was just as politically deadly: the revival of long-standing rumors that Jack Kennedy had been secretly married to a Palm Beach socialite named Durie Malcolm before his high-society wedding to Jacqueline Bouvier in 1953.
Charles Spalding, a retired New York stockbroker who had been a Kennedy intimate since World War II, was the first to acknowledge for this book that he and other insiders had known for many years that the rumors were true: Kennedy and Malcolm were married, albeit very briefly, in early 1947. Spalding knew Durie Malcolm from her childhood days at the Winter Club in Lake Forest, Illinois, a wealthy suburb north of Chicago. She was a sensational athlete, Spalding said: "She'd play ice hockey in the winter and basketball with the guys." Malcolm was special in other ways, he added; she was as adventurous in romance as in sports. "She got into men in a big way," Spalding told me. "She had plenty of men hanging around." By the winter of 1946--47, when Kennedy first became infatuated with her, Malcolm had been twice married and was in the process of getting her second divorce. (The final decree for her second divorce was filed on January 24, 1947.)
Spalding loyally sought to describe Kennedy's marriage as little more than a lark---"a high school prank, a bit of daring that went too far." Getting married with no advance notice, he told me, "was the kind of joke that Durie would go for"---a spur-of-the-moment event that lasted "just twenty-four hours. They went down and went through the motions. It was like Halloween. I remember saying to Jack," Spalding told me, "'You must be nuts. You're running for president and you're running around getting married.'"
But there is evidence that the relationship was more serious. The New York World-Telegram's society writer, Charles Ventura, in his column, "Society Today," reported on January 20, 1947, that young John F. Kennedy was on the verge of being given Palm Beach's "annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance." Kennedy, pictured in the column, was cited for giving Malcolm "the season's outstanding rush ... Only the fact that duty called him to Washington as a Congressman from Massachusetts kept Jack from staying around to receive his Oscar in person, so it may be awarded to Durie. The two were inseparable at all social functions and sports events. They even drove down to Miami to hold hands at football games and wager on the horses." Durie was described by Ventura as beautiful and funny.
Even in early 1947, Spalding said, it was clear that Jack was being groomed and financed for the White House by his father. Joe Kennedy had "a hemorrhage" when he learned about the marriage, Spalding told me. Malcolm, besides being twice divorced, was Episcopalian. "He demanded that it be taken care of," Spalding recalled. "They [the family] were afraid the whole thing was going to come out.
"I went out there and removed the [marriage] papers," Spalding told me, presumably from the Palm Beach County courthouse. "It was Jack who asked me if I'd go get the papers." Spalding said he "got" the marriage documents with the help of a lawyer in Palm Beach.
Florida law requires no blood test before a couple can apply for a marriage license. Prior to 1983, however, couples making application had to wait three days for a license to be issued. If Jack Kennedy and Durie Malcolm followed the law, their wedding was planned at least three days in advance and thus was more than a spur-of-the-moment "prank," as Charles Spalding claimed.
Palm Beach County officials, queried for this book, were unable to find documentary evidence of a Kennedy-Malcolm wedding in 1947. But one city attorney explained in an interview that the county's marriage records were recorded by hand in those days, and were not filed in alphabetical order. It was "impossible to determine if something was missing," the attorney told me, after she personally researched the county records. "The whole point of expunging," the attorney said, "is to leave no record at all." It is possible the couple applied for a marriage license but changed their minds. It is also possible that Kennedy, who married in 1953, and Malcolm, who married twice more, were bigamists. No evidence of a divorce was found during research for this book.
It was the issue of bigamy that prompted the wife of one of Jack Kennedy's friends from the high-society days in Palm Beach to urge that this book say nothing about the Kennedy-Malcolm marriage, which she was convinced had taken place. "You sit down and think hard about it," the woman said to me in a 1997 telephone interview granted only after I promised her anonymity. "Jack was never married legally to Jackie, and all that's left of Jack are his two children and his grandchildren." Telling about the marriage "makes them [Caroline and John Jr.] not legal. That's a very disruptive thing to do. Those children had a hard enough time as it is---they lost their father."
In recent years, gossip and allegations about Kennedy's suspected first marriage have been fodder for tabloid newspapers and television entertainment news shows in the United States and England. A typical article in London's Daily Mail on January 24, 1997, included an enlarged photograph of a young Durie Malcolm, wearing a wedding dress, with a caption asking, "Was she JFK's secret first bride?" Malcolm, now over eighty years of age and a widow-
--her fourth husband, Frank Appleton, died in 1996---has consistently denied the story. "I wouldn't have married Jack Kennedy for all the tea in China," she told London's Sunday Times in 1996. "I'll tell you why, if you want to know the truth. I didn't care for those Irish micks, and old Joe was a terrible man." Malcolm has issued similar denials since the story first became public, in 1961. Her only child, a daughter also named Durie Malcolm, who lives in London, has never spoken publicly about her mother.
Durie Malcolm, contacted in the fall of 1997 by a close friend on behalf of the author, was categorical in refusing to be interviewed. "Tell him one thing," she told her friend. "I've never been married to John Kennedy and there's nothing to discuss. Just call him up and say we were never married."
An extensive search for family members and friends who might be willing to talk proved disappointing: Malcolm outlived many members of her immediate family, and none of her old friends from the 1940s, as reported in the Palm Beach society pages from that era, could be located.
Charles Spalding was seventy-nine years old when interviewed, and suffering from impairment of his short-term memory. However, his account of Jack Kennedy's early marriage was directly supported in subsequent interviews with me and indirectly confirmed by the late Richard Cardinal Cushing, the archbishop of Boston, who functioned as a parish priest to the Kennedy family. Cushing, committed to social action, in 1958 founded the St. James Society, a Boston-based group of young priests dedicated to missionary work among the poor in Latin America. In 1964, during a visit to Bolivia, the cardinal stayed up late one night, sharing a bottle of scotch with a dozen or so missionaries, including Father James J. O'Rourke. The young priests were eager "for a taste of things back home," O'Rourke told me in a 1997 interview for this book. "What's going on in the diocese. What's here, what's there. Somebody said, 'Your Eminence, if Jack Kennedy had run for reelection, would he have been reelected?' I think most of us just figured the question would give an automatic, 'Sure.' But he didn't. He said, 'Well, you've got to remember the Republicans would have put up [Nelson] Rockefeller, and Rockefeller's very popular, ... the only guy with the image who could go against Kennedy. The Democrats would have tried to make political hay out of Rockefeller's divorce. And divorce was a strong issue. But then again,' [the cardinal] said, 'the Republicans would have used Jack Kennedy's first marriage. They would have brought that up.'
"I don't think one of us in that room had ever heard a whisper of that," O'Rourke told me. "We kind of hung in space. And he said, 'Well, they won't find anything [or] any mention of it. The pages are torn out of the register.' And he chuckled and that was it," O'Rourke said. Cushing noticed the stunned reaction of the young missionaries, O'Rourke recalled, and added, "Yeah, Kennedy was married before, but it got taken care of."
Father O'Rourke, who was pastor of a parish church in Brighton, Massachusetts, in Boston, when interviewed, also explained that if Kennedy's marriage to Malcolm did not take place in a Catholic church, as it apparently did not, he would not need a formal annulment from the authorities in Rome. Instead, Kennedy would need only a Declaration of Nullity from a local church marriage court before being free to marry again in a church ceremony. "An annulment only comes into play when a Catholic is involved and the marriage has taken place in the Catholic church," O'Rourke told me. "It's less complicated" to get a nullity declaration, he said. "One still has to go through the local marriage court. You present them with evidence and they have to say, 'Yes, we concur that so and so is free to get married.' But that wouldn't take a great deal of time. If the Kennedys wanted something done," O'Rourke added, "I assume they would have called" Archbishop Cushing. "I doubt if they'd have bothered with the middleman"---a parish priest---"when they could talk to the boss."
In a separate interview, Spalding's former wife, Betty, also supported her former husband's recollections. Eunice Kennedy, Jack's younger sister, told the then-Mrs. Spalding that "there was a drunken party and they [Jack and Durie Malcolm] went off to a justice of the peace to get married" at two o'clock in the morning. Eunice Kennedy's account laid the blame on Malcolm. Betty Spalding quoted Eunice as claiming that Malcolm "wouldn't sleep" with her brother "unless he married her." Afteward, Betty Spalding recalled hearing, "the Old Man had a shitfit and got it nullified." The presumed marriage took place in the years after World War II, Betty Spalding said, when she and her then-husband were living with his parents at their home in Palm Beach. Betty Spalding remembered Durie Malcolm as "tiny, blond, and very pretty."
Joe Kennedy got his way with his son, as he always did, and on July 11, 1947, Durie Malcolm married another wealthy Palm Beach socialite named Thomas Shevlin. It was her third (acknowledged) marriage, and his second, but it lasted until Shevlin's death, in 1973. Durie's secret marriage to Kennedy was widely known inside the Shevlin family, according to Frances Howe of Greenville, South Carolina, who was married for thirteen years to Deering Howe, Jr., Thomas Shevlin's nephew. (Deering Howe's mother was Shevlin's only sibling.) "I knew all the players in Palm Beach well," Frances Howe said in a 1997 interview for this book. Information about Durie Malcolm's brief marriage to Jack Kennedy "was all over the family."
Shortly after marrying Deering Howe, Frances told me, she ran into Durie Malcolm at a party. "She tapped her finger on my cheek and said, 'You poor child. Shouldn't have married into the family.'" Frances said she immediately took a liking to Durie and, after getting "up to speed" on the Shevlin family history, asked Durie at a polo match "whether it"---the marriage to Jack Kennedy---"was true. She said 'Yes.'" It was her understanding, Frances Howe added, that "Joe went ballistic and got everything eradicated---all the records wiped out." Shevlin family history had it, Frances Howe told me, that "Jack really loved [Malcolm] and wanted to be with her." But "young Joe [Kennedy] had died and Jack would be running for president."
Kennedy's marriage was known to at least a few of the phalanx of friends who could be found on any summer weekend at the Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port. Morton Downey, Jr., whose father was close to Joseph Kennedy, recalled hearing as a teenager all about Jack Kennedy's stupidity in getting married and Joe Kennedy's anger at his son. "Dad told me, 'I hope you have enough sense not to do this'---run off and get married," Downey said in a 1997 interview for this book. Morton Downey was a popular radio and television singer in the 1950s.
Kennedy's first marriage remained a family secret until 1957, when Louis L. Blauvelt, an amateur genealogist, privately printed three hundred leather-bound copies of a Blauvelt family tree. Blauvelt, a retired toolmaker who lived in East Orange, New Jersey, spent thirty years compiling entries for each generation of the family, beginning with Gerri Hendricksen Blauvelt, who came to America in 1638. Entry number 12,427, the eleventh generation, listed Durie Malcolm (her name was misspelled) and said that her third marriage was to "John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England." Blauvelt was careless in his handling of the Durie Malcolm entry; he did not cite her later marriage to Shevlin, and he also reversed the names of her first two husbands. The Blauvelt book attracted no attention until mid-1961, when its entry on Jack Kennedy began being circulated by his political opponents. The word soon passed to newspapermen.
In his memoir Conversations with Kennedy, Benjamin Bradlee, who, like the journalist Charles Bartlett, was a social friend of the Kennedys, recalled first hearing of Kennedy's "other wife" in August 1961, as the crisis over the Berlin Wall was unfolding. "Some D.A.R. type had walked into the city room of the [Washington] Post, announcing that she had documentary proof of an earlier Kennedy marriage," Bradlee wrote. "She had offered the story to the Chicago Tribune, which had refused to print it." The woman told the Post about the Blauvelt genealogy, which was on the shelves at the Library of Congress. Bradlee, then covering the White House for Newsweek magazine, immediately telephoned the library, he said, "only to be told pointedly that the book was out, and that the waiting list included ten members of Congress."
Kennedy turned once aga
in to Clark Clifford, the Washington lawyer who had helped him weather other crises. In his memoir, Counsel to the President, Clifford recounted how "Kennedy and his staff had tried to deal with the matter by ignoring it; but when the rumor continued to circulate and then surfaced in a few minor periodicals, the President called me. 'All I know is that some years ago, I knew very briefly a young woman named Durie Malcolm. I think I had two dates with her. One may have been a dinner date in which we went dancing. The other, to my recollection, was a football game.'" Clifford telephoned Malcolm, whom he had met when she was married to her second husband, Firmin V. Desloge of St. Louis; she told a very similar story in denying the marriage. "My recollection," Clifford quoted Malcolm as saying, "is that we had two dates. We may have had dinner in New York and the other time we went to a football game." She agreed to sign an affidavit stating that she had not been married to John F. Kennedy, according to Clifford's memoir. She took her telephone off the hook.
Ben Bradlee reentered the scene at that point. He met with the president and was told by Kennedy and Pierre Salinger, the White House press secretary, that Durie Malcolm had "executed an affidavit, swearing she had never been married to John F. Kennedy." Malcolm's sworn affidavit, if it existed, has never been made public. "Kennedy later confirmed to me," Bradlee wrote in his memoir, "that he had dated her once, but that she had been a girlfriend of his brother, Joe." Bradlee was unable to reach Durie Malcolm by telephone; he also discovered the discrepancies in the Blauvelt genealogy. Louis Blauvelt had died, at age seventy-nine, in 1959, and there was nothing in his files, Bradlee was told, proving that the Kennedy-Malcolm marriage took place. All of this was reported to the president, who, Bradlee wrote, breezily told him, "You haven't got it, Benjy. You're all looking to tag me with some girl, and none of you can do it, because it just isn't there." The first lady listened to her husband "with a smile on her face," Bradlee wrote.