The Devil May Dance

by Tapper, Jake

  “So where’s Charlie this evening?” Goode asked, not looking up from her task. “Rancho Mirage?”

  He was, in fact; he’d been picked up by Lawford in the late afternoon. “How did you know that?”

  Goode shrugged. “We know everything.” She leaned back in her chair and stretched like a cat in the sun. “We have this whole town wired. Cops. Nurses. Bartenders. Doormen.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  “The proletariat work for scraps, but the tsars have other motivations,” Goode said, “ones contained in those file cabinets.” She pointed vaguely in their direction. “Feel free to take a look around the office,” she said, clearly distracted. “I’ll be done in a sec.”

  “Please,” Margaret said. “I’ll just freshen up.”

  “Oh, sure, right over there,” Goode replied, pointing toward a door in a corner.

  Margaret walked into the cramped bathroom, painted yellow and barely more spacious than a restroom on an airplane. The most recent edition of the tabloid sat on the floor under the toilet paper roll. “Sinatra and Prowse Splitsville” blared the headline next to an illustration of a torn photo of the couple. “Dancer’s Refusal to Embrace Motherhood Leaves Blue-Eyed Crooner Blue.”

  Was that what had happened? Margaret wondered. Sinatra was mercurial and the sudden engagement had seemed to surprise even his friends. After what she’d seen and heard, Margaret doubted Hollywood Nightlife’s version of events, though she knew, given the power of the tabloid, that it would be accepted as gospel. She supposed it wasn’t surprising that the breakup would be blamed on the less famous partner.

  Smaller type highlighted the travails of lesser stars: “Did Bobby Darin Only Marry Sandra Dee to Get More Famous?” “Is Natalie Wood Ignoring the Woman Who Did Her Singing in West Side Story?” “Brigitte Bardot’s Latest to Be Directed by Her Ex!”

  Where am I? Margaret wondered. Not long ago she was raising her kids, reading zoological journals, and helping Charlie steer his political career. She’d had a weird hankering to learn how certain cloven-hoofed animals of the Paleozoic were related to the modern equine and a few thoughts on how to restart her research, but she’d wait until her kids were in grade school to find out. But now, she was trying to figure out who might blackmail her husband with the body of a dead teenage girl, how she could get her father-in-law out of prison before he died there, and where she might track down her runaway niece. And she was contemplating it all from the shoddy restroom in the offices of a tawdry Hollywood scandal sheet.

  And then she heard someone talking.

  “What the hell, Charlotte!” blared a man’s voice.

  Margaret carefully turned the handle to crack open the door and better observe. Tarantula had shown up in all his slime and hideousness, a camera hanging from a weathered strap around his doughy neck.

  “We don’t pay you to lecture directors on red carpets,” he hissed. “I’m fucking serious here. If this happens again, there will be consequences!” Margaret couldn’t see his face, but Goode appeared chastened and perhaps even frightened. He began turning his ample frame toward the bathroom. Margaret ducked behind the door. Her heart skipped a beat. Was she even allowed to be in these offices?

  “The toilet’s broken,” Goode said, answering the question. “I called the plumber.”

  “Good fucking Christ,” Tarantula said, cursing at the floor. “I’ll be at McGill’s.” A few seconds later Margaret heard the metal door slam.

  Margaret peeked her head out again. “Yikes,” she said.

  “I’m so glad he bought the toilet excuse,” Goode said, exhaling. “Not sure what he’d have done if he found you in there.” She lit a cigarette, her hands shaking. “Jesus, I’m fifty today.”

  “Happy birthday,” said Margaret. “Let’s celebrate. Unless you have plans?”

  “I had plans,” Goode said, and she took another swig from her flask. “I was going to write the next His Girl Friday or Bringing Up Baby. I thought by age fifty I’d have won a screenwriting Oscar or two. Not…this. Maybe Peg Entwistle had the right idea.”

  Margaret racked her brain and then recalled the story of the ruined actress who’d dived off the H of the Hollywood sign. Silence filled the room.

  “Charlotte, I need your help,” Margaret finally said.

  And Lawford needed Charlie’s help. Earlier that day, he’d picked up Charlie in his Ghia, and now they were heading to Rancho Mirage.

  “He’s going to blow his stack,” Charlie said. “I’ll be there for moral support, but you have to light the fuse.”

  “Thanks,” Lawford said. “That won’t be hard to do.”

  Charlie had little confidence in Lawford’s pledge, and the distrust hung in the air awkwardly until Lawford turned on the radio.

  …the youngest brother of the president, who is seeking his older brother’s former Senate seat, admitted today that in his freshman year at Harvard he was asked to leave the college after he was caught cheating on an exam—

  “Oh, Teddy.” Lawford sighed.

  “Lot to live up to in that family,” Charlie said.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” Lawford said, a rueful smile on his face. He changed the station.

  …twelve hundred defendants, sitting in a basketball court in the Principe Prison, facing Castro government charges that remain secret but clearly relating to the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Cuban defense lawyers say they believe prosecutors will seek various punishments including the death penalty—

  Lawford sighed again and punched in another station, this time one that played music, producing a familiar crooning from the man they were about to confront.

  …like the love of Ant’ny for Cleo,

  When I left my heart down in Rio

  What is more sad than a good love gone bad

  I was an Aries devoured by a Leo!

  Sinatra’s light baritone prompted Lawford to grimace. He changed the station.

  In ’43 they put to sea thirteen men and Kennedy

  Aboard the PT-109 to fight the brazen enemy…

  “PT-109” by Jimmy Dean was climbing to the top of the country chart, but Lawford was clearly not in the mood for the hagiography, and he shut the radio off completely.

  The report from Cuba, meanwhile, had prompted Charlie to ruminate about the classified Oversight Committee hearing a week before where a terrified lieutenant had told him and two other House Republicans about Operation Northwoods.

  Charlie couldn’t believe his ears as the officer explained the false-flag scheme he claimed the Joint Chiefs chairman, General L. L. Lemnitzer, had presented to Defense Secretary Bob McNamara days before: the U.S. would stage a “series of well-coordinated incidents” at or near the U.S. base at Guantanamo “to give genuine appearance of being done by hostile Cuban forces.” Fake saboteurs, fake riots, burning our own aircraft, even staging funerals for mock victims. The document the lieutenant presented was hideous: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” it stated. The general proposed staging terrorist operations against Cubans in Miami and Washington, DC, sinking a boatload of Cubans, real or imagined, an “incident” where a Cuban aircraft shot down a chartered civilian airliner on its way from the U.S. to Central America, or an “incident” where Cuban MiGs destroyed a USAF aircraft over international waters in an unprovoked attack. This, of course, would prompt a massive U.S. invasion of Cuba. Adiós, Fidel.

  Charlie and his fellow congressmen promised the lieutenant they would protect his name. Who knew what a Pentagon willing to hatch and carry out such deranged orders might do to a leaker? And what the lieutenant didn’t know was that he was not the first officer to tread outside his chain of command. Charlie had previously received an anonymous letter detailing the CIA’s Operation Dirty Trick, a plan to blame the Cubans if anything had gone wrong with the Mercury orbit the month before. A different source told them about Operation Good Times, which would spread throughout Cuba a fake photo of “an obese Castro with two beautie
s in any situation desired” next to a “table brimming over with the most delectable Cuban food with an underlying caption (appropriately Cuban) such as ‘My ration is different.’”

  After several years on the Oversight Committee, through the Eisenhower and now Kennedy administrations, Charlie had reached many disappointing conclusions about the wisdom and even the emotional stability of those tasked with keeping the United States safe, mostly those at the CIA, run by men to the manor born, boola-boola Brahmins with no sense of humility. The worst of these unaccountable operatives was the one known as “the most brilliant man in Washington,” Richard Bissell—he of Groton, Yale, the Skull and Bones, the Marshall Plan, and the Ford Foundation—the agency’s deputy director for plans ever since the man who’d recruited him for the job, Frank Wisner, had had a mental breakdown in ’58.

  Charlie first met Bissell in a closed-door hearing after his much-heralded high-altitude U-2 spy-plane program, which had been collecting reams of data through its illegal flights over the USSR, was ignominiously exposed after one of its planes was shot down over Sverdlovsk and its pilot captured. This happened literally days before President Eisenhower and Premier Khrushchev had been set to meet in Paris to discuss possible nuclear disarmament and a test ban. Eisenhower ultimately was forced to admit the United States had been spying on the USSR. Behind closed doors to the House Oversight subcommittee, Bissell demonstrated no contrition, no repentance, nothing indicating that he accepted responsibility for actions that had put the nation at greater risk.

  Bissell next appeared before Charlie after the April 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster. The attitude, again, was pure hubris. Under questioning by Charlie, Bissell revealed that he’d feared that sharing a candid assessment of everything that might go wrong could frighten President Kennedy and keep him from taking any action, which he could not allow to happen. Again, he took no responsibility for the fiasco, the loss of life, or the embarrassment the president felt.

  Charlie had spent a great deal of his time in Washington, DC, feeling staggeringly dismayed at the sad state of intellect in the nation’s capital. It wasn’t that they weren’t smart, the Eisenhower and Kennedy administration officials, congressional leaders, and members of the military-industrial complex Ike had warned everyone about in his farewell address. It was that they thought they were smarter than they were. They came up with plans that were so convoluted that if they backfired, they caused repercussions that lasted for years and only grew in their destructiveness. And here we had CIA officers and generals—the goddamn chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—

  “Charlie.” Lawford interrupted Charlie’s furious train of thought. “Do you watch The Twilight Zone?”

  “Sure,” said Charlie. “Rod Serling’s a genius.”

  “A few months ago they had this episode where this kid, I think his name was Anthony, had terrifying powers and could just wish people into the cornfields or transform them into horrific creatures. Did you see it?”

  Charlie had. “Yeah. Creepy. Everyone’s afraid of the kid so the family turns into a bunch of sycophants. ‘It’s good you’re making it snow. A real good thing!’”

  “Yeah,” said Lawford. “Exactly.” He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Charlie was about to ask why he’d brought up the episode, but then he understood. They pulled into Sinatra’s Rancho Mirage estate.

  They knocked on the door, and George Jacobs opened it while pouring from a shaker into two martini glasses. Despite the festive greeting he was offering, his tone was grim: “The boss has a cold,” he warned them.

  “Oh, that’s too bad,” Charlie said, wondering what that might mean in terms of Sinatra’s mood.

  “How bad?” Lawford asked. “His pipes clogged?”

  “He’s worried about his ability to perform,” Jacobs said. “At the Oscars.”

  “Hoo-boy,” said Lawford as they walked into the house.

  Sinatra was sitting on the sofa in pajamas and a bathrobe, drinking a bourbon on the rocks. “Gentlemen, to what do I owe this honor?”

  Charlie looked at Lawford awkwardly but Sinatra changed the subject before they had to confront their task.

  “You went to the Globes, right?” Sinatra asked Lawford. “I heard Marilyn could barely walk.” The Hollywood Foreign Press Association had given Monroe and Charlton Heston their top awards a few weeks before.

  “She was not in good shape,” Lawford agreed as he sat in a plush armchair across from Sinatra.

  “‘Town Without Pity’ won,” Sinatra said, referring to the Best Original Song winner. “That and ‘Moon River’ are going to be tough to beat.”

  “I’ve got my eye on some of the Globes’ ‘New Star of the Year’ girlies,” Lawford said. “Jane Fonda. And that Ann-Margret!”

  “You and me both, pally,” Sinatra said, toasting his friend.

  “Warren Beatty got one of those awards too,” Lawford said. “The kid is quite a swordsman.”

  “That whole evening is ridiculous,” Sinatra said. “Foreign Press Association. It’s like five guys wearing fezzes—no one even knows if they write for actual papers.”

  “Nothing like an Oscar, I’d imagine,” said Charlie, positioning himself on the other side of the room.

  “That was something special,” Sinatra said. “Hey, Charlie, I got Joey tickets to the Oscars this year but per usual, he’ll be a no-show. You want ’em?”

  Rat Pack member Joey Bishop was almost never around, working steadily on his new sitcom and preferring a comparatively normal life with his beloved family. Bishop’s membership in the Rat Pack was pretty much confined to movie sets.

  “Yes, of course,” Charlie said.

  “You’ll need to stand up and applaud like hell when I sing!” Sinatra said playfully.

  “A given,” Charlie said.

  “George!” Sinatra called. His valet walked into the room. “Go get Joey’s Oscar tickets that he’s never gonna use and bring them to Charlie. Put them in the car so he doesn’t forget them.”

  “At once, Mr. Sinatra,” Jacobs said. “Do you want me to give him the screenplay you asked him to look at?”

  “What’s this?” asked Lawford.

  “Oh,” Sinatra said. “A picture about the U.S. accidentally dropping an A-bomb on North Carolina. Charlie’s going to give it a scrub to see how realistic it is.”

  “Peachy,” said Lawford.

  “Oh, and I got something else for you, Charlie,” Sinatra said. “An LP. Listen to it when you get back to your suite.”

  “Will do,” Charlie said.

  “What is it, Pope?” Lawford asked. “No parting gifts for me?””

  “Oh, it’s nothing, Pete,” Sinatra said. “I was fiddling around the other night in the recording studio out back, and we recorded a jazzier version of ‘The Devil May Dance.’ We cut a few thirty-threes. I have one extra. I can get you one next time.”

  Small talk continued for another hour, with Sinatra minorly obsessed with Jack Paar’s departure from The Tonight Show that week, his last live show airing the night before. Paar had said he was leaving because the daily grind had grown too tough, which Sinatra found silly: “Some of this showbiz stuff is long days and hard work, but c’mon, we aren’t coolies building the railroads!”

  What most animated Sinatra, however, was that Paar, who would be replaced by Johnny Carson in the fall, had devoted way too much time in his last show to settling scores with his enemies in the press.

  “I mean,” Sinatra said, “it’s all pussy and jelly beans. What is he bellyaching about?”

  Paar had taken some hits a year before for comments he’d made defending Castro—credulous and naive homages to the Cuban leader about how beloved he was and how he wasn’t a Communist. And although Castro’s declaration that he was a Marxist-Leninist the previous December had prompted Paar to admit he’d made a mistake, on his last night as host of the show, he was unabashed and untethered and determined to exact revenge. “Phony patriotism,” Paar had said of columnist Walter W
inchell. “He wrapped himself in the American flag whenever you criticized him, and he wore the American flag like a bathrobe.”

  “Why even bring that shit up?” Sinatra asked. “No one watching was thinking about Castro. People don’t put on Jack Paar because he’s talking about Cuba. They put him on because he doesn’t.”

  Charlie glared at Lawford. There was never going to be a better moment for Lawford to drop the bad news on him like an A-bomb on Goldsboro. But Lawford was looking down, still clearly afraid.

  “Speaking of current events,” Charlie said. “Peter has some news on the JFK visit.”

  “Yeah?” asked Sinatra, crossing his arms. “I wondered when I was going to get the final word—he’s supposed to be here in a week and a half!” He looked at Charlie, who nodded toward Lawford. “Yeah?” he said directly to Lawford.

  “I’m afraid it isn’t good news, Frank,” Lawford began.

  “It was fucking Bobby, wasn’t it?” Sinatra asked, his face turning pink. “Fucking choirboy. Fucking Puritan.”

  “I pleaded with him to reconsider,” Lawford said. “They say it was a Secret Service decision. Security. They don’t think this compound is safe enough for a visit. It’s nothing personal, Frank!”

  Sinatra stood, enraged. “George! Get the president on the phone! This is fucking bullshit!” He grabbed a decanter of bourbon in one hand and a tumbler in the other, poured some bourbon, took a swig, then replenished the glass. “George!” he bellowed. He started pacing around the room maniacally.

  Jacobs yelled from the kitchen: “Just got through to the White House! I’m on hold!”

  “Let me know when you get that son of a bitch on the phone,” Sinatra snarled. He turned to Charlie. “The president’s been dodging my calls for months.”

  “Look, Jack called Patricia,” Lawford continued, an emotional dam having been broken. “He said that as president, he just couldn’t sleep in the same bed as Giancana had. She protested, but—”

  “That hypocritical fucking mick,” Sinatra said, shaking with rage, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth. He stared at Lawford, then threw his tumbler across the room; it shattered against the wall, leaving a stain.