Authors: Jeannette Walls
Cassini had a sideline business—he ran a public relations firm, Martial, and would regularly plug its clients in his column. Cassini insisted that his bosses knew about his double dealing and that it was even sanctioned by tradition. “My predecessor Maury Paul—
and he is not the only one to have done so—used to take checks from socialites,” according to Cassini, “aspiring or real, in payment either for what he wrote or for what he knew but graciously did not say.”
Cassini’s blatantly biased plugs may have represented unethical journalism, but they weren’t illegal. The incident for which Robert Kennedy indicted him—acting as an unregistered agent of the Dominican Republic—was illegal. It was also arranged by the Kennedys themselves.
It began one day when Cassini mentioned to Joseph Kennedy that a friend—playboy Porfirio Rubirosa, who had been the ambassador to the Dominican Republic—was worried that the country was on the brink of a Cubalike coup. Joe Kennedy passed the information along to his son John Kennedy, and the President asked Cassini to make a diplomatic trip to the Dominican Republic. “With all the billions this country spends on its State Department and Central Intelligence Agency,” noted the
New York Times,
“it will be interesting to learn why the White House turned to a society columnist as the initiator of a special mission to the Dominican Republic.”
The incident was also seized on by reporter Peter Maas, who wrote an exposé of Cassini in the
Saturday Evening Post.
A month later, Attorney General Robert Kennedy indicted Igor Cassini as an unregistered agent of the Dominican Republic.
*
“I was prepared to fight the charges, but the legal bills were very high and I was running out of money,” Igor later explained. “Robert Kennedy sent word through my brother that I should plead no contest. He said, ‘Don’t worry, everything will be fine.’ I had done nothing illegal. He promised everything would go back to being the way it was.”
Igor was forced to resign the Cholly Knickerbocker column—it was taken over by Aileen “Suzy Knickerbocker” Mehle. As a result, he lost most of his public relations clients. He also lost his status in society. Igor’s brother Oleg was still invited to the White
House, where he was teased by the Kennedy sisters who would say, “Bobby’s going to put your brother in jail.”
“They’ve got everything on you,” Oleg once told his brother in a frantic phone call. “They don’t care whether you’re innocent or not. Bobby Kennedy has told me he’ll put you in jail for ten years!
“That self-righteous bastard!” Igor replied. “I know the redhead he’s sleeping with!” Igor claimed that he later discovered that Bobby Kennedy was taping the call.
Igor’s wife, Charlene Wrightsman, had been a longtime friend of the Kennedys, but she had become increasingly depressed over her husband’s indictment. The couple became such pariahs that her socially prominent father, Charles, and his wife Jayne Wrightsman, wouldn’t let Charlene or Igor visit when they were entertaining the Kennedys. On March 31, 1963, Charlene wrote a desperate letter to her former friend and neighbor John Kennedy:
Dear Mr. President:
I have hesitated writing you before, but now I feel I must appeal to you…. We always considered ourselves good friends of the Kennedys and [Igor] still cannot understand why the son of a man whom he considered one of his closest friends for 17 years, and who so often advised him in all matters, should now be determined to bringing him down to total ruin…. I hope, Jack, that you will not resent my writing you this letter. We’ve been friends for so many years, and now in this terrible moment in which our family needs help, I appeal to you.
Charlene waited for a reply, but it never came. Several months later, at age thirty-eight, she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
*
“I was ruined,” Cassini said. “I lost my job. I lost my wife. Nothing was ever the same again. The Kennedys,
who were supposed to be my friends, ruined me because I became an embarrassment to them.”
Such tactics help explain why Jack Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe was left untouched by the press. The relationship was common knowledge among gossip columnists. In early 1962, Monroe confided to her good friend and confidante, gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, that she was having an affair with “The Prez.”
“Are you surprised?” Marilyn giggled.
“No, nothing you do surprises me,” Skolsky sighed. Skolsky, who wrote a Hollywood column for Hearst, had been friends with Monroe for more than fifteen years. The actress complained to him how difficult it was to have private time with Kennedy—when they got together at Peter Lawford’s beach house, she said, they had to leave the light on or the Secret Service men took it as a signal to burst in and “rescue” the President. Monroe told the gossip columnist that she expected to be able to spend more time with him in the White House sometime soon. Skolsky, however, never mentioned the affair in his column. “In a society that boasts of freedom of the press, no reporter, including myself, dared to write about Marilyn Monroe’s affair with John F. Kennedy,” Skolsky once admitted. “I accept my share of the blame. I also confess that I still find it grim to speculate on what might have happened to me if I had tried to write about this romance in my column.”
Skolsky wasn’t the only reporter afraid to print what he knew. “If I dared print but one-half of one percent of all I know about these people, I’d be run out of Hollywood on a rail in five minutes flat!” said Hollywood columnist Ruth Waterbuy. Peter Lawford’s mother gave Hedda Hopper an interview in which she complained about Kennedy and his extramarital affairs. Hopper never published it.
Gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, who was among the most fearless writers in the country, was getting increasingly obsessed about Kennedy’s relationship with Monroe. She used to regale her friends with tales of Kennedy’s indiscretions.
“Why don’t you write that?” one asked.
“I couldn’t possibly,” Dorothy said. “Nobody would.” But as
Kennedy’s philandering started getting more brazen, Kilgallen took to hinting at it in her column. When Monroe sang “Happy Birthday” to the President in May 1962, the two danced together five times. “Marilyn Monroe is cooking in the sex appeal department,” Kilgallen wrote not long afterward. “She has appeared vastly alluring to a handsome gentleman. A handsome gentleman with a bigger name than Joe DiMaggio in his heyday—so don’t write her off.”
After the item appeared, Kennedy, deciding that on this occasion flattery would work better than intimidation, invited Kilgallen and her eight-year-old son Kerry, for a private tour of the White House. The President personally greeted Dorothy and her son, and fussed shamelessly over young Kerry: gave him a ballpoint pen with the Presidential seal on it, and pinned a gold PT-109 pin on the school tie of the beaming boy. Kilgallen stopped writing blind items about Kennedy.
But the Kennedys did persecute and discredit one news source whom they were afraid might disclose Jack’s affair with Monroe and Bobby’s unofficial, and secret, trip to her apartment in the wake of her suicide: Fred Otash, the private investigator and former
Confidential
informer.
Early in the morning on August 4, 1962, Fred Otash was jolted by a call from Peter Lawford. The actor was upset, Otash remembered, he seemed nervous or drunk, maybe. “I have a big problem,” Lawford said. “I need to come over and see you.” Otash invited the Kennedy in-law to drop by his Laurel Avenue office.
Otash had once been the most powerful, feared private detective in Hollywood, but business had never been quite the same for him since
Confidential
had folded. Otash had known Kennedy’s brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, when he was a vice cop for the L.A.P.D. (Lawford’s name, according to Otash, was in the black book of almost every high-class prostitute in Los Angeles.) When Otash became a private detective and started working as a source for
Confidential,
he would get new clients—his list included Howard Hughes, Judy Garland, Edward G. Robinson, Lana Turner, and Bette Davis—by promising to keep them out of the scandal magazine. One day, Lawford called him. “Fred, I know
Confidential
has something coming out on me,” Lawford told him. “Now that I’m married to Pat Kennedy, I really can’t afford this horse-shit.” If Otash would get the story killed, Lawford would become a source for him. The story was duly killed and Lawford duly began passing Otash information on other Hollywood celebrities.
Coincidentally, another Otash client was Marilyn Monroe. According to Otash, the actress thought she could protect herself from any possible retaliation from the Kennedy family over her affair with Jack if she had her own evidence of her conversations with him and his associates. So, according to Otash, at the recommendation of their mutual friend gossip columnist Sidney Skolsky, Monroe hired him to bug
her.
Otash not only tapped Marilyn’s phone for her, he gave her a recording device for her purse, as well as one that could be hidden in her wristwatch.
Then in 1961, according to Otash, he was approached by the Teamsters Union leader Jimmy Hoffa, an old client, who said he was being investigated by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and according to Otash, the union boss wanted a little something to use to fight back. Otash knew that Jack Kennedy had seen Monroe at Peter Lawford’s Santa Monica beach house. With Lawford’s approval, according to Otash, he arranged for the actor’s sound man, Bernie Spindel, to wire the house where Kennedy and Monroe would meet. According to Otash, he actually acquired several tapes of these sessions. He passed them on to Hoffa but they disappeared.
Lawford arrived about 2
A.M
., “half crocked and half nervous,” Otash recalled. “[Lawford] said he had just left Monroe and she was dead and that Bobby had been there earlier,” Otash later told the
Los Angeles Times.
“He said they got Bobby out of the city and back to Northern California and would I go on out there and arrange to do anything to remove anything incriminating from the house.”
*
According to Otash, Lawford said Bobby Kennedy, who was also reportedly sleeping with Monroe, had been to her house the
previous evening and the two fought over their relationship. “According to Lawford, he had called [Monroe] and she had said to him that she was passed around like a piece of meat,” Otash said. “She’d had it. She didn’t want Bobby to use her anymore.”
Lawford told Otash that he had been to the actress’s house to try to clean out any evidence of the affairs with the Kennedys, according to the detective, but he wanted Otash to double-check. “He said, ‘I took what I could find and destroyed it—period,’ ” said Otash. “But he said, ‘I’m so out of it, I would feel better if you went there.’ ” Otash was worried he’d be recognized, he said, so he sent someone else who found and destroyed incriminating material such as letters that Lawford may have missed.
Otash became convinced, after that night, that he was in trouble. He felt he knew too much. In 1959 he had been convicted of conspiracy in a racehorse-doping incident, and though he claimed he had been set up and though the conviction was later reduced to a misdemeanor, the California Bureau of Private Investigators and Adjusters revoked his license in 1965 citing evidence of “moral turpitude.” Edmund Brown, who had prosecuted Otash in the
Confidential
trial, was by then the Governor of California. He was also a close political ally of the Kennedys, having helped Jack win the California primary in 1960, and Otash was convinced that his license had been revoked on Brown’s orders and that the Governor was acting at the behest of Robert Kennedy. “That son-of-a-bitch Bobby Kennedy,” Otash claimed, “had been trying to get me for years.”
It was the end of Otash’s career as the world’s premiere gatherer of sleaze—he went on to become the head of security for the Hazel Bishop beauty salons and during the 1970s and 1980s was manager of the Hollywood Palladium. Otash died in 1992 at the age of seventy. His infamous tape of Marilyn Monroe, however, would surface nearly three decades after it was made and would help change the direction of tabloid television.
*
Twenty-five years later, Seymour Hersch resurrected the Durie Malcolm story in his book The Dark Side of Camelot and declared it true.
*
Apologists would later dismiss the self-censorship, arguing that until the tabloidization of the press in the late 1970s and 1980s politicians’ private lives were off limits. That is simply not the case. Throughout American history, politicians’ sex lives have been the subject of newspaper articles. The very first newspaper in America, Publik Occurrences Foreign and Abroad, reported in 1790 a rumor that the King of France was sleeping with his daughter-in-law. Thomas Jefferson’s affair with his slave, Sally Hemings, was first reported in the Richmond Record in 1802. When Andrew Jackson got married before his wife’s divorce was legal, the papers tormented him with stories about bigamy, and Grover Cleveland’s illegitimate child was so widely reported that it became the stuff of nursery rhymes.
*
Oleg set up dates for patriarch Joe Kennedy; they met every Tuesday night at eight at the swank midtown Manhattan restaurant La Caravelle. “I would usually bring some lady friends—top models or society girls,” according to Oleg, “although, on several occasions, Joe did the honors and, believe me, he knew some real beauties.” Jack Kennedy had an affair with Oleg’s wife, Gene Tierney.
*
Igor Cassini actually coined the phrase “Jet Set.” His predecessor, Maury Paul, had coined the phrase “Cafe Society.”
*
If Cassini was paid for his services, he would have been required to register with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, which was enacted to identify spies. Cassini has always maintained that he was never paid and, indeed, a check was never found.
*
Confidential again took the opportunity to bash a gossip columnist. “The Truth About that Jet Set Suicide” claimed that Charlene Wrightsman killed herself over her husband’s infidelities.
*
Lawford denied this account to the Los Angeles Times and offered to take a lie detector test. When the Times took him up on it, he declined. He died shortly thereafter.