Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [137]
It was April 25, 1969. Teddy Kennedy was coming to Las Vegas to keynote a hundred-dollar-a-plate testimonial dinner for his Senate colleague, Nevada’s Howard Cannon. It was the perfect opportunity for Hughes to cement his new Camelot connection and at the same time to score a real blow against the bombers.
That battle had by now escalated to the point that Hughes was threatened with a congressional subpoena. He needed powerful allies. He wanted Teddy Kennedy.
“Do you have any word from Kennedy?” he asked Maheu, growing restless as speech time neared.
“And also, please tell me what it is we want him to mention, I have forgotten,” added Hughes, either so far gone on codeine and Valium that the bomb had actually slipped his mind, or more likely just testing his lieutenant, making sure that he had not forgotten the Teddy-AEC-sheep scenario. But now he was suddenly seized by another obsession.
“Incidentally,” he added, “I think you should have somebody explain most carefully our position on the water system to Kennedy, otherwise he is sure to say something suggesting his support of the lake system in his speech.”
The reminder reached Maheu at the Sands, where he was throwing a predinner private cocktail party for two hundred select invitees to the big Cannon bash. The guest of honor was Teddy Kennedy.
Whatever Maheu may have said to the senator at his little soiree, Teddy did not savage the AEC, or blast the bombing, or eulogize the dead sheep in his speech that night. And he never got the sky or the moon or any of Hughes’s money.
But Kennedy did get a showgirl.
The assignation was arranged by Jack Entratter, Hughes’s entertainment director at the Sands. The onetime bouncer at the Stork Club met with Kennedy at midnight and took him upstairs to a suite on the eighteenth floor. Teddy spent the night there—although he was registered at another hotel—and so did the showgirl.
When the publisher of a local scandal sheet got wise and threatened to reveal all the racy details, Maheu tried to buy him out to suppress the story. When the feisty muckraker, Colin McKinlay, refused to sell, Maheu had to tell Hughes.
“Until several hours ago Bell was convinced that he had McKinlay under control,” reported the worried fixer.
“McKinlay, however, informed Bell that he had a ‘hot story’ pertaining to Senator Kennedy’s recent trip to Las Vegas when he appeared to make a speech on behalf of Senator Cannon. McKinlay claims that upon the completion of the festivities that evening, Senator Kennedy went to the Sands Hotel and spent the evening with a ‘broad’ which was furnished to him by Jack Entratter.
“Today McKinlay made the statement that he is going to bury Kennedy and you and me by publishing this story in his next News Letter. In an attempt to prove that when important people appear in Las Vegas all provisions for their satisfaction are made available through the Hughes interests.
“Unfortunately, Howard, there is substance to the story, although Entratter had not cleared any of the details with me,” concluded Maheu, admitting the worst. “We are still making every effort to make sure that this next scandal sheet will not be printed and distributed.”
It was futile. The story ran. But without Maheu’s secret admission of its truth, the report was virtually ignored—although it told of a “bosomy blonde” who answered the door at Kennedy’s suite when a bellhop arrived with liquor that night, who was still there when room service brought up breakfast—and although by the time the story appeared, Kennedy’s womanizing had become front-page news.
It was July 1969. Mary Jo Kopechne was dead. And Teddy Kennedy was preparing to go on national television to explain Chappaquiddick.
“What is the most educated guess as to what is going to happen about the Kennedy situation?” Hughes inquired on the evening before Teddy emerged