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A year later, according to Susan, Rosenstiel asked her to accompany him to the Plaza again. She agreed, in return for an expensive pair of earrings from Harry Winston’s, and the procedure was the same as on the previous occasion. Cohn ushered them into a suite to find Edgar, again attired in female finery. His clothing this time was even more outlandish. ‘He had a red dress on,’ Susan recalled, ‘and a black feather boa around his neck. He was dressed like an old flapper, like you see on old tintypes.

‘After about half an hour some boys came, like before. This time they’re dressed in leather. And Hoover had a Bible. He wanted one of the boys to read from the Bible. And he read, I forget which passage, and the other boy played with him, wearing the rubber gloves. And then Hoover grabbed the Bible, threw it down and told the second boy to join in the sex.’

When they got home that night, the Rosenstiels quarreled. Lewis rebuffed his wife’s questions and never again asked her to go to the suite at the Plaza. She saw Edgar only once more, in 1961, when he and Cardinal Spellman visited the Connecticut estate.

Susan Rosenstiel has insisted she could not possibly have been mistaken, that Edgar was definitely the man in female dress at the Plaza. Her account remained consistent, and she signed a sworn affidavit that it is true.

She was permitted to witness Edgar and the others in such a situation, she surmised, ‘because they wanted a woman present. I guess it gave them some sort of extra thrill. And if I’d said anything, they’d have said I was crazy, that Hoover hadn’t been there. It would have been my word against theirs, and no one would have believed it.’

People who knew Rosenstiel say he was bisexual. Roy Cohn was indeed homosexual and regularly hired young male prostitutes. The facts of Edgar’s life, meanwhile, fit the Plaza scenario well enough. He regularly traveled to New York City, and without Clyde. Former Agent John Dixson, who served in New York during that period, often had the task of meeting Edgar when he arrived at Penn Station, after traveling alone from Washington. He would be taken by car to the Waldorf, his usual hotel, and left to his own devices.

Nor is it odd that Clyde Tolson was not present at the Plaza. Thirty years had passed since the first flower of his affair with Edgar, and he was no longer the handsome young man who had attracted Edgar in 1928. He was fifty-eight and, unlike Edgar, his health was failing rapidly. He was hospitalized repeatedly during the fifties for a serious eye ailment and for problems with duodenal ulcers. It was the start of a decline that would lead to open-heart surgery and several strokes.

Edgar and Clyde always remained intimate friends. When Clyde’s mother was dying, Edgar traveled to be at his side in Iowa. When Edgar made a token appearance at the funeral of his sister, Lillian, Clyde was there with him. At work, each could depend entirely on the other, and that was perhaps the real bond between them. Physical love, however, had probably run its course.

There is another account of Edgar’s interest in dressing up as a woman, one that refers to an episode in Washington in 1948, ten years before the orgies at the Plaza. It comes from two men, successful professionals in their fields, both heterosexuals, who have requested anonymity. For several months that year, they said, they frequented a Washington watering hole called the Maystat that was noticeably, though not exclusively, used by homosexuals. At the Maystat they were befriended by Joe Bobak, a fifty-year-old Army Supply Sergeant serving at Fort Myers. ‘Bobak,’ one of the witnesses recalled, ‘was decidedly gay, a bit swishy. He knew senior officers at the Pentagon, even senators and congressmen who were also gay. It was a strange group to us, and we were fascinated.’

One evening in 1948 the two young men sat in a car outside the Maystat with one of Bobak’s regular companions, a younger man in his mid-twenties.