Official and Confidential_ The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover - Anthony Summers [209]
A new gag was now making the rounds in Washington. Plans were being made, it was said, to make Edgar’s reappointment automatic – in the year 2000.
Terrorized as they were by Edgar’s homosexual smear, the President’s aides would have been interested in an account of what he himself was up to in 1969. Much later, information reached the police that, on vacation in California with Clyde, he went to great lengths to indulge a sexual interest in teenage males.
The story was told to this author by Charles Krebs, one of a group of Los Angeles homosexuals who kept close company in the late sixties. One of Krebs’ friends was Billy Byars, Jr., wealthy son of the oil magnate who had used the bungalow next to Edgar’s at the Del Charro hotel in La Jolla. With the help of an acquaintance he had made through knowing Byars, Jr., said Krebs, Edgar made the contacts necessary to have teenage boys brought to him at La Jolla.
Byars was thirty-two in 1969, a part-time filmmaker, fitness enthusiast and dilettante. He went on to produce The Genesis Children, an X-rated movie with scenes featuring naked male adolescents. He was indicted in 1973, along with fourteen other men, shortly after Edgar’s death, during a police inquiry into other movies that featured sex acts involving young boys. Byars was by then abroad, reportedly in Morocco, and stayed out of the United States for many years to come.
According to Krebs and others, Byars’ house in Los Angeles, at the summit of Laurel Canyon, was for a while a haven for adult homosexuals and male teenagers. Some of Byars’ friends were aware, as Del Charro staff and Byars himself confirmed, that their host knew Edgar and sometimes saw him at La Jolla. They noticed that a card arrived from Edgar one Christmas and that a fifteen-year-old youth at the house talked openly of having met Edgar at the Del Charro. ‘Hoover bawled me out,’ he complained, ‘for having long hair, but I told the old faggot where to go. No way was I getting a haircut.’
‘It was accepted in our circle that Hoover and Tolson were homosexual,’ Krebs recalled. ‘The impression I had from Byars was that Hoover and Tolson had had a sexual relationship with each other when they were younger, but not anymore. They were just two old aunties together in old age, but they were queens. On three occasions that I knew about, perhaps four, boys were driven down to La Jolla at Hoover’s request. I think the arrangements were made by one of Billy’s friends, an older man.
‘I went down to La Jolla with the group a couple of times, and we spent a good deal of time at a bar called Rudi’s Hearthside, where the Hoover rendezvous were. We’d go to the Hearthside with the boys, the fifteen-year-old and another youngster. Hoover and Tolson would be driven there in a limo, always at night. I saw them and their security a couple of times – guys in suits and pointy shoes who looked like crooks. I’d be left behind and they’d go off in two cars, Hoover’s and the one carrying the boys. The way I heard it, they’d drive to a reservoir up in the hills. The two cars parked headlight to headlight, with a cover car down the hill. And the boys would go and get in the Hoover car, and that’s where they’d do their business.’3
Detective Don Smith of the Los Angeles police vice unit interviewed the juvenile witnesses in the 1973 sex-movie case. ‘This was a group of homosexuals,’ he recalled, ‘some of them pedophiles. There were a number of Hollywood people, also doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers, a head of a corporation. These were upstanding community leaders, but that was their quirk … The kids knew them as “Uncle Mike” and “Mother John,” not by their real names. They’d describe the vehicles the guys were driving in and the chauffeurs who got out and made the pickups. The kids brought up several famous names, including those of Hoover and his sidekick.’
Charles Krebs expressed anger at the memory of the expeditions to La Jolla. ‘Here was J. Edgar