The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [144]
Jack told Lannan that he hoped to enter public service. “Oh, you mean politics,” Lannan said, but Jack treated the word as if it were an epithet. “Politics” still had that immigrant stigma to it. It was the pathway upward. At Choate and Harvard he had heard the understated disdain for the motley business of politics, and he was not yet ready to shout out the name of his intended profession. Men of the upper class might go into the State Department or OSS, but they did not for the most part run for office. They did not choose to have their careers depend on the will and whim of people they neither knew nor, for the most part, wanted to know.
Every afternoon at five, Jack made sure that he was in the cottage waiting for a call from his father. Joe sent him books that he thought his son should read, as well as steaks and chops to bolster his strength. In their daily conversations, Joe tried to decipher the truth filtered through Jack’s cheery dialogue.
“Frankly, don’t think it [his health] is any too good,” Joe admitted in a letter in March 1945 to Red Fay, Jack’s friend. “On the phone he is still his gay self so it is very difficult to give you any more definite information from this.”
Jack didn’t have to depend solely on his father to learn what was happening in Hyannis Port. Bobby wrote his big brother, providing Jack with intelligence about life back home. Bobby did not lace his letters with the joshing put-downs that had run through Joe Jr.’s correspondence but wrote with simple sincerity. Bobby knew that he and his brother shared the mixed blessings of a mother and father who hovered over them, egging them on more like coaches than traditional parents. “Everyone evidently thinks you’re doing a singularly fine job out there, except mother who was a little upset that you still mixed ‘who’ and ‘whom’ up. Get on to yourself…. I suggest you stay out there for as long as possible. That staying away will also be good for keeping you a fair headed boy around the house, for I know it takes you almost as short a time as it does me to finish yourself off when you’re home.”
Even though Jack’s back troubled him so much that he thought he might have to return to the Lahey Clinic in Boston, when he drove into Phoenix to stay at the Arizona Biltmore, the sight of attractive women, including one of Hollywood’s leading stars, made him forget his pain. “Anyways their [sic] was some pumping which interested me,” he wrote Lem, “and I did take Veronica Lake [for] a ride in my car…. I don’t mean by all this that I pumped her or that if you should ever see her you should get a big hello…. I am heading out of here to Palm Springs where I expect to tangle tonsils with Inga Binga among others.” He was not without his conquests: he bragged to Lem that he had slept with forty-three-year-old Lili Damita, a former film star and Errol Flynn’s recent wife. “I took a piece out of Lili Damita just for the sake of Auld Errol Flynn,” he wrote Lem, “but did not come back for a second helping.”
Jack ended up in Los Angeles. Since he was a little boy, and his father had returned from Hollywood with Tom Mix cowboy suits and wondrous tales, Jack had been fascinated with the movie world. On the Hollywood screen the sick were made whole, the barnacles of age removed, and cares exorcised. Some of these illusions were so powerful that nothing erased them, no merciless houselights, no rude truth-sayers, nothing.
His friend Chuck Spalding was working for Gary Cooper. The lanky, taciturn Montanan conveyed a sense of manly heroism and dignity that nothing he did or said could obstruct or diminish. Jack was what they called a war hero, but what was he compared to Cooper, who portrayed