The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [265]
Jack had flown in from New Mexico on February 7, 1960, to attend Frank Sinatra’s show at the Sands Hotel that evening. Sinatra, one of the biggest names in show business, was a liberal Democrat and one of Jack’s most fervent supporters. The singer also had an ever-changing entourage of available women, and they were there that evening in ample supply at Jack’s table. One of the other guests, the journalist Blair Clark, recalled the women sitting there as a collection of “some bimbos and some show girls,” hardly the type of woman whom he and Jack had generally associated with when they had been together at Harvard, and none of them notable enough to stay in Blair’s memory.
Sinatra had invited Exner to fly in from Los Angeles for the weekend, or so she claimed. The singer had ample reason to believe that Exner might well provide a midnight treat for Jack. Three months before, Sinatra had met Exner at Puccino’s, one of his favorite restaurants. The next day he called and invited her to join him that day on a Hawaiian vacation. Exner flew out of Los Angeles that night and by the following evening was in the entertainer’s bed. The affair was short-lived, largely, according to Exner, because Sinatra tried to involve her in a sexual threesome, an invitation that she declined. She was not distressed enough, however, to turn down Sinatra’s invitation to come to Las Vegas to see his show at the Sands.
Exner recalled that it was Teddy, not Jack, who made a pass at her that evening, inviting her to fly to Denver with him. Jack, for his part, supposedly called and invited Exner to lunch the next day in Sinatra’s suite. Exner asserted later that no sexual encounter took place that long afternoon. Instead, for three hours “the main topic of conversation, once I had given him my family history, was religion.”
Jack was not given to lengthy dialogues about religion and may never have had a three-hour discussion with a woman in his life. Exner, moreover, was largely uneducated. She had the mascara-thin layer of culture acquired by many Hollywood actresses and would-be actresses; it largely consisted of the judicious application of a few multisyllable words and an accent suggesting that its speaker had at one time passed through London.
Jack had no way of knowing that much of what Exner said about her family history was simply not true. She fancied that she, like Jack, came from a wealthy, privileged family. She described her childhood home as an elegant, twenty-four-room mansion in Pacific Palisades so enormous that she found it “kind of spooky.” There is no evidence that Exner’s father, Frederick Immoor, a project architect, ever owned the house or that the family lived in it for an extensive time. The family may have stayed there for a period while Immoor was renovating the mansion, or in partial payment for his services. In any event, a more realistic version of her childhood would be painted in far more modest hues. The family traveled from rented house to rented house, in Pacific Palisades, Chicago, New Jersey, Phoenix, North Hollywood, L.A., sometimes living well, other times only a few steps from insolvency.
Exner never finished high school and says that she was privately tutored to get her degree. As a teenager, she became one of those young women who hang around the studios with vague dreams of becoming a star, a singer, a notable, somebody. She was stunningly beautiful, her face set off by thick eyebrows that another woman would have plucked but that emphasized her exquisite, dramatic features. She met Bill Campbell, an actor in his midtwenties, who married her when she was only eighteen. The marriage was a disaster from the beginning, and by 1958 Exner was a single woman again with alimony of $433.33 a month.
Exner said