The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [266]
When Jack met Exner, she was living off and on with her parents. Her father, who was earning $866 a month, was in such financial straits that he took out a number of loans that year, the last one in December for $2,032 to consolidate his debts and pay for Christmas gifts.
Exner called herself an artist, but her primary creation was the illusion of affluence. She was shrewd, not smart, with an affinity for older gentlemen whose major virtues were their money and their largess. Just two weeks before meeting Jack, she had been in Las Vegas staying at the Sands as the guest of Richard Ellwood, a middle-aged businessman who later became publicly known as a “boyfriend.”
Another of her friends was John Rosselli, a dapper fifty-four-year-old gangster with close connections to the film industry who frequented the same nightclubs that Exner did. Rosselli was one of the top Mafia figures on the West Coast, and his biographers have speculated that “almost certainly it was Rosselli who produced his friend to meet Kennedy.” Another proponent of that position is Fred Otash, a private detective with a propensity for wiretapping. It was from Otash, who had friends in low and high places, that the FBI may first have learned that Jack and Exner were having an affair when he suggested to the agency that she was “shacking up with John Kennedy in the East.”
“It was common for Sinatra and his various friends to ‘pass a girl around,’ that is, members of the clique were expected to introduce comrades to sexually satisfying young women of their acquaintance,” Otash told the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978. “He stated his belief that this was how Rosselli ‘planted’ Judith Exner on John F. Kennedy.”
Sinatra had his mob connections too, and it is possible that he invited Exner to Las Vegas to compromise Jack. But the singer was devoted to Jack, considering it a high honor to be in his company. Moreover, if Sinatra had done so, he probably would have given Exner a room at the Sands Hotel, where he was performing. Instead, she stayed at the Tropicana Hotel for three nights.
From this weekend on, Exner traveled for the next three years at the highest level of luxury, crisscrossing the country again and again. She invariably flew first-class, wearing high fashion and fur and apparently paying cash for tickets and accommodations. She had so much luggage that she paid for as much as one hundred pounds of overweight luggage. When she arrived at her destination, limousines took her to the finest hotels.
Exner simply did not have the resources herself to travel this way. As generous as her gentlemen friends in Los Angeles may have been, they did not provide her with enough to support so extravagant a lifestyle during much of her time away from California. Clearly her journeys were bankrolled by individuals who had more in mind than simply bedding the beautiful young woman.
When Jack invited Exner to meet him at the Plaza Hotel on March 7, 1960, she said that he offered to pay for her ticket. She claimed that she refused, yet flew first-class to New York City to stay at the exclusive hotel where Jack was also staying. Exner had just received a $6,000 final settlement from her former husband in lieu of further