The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [359]
In 1997, during a legal deposition in a libel suit, Exner recalled under oath that she had received an amount that “could have been in the $20,000” range for a television series with Anthony Summers, a British journalist. She said that he had paid her more money for a newspaper serial for the London Sunday Times. “I, Anthony Summers, have never paid Judith Exner a bean,” Summers asserted. German television purportedly paid Exner around $6,000 for an interview. She swore that Frontline, the public television series, paid her. Exner said that the Japanese paid her between $10,000 and $20,000. For an article by Gerri Hirshey in Vanity Fair in 1990, the journalist agrees with Exner that the magazine paid her $5,000 in “expenses.” For another piece seven years later in the same magazine, telling a different tale, she said in her sworn testimony that the gossip columnist Liz Smith personally paid her $10,000. “I did try to help her,” Smith said. “I was very concerned for her.” Exner said under oath that for a program featuring another dramatic new version of her life hosted by Peter Jennings on ABC in 1997, based on Seymour Hersh’s exposé, that she was scheduled to receive a total of $20,000; this is denied by both Mark Obenhaus, the producer, and Hersh. She said that Tribune Entertainment paid her $25,000 for an option on her life story, the BBC paid another $25,000, and Showtime paid $200,000 for rights.
Whatever Exner’s critics thought of her ever-evolving revelations, for a decade there was overwhelming sympathy for a woman who was suffering from bone cancer that made her every move painful and who claimed to be standing at death’s half-open door during that time. In her sad last years, though she did have breast cancer, she apparently knowingly lied about the extent and nature of her illness, as she had lied about so much else in her life. Kim Margolin, her doctor and a partner in this deception, admitted in a 1998 deposition that she had a number of times made false statements when she said that Exner suffered “from extensive bone metastasis, including destruction of the spine,” and that she had “made an error several times trying to help this patient. I didn’t realize it was going to get us into trouble in a court of law.”
Unlike some once-beautiful women, Exner did not exaggerate her makeup and her clothes as she grew old, trying to maintain some vestiges of her youthful allure. It was her own life that she exaggerated. Her true life was theatrical, and her pain genuine, but she insisted on rouging up her life, each time spreading a thick coat of drama over the few rich moments of her days, treating her occasional sexual relationship with Kennedy as a treasure that could endlessly be exploited and exaggerating even the painful circumstances of her fatal disease.
Much of the truth of her life and her relationship with Kennedy probably lies somewhere among the discarded garments of her life. Giancana was unlikely to have fancied Exner’s regular company if he was not having a sexual relationship with her. “Whenever she’d come to Chicago, Mooney [Giancana] would fuck her,” recalled Robert J. McDonnell, an attorney who has defended mob figures and married and divorced Giancana’s daughter, Antoinette. “Mooney was one horny guy. And I don’t understand why she’d have money problems. Mooney always took care of her. Always.”
Giancana was fully aware that Exner was journeying from Chicago to be with Kennedy, using cash that probably came from his criminal ventures. He was content to share Exner with Kennedy, knowing that his knowledge of their affair might prove to be a free pass that he could use one day, perhaps avoiding prosecution. Some called that blackmail, but to a man of Giancana