Mary's Mosaic (37 page)

Or was Jackie trying to be the woman she thought her husband would find more exciting? She told Jack about the fling with Holden, claimed author Peter Evans, just a few days after it happened. Her hope was to stimulate his affection, because women who slept with powerful men were a turn-on for Jack. The plan backfired. When Jackie discovered not long after that she was pregnant, Jack became resentful, allegedly not believing the child was his. Eight months into the pregnancy in August 1956, Jackie accompanied Jack to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention, where he vied, unsuccessfully, for the vice presidential nomination.
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After the convention, still seething over his wife’s infidelity, Jack dumped Jackie at her family’s estate in Newport, Rhode Island, and flew to Europe with Senator George Smathers of Florida. The two men chartered a yacht and cruised the Mediterranean. Indulging their shared predilection for promiscuity—the yacht became a floating senatorial bordello—word reached Jack by the ship’s radio that Jackie had delivered a near-full-term stillborn girl who she had already named Arabella. Jack was said to be indifferent to the news. Newspapers had picked up the story that he was “traveling” in Europe and was unable to be reached. It reportedly took Smathers another three days—and an ultimatum—to convince the Massachusetts senator to return. “If you want to run for President, you better get your ass back to your wife’s bedside, or else every wife in the country will be against you.” In fact, Smathers flew back with Jack, but only after the patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., “convinced” his son to make the trip.
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It was, by that point, no secret Jackie wanted out of the marriage. After recovering from the stillbirth, she took off for London to play with her sister, Lee Radziwill, who had several affairs going at once with British royalty. When
Washington Post
columnist Drew Pearson got wind of all the “fun” Jackie was having sans Jack, the patriarch again took matters into his own hands. Upon Jackie’s return, the elder Kennedy took her to lunch in New York at the swank Le Pavillon. He knew the marriage was on the skids, but there were more important things on the horizon: like the presidency for his son.

Jackie and Joe Sr., had always gotten along, and so rather than intimidate his daughter-in-law, the elder Kennedy struck a deal. Jackie had laid out her demands: She wanted out of the Hickory Hill estate in McLean; she didn’t want to have dinner every night with the entire family when she came to Hyannis Port or Palm Beach; she didn’t want to play the role of political wife, campaigning endlessly for her husband. In a word, she wanted freedom. In exchange, she agreed to keep up appearances for the sake of Jack’s future political career.

That left the question of children. Without them, Jack’s political future might quickly dead-end; with them, any political height was scalable. According to author Edward Klein, Kennedy put it this way: “It’s up to a wife to keep a marriage together. Speaking from personal experience, I can tell you that children are the secret of any marriage. I’m going to set up a trust for your children. You will have control of it when you have children.”

“And what if I can’t have children?” Jackie asked.

“If you don’t have any children within the next ten years,” said the patriarch, “the trust fund will revert to you. The money will be yours to do with as you wish.”
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That fall, the Kennedys left Hickory Hill for Georgetown.

B
y 1957, Mary Meyer had also made Georgetown her home, just a few blocks away from the new Kennedy home. In spite of his failed bid for the vice presidential nomination the year before, Jack still had his sights set on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The fact that his marriage was widely understood to be window dressing didn’t deter him. Mary, for her part, was adjusting to life without Cord, and without her son Michael. While her path and the future president’s surely crossed, her more pressing concerns took precedence. One of her priorities was finalizing her divorce as quickly as possible. She went to Nevada, a state that expedited the process, and waited out the six-week residency requirement at a no-frills “divorce ranch” run by artist and nature
photographer Gus Bundy and his wife, Jeanne.
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There were many such places in Nevada, some offering luxury living with fine food and other perks. The Bundy divorce ranch, however, was far from luxurious and offered only four residential apartments. For Mary, it would serve her purpose splendidly, allowing her to come and go as she pleased.

Before Mary left on one of her trips to Nevada in 1958, her neighbor Jack had asked for a favor. Would she allow “a friend” to stay at her Georgetown house while she was away? The sylphlike, elegant dark-haired Pamela Turnure had been a receptionist in Kennedy’s Senate office. She would eventually join his presidential campaign and become Jackie’s press secretary, all while maintaining an intermittent sexual relationship with Jack. Pam had been renting an apartment in the Georgetown home of Leonard and Florence Kater. One spring night, the Katers were awakened by the sound of pebbles against their tenant’s window at 1:00
A.M
. They looked out their window and saw Senator Kennedy begging Pam to let him in. She did. Enraged—as “good Catholics” would be in such a situation—the Katers set out to expose Jack and destroy his chances for the presidency. They placed two tape recorders in an air vent that led to Pam’s bedroom and recorded Jack and Pam’s conversations, as well as their sexual activity. After that, they revoked Pam’s lease.

“I was so enraged,” Florence Kater told author Michael O’Brien, “that this Irish Catholic senator, who pretended to be such a good family man, might run for President that I decided to do something about it. I was very innocent and naive in those days and had no idea of the power I was up against. I knew no one would believe my story unless we had actual proof, so it addition to the tape recorders, we decided to get a photograph.”
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Mary had to have known that Jack was involved with Pam Turnure, although it is unlikely she knew what the Katers were up to when she allowed Pam to house-sit for several weeks. One evening in July 1958, while Mary was in Nevada, the Katers staked out Mary’s house and caught the senator leaving in the wee hours of the morning. “Hey, Senator!” Leonard Kater yelled. As Jack turned toward him, Kater snapped a picture. “How dare you take my picture!” Jack shouted indignantly. Florence Kater reportedly jumped out of the car and loudly proclaimed, “How dare you run for President under the guise of a good Christian!” She added, “I have a recording of your whoring. You are unfit to be the Catholic standard bearer for the presidency of this country!”
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Unaware of the Kater stakeout, her divorce finalized in August,
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Mary returned from Nevada in September to find her house under the couple’s surveillance. “Mary found herself drawn into a web of intrigue,” an anonymous
friend of hers told Leo Damore in 1990. “Pam was living with her and seeing JFK on the sly. Mary knew about the relationship. She thought Jack stupid and reckless if he seriously had his sights set on the presidency. Half-amused though, the episode left a bit of a bad taste, not only for the violation of her house—and her trust—but to be identified in gossip with one of his betterknown sexual peccadilloes offended her sensibility.”
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As Mary’s long-term former boyfriend Bob Schwartz had made clear, “Mary wasn’t flamboyant. She was a private person in terms of protecting who she was. Her privacy was a way of being herself.”
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Florence Kater, however, was undeterred. She took her obsession with Kennedy’s philandering to the streets, attending political rallies with signs that displayed the image of Jack taken outside Mary’s house. She picketed former president Harry Truman’s house in Missouri while Kennedy was visiting, and she marched in front of the White House. Kater allegedly contacted more than thirty newspapers and magazines with her proof of the presidential aspirant’s wayward habits. As late as April 1963, she contacted FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, but he refused to meet with her, though he likely seized on her revelations to add to Kennedy’s already growing file. For a time, the
Washington Star
pursued the Kater story before abruptly dropping it, threatened by a Kennedy family lawsuit. After five years, Florence Kater finally gave up her crusade. “I had told the truth but no one would listen to me,” she said. “The press wanted Kennedy to be President and that was that.”
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I
n spite of the travails of divorcing Cord, Mary set her sights on the future.

She longed to move forward in her new life; and brooding would play no part. She adjusted gracefully to life without Cord, who saw his sons on weekends and part of school vacations. As agreed in the divorce settlement, he would assume full charge of their education.

Still mired in grief over Michael’s death, she embarked on a period of deep exploration. Artist Ken Noland became Mary’s lover during this time; for the next two years, he was a significant presence. Noland later recalled that Michael’s death had been a “deep, dramatic event for her,” one that had “affected her balance—I think this one [her son Michael] was her favorite.”
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Her introspection during this time was as much artistic as it was personal. “Every real artist has to further themselves,” said her former lover Bob Schwartz, recalling Mary’s sense of commitment to herself. “She wasn’t interested in trivia, at any level or any sort. She never did anything that didn’t have a sense of totality about it.”
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Even in grief, that disposition seemed to pervade her entire being. During her time in Nevada, Mary visited with Anne and Jim Truitt at their home in San Francisco, where they had moved for Jim’s
Newsweek
posting. (The Truitts also visited Mary at Gus Bundy’s Divorce Ranch.)
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In 1958, Jim and Anne Truitt would name their second daughter Mary, in honor of their beloved friend. According to Jim Truitt, who had a keen interest in psychedelics and Eastern mystical traditions that embraced altered states of consciousness, it was during a visit in California that Mary had her first psychedelic experience. (It wasn’t known which hallucinogen she had been introduced to, but it was likely either LSD or psilocybin). “The depths of the colors would intrigue Mary,” Truitt later recalled, “because of her interest in that as an artist.”
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Just south of San Francisco, the Palo Alto Mental Research Institute was exploring the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens such as LSD and the peyote derivative psilocybin. The Beat Generation, an emerging cultural phenomenon in California’s Bay Area that counted Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassidy, and Allen Ginsberg among its members, was at the vanguard of this mind-altering wonder.

LSD and other hallucinogens had been in use as psychiatric aids among the fashionable in Hollywood since the mid- to late 1950s. A number of actors, writers, musicians, and directors—people like André Previn, Aldous Huxley, Anaïs Nin, Esther Williams, Betsy Drake, Sidney Lumet, and playwright Clare Booth Luce, among them—explored the regions of their consciousness, encouraging others to partake. Luce, for her part, convinced her husband,
Time
publisher Henry Luce, to experiment with her, as well as very possibly one other notables who will be discussed later. Actor Cary Grant was so convinced of the positive impact of LSD in his life that
Look
magazine published an article about it in 1959.
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If Jim Truitt was correct that Mary first experimented with psychedelics in California in 1958, then it very well could have been the legendary captain Alfred M. Hubbard who first introduced her to such exploration. A former World War II OS agent who later built a fortune as a uranium entrepreneur,

Hubbard was often referred to as the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” Hubbard himself first used the drug in 1951. He would later claim to have witnessed his own conception, saying, “It was the deepest mystical experience I’ve ever seen.” Hubbard befriended people like psychedelic pioneer Aldous Huxley long before Timothy Leary came upon the scene. It was Hubbard who first asserted that LSD could be enormously therapeutic, given its propensity for
the inducement of transcendental mystical experiences. On his own, Hubbard administered the drug to a number of alcoholics, many of whom reportedly emerged from the experience to successfully claim a life of sobriety, at least for a while. Hubbard’s early success with LSD’s therapeutic possibilities moved him to set up three treatment centers in Canada in 1958, one of which reportedly attempted to treat Ethel Kennedy, wife of Robert F. Kennedy, for incipient alcoholism. She was allegedly a patient of Dr. Ross MacLean, a close associate of Hubbard’s.
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Hubbard’s vast network of business contacts, as well as his personal wealth, enabled him to procure a huge supply of LSD and to distribute it at his own expense. (He would find out years later that the CIA was monitoring him.) Hubbard wanted nothing in return; his motivation appears to have been to give humanity a new point of view. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, Hubbard traveled across Europe and the United States dispensing LSD to anyone who wanted to try it. According to one account, he “turned on thousands of people from all walks of life—policemen, statesmen, captains of industry, church figures, scientists.”
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