In this instance, Kennedy’s biggest worries came not from Republicans but from his fellow Democrats, who were eager to find ways to discredit their competition. Word of the liaison reached Charles W. Engelhard, a South African diamond merchant and investor with corporate offices in New Jersey. Engelhard had endorsed Robert B. Meyner, the Democratic governor of New Jersey, who had presidential ambitions of his own; he and Meyner could not resist a chance to get rid of Kennedy. The two men arranged for one of Engelhard’s aides to approach a former New York City policeman, then a private investigator, and offer him $10,000 to fly to Boston and take incriminating photographs of Kennedy with the Radcliffe student. However, the former policeman was a staunch Kennedy supporter. He turned down the job and, through a mutual friend, brought the plan to the attention of a politically connected Democratic lawyer in Washington. The lawyer, who had spent many years as a Senate aide, immediately arranged to see Jack Kennedy.
“Evelyn Lincoln shows me in,” the lawyer, who did not wish to be identified, recalled in a 1996 interview for this book, “and I show him the name of the girl. He says, ‘My God! They got her name.’ He started to explain—some bullshit—and I said, ‘I’m not really interested. I just wanted to let you know.’ He was so appreciative that I’d tipped him off.”
It was clear, the lawyer said, that “Charley Engelhard was trying to get the goods on Kennedy to knock him out of the running. They were going to set him up.” Senator Kennedy, in the meeting, had exclaimed, “That goddamned Charley Engelhard. I’m going to give it to him up to there”—drawing his hand across his neck. Changing the subject, the lawyer asked Kennedy what he could do to help him win the Democratic nomination. He vividly recalled the answer: “I need money. I can’t ask my father to pay for everything. Raise money.”
Months later, during the campaign, the lawyer bumped into Kennedy and was thanked anew for his timely information. Kennedy told the lawyer he had assigned Carmine Bellino, one of his longtime assistants, to find out what was going on. Bellino, he said, had “put in a wire” on the Engelhard Industries official who had tried to hire the former New York City policeman. The lawyer raised an objection to the use of wiretaps and Kennedy reassured him, explaining, “We’re not tapping his phone—just recording who he called.”
In a meeting with the lawyer after the election, Kennedy reported that he was being urged by many ranking Democrat members of the Senate to name Engelhard ambassador to a high-profile embassy. “I’m going to fuck him,” Kennedy said, with a laugh. “I’m going to send him to one of the boogie republics in Central Africa.” Engelhard, who died in 1971 one of the world’s richest men, never got his embassy, but the Kennedy administration did name him as the American representative to the Independence Day ceremonies in Gabon and Zambia. Kennedy, as we have seen, continued his relationship with the student. After his inauguration, he arranged for her to be named a special assistant to McGeorge Bundy, who had been dean of faculty at Harvard. She remained on Bundy’s White House staff until late 1962. “It was very embarrassing,” the woman recalled in one of our interviews. “It put McGeorge in a very creepy situation.”
The fourth woman, and the one who, in the spring of 1960, posed the most direct threat to Kennedy’s presidential aspirations, was a self-proclaimed artist named Barbara Maria Kopszynska, who had emigrated with her mother from Poland to Boston as a displaced person after World War II. According to heavily censored FBI files made public under the Freedom of Information Act in 1977, Kopszynska began telling reporters after the 1960 election that in 1951 she had become engaged to marry Jack Kennedy, then a member of the House, only to have the engagement broken up by Joe Kennedy because she was half Jewish. In March 1957 the blond and beautiful Kopszynska, who had changed her name to Alicia Darr, married Edmund Purdom, a British actor and playboy, and moved to Rome with him. The marriage quickly fell apart, and by early 1960 the Purdoms were in an Italian state court filing charges against each other.
Alicia Darr’s FBI file created a brief stir when it was released in 1977. It included a summary of an interview in the issue dated January 31, 1961, of Le Ore, an Italian weekly magazine, in which Darr described her early relationship with Jack Kennedy and declared, according to a translation made for this book, that she “could have been the first lady.” The FBI attaché in Rome told J. Edgar Hoover on January 30, ten days after Kennedy took office, that the article indicated that Darr “was considering the release of further information.” The U.S. media paid no attention to the interview in 1961.
But a second FBI document in Darr’s file, dated June 4, 1963, and sent at that time to Bobby Kennedy by J. Edgar Hoover (as the Le Ore summary had been two years earlier), made headlines in 1977, when America’s newspapers, no longer in awe of the presidency after Watergate, were eager to publish any account of Kennedy’s womanizing. Hoover warned the attorney general that the president’s name had come up in connection with a disciplinary proceeding in New York against two Darr attorneys, Simon Metrik and Jacob W. Friedman. Metrik and Friedman, Hoover reported, had filed documents in court describing Kennedy’s relationship with Darr and claiming that “just prior to the President’s assuming office you”—Bobby Kennedy—“went to New York and arranged a settlement of the case out of court for $500,000.” Reporters found Darr, by 1977 remarried and living in the Bahamas, and she denied having received any money from the Kennedys. The Hoover memoranda, even though heavily censored when released, produced the kind of stories that, if they had been published during JFK’s days in office, would have seriously damaged his reputation and his chances for reelection. Most newspapers, citing the FBI documents, flatly reported that Kennedy had paid $500,000 to quash a lawsuit filed by Darr.
Those newspaper stories were wrong. The full story—that is, as much as could be obtained for this book—is far more dramatic.
The uncensored versions of Hoover’s reports to Bobby Kennedy, made available in full for this book, reveal that Alicia Darr posed an extreme danger to Jack Kennedy in 1960, a danger that was hidden by deletions FBI censors made in the documents released in 1977. The uncensored versions reveal that Darr was well known to federal authorities and the New York police as a high-priced Manhattan prostitute and madam. The documents Hoover forwarded to Bobby Kennedy reported that in 1951, the year she first met Jack Kennedy, Darr was operating a “house of prostitution” in Boston. She moved to New York City a year later, where she turned again to prostitution, the FBI said, and also “was blackmailing people involved in the ‘Jelke case’”—a highly publicized 1952 sex scandal involving New York’s café society. The scandal led to a three-to-six-year jail term for Minot Frazier Jelke III, the twenty-three-year-old heir to an oleomargarine fortune, who was found guilty of procuring.* By 1953 Darr, described as a “talented prostitute,” was operating “a call girl service” in midtown New York, the unexpurgated FBI report said. Another of the FBI documents depicted her as “a notorious, albeit high-class, ‘hustler.’”
Darr’s marriage to Purdom was in shambles by December of 1959, when she sued him in Rome for assault, battery, and nonmaintenance. She was out of money by early 1960 and, according to contemporary European newspaper accounts, began writing bad checks, for which she was eventually arrested and briefly jailed. In September 1961, a month after she was granted a divorce, in Mexico, Darr’s finances improved dramatically: she married Alfred Corning Clark, a millionaire heir to the Singer sewing machine fortune. It was her second and his sixth marriage. Alfred Clark died of a heart attack in upstate New York thirteen days later, leaving her the bulk of his $10 million estate.
Alfred Clark’s other surviving heirs quickly challenged his state of mind at the time he wrote the will. Simon Metrik, who had since 1958 been Alicia Darr’s lawyer and media adviser, throughout her marriage to and divorce from Purdom, was retained on her behalf to handle the Clark family’s protests. (He later said that