Alicia Darr Clark insisted in one of her interviews for this book that she had had no child out of wedlock by Jack Kennedy and would never have sought money from him. But in a 1997 telephone interview from Rome, Edmund Purdom, her former husband, said that the talk of a baby had a familiar ring. “She told me she was pregnant,” he said. “That’s why I married her [in 1957]. Of course,” Purdom added, “she never had any children.” Purdom, still involved in the entertainment business, was exceedingly bitter about his ex-wife, who is, he said, “a very dangerous woman” who has misrepresented many facts about her life and was always avaricious. He learned after their marriage, Purdom added, that his wife had been well known as a call girl among his friends in New York. Purdom said that in the early 1960s Simon Metrik told him, among other details, that he had “saved her from two police raids.” At the time of the rescue, Metrik told Purdom, Darr was actively running a call-girl ring in partnership with a woman from West Germany. “I’m not out to get her,” Purdom said, in concluding our conversation. “I’m out to forget her.”
Alicia Darr, known today as Mrs. Alicia Clark, breezily refused to discuss her past in detail in interviews for this book in 1996 and 1997, but she remained eager to talk about her relationship with the “beautiful and charming” Jack Kennedy. “I was one of his pals,” she said of John Kennedy, who was a congressman when they met. “I didn’t want to be a first lady. Believe me, he loved me. He knew me as a kid and loved me to the day he died. But I preferred to be married to a movie star. Why marry Jack and be stuck with Old Joe, and having to please him? John Kennedy,” she added, “was a spender. He’d buy you flowers, gifts. He told me he’d like to buy me diamonds, but he had trouble with his father, who was telling him he was spending too much money.” Darr insisted that he was willing to marry her, but she said no. “He was looking for me,” she told me. “I wasn’t looking for him. He was calling Rome. He wanted to run away from it all with me—to Europe, just to skip town. But I’d say, ‘Jack, you don’t have enough money.’”
Once safely in the White House, the young president did seem to be more than ever intrigued by her—or by the danger of being with her. Maxwell Raab, a Boston attorney who was secretary of the cabinet in the Eisenhower administration, found himself dancing with Clark at a British Embassy party in the early 1960s. President Kennedy suddenly entered the room, and Clark whispered to Raab: “I’d like to see the president. Dance me over to him. I know him very well.” Raab, recalling the incident in a 1995 interview, said he understood what “very well” meant.
The president was indeed delighted to see Clark, Raab said, and whisked her off. “I saw that I was not to be in this,” Raab said, “and so I walked away.”*
* The case attracted front-page attention even in the staid New York Times, which reported in August 1952 that Jelke, now deceased, had provided call girls to society figures and businessmen for fees ranging from $50 to $500. Alicia Darr’s name did not show up in newspaper accounts; it is impossible to determine what role she had, if any, in the scandal, or how the FBI concluded that she had been blackmailing some of the participants.
* In March 1996, the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division denied my request to unseal the Metrik and Friedman file. The request was initially opposed by Richard M. Maltz, the deputy chief counsel to the disciplinary committee of the Appellate Division’s First Judicial Department. In a memorandum dated April 11, 1995, Maltz noted that my argument had a “superficial appeal” because “there may very well be public interest in the type of information the applicant is seeking to uncover.” However, Maltz said he could not determine from the available files why “the Court sealed a record that would otherwise, as a public censure, be public.” Without such information, he added, the disciplinary committee had no choice but to oppose any proposed unsealing. As an alternative, he urged the justices of the Appellate Division to review the record, in camera, to determine whether the public interest would be served by unsealing. A year later, on March 8, 1996, the Appellate Division reviewed the files, deliberated on the issues, and denied my request in a one-page ruling.
* Clifford had performed valiantly for Kennedy in 1957, after questions were raised about the authorship of his Profiles in Courage, a series of case studies of senators who chose the greater good over narrow party interests. In an interview televised on ABC in December of that year, Kennedy was described by the columnist Drew Pearson as being “the only man in history that I know who won a Pulitzer Prize on a book which was ghostwritten for him, which indicates the kind of public relations buildup he’s had.” A few days later, a distraught Kennedy came to see him, Clifford wrote in his 1991 memoir, Counsel to the President, and sought his guidance. “I cannot let this stand,” Clifford quoted Kennedy as saying. “It is a direct attack on my integrity and my honesty.” At that point the telephone rang. It was Joe Kennedy. “Before I could even say hello,” Clifford wrote, “Joe Kennedy said: ‘I want you to sue the bastards for fifty million dollars. Get it started right away. It’s dishonest and they know it. My boy wrote the book. This is a plot against us.’ ‘Mr. Ambassador,’ I said, ‘I am preparing at this moment to go to New York and sit down with the people at ABC.’ ‘Sit down with them, hell! Sue them, that is what you have to do. Sue!’ he shouted in my ear. His son watched me with a faint air of amusement.” Clifford eventually compelled an ABC vice president to state on the air that Pearson’s charges were unfounded and that “the book in question was written by Senator Kennedy.” In his diary, published years later, Pearson wrote that Kennedy “got a whale of a lot of help on his book” and expressed doubt that Kennedy “wrote too much of the final draft himself.” But, he added, he met for an hour with Kennedy after their skirmish and concluded that he showed enough knowledge of the book to enable him to conclude that “basically it is his book.”
* Raab, who served with distinction as ambassador to Italy during the Reagan administration, had been used by Senator Kennedy during the 1960 campaign. He left the White House in 1959 and was working as an aide to Senator Kenneth Keating, Republican of New York, when Kennedy, very agitated, sought him out. The two men had known each other since the late 1940s, Raab told me in our interview. “I gotta talk to you,” Kennedy said. “Nixon and the Republican National Committee are doing a job on me. They’re trying to destroy me and they’ve got Jackie all upset. It’s created havoc in my home. It’s got to be stopped.” Kennedy asked Raab to approach Nixon and his fellow Republicans and tell them “to stop spreading the word that I’m philandering.” “It wasn’t rage,” Raab said of Kennedy’s demeanor, but “the nearest thing.” Raab dutifully brought up the matter with Leonard Hall, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and with Nixon. “Nixon said, ‘I’m not doing it,’ but he”—referring to Hall—“was.” Raab, who admits he was very naive about Jack Kennedy at the time, subsequently reported back to the senator, assuring him that “there will be no more talk from the White House or Republican National Committee.” Kennedy thanked him.
Jack Kennedy came to Los Angeles with more than enough delegates to assure a first-ballot nomination, and enough excess baggage—from the huge cash outlays in West Virginia and the womanizing—to threaten his certain victory. It is only with an understanding of the dark side of the Kennedy legacy—and who was aware of it at the time of the convention—that the surprise selection of Lyndon Johnson as the vice presidential candidate can be understood.
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