I would mourn Bob in my own way.
That wouldn’t include riding the funeral train, with its famous faces and lots of food and drink, though I caught glimpses on TV of the stir the trip caused. A million mourners lined the Penn Central tracks on the 226-mile journey, Boy and Girl Scouts, factory workers and nuns, firemen and brass bands, people hanging from water towers, Little Leaguers in uniform, men with hats off and women clutching male sleeves, citizens brandishing hand-lettered signs (“We Love You, Bobby!”), impromptu public choruses singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” That, I understand, is what Andy Williams sang at the mass I’d passed on. I’d been offered a seat both in church and on the train, but said no thanks to both, respectfully.
Glad I did. The twenty-one railcars took over eight hours to get from New York to Washington, D.C. I’d flown from Chicago that morning to our nation’s capital, and was at Arlington for the burial, where I wound up waiting several hours in a drizzle too meager to be metaphorical. The public showing along the way meant the funeral train hadn’t made it into D.C.’s Union Station till after nine P.M., the free food and booze long since run out.
I watched with bitter amusement at Arlington as cemetery officials rushed to change their plans to an evening interment. Floodlights were positioned around the open grave as members of the military handed out thousands of candles, one of which I accepted, now that the half-hearted rain had fizzled out. A nearly full moon hung discreetly over the cemetery, as if any less illumination, or any more, might be disrespectful.
When the funeral motorcade entered the cemetery around ten-thirty, the crowd lining the lane lighted their candles to guide the way. As somebody who got there early, I had a ringside seat when Steve Smith and aides I knew from the Ambassador hoisted the casket and made it somewhat clumsily up the hill to the knoll where Bob’s brother Jack was buried. Bob would rest about thirty feet away.
The service was brief, conducted by the Archbishop of New Orleans, filling in for another high Catholic mucky-muck who’d got sick on the train, the Almighty apparently having a sense of humor similar to mine. John Glenn folded the American flag that had been draped over Bob’s casket and presented it to brother Ted, who handed it off to Bob’s eldest son, Joe, who passed it to his shell-shocked mother. It all should have moved me but only made me feel irritated. I wished that bushy-haired little bastard, Sirhan Sirhan (as we all now knew his name to be), was the one going into the ground, just nowhere near Jack Kennedy.
Leaving, I spotted Peter Lawford and Sidney Poitier and Shirley MacLaine and Lauren Bacall and others of their rarified ilk, including a stringy-haired hippie who turned out to be Bobby Darin, under bright floodlights hovering like spots focused on a dark stage. George Plimpton and John Lewis and Mrs. Martin Luther King, among newsworthy others, trudged off with all the lightness of step of the Bataan death march.
I looked for Nita but no luck. I hadn’t heard from her since that night. Probably she’d had sense enough to stay in L.A. There was, as the police like to say, nothing to see here.
But I had an excuse — Bob had been a friend and I had a right to say goodbye. After all, wasn’t I the trusted bodyguard who fucked up? And, hell, I was going to be in D.C. anyway. A longtime client here had left word at the Mayflower for me to come see him.
The next morning was beautiful and warm and the sun had finally banished the overcast gray, encouraging us to move on from the latest tragedy. This was 1968, after all, and we had more horrors to brace ourselves against. Like a Democratic convention where Robert Kennedy’s delegates would have to choose between cold fish Gene McCarthy with his high-school principal charisma, and passé politico Hubert Humphrey, that too eager-to-please overage needy child.
And hovering over everything were the gleaming eyes, dark jowls and sly smile of a would-be president oblivious to the scream of B-52s, the whir of machine-guns, the swoop of fighter jets, and the pop-pop-pop of firefights, so far away and yet right here.
Georgetown’s shade trees let enough sun through their branches to make interesting patterns of shadow on the well-worn brick sidewalk. The cab had let me out at 1313 29th Street, a Federal-style, brass-appointed, faded yellow-brick residence commanding the corner. Formed from two smallish three-story edifices joined by a central projecting wing, this was the domain of a syndicated columnist whose dozen employees surely felt at home in these onetime slave quarters.
Drew Pearson maintained a quiet dignified residence on one side and on the other a noisy sprawling newsroom where typewriters chattered, newswires tickered their tape, and phones rang and rang and rang, a dozen young men and women moving through all of it in a stop-and-start dance.
Greeting me at the door with a slight, polite smile was a fleshy but not fat man in his mid-forties, about as tall as me, with an oval head, dark hair combed over, sideburns going white. His face was pleasant with light blue eyes a teenage girl would die for, in herself or a boyfriend. His dark suit and tie might have been on loan from a funeral director. On this trip that seemed about right.
“Nate,” Jack Anderson said. “Condolences on the loss of your friend.”
He offered a hand to shake. I took it, thanked him, gave it back.
Legendary legman Anderson had been with Drew Pearson for decades, a real feat, since Jack was a Mormon who didn’t work Sundays, deadlines and breaking news be damned. Or maybe darned.
I followed him inside to the landing separating the two halves of the house.
I said, “Normally I’m met by somebody better-looking than you.”
As long as I’d known him, Pearson had enlisted one fetching young secretary after another to be his latest “fair-haired girl,” traveling with him on lecture dates and out-of-town TV bookings and so on. These were not full-blown affairs (so to speak), rather father-and-daughter relationships that occasionally got incestuous. Pearson’s wife Luvie looked the other way and so did the staff.
Anderson, who was no prude (even if a Mormon with only one wife), glanced back at me as we went down the few stairs into the office area.
“Margaret, I’m afraid, is long gone,” the legman said, referring to the last of the fair-haired girls I’d encountered here. “She left us to get involved with Civil Rights down South.”
“Good for her.”
Unlike several of Pearson’s other “cutie pies” over the decades, pleasantly plump Margaret of the rosy cheeks and long black hair had never succumbed to my charms.
As we cut through the bullpen of desks and file-cabinet-rowed walls where young worker bees buzzed oblivious to our presence, Anderson and I went through into an alcove off of which Pearson’s office nestled. The bullpen and its offshoot small offices were air-conditioned, which the artificial-cooling averse Pearson grudgingly allowed. I slipped out of my Botany 500 jacket and draped it over an arm, anticipating a warm welcome.
Not from Pearson himself, who was pounding away on a battered Smith Corona portable on a metal stand near his desk. He didn’t care if Eisenhower dropped by; if Pearson was in the middle of something at the machine, Ike could wait.
Anderson hadn’t knocked or announced us. Just walked in, pulled up a chair while I took one opposite the desk in this den of an office, slinging my jacket over the back. The dark plaster walls were arrayed with autographed celebrity photos (political and Hollywood) and some framed political cartoon originals with Pearson appearances. To the left, over a working fireplace (not lit, thankfully), a rural landscape hung slightly crooked and obviously amateur. Windowsills were piled with books, between stacks of which a cat snoozed, not bothering to wake up for the new entrants.