“Take it easy, John,” Bob said from the backseat. “Life is too short.”
Two
At just after seven, Frankenheimer was tooling his silver Rolls along Wilshire, his enthusiasm behind the wheel curtailed by downtown traffic and red lights. Bob and I, a couple of his advisors opposite us in the limo seats, watched Los Angeles slide by like postcards. With the sun still up but heading down, this was what the movie people called Magic Hour, when dusk painted the City of Angels with a forgiving brush. Young people owned the sidewalks, college kids in preppie threads, hippies friend or faux in huarache sandals, boots motorcycle or cowboy, hair straight, curly, shoulder-length or longer (as the song went), Quant cut or rounded Afro. Minis on the go-go, would-be rockers in Cuban heels, heads bobbing with beaded bands, hooped earrings, rainbow colors (clothes and people), peace signs and raised fists, nothing quite real in a twilight where the fireflies were neon. Times they were a changing, and the man in back next to me seemed to be wondering where he fit in.
“Your people, Bob,” I said.
“Some of them. McCarthy has the A and B students. I have to settle for the rest.”
At left the Brown Derby’s giant bowler, half-swallowed by its mission-style expansion, squatted on a corner. Our destination was at right, past a white obelisk looking like a pillar of salt left behind by God in an Art Deco mood—
— with a bronze statue of a scantily clad goddess at its base posed, they say, by Betty Grable.
On a city block’s worth of landscaped grounds between Wilshire and West Eighth Street, at the end of an endless drive, sprawled the Ambassador, a city within the city. Its twenty-four unlikely acres in downtown L.A. included tennis courts, Olympic-size pool and golf course. Eight coral-colored stories spawning wings were home to twelve-hundred-some rooms, restaurants, movie theater, post office, beauty and barber salons, shop concourse and the palm-swept rococo Cocoanut Grove, where Rosemary Clooney was headlining.
From its Jazz Age beginnings, including half a dozen Academy Award ceremonies until well after World War II, the Ambassador had been Hollywood’s favorite movie-star haunt — from Harlow, Gable and Crosby to Marilyn, Sinatra and Lemmon. But in an era where Jane, not Henry, was the reigning Fonda, the Ambassador seemed about as up to date as when Charlie Chaplin was in residence.
Still, it didn’t seem like anything could kill the old girl. In these times, the Ambassador depended on tourist trade, business seminars and political events — tonight, in addition to the optimistic Kennedy campaign’s planned victory celebration, were two election night parties, Democrat Alan Cranston and Republican Max Rafferty for nominations in the upcoming Senate race.
Frankenheimer drove around to a rear door off the Cocoanut Grove’s kitchen, parked back there and said he needed to check on the guerrilla film crew he’d positioned in the Embassy Room. The rest of our little group went up the freight elevator to the fifth floor, where Bob and Ethel had been staying in the Royal Suite during the California campaign. Tonight two more rooms had been added, 511 across the hall, a war room for aides and advisors, and 516 for invited press, down the hall a ways.
I stayed near the candidate, either at his side or just behind him while he dropped by the press room where he smiled in his shy way, shaking hands here and there. The twenty-five or so journalists packed into the room, which had been cleared of its bed, included some of the most famous in the country — Pete Hamill of the New York Post, columnist Jimmy Breslin, Jack Newfield of the Village Voice, and that unlikely patrician sportswriter George Plimpton.
The smoke was no thicker than the fog had been over the Pacific this morning, and the rumbly murmur of voices trying to be heard might have been Jap planes making a comeback. A small open bar had been set up to accommodate the large gathering, doing a mighty business.
Breslin and Hamill somehow managed to buttonhole Bob. Both knew me a little and granted me the kind of nod a New York celebrity grants a Chicago nobody, and started in telling the candidate what he needed to do to win in New York. Youthful Hamill, with a shock of reddish red hair to rival Bob’s brown mop, grinned and smoked and leaned in aggressively, like an off-duty Irish cop.
“You better score a knockout tonight, champ,” Hamill said, “if you wanna make a dent in all this anti-you shit.”
Bob chuckled but his eyes were already weary. “What is all this New York animosity about, anyway? My guys say it’s going to be a bloodbath.”
Hamill grinned like the Cheshire Cat. “Face it, Bob — New Yorkers are haters! They can work up an unbelievable amount of bile. They resent wakin’ up in the morning.”
Breslin, a fleshy-faced bulldog who always seemed half in the bag, leaned in, raving, ranting. “It’s the goddamn Jews! Ya gotta get through to the Jews if you want a shot!”
Trying to conceal his distaste, Bob swept back his bangs and said, “Personally, I’d like to get through to the New York Times,” and excused himself and we got out of there.
Right across the hall from the Royal Suite, 511 was almost as packed as the press room, in this case with aides in no-nonsense work mode. No bar in here but plenty of cigarette smoke, and little phone stations had been set up everywhere, with a bank of three TVs against one wall. The overall murmur was muffled out of respect to those on the phone. In this nearly all-male room, a sea of rolled-up white shirts and a few suits of campaign spokesmen, those not phoning were huddled in little groups, strategizing. Frank Mankiewicz, Bob’s campaign press secretary, seemed in charge of what reminded me of a wire room.
Mank, who I’d met a few times, was a former journalist whose late father had written Citizen Kane, the most famous newspaper movie of all. I wasn’t sure if that was ironic or just fitting. Someone once described Mank as a rumpled little guy who might have been a used-car salesman, but his dark eyes were as shrewd as they were sad and his high forehead seemed to tell you a good-size brain resided.
“Good,” Mank said to Bob, “you’re here. I’ve got Senator McGovern on the line. He’s got excellent news for you from South Dakota.”
Bob went to a nearby phone and I stayed back with the press secretary. I asked him why he wasn’t with the journalists.
“Half the time I am,” Mank said. “But this room is even more important. We’re feeding the media that didn’t make the trip. Look, uh, Nate, make sure Bob spends time on a speech. When he wins tonight, and goddamnit he will, every network will be covering him. That victory speech needs to sing. He’ll listen to you.”
“You do know I’m just a bodyguard. And not even allowed a gun.”
Mank touched my suitcoat sleeve. “He likes you.”
“Why?”
“Two reasons. You never kiss his ass. And you never ask about his brother.”
Bob came back smiling, raising a fist chest high. “More votes than McCarthy and Humphrey combined. Got both the farmers and the Indians. Carried some of the Indian precincts one hundred percent!”
A smile was buried somewhere in Mank’s furrowed puss. “Exit polls say the same about the blacks and Mexicans.”
Bob nodded and his smile faded. “If I could just shake loose of McCarthy. I shouldn’t be on street corners in Manhattan begging for votes when I could be chasing Humphrey’s ass all over the country.”