She closed the door and straightened her husband’s tie, tugged at his coat, then adjusted his pocket hanky.
“Now you look like a president,” she said.
“Don’t let’s get ahead of ourselves,” he said.
His twelve-year-old son rushed over.
“You’re a winner again, Dad!” the boy bubbled. “Aren’t you excited?”
Bob knelt and ruffled his son’s hair. “Over the moon,” he said.
Impulsively, the boy kissed his father on the cheek as the mother looked on fondly, their springer spaniel coming out of somewhere to dance around them, and I got the hell out. I was enough of a sleuth to detect a private family moment when I saw one.
I caught up with Nita in what might have been the go-go party at the start of a Laugh-In episode. She was talking to Milton Berle near a pocket of dancing, giddy laughter adding grace notes to “Cry Like a Baby” on the stereo.
As I drew her away, I said, “Stick with me — unless you wanna know if the rumors about Uncle Miltie are true.”
She smirked at that, looking more than a little like Stefanie Powers. “Where are we off to?”
“I’m getting you on that stage. You’ve earned it.”
“I think you’re just trying to get lucky.”
“I think you’re right.”
In five minutes, around 11:45 P.M., the candidate’s entourage of key journalists, union officials, advisors and aides assembled in the narrow hallway, like fraternity brothers stuffing a phone booth sideways. As the candidate’s bodyguard, I was waiting for Bob and his wife at the master bedroom door, Nita just behind me to one side.
Big Rosey Grier and lanky Rafer Johnson approached and introduced themselves, as if that were necessary. But in fact we hadn’t met. Firm handshakes were exchanged, Grier’s massive hand swallowing mine like a largemouth bass gulping down a minnow.
“Mr. Heller,” Grier said, “I understand you’re filling in for Bill Barry tonight.”
“I am.”
Olympian Johnson said, “Well, we’re here to back you up all the way, Mr. Heller.”
“Make it Nate,” I said, “and you’re Rosey and you’re Rafer and we’re all buddies here. With luck we won’t be needed. I think you know, Miss Romaine, Rosey. She just helped type up the candidate’s victory speech.”
Grier smiled and nodded at Nita, and told her how everybody needed to pitch in and make this happen, when we heard, slightly muffled on the other side of the door, Ethel say, “Ready?”
The couple was no doubt checking that mirror one last time.
Bob’s slightly muffled voice came: “Ready.”
The crowded hallway parted like the Red Sea and the Kennedy couple made their way to the front of the pack where Mank waited. Nita and I tagged after.
At the elevators, Bob said to his press secretary, almost sighing, “Mank, it’s late and I’m beat. Let’s take the freight elevator again and avoid pushing through the crowd.”
Bob was the boss.
We went down with the candidate and his wife, Mank, Grier and Johnson also making the trip. We came out at the edge of the bustling main kitchen.
The rumpled press secretary took me aside and pointed. “Around there’s the way to the stage, through what they call the Pantry, an adjacent serving area. We’ll be going through there on the way, and back again, after, to get to the temporary press room.”
“I better check it out.”
“Yes you should.”
I entered into a long narrow passageway representing just the kind of grubby space you hope wouldn’t be part of any restaurant kitchen: bare sandy-colored cement floor, dirty blanched walls, a rusty ice machine and shelves of unwashed glasses on one side opposite a row of three steel serving tables, one all but covered by trays of unwashed dishes. Beyond that was an archway onto the main kitchen where Chicano busboys and cooks wore white smocks like medics on the edge of an accident scene; they stood clustered together, obviously eager to see the famous Kennedy.
Among them, with a holstered sidearm, was a pasty-faced security guard in a brown uniform and dark cap. So there was some security, at least. A few network TV cameramen were posted, too. At the east end was a door that I went through into an area with restrooms and the rear doors of the Colonial Room, labeled PRESS. At the west end, where we’d be returning from the Embassy Room stage, were double doors opening onto the backstage area, an unadorned narrow corridor with a slight slope.
Not loving any of that, I returned to Mank and said, “Looks fairly clear. Lot of kitchen staff, though. I could frisk them.”
“No need,” Bob said, stepping forward. “Let’s get out there.”
The waiting crowd agreed: “We want Bobby! We want Bobby!”
A campaign advance man, two hotel personnel and I led the way through this so-called Pantry — an insult to diners everywhere — with Bob and Mank behind me followed by Ethel, Rosey and Rafer, Nita in the next row, as our small army of key advisors and union leaders and bigtime reporters like Hamill and Breslin trooped through the unappetizing area. Some of those Chicano workers surged out from the kitchen to shake hands and get autographs. Bob accommodated them. Then from behind the wall of brown faces and white aprons came that self-professed dark-curly-haired fan I’d hustled out upstairs, a tube of some kind in his hands.
I got him by the arm and was yanking him back, but he appealed to Bob, “Please! I have a campaign poster for you to sign, Senator Kennedy!”
“It’s all right, Nate,” Bob said, nodding to me to let go of the guy, and scrawled an autograph on the tube itself. I hauled the fan out of Bob’s path and said through my teeth, “Don’t let me see you again,” and he scurried away. No surprise finding a rat in this kitchen.
That security guard hadn’t done a damn thing about it, and I got in his face and said, “Sharpen the hell up.”
“Yes, sir,” he mumbled. His face had a soft look, gray, the color of wet newspaper.
Nita clutched my arm, but her eyes were looking at me differently. “Nate, you’re scaring me.”
“That’s not a bad thing,” I said.
Bob himself was in the lead now and, in a few eye blinks, we were through the double doors and up the slight incline within that featureless corridor. Then Grier, Johnson and I went through a door into the Embassy Ballroom, followed by Bob and Ethel, and the “We want Bobby” chant quickly transformed into cheers.
We’d come out to the left of the stage. After a moment of getting our bearings and registering the ballroom’s overwhelming heat, we went up three creaky stairs onto the spongy platform, red-white-and-blue bunting over us and gold curtains to our backs, thunderous applause and cheers engulfing us in waves rivaling the ones that had almost consumed Bob and son David a hundred years ago this morning.
I was already sweating and I wasn’t alone. The TV lights at the back of the room were burning hot, blinding bright, but that only ignited an adoring explosion from a crowd trapped in this sweltering space for hours. Bodiless heads and waving arms created a surreal scene out of Dali with red and blue and white balloons bouncing up to the curved ceiling with its glittering chandeliers while below straw hats seemed to bob in the crowd, as if tossed to float in the waters of some other time and place.
The chant of “We want Bobby!” had resumed with an edge of hysteria, and the candidate tried for long moments to rein them in. The mood was both exhilarating and frightening — this crowd loved their man so much they might tear him to pieces. The stage beneath the feet of the twenty-or-so of us crammed there felt as if it might give way at any moment, which seemed only to add to the anxiety-edged thrill.