The Birth of Cool Politics

William Gargan, star of “Martin Kane, Private Eye,” a popular early ‘50s TV detective show, knew who was staying upstairs in the penthouse suite of a three-story apartment building at 522 N. Rossmore Ave. Gargan and his wife, Mary, had been sworn to secrecy not to reveal his identity. But as they sat watching the roll call at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, they had a surprise visit from their surreptitious neighbor.

Sen. John F. Kennedy had been upstairs watching the Alabama delegation cast 20 votes for Lyndon Johnson when the lights blew out and the TV went black. As a pair of LAPD detectives scrambled to replace a blown fuse, Kennedy hurried down to the Gargan apartment and asked if he could watch the balloting with them. When Mary Gargan went to put on a dressing gown, Kennedy stopped her. “Don’t worry about your pajamas,” he said. “Sit down and be comfortable.”

The roll call would go all the way to Wyoming before Kennedy officially won the nomination, but if the brash young candidate had any doubts about the outcome, he didn’t let it show. “He was very relaxed and informal,” recalls Leslie Gargan, whose parents often told the story of Kennedy’s visit. “I remember what really struck my father was how quick Kennedy’s mind was. As they went through the roll call, state by state, he didn’t even need to write anything down. He did all the tabulations in his head.”

Kennedy’s cozy evening with the Gargans was just one of the many harmonic convergences of Hollywood and the Democratic Party in the steamy carnival atmosphere of the 1960 Democratic National Convention. In many ways, that year marked the dawn of the Hollywood-ization of American politics. Raised to be a ruler since boyhood, Kennedy was the first politician to project a cool, detached celebrity style.

“You could say that Jack was the first movie star to be president,” says actress Shirley MacLaine, a longtime Democratic Party activist and sometime member of the Rat Pack who attended a convention session with Frank Sinatra and Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford. “He was there first, 20 years before Ronald Reagan.”

In today’s world of meticulously scripted made-for-TV conventions, politicians surround themselves with beaming family members and never dare to make a spontaneous move. But at the 1960 convention, Kennedy lived like a rock star on tour. He left Jackie behind in Hyannis Port, stayed in a secret bachelor pad, hung out with Sinatra and Lawford, and apparently had several trysts, including one abortive rendezvous with Judith Campbell Exner, a girlfriend he’d met through Sinatra, who’d also introduced her to Chicago mobster Sam Giancana.

Norman Mailer, covering the 1960 convention for Esquire magazine, compared Kennedy’s appeal to the brooding aura of Marlon Brando, saying that, like Brando, “Kennedy’s most characteristic quality is the remote and private air of a man who has traversed some lonely terrain of experience, of loss and gain, of nearness to death, which leaves him isolated from the mass of others.”

Kennedy’s star appeal struck a responsive chord. At a party at Lawford’s beach house, Kennedy took Janet Leigh for a spin on the dance floor. The actress was dazzled: “Imagine a possible president dancing with just a girl like me.” By the time Kennedy won election in November, he’d developed a Hollywood aura of his own, marrying movieland glamour with media politics. In an era when politics had been dominated by father figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy exuded a Rat Pack cool.

“1960 was the hinge, the beginning of a real political re-energization in Hollywood,” says Frank Mankiewicz, Bobby Kennedy’s press secretary, co-director of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign and son of “Citizen Kane” screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz. “Jack Kennedy was vigorous and handsome, and he made it a point to have a connection to the film industry. The young writers and directors and agents liked Jack for the same reason movie people like Bill Clinton. It was an emotional attraction. They were both dynamic and exciting, something that has always had appeal in Hollywood. They had drama.”

For Los Angeles, the Democratic convention was a signal cultural event, almost as much of a boost in civic morale as the arrival of the Dodgers in 1958. Aside from its sprawling movie lots, Los Angeles was still a town in search of an identity. City Hall was the tallest building in town. The Music Center and Dodger Stadium were yet to be built. The Sports Arena, which housed the convention, had only been open a year. The Santa Monica Freeway was still in the planning stages. MCA was still a talent agency, not a movie studio. MCA chief Lew Wasserman hadn’t yet become a political force: In 1960, he was helping settle a TV writers’ strike.

When he came to town, Sen. John F. Kennedy had an official suite at the Biltmore Hotel, headquarters for the major candidates and the Democratic National Committee. But the candidate never slept in the room. A week before the convention opened at the newly built Sports Arena, Kennedy aide Dave Powers slipped into town to find the senator a secret hideaway. He soon located the perfect bachelor pad, the three-bedroom penthouse suite in a striking pink-and-white streamline Moderne apartment building 10 minutes from downtown.

As with so many things in Kennedy’s world, the hideaway had a connection to Hollywood and his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, who’d once owned RKO Pictures and carried on a legendary affair with Gloria Swanson. The elder Kennedy was in town himself, out of sight, monitoring the convention from the safety of former William Randolph Hearst mistress Marion Davies’ Beverly Hills mansion.

Old Hollywood hands assumed Joe Kennedy greased the deal for his son’s convention hideaway, an apartment owned by Jack Haley, the actor best known for his role as the Tin Man in “The Wizard of Oz.” “Jack Haley and old Joe were great friends,” remembers producer Sam Goldwyn Jr. “They were Irishmen together--I met Haley on a plane once, and he was talking about knowing Joe back in the old days.”

Four telephone lines were installed in the apartment. Each morning, Powers would make Kennedy bacon, two boiled eggs, toast, coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. Then Kennedy would take an elevator down to a secluded driveway, where a telephone-equipped car would pick up the candidate and ferry him around town to woo delegates.

The press eventually discovered Kennedy’s hideaway and staked it out. Due for a swim with his father at Davies’ house, Kennedy asked the Gargans how he could slip away. According to their son, Leslie, they suggested a fire escape in the rear of the building that couldn’t be seen from the front driveway. So the candidate, swim trunks in hand, slipped out the back door and down the fire escape. His aides slung a mattress over the back fence and boosted Kennedy into a neighbor’s garden, where he made his escape. When reporters out front asked a Kennedy aide what was going on, he responded with the aplomb of a Hollywood press agent: The candidate was upstairs, he said, watching the convention and drinking a Coke.

It’s no wonder Hollywood and Kennedy were such a neat fit: He was schooled to be president the way a studio player was groomed for stardom. Joe Kennedy sold his family the way a studio marketed a picture. He hired press agents to turn his son’s wartime PT-109 misadventure into a saga of heroism. Studio flacks have long been expert in transforming actors from pretty faces into thoughtful talents. Joe Kennedy did the same with his boy: After Jack published “Profiles in Courage,” he earned the reputation of a big thinker. It would be years before anyone learned the book had largely been written for him.

Nothing was left to chance. On his way to Los Angeles for the convention, the elder Kennedy stopped in Las Vegas and put down a big bet on Jack to ensure that the gambling odds would favor his son.

“Joe Kennedy understood hype before the word was invented,” says political writer Richard Reeves, author of the Kennedy administration biography “President Kennedy: Profile of Power.” “He used the techniques of a movie studio to promote his family. He filmed his children’s lives from the start, creating fodder for campaign commercials and fueling the Kennedy myth. He had wardrobe and makeup people, and he made his daughters watch Katharine Hepburn movies so much that they all ended up looking just like her.”

The annals of Hollywood are full of ambitious tycoons like Joe Kennedy, fueled by a passion for politics and image-making. MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer, so patriotic that he adopted the Fourth of July as his birthday, was such a big Herbert Hoover man that the president offered him the ambassadorship to Turkey. In 1934, the studio bosses joined forces with newspaper tycoon Hearst, using bogus newsreels to defeat Upton Sinclair, the left-wing Democratic candidate for California governor. After the election, Fredric March confronted MGM’s Irving Thalberg, who’d helped make the newsreels, saying it was an unfair tactic. Thalberg’s reply: “Nothing is unfair in politics.”

The studio chiefs were Republicans. Their employees--writers, directors, craft union workers and many actors--were Democrats.

“You have to separate the artistic community in Hollywood from the financial community in Hollywood,” explains Warren Beatty, a longtime supporter of Democratic causes who was touted by many liberals as a presidential candidate last year. “Up until the 1960s, the creative people, who were liberal Democrats, were under contract to management, and management, who were conservative Republicans, had the money.

“You could make a case that the Hollywood artistic community was more liberal in the 1940s and 1950s than it is now. Since the demise of the contract system, the creative community, to a greater extent, has become management.”

The patriotic fervor of World War II temporarily papered over everyone’s ideological differences. But with the onset of the Cold War, Hollywood became one of the prime targets for Red Scare hysteria. In 1947 and again in 1951, the House Committee on Un-American Activities held show trials in which Hollywood activists--some Communists, some not--were forced to inform on their friends. Those who refused were blacklisted by the movie studios.

In 1950, Helen Gahagan Douglas, who’d been in Congress since 1944, ran for the California Senate, opposed by Richard Nixon, then a young Republican congressman. Nixon labeled Douglas “the Pink Lady” and won an easy victory. Bullied by the House committee hearings, most Hollywood Democrats sat out the election.

“People were afraid of being smeared as Reds if they gave money to Helen,” recalls Betty Warner Scheinbaum, daughter of Warner Bros. studio co-founder Harry Warner and a longtime Democratic activist. “In the ‘50s, everyone in Hollywood was afraid of being labeled a Communist. It certainly dampened any involvement people had in politics--it could get you in too much trouble.”

By 1960, Hollywood Democrats began to surface again, but few took their political acumen all that seriously. Not long after attending a civil rights dinner at Sammy Davis Jr.’s house, Joan Didion described the public life of liberal Hollywood in the Saturday Evening Post as a kind of dictatorship of good intentions where “disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth. Political ideas are reduced to choices between the good (equality is good) and the bad (genocide is bad), tending to make even the most casual political small talk resemble a rally.”

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One night during the 1960 convention, Gore Vidal threw a party. A novelist, playwright and MGM contract writer, Vidal was a step-cousin of Jackie Kennedy and had a grandfather who’d been a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. Planning a run that fall for Congress in the 29th District in upstate New York, Vidal thought it might be helpful to introduce the old-line Tammany Hall politicos to some Hollywood insiders.

“It began with a whimsical desire of mine to be able to say to [New York City political boss] Carmine DeSapio, ‘Mr. DeSapio, this is Christopher Isherwood.’ ” Vidal recalls. “The party cost a fortune, but people running for office will do all sorts of things to get attention for themselves.”

Held at Romanoff’s, a venerable Hollywood watering hole, the fete went all night. Vidal says 500 people were invited; another 500 crashed the party. He never got to introduce DeSapio to Isherwood, but plenty of other odd couples made acquaintances.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr., New York’s flamboyant black congressman, flirted with Gina Lollobrigida. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. talked history with Lauren Bacall. Lyndon Johnson worked the room, glad-handing Gary Cooper and Henry Fonda. Also in attendance: Jack Lemmon, Shelley Winters, Charlton Heston and Norman Mailer, who Vidal claims sat morosely at the bar, telling Vidal, “You’re too successful.”

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If any one person was instrumental in bringing the convention to Los Angeles, it was the late Paul Ziffren, a Beverly Hills attorney who was a power in Hollywood and Democratic party circles. As California’s Democratic national committeeman in the 1950s, he played a key role in rebuilding the state’s Democratic Party and established ties between Hollywood and Washington that paved the way for the emergence of industry power brokers like Wasserman.

“There’s no question that the convention put Los Angeles on the map,” says Mickey Ziffren, Ziffren’s widow. “It was a coup for the city. It changed our image from just being this funny place in the West where they made movies to a real grown-up town.”

The visiting media were easily seduced by the city’s physical charms. In town researching his campaign chronicle “The Making of a President: 1960,” Teddy White marveled at L.A.’s “smogless and milk-blue skies.” The Hollywood studios ran special buses from the Ambassador Hotel for tours of the back lots. Disneyland outdrew all the city’s nightclubs combined, even the Club Largo, a popular strip club that was packed each night with boozy delegates. Lipton Tea sponsored a helicopter that ferried celebrities over the packed freeways to the Sports Arena.

The social scene was at a fever pitch. Legendary hostess Pearl Mesta gave a big brunch at the Cocoanut Grove for Democratic Party leaders. MCA founder Jules Stein had a cocktail party where the studio chiefs mixed with Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn and New York Mayor Robert Wagner.

Jack Kennedy was the guest of honor at a party at Chasen’s; he was also on hand at brother-in-law Peter Lawford’s beach house for a late-night party where, according to one Marilyn Monroe biography, the candidate met the actress, who’d come with Sammy Davis Jr. According to accounts in various biographies, Kennedy slipped away from his bachelor pad one night, apparently for a tryst with a former diplomat’s wife he’d known for years. On another night, he invited Judith Campbell Exner to Lawford’s suite at the Beverly Hilton. When Kennedy brought her to his bedroom, she was shocked to discover another woman waiting for him. Exner fled the hotel. By way of apology, Kennedy got Exner tickets to the convention; she took a pass, sending her mother instead.

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Kennedy also spent time with his most ardent industry supporter: Frank Sinatra. The Kennedy clan showed up at Sinatra’s house one night for a screening of his newly released film “Ocean’s Eleven.” Sinatra returned the favor by singing the national anthem at the convention’s opening ceremony and recruiting stars to perform at the convention’s closing night. That fall, Sinatra arranged for his Rat Pack pals and other celebrities to headline a host of Kennedy fund-raisers and campaign appearances, culminating with a lavish show at Kennedy’s inaugural ball.

“It was a heady relationship for both of them,” recalls producer Guy McElwaine, who was a young MGM publicist working for Sinatra in 1960. “They were two kings with a common cause. Frank was a real Roosevelt Democrat who really respected what Kennedy stood for. And Jack loved being around Frank. Hey, it was Frank Sinatra. No one had the power, charisma and volatile nature that Frank had in 1960. Jack knew a lot of powerful men, but no one like Sinatra.”

It was a perfect time for a charismatic young politician to woo the entertainment community. Yet outside of Sinatra, Kennedy had few supporters in Hollywood until after he was nominated. Adlai Stevenson was Hollywood’s favorite son, the party’s die-hard liberal standard-bearer. Kennedy was viewed with suspicion, by both rank-and-file Hollywood and the studio moguls, who were predominantly Jewish.

In 1940, Joe Kennedy, then the United States ambassador to England who was a suspected Nazi sympathizer, came to Hollywood and met with the assembled studio chiefs. He bluntly told them that Hollywood’s Jewish community would be in jeopardy if they didn’t stop making anti-Nazi pictures that promoted democracy over dictators. He said anti-Semitism was growing in England, and that if America were forced into the war, prominent Jews like themselves would be blamed.

“The studio heads came away with the very strong feeling that the Kennedys were anti-Semitic,” recalls Sam Goldwyn Jr., whose father was at the meeting. “That’s one reason Joe wouldn’t show his face at the convention--he was too unpopular here. He’d been close with Sen. Joe McCarthy, who’d ruined so many people’s lives in Hollywood. People were worried that Jack would be too much like his father.”

And there was the issue of Kennedy’s religion. Tina Sinatra remembers her father worrying that Kennedy’s Catholicism would hurt him with Protestant voters. “Being an Irish Catholic cut both ways,” recalls Frank Mankiewicz, who brought Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, who was Jewish, to meet industry Democrats at the convention to soften opposition to Kennedy. “A lot of people liked it that Jack was so vigorous and athletic, but for the Jews, it only reminded them of all the Irish kids who’d beaten them growing up in New York and Boston.”

For Hollywood Democrats, Stevenson had more gravitas. “We didn’t know Jack--we didn’t know then that you needed charisma to win,” says Shirley MacLaine. “I was part of the Rat Pack, but I was always more impressed by someone’s intellect than their charisma. Jack was smart and good-looking, but I liked Adlai--he was kind of the absent-minded professor. You knew he was the real thing because he had holes in the bottom of his shoes.”

Even after it was clear Kennedy had won the nomination, not everyone was persuaded. At convention’s end, Shelley Winters cornered Mailer and said: “Tell me something nice about Kennedy so I can get excited about him.”

After Kennedy was nominated, Hollywood began to change its tune. Longtime Democratic activist Roz Wyman, then a member of the Los Angeles City Council, ran a women’s committee for Kennedy that organized fund-raisers around the country. One of her big draws was a group of Hollywood celebrities, led by Sinatra, who lent the campaign his airplane and recruited big names.

“Washington people were fascinated by Hollywood,” Wyman recalls. “It was a different world for them. Frank was the one who really made a difference. If he asked people to go somewhere, they’d go. Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin, Milton Berle, Bobby Darin, Steve Allen and Jayne Meadows. Frank got them all to do events for us.”

The first major post-convention fund-raiser was at (then-married) Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis’ house on Summit Drive. Politics wasn’t yet a big-money sport. Wyman recalls charging $50 a head for people to see Sinatra sing on a diving board in the Hollywood couple’s backyard.

“So many people came that there was a traffic jam all the way back to Wilshire Boulevard,” says Leigh, who wrote a column for the Hollywood Reporter (“from the viewpoint of a glamorous Hollywood star”) about her visit to the convention. “Frank sang a few songs, Teddy Kennedy gave a speech. It was a very heady time to be involved in politics.”

Leigh appeared at numerous fund-raisers around the country, including a rally at the Shrine Auditorium, headlined by Judy Garland, that was so packed that Leigh went outside, climbed on top of a car and spoke to the overflow crowd. Leigh also went to Lawford’s beach house, where she met the candidate.

“Jack Kennedy seemed different than the cigar-smoking politicians we were used to,” Leigh says. “He wasn’t an actor, but he had the charisma of a performer. But mostly he inspired an idealism about politics that we just don’t have today.”

Kennedy instinctively grasped the show-biz maxim that image was more powerful than reality. It seems somehow fitting that he and Los Angeles came of age at the same moment in time.

“The convention made us a big-league city,” Wyman says. “But I really miss the excitement and spontaneity. We had fun back then. There were parades and debates and a roll call. It wasn’t like today, where everything is scripted for TV. Back then it was theater, but it was good theater, because it really mattered.”

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Editorial assistance by John Jackson.