Thy Neighbor's Wife (16 page)

In 1959, after a Chicago vice squad had arrested fifty-five independent news vendors for selling girlie magazines, a jury of five women and seven men—uninfluenced by a church group that sat in the courtroom holding rosary beads and silently praying-voted to acquit the defendants. After the verdict had been announced, the judge seemed stunned, then slumped forward from the bench and had to be rushed to a hospital. He had had a heart attack.

By 1960 the multiplying fortunes of Hugh Hefner permitted him to purchase for $370,000 a forty-eight-room Victorian mansion near the exclusive Lake Shore Drive, and to spend an additional $250,000 on renovations and such furnishings as a large circular rotating bed that would become the center of his expanding empire. Hefner also opened during this year in Chicago the first Playboy Club, which featured a new black comedian named Dick Gregory and was decorated by wall posters displaying such centerfold inamoratas as Janet Pilgrim and Diane Webber. Among the first customers, having just turned twenty-one, and currently between jobs, was Harold Rubin.

As if to separate itself officially from the grandfatherly era of Dwight D. Eisenhower and to acknowledge the inevitable ascendance of a new generation, the nation in November 1960 elected to its highest office the youngest American President in history, the handsome forty-three-year-old senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy.

During his brief, dramatic term in office—one that would involve him in a failed attempt to invade Cuba, a triumphant nautical confrontation with the Russians, various crises in the Congo and Berlin and Southeast Asia as well as in Mississippi and Alabama—he nonetheless found time to inaugurate the Peace Corps, to promote national physical fitness and body awareness, to go sailing off Newport, to appear on a California beach in bathing trunks surrounded by admiring women, and to embellish the White House with a glamour and glitter that, for those fortunate people who shared it with him, was unforgettable.

Almost everything he said in speeches, or did in public, or read in private had an awesome influence during these trendy times. His publicized admiration for Ian Fleming’s spy novels boosted their sales; he lent distinction to cigar smoking; even his special rocking chair, prescribed for his aching back, became a celebrated design quickly imitated by furniture manufacturers.

His personal popularity was of course enhanced by his fashionable young wife, Jacqueline, who became the most photographed woman in the world and, parenthetically, the masturbatory object of numerous male magazine readers. Never before in American history have so many men privately craved a President’s wife; but as enticing as she appeared to be, it did not curb her husband’s interest in other women. Though a Roman Catholic, he was not monogamous; he was an elitist member of that religion, a wealthy worshiper who, like his father before him, consorted with cardinals and was unaffected by the joyless philosophy that stifled the sex lives of the poor parish regulars.

While his infidelities were not reported in newspapers, the rumors were constant, and various journalists assumed that his lovers included, among others, two Hollywood actresses, a young
Radcliffe graduate living in Boston, an attractive secretary on the White House staff, the genteel sister-in-law of a communications executive, and a lovely divorcee residing in Los Angeles. If the name of no particular mistress emerged in the 1960s to personalize or scandalize his secret fervor, it was because he, unlike a few previous Presidents, had no desire for a mistress; he preferred variety, and, according to one correspondent who knew him well, he could make love as casually and quickly as he could swim the length of a pool—which is not to denigrate his fondness for the women who shared his bed, but rather to suggest that sexual intercourse for him was not a clinging complicated act of commitment. It was an indulgence in pure pleasure, a healthy exercise that relieved tension and produced a delightful sense of being alive. Kennedy was—as D. H. Lawrence might have described him—a phallic President.

However representative of the sixties his sexual style may have been, there were White House aides and political associates who were quietly appalled by it, or who, having so long associated the presidency with much older men, were unprepared for the youthful lusty drives exemplified by Kennedy and other New Frontiersmen.

One comely young woman, a campaign worker in 1960 who thought that she had gained a White House job because of her intelligence and idealism, was disappointed to discover that what Kennedy and a few of his men found most desirable about her was her body. Another White House secretary, who also traveled with the President and spent many private hours with him when Jacqueline was away, gradually by 1963 became consumed with anxiety because she feared that soon the press would expose the
dolce vita
and her own participation in it; and later, hearing the disastrous news of his death in Dallas, her first reaction was a sense of relief. Now his image as a good and gallant leader would be preserved, she thought, untarnished by an exploitative inquiry into his private life.

Hugh Sidey,
Time
magazine’s Washington correspondent, had before Kennedy’s death written about the libertinism in the
White House, but Sidey’s account was a confidential memorandum meant only to inform his editors in New York. In the memo, Sidey suggested that at times the sensuality and sumptuousness of the Kennedy administration evoked thoughts of the hedonism of ancient Rome, and this made Sidey’s reportorial job more difficult since he often could not reach government spokesmen at night or during weekends because they all seemed to be socially involved in Washington or elsewhere. During one weekend when Kennedy and his staff were in Palm Beach, the memo added, even the President’s aging mother, Rose Kennedy, was part of the high life, attending a party with an escort that Sidey had overheard being referred to as her “gigolo.”

Although the
Time
staff alone was to have access to this memo, Hugh Sidey was later astonished to discover himself in the office of the Attorney General, Robert Kennedy, hearing the latter say in an enraged voice: “We could sue you for slander.” Robert Kennedy had on his desk a copy of the memo. When Sidey demanded to know how Kennedy had gotten it, the only answer was that someone had sent it to him. Sidey now became angry, and while apologizing for the flippant reference to Rose Kennedy’s escort, he would not retract anything else he had reported, saying that what was going on was “disgusting” and “I don’t think that this is the way the government should be run, or the way you people should encourage it to be run.”

Had
Time
magazine published the contents of Sidey’s memo, it would perhaps have prompted many favorable replies from readers, particularly those residing in smaller cities and towns away from the eastern seaboard, for despite the Kennedy-inspired excitement and welcomed changes there was increasing sentiment among middle-class Americans that things were moving too fast, that there were too many sit-ins in the South, and that there were too many parties in Washington to which they had not been invited. The Kennedys inspired a clannishness, an “in” crowd of beautiful people and movie stars, Harvard professors and rich liberals who wanted to democratize every place ex
cept their well-policed city neighborhoods and exclusive beaches in New England and the Hamptons.

The emphasis on youth made many Americans in their thirties feel older, particularly those junior executives who, having identified with corporations and having associated wisdom with seniority, now felt suddenly uncertain and outmoded in this age of new personalities and vacillating values. College graduates of the 1950s, revisiting their schools in the 1960s, were astonished by the new freedom on campus. Unmarried co-eds, some of them pioneering with the Pill, lived openly with young men, taking for granted liberties that years ago would have caused their predecessors’ expulsion. The male students of the sixties seemed almost devoid of formality, lacking neckties and a traditional respect for elders, and they suggested an easy confidence inspired perhaps by an assumption that with their knowledge of the new technology, and the accelerating obsolescence of the older generation, they could anticipate careers characterized by shortcuts to the top.

While older graduates were often irritated by this attitude, they also envied those who were part of the new freedom, and wished that they were younger and more available to indulge in it. One individual who felt this way, whose emotions were typical of thousands of other men in their early thirties—and who would later be lured into a voluptuous experience that would exceed his desires—was a normally cautious insurance executive in Los Angeles named John Bullaro.

J
OHN BULLARO
was a compactly built man, just under six feet, with hazel eyes and even features, who arrived each morning at the insurance office in downtown Los Angeles wearing a suit and tie and exuding a pleasant, outgoing manner. His clothes were in the style of Brooks Brothers, and his light brown hair, cut short and neatly trimmed, would have pleased his conservative Italo-American father, who had once operated a six-chair barbershop in the Hearst building in Chicago.

While Bullaro had voted for Kennedy and had mourned his death, he was aware that the Kennedy influence had widened the wedge between the ways of fathers and sons, creating an atmosphere out of which would come the “generation gap” and John Bullaro was personally offended after the Berkeley campus riots of 1964 when one student made headlines by saying: “You can’t trust anyone over thirty.” Bullaro was thirty-three, and he felt at least as trustworthy and idealistic as any caviling self-righteous campus radical.

Since graduating in 1956 from New York University with a master’s degree in educational administration, having resisted inclinations toward medical school, Bullaro spent years in youth work as a director with the Boys’ Club of Hollywood in Los Angeles; and in 1960, following his marriage to Judith Palmer, a pretty blonde who was training to become a nurse at the Beverly
Hills Clinic, he shifted his career to a higher-paying position in the insurance business, which he saw as being somewhat related to social work and community assistance and, by extension, to the national welfare.

Without the underwriting and risk-taking of the great insurance companies, Bullaro believed, the United States could not have achieved the economic miracle of the past century, and as a young agent in its Los Angeles office he read with pride the history of the New York Life Insurance Company, which since 1845 had shared in the grief and glory of American adventure. New York Life helped to finance the Industrial Revolution, it insured the lives of wagon-wheeled travelers to the California gold rush, it invested many millions in government bonds to support American military efforts in Europe and Asia.

While John F. Kennedy had not been a policyholder, the company had insured the lives of nine earlier Presidents, including both Roosevelts and two victims of assassination, Garfield and McKinley, as well as such venturing individualists as Harry Houdini and the astronaut Virgil Grissom, Charles Edison and Walter Chrysler and General George Custer, whose last stand in 1876 at Little Big Horn had been insured by New York Life for $5,000.

When Bullaro joined it, the insurance company was established as one of the nation’s five largest, maintaining 360 offices around the country with nearly ten thousand full-time employees, and an equal number of independent agents working on commission; but Bullaro nonetheless felt personally involved with the firm, being by nature an organization man who could identify with corporate goals, and he soon was cited for promotions. In 1962, having fulfilled the company’s highest sales standards, he was made an assistant manager. In 1964 he was appointed to a regional managership, was given a large raise, and purchased a spacious home in the Los Angeles valley suburb of Woodland Hills. He was a member of the local Rotary Club and the Junior Chamber of Commerce, a fund-raiser for United Way, and an adviser to the Boys’ Club of Hollywood where he had once worked. He was also on the board of the Valley Oaks Church of Religious
Science, having abandoned the casual Catholicism of his Italian father and the stronger traditions of his Jewish mother.

As a teenager in Chicago, living in a lower-middle-class neighborhood where anti-Semitism was prevalent, he had never revealed to his friends his mother’s Russian-Jewish heritage. Fearing social ostracism, and hoping to blend in with the Christian majority, he had once belonged to a neighborhood youth club affiliated with the Episcopal Church. But after his family had moved to Los Angeles in 1951 at his mother’s insistence, she having grown weary of Chicago’s cold winters and the crowded urban apartment house in which they lived, Bullaro became more accepting of himself.

He felt less self-conscious and ethnic in the sprawling open atmosphere of Southern California, where there were no insular neighborhoods dominated by the Irish or Italians or Slovaks or Germans, feuding factions united only in their animosity toward the blacks and Jews. Los Angeles was a relatively young and rootless city unconnected to Old World ties and traditions; here the settlers had not come from Europe but from other cities in America—they were native-born, secure in their national identity, and they did not seek shelter or strength in ethnic alliances. Their reliance on the automobile made them a very mobile society, less circumscribed and entrenched than most Chicagoans or New Yorkers, and in the balmy Los Angeles climate even the slums, the white rows of palm-shaded shacks, seemed vastly preferable to the dark, dank tenements of Chicago in winter.

As with thousands of other westward-moving people who were establishing California as the fastest-growing state in the nation, Bullaro saw the shift as rejuvenating and emancipating for both himself and his family. His father, who had initially been reluctant to leave the prospering barbershop in Chicago, soon found work at M-G-M studios and was cutting the hair of Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, and Mario Lanza. His mother, who after eighteen years had recently had another child, was now joyfully preoccupied in California with her infant daughter and was less intrusive into her son’s personal affairs. Though she had sought to discour
age him from leaving Los Angeles in 1955 for New York University, and was later disappointed when he stopped seeing the young Jewish woman that he had been dating, she did not object to his courtship of Judith Palmer, and in 1958 she attended the wedding, conducted by a Congregationalist minister.

Bullaro’s marriage to Judith Palmer greatly advanced his quest for assimilation. He felt that her acceptance of him was almost tantamount to his admission into a desirable club to which a majority of citizens belonged, and it was no longer necessary for him to think of himself as a member of a minority group, a fractional American. Her father, a top executive with a Los Angeles aeronautics firm, had personal connections in the industrial-military complex that was investing billions into the California economy, and in him Bullaro saw an ally in the corporate hierarchy to which he himself aspired.

From the moment he met her, Bullaro had been attracted to Judith’s wholesome good looks, and her fair complexion, cheekbones, and short blond hair reminded him of the actress Kim Novak. While at parties Judith drank more than any woman he had previously known, he attributed this to her liberated background and possibly to the influence of her convivial father, whom she adored. Since the drinking did not detract from her poise in public, Bullaro was not unduly concerned, although he was aware that it had an invigorating effect on their sex life. After parties and much drinking, she became extremely responsive and uninhibited in bed, and on such occasions she performed fellatio with uncommon skill and ardor.

Otherwise she was sexually passive, and this seemed to be increasingly prevalent as their marriage moved through the 1960s. It was as if the illicit premarital passion that they had enjoyed with one another in the 1950s had languished with legality, and it now required added stimulation for revival. Also, as they had children, first a son, then a daughter, Judith was often tired in the evening, and Bullaro sometimes welcomed this because, with his
increased responsibilities at New York Life, he was able to work at home late at night while the family slept.

He enjoyed living in the Woodland Hills house, it being the first house that he had ever owned after a lifetime of dwelling in apartments. It was a beige ranch-style house with a heavy shake roof, and in the front were planted pine trees, sycamores, and a pepper tree. A semicircular driveway cut through the dichondra lawn, and in the garage were two cars, Bullaro’s new Oldsmobile and an older Thunderbird that had been a gift to Judith from her father. The interior of the house suggested a Spanish influence, and there was a brick fireplace and an oval table which served as a bar and on which were bottles of California wines.

On weekends the couple sometimes had dinner out with Bullaro’s colleagues from New York Life and their wives, and they would all return home for an after-dinner drink. One evening they were joined by a man from the John Birch Society who showed a political film on the Conservative party and was anxious to solicit Bullaro’s help on the formation of a Birch chapter in Woodland Hills.

Although Bullaro had become more conservative politically since the death of Kennedy, he was far from ready to become a Birch activist; and while Bullaro was as surprised as his friends by the recent race riots in the Watts section of Los Angeles, and was affronted by the recurring disturbances on campuses, he also recognized within himself a grudging fascination with the way young people were now expressing themselves. He was impressed by their openness and their assertiveness in defending minority groups and opinions, and by the ease with which they found time to indulge in sexual freedoms that Bullaro could only envy.

On Sunday mornings, after telling Judith that he was going off with his bicycle-riding club on a cross-country trip, as was his custom, Bullaro would sometimes peddle alone for fifteen miles to Venice Beach, where large numbers of students and hipsters and artists and dropouts gathered in the coffeehouses or along the waterfront, sitting in the sun conversing among themselves, or reading avant-garde paperbacks that Bullaro had never heard
of. As he slowly rode his ten-speed bicycle along the palm-lined path, wearing his NYU sweat shirt and sneakers that he knew were too white, he could see the colorful plastic Frisbees spinning softly in the sky and the long-haired couples strolling along the beach, and sometimes as he rode past the open windows of seaside apartments he caught glimpses of young people walking around casually in the nude. Bullaro often smelled the fragrance of marijuana in the air, and from the cafés he heard guitar music and folk songs making a mellow mockery of his materialistic world, and at such times he was tempted to step down from his bike and politely approach these tranquil strangers at their tables and try to reason with them and perhaps convince them that he was a part of them, that he too was skeptical of the system, and was personally unfulfilled despite his seeming success. But he continued to peddle onward rather than subject himself to what he foresaw as their ridicule, and he perceived his Sunday bike rides through Venice for what they probably were, an exercise in self-pity, a search for a solution to a problem he could not define. He knew only that, in his thirties, he felt old and very alienated.

But on Monday mornings, as if the Sundays had never existed, Bullaro was back in his suit and tie and driving his new car with enthusiasm toward his office—or, as on this September morning in 1965, he was a passenger on an airplane flying to Palm Springs to attend an insurance conference over which he would partly supervise. Among those invited were several dozen newly hired California agents of New York Life, and, for three days and two nights at a modern hotel in the desert, they would listen to speeches by senior executives, participate in seminars, and learn about the future goals of the company. The invited agents had already in their brief careers with New York Life proved by their records that they could sell insurance, which is a rare and special talent, for the agent must sell a product that the public subconsciously associates with death and disaster, and the natural resistance to it is so strong that agents initially confront repeated rejection.

One consequence of this, Bullaro believed, was that it made in
surance selling less tolerable to women than to men; women tend to avoid situations that could lead to face-to-face rejection, whereas men become accustomed to it early in life when they begin to make sexual advances, and they soon accept rejection as a natural if not pleasant part of life. Bullaro noticed during the first day at the conference that there were only four women among the seventy new agents; one of the women, however, had surpassed nearly all of the men in sales, and Bullaro had already heard of her by reputation before meeting her in the cocktail lounge that first evening.

He had been sitting with three other executives when she entered the crowded room alone, and, after one of the men who knew her asked if she would join them, she did. Her name was Barbara Cramer. She was a petite, bespectacled woman in her mid-twenties with short blond hair and a well-proportioned body clothed in a dark tailored business suit; though somewhat plain, she was attractive in a boyish way. She sat next to Bullaro and, after refusing a cigarette and ordering a drink, she listened quietly but attentively as the men resumed their conversation. They were talking about the Keogh plan, a tax-free pension program for self-employed citizens that Congress had just passed, and, without abruptly interjecting herself, she nonetheless conveyed the impression that she knew as much as they did about the complexities of the plan.

The business discussion went on for an hour and two more rounds of drinks, after which the men stood to say good night and left Bullaro at the table with Barbara Cramer. Though she made no move to leave, she did complain of a mild headache, and Bullaro offered to get her an aspirin. The bar was crowded and so Bullaro walked across the lobby toward his room, which was nearby on the second floor. As he opened his medicine cabinet, he heard the door to his room close behind him. Turning, he saw that Barbara Cramer had followed him. She was standing next to the bed, and was smiling.

“I’ve decided,” she said, “that I probably need more than an aspirin. I need a good lay.”

He knew that he had heard her correctly, but even so he was astonished by her directness. His first concern was whether she had been seen by any of his associates as she entered his room. The regional vice-president was next door, and other executives were across the hall; but before he could say anything she had removed her jacket and her shoes, and was beginning to unbutton her blouse.