The Marilyn Tapes

Washington, D.C. September 4, 1962

Hoover

J. Edgar Hoover said to his friend and associate Clyde Tolson, “I’ll be upstairs in the den for a while.” He smiled. “Just some last minute catching up.”

The smile was in reference to Clyde’s remark at dinner that Edgar was working too hard these days.

“I worry about you, Edgar,” Clyde said from the comfort of the leather armchair in the living room. A handsome man with wavy hair combed straight back in the fashion of a forties movie star, Tolson, unlike Hoover, was an avid reader. Tonight he was finishing a bestselling adventure novel by Hank Searls.

“Well, I worry about you too,” Hoover said. “All that reading you do is liable to make you blind.” He chuckled.

Despite their friendship of several decades, there was a curious formality between the men. Sometimes it almost seemed as if they were strangers, which was odd indeed for two people who spent virtually every day and most evenings together. Clyde had an apartment, but he spent much more time at the house on Thirtieth Place NW, which was a retreat of sorts for both of them. Usually, anyway. For the past few evenings, Clyde had sensed something wrong with Edgar.

Clyde sounded nervous when he spoke now, as if afraid he might be prying. “Are you all right, Edgar? The past few days — well, you’ve seemed kind of distant.”

Hoover smiled. “You and those darned magazines you read, Clyde. You psychoanalyze everybody.”

Hoover glanced about the house, the large Georgian-style home having recently been redecorated. The living room walls were wiped wood to blend with the Adam mantel and the mixture of contemporary sofas and a few Oriental objets d’art. Hoover took abiding pride in his home.

Clyde smiled back. “There’s no need to psychoanalyze you. I already know you’re crazy.”

The director laughed and went upstairs, passing a portrait of himself of the first floor landing, and then along a hallway that was a photo gallery of the rich and famous and powerful standing next to Mr. Hoover. Only the president, and perhaps the Pope, could boast such a gallery of friends and admirers. The hallway floor was covered with Oriental rugs. Hoover had a passion for them. Like most of the house, this wing had the feel of a museum that had been entombed in well-polished mahogany.

He closed the den door and went directly to the phone. It was a “safe” phone. Hoover had it checked for bugs every seven days.

As he lifted the receiver, he wondered if dear trusted Clyde had figured out what indeed had made Hoover so distant lately, so fixated to the exclusion of everything else.

If he could just find them, possess them... he’d show those snickering bastards just who was in control here. No more implications about him being past his prime; no more smirks about his friendship with Clyde. There had been a time when he’d enjoyed visiting the White House — back in the days when presidents had cooperated with him — but with the new president things were different. All the president’s friends treated Hoover either coldly or with smug superiority.

But that would change, and damned soon.

As he was opening the center drawer in the desk, his eyes fell on the framed photograph of his beloved mother Annie, who had been taken from him in 1934. Not long before her death, a second-rate gossip columnist for one of the New York newspapers had hinted of an unnatural attachment between Hoover and his mother.

What fierce G-man calls his Mommy every single night and squires her around like a shiny new beau to the best restaurants and theaters? If we didn’t know better, we’d say they were lovebirds.

Well, the man’s laugh had been short-lived. Six days after his column appeared, he was accused by a fourteen-year-old girl of statutory rape. Ultimately the charges were dropped, but not before more than one hundred newspapers around the country had dropped the reporter’s column.

As for the girl, the press didn’t report that the charges against her were also dropped. A friend of the director had discreetly hired her to file the complaint against the columnist, in return for which her criminal record as a prostitute would be expunged from the files of the local police.

Hoover stared at his mother again and recalled, as if she were here in the room with him, the sweet soft scent of her cologne, the deep, exciting blue of her eyes...

He put the photograph back, his eyes falling on a few of the other items in the drawer. The lucky rabbit’s foot he’d had since he was a boy, to which he ascribed mystical powers; the stack of UFO paperbacks, a few of which had confirmed his suspicions that the Russians had made a secret deal with alien beings; and an autographed glossy of Olympic diving star and now movie star Buster Crabbe in skimpy bathing trunks.

“To Mr. Hoover, The Most Respected Man in America, Yours Sincerely, Buster.”

From the middle drawer, he took out a sheet of paper with a telephone number written on it in pencil, and dialed.

On the other end, in Los Angeles, there were six rings before somebody answered.

“Hello?” Melanie said.

“It’s me,” Hoover said.

“I was hoping it would be. Things are going very well.”

Hoover did not hide his excitement. “You mean you’ve got them?”

“Not yet. But pretty soon now. There’s a private investigator named Tully. He doesn’t know it yet, but he’s going to give them to me.”

“I was hoping you’d be a little further along.”

“It won’t be long. You’ll see.”

Sometimes he wondered if it was wise to work with a woman at all, even a smart, ruthless, beautiful one like Melanie. Of course, she had certainly served him well in the past.

“I think we’re looking at twenty-four hours for this thing to be wrapped up,” Melanie said.

“I didn’t mean to sound cross, Melanie. You’re doing a very good job. Keep at it.” He paused. “It’s just that, well, you know how important this is. The whole government could—”

“I know how important it is. It’s all I think about, believe me. So why don’t you go relax?”

“I think I’ll do that. I’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

“Night.”

“Good-night, Melanie.”

He sat back in his chair and closed his eyes for a time. Sometimes he felt so old, so weary. He had to constantly defend himself against a variety of enemies — and sometimes one tired of the defense.

He remained in this glum revery for a few minutes. Then he remembered the photographs in the bottom left drawer of the desk.

The movie star Rock Hudson and his latest young man. Hoover had assigned an agent in the Los Angeles branch to do nothing but follow Hudson around and snap secret photos of his various trysts. A new batch had come in today.

Hoover spent the next twenty minutes going over each of the ten black-and-white shots carefully. Hudson was truly insatiable.

Then he went downstairs to say good-night to Clyde.

Los Angeles

Louella

At the same time J. Edgar Hoover was saying good-bye to his friend Clyde, the world-famous Hollywood gossip columnist Louella Parsons was just stepping from the limousine that was returning her from Joan Crawford’s birthday party. Louella and Joan had been friends for many years, ever since Louella had obtained some pornographic photographs of the young Crawford. Louella had shown them to Joan.

“If you promise me the exclusive on anything that happens to you in the future, I’ll burn these photos.”

The Great Crawford agreed. Louella burned the photos.

But friendship aside, Louella hadn’t felt like staying late tonight. Her bladder problems — she’d already seen three specialists — forced her to wear rubber panties when she went out these days, and of course by now virtually everyone in Hollywood knew about her bladder, gossip being the coin of the realm in executive suites and fashionable restaurants. So they snickered at her behind her back; she’d finally given them a weapon — albeit unwillingly — with which they could club her. Louella and her rubber panties.

At this point in her life, Louella Parsons, the gossip columnist, was not unlike Norma Desmond, the faded silent screen star portrayed in Sunset Boulevard. At the height of her prominence, Parsons’ column had appeared in more than one thousand newspapers, not to mention the radio or the TV show.

But William Randolph Hearst, her benefactor and the man commonly believed to be the model for Citizen Kane, had died not long ago, and Hearst’s replacement, Gibbons, had started shaking things up by offering a variety of new columns. It was his stated belief that, with the rise and fall of magazines such as Confidential, gossip was becoming a cheap commodity.

Gone were the radio show, the TV show. Miss Parsons, as she liked to be called, was down to fewer than four hundred papers.

Gibbons said, “To be blunt, Miss Parsons, you haven’t had a scoop that amounted to anything in ten years.”

At this point, most industry people had pretty much written Louella off. Oh, there were award ceremonies and retrospective honors, and when she went to a nightclub (which was frequently, Louella being notorious for her love of night life), the singer, whether it was Patti Page or Frank Sinatra or Johnny Mathis, always saw to it that Louella had a ringside table, and always dedicated at least one song to her in the course of the evening.

But people weren’t afraid of her anymore. And that was what Louella mourned most of all.

In the decades of the thirties and forties and the early fifties, Louella had enjoyed a power surpassed only by Walter Winchell. If Louella went after you in her column, you or your project was very likely dead. For this reason, most stars and all studios had devised elaborate methods of appeasing Louella — to the point that one studio paid $75,000 for screen rights to Louella’s one and only (and very bad) romance novel.

The money was there and the mansion and the chauffeur were also there and so were all the “A”-list party invitations — but the power to scare the living shit out of people seemed gone forever.

And so Miss Parsons had her Norma Desmond days, times when she came downstairs angry and bitter at her loss of eminence, and God forbid that your name got drawn in her little lottery — because she would not only flay the hell out of you, she would do it with great relish.

Now, she fled to the privacy of her expensive new home, one of those sweeping, Moorish-like houses so fashionable in Los Angeles these days, pool, tennis court and greenhouse tucked discreetly behind palm trees, while inside the vast white rooms were filled with English furnishings and expensive art.

She needed some rest anyway. She had recently started writing a book about Marilyn Monroe called American Goddess, after Marilyn had made some tapes about her background for Louella’s exclusive use.

Louella stood in her kitchen, pouring a 7UP over six ice cubes and then tapping two aspirin into her palm. She felt a head cold coming on.

The phone rang. The maid was not always good about picking up.

Rather than track down the maid and yell at her, Louella decided to pick up. A few moments later, she was very glad she did.

A suave man’s voice said, “This is Salvitore Rossetti.”

Louella thought what she always thought about him. Why would a man so cultured and polished want to be a mobster? He was the number-two man in the entire West Coast organization. Louella had dined with him many times and found him “enchanting,” as she’d mentioned once in her column.

“I may have something for you you’re going to like very much,” Rossetti said.

“Oh?”

And then he told her.

At first, she thought he might be playing with her. He could be a terrible tease. But after a few more words, she realized he was quite serious.

“And you think you can get them?”

“Yes. Get them and give them to you, Louella.”

“I’m very, very flattered.”

“Let’s face it, Louella. I owe you.”

“Any idea about how much time it will take?”

“Not long. That’s why I called tonight. To give you a little warning.”

She was — quite uncharacteristically — speechless.

This wasn’t gossip column piffle. This story could bring down a government.

“I’ll call you soon,” Rossetti said. And then hung up.

Louella stood there, stunned, the receiver still in her hand, a dial tone burring belligerently.

With one phone call, her life had changed.

If Rossetti could deliver what he had promised...

She found a quart of good bourbon and mixed a little in with her 7UP.

She was doing a little celebrating. In advance.

Palm Beach

Joe Kennedy

Several of the staff had noted that old Joe Kennedy, the man who had bought the White House for his second-born son, was even more formidable following his stroke.

He would slump in his wheelchair and you would think he was dozing.

But he wasn’t.

He’d sense you — the way a bat senses things — and then he’d start shouting at you in a frightening rush of incoherent syllables that were all he could muster after his stroke.

But the rage was coherent.

The rage was very coherent, sending his nurses running from him in tears.

He had a lot to be angry about these days, Joe Kennedy thought, as he sat at the window staring out at the Atlantic Ocean. A writing tablet lay in his lap. With a fountain pen, he had written some lines on the linen paper.

Palm fronds clacked eerily in the moonlit night, around a home many of the locals found eerie enough already — an old-world hacienda with white walls and red roof-tiles, fronted by an enormous hedge. But this was what old Joe wanted — to say to the world, I’ve got my fortune, shanty Irish sonofabitch that I am, and fuck you if you don’t like it.

And one local wag, a relative of the DuPonte family, had been shrewd enough to say just that: “Darling, you’re looking at the phrase ‘fuck you’ put into architecture.” Imposing. Impregnable. Secretive. That was the compound, and that was the way old Joe liked it.

The fronds rattled again, bringing him back to his previous thoughts.

He hadn’t planned on dying in Florida — too many rednecks for his taste — but he could no longer face the winters in Hyannisport.

Now, as he looked at the moonlight on the water, he felt a familiar tremor move through him, knot his stomach, clench his bowels, freeze his spine.

Jack and Bobby were going to blow it.

Three weeks before the Inauguration, Joe Kennedy had invited a friend of his sons’ to the compound and had plied him first with liquor and then with promises of cash.

I want to know what goes on in that fucking place, Joe had grunted. You understand me?

The nice young man had nodded. He seemed nervous but interested. He didn’t come from particularly good stock, Joe Kennedy noted, so of course the money interested him immediately.

But he played it coy, the little prick, self-righteously turning down three offers before the money got green enough.

And that was how Joe Kennedy learned that both of his sons, within the past six months, had spent time with Marilyn Monroe.

Some fucking dope-fiend Hollywood chippie.

Were those two boys of his out of their minds?

Even worse than that, his spy had told him that Bobby seemed to have serious feelings toward Marilyn.

Joe Kennedy shook his head.

Bobby had always been the smallest of the boys and the most vulnerable. While Jack just screwed Marilyn for a couple of months and then forgot all about her, Bobby had fallen in love. His spy told him that during the month before Marilyn’s death, Bobby flew to L.A. five times just to see her.

Futhermore, the word was now out on Bobby’s indiscretions.

Not that Joe was particularly worried about him. Edgar had kept a file on his boys for over fifteen years now. Occasionally he’d shown it to Joe. After the Inauguration, he’d presented Joe with photos of the whores Jack had banged during the 1960 Democratic convention.

That episode had been upsetting but still Edgar’s files did not bother Joe in and of themselves. He accepted them as a fact of life. Hoover had a file on everyone, including Joe himself. The only people Edgar had consistantly laid off of were members of the Mob, the reason for which Joe was well aware of.

Back in ’38, two Mob-sponsored agents infiltrated the Bureau all the way to the top. One night Hoover received a call from a Mob boss who told him about the infiltration. The boss said that unless Hoover laid off the Mob, they would make the infiltration public and simultaneously ruin his personal reputation. So Hoover went easy on the Mob until the 1950s when — in order to get back at them — he aggressively wiretapped certain key Mob players.

Still, the boys had to quit playing around. They had to.

Well, this short note he was sending them would shake them up.

Nobody scared them the way their old man did. The same old man who’d killed any mobster who tried to take over his Prohibition whiskey business; who’d framed legitimate business rivals on trumped-up criminal charges and railroaded them into prison; who’d developed a profound respect and personal fondness for Adolf Hitler. This old man would have no trouble disciplining two snot-nosed kids.

If he’d only had someone around when he was their age to keep him in line and watch his back.

If the Jews in FDR’s administration hadn’t stopped him, he would have formed an alliance with Hitler, become the next president, and ruled half the world.

But the Jews, as always, had whispered and pushed and undermined...

He tried not to think of how he’d been destroyed by a 1939 newspaper interview in which he expressed some admiration for Hitler.

The Jews had never forgiven him.

They had driven him out of Washington and into a kind of exile. He was rarely seen with his sons because he knew the press would spend most of its time writing not about the boys but about what an anti-Semite their old man was.

FDR, Hitler, his longtime mistress Gloria Swanson... some nights when he sat before this silent starry window he heard their voices, saw their faces. He even saw the face and heard the voice of his disturbed daughter Rose... all the shit he’d had to endure for lobotomizing her.

His doctor friend at the clinic where they took Rose told him about lobotomies. “You won’t have any more problems with her. I promise you.” Joe hadn’t consulted anybody else in the family. He simply went ahead and did it. He tried not to think of a knife being pushed down into the front section of her brain. His family would always hate him just a little bit for that.

He looked down at his writing tablet.

The boys would not be happy when they saw this note:

After a time, Joe Kennedy slumped in his chair again and began to snore softly.

But then he jerked awake.

He had had a dream where young Rose was on an operating table and a maniac in a white surgeon’s outfit was holding a knife directly over her forehead.

The surgeon was old Joe Kennedy himself.

Then there were just the night sounds, surf and wind and lonely distant dogs.

And somewhere out there — beyond the sky, in some other dimension perhaps — there was death, its dark arms spreading wide to envelop him.

Why couldn’t he be eleven years old again with the golden sunlight on the blue bay of Boston... and the cute little Irish-Catholic girls watching him as he fished off the banks...

We shouldn’t have to die.

It made no sense.

It was so cruel.

Sunlight and laughter and innocence all lost to darkness... to utter extinction.

Los Angeles

Melanie

Surveillance was boring. The worst part of her whole job. Surveillance was even more boring than all those “dates” her mother had fixed her up with back in Texas.

Two hours after she talked to Edgar, she was back at it.

She was sitting in an alley in North Hollywood looking up at a second-floor apartment window. There was light in the window, but no people. Off and on for a couple of days, she had been following a man named Tully — and a few other people.

She spent a few moments looking at herself in the moonlit rearview mirror. She tried not to dote on her fiery red hair and her beautiful looks. As her mother always said, God gave her those looks. Melanie hadn’t earned them and therefore shouldn’t be congratulated for having them. Of course, her mother was always the first to point out how gorgeous her daughter was.

Melanie put on fresh lipstick and smoothed the jacket of her fashionable aqua-colored summer suit.

The cop car came five minutes later.

It came from the opposite end of the alley, crawling past the orderly garages and neat garbage cans.

Melanie knew that, being LAPD, they’d have questions for her. What’re you doing out here, miss? It’s after ten o’clock. May I see your license?

She sure didn’t want to answer any questions.

She moved automatically, wheeling the brand-new Pontiac Bonneville into a parking space to turn around.

She did all this with no headlights.

When Melanie floored her Pontiac, hurling gravel back at the squad car, the cops turned on their searchlight and their cherry.

Not that Melanie worried. By the time she reached the mouth of the alley, she was going forty miles per hour. Halfway down the block, she was going seventy. At eighty, she ran a stop sign, a red light, a flashing yellow light. At ninety, she took three different corners on two wheels, causing pedestrians to flee in panic.

But she still hadn’t reached the freeway, and the cops were gaining on her. In fact, they were now pulling up so close she could glimpse their faces in her rearview. They looked real mad.

Darn it all. She had to get away.

Turning onto Sunset, she gave it the gas — only to have a woman with a baby carriage cross the street directly in front of her. Swerving to miss them, she jumped the curb and roared up the sidewalk like an express train. Plowing through two advertising sandwich signs, she finally broke free of the cop car and made the hard screeching turn onto La Cienega, burning rubber all the way.

In her rearview she watched the cop car hit a hydrant, flip twice, then skid on its top all the way down Sunset. Hydrant water spouted high above the boulevard.

Her laughter rang through the night. The night returned her howls with the echoing scream of sirens. She was high, heedless, free; the speedometer topped 100. She loved this kind of danger; it nourished her.

Glancing at the speedometer, she was now clocking 112.

Everything else was a blur — faces gawking, people shrieking, store windows flashing, cars pulling over, pedestrians running for cover. All they did was make her laugh.

Up ahead, just north of Melrose, something did get her attention: the roadblock.

These guys were fast.

The roadblock was two blocks away. She could have tried to turn left but it was too tight a corner.

Laughing, she put the pedal to the metal.

She laughed even harder when she saw the faces of the cops, diving for cover as the Pontiac bore down on them.

She hit the roadblock at 114 miles per hour, crashing through with no trouble, concerned only with keeping the car from rolling when she turned the next corner — the one heading away from the freeway.

Disappointing as it was, Melanie couldn’t afford to push this any further.

Lord, if Edgar ever found out that she’d led the LAPD on a chase like this—

She roared away from the freeway, bringing the car gradually down to fifty miles per hour over the next four blocks.

The night was oppressive with sirens now. It sounded like the aftermath of an earthquake, that kind of panic, that kind of craziness.

She had to ditch the car fast. She stayed on the residential street until she found an alley.

A cop car was a few blocks behind her.

She turned in the alley, cut her headlights, raced down the gravel until she found a large garage.

She pulled in along the far side of it so the cops wouldn’t be able to find it at first, and then got out, already fumbling with her purse.

She was sweaty and shaky and loving every minute of it.

A few minutes later, she was walking down the street when a squad car pulled over.

“Good evening, officers.”

“Good evening, Sister.”

She could see how tense and angry they were. How they ached to get their hands on the person who’d been driving.

“Sister, have you seen anybody running down the street in the last few minutes?”

“I’m afraid I haven’t, Officer. I was just out walking and saying a few prayers and—”

“Thank you, Sister.”

The cops raced away.

Melanie kept on walking.

Thank the Lord for that nun’s habit she always carried in the large and stylish leather bag that doubled as her purse. The habit was so quick and easy to pull on. So blinding to others.

All they saw was the habit. They responded only with deference.

Humming a tune, Melanie started the long walk back to her hotel, losing the habit in a DX ladies’ room a half hour later.

Washington, D.C

Bobby

Just as Melanie was leaving the service station, Robert Kennedy looked across the shadows of the Oval Office and said, “I don’t have to tell you what would happen if that pansy Hoover ever got his hands on them.”

Jack Kennedy said nothing. Just rubbed his eyes. There was a melancholy aspect to the Oval Office this late at night — the room largely in shadows, the blue and silver seal that had been ingeniously woven into the carpet; the two naval pictures of Jack’s days in World War II flanking the fireplace; the small model of the USS Constitution on the mantel; and the rocking chair in the corner, a sad symbol of the president’s dubious health.

“Maybe Lenihan’s wrong,” Jack said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Some guy just calls up the White House and tells David Lenihan that—”

“Goddammit. Can we establish once and for all that the fucking phone call David got was legitimate? It happened.”

“Then you really believe this guy has what he says he has?”

“Absolutely.”

“Fuck.”

“You got a little wild there, brother. A little out of control. I mean, you’re the president of the United States. You just can’t take these kinds of chances.”

Jack smirked. “No, you can only run around and fuck all the girls when you’re attorney general. Nobody ever notices the attorney general, do they?”

Bobby crossed the floor and dropped into a chair facing his brother’s desk.

“This isn’t exactly helping the situation, the two of us going at it this way,” Bobby said.

“Then figure it out for me.”

Bobby sighed. “We have to send somebody out there.”

“And?”

“We’ll have to find the goddamn things.”

“And?”

“And destroy them. What else would we do with them?”

Jack Kennedy didn’t respond for a long time. Then he said, in not much more than a whisper, “This isn’t going to be protected by any national-security cover.”

“I know that.”

“If we kill anybody, it’s just plain murder.”

“Jack, for God’s sake, you think I don’t fucking know that?” He paused. “You know what the old man said the other night.”

They both knew. Joe was enraged, telling them that this kind of gossip could destroy them. He used himself as an example, reminding them how he’d once made a few statements that people felt were sympathetic to Hitler and how once the statements had reached the press, his public career was over.

“This is spooky shit, Bobby.”

“Tell me about it.”

They stayed in the Oval Office six more hours, until the sky became a dusty blue and the cry of the morning birds intruded.

Washington, D.C. 9:45 A.M

Hoover

“Edgar?”

“Yes.”

“Lyndon.”

Oh, great. Just what he needed — starting the day with Lyndon Johnson.

Everything else up till now had pointed to a smooth-running day for Hoover. The walk with Clyde from the Justice Department to FBI headquarters; the ride up in an elevator that his staff always made sure was empty before the director stepped on; his greeting of Sam Noisette, the lone Negro to serve in the Bureau home office. Sam was a receptionist. Then into his own office, his true inner sanctum, walls filled with landscape paintings and a mounted sixty-pound sailfish he’d caught. The desk was essentially bare at the moment, but soon the mail would be delivered and Hoover could get to work.

As soon as he took care of Lyndon. The guy could wear you down in ten minutes with his whining and scheming and pushing.

But Hoover had found him useful.

In fact, two years ago, when Jack Kennedy had been looking for a vice president, Hoover had offered Lyndon’s name, despite the objections of eastern liberals who had found Lyndon too crude, too corny, too unlike themselves.

But Hoover knew a different Lyndon — one who would play ball. Lyndon had always made that clear. From the beginning. From his first days on the floor.

And his hunger for gossip was inexhaustible.

After Jack was nominated, Hoover recommended that Kennedy put Lyndon on the ticket. Then Hoover had added:

“You know, Jack, I’ve never seen any reason to do anything with those photos of you and that young lady. I just want you to know that they’re safe with me and that you don’t have a darned thing to worry about.”

So now, here was Hoover talking to the man he’d made vice president.

“Yes, Lyndon.”

“Edgar, those Kennedy bastards are up to something. There’re a lot of secret meetings going on over there. With Lenihan.”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Lenihan. Their troubleshooter extraordinaire.” He smiled, knowing how much Lyndon hated polysyllabic words.

“You think you can find out what’s going on?”

“I can try, Lyndon.”

“Do more than try. I smell dick trouble.”

“Dick trouble?”

“Them Kennedy boys’d stick their dicks in a woodpile on the chance there was a snake in it, and now that snake’s reached back and bit ’em.”

“You may be right.” God, he hated the way Lyndon talked.

“Edgar, the time’s now.”

“Time for what?”

“I want their balls. I want them two gelded. Edgar, you’re gonna cut their dicks off for me.”

“That may not be as farfetched as it sounds.”

“Then let’s make it happen, boy. I’m tired of eatin’ Kennedy shit.”

“That’s the president of the United States and his brother we’re talking about.”

“And we’re gonna own them.”

“I’ve known their old man for forty years. They’re his kids. They play rough.”

“And I’m gonna have their balls. I’m gonna know when they eat, when they sleep, when they shit, how many times they make it with their old ladies. I’m gonna have their peckers in my pocket.”

“How do I do that?”

“You stick it to ’em. You break it off: And I mean all the way, Edgar, right up to the balls. Right up their rich-boy assholes.”