Eleanor & Amelia, and other delights from Vidal’s memoirs
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gossip/story/460953p-387815c.html
[Rush & Molloy]
Vidal: Amelia sent Eleanor’s heart soaring
Did First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt have the hots for aviatrix Amelia
Earhart?
Biographers have long speculated about Roosevelt’s close friendship
with reporter Lorena Hickock. Now comes author Gore Vidal to assert
that FDR’s wife lusted after Earhart.
“Eleanor did like my father [Gene Vidal] because he was close to
Amelia Earhart, for whom she had a Sapphic passion that Amelia found
disconcerting,” Vidal writes in his second memoir, “Point to Point
Navigation.”
“Amelia said that Eleanor was always suggesting they make flights
together all around the country, just the two of them, communing with
the wind and the stars.”
When Earhart’s plane disappeared, Vidal quotes Roosevelt saying, “I
made my own small investigation. … I harassed everyone connected
with the flight and the search.” He says she concluded that, contrary
to rumor, Earhart hadn’t been spying but “simply lost her way.”
Vidal also asserts:
Organized crime bosses ordered the assassination of John F.
Kennedy. “The late film producer Ray Stark told me how, during the
short presidency of JFK, Joe Kennedy and [retired mob chief] Frank
Costello would often have dinner at Kennedy’s Central Park South
apartment and rehash old crimes, often in the company of a retired
Teamster who gave great massages. Joe’s mob connections were useful
to Jack in the 1960 election and could easily have saved JFK’s life
in 1963 had Bobby Kennedy, in the interest of building himself up in
the public’s eyes, not started arresting important mobsters.”Vidal’s cousin Jackie Kennedy believed she might have saved the
President on the fateful day in Dallas. “Since he wore a corset for
his bad back, all she needed to have done was pull him onto the car
floor, but she reacted too slowly in the shock of the moment.”His longtime foe Truman Capote “lived for gossip, and he was also a
marvelous liar. No fact ever gave him pause. … Jackie Kennedy, whom
he claimed to have known since childhood, actually met him at a lunch
in New York just before the 1960 election. … I warned her, ‘Just
remember all those scurrilous stories you found so interesting about
other people he’ll now start to invent about you.’ “