THE LAST ACT OF JUDITH EXNER

The bad girl of Camelot—girlfriend of J.F.K., Sinatra, and Mob boss Sam Giancana— has finally found a man she can count on: her lost son. GERRI HIRSHEY reveals how the love child of a Hollywood liaison tracked down his dying mother

Last June, on the Monday morning after Father's Day, Judith Campbell Exner reached for the phone trilling beside her bed. She was tired, ill. What now?

Her unlisted phone does not ring much. This time it was her brother. A young man had called him the night before and identified himself as Judith Exner's son. No, he wasn't one of those tabloid geeks—the ones claiming "I Am J.F.K.'s Love Child," or " 'Mob Liaison' Exner My Mom. ' ' This kid was the real thing. He knew about the correct dates, the hospital... the birthmark.

And he was the right age: twenty-four.

Exner stared at the photo on her nightstand: a laughing infant with a birthmark on his brow. For years she had lain down to sleep every night within reach of that picture and another keepsake—a loaded gun. Both are legacies of her life thirty years ago—of the love affairs that made her notorious, and the son bom of a brief liaison with a Hollywood producer and given up for adoption.

Yes, the young man told Exner's brother, he was aware of her past. He wanted to find her, tell her that he was O.K.—had a great family. He wanted to thank her for giving him a chance.

Finally, Judith Exner has a PG love story to tell.

Exner's relationship with Sam Giancana cost her her son.

In 1988, before the commemorative orgy that marked the twentyfifth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's murder, America began reappraising Camelot—for the most part, downward. Revisionists gamboled in the most fertile fields: Vietnam. The Bay of Pigs fiasco. The crackpot C.I. A.-Mafia plots to kill Castro. The women.

Suddenly, everybody—networks, newsweeklies, scholars, cablemeisters —was looking for Judith Exner, the woman in dark glasses whose image had burned into telecasts worldwide in 1975. Back then, revelations of her affair with Kennedy made her the most reviled woman in America since atheist Madalyn Murray forcibly dragged prayer from the schools. Now Dan Rather wanted her for, ahem, perspective.

"Just a quickie," producers pleaded. A sound bite, a tease.

Exner consented to a brief appearance on Rather's show, then retreated to her well-secured house in Southern California. At fifty-six, she knows all about Consequences. But ask her about how she became one of this country's most infamous scarlet women, and she still seems a bit mystified. "I was just living my life," she says. "It seemed so normal to me."

She was, after all, a child of Hollywood, raised in a twenty-four-room villa perched in Pacific Palisades. Gorgeous, twenty-five, and financially secure, Judy Campbell stepped into History like it was just another night at El Morocco. Her calamities all began lit with the rosy hues of screenwriters' tableaux—airbrushed, cinematic, with front-page leading men.

Waikiki, 1959. Frank Sinatra's penthouse suite at the SurfRider Hotel. ' 'Here's That Rainy Day' ' is on the turntable, Jack Daniel's in the glasses. Judith Campbell begins a brief affair with Sinatra, whom she had met through a friend in Beverly Hills.

In 1976, after it's been revealed that Judith Campbell had an affair with John F. Kennedy, Sinatra will issue a press statement about Judith Campbell Exner: "Hell hath no fury like a hustler with a literary agent."

New York, March 7, 1960, the Plaza Hotel. It is the eve of the New Hampshire primary. Senator Jack Kennedy, who had been introduced to Judith Campbell by Sinatra a month earlier in Las Vegas, arrives at Room 1651. Judith fixes him a drink. They begin an affair that will continue after his election.

On March 22, 1962, President Kennedy's avowed enemy J. Edgar Hoover tells him over a private lunch that the jig is up: this Campbell girl has been under heavy F.B.I. surveillance for her friendship with two Mafia kingpins, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli. Giancana, too, was introduced to her by Sinatra. And just a month after the singer had put her and Kennedy together. The president is livid at being told to keep his pinstripes zipped and his phones clean. He rings Campbell and warns her to call him from her mother's home; her phone is not safe. She complies, but their affair, which has been on the wane, expires quietly a few months later.

Chicago, 1961. Queen of Heaven Cemetery. Judith is walking tipsily through the tombstones, escorted by two men who have been feeding her martinis. Back in California, her sister is ill, on the verge of a sixth miscarriage, and Sam and Johnny are helping her wait out the news. Sam, the short, homely Sicilian, always has an ear for her troubles. Give up the Kennedy bum, he tells her, and come go with me. Now Sam has hauled her out to this boneyard for a little fresh air. Johnny is on some kind of mission, looking for tombstones that bear his last name, Roselli. He is spinning stories of the deceased Rosellis, laughing like a hyena. Aunt this, Uncle that. Sam wheezes along. Judith has the sense they know something that's making it a whole lot funnier to them. . .

In 1976, Filippo Sacco, who lived under the alias Johnny Roselli, is found strangled in a chained oil drum floating in Biscayne Bay, shortly after testifying before a congressional committee investigating an alleged C.I.A.-Mafia plot to murder Fidel Castro. A year earlier, Chicago boss Sam "Momo" Giancana had been gunned down in his basement kitchen—while under police protection—just before he was scheduled to sing to that same committee.

Though Roselli swore under oath that Judith Campbell knew nothing of the bozo C.I.A.-Mafia scenarios for Castro's demise—the poison cigars, the exploding seashells—she is also forced to testify. She is promised secrecy, but government sources soon leak her identity and her relationships with J.F.K. and the mobsters to The Washington Post. She and golf pro Daniel Exner, her husband of only a few months, hole up in their honeymoon home with six skeet guns, a revolver, and a hundred-pound Doberman.

What Exner calls her Mistakes were committed over the course of three years, between 1959 and '62. But the lid came off only after September of 1975, when she was called to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee chaired by Frank Church. In its December 29, 1975, issue, with a cover story on Mother Teresa and "Living Saints," Time ran "J.F.K. and the Mobsters' Moll." A sidebar speculated on "Jack Kennedy's Other Women," with photos of Kim Novak, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson—all Tinseltown blondes with the legend or the agent to deflect the heat. Judith Exner had no press protection— just seventy phone calls on the White House log.

Often, Exner has wondered about how Dickinson in particular escaped the kind of scrutiny she received. She recalls an incident in early 1963. Eddie Fisher was hosting a cocktail party before a Hollywood screening at Paramount. The party included Judith Campbell, Angie Dickinson, and Alain Delon.

"After dinner, when she was introduced to me, Angie said, 'Oh, you're Judy Campbell. John has told me so much about you.'"

So indiscreet was John that Walter Winchell had the scoop in May of '62: "Judy Campbell of Palm Springs and Bevhills is Topic No. 1 in Romantic Political Circles." Kennedy usually shook his Secret Service detail when he met her at hotels, but in the White House, she dealt with servants, ate burgers with presidential aides. If Kennedy had lived, would he have eventually been hoist by his own monkey business like Gary Hart? Hard to say. Adultery is always a crapshoot. But at that time, press and staff were far more loyal to The Old Boys' code of silence.

T he news photos from 1975 show a somber, ashen face beneath a dark helmet of hair and oversize shades. At the time, the photos only added fuel to the bonfire of public outrage; Exner even looked like Jackie, the most venerated woman in the world. Photos of Judith in her sporty late teens and early twenties manifest some perfectly natural similarities, but in the harsh glare of the moment, even this was recast as sin: Mockery of the Widow.

Hers was a scandal of another level and era—not like the made-for-TV eighties sleazefests that have landed Jessica Hahn in Playboy spreads and MTV wrestling pits, and Donna Rice in No Excuses jeans. Back then, there really was no protocol. So Exner tried to play it straight. Ladylike. With the same astonishing naivete that helped get her in so much trouble, she walked, blinking, into the klieg lights. She held a disastrous press conference, wrote her book, My Story, then withdrew into seclusion when reporters and the public body-slammed her, con brio. "You can't believe,'' she says, "the things people say.''

Some of them claim to see God's vengeance in her post-scandal life. Since 1970, she has lost both parents and a sister to cancer. She herself underwent a mastectomy, chemotherapy, a recurrence, the loss of a lung. Midway, her second husband, Daniel Exner, suffered a near-fatal illness. He recovered, but the accumulated strains were too great; they separated for good in 1985—two years before doctors pronounced her own disease terminal.

Then in 1988, terribly ill, Judith Exner accepted $50,000 for telling People magazine that she had committed perjury when she testified before the Church committee. Under oath, and in fear for her life, she had denied being the link between the White House and the Mafia. But in fact, she now confessed, she had been a go-between for Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana, setting up their meetings, carrying manila envelopes between the two. As a candidate, Kennedy had told her that "Sam could help me'' in the election, and the meetings and courier service continued after Kennedy became president. Exner speculates, as the congressional investigators did, that the president and the Godfather may have discussed the plot to kill Castro.

No government types came forward to dispute her account of all this, but the newspapers cried foul. Judith Campbell Exner was cashing in on history. Again. She had taken money to speak The News.

"I am a terminal cancer patient, and I had nothing to lose," Exner responds. "I felt great relief having finally told the truth. I actually felt safer."

Over the years, Exner has had her defenders—some of them grudging—on the grounds of both historical fact and character: In 1976, federal judge Edward J. Schwartz mustered considerable indignation at her treatment by the government. When Exner sued the F.B.I. to obtain her files under the Freedom of Information Act, Schwartz ruled in her favor, awarding her court costs and attorneys' fees totaling $10,000. In his ruling, the judge pointed out that Exner had kept her secrets for fifteen years, until she was required to testify. And that she was promised confidentiality. "Then," said Schwartz, "she found that the proceedings, at least insofar as they pertained to her, had been leaked obviously—and I can't imagine any other way than through some Government source." It was dirty pool—and dangerous. The judge noted that Mrs. Exner felt physically threatened as a result of that publicity. Given the unsolved murders of Roselli and Giancana, this was understandable.

In 1977, New York Times columnist William Safire wondered why the committee that had questioned the woman who knew both Giancana and Kennedy had not called the man who had introduced her to them—Frank Sinatra. Both Safire and Walter Mondale questioned the government's failure to investigate the murders of the men it had subpoenaed.

Apart from the political watchdogs, there are some who just like Judith Exner. Over the years, columnist Liz Smith has persistently and crankily challenged Exner's deriders. "It was easy for the press and for Americans to deposit a load of their blame for Jack Kennedy's behavior onto Judith," Smith says now. "But she was young and in love with him and did pretty much whatever he asked. When I see her described as a cynical, hardened, opportunistic prostitute, I just see red. She had lousy taste in men, but I think she has a lot of character, and is a very dear person." Exner has another wellplaced media ally in Barbara Walters, who stays in touch and gives advice. Both Smith and Walters have acted as confidantes during the latest episode of Judith Exner's strange saga: the reunion with her long-lost son.

Twenty-four-year-old David Bohrer turned up this past June, just two weeks after Exner's oncologist delivered the news that the cancer she had been battling for ten years had spread to her spine. "This," says Smith, "is the happy ending to what has been a rather sad life."

He is prowling her kitchen in jeans and a sweatshirt, a blond, stubbled-chinned son eyeing a plate of cookies. David Bohrer is a sociology major at Cal State in Long Beach, and a part-time contract photographer for the Los Angeles Times. He lives with his adoptive parents, an hour north in an L.A. suburb. His mother is an office manager, his father is in telemarketing. They are Jewish, a specific request of his Catholic birth mother, who says she had boundless faith in what she'd seen of Jewish family life. By David's account, his is a close, quiet family, intensely private. Normal. He knows what he's done has been hard on his parents, but says, "They always supported me. They've always answered any questions that they could."

Every two weeks or so, Bohrer drives down to Newport Beach and his birth mother's home, a ranch-style house filled with plants and cats and country prints. Today he's brought her burritos. They are a striking pair, so light and dark, but with the same vivid blue eyes. Not long ago, David inquired at the offices of two show-business publications and came away with a glossy head shot of the man he has been told is his father—a movie producer. He sat studying the jawline, the matching dimples. It just had to be. But he's not the story. Like the vast majority of searching adoptees, David Bohrer was preoccupied with finding his birth mother.

"Every birthday, I thought about it," he says. "You know, my birthday's coming and maybe she's out there and she just kind of forgot. Those were real tough times."

In March of 1988, curiosity finally induced him to drive to Vista del Mar, the West Los Angeles adoption agency that had placed him. There he met with caseworker Jay Goldman. After a long, emotional talk, Goldman told him he'd have a file available for him in five days. The adoptee thanked him—and dropped out of sight for a year. He just wasn't ready.

Goldman wrote and phoned him, to no avail. He knew who Bohrer's birth mother was, and he was worried. This was a nice, sensitive kid.

Exner even looked like Jackie. Was it Mockery of the Widow?

He'd cried on that first visit, which came just a month after Exner's "JFK and the Mob" story appeared in People. An alert staffer had slipped it into the file. It lay there, bright scarlet, with cover lines to chill any mother's son. The worst of them: "[Exner] Now Gravely Ill"

When Bohrer finally reappeared the following March, he and Goldman talked for a long time. California law forbade the caseworker from giving any identifying details—name, address. But he provided a two-page file. "It said that I was given up because of her mother's Catholicism," recalls Bohrer, "and other stresses in her life."

He wondered—just what was the problem? The file also indicated she was middle-class, educated, from very nearby. What had happened to this nice Catholic girl—listed on the form as an artist?

Twenty-six years before she made headlines, Judith Katherine Immoor was photographed for the Los Angeles Examiner's "Smart Set" page, posing with members of an elite teen volunteer group, the Junior Silver Spoons.

Her childhood home was a four-story Mediterranean villa with vaulted, handpainted ceilings, grand stairways, and cold, shiny tiles. "Elegance, in the grand manner," reads a newspaper caption in a color feature on the house. But to Judith, a timid fourth of five children, it was "kind of spooky." She'd run into a room, then stand frozen by its size.

Her mother, Katherine Immoor, was a firm, independent Irish Catholic given to family and charity work. Her father, Fred, was a moderately successful architect with appalling financial skills, a bon vivant who came to rely on the comforts of his father's immense realestate fortune. Much of what he inherited he lost in bum investments. Life in the grand house went through seizures of excess and thrift. This made little Judy nervous. Of the two boys and three girls, she was the child who needed special tutors, doctors, rest cures. Always, she required great care. And early on, men seemed willing to provide it.

Many of the ones she knew were in the Business. Bob and Dolores Hope were family friends; so was Bert Lahr. It was on the arm of her pal R.J., Robert Wagner, that sixteen-yearold Judith attended a party at the home of an actor named Billy Campbell. He was in his mid-twenties, experienced, and rather wild —everything a fragile child-woman didn't need. Billy Campbell, she says, was the first big Mistake.

She married him at eighteen, wrapped in seventyfive yards of French tulle and her father's strong objections. The bride was soon battling night frights in a cottage in the Hollywood Hills. She says Billy drank, cheated, took "vacations" alone. Expensive lawyers convened, and they were divorced in 1959.

"It did make me decide that no man could be faithful," she says today. She thinks that she went for the others—the tomcatting Sinatra, the married president—because it avoided commitment and its pain. She wonders if lots of those Mistakes might have been Getting Back at Billy.

After the divorce she took her alimony and an inheritance and stepped into the sunny circuit of Malibu, Palm Springs, Miami. But Hollywood could spook her as much as her father's big, overblown house. It was not a friendly place for single young ladies.

"If a woman had a nice apartment, it was assumed that she was kept," she says. Too many times, growing up, she'd seen a beautiful woman smile at Chasen's while the studio jackals whispered about which producer paid for those teeth.

She thought her checkbook could protect her from such talk. She socialized, painted, and sketched. Family money kept her in furs and Palm Springs weekends and steak Diane. And then she fell for Frank Sinatra, Mistake No. 2.

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"To Frank," she sighs, "all women are broads."

He had seen her around, met her at parties in Hollywood and Beverly Hills. In those places especially, men noticed Judy Campbell, the freshest face in the crowd. Her coloring was a natural relief amid the casting-couch blondes, the dark swing of hair and high-wattage blue eyes. She even had a few freckles. She wore little makeup, never crossed the tarty doorsills of those striving-starlet boutiques, opting for smart suits, discreet accessories. From across the room or over a martini, Judy Campbell was an intriguing bundle of contradictions—a classy dame with a schoolgirl voice.

She says Sinatra was charming at first. He approached her at a booth in Puccini's, a Beverly Hills restaurant; the next day he invited her to Hawaii. They also met in L.A., Miami, Las Vegas. It was a short relationship, killed, Exner says, by the brutal Jekyll-and-Hyde behavior that has sent so many women running for hankies. He stunned her when he cursed and screamed, brought another woman to their bed, and drove her to hysterics. She would have preferred a little consideration. Which is why, she says, she took an instant liking to Sinatra's friend "Sam Flood."

Giancana was given to silk suits and that alias when Sinatra introduced him to Judith Campbell in Miami. He held both her hands, told her she should be wearing rubies. For two years, the J.F.K. years, he was the staunchest platonic friend. He

cooked her steaming plates of pasta, flooded her with flowers. Sam was homely and much older, but Sam took care. And Sam, more than anyone, would cost her her son.

"I'm not sure exactly when the surveillance on me started," Exner is saying. "But it surely was because of Sam."

In her bedroom, she has been sorting through an astonishing paper trail that details those "other stresses" the adoption file alludes to. The bed and the floor are cluttered with boxes of documents, hotel and plane receipts, F.B.I. wiretaps, surveillance files.

Once she won the right to see her files, she was not given all the information. Some was deemed a security risk; some has been sealed for fifty years with other J.F.K. papers. Much of what she's seen, she insists, is full of inaccuracies—and the laughably mundane. Her son picks one F.B.I. memo up and reads aloud:

"Judith Campbell.. .was observed today in her automobile, accompanied by another female believed to be her mother, Katherine Immoor. They proceeded from vicinity of City National Bank of Beverly Hills.

A shopping trip.

"Whoa," says David. "Rough stuff."

Other memorabilia—telegrams from J.F.K.'s White House, inaugural invitations—are in a safe-deposit box. The brooch Kennedy gave her, a diamondand-ruby triple starburst, is with a local jeweler because she wants to sell it. "It just represents pain," she says.

"These scraps of paper are the priceless stuff," she says, pointing to a black briefcase with a sturdy lock that lies open on the bed. It overflows with old plane tickets, hotel bills, datebooks. "Those are the records. They saved me."

Once The Washington Post crowed her name, White House familiars denied knowing her. Compulsively, Exner reeled their phone numbers off in her book, along with addresses, hotel-room numbers, dates. It wasn't a planned fail-safe, just the habit of a lifetime. She says she's been a pack rat since she got her First Communion card.

Follow her paper trail to 1961 and the "stresses" soon outweigh the good times. Exner pages through F.B.I. memos requesting and authorizing permission to rent apartments close to hers for surveillance purposes. They report on her alimony payments, her rent costs, and, of course, her dinners with Giancana and Johnny Roselli. When agents confronted her directly, their questions were always regarding the men the files rather quaintly call "hoodlums." But a March 15, 1962, memo reveals that the Feds were not unaware of her relations with the commander in chief. An interview between an agent and a private detective in L.A. produced this observation: "He (the detective) then made the statement that Campbell is the girl who was 'shacking up with John Kennedy in the East.' "

She says she complained to J.F.K. about the increasing harassment, but he was unresponsive, more distant. Logistically, things were getting dicey. "Jack wanted me to move to Washington. He wanted me on a particular list for functions at the White House; he wanted me to go on Air Force One. I said I couldn't go to any White House functions with you and your wife. That was one of the things that split us apart. He was getting impatient with me, because I wouldn't move to Washington." By late '61, the relationship was foundering. When it finally ended, in the summer of '62, Giancana was only too glad to fill the void.

Theirs was an old-fashioned affair, less passionate than comfortable. She says everything seemed very safe near Sam. Even the F.B.I. bogeymen turned into buffoons. Giancana had the gangster's practical humor about his F.B.I. shadows. With Judith whooping in the passenger seat, he led them on merry chases, kept her current on their latest high-tech listening devices.

By then she'd long known Sam Flood's real name, knew who he was, although she says he and Johnny Roselli never did business in front of her. But what did they talk about so much in Italian?

"It never occurred to me to ask."

Press her about Mistake No. 4 and Exner points to those baffling character references. For two years, she'd been seeing Sam on behalf of the president of the United States, she says, carrying envelopes, arranging their meetings. "Why should I question who this man is, or what he does?"

She knew it was screwy—the gangsters protecting her from the G-men. But Sam treated her like a lady and the F.B.I. treated her like a tramp. The agents followed her, hissing, "Hey, Judy, come here." Sam sent a dozen yellow roses, every day.

The romantic relationship with Giancana lasted only two months. She says he pressed her to marry him, and when she refused he turned his attentions to Vegas chanteuse Phyllis McGuire. Without Giancana's flying wedge of "the boys" and his crack legal eagles, Exner tried to cope with the agents, who by then had dropped all subtlety.

"They broke into my apartment," she says, plucking out a memo that refers to the incident. Returning from a lunch, she confronted two agents in her living room. Another pair turned up in her hospital room as she was recovering from gynecological surgery and accused her of having an abortion.

Her nervous condition grew perilous, bordering on paranoid. Scared off by visits from agents, many in her old crowd had drifted away. Jack Daniel's often put her to sleep. And the fabulous "enzyme and vitamin" shots she was getting turned out to be amphetamines, courtesy of the infamous jet-set Feelgood, Dr. Max Jacobson. By mid-'63, Judith Campbell was a mess. That November, Kennedy's assassination left her nearly catatonic, less able than ever to cope. She convinced herself that the agents were goading her into suicide, that she might even be killed. "My family thought that I was going off the deep end," she says. " 'Boy, Judith has really lost it.' "

It looked that way. "That whole year [1964] I would cry at the drop of a hat if someone mentioned Jack's name. I couldn't get over it, couldn't let go."

She says she was still rocky when she began seeing an old friend, a Hollywood producer, recently divorced. He was older, with two children, the kind of man you could call for lunch or dinner with no strings attached. Until one night.

"We had gone to dinner and we went back to his place for a drink. He had put on an Edith Piaf album, and it was so heart-wrenching I broke down. His comforting me was what led to the intimacy. That's the night I got pregnant."

A doctor confirmed it in January of 1965. She spoke to the producer once after learning the news. He did not call again, and she did not pursue him. "I felt it was my responsibility," she says.

There was just a very small paragraph on my father," says Bohrer of the agency file. "I think I kind of determined that he didn't play a big role in this. So my thoughts just focused on her."

After a few more conversations with Jay Goldman, Bohrer had decided. "I was really intent on finding her. Not necessarily meeting her. Ideally, what I thought I'd like to do is just kind of look in on her life without her seeing me."

Since the agency could not legally help him further, Goldman put him in touch with Betty Hanlon, a professional adoption researcher. Bohrer gave her the scant information he had. A month passed, and he received a letter from Hanlon. "The letter said, 'I have accidentally come across the identity of your birth mother. Should you ever want to see or meet her, there is some urgency involved.'"

Some urgency? Maybe she was seriously ill. The following day Bohrer called Goldman, who had already had a conversation with Hanlon. She had made her tentative identification by coincidence. She, too, remembered that People magazine. The Exner story had referred to her son's birth, and her reasons for giving him up. All of it, including the biographical detail, was in sync with the information Hanlon had been able to gather. Goldman's advice to Bohrer was simple: call Hanlon, and you can find out right now.

When he reached her, there was another shocker. "She's somebody well known," Hanlon told him. They agreed to meet the following day. The adoptee had one night to think about it. He knew he'd been given up in West L.A. "Artist," that agency report had said. Was he the love child of a screen goddess? He and a friend got goofy, trying to think of actresses who might be about fifty-five. The following afternoon, seated at a table in Carl's Jr., Hanlon slid a small piece of paper across the Formica with the name: Judith Campbell Exner.

"Who?"

He had no idea, so Hanlon gave him a thumbnail biography. Bohrer laughs, says there's nothing like having your world rocked in a fast-food restaurant. His father was home that afternoon when he returned from the meeting. Bohrer told him the news and he was quiet for a moment. "Oh, my God," he said.

It was time for some serious research. Bohrer hit the libraries with his close friend Frank Esposito, one of the few people he'd confided in about his search. They found microfiche newsclips, TV transcripts, and, at last, that People article—with photographs. As Bohrer drove home, Esposito kept holding the cover shot up beside his face.

"We're driving along and Frank's reading to me. It talks about her suicide attempt, then when she gave birth to an illegitimate child." Bohrer hit the brakes and pulled over. "I can't describe the feeling. It was like everything stopped. Here's more proof than we've seen before."

The date was right—1965.

That year, the post-Camelot sixties had begun to unwind beyond the neat, Kimberly-knit borders that had circumscribed Exner's years as a Bright Young Thing. In 1965 U.S. ground troops would officially engage with North Vietnamese. Watts would bum. Judy Campbell was oblivious. All she knew was panic. She awaited the birth in her parents' house, where she kept to her room, and took Tuinal to sleep. She was sure they were still watching, a suspicion confirmed when two agents appeared at her parents' door. At the time, she was five months pregnant. She pulled on a robe and wobbled into the room where agents were showing her mother photographs of Giancana and Roselli. And again she grew hysterical, screaming she'd murder them if they didn't leave her mother alone.

"It was the feeling like when you're going through an earthquake," Exner says now. "You have no control, your life is not in your hands.... It was not so much being an unwed mother. But I couldn't stand the thought of giving the baby up, and I couldn't stand the thought of what he would go through."

Two days after that F.B.I. visit, she sat on her bed and emptied a bottle of Tuinals, swallowed them, and lay back to die.

"The People article had stuff about her suicide attempt, but not that she was pregnant with me." Bohrer did not find this out until he finally located her book, after three days of searching in L.A. Nothing he had read thus far prepared him for Chapter 14. "Reading through a lot of the parts, I'd just start to cry. It was real tough to get through. All this harassment, then she downed this bottle of sleeping pills. And she was just beginning to fade off and her sister Joan called. And Joan could tell something was wrong."

He kept reading the next line over and over. That telephone call saved two lives.

So she'd nearly killed them both. He got through the part about her being mshed to the hospital, his premature birth two months later, her decision to give him up. "She says that she couldn't give me the life that she thought I deserved. You know, 'I wonder about him every day... I constantly wanted to call the adoption agency asking if he's all right, is there anything I can do for him.' "

This part he had committed to memory, he read it so many times.

"Those were the same questions / wanted to answer. That was the single paragraph that had the most impact on me. And when I read that I said, 'Yeah, she's my mother. Yeah, this is her.' " With Esposito, he parsed the clues in People. She'd been interviewed in a Newport Beach hotel room. It said that her brother lived nearby. Yes, Information had an Allen Immoor in Newport Beach. David wrote out what he was going to say—proof about the hospital records, the birthmark, which he had had removed when he was in elementary school. He didn't want to blow it and have them think he was just another sleazeball claiming to be J.F.K.'s love child or something.

Immoor was convinced. The following evening, Bohrer answered the phone and heard his mother's voice.

"I just lost everything I had in me," he says. "I was tingling and shaking all over. I sat down on the bed. I don't even know what we talked about."

He did get the message out—the same one he'd written for the call to her brother. "I said, 'I just wanted to tell you I was O.K. And that I have a loving family, and my mom and dad are great. We have a dog... I go to school... I work... I wanted to tell you everything is all right. Thank you."

It was a twenty-minute call, and he figures half of it was silence. Since those awkward first moments, they have spent a good deal of time together. He says he doesn't know how much time he has. It took him weeks to ask about her illness. Now he calls her nearly every night.

He has read only the parts of her book that deal with his birth. "A couple of my friends have said, 'Aren't you dying to read the whole thing?' and I said no. The only thing I cared about—still care about— is that she is who she is. The person who cared enough to give me the chance at what I have now. I love her for the decision she made. And for who she is."

There is just one gap in the circle. David's birth father. This January, Exner called him. He was delighted to hear from her, until she told him her news. Vehemently, he denied David could be his. "It was humiliating," she says. "Just awful." She says she won't press it; anything further is up to her son.

David has driven off, back to his parents and the beginning of the spring term at Cal State, and Exner's wattage has dimmed appreciably. It has been a long day, but she has a few more things to say about Getting It Straight.

She does not deny her own regrets, nor does she offer a blanket apologia. "I always knew it was a mistake seeing Jack. The relationship absolutely was a mistake. I'd never want to go through it again." She says that seeing a married man was wrong. But seeing a Godfather on behalf of a president was something else:

"I don't feel even today that I was making a mistake in taking those envelopes to Sam. If it was anybody's mistake, it was Jack's."

She, too, has done her reassessment of his presidency. In the end, she says, it was his character that she came to doubt. Something bred in the bone.

"The father [Joseph Kennedy Sr.] really set the pace for the boys. I used to say that the Kennedy men were morally bankrupt. And I still feel that way. It's a rather harsh judgment, but it's what I came to realize about Jack. No one wants to accept it, but there was a very cold inner core to him. He did what was right for Jack. And everybody let him do what was right for Jack. Whatever Jack wanted."

She stops to shoo a Persian off the tape recorder.

"I don't believe Jack should have been president."

Why?

"His conduct."

Meaning his alleged dalliance with Giancana? His womanizing Mistakes?

"It's flaunting who you are and the power. And I think Jack did abuse the power.

The C.I.A. did also, by having anything to do with the underworld. I mean, you either set the standards and live by them yourself, or you have no business being there."

It's dark outside the sliding patio doors, she is tired, and it is time for her to lie down. There is another week of hospital tests coming up, and before she can rest she must clear her bed of the wiretap reports, the briefcase, the court papers, the yellowed scandal sheets. She'd like to just toss them out, but she feels she can't. She'll pack them up again and stack them on a dainty chaise, beneath her own mid-sixties pencil sketch of a weeping Madonna.

"I drew a lot of those then."

As usual, she'll sleep within reach of the baby picture and the gun. But there is a new addition to her nightstand. She says she should have put it away after the holidays, but she can't just yet. It's a clear round tree ornament, engraved with OUR FIRST CHRISTMAS.

"He gave it to me," she says. "David—my son."