[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.' "