The Go-Between: A Novel of the Kennedy Years »

FREDERICK TURNER is the author of many works of nonfiction and two novels, and is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.

At the twilight of his career, a faded newspaperman makes the find of a lifetime in a Chicago basement: diaries belonging to the infamous Judith Campbell Exner, one-time paramour to some of the most powerful men in America.

When Frank Sinatra flew Judy to Hawaii for a weekend, she could hardly have imagined where it would lead her: straight to the White House and the waiting arms of Jack Kennedy. And then came the day that JFK and his brother Bobby sent her to Chicago, where she was to hand a black bag to the boss of bosses, Sam Giancana. As the reporter fashions Judy’s diary entries into a coherent story, he finds mob connections, rigged primaries, and assassination plots—and begins to see beyond the tabloid fare to a real woman, adrift and defenseless in a dangerous world where the fates of nations are at stake.

Who was Exner, after all? Just a gangster’s moll? Or a bighearted woman who believed the sky-high promises of the New Frontier—and paid the price?

Publishers Weekly

The sordid and fabled history of the American Camelot comes to life in this highly stylized, faux-journalistic reconstruction of the life and wild times of Judith Campbell Exner, reputed mistress to Frank Sinatra, JFK, and mob boss Sam Giancana. Our unnamed guide is an old-school Chicago journalist who talks in a hard-bitten voice about crooked prosecutors and pot-smoking car-dealers. But these marginal characters offer him his first glimpses into Exner’s strange life and all the secret deals, trysts, and high-stakes maneuvers involved. Soon, he becomes obsessed and convinced that Exner was no high-class hooker, but an innocent believer attracted to romance and the high life, though ultimately in over her head as she goes from a party girl who catches Sinatra’s eye to a paramour of the president and later a somewhat-unwitting go-between between the Kennedys and the mob. Turner paints her as a dark-haired counterpart to Marilyn Monroe, a quintessentially American tragic figure who enjoyed a charmed ascent and fell out of grace thanks to her flaws. Beneath the book’s gossipy veneer, Turner (Redemption) cunningly probes notions of power, glamour, and notoriety. (May)