About the Book
This book is about the shared adventures of author Jeanne Rejaunier and four of her women friends who took weekend saunas with a handful of individuals who are frequently cited in Kennedy assassination research, as well as the author's experiences with two persons with whom she was connected in her acting career, whose activities had significant impact in the lives of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Hollywood Producer/ writer Sy Bartlett's Saturday and Sunday sauna, sun and swim parties were legendary, attended by scintillating guests from the who's who of Hollywood, big oil, sports, upper echelon military, local law enforcement, organized crime, and Washington politics. For five years in the 60's, Rejaunier and her friends were guests at Bartlett's ongoing get togethers held at his home in the Hollywood hills. Initially, the five bikini clad young women had no idea that some of their fellow guests were as notorious as they subsequently proved to be. But it didn't take long to start hearing gossip about the infamous group they were socializing with. Regulars at the gatherings included persons whose names will be familiar to followers of Kennedy assassination literature: Washington insider, President Lyndon Johnson's protégé Bobby Baker and his devoted but doomed lady love, toothsome Tennessean Carole Tyler, who would die under questionable circumstances; cocaine addicted, mafia connected Dallas Cowboys owner Clint Murchison; communications pioneer Gordon McLendon, with ties to the CIA; air conditioning magnate/ sex toy manufacturer Roy B. Lofton; and military cold warrior General Curtis Le May of the Joint Chiefs, who made no attempt to disguise his intense hatred of JFK, all of whom have been cited in countless books, articles and online forums as "close to the source" possible co-conspirators in the assassination, persons of interest, and/or as having had foreknowledge of the events of November 22, 1963. Also aboard as regular attendees at these weekend gatherings were former Chicago organized crime figure turned Las Vegas casino bigwig Charlie "Babe" Baron, who frequently appears in assassination reports; Baron's tall, curvaceous, dark haired girlfriend Barbara Barrett, an exotic dancer at Hollywood's burlesque palace the Pink Pussycat; Hollywood leading man Glenn Ford, whom Rejaunier was dating; Acting Los Angeles Chief of Police Thaddeus Brown and Chief of Detectives Rudy Diaz; popular broadcasting figure Arthur Godfrey and JFK-LBJ Press Secretary Pierre Salinger; as well as an assortment of recognizable Hollywood entertainment figures. The two individuals who didn't frequent the Hollywood Sauna but had ties with others who did, are persons with whom Rejaunier appeared on television in her acting career: fabled attorney/ lobbyist Tommy "the Cork" Corcoran, intimate of LBJ and Bobby Baker who played an incredible role in our nation's history; and the ill fated back channel to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, TV journalist Lisa Howard, who died mysteriously after her groundbreaking interviews with Castro, whose relationships with Castro and Kennedy surely contributed to her untimely end, and whose key role, when reanalyzed in light of facts that emerged years later, can shed new understanding not only on her own death but, Rejaunier believes, on Kennedy's as well. Rejaunier is an assassination aficionado who spent many hours with persons about whom other authors have written a great deal, but never met. Rejaunier did meet these individuals and mingled with them socially over a considerable period of time.
About the Author: Jeanne Rejaunier graduated from Vassar College, and did postgraduate studies in Paris, Florence, Rome, and at UCLA. While a student at Vassar, she began a career as a professional model, and subsequently became an actress in Manhattan, Hollywood and Europe, appearing on and off Broadway, in films and television, on magazine covers internationally and as the principal in dozens of network television commercials. Rejaunier achieved international success with the publication of her first novel, The Beauty Trap, which sold over one million copies and became Simon and Schuster's fourth best seller of the year, the film rights to which were purchased outright by Avco-Embassy. Rejaunier has publicized her books in national and international tours on three continents in five languages. Her writing has been extolled in feature stories in Life, Playboy, Mademoiselle, Seventeen, BusinessWeek, Fashion Weekly, Women's Wear, W, McCalls, American Homemaker, Parade, Let's Live, Marie-Claire, Epoca, Tempo, Sogno, Cine-Tipo, Stern, Hola, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, and countless other publications. In addition to The Beauty Trap, Rejaunier has written some two dozen other books, both fiction and nonfiction. Branching out as a filmmaker, Rejaunier produced, directed, filmed, and edited the four hour documentary, The Spirit of '56: Meetings with Remarkable Women.