KENNEDY WAS COCAINE USER, NEW BOOK CLAIMS

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - John F. Kennedy snorted cocaine with actor
Peter Lawford while the two stayed at Frank Sinatra's Palm Springs
house in the late 1950s, according to an excerpt from a tell-all book
written by Sinatra's former valet.

Writing about the close friendship between Sinatra and the future U.S.
president, George Jacobs said that although the Rat Pack singer knew
of Kennedy's weakness for women -- and went so far as to arrange
liaisons for him -- he would not have approved of his drug use.

In an excerpt from his forthcoming book "Mr.S," released in the June
edition of Playboy Magazine, Jacobs said he was present on several
occasions in Palm Springs "when Peter Lawford and the future president
did lines of cocaine together in Lawford's guest rooms."

"The first time it happened Jack must have seen the shocked look on my
face. 'For my back, George' Kennedy said to me with his bad-boy wink,"
Jacobs wrote, adding that Lawford pleaded with him not to tell Sinatra.

Lawford was married at the time to Kennedy's sister Pat and both men
were frequent guests at Sinatra's Palm Springs compound.

Jacobs, who was Sinatra's valet from 1953 to 1968, said Kennedy had an
"endless obsession with sex and gossip. He wanted to know all the
Hollywood dirt." But Jacobs said he never told Sinatra about Kennedy's
cocaine habit.

"I wasn't about to break the bad news about Jack, who Mr. S. had put
on a pedestal. Sex and alcohol may have made Jack a better man in
Sinatra's sight. Cocaine was a different story," he wrote.

A new biography of Kennedy by historian Robert Dallek published this
month disclosed that in the last eight years of his life Kennedy was
taking as many as eight medications a day for a variety of medical
problems including back pain and Addison's disease, a life-threatening
lack of adrenal function.

Jacobs' book about his life as Sinatra's right-hand man is to be
published in June by HarperCollins.