“There are no secrets,” writer Nora Ephron once opined. Perhaps she should have added a corollary: “Kennedy secrets always sell books.”
Fresh case in point is “Ladies’ Man: The Careless Heart of John F. Kennedy,” a compendium of the love affairs of the 35th President, beginning when he was 17 and attending Choate, a Connecticut prep school.
Author Laurence Leamer, who previously penned “Capote’s Women,” and “Hitchcock’s Blondes” inevitably goes over old ground in this new book, but the vast number of women and incidents he includes makes “Ladies’ Man,” if not edifying, certainly astonishing for sheer scope. It’s a wonder that Kennedy accomplished as much as he did, so frequently was he jumping in and out of bed.
His secret? Keep the encounters brief, and the affairs — if you want to call them that — short-lived.
Those around Kennedy were aware of his brazen promiscuity, but the general public remained oblivious during his lifetime. He never suffered any consequences for behavior that was not merely unbecoming, but downright scuzzy.
Did Kennedy love any of his paramours? Leamer makes the case that two Scandinavians captured his heart — at least for a time. The first, Inga Arvad, was a sophisticated older woman whom Kennedy met in November 1941 through his sister Kathleen, her colleague at the Washington Times-Herald. Then 24 and a naval ensign, Kennedy fell hard for the 28-year-old Danish journalist, and their letters reveal a passionate and confiding intimacy. “She came to understand him in ways no one else in his life ever had, to see him in all his flawed and fractured glory,” Leamer writes of Arvad. “As for Jack, he opened himself up to Arvad, exposing every emotion and concern.”
Arvad was married, although estranged, from her second husband, movie director Paul Fejos. More problematic were her links to Adolf Hitler, whom she had met and interviewed while working in Berlin. The German leader praised her as the perfect example of Nordic beauty, and Arvad attended parties hosted by high-ranking Nazis. She was even photographed sitting next to Hitler in his box during the 1936 Olympics.
After Pearl Harbor, the FBI began investigating Arvad as a possible spy. That same month Kennedy was transferred to South Carolina, where, unbeknownst to the couple, their hotel meet-ups and telephone calls were recorded by the bureau. Kennedy’s father disapproved of his relationship with a married woman of dodgy reputation, and Arvad was involved with at least one other man, so the couple broke up in March 1942.
Gunilla von Post, a Swedish aristocrat, met then-Senator Kennedy when she and a friend were hitchhiking on the Cote d’Azur in July 1953. An old English friend of Kennedy’s offered them a ride and then, driving a few miles further into Cap d’Antibes, was surprised to spot the senator standing by the side of the road. Kennedy, due to wed Jacqueline Bouvier two months later, was indulging in a last solo jaunt as a bachelor.
The foursome went out for dinner and dancing that evening. Von Post, 21, was enchanted by Kennedy, and how, as the band played “I Love Paris,” he crooned the words into her ear. Later, as they stood on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, Kennedy declared: “I fell in love with you tonight.”
Then he confessed he was heading back to America to be married. Von Post allowed Kennedy to walk her home, but when he asked to come in for a nightcap, she sent him away.
For most men, that would be the end of it. Yet Kennedy continued to pursue von Post, writing from his Senate office, asking to see her again. He contrived to travel to Sweden two years later, with friend Torbert Macdonald as beard, to spend a week with his young lover, while wife Jackie, who had nursed him tenderly through back surgery, stayed home. Von Post, later a neighbor of Leamer’s in Palm Beach, told the author that their time together was “one of the few weeks in [Kennedy’s] life that he was free as a bird.”
(Poor Jack…not!)
Von Post’s mother blocked Kennedy’s plan to install her in Manhattan’s Carlyle Hotel where he could drop by regularly. They met once again, by chance, at a banquet at the Waldorf Astoria in 1958. Von Post waited for Jacqueline Onassis to pass away in 1994, before writing and publishing a fond memoir titled “Love, Jack.”
Other young women were treated with far more callousness.
Kennedy picked up Diana de Vegh, then a junior at Radcliffe College, at a campaign fundraising dinner in Boston in 1958. The candidate, prowling the ballroom, spotted her and asked her date to give up his seat “so a tired old man can sit next to a pretty girl.”
De Vegh was flattered by Kennedy’s interest, not anticipating that a couple of weeks later, after she’d accompanied him to other campaign events, he’d take her to his Boston apartment for “quick and efficient” sex.
For several years Kennedy continued to hook up with de Vegh, and arranged a job for her in the White House after he was elected President. He’d hint to her that he’d like to be introduced to some of her friends. She refused that request, but otherwise always came when he called.
“Back then, I thought my job was to become pleasing, an enabling acolyte to a master of the universe,” de Vegh explained to Leamer.
Kennedy dispatched with Mimi Beardsley’s virginity in his wife’s bedroom while ostensibly giving the 19-year-old intern a private tour of the White House in 1962. Beardsley subsequently swam with him the White House pool, stayed overnight when the First Lady was away, and accompanied him on overseas trips. White House staffers recognized the role this intern with scant secretarial skills was playing in the President’s life, and journalists saw Beardsley slipping out of Air Force One. Even so, the secret of her involvement with the Kennedy held for 40 years.
Only the Katers — Leonard and Florence — made a serious effort to expose Kennedy’s proclivities at the time. The couple, devout Catholics, rented a room in their Georgetown townhouse to Pamela Turnure, who worked as a receptionist in Kennedy’s office. When they realized in 1958 that the senator was making illicit nighttime visits to Turnure, 21, they confronted him, and even snapped a photo of him exiting the house, furious that he was passing himself off to voters as a good Christian. They contacted the FBI, sent letters and the photo to various newspapers to report the affair, and Florence picketed the White House.
Kennedy’s aides, who adored him, worked hard to discredit and sideline the Katers, author Leamer told the Post. “Also, it was a different, more deferential era.” If however, Kennedy had lived to run for re-election in 1964, Leamer believes, his sexual exploits may well have come to light as well as his very poor health.
These two secrets — that Kennedy would try to bed any attractive woman in his orbit, and that he suffered from severe and chronic health problems — were linked. “He never wanted to think of himself as sickly,” Leamer explained. “Sex was a way of expressing his vitality.”
Plus, Kennedy relished the danger that illicit assignations involved. “He was always reckless from the time he was young,” Leamer said. “He got off on taking incredible risks.”