The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People (72 page)

—L.A.B.

The Philandering President

JOHN F. KENNEDY (May 29, 1917–Nov. 22, 1963)

HIS FAME:
One of America’s most

charismatic leaders, John F. Kennedy was

also the nation’s youngest elected chief

executive and the first Roman Catholic

to become president. After Kennedy was

gunned down by an assassin in Dallas,

Tex., near the end of his first term, his

time in office came to be characterized as

the “1,000 days of Camelot.”

HIS PERSON:
Born into the wealthy

and tightly knit Irish Kennedy clan, the

man who would become president 42

years later was instilled from birth with a

fiercely competitive spirit that was fueled

President John F. Kennedy and family in Hyannis Port
by a demanding father who wouldn’t

accept second best from any of his four sons. Jack Kennedy was a quick study with a voracious memory and graduated cum laude from Harvard. He was plagued with a weak back all of his life and also suffered from Addison’s disease. But despite the fact that “at least one half of the days that he spent … were days of intense physical pain,” Kennedy refused to act the part of an invalid and carried on an active life, enjoying sailing, swimming, and other sports. A casual dresser who favored loafers without socks and old tennis sweaters, Kennedy nevertheless carried his 6-ft. 1-in., 175-lb. frame with a certain elegance, and when he became president he took great care to look good. The cool gray-eyed Democrat enjoyed laughing at himself and was fond of telling about the time his father sent him a telegram during an election. It read: “Dear Jack, Don’t buy a single vote more than necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” After serving as U.S.

senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential race. Part of his appeal was his talent for expressing grand-sounding ideals, epitomized by his famous remark, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.” On the one hand Kennedy was a serious-minded politician, who readily admitted his mistakes and took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. However, he was also capable of projecting a lighthearted devil-may-care attitude, prompting one of his aides to remark, “This administration is going to do for sex what the last one did for golf.”

SEX LIFE:
Kennedy prided himself on being a sexual athlete and was well known for his popularity with women. He viewed sex as a natural need and once offhandedly remarked to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan that if he went too long without a woman he suffered severe headaches. One of his closest friends in the Senate, George Smathers, described his colleague as having “the most active libido of any man I’ve ever known.”

Kennedy’s initiation into the sexual world took place in a house of prostitution in Harlem with a school buddy at the age of 17. Although his reputation as a playboy still was developing during his college days, he managed to get in trouble at least once for having girls in his room, which was not permitted. From there he progressed to a more dangerous female entanglement, which nearly jeopardized his naval career. While stationed in Washington, Kennedy became involved with Danish journalist Inga Arvad, whom he affectionately called Inga-Binga and who was suspected in certain intelligence circles of being a Nazi spy.

After cold water was thrown on the affair by government officials, Kennedy rapidly moved on to other conquests.

During his congressional years, Kennedy was dubbed “the gay young bachelor” and was rarely at a loss for female companionship, although the word among some Georgetown women was that the senator was a disappointment in bed and had a talent for making love with one eye on the clock. Indeed, former Senator Smathers commented that “just in terms of the time he spent with a woman, he was a lousy lover. He went in more for quantity than quality.”

Others indicated that Kennedy enjoyed the pursuit and conquest almost more than the act. Kennedy himself once told reporters, “I’m never through with a girl until I’ve had her three ways.”

According to Smathers, “No one was off limits to Jack—not your wife, your mother, your sister.” During their Senate days, Kennedy and Smathers shared a
pied-à-terre
where they could carry on discreet affairs. Once, when Smathers was called away to the Senate, leaving Kennedy with both of their dates, he returned to find the ambitious senator chasing both girls around the apartment. Having two girls at once was one of Kennedy’s “favorite pastimes,” Smathers said.

When Kennedy finally decided in his mid-30s that he needed a wife, he went far afield from the voluptuous starlets and model types he usually was attracted to and chose Jacqueline Bouvier. A nervous Thoroughbred with an

impeccable family background, the elegantly attractive Jackie was an ideal wife for a presidential candidate. However, marriage did not mean monogamy to Jack Kennedy, and the opportunity for sexual liaisons was wide open on the campaign trail. Kennedy maintained a cool nonchalance about the potential stir his meanderings might cause. Some years before, when aides became frantic over a picture showing Kennedy lying next to a nude and very buxom brunette on a Florida beach, the senatorial candidate merely smiled and remarked, “Yes, I remember her. She was great!” Another time, when a landlady took pictures of Senator Kennedy leaving the apartment of his 21-year-old secretary, with whom he was having an affair, he simply brushed the incident aside.

Kennedy also refused to let anything cramp his style. Fond of swimming in the nude in the White House pool, Kennedy was even fonder of being accompanied by well-endowed beauties similarly unattired. A number of women were reportedly smuggled in and out of the White House when Jackie was absent, and two secretaries, referred to by Secret Service agents as “Fiddle and Faddle,”

were reputedly kept on the staff for Kennedy’s personal convenience.

That Jackie knew of her husband’s infidelities seems fairly certain, and it was reported that Kennedy’s father offered her a million dollars not to divorce his runaround son on the brink of the presidential campaign. Friends said Jackie would often turn a blind eye on Kennedy’s affairs, although once, upon discovering a pair of panties stuffed in a pillowcase, she icily asked him, “Would you please shop around and see who these belong to? They’re not my size.” However, despite all of Kennedy’s wanderings, the two shared a certain intimacy, and the White House staff had strict orders not to disturb them when they retired to their quarters in the early afternoon while their children were napping.

SEXUAL PARTNERS:
While he was still alive, John F. Kennedy’s sex life was considered a taboo subject by the world press, but 12 years after his death, with the U.S. in a post-Watergate mood, women began appearing from every direction to tell their stories of indulging in pleasures of the flesh with the martyred President. Kennedy’s taste in women ran the gamut from starlets to society women to obscure secretaries and airline stewardesses. Stripper Blaze Starr claims to have spent 20 minutes making love to Kennedy in a closet in a New Orleans hotel suite in 1960, while her fiancé, Gov. Earl Long, held a party in the next room. In the closet, Kennedy found time to tell Blaze the story of President Harding’s making love to Nan Britton in a White House closet.

Divorced painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, wife of CIA operative Cord Meyer, said that she had a sexual affair with Kennedy in 1962. They smoked marijuana together in the White House and he wrote her love letters. She kept a diary of the affair, but it disappeared after she was murdered in October, 1964.

Kennedy’s most notorious affair involved a dark-haired beauty who was later investigated for having close connections with the Mafia. Judith Campbell Exner met Kennedy before he became president, but continued her affair with him during his early days in the White House. Kennedy was generous and once insisted on buying her a fur coat, Exner said, but his generosity did not carry over
to the bedroom. His favorite way of making love was on his back, which was partially due to his back problem but which made it seem to her as if the woman was there “just to satisfy the man.” Kennedy tried to talk her into a
ménage à trois
one night while a tall, thin woman waited for them in the bedroom. But Judith refused, even though he told her, “I know you, I know you’ll enjoy it.”

Part of Kennedy’s attraction was his humor, according to one former mistress, who says she enjoyed Kennedy, “not because he was so great in bed, although he wasn’t bad, but because he had such a great sense of fun.” This stood Kennedy in good stead when he encountered an infrequent rejection. After he had attempted unsuccessfully to seduce Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Dr.

Margaret Louise Coit, she asked him, “Do you do this to all the women you meet?” “My God, no,” he replied, “I don’t have the strength.”

The young President’s name was linked with those of many movie stars and Hollywood actresses, including Gene Tierney and Jayne Mansfield. But his most famous liaison was with sex goddess Marilyn Monroe. Monroe, who sang a sexy happy birthday in her breathy whisper at Kennedy’s 45th birthday party in Madison Square Garden, was reportedly sneaked aboard Kennedy’s plane after their affair began in 1961.

Despite his profligate affairs, Kennedy maintained a certain detachment and rarely became emotionally involved with his women. As he himself readily admitted, he never lost himself in passionate affairs, explaining, “I’m not the tragic-lover type.”

—L.K.S.

The Elusive Extrovert

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT (Jan. 30, 1882–Apr. 12, 1945)
HIS FAME:
A believer in progressive

reform, he was president of the U.S. for

Depression and WWII.

HIS PERSON:
Charismatic and handsome, though partially paralyzed by

polio in 1921, Franklin Roosevelt was a

strangely elusive apparent extrovert.

Behind the jauntiness exemplified by his

up-tilted cigarette holder and sweeping

cape was a man who did not often

indulge in confidences. His son James,

referring to his father’s “rigid, Hyde Park

upbringing” (Hyde Park was the site of the family estate), once said, “Of what was inside him, of what really drove him, father talked to no one.”

An only child, Franklin was the product of an aristocratic and traditional family. He was adored by his mother, Sara, who later interfered constantly in his marriage. At Harvard he was active in the Missionary Society but was not invited to join the exclusive Porcellian Club, which was a great disappointment to him.

Some of those in his social circle considered him a lightweight and called him

“the feather duster.”

In 1905 he married a distant cousin, Eleanor Roosevelt, by whom he had five children who lived to maturity. He went on to law school and a political career, which was interrupted by his bout with polio at age 39. He fought his way back from the life of an invalid by exercising, particularly in the mineral waters at Warm Springs, Ga. (He established the Warm Springs Foundation for paralytics in 1927.) Never again able to stand without braces or support and afraid of dying in a fire, he practiced crawling as an escape measure.

He campaigned for governor of New York in 1928 from a specially equipped car. His promise: to help “the forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid.” He won the election and four years later was elected president of the U.S. His New Deal included an alphabet soup of reform agencies—Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Works Progress Administration (WPA) among them. He also introduced Social Security. In his inaugural address he quoted the maxim “the only thing to fear is fear itself,” often requoting it as he led the country through the Second World War.

Roosevelt liked martinis (which he prided himself on mixing well), collecting (stamps, books, naval prints), and sailing. Only once was he known to cry—

when, after the death of his mother, he came upon the mementos of his life that she had saved.

LOVE LIFE:
Roosevelt had a patrician handsomeness—firm jaw, finely chiseled nose (with pince-nez accentuating it), level brow—and a flirtatious magnetism which appealed to many women. The women who attracted him tended to be tall and straitlaced, even prudish. Eleanor Roosevelt had been brought up as a Victorian young lady and was, perhaps, even more the product of old-fashioned virtues than her contemporaries. Lucy Mercer, with whom Roosevelt had an affair, and Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, with whom he
may
have had an affair, were products of Catholic childhoods and noted for their reticence.

He proposed to Eleanor on a walk, admired her mind, wrote her poetry, was in love with her. On their honeymoon he had a vivid dream about a beam that revolved dangerously over Eleanor’s head. When she woke him, he exclaimed,