These Few Precious Days (23 page)

NONE OF THIS WAS ABOUT
to stop Jack from seeing other women while his wife was half a world away. Less than twenty-four hours after Jackie departed for India, Jack headed off to Florida for a few days of “girling” with fellow Lothario George Smathers.

Jackie was under no illusions about what was going on on the home front, although the identities of some of her husband’s lovers would have shocked her had she known. One was a gorgeous, dark-haired, multilingual, twenty-seven-year-old mother of two named Helen Husted Chavchavadze. Helen was the ex-wife of Romanov descendant David Chavchavadze and, incredibly, the first cousin of the man Jackie once intended to marry, John Husted.

Jack began his affair with Helen Chavchavadze when Jackie, then five months pregnant with John, was resting at Hammersmith Farm. To compound the irony, Helen and Jack hit it off at yet another intimate dinner party thrown by Charles and Martha Bartlett, the same couple who played matchmaker to Jack and Jackie. On the way home after dinner, Chavchavadze glanced in her rearview mirror and saw Jack’s white convertible. He followed Helen to her Georgetown house, and they tumbled into bed.

Their affair continued sporadically during the campaign, but after Jack was elected, Helen assumed that JFK would no longer engage in such risky behavior. She was wrong. Days after taking office, Jack and Smathers sauntered into Chavchavadze’s Georgetown house. She felt that by “paying a call” in “broad daylight,” Jack was sending an unmistakable message: “ ‘I am a free man. The Secret Service are not going to stop me . . . I will be free to see the women I want to see in the White House.’ ”

Chavchavadze never knew if Jackie found out about her clandestine affair. If Jackie did, she never let on. Over the next two years, Jackie invited Helen to several parties at the White House. JFK, in turn, invited Helen over when Jackie was out of town. Chavchavadze came to view JFK’s “incorrigible promiscuity” as a “guilt-free compulsion”—behavior he viewed as completely natural and certainly not immoral or “wrong.”

By this time, JFK had already raised the bushy eyebrows of British prime minister Harold Macmillan with offhand comments about his sex drive. “I wonder how it is with you, Harold?” Jack asked when the two leaders conferred in Bermuda. “If I don’t have a woman for three days I get a terrible headache.” (At least Macmillan was spared Jack’s surprisingly candid admission to Smathers that he was “never finished with a girl” until he had “had her three ways.”)

Diana de Vegh was only twenty-two and had just graduated from Radcliffe when JFK found a place for her on the staff of National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy. Like most of the other young women Jack surrounded himself with, De Vegh was smart, beautiful, well-bred, spirited—and drawn to power. She was looking, De Vegh later confessed, for a man “who would think I was charming and make me feel safe—like Daddy’s best girl.” Their trysts, which occurred only when the first lady was out of town, took place almost exclusively in the Lincoln Bedroom.

None of the women with whom Jack was involved seemed to be aware of the others. That was certainly true of aspiring painter Mary Pinchot Meyer, an heir to the Pinchot dry goods fortune who had known Jack since his days at Choate. Brought up in Manhattan and on a 3,600-acre estate in Pennsylvania, Mary was also the sister of Ben Bradlee’s wife, Tony, a former roommate of Pam Turnure, and a distant relative of Diana de Vegh. In fact, in the late 1950s and early ’60s, the rich, blond, Vassar-educated Pinchot sisters had achieved a certain fame as two of Washington’s most intriguing women.

Jack happened to share that view, making frequent passes at Tony even while her husband, his good friend Ben Bradlee, was standing only a few feet away. Tony rebuffed JFK’s advances. Her more adventurous sister did not.

Mary had been married to dashing journalist-turned-CIA agent Cord Meyer, but they split after the second of their three sons was struck by a car and killed. From that point on, she indulged in several brief affairs, careful to avoid any long-term emotional entanglements.

On January 22, 1962, Meyer began an intimate relationship with JFK—a fact she shared with only one person, her friend and confidante Anne Truitt. According to Truitt, the affair would last more than a year.

Like Helen Chavchavadze, Meyer was a frequent dinner guest at the White House. The guest lists for these soirees were prepared by the first lady but run by JFK for his approval (ironically, Jack and Jackie went over the lists with another of his lovers, Turnure). Although Jackie was aware of her husband’s peccadilloes and knew the identities of several of his lovers, she may well have been totally in the dark about Jack’s affair with Mary Meyer.

She was not alone. “Mary was a free spirit—a sensualist and maybe a little wilder than the rest,” Cassini said. “I think she was one of those wealthy young women who were not quite sure of themselves and therefore look for approval in the eyes of powerful men. But she never let on that she was sleeping with Jack.” NBC anchor Nancy Dickerson was dating Meyer’s ex-husband, Cord, at the time, “so I was paying attention to those things. I knew Jack was fond of Mary Meyer,” Dickerson said, “but nobody remotely suspected they were having an affair. None of us knew.”

Not Smathers or Spalding or—even more astonishingly—Ben and Tony Bradlee. Much later, in October 1964, Mary was taking her customary walk along the towpath of the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal along the Potomac River when someone grabbed her from behind and shot her twice under the cheekbone, execution-style. She was forty-three. A young black man named Raymond Crump Jr. was subsequently arrested, tried, and acquitted of the murder. It was only after Mary’s death that the Bradlees stumbled upon her diary—and a detailed account of her affair with JFK.

“To say we were stunned doesn’t begin to describe our reactions,” Bradlee wrote in his memoirs. “Like everyone else we had heard reports of presidential infidelity, but we were always able to say we knew of no evidence, none.” Given the frequent passes JFK made toward Tony Bradlee—including one party aboard the presidential yacht,
Sequoia,
when he literally chased her around the cabin—the Bradlees’ sweeping denial about Jack’s womanizing rang hollow. Nevertheless, Mary Meyer was undoubtedly successful at keeping her relationship with the president a secret from even those closest to her.

The Bradlees turned the potentially explosive diary over to the CIA with the understanding that it would be destroyed. When the diary mysteriously reappeared a dozen years later, the original was returned to Tony. She promptly burned it.

In March 1962, however, Jack’s clandestine affair with Mary Meyer was still fresh. According to CIA counterintelligence chief James Angleton, who read the explosive contents of Mary’s diary, she and the president shared three joints of marijuana in the Yellow Oval Room of the White House. The diary also allegedly described a “mild acid trip together, during which they made love.”

At the same time, Jack was forced to call it quits with another lover. Over lunch at the White House, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover confronted Jack with evidence that for two years he had been seeing Judith Campbell. Campbell’s relationships with mobsters Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli—two men who had been enlisted by the CIA in botched attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro—were of “grave concern” to Hoover. (Years later, both Giancana and Roselli would be rubbed out in classic mob hits.)

After breaking up with Judy Campbell over the phone, Jack flew to California to find solace in the arms of the paramour Jackie worried most about: Marilyn Monroe. On Bobby’s advice, Jack was no longer staying at the Palm Springs home of Frank Sinatra, the mob-connected singer who had slept with both Campbell and Marilyn before introducing them to JFK. Risking Sinatra’s enmity, Peter Lawford was now arranging for the president and Marilyn to meet secretly at the Palm Springs estate of Bing Crosby.

One of Crosby’s other guests, California Democrat Philip Watson, inadvertently wandered into a bungalow on the property and came across JFK “wearing a turtleneck sweater” and a soused Marilyn “dressed in kind of a robe thing. It was obvious they were intimate,” Watson said, “that they were staying together for the night.”

Marilyn’s condition that night was typical. She had always grappled with severe psychiatric and emotional problems, made worse in recent years by alcohol and prescription drug abuse. At thirty-six, she realized her sex-symbol days were numbered and began to see a new role for herself: as the second wife of the president. Confiding the most intimate details of the affair to her friend Jeanne Carmen, Marilyn was convinced JFK was about to leave Jackie for her. “Can’t you just see me,” she asked Carmen, “as first lady?”

It was a dream she also shared with a former boyfriend, Robert Slatzer. “Marilyn told me that the President planned to divorce Jackie and marry her,” Slatzer said. “She believed it because she needed to believe it.”

Tellingly, during this period Marilyn would get up at parties and sing “I Believe in You,” the hit song from the 1961 Broadway smash
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,
to herself in a mirror—just as protagonist J. Pierpont Finch does in the musical. “It became her personal anthem,” journalist and friend James Bacon said. “Marilyn was so riddled with self-doubt—with self-loathing, really. . . . The idea that the President of the United States was in love with her, would leave his wife for her—to Marilyn, that would have been the ultimate revenge.”

After Marilyn introduced “I Believe in You” to Jack, he also became obsessed with the tune. He played Robert Morse’s version from the original cast album of
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
at the White House so frequently that another lover who soon came on the scene, Mimi Beardsley, felt compelled to learn the lyrics so she could sing along. The song, Beardsley later said, “seemed to light up some pleasure center deep inside his brain.”

There was never any possibility of Jack divorcing Jackie, or of Marilyn becoming first lady. Yet Jack led Monroe on. According to Peter Lawford, Marilyn, wearing a black wig and dark glasses, masqueraded as his secretary aboard Air Force One. She wore the same disguise at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where she stayed more than once when Jackie was out of town.

Despite understandable skepticism that Monroe could have gone unnoticed as a guest of JFK at the White House, Smathers, Lawford, and Spalding were just a few of the eyewitnesses to her presence there. “I know because I saw Marilyn at the White House,” Smathers insisted. “She was there.” How often? “A lot.”

That didn’t mean, Chuck Spalding observed, that Jack was more serious about Marilyn than he was about any of the other women he managed to juggle simultaneously. “Marilyn fell into the girlfriend category,” Spalding said. “Jack never considered her on a par with Jackie.”

Apparently no one told Marilyn. Peter Lawford claimed that Monroe called the White House and told Jackie of the affair, and of Jack’s alleged promises to her. “Marilyn, you’ll marry Jack, that’s great,” Jackie reportedly responded in that breathy voice that sounded not unlike Monroe’s. “And you’ll move into the White House and you’ll assume the responsibilities of first lady, and I’ll move out and you’ll have all the problems.”

Jackie’s half brother Jamie Auchincloss had “no trouble” believing the confrontation between Marilyn and Jackie took place. “It sounds,” he concluded, “like the kind of gutsy thing my sister would say.” Either way, Jackie chose not to dwell on her husband’s problematic love life. Exhausted from her travels in India and Pakistan, Jackie scooped up the children and took them to Palm Beach, where she spent most of April recuperating.

As was so often the case when Jackie simply decided to disappear, the president stood in for her at ceremonial events—in this case, hosting a White House luncheon for the Duchess of Devonshire. But one White House event Jackie wasn’t about to miss that month was a state dinner for the Shah of Iran and his much younger wife, the breathtaking Shabanou Farah Diba. “Their sex life,” Vidal said, “had been the object of intense speculation in Washington. Sex and power fascinated Jack and Jackie the way it does everybody else. They thrived on gossip.”

There was the matter of what to wear. Jackie was not accustomed to being outdone by any woman in terms of fashion, but the Farah Diba presented a real challenge. JFK couldn’t resist needling his wife about the beautiful young Iranian empress with an unlimited budget. “You’d better watch out, Jackie,” he warned her. “You’d better put on all your jewels.”

At first, Jackie scrambled to borrow tiaras, necklaces—anything she could from wealthy friends. Finally, Tish Baldrige recalled, “Mrs. Kennedy did a very crafty thing. She took off all her jewels except for one in her hair”—a diamond sunburst pin.

At the dinner, the empress arrived wearing a shimmering gown of embroidered gold silk and “every jewel in the whole Iranian kingdom on her back, front, and head,” Baldrige said. These included Iran’s famous peacock crown, and a necklace that glistened with twenty-carat diamonds and gumball-sized emeralds. Cassini, who had designed Jackie’s pink-and-white dupioni silk gown for the occasion, admitted that it was “difficult to take your eyes off the Shabanou. She literally glowed in the dark.”