Kennedy and Reagan

by Scott Farris

  But as beautiful as Kennedy and Reagan were to look at, it is remarkable how little prurient feelings they aroused. They were, to borrow a phrase from historian Garry Wills, “innocently sexy.” Like television anchormen, their beauty was more reassuring than arousing. Their sexuality was not unsettling. They did not possess the smoldering, sweaty sensuality of, say, Marlon Brando in his prime. They provided their audiences (and voters) with an aesthetic pleasure, not an erotic one. Neither projected a sense of danger, sexual or otherwise.

  This was not necessarily how either man necessarily wanted to be seen. Kennedy saw himself as a modern-day Lord Byron, and he was thrilled by Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of the poet-adventurer as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” And Reagan had begged Warner Brothers to get him out of light comedies and into rugged, manly Westerns. As president, they both talked tough and worked hard to project a rough masculinity. Reagan loved to be pictured in cowboy garb riding a horse or off at his ranch clearing brush, while Kennedy kept emphasizing his “vigah,” most notably through his family’s often bloody touch football games.

  But for all that, they still seemed like the type of men (and boys) who always got their dates home before curfew. Kennedy may have imagined himself a latter-day Byron, but his friend Florida senator George Smathers said the key to Kennedy’s appeal with women was that he was “a lovable guy . . . a really sweet fella.” However active Kennedy’s libido was—and, oh, my, was it active!—what women really wanted to do with him was marry him or mother him. He may have been a libertine, but few of the women whom he kissed and who have since told seem to express any bitterness that they were used. He is forgiven for things that would be unforgivable if done by another man. Perhaps it’s why ongoing revelations about his sex life have not diminished Kennedy’s popular appeal.

  Kennedy and Reagan projected boyish innocence, even vulnerability. Kennedy joked that he was so youthful looking as a congressman that he was often mistaken for the elevator operator, and even later as senator and president, his “tousled hair preserved an adolescent look.” After Kennedy was killed, the actress-turned-princess, Grace Kelly, one of his many paramours, remembered Kennedy as “the All-American boy.” It was as if Kennedy had never completely grown up. Maybe he never did.

  Despite his compulsive infidelities, Kennedy was more teen idol than Lothario. Years before anyone had heard of The Beatles, Kennedy’s campaign staff called the excited women who greeted their candidate with squeals of delight the “jumpers.” In describing Kennedy’s appeal, one woman said he looked like “a knight in shining armor,” the language of an adolescent girl’s fantasy rather than an adult woman’s lust. One woman admitted that she stayed up until three o’clock in the morning in her Connecticut town just to get a glimpse of Kennedy, and then she ran next to his motorcade screaming in ecstasy. “He was so handsome,” she sighed. “I thought my husband was going to kill me.” She was fifty-three years old.

  Reagan, too, despite being our nation’s oldest president, projected a boyishness. When Time magazine named him their “Man of the Year” in 1980, they described him as a “boyish man.” There was his well-publicized passion for jelly beans (neither Reagan nor Kennedy drank much alcohol), and the parties he threw while single in Des Moines and in Hollywood were so innocent that his mother usually attended as an invited guest. He called his mother by her first name, Nelle, but his pet name for his wife, Nancy, was “Mommy.”

  In his Hollywood career, with but a handful of exceptions, Reagan played an innocent. In 1955’s Tennessee’s Partner, the forty-four-year-old Reagan plays the only cowpoke who does not realize that the “nice place you have here, ma’am” is a brothel. Reagan’s failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to his inability to project menace, sensuality, or even moral ambiguity. “Astonishingly good-looking . . .,” wrote Reagan’s son Ron, “he, nevertheless, generally failed to project onscreen the urgent sexuality, the heat, that made some of his contemporaries like [Errol] Flynn, Clark Gable, even Humphrey Bogart genuine movie stars.” A woman who dated Kennedy said almost the same thing: Kennedy “gave off light instead of heat.”

  Reagan had dated his first love, Margaret Cleaver, his pastor’s daughter, for six years, from high school all through college. We do not know if they ever had sex—it seems doubtful—because, unlike Kennedy, Reagan seldom discussed his sex life. There has never been a suggestion that Reagan was unfaithful to either Jane Wyman or Nancy Davis while married. During the time between his divorce from Wyman and his marriage to Davis, Reagan did, as Kennedy had and would, bed a series of starlets, but his attempts at seduction were sometimes so awkward they left his intended prey in giggles. As part of the studio publicity machine, Reagan was often seen squiring actresses Lana Turner and Anita Louise around town, but the word among young women in Hollywood was that Reagan was “more gab than grab, and no threat to any virgin.”

  Perhaps a wholesome appearance has helped Kennedy’s reputation weather so many revelations of debauchery. Such stories just don’t ring true with the face we see—despite all the evidence that confirms the veracity of the stories. Perhaps, knowing more about his family life, we see Kennedy’s behavior as a disorder, or even a disease, rather than a lifestyle. Or perhaps Kennedy is given a pass because we think his behavior was a product of a time long ago when such bad behavior was titillating rather than abhorrent.

  Kennedy was president during the first wave of the sexual revolution. This wave had little to do with women’s equality and everything to do with the sexual gratification of men. It was the age of Hugh Hefner, James Bond, and Norman Mailer, the early 1960s as the television drama Mad Men imagines it to have been—martini in hand, Sinatra on the hi-fi, and your secretary in your lap. This pre-feminist part of the sexual revolution was built around the cult of Ernest Hemingway—“dominating men, hunters, bull-fighters, risk takers”—and so it is Hemingway whom Kennedy quotes on the first page of Profiles in Courage as defining courage as “grace under pressure.” The culture’s embrace of this idea of machismo was illustrated in the famous essay Mailer wrote for Esquire in 1960, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” which openly winked at rumors of Kennedy’s infidelities.

  Scholar Garry Wills recalls discussing Mailer’s essay at the time with a young woman who was a fellow graduate student at Yale. Wills asked her what she thought would happen to Kennedy’s political career if his womanizing became widely known. “That will help him,” she replied. “It will show he knows how to get what he wants.” The Kennedy libido had found the perfect era for its full expression.

  Kennedy’s father was a philanderer, and many have suggested that Jack simply followed in his father’s footsteps. His father certainly encouraged him to do so. While a freshman at Harvard, Jack took five of his football teammates to Hyannis Port, where his father’s secretary, Edward Moore, had arranged for them to be with four girls. The weekend turned into an orgy. One of the girls Kennedy was with became pregnant. It is presumed she had an abortion and was paid to keep quiet—a situation reportedly repeated several times when Kennedy was an adult. Kennedy had learned, because of his wealth and his father’s enabling behavior, that sex had no consequences—at least for him. As biographer Geoffrey Perret noted, “What would have been a crisis for other young men was no more than a minor irritant for him.”

  As Kennedy bragged to his valet, if a girl or woman refused to have sex with him on the first date, he did not bother to call her again. If they had sex, Kennedy boasted to friends, he would not drop her “till I’ve had her three ways.” The number of women Kennedy slept with ran to hundreds and hundreds, for as he confided to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, “If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches.”

  Some were famous women. There were movie stars, such as Gene Tierney, who had delusions of marrying Kennedy once she divorced her husband, Oleg Cassini;* Angie Dickinson, with whom Kennedy had sex on the day of
his inauguration; Jayne Mansfield, with whom he had sex while she was eight months pregnant; sixty-one-year-old Marlene Dietrich, whom Kennedy was relieved to learn had not also slept with his father; and, of course, Marilyn Monroe, who also thought she might become Kennedy’s wife but who instead became a nuisance and potential political liability, and who may or may not have eventually been passed on to Kennedy’s brother Robert.

  * To underscore the incestuous nature of this world, Cassini was later Jackie Kennedy’s favorite dress designer.

  There were call girls and strippers, some famous, such as Tempest Storm, but most anonymous, despite Kennedy’s boast that he never forgot a woman with whom he had slept. Some were the mistresses of friends passed on to Kennedy like gifts, such as Judith Campbell, who was a mistress of both a friend, Frank Sinatra, and a mob boss named Sam Giancana. Sometimes Kennedy passed the women on to others, such as nineteen-year-old White House intern Mimi Alford, whom he cajoled into fellatio with his aide Dave Powers while he watched. Some were family friends, such as Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was murdered the year after Kennedy was assassinated. Some were Kennedy employees, such as two twenty-something “secretaries” nicknamed “Fiddle” and “Faddle,” who were always available for a midday nude swim in the White House pool when Jackie was away. At least one of the many women worked for Jackie, her look-alike press secretary, Pamela Turnure, whom Kennedy had ensured Jackie hired so she would be readily available when needed. The list is so long, it quickly stops being titillating and only depresses.

  It was usually joyless sex, lacking passion or any emotional connection. Almost all of the encounters were “quickies.” “It was like a rooster getting on top of a chicken real fast then the poor little hen ruffles her feathers and wonders what the hell happened to her,” explained Smathers, a notorious Lothario himself. Foreplay was generally non-existent. Alford reported that she and Kennedy did not even kiss the time he took her virginity. The sex was usually so rushed that one showgirl reported that Kennedy looked at his watch during the act. “He was not a cozy, touching sort of man,” said one woman. Another said Kennedy was “nice—considerate in his own way, witty and fun. But . . . Sex was something to have done, not to be doing. He wasn’t in it for the cuddling.”

  Why Kennedy behaved this way remains an open question. Some suggest his father’s philandering and his mother’s acquiescence made him contemptuous of women, others that his upbringing left him with deep difficulties with intimacy. A female staffer in his Senate office once asked him why he womanized and risked scandal. “I guess I just can’t help it,” was Kennedy’s only response, though she said he looked like a little boy near tears when he said it. Then there was his fear that he would die young. As he told author Margaret Coit, whom he unsuccessfully tried to seduce, “I’m going to grab everything I want. You see, I haven’t any time.”

  Kennedy’s zeal for grabbing what he wanted led him to take risks even more foolish than simply sleeping around. He ended his relationship with Monroe when newsmen began to suspect their affair, and he dropped Campbell in 1962 when confronted by J. Edgar Hoover about her ties to the Mafia. But in 1963, so the FBI believed, Kennedy began a relationship with Ellen Rometsch, an East German refugee and the beautiful wife of an American serviceman whom Hoover suspected of being a Communist spy. Rometsch was deported and Kennedy ended that relationship too, but had he lived past November 1963, he definitely would have taken other risks with other risky women, always confident that others would protect him from scandal just as his father had.

  When journalist Marie Ridder asked him at a 1960 dinner party how he intended to carry on his affairs while president, Kennedy replied, “Oh, it’ll be much easier because the Secret Service will protect me.” Even if he got caught, Kennedy seemed to believe the public would forgive him, telling Ridder “all great men have this failing. Wilson stopped the conference at Versailles to have his ‘nooner,’ and Alexander the Great had so many sexual appetites he never knew next what gender would appeal to him.”

  Reagan did not have that failing. Throughout most of his life, he was a serial monogamist, with three great loves in his life: Margaret Cleaver, Jane Wyman, and Nancy Davis. It was perhaps this faithfulness that inspired a more chaste devotion from his film fans than his physical beauty might have inspired. The core of Reagan’s fan base, even in the postwar years when he was in his thirties, were teenage girls, “bobby-soxers,” which is one reason he was teamed up with nineteen-year-old Shirley Temple in That Hagen Girl. It was such a given in Hollywood that Reagan lacked the ability to make a woman’s pulse race that it was news when Reagan was mobbed by female fans while on tour with Louella Parsons; Motion Picture magazine had a photo of the scene with the headline, “What! No Sex Appeal?” But in truth, women found Reagan more attractive than desirable.

  Wyman, who had been married and divorced twice before marrying Reagan, said she was drawn to Reagan not because of any great physical chemistry between them, but because “he was such a sunny person . . . genuinely and spontaneously nice.” He was also boring, she said, and not merely because of his lengthy lectures on politics. Privately, she told friends that one reason she divorced Reagan was that he was “a bore in bed.”

  Actresses who worked with him said Reagan seemed to lack sexual desire. “I don’t think he ever looked at Ann Sheridan (a frequent costar), and she was luscious,” one said. Reagan admitted that he enjoyed being the center of attention, and one woman he dated said this love of attention bordered on narcissism. Jeanne Tesdell, an attractive coed at Drake University who dated Reagan when he was at WHO radio, broke up with Reagan in part, she said, because when they danced she could tell that Reagan did not take pleasure in her as a woman but in them as an attractive couple that others admired. “He’s a people pleaser,” she said. “Always was.”

  Reagan had been devastated by the divorce from Wyman—a divorce he emphatically did not want. Women who dated him afterward recalled that Reagan mostly talked about his failed marriage and mooned over Wyman. His costar in The Hasty Heart, Patricia Neal, said, “He told me how sad it was—that somebody had fixed him up with another woman, but the desire wasn’t there.” When he made a play for Neal, she just laughed and fended off his advance with, “Oh, Ronnie, no!” Another actress, Joy Hodges, who had helped Reagan break into the movies, said that Reagan’s romantic overtures were somehow comic and made her and other women giggle.

  Shortly after his divorce, Reagan even proposed to a young writer, Doris Lilly, telling her “I’m no good alone.” Not surprisingly, Lilly declined a proposition that seemed to have little to do with her own appeal. Reagan was finally taken aside by a true Lothario, Errol Flynn, who told his friend to put the divorce behind him and seize new opportunities. “Be happy, old sport. . . . Think of the parties, think of the girls. Do what I do.” Reagan gave it his best shot. Fan magazines had him variously dating Doris Day, Rhonda Fleming, and even the underage Piper Laurie (hopefully, only for publicity purposes). He followed Flynn’s advice well enough and slept with so many women (whom he oddly referred to as his “cocker spaniels”) that he admitted to biographer Edmund Morris of once waking up with a young starlet by his side and being unable to remember her name.

  But what Reagan liked better than sex was talking—if he had an audience. Morris concluded that what Reagan missed most from his divorce was not having someone to love, but having someone love him. Doris Day said that when she dated Reagan they didn’t really make conversation. “[I]t was rather talking at you,” she said. “I remember telling him he should be touring the country making speeches.”

  Fortunately for Reagan, among the several women he was dating was Nancy Davis, a born listener who seemed mesmerized by everything he said. Reagan would massage the story in later years, saying he had been in the dumps following his divorce from Wyman until “along came Nancy Davis and saved my soul.” Looking back on a marriage that would last more than fif
ty years, Reagan no doubt wished he could boast of being smitten at first sight. Actually, he continued to date other women for several years after meeting Davis before deciding she was the one. One factor, too, may have been that Nancy gave birth to their first child, Patricia, just seven and a half months after her and Reagan’s wedding.

  Nancy Davis was the daughter of a successful stage and screen actress named Edie Luckett, who had performed with stars such as Spencer Tracy and Walter Huston, and Nancy’s godmother was the famous and eccentric stage actress Alla Nazimova. Nancy’s given name was Anne Frances Robbins, but her father, a car salesman named Kenneth Robbins, abandoned the family while Nancy was still an infant. When Nancy was eight years old, her mother married Chicago neurosurgeon Loyal Davis, but Edie continued to act, and Nancy soon followed her into the profession.

  Nancy studied drama at Smith College and starred on Broadway while Reagan was still a sportscaster in Iowa. Among those she dated while in New York was Clark Gable. When Nancy decided to give Hollywood a try in 1949, she called on a friend she called “Spence,” Spencer Tracy, to help arrange her screen test. He did, and even had George Cukor direct her scene. A far more accomplished actor than Reagan, Nancy’s first film was an “A” picture—Cukor’s East Side, West Side, followed the next year by William Wellman’s The Next Voice You Hear. By contrast, Reagan did not work with a name director until his twenty-third film.

  Known for her large, widely spaced eyes, Nancy was usually cast as a sober, dependable, family woman, which was a good thing for her future role as a political wife. Had she played ingénues or sexpots in films that might appear on the late show, first California and then the nation might have been more wary of an actress becoming first lady.