by Unknown
Instead, I flew commercially on a prepaid ticket, which was just fine with me. It was December in Massachusetts, and I was looking forward to some sun at the Lyford Cay Club, where the President’s entourage was staying.
Traveling without the official cover of the press office came with a slight complication. It meant that I had to remain invisible the whole time I was at Lyford Cay; no one could know I was there. That was fairly easy to do, as long as I was relaxing alone in my luxurious villa, or when Dave Powers would come by to drive me to the President’s rented home in the evenings after his official duties had ended. Most of the White House people were staying in rooms at the clubhouse, so the back-and-forth between my quarters and the President’s wasn’t on anyone’s radar.
But when it came time to leave for the airport on Friday, Dave Powers made an uncharacteristic tactical error. I would be riding to the airport in Dave’s car and we would drive over to the President’s house with the rest of the entourage.
Then we’d follow in the motorcade to the airport. Dave, however, was still intent on keeping me invisible. He told me to sit up front—not only that but to crouch on the floor of the car so that no one would see me. He’d forgotten, however, that I am 5ʹ9″. I did my best to fit under the dashboard, but when the motorcade drew up in front of the President’s villa to pick him up, I was spotted.
Here’s how Sally Bedell Smith, relying on Barbara Gamarekian’s oral history at the Kennedy Library, described the scene in her book, Grace and Power: When Kennedy was leaving Nassau on Friday afternoon, Mimi Beardsley quite literally popped up again. “As the entourage of cars pulled up in front of the house to pick up the President,” Barbara Gamarekian recalled, Pierre Salinger and his aide Chris Camp “saw the top of a little head over the door” and “thought there was a little child sitting in the front seat of the car. Chris said to Pierre, ‘Who could that child be?’ and they walked over and looked in the car, and here seated on the floor was Mimi! She was sitting on the floor of a car so she wouldn’t be seen by anyone. She’d been [in Nassau], apparently, for several days. They took one look and sort of backed away and didn’t say anything.”
Here’s the thing: Everything in the above passage is, no doubt, true. I was there and can attest to its veracity. But I wasn’t aware of any of it while I was hiding under the dashboard in the hot sun. I didn’t hear people talking outside the window, didn’t sense people craning their necks to take a peek at the top of my head. I simply obeyed Dave Powers. I crouched down and—as I so often did—waited.
Why Dave felt the need to hide me in the first place still puzzles me. The President was going on from Nassau to Palm Beach. If I was supposed to be kept a secret, then why was I on the passenger list of the backup plane to Florida, along with Dave Powers, Kenny O’Donnell, Llewellyn Thompson, the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, and so many others? Why was I permitted to sit in the back of the plane, in full view of everyone, on the flight home?
I dwell on this incident because it highlights a couple of the tricks that memory plays on us.
For one thing, it showcases how people have different motives for not only what they remember but how they choose to share it. Barbara Gamarekian retold this story because it was a vivid “gotcha moment,” one where she and others got ever so much closer to the “smoking gun” proof that the President was having an affair with me.
For me the incident highlights how keeping a secret colors—but doesn’t wash away—our memory. It forces us to be selective, if only for self-preservation. If I hadn’t read this paragraph about me in Bedell Smith’s book, I don’t think I would have recalled the crouching-in-the-car incident in quite this way—as a comical highlight of my trip that week. I’d recall how luxurious and decadent spending three full days in the Caribbean sun were compared to being holed up indoors in New England with my classmates. I’d recall how relaxed the President was and how unusual it was for me to spend three consecutive nights with him. I’d recall how my family commented on my tan when I returned home for Christmas. But as for ducking down in the car, I let that particular moment recede from my memory, as many of us would do when confronting a needless humiliation from our past. Only when I read about it did it come back to me.
I realize now that I suffered two humiliations that day. The first was in having to hide in the car. The second was that the people in the press office knew about me, were talking behind my back, and were laughing at me.
I wonder which is the greater humiliation, but I don’t wonder why I kept my secret for so long. I wasn’t keeping it only from everyone around me. I was also keeping parts of it from myself.
Chapter Ten
“I met someone,” I told the President in the winter of 1963. I said it in a teasing way but also with a note of pride, as I rarely had anything substantive to report about my social life when he asked. And he always asked. “I went to Williams College on a blind date.”
“Williams!” he exclaimed. “How could you?”
“Not everyone goes to Harvard, Mr. President.”
During this particular conversation—the President had called me at Wheaton—he pressed me for details, but after just one date I was short on specifics. All I could say was that my date was “really nice.” The President continued to feign shock. “Ah, Mimi,” he said, “you’re not going to leave me, are you?”
“Of course not,” I assured him, and it was true. The thought of extricating myself from the President had never occurred to me. But it would in time.
The young man in question was Tony Fahnestock, a senior at Williams. Only later would he tell me that his invitation to join him at the college’s Winter Carnival had been a shameless ploy. He wasn’t interested in me; he was keen on meeting my beautiful blonde classmates, Wendy Taylor and Kirk Dyett.
I’d seen Tony once before, from a distance, when I was sixteen and working as a mother’s helper in the summer of 1959. We were at the Seabright Beach Club in New Jersey, and he was sitting with a group of eighteen-year-old boys and girls under a green-and-white striped umbrella while I was keeping my little charges from drowning in the baby pool. A two-year age difference is an enormous gap when you’re a teenager. I remember watching Tony’s group lounging about and laughing, envying their cool sophistication, and wondering if I could ever be like them. So I was surprised when he called me, out of the blue, at Wheaton; he wasn’t someone I ever thought I’d run into again.
The first thing I noticed when he picked me up at the bus station in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, were his dark, crescent-shaped brown eyes. They gave him an endearing, sleepy look. He was two inches taller than I, which was a relief for someone my height. He wasn’t brash and loud and overconfident, and he didn’t talk about himself excessively. He was quiet and serious, and I liked that immediately.
Tony was busy taking special State Department exams for most of the weekend; he was considering joining the CIA. Our date was basically the Saturday-night dance, where I had to coax Tony out on the dance floor. We surprised each other by hitting it off from the beginning, to the point that Tony soon forgot all about my beautiful classmates and began to focus only on me. I knew that something special was happening when he insisted on driving me all the way back to Wheaton on Sunday, nearly a three-hour ride in weekend traffic, instead of sending me off at the Pittsfield bus station.
That was the sum total of my knowledge of Tony when I told President Kennedy that I had “met someone.” Whether I was eager to have a serious boyfriend or sensed that Tony was “the one,” I cannot say. What I could be sure of was that, on paper, Tony was a perfect match for me—and I for him. Our families were similar, well off, and members of the same kinds of clubs. Tony had gone to a good boarding school, Brooks, and had bright prospects for the future. I had been raised to be with someone like Tony.
In the following weeks, I visited Tony twice at Williams—and then he started coming to Wheaton to see me. It was a new feeling to have a boyfriend so devoted to me. It was heady
and intoxicating, and also deeply confusing—because it made me confront my continuing, and one-sided, relationship with the President. Although Tony and I were not “going steady,” as we used to say about a serious relationship, there was no doubt in my mind that he was my boyfriend, and a very desirable one. At some point, I knew, I would have to make a decision about the President. But I wasn’t ready to do that yet.
As winter melted into spring, I began seeing Tony practically every weekend, either at Williams or at Wheaton. We didn’t have an intimate relationship at this point. He never pressed me for sex.
While his gentlemanly behavior was quite attractive, this situation did pose a bit of a conundrum for me. I was physically attracted to Tony and I had learned the pleasures of sexual intimacy from President Kennedy. This created a yearning in me for something more than necking in dorms and cars. But pushing for sex with Tony would have raised questions; girls like me didn’t do that back then. I might have to explain why it wasn’t my first time, and that wasn’t a conversation I wanted to have.
When I wasn’t spending weekends with Tony, I was spending them with the President. Tony wasn’t curious—or suspicious—about my other life in Washington. Why would he be? When we had started dating, I had already spent a full summer at the White House—and I had warned him that I continued to be needed by the press office even while I was at college. He not only accepted that lie, he was impressed by it. One time, after I told him I might be returning to the White House for a second summer internship, Tony proudly introduced me to his favorite professor at Williams, Frederick Rudolph. Dr. Rudolph, an eminent historian, was moving to Washington with his family that summer for a sabbatical year, and Tony wanted him to know that I would also be there, working in the White House.
Until then, I had never been a duplicitous person. I had lied only once that I can recall—to my mother, about an unattractive dress that she wanted me to take on a trip. I told her I’d taken it with me, but I’d really left it behind in my room.
My lie was discovered when she found the dress. Beyond that, I considered myself a morally centered person, someone who knew right from wrong. Most of us think of ourselves that way, I suppose—that we’re decent human beings.
But I thought of my honesty as a defining aspect of my personality, a core value.
I wasn’t a saint, but if someone had asked me to identify my virtues as a person, I would have said that I was nice, that I wanted to be liked, that I was eager to please, and that I told the truth. It mattered to me that I had never knowingly hurt anyone by lying.
Now I was getting heavily involved with my first real boyfriend—and at the heart of the relationship was a massive, ongoing deception. A lie. Lying is inevitable when you’re committed to keeping a secret. The lie becomes a sin of omission, not commission, but it’s a lie nonetheless.
For the first time, it dawned on me that my secret life with the President might have consequences for someone other than me. Before I met Tony, my secret was my problem; it had no impact on anyone else I knew. If I kept it until the day I died, no one would be any worse off. But that was changing as Tony and I became more serious about each other; trust would become essential.
Soon I was thinking about Tony constantly. Mine was the schoolgirl daydreaming that any young woman with a new beau engages in, the delicious, guilty pleasure of “he loves me, he loves me not.” I even practiced writing Mrs. Anthony E. Fahnestock and Mimi Fahnestock in the margins of my notebook.
With Tony I began to think we had a future together. With the President I began to realize that my attachment, however strong, had no future; it was both real and unrealistic.
I cannot locate the exact time or place when I realized that Tony Fahnestock was the man I loved. I often wonder why. It’s possible I once knew but have simply forgotten. But it’s also possible that in holding back the full truth of who I was, I was also holding back myself, which shut me off from experiencing the thrill of falling in love. That’s just one of many ways my secret has cost me. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
And yet, being with the President and having his undivided attention was like taking this incredibly potent self-esteem drug. And that’s a hard habit to kick.
Despite the humiliations and uncertainty, I remained enthralled by his charisma and the glamour of traveling with his entourage. My college life of dorm rooms, cafeteria dining, fraternity parties, homework, and moviegoing paled by comparison with Air Force One, Caribbean resorts, the Secret Service, and limousines.
Simply put, I was leading two lives and enjoying both of them.
In the middle of March 1963, I accompanied the President to South Florida. He was taking the weekend to relax at the family estate in Palm Beach before going to Costa Rica to meet with Central American leaders. It wasn’t deemed appropriate for me to stay at the house, so Dave Powers booked me a room at a pink motel on South Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, where I played the Waiting Game in the mornings and then, in the afternoon, the President would send a car for me and we’d enjoy a few hours relaxing by the pool together. In the evening, the President and Dave would go for a sail on the family yacht, the Honey Fitz, and I returned to the motel. The next day we followed the same routine.
After the President left for Costa Rica, I stayed at the motel for two more days before flying back to New York. It was an enjoyable respite. Too enjoyable, it turned out. I lay out in the sun too long one day and got a severe case of sun poisoning. Feeling feverish and nauseated, I panicked. Not knowing what to do, I tracked down Dave Powers in Costa Rica and called for help. From there he placed a call to the motel’s front desk—which was less than thirty yards from my room—and instructed them to watch out for me, while I adhered to a regime of cool baths and lots of water. If I hadn’t gotten sun poisoning, it could have been a nice short break from school in midwinter. But the blisters on my chest were unbearable, preventing me from sleeping for more than an hour at a time.
For years afterward, whenever I went out in the sun, my chest would burn and remind me of that time.
It puzzles me now that I wasn’t peevish about having to shuttle between my spare motel room—where I spent most of my time that weekend, watching TV—and the sumptuous setting of the Kennedy estate, where it seemed like a party was always under way. I suppose I should have felt cheapened by the experience, as if I was a second-class citizen who had to be hidden away, out of sight. But I honestly don’t recall feeling that way. I remember feeling happy to be there. Such was the depth of my intoxication with the President.
That intoxication continued even as my feelings for Tony were deepening. If I was confused by my attachment to two men, I was masking it well. That spring, I hatched a plan to drop out of Wheaton after my sophomore year, complete a second summer in the press office, and then stay on full-time in Washington, where surely some sort of exciting job awaited me. The President would be running for re-election in 1964, and I figured I could work on his campaign.
Fiddle had done the same thing three years earlier. She had dropped out of college to work on the first Kennedy presidential campaign, and she was certainly thriving.
This time, my parents did not try to persuade me to finish college. It was not uncommon then for girls to go to a two-year junior college or to leave college before graduating to marry or go to work. Tony, too, endorsed the plan.
So bewitched was I by my life in the White House, I didn’t want it to end.
Had I known, though, how much ill will I was generating among the women in Pierre Salinger’s office, I might not have been so eager to return. When I read the oral histories of Chris Camp and Barbara Gamarekian at the Kennedy Library, the few paragraphs about me were truly upsetting. “Mimi had no skills.
She couldn’t type,” Barbara Gamarekian recalled. “She could answer the phone and she could handle messages and things but she was not really a great asset to us.”
Chris Camp was also harsh, describing me as a “presidential favorite” whose �
�abilities and skills and capacity to maintain a job in the press office were not immediately apparent to anyone who was associated with her.… She did what she could, but she was not a typist; she did not take shorthand; she was not skilled in clerical or stenographic work. In other words, she was filling a chair which could have been filled by somebody else who had the needed skills.” Chris, as far as I know, didn’t dislike me personally; at least she referred to me as a “very pleasant girl.” But she clearly resented me on professional grounds.
Presidential plane rides were the ultimate merit badge in the press office, and, in her eyes, I had done nothing to earn them. Chris had worked hard for years—on the President’s Senate staff—to get to her position and, quite rightly, resented the ease with which I had gained my seat on Air Force One. In her oral history, she claimed she’d told Pierre more than once to “take her off the press plane, take her off Air Force One … and don’t put her in motorcades.” Barbara Gamarekian, on the other hand, obviously disliked me and was also annoyed by how easily I had leapfrogged the normal rotation of personnel on the coveted presidential trips. “Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform any function at all, made all the trips,” she said.
Barbara was wrong. I didn’t make “all the trips,” and I can’t apologize now for having been there. My biggest disappointment, in fact, was missing out on the President’s trip to Europe in June 1963, when he made his iconic “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in front of the Berlin Wall and then continued on, triumphantly, to Ireland, England, and Italy. In her oral history, Gamarekian insists that I behaved like a spoiled child over being left behind for this trip—and that I called the President in tears while he was in Ireland to complain that Helen Ganss, the woman left in charge of the press office, wouldn’t let me have that Friday off. The President had been “furious” after my call, Barbara said, and told Dave Powers that if “he were back in Washington, Helen Ganss would be fired this very instant.”