by Garry Wills
Only John seems to have inherited his father’s consuming interest in the movies, in the myths and gossip of Hollywood. As President he even called the set where Advise and Consent was being filmed, to learn when he could get an early print. He watched films constantly in the White House. And he was as interested in the actors’ private lives as in their screen performances. The adoring Kenneth O’Donnell admits: “His fondness for Frank Sinatra, which perplexed a lot of people, was simply based on the fact that Sinatra told him a lot of inside gossip about celebrities and their romances in Hollywood.” Not only was Sinatra the President’s private Rona Barrett—he was also one of the President’s favorite topics of conversation. Judith Campbell (later Mrs. Exner), who had been recommended to Kennedy because “she looks like Elizabeth Taylor” (in 1960, the subject of most movie gossip), says Kennedy’s conversations in the White House returned again and again to Frank Sinatra’s affairs.
Oh, but he loved gossip. He adored it. That was something he was always asking me about on the telephone and in person. He would say, “Who’s Frank seeing now?” or “I heard Frank is seeing so-and-so and isn’t she married?”
He thought Frank’s temperament was a riot. He was amused at the havoc Frank could cause and at the way people around him would cower in fear.
Almost immediately Jack started pumping me for gossip, most of it directed at Frank. What was Frank doing? Was it true that he was seeing Janet Leigh? We went through the same routine.
Mrs. Exner does not seem to realize that her own glamour for Kennedy came largely from the fact that she had been Sinatra’s mistress.
Every time we talked on the phone, and I am referring to before and after our meeting at the Plaza, he invariably would ask, “Have you seen Frank lately?” I would answer, “No,” or “Yes, I saw him on the set,” or “He called last night and I wasn’t home,” or whatever was the circumstance at the moment. Jack would say, “Ohhh, you still want to see Frank?” I would say, “We’re just friends, Jack.” Then he’d say, “Okay, okay,” in almost a little boy’s “See if I care” voice. Then the very next day, “See Frank? Where did you go last night? I called and you weren’t home.”
Kennedy pursued “stars” (Sonja Henie and Gene Tierney) the way his father had. And since his father had taken Gloria Swanson and other mistresses to Hyannis Port, daring any in the family to object, John Kennedy met his women in the White House. The Hyannis Port competition for women, which made that compound partly a fraternity house, was repeated in the executive mansion. Mrs. Exner was a prize up for grabs, not only between brothers but among Kennedy “gofers” as well:
He asked about Frank again, and although I felt that his interest in Frank was genuine, I found it a little annoying that I always seemed to remind him of Frank. Then as we walked into the [White House] dining room, he said, “Have you heard from Teddy?”
That stopped me. “You mean your brother?”
“Yes. Has Teddy called you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “You should know that.”
“Well, I just wondered.”
Jack never forgot what Teddy had tried in Las Vegas. Several times when we were in bed he said, “Boy, if Teddy only knew, he’d be eating his heart out.” I think he got a big kick out of the fact that he had succeeded where Teddy had failed.
When Mrs. Exner ferried Kenneth O’Donnell to the secret apartment kept by Kennedy during the Los Angeles convention, O’Donnell made a grab at her, and was astonished when she resisted. Everyone joined the game, with no preliminary niceties. Part of the father’s aggressive charm, passed on to the sons and their imitators, was a merry effrontery, a freshness and candor of rapacity, what Montaigne calls his own “impertinently genital” approach. Burton Hersh has described the family manner, as exemplified by Edward Kennedy: “College girls who went out with him reported back that he made his expectations clear early and with great undisguised feeling, and took it more as a curiosity than an affront if his straightforward-enough offer was not instantly accepted.” Even a custodian of the Kennedy legends, James MacGregor Burns, was astounded at the openness of the youngest Kennedy’s “series of brief flirtations and longer, more intense involvements,” and quotes a friend of his in Congress: “I have told him ten times, ‘Ted, you’re acting like a fool. Everybody knows you wherever you go.… Jack could smuggle girls up the back way of the Carlyle Hotel. But you’re not nearly as discreet as you should be.’ He looks down with a faint smile and says: ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’ But he never listens.”
The family game of “chasing” is part of the self that was built up by all three imitators of their magnetic father. Passing women around, and boasting of it, to other men and other women, was a Kennedy achievement:
As soon as I was introduced to Angie [Dickinson), she let out a shriek: “You’re Judy Campbell?” I told her I was and she said, “John has told me so much about you!” All I could say was, “Oh, really?” At first I thought she meant Rosselli [a Giancana associate], but then I realized that she meant John Kennedy. She kept saying, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
Kennedy’s curiosity and candor about his own and other people’s sex lives may indicate why his favorite book was Cecil’s Young Melbourne, a gossipy and superficial look at “lives of the aristocrats” in Regency England. Betty Spalding was astonished at Kennedy’s intrusive questions, as Mary Pitcairn had been by Joseph Kennedy’s: “He would say personal things to me. I mean, ask me personal questions about women and marriage—and later he talked to me about his sex life with Jackie.”
Ben Bradlee also describes Kennedy’s appetite for gossip about the sex life of others: “The four of us got on the subject of a guest at the birthday party last night (who shall here be nameless), who had told Jackie and Tony that he had not slept with his wife for the last sixteen years. This kind of dirt the president of the United States can listen to all day long.” It is clear from Bradlee’s book what conversation Kennedy enjoyed: “Tonight’s last minute miscellany included: Why none of us had women friends with large bosoms.” And: “Before we left we reminisced about the night of the West Virginia primary, the dirty movie we had seen, whose plot the president seemed to recall remarkably well, given his preoccupations that night.” Kennedy could not even wait for a child to grow up before speculating about its sex life. Complimenting the Bradlees on their infant son, he said: “My God, he’s a good looking child. Those eyes. He’s going to do a helluva business.” That must be what his own father said of the infant Kennedy.
When not gossiping about sex, Kennedy liked to fantasize about it with the help of movies. Even Ben Bradlee was surprised at the President’s taste:
The movie was James Bond, and Kennedy seemed to enjoy the cool and the sex and the brutality.
The president was determined to see a movie, even though Jackie said the choices were strictly limited. Jackie read off the list of what was available, and the president selected the one we had all unanimously voted against, a brutal sadistic little Western called Lonely Are the Brave. Kennedy watched, lying down on a bed placed in the front row, his head propped up on pillows.
Obviously only one vote counted in that room. Those without a taste for low movies must have found the famous Kennedy charm wearing thin come nightfall: “We dined alone with the president last night. Jackie did not appear. We saw a dreadful movie about some Englishmen in a German prison camp.”
Joseph Kennedy, a man of strong will and low tastes, passed on both traits to his son. He aspired upward to the White House and downward to tabloid heaven. John Kennedy reached both places; and though the tabloids cruelly exploited his widow in later years, the son had been groomed for the one place just as surely as he was for the other. It is difficult to become an American prince.
2
The President
He had been at Eton and Oxford, but he had not learnt, what is often learned there, a decorum in profligacy.
—WALTER BAGEHOT, of
Bolingbroke
In 1960, as a graduate student in New Haven, I was discussing Mailer’s Esquire article with another graduate student, a woman. What, I asked her, would happen if Kennedy’s womanizing became even better known? (The reputation was already there, winked at several times by Mailer in his piece.) “That will help him,” she replied. Why? “It will show he knows how to get what he wants.” The liberal world was so bored with avuncular “Ike” that it welcomed a President who had the nerve to wear a rake’s rather dingy halo. It is easy to forget that the Sinatra “rat pack” was considered a liberal phenomenon in the late fifties. After all, it admitted one black performer to its carousings.
The graduate student in New Haven, afire for liberal causes, was also excited by John Kennedy’s sexual image, which was not “irrelevant” for her—as it later became for those trying to hide Kennedy’s affairs. It was, precisely, a basis of political appeal. Power was one, over women or over Khrushchev. As Kathleen had written to her brother in the South Pacific, “It’s just that sort of treatment that women really like.” Women could trust a man who “treats ’em rough” to be tough in other contexts too.
I thought of that graduate student when I went to work for a magazine where a female writer was described to me as “a Kennedy-style celebrity-fucker.” She too admired New Frontiersmen for their macho. But by the time Sammy Davis, Jr. was embracing Nixon and Frank Sinatra was subsidizing Agnew, that woman had become a feminist—and a critic of Edward Kennedy. Mailer was right to see things poised for a massive swing of mood in 1960; but he could not see how wide the mood would ultimately veer from his own (and the Kennedy) view of male heroism. The sexual revolution launched with a glorification of aggression would lead, finally, to profound criticism of it.
But all that was far ahead when John Kennedy became the first movie-star President. It is hard to remember that the “sexual revolutionaries” of the 1950s—male and female—had been brought up on the cult of Hemingway, of dominating men, hunters, bullfighters, risk-takers. This was the Hemingway called on in the first sentence of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage. Mailer voiced the creed of that time during and after the 1960 campaign:
The film studios threw up their searchlights as the frontier was finally sealed, and the romantic possibilities of the old conquest of land turned into a vertical myth, trapped within the skull, of a new kind of heroic life, each choosing his own archetype of a neo-renaissance man, be it Barrymore, Cagney, Flynn, Bogart, Brando or Sinatra, but it was almost as if there were no peace unless one could fight well, kill well (if always with honor), love well and love many, be cool, be daring, be dashing, be wild, be wily, be resourceful, be a brave gun.
Naturally, there was no occasion to talk of female heroism. Woman’s role was to be one of the “many” getting “well loved.” They were to revolve (replaceably) about the hero, like the freshets of nubile bodies circling Sean Connery in James Bond movies, the favorite entertainment of Mailer’s “Superman” in the White House.
It may seem pointless to notice that John Kennedy had extramarital affairs. Politicians are not famous for fidelity. The male politician’s ego reaches out to manipulate others, to dominate; and with women that domination often takes a crude sexual form. Lyndon Johnson, for instance, tried to put his brand on everyone around him, and was colorfully direct about the nature of the branding iron used on women. But John Kennedy’s womanizing was different in both scale and intensity. It led him to take political and personal risks, from the time of Inga Arvad to that of Sam Giancana’s lover, Judith Campbell; risks even his father and brothers thought foolhardy. It would in time enmesh most of his entourage in a complex set of lies and cover-ups. And it seems never to have abated. Few politicians—much less Presidents—would candidly inform a Prime Minister of England that they get headaches if they go for long without a woman.
When Kennedy said that to Harold Macmillan, he was assuming his sister Kathleen’s view of the English attitude toward sex—an attitude celebrated in Kennedy’s favorite book, Cecil’s life of Melbourne: “‘I was afraid I was going to have the gout the other day,’ writes Lord Carlisle to a friend. ‘I believe I live too chaste: it is not a common fault with me.’ It was not a common fault with any of them. In fact, an unmarried man was thought unpleasantly queer if he did not keep under his protection some sprightly full-bosomed Kitty Clive or Mrs. Bellamy, whose embraces he repaid with a house in Montpelier Square, a box at the opera and a smart cabriolet in which to drive her down to Brighthelmstone for a week’s amorous relaxation.”
The sheer pace of Kennedy’s sex life, its serial and simultaneous variety, awed his friends and competitors. Rip Horton, a Choate friend who was with the teenage John Kennedy at his sexual initiation in a bordello, remembers what Congressman Kennedy’s bachelor pad was like in the fifties:
I went to his house in Georgetown for dinner. A lovely looking blonde from West Palm Beach joined us to go to a movie. After the movie we went back to the house, and I remember Jack saying something like, “Well, I want to shake this one. She has ideas.” Shortly thereafter, another girl walked in. Ted Reardon was there, so he went home and I went to bed figuring this was the girl for the night. The next morning, a completely different girl came wandering down for breakfast. They were a dime a dozen.
They were, in fact, so interchangeable he had trouble keeping them straight, according to Charlotte McDonnell: “I got a letter from Jack from the South Pacific. When I opened it up, I saw it wasn’t meant for me. He had written two letters and got the envelopes mixed up. The salutation was ‘Dearest—.’ She must have been some starlet.” Anthony Gallucio, a friend of Joseph Jr., who worked in John Kennedy’s campaign, told the Blairs:
The male side of the family were all like that. They came by it naturally—from the father, who chased anything in skirts. Girls would come around and Jack would get all excited. He was like a kid. He really liked girls. But it was just physical and social activity for him. He’d just keep moving. Italians get emotionally involved. But Kennedy never got emotionally involved. He’d sleep with a girl, and then he’d have Billy [Sutton] take her to the airport the next day.
Senator George Smathers of Florida, known as a ladies’ man himself, was Kennedy’s closest social friend on the Hill during their early Washington days. He says: “Jack liked girls. He liked girls very much. He came by it naturally. His daddy liked girls. He was a chaser.”
But according to the English tennis star Katherine Stammers, who dated Kennedy just after the war, Kennedy did not so much “like” girls as use them, at a fast turnover rate: “He really didn’t give a damn. He liked to have them around and he liked to enjoy himself, but he was quite unreliable. He did as he pleased. I think he was probably spoiled by women. I think he could snap his fingers and they’d come running.”
We have seen that his father tried to discourage a woman from marrying one of John Kennedy’s friends. The Blairs found that the son, too, tried to discourage others from getting married. And the wives of those already married resented his attempt to keep their husbands still “on the chase.” The wife of a Navy friend, James Reed, complained:
Jack would frequently ask Jim to parties—but not me! It was a male prowling thing and Jack couldn’t understand why Jim couldn’t leave me behind and prowl with him. Maybe this is acceptable in the “upper class” [her husband, too, called Kennedy’s attitude an aristocratic “English attitude”]. I think Jack felt this was being manly. But, it seemed to me, he had a contempt for women, possibly because of his father’s attitude toward women.
Friend after friend traces the speed of female turnover to a total lack of emotional involvement. Leonard Nikoloric, another Navy pal, said: “Girls were almost an obsession with him. We liked them too, but we didn’t make a career of it the way he did.” The journalist John White, who dated Kathleen Kennedy, told Herbert Parmet: “He was completely driven to dominate them. Once he got them, he lost interest and moved on to the next.” It is the classic Don Juan
attitude: by putting them on the list, you cross them out of existence. Conquest erases the conquered. In Montaigne’s words: “As soon as we can make them ours, we are no longer theirs.” The cancellation could take place so fast that a woman might well wonder if she was still there. Judith Campbell contrasts the active lovemaking of Frank Sinatra with Kennedy’s supine passivity:
I understood about the position he had to assume in lovemaking when his back was troubling him, but slowly he began excluding all other positions, until finally our lovemaking was reduced to this one position. It is impossible for me to pinpoint when I first realized it, because it was such a gradual process, but slowly I began to feel that he expected me to come into bed and just perform. There would be a moment of stillness when I came into bed and it was almost like he expected me to roll over and put my arms around him and make love to him.… I was there to service him.
Inga Arvad’s son heard the same complaint from her: “If he wanted to make love, you’d make love—now. They’d have fifteen minutes to get to a party and she’d say she didn’t want to. He’d look at his watch and say we’ve got ten minutes, let’s go. There was a certain amount of insensitiveness, an awful lot of self-centeredness.” He had this terrible itch that needed constant scratching, and the attention was on the itch, not on the replaceable scratchers. As Lord Rochester wrote of a profligate duchess:
She’ll still drudge on in tasteless vice
As if she sinn’d for exercise.
The crowded, compulsive schedule of Kennedy’s sex life went beyond that of most politicians, beyond even that of his father or brothers, though it was grounded in the father’s code. Charles Spalding, one of Kennedy’s closest friends, said:
He was always interested in seeing whether he had it or didn’t have it. Can I do it or can’t I do it? To me, that always accounted for a lot of the numbers, if you will. And the other thing I think is having a very, very strong father. All kids, I suppose, want to be better than their fathers. That’s part of the game. Mr. Kennedy was a very strong and also a very worldly fellow.