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.”
President John F. Kennedy and family in Hyannis Port
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 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 12 years, through most of the Great 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, “Don’t you see it?” (He also was a sleepwalker.)
In 1916 he began an affair with Lucy Mercer, who was originally hired as Eleanor’s secretary. Lucy came from a Social Register family which had suffered financial reverses. Stately, with a rich, velvety voice, she had an air of mystery and elegance about her. She accompanied Franklin (without Eleanor) on a weekend yacht cruise up the Potomac, and the two of them registered one night as man and wife at a Virginia Beach motel. When Eleanor wrote him letters reflecting her suspicions of why he chose to remain in Washington while she was at Campobello, their summer place in Canada, he answered ingenuously, “I really can’t stand that house all alone without you, and you were a goosy girl to think or even pretend to think that I don’t want you here all the summer, because you know I do!”
When Franklin returned from a trip to Europe as assistant secretary of the navy in 1918, he was ill with pneumonia. Eleanor sorted his incoming mail for him and found Lucy’s love letters. In a family conference, with Sara Roosevelt present, Eleanor offered him his freedom, but they decided to stay together, perhaps for political reasons, on the proviso that Franklin never see Lucy again. In 1920 Lucy married, but much later, shortly before Franklin’s death, they met without Eleanor’s knowledge, though probably not for sexual intimacy. Lucy, along with several other people, was with Franklin at Warm Springs when he died. Eleanor wasn’t.
According to most sources, Franklin and Eleanor, who had never kissed before their marriage, stopped having sexual relations sometime between 1916 and 1918. Their relationship was cool, though not without affection. James Roosevelt, their son, recalls an incident where “she went to father and said simply, ‘Hall [her brother] has died.’ Father struggled to her side and put his arm around her. ‘Sit down,’ he said, so tenderly I can still hear it. And he sank down beside her and hugged her and kissed her and held her head to his chest….” Franklin’s pet name for her was Babs, which meant baby; in the latter part of their marriage he called her “my missus,” usually with pride.
In 1923 Missy LeHand, 23 years old and somewhat good-looking, became his secretary. She went everywhere with him, waited on him, and was probably in love with him. On more than one occasion, while they were cruising on the Larooco, the Roosevelt houseboat, she was seen sitting on his lap. When Eleanor was away, Missy acted as hostess for Franklin; she was his companion, listener, conscience. One Roosevelt son, Elliott, believes she was Franklin’s mistress; his son James does not. At 41 Missy was felled by a stroke, which left her without speech. In despair she swallowed chicken bones in an abortive suicide attempt. For a while she lived at the White House, and Franklin wheeled himself into her room often to see her. In his will he left her half the income from his estate to pay her medical bills. Though she died before he did, he did not change his will.
Other women named as FDR’s possible lovers were Dorothy Schiff, once owner and publisher of the New York Post, and Princess Martha of Norway, who lived in the U.S. during WWII and called him “dear godfather” at his request. Roosevelt was certainly capable of sexual activity in spite of his paralysis. In 1932 three doctors testified to that in writing: “No symptoms of impotentia coeundi [inability to copulate].”
HER SEX LIFE: To compensate for her loneliness and to fulfill her need for human warmth, Eleanor undertook a relationship of her own. In 1932 she met Associated Press reporter and possible lesbian Lorena Hickok, to whom, over the next 30 years, she wrote more than 2,300 letters, a few passionate. For example, shortly after the Roosevelts moved into the White House, she wrote: “Hick darling, … Oh, I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn’t be wearing it.” On Nov. 27, 1933, the First Lady penned: “Dear one, and so you think they gossip about us, well they must at least think we stand separations rather
well! I am always so much more optimistic than you are—I suppose because I care so little what ‘they’ say.” A few weeks later Lorena received this note: “Dear, I’ve been trying today to bring back your face—to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of reassuring smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips. I wonder what we’ll do when we meet—what we’ll say. Well, I’m rather proud of us, aren’t you? I think we’ve done rather well.” Drawn together by a mutual sense of unattractiveness (Lorena wore her hair in a bun and was overweight) and humanitarian causes, they may have become lovers. At least one Roosevelt scholar, Rhoda Lerman, discounts the idea, but Lorena Hickok did live at the White House for four years, and Eleanor always made sure she was financially secure.
HIS THOUGHTS: “Nothing is more pleasing to the eye than a good-looking lady, nothing is more refreshing to the spirit than the company of one, nothing more flattering to the ego than the affection of one.”
—A.E.
WORLD LEADERS
The Jewish Lion
BENJAMIN DISRAELI (Dec. 21, 1804-Apr. 19, 1881)
HIS FAME: One of Britain’s greatest statesmen, Disraeli served in Parliament for 30 years and twice became Queen Victoria’s prime minister (1868; 1874-1880). His domestic and foreign policies, implemented by debate and oration, eventually led to the founding of the United Kingdom’s present-day Conservative party.
The Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People Page 49