The Sexual Education of a Beauty Queen

by Taylor Marsh

  Politicians are often complicit in their fantasy portrayals that the media foist on us. John F. Kennedy himself worked hard to create the 1950s image of marriage by hiring Richard Avedon to capture them in his photo book, The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family. The photo session happened on January 3, 1961 and was written about in Vanity Fair in 2007. The story “As Camelot Began…” was written by Kennedy historian Robert Dallek, whose book on John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life, is arguably the most revealing in history, especially on the seriousness of JFK’s medical condition and the medicine cabinet filled with drugs he took to keep himself alive and highly functioning. A total of seventeen Avedon photographs appeared in the February 1962 issues of Harper’s Bazaar and Look, though many more were taken. Richard Avedon told Newsweek after the photos were published, “When I took Caroline’s picture with her father, he was dictating memos to his secretary. When I’d ask him to look around, he’d stop dictating. But the moment I finished, he’d start in where he left off.”

  Ronald Wilson Reagan’s image was pure Hollywood myth, a casting director’s dream, along with his marriage to Nancy Reagan, which was a great love affair. He had none of the grit revealed through Kennedy’s World War II heroism, which led to JFK’s great skepticism about war and the upper echelon military brass. The steel exhibited through Reagan’s physical persona was manufactured marketing to make him the man he was to the public. The perfect actor was cast as president, which worked. Few people today discuss the generation of men lost to AIDS through Reagan’s indifference, his multiple, even historic, tax hikes, or his crimes during Iran-Contra, which are part of history. Reagan built his pitch and his fan base by traveling the country as a front man for General Electric, honing his political patter one slick stump speech at a time, that is, until his bosses got wind and fired him. It’s impossible to imagine John F. Kennedy as a G.E. spokesman, but then, imagining J.F.K. as the faithful husband, as Ronnie was to Nancy, is an equally ridiculous exercise.

  JFK’s legacy includes the established craft of a politician working the media and concocting a public persona based on what he wanted the American people to believe, which hid many secrets. It’s what encourages voters to have a cult-like fascination with our presidents, which makes their celebrity more important than anything else. Considering John F. Kennedy was first a prince-in-waiting, it’s very likely that looking at Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in the early 1950s, what he saw was a woman with the breeding and image of the Perfect America Wife.

  Of course, she was also cultured, beautiful and fascinating. Ruthless, too, especially when it came to JFK’s image after his death. The widowed Mrs. Kennedy was not only shrewdly focused on her husband’s legacy, but brutal when comparing him to his older brother Joe Kennedy Jr., who was being groomed before JFK to run for president but was killed in WWII. In the 1964 interviews with Mrs. Kennedy, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. asked whether the stories were true that Joseph P. Kennedy, the family patriarch, “expected Joe to be the great political figure of the family.” Mrs. Kennedy’s answer is revealing: “I’ve got a feeling, from what I think of Joe and everything, that he would have been so unimaginative, compared to Jack. He would never have — I think he probably would have gotten to be senator, and not much higher. I don’t know if that’s prejudiced, but I don’t think he had any of the sort of imagination that Jack did.”

  This wasn’t just a widow talking, though one can only imagine the crushing loss she felt. Mrs. Kennedy knew that in these interviews, which would become the last she’d speak of him or their life together, she was establishing John F. Kennedy’s legacy. Her assessment of Jack’s older brother was biting, while elevating her slain president husband. This all came from an educated journalist who knew what she was doing. She also had to learn from watching Jack.

  This was a woman who had written since high school and in 1951 had entered a Vogue Prix de Paris contest, which required, according to a FirstLadies.org biography, “an original theme for an entire issue, illustrations, articles, layout and design, an advertising campaign that could be tied into the issue’s content.” Out of 1280 entries, she’d won, but her mother wouldn’t let her leave the country or accept the other part of the prize, which was becoming a junior editor for Vogue. Subsequently, before marrying JFK, she also worked for the Washington Times-Herald as its Inquiring Camera Girl, earning $42.50 per week, interviewing local citizens. Her first subject was Pat Nixon, with Richard M. Nixon eventually also becoming a subject, as did her future husband, John F. Kennedy. The former first lady knew how to craft a story and likely also knew her audience would be fully trusting of the mythology she was crafting, which purposefully elevated Jack above all others.

  Jack and Jackie became who they were because their glamour played so well in the television era. The style and radiant hope they emitted through the television screen further attached people to the couple. Meanwhile, the media world had been invested in the image of the perfect wife and husband, so once Jack and Jackie were crowned America’s answer to royalty, to say it was an inconvenience that Betty Friedan was blowing a whistle on all that Jacqueline Kennedy embodied is an understatement.

  The Kennedy bubble allowed First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy the privilege of crafting her image through activities that kept her well away from politics, which was odd considering it was the early 1960s, when American culture was shifting underneath them. Mrs. Kennedy became the first lady of the White House to have a press secretary. It was an era when politicians were still granted privacy, which allowed her also to escape the humiliation and scandal that would have embroiled the Kennedy legacy and made the creation of the Camelot myth impossible. It’s likely one reason she never spoke on the record again after her taped conversations with historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Mrs. Kennedy Onassis had no intention of answering questions that would open and allow a rewrite on the Camelot book she’d closed.

  Jacqueline Kennedy was not oblivious to her reality, which is why she fled the White House whenever she could. She knew about all of her husband’s extramarital escapades and at times made sure people knew she wasn’t stupid. When talking with a reporter from Paris Match during a tour of the White House, Mrs. Kennedy shifted into French and said, “This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.” She was referring to one of the infamous Fiddle and Faddle girls, who played sex games with the president on the White House grounds on innumerable occasions.

  Jacqueline lived with her husband’s womanizing and compartmentalized it to make his presidency what it remains today. Mrs. Kennedy’s active role constructs the most impossibly tortured picture of a marriage you can get, at the start of the sexual revolution. That it manifested in an era when American culture, the U.S. media and JFK himself were complicit in the fantasy, is part of the spellbinding story of these two complicated creatures who draw us in to their epic historical drama every time the era is revisited.

  What Arthur Schlesinger described as “reciprocal forbearance” read much more like the misogyny that typified the age of the feminine mystique. Jacqueline Kennedy played out the role for women across America so they could see what they were supposed to be doing. But just like Mrs. Kennedy, with her injections that were the equivalent of speed, many women who came of marrying age in the era of the 1950s and 1960s were masquerading as happy on the outside, while doing what was ex-pected and taking pills to get through the day, because American society had written a script that didn’t come with choices.

  The Kennedys miniseries, which was picked up by Reelz because Kennedy loyalists — Democrats and others — pitched a fit and got the History Channel to dump it, went into detail about Jackie’s indulgence of amphetamine-laced shots from John F. Kennedy’s physician, Dr. Max Jacobson. Jace Lacob, who covered the miniseries for The Daily Beast, wrote that even the whitewashing of The Kennedys went through its own scrubbing. One of the lines Lacob reports was cut from the miniseries is John F. Kennedy saying, “I love lobster, but not every night. If I don’t have some strange
ass every couple of days, I get migraines.” It doesn’t comport with the public image of JFK’s eloquence, but why should we care if we learn something about the man? It doesn’t make his leadership during the Cuban Missile Crisis any less impressive. A line given to Jackie in the original screenplay, according to Lacob, painted a picture of the much-admired first lady that nobody wants known, beginning with the fact that she wanted to divorce Jack due to his philandering. Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., offers to pay her a million dollars, which makes it into the miniseries The Kennedys, but what was scrubbed was Mrs. Kennedy’s worry about getting an STD, to which Joe Sr. replies that if it happens, she can “name her price.”

  Can’t have the wife of a legendary president revealing herself as someone who knew what was going on and had no intention of risking her quality of life for a man whose obsession with mortality could take her with him. People like to bubble-wrap their heroes.

  Just like other American women of the time, Jacqueline Kennedy wasn’t satisfied sexually either. “He just goes too fast and falls asleep,” she’s quoted by Bedell Smith as saying. If only we could ask Judith Exner, who was bedding both mobster Sam Giancana and Kennedy, even if the latter couldn’t remember the names of many of the women he slept with.

  When Exner died, not even the venerable New York Times could bear to tell it like it actually was and what Exner asserted with enough details to prove she was telling the truth. It resulted in the Times having to print an Editors’ Note apology, because they’d doubted Exner’s story and omitted what had been proven by the FBI:

  September 30, 1999, Thursday — An obituary on Monday reported the death of Judith Campbell Exner. It quoted assertions she had made over the years that she had had an affair with John F. Kennedy before and after he was elected President. The article reported that aides of President Kennedy’s, including Dave Powers, denied the affair. But it should also have reflected what is now the view of a number of respected historians and authors that the affair did in fact take place. The evidence cited by various authorities in recent years has included White House phone logs and memos from J. Edgar Hoover.

  Thirty-five years after John F. Kennedy’s death, what once was the paper of record in America still has trouble reporting the facts in a woman’s obituary, because she’s talking about an affair she had with President Kennedy. There were scores of such women, but few held a position with Kennedy equal to that of Exner, who got the last word, backed by J. Edgar Hoover no less, something that had to make the tortured FBI megalomaniac gleeful from beyond.

  The year before The Feminine Mystique was published, Mimi Alford was a nineteen-year-old virgin intern when she claims to have had an affair with President John F. Kennedy. She recounts the details in Once Upon a Secret: My Affair With President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath. She even serviced JFK’s friends. Writing about the book for The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan describes Mimi’s relationship with Kennedy this way: “The president schooled Mimi in all the skills a mistress must know, from performing fellatio to making scrambled eggs.”

  It wasn’t until 1975, after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had raised her children and her second husband had died, that she returned to New York City and began her career as a consulting editor. As Vanity Fair reported in an excerpt from Greg Lawrence’s book, Jackie as Editor: The Literary Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, she’d admitted to one of her friends, “I have always lived through men. Now I realize I can’t do that anymore.” Of course she could; after all, she was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who could do anything she wanted. However, she chose something else. As the story goes, Letitia Baldridge suggested she talk to her publisher at Viking, Tommy Guinzburg, whom she’d know for twenty years.

  The job at Viking turned into drama, when a book with a plot line about an assassination of the America president was published and Jackie got caught between the Kennedy family and Guinzburg. Assuming she’d been involved in the publishing of the book, a New York Times review called the book “trash,” and said, “anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.” Jackie resigned through her social secretary, which was a statement in itself about the rarified world of Mrs. Kennedy Onassis. Not long afterward, she landed at Doubleday, where she would shepherd Michael Jackson’s memoir Moonwalk to print, which would take four agonizing and drama-filled years.

  “If you produce one book, you will have done something wonderful in your life,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis once said, and if that applies to anyone, it does to her. She also stated that it “helped me to be taken seriously as an editor, for my own abilities.”

  Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy was an educated woman at a time when “togetherness” was being sold to the American female, with pictures of the perfect marriage and blissful homemaking life filling the media; when women weren’t seen fit to have any thought but marriage and home life, which wasn’t making them happy. The myth of feminine mystique was that this was all women required. Nothing outside the home could possibly make her a real woman. If she dared show interest in the world, the next thing that would happen is she’d lose her man to a woman who was content with her femininity. Again, the secret was to just be.

  I’ve studied and researched John F. Kennedy, written and produced a one-woman show about him that includes Jacqueline Kennedy, too, so I know the personal flaws of the man made public. Regardless of his human weaknesses, Kennedy earned his enduring image and public importance through his words and intentions, much of which Lyndon Johnson made manifest. The JFK mythology is sewn into our history, which Jacqueline Kennedy played the instrumental role in creating, even knowing that the truth never matched the myth. It was JFK’s vision of America and what we can help make the world — not his personal, sexual compulsions — which crystallized what our country is supposed to stand for in the modern era.

  The gorgeous, sophisticated and educated Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and the raised-for-greatness war hero John F. Kennedy had to happen in the era of the feminine mystique. It’s not a coincidence. They epitomized the model male and female of the moment, when WWII was shifting our culture and re-crafting the American woman into a happy homemaker with all of the appliances she needs to be the perfect wife and mother. While magazines screamed what women should be, Jackie’s American hero husband seduced the world. The politics of sex embraced Jack and Jackie, who exuded desire, romance, sex and power, and became the embodied dream of the perfect American marriage.

  According to Betty Friedan’s research, by the end of the 1950s “the average marriage age of women in America dropped to twenty, and was still dropping, into the teens.”

  In the early 1960s the Kennedys were dreamily ensconced in the White House at the same time Friedan was interviewing women who were so disconsolate that they were seeking out doctors for “the problem that has no name.” That was Friedan’s label; doctors were naming it “the housewife’s syndrome,” aka “occupation: housewife.” It plagued women who supposedly had everything, but had “blocks,” as Friedan reported it, to “fulfillment as a wife and mother.”

  In June 1960, a New York Times story reported, “The road from Freud to Frigidaire, from Sophocles to Spock, has turned out to be a bumpy one.” That same year, a Time cover blared the opposite in, “The Suburban Wife, an American Phenomenon.” Inside, the story characterized these women as, “Having too good a time… to believe that they should be unhappy.” Newsweek, in March 1960, was more nuanced: “She is dissatisfied with a lot that women of other lands can only dream of.” On the article went, quoting Freud’s famous dictum, “Anatomy is destiny,” while critiquing a woman’s discontent just years before Betty Friedan would document it, and going beyond what Kinsey would say, that women are sexual, to proving that women are also individuals with brains and thoughts and cares about life outside the home and motherhood.

  Redbook weighed in, which Friedan cited, too: “Few women would want to thumb their noses at husbands, children and community and go off on their own. Those who do may
be talented individuals, but they rarely are successful women.” Look reported that the “more than twenty-one million American women who are single, widowed, or divorced do not cease even after fifty their frenzied, desperate search for a man.”

  It was rarely digested that the people assigning and editing these articles were men. Today, according to a study by the women’s literary organization VIDA that looks at the publication trends by gender, the amount of men who get bylines, have their books reviewed, or are assigned essays, towers over the number of women getting the same opportunities. Whether you’re talking about the Atlantic, the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, the Times Literary Supplement, or other publications, with the notable exception of the Paris Review, men have more literary light shone on their work than women. Slate.com covering the VIDA study in February 2011, wrote, “VIDA’s study raises questions about how seriously women writers are taken and how viable it is for them to make a living at writing.” By March 2013, VIDA revealed it wasn’t much better.

  Into this mix, throw in the most famous actress in the world, Marilyn Monroe, whose love affair with John F. Kennedy made the myth of the man even stronger. Hers was the ultimate tale of the sexual woman about to turn into parable.

  Written about in innumerable books, the affair between Kennedy and Monroe played out at the Hollywood home of Patricia and Peter Lawford, who were JFK’s sister and brother-in-law. JFK was Mr. America, Marilyn Monroe the goddess he’d earned. Their union came at the beginning of the decade that would represent a sexual explosion, as our country began convulsing.

  Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, in his book The Dark Side of Camelot, reveals a fascinating detail that has gotten lost over the years. After Monroe’s death, the head of the medical legal section of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office, John Miner, was given special confidential access to a psychiatric “stream-of-consciousness tape recording” of Monroe, which Hersh reports in the book was recommended by her psychoanalyst, Dr. Ralph Greenson. Miner’s transcript of Monroe’s tape was made available to Hersh for publication in his book, after Greenson’s family gave their permission.