WAS JFK A BIGAMIST?
An explosive new book claims that the assassinated President had a secret fi rst wife
Daily Express Monday July 27 2015
THEY called it Camelot. President John F Kennedy and First Lady Jackie reigned over a seemingly idyllic White House, at the promised dawn of a new postwar America. Over half a century later, Kennedy’s reputation has been tarnished by countless revelations of illicit affairs with lovers from Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich to Mafi a moll Judith Campbell Exner. Even Jackie Kennedy, who would have celebrated her 86th birthday tomorrow, has been accused of fl ings with lovers including Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando and Paul Newman.
Now the last vestiges of respectability in their fabled marriage have been ripped away by a Kennedy family biographer who claims that JFK had a secret earlier marriage that never ended in divorce, that his “marriage” to Jackie was bigamous, and their children illegitimate.
“I’m sure this secret marriage happened,” says Jerry Oppenheimer, author of Ethel Kennedy biography The Other Mrs Kennedy, and whose new book RFK Jr: Robert F Kennedy, Jr And The Dark Side Of The Dream is published in September.
“John F Kennedy was a skirtchasing philanderer, and after a drunken party with a beautiful young girl they ran off and got married,” he suggests.
“What’s shocking is that there is no record of a divorce, which means that when he married Jacqueline Bouvier six years later, he was a bigamist.”
Florida socialite Durie Malcolm was the petite, glamorous blonde pursued, wooed and allegedly wed in 1947 by John F Kennedy – at that time just a fi rst- term Massachusetts congressman, but already being groomed for the White House.
Shocked by the impetuous marriage, JFK’s friend and confi - dante Charles Spalding told the young politician: “You must be nuts. You’re running for president and you’re running around getting married?”
A wealthy Chicago native and natural athlete, Durie Malcolm was twice divorced by the time she met JFK in Palm Beach, Florida.
Kennedy was infatuated with the sophisticated and worldly Durie, and rushed to the altar as “a bit of daring that went too far... the kind of joke that Durie would go for,” said Spalding.
“Durie was the perfect girl for Jack Kennedy,” says Oppenheimer. “She was a beautiful, sexy Palm Beach socialite, athletic – playing ice hockey and basketball with the guys – and loved sporting events. She chased men as much as they chased her. She was far more of a Kennedy woman that Jackie ever was.”
ANEW York society column in 1947 reported that JFK was likely to win Palm Beach’s “annual Oscar for achievement in the fi eld of romance” for giving Durie “the season’s outstanding rush”.
Questioned years later about their romance, Kennedy claimed that he and Durie had barely dated. JFK’s former lawyer Clark Clifford, in his memoir Counsel To The President, recalled Kennedy telling him him: “I think I had two dates with her. One may have been a dinner date in which we went dancing. The other, to my recollection, was a football game.”
But friends recall the lovebirds being inseparable in the winter of 1946 and the following spring, attending social functions and sporting events together, holding hands at football games and cheering together from the grandstand at horse races.
Booze and parties fuelled their whirlwind romance, and once, around two in the morning, they got the wild idea to tie the knot.
“There was a drunken party and they went off to a Justice of the Peace to get married,” JFK’s younger sister Eunice Kennedy told Spalding’s former wife Betty. That’s according to Pulitzer Prize- winning reporter Seymour Hersh, whose book The Dark Side Of Camelot exposed numerous skeletons rattling around the Kennedy clan’s cupboards.
JFK was infatuated but Durie “wouldn’t sleep” with him “unless he married her”, Eunice claimed.
But domineering family patriarch Joe Kennedy, who was already moulding JFK for a White House bid, had a “haemorrhage” when he learned of the secret marriage, Spalding is said to have revealed. “He demanded that it be taken care of.”
JFK sought a hasty retreat from the marriage, beginning by obliterating all trace of its existence, expunging all documents from public records.
“JFK sent his friend Charles Spalding and a lawyer to the courthouse to destroy all evidence of the marriage,” says Oppenheimer. The former archbishop of Boston and Kennedy family confi dante Richard Cushing told a Boston parish priest: “Kennedy was married before, but it got taken care of... the pages are torn out of the register.” Yet shockingly, no record of JFK’s divorce from Durie has ever been found.
Oppenheimer questions whether Jackie Bouvier, who “married” Kennedy in a high society wedding in 1953, “was the fi rst, or actually the second wife of President John Kennedy – or even married to him at all.”
In the hours after JFK’s assassination in November 1963, brother Robert scrambled to remove all incriminating from the White House.
“Bobby Kennedy knew the White House fi les could destroy JFK’s reputation,” says Oppenheimer. J Edgar Hoover, the Machiavellian FBI director notorious for using classifi ed information against his enemies, evidently had his own fi les on JFK’s secret marriage, perhaps infl uencing Kennedy’s fi rst decision as president- elect: to reappoint Hoover as FBI chief.
The clandestine nuptials might have remained secret, had not amateur genealogist Louis Blauvelt published his family tree dating back to 1638 and encompassing distant relations including Durie Malcolm, noting her third marriage to “John F Kennedy, son of Joseph P Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England”. JFK’s enemies began investigating.
Dfi les URIE reportedly signed an affi davit swearing that she had never married Kennedy – though this document was never seen – and attorney general Robert Kennedy warned an inquisitive Look magazine reporter: “You print that story and I’ll end up owning Look magazine.” Jackie Kennedy, who died of cancer in 1994 aged 64, reportedly smiled broadly as JFK dismissed rumours of an earlier marriage.
Twice- divorced Durie married twice more after her romance with JFK: fi rst to wealthy Palm Beach socialite Thomas Shevlin, and then moving to Britain to wed the son of a retired major in the Coldstream Guards. But several relatives of Shevlin, claim that her marriage to Kennedy was common knowledge within the family.
And Shevlin’s fi rst wife Lorraine – who went on to marry Kentucky senator John Cooper, a good friend of the Kennedys – recalled how at a dinner party the President “would laugh and say: ‘ Lorraine and I are related by marriage’”.
Whatever the legal status of their relationship, John F Kennedy certainly found one of his most loyal confi dantes in Durie Malcolm. She branded rumours of their secret marriage “absolutely false and ridiculous,” and insisted: “I wouldn’t have married Jack Kennedy for all the tea in China. I don’t care for those Irish micks, and old Joe was a terrible man.” She took her secret to the grave, dying in 2008 aged 91.
“Knowing JFK as we do today, it’s not so shocking that he would marry for a lark,” says Oppenheimer. “What’s shocking is that with no record of a divorce, his marriage to Jackie would have been bigamous. As her birthday approaches, that’s not something she’d have celebrated.”