JFK’s White House harem
Hollywood stars. Call girls. Two secretaries called Fiddle and Faddle. Even Jackie’s sister — the priapic President slept with them all. But, as a new cache of private notes reveals, he was terrified of being exposed
JOHN F. KeNNeDY wasn’t really picky about the women who made up his ‘conga line’ of paramours. From Hollywood stars to White House secretaries — including a pair known as Fiddle and Faddle — interns, Mafia molls, strippers and call girls, for the libidinous President it was all about the sex.
As he confided to British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan: ‘If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get a terrible headache.’
However, he was not only a prolific womaniser but a prodigious scribbler, and now newly uncovered notes from the 1960 election campaign trail reveal just how his voracious sexual appetites weighed on his mind.
In the scrawled messages to aides — he developed laryngitis and was ordered not to speak — the soon-to-be President fretted that they might cost him the election.
‘I got into the blondes,’ he confided in a note on one of 98 pages being sold by a private collector via a Texas auction house next month.
Fearing that opponents might expose his philandering, JFK — seven years into his marriage to Jackie — added: ‘I suppose they are going to hit me with something before we are finished.’ In another message, employing the word ‘poon’ (American slang for vagina) he crudely speculated: ‘I suppose that if I win, my poon days are over.’
Hardly. According to JFK, his father, a former U.S. ambassador to Britain, had instructed his sons to ‘get laid as often as possible’ and he certainly tried to follow that advice. The Kennedy White House was far removed from the image of perfect-young-family bliss that he and Jackie tried to project.
In what one chronicler of his love life called a ‘bimbo eruption’, JFK — 43 when he became President — exploited his wife’s frequent absences from Washington and his own busy travel schedule to cheat on her at every very opportunity. His defenders note that t no woman ever accused him of rape or sexual xual assault — but then, nor did many of Harvey rvey Weinstein’s accusers until recently. ently. Certainly, Kennedy’s charisma, sma, film-star looks and power, together ether with the very different sexual xual dynamics of those days, allowed wed him to get away with behaviour iour that would cause outrage today. ay.
He met his most famous ‘blonde’, de’, Marilyn Monroe, in 1962 at ta a New York dinner party, greeting ing her with the words: ‘ Finally! ly! You’re here.’
He invited her to join him in Palm Springs, California, the following olhis month — adding that his wife wouldn’t be there.
They spent a weekend at Bing ng Crosby’s house and that, according das to some sources, was as far as the affair went, although Monroe e was besotted.
She reportedly wrote to Jackie e telling her that she intended to o become First Lady.
Fine, Jackie replied: ‘ Marry him. I’ll move out and you’ll have all the problems.’
In September 1963, Kennedy seduced the iconic German actress Marlene Dietrich, a former mistress of his domineering father Joe, who was also a serial philanderer. JFK made what she called a ‘clumsy pass’ in a White House bedroom and wasn’t deterred when Dietrich told him that, at 60, ‘Mr President, I’m not very young’.
THE encounter lasted 20 minutes before the President fell asleep.Dietrich shook him awake to ask how to get out of the White House.
Sometimes he was quicker. The actress Angie Dickinson called sex with Kennedy ‘ the most exciting seven minutes of my life’.
According to biographer Christopher Andersen, JFK worked his way through a sizeable chunk of Hollywood’s leading ladies.
even Audrey Hepburn was reportedly a notch on the Kennedy bedpost during regular visits to the White House. The My Fair Lady star had what Andersen called ‘a very sexy, very naughty side that the public never saw’.
Other actresses to fall for the Kennedy charm included 22-yearold Lee Remick and voluptuous Swede Anita ekberg.
While the British-born film star Jean Simmons was filming in Boston, she said, JFK ‘practically broke down’ her hotel room door to demand sex with her.
As for Sophia Loren, then 24, Florida senator George Smathers said he initially approached the sultry actress on his friend’s behalf. JFK rarely failed, said Smathers — ‘he just would not take no for an answer’. But he didn’t succeed with Loren, who turned him down twice.
With most women it was simply sex, but Kennedy apparently fell in love with one of his mistresses. Swedish socialite Gunilla von Post was 21 and JFK was 36 when they met on the French Riviera. They spent the evening flirting, only for r him to reveal that he was marrying g Jackie in three weeks. They met t again two years later and ended up p in bed. JFK was smitten and rang g his father to say he wanted to get a divorce and marry Gunilla. Joe told d him he’d destroy his career if he did, , and the affair ended there and then. .
Other old friendships were e rekindled when JFK became e President. Married socialite Mary y Pinchot Meyer, who had first met t him at a school dance, visited the e White House for trysts.
When she died in a mystery execution-style shooting on a Washington street in 1964, some claimed that officials had ordered her death to stop her influencing the President with her support for pacifism and mind-bending drugs.
Meyer wasn’t the most controversial of his lovers, though. That title goes to Judith exner, who had links to the Mafia. She was introduced to
JFK by Frank Sinatra, with whom she was also sleeping. Exner, who went on to be mistress of the Sicilian-American mobster Sam Giancana, says she first met Kennedy in 1960 in Las Vegas.
She recalled feeling how he focused on her ‘ as if every nerve and muscle in his whole body was poised at attention’.
She also claimed she became the ‘bagwoman’ ferrying money from
Kennedy to Giancana to secure election votes. This has been widely discredited, although her insistence that they had a two-year affair while he was in the White House is supported by phone records and official documents. Exner also said she had an abortion, which seems likely given Kennedy kept the details of a doctor who performed terminations — then illegal — in his Rolodex. It was Exner who revealed that JFK had prostitutes brought to the White House for naked pool parties. One call-girl guest was ‘Elizabeth Taylor lookalike’ Ellen Rometsch, an East German emigre and former Communist Party member who visited the White House for sex with the President several times in 1963. His brother Bobby, the attorney general, later had her deported, fearing she could harm
JFK’s re-election campaign. But nobody could stop Blaze Starr, a buxom red- headed stripper dubbed ‘The Hottest Blaze in Burlesque’, blabbing, although she waited until 1989 before revealing that JFK had been ‘very quick and very wild’ in the sack.
‘He knew exactly what he was doin’ with the girls, so it didn’t take him long,’ she said. ‘No, that bad back [the result of a wartime injury] didn’t faze him.’
Starr said she had met JFK in 1954 when he started visiting her Maryland strip club, but didn’t get a White House invitation until 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis intervened and put paid to their planned tryst there.
Prostitutes weren’t the only way Kennedy could have access to women without leaving the White House. He put them on the staff.
Fiddle and Faddle were the cheeky Secret Service codenames for White House secretaries Priscilla Wear and Jill Cowen. Both did little office work — they couldn’t type — but managed a fair amount of skinny- dipping in the pool with the President.
Jackie Kennedy certainly knew about them, once passing Wear’s desk with a Paris Match reporter and remarking in French: ‘This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband.’
If she had known the same was true of Pamela Turnure, JFK’s secretary when he was a senator, Jackie would surely not have agreed to his request to make Turnure her own press secretary in the White House. During a relationship stretching between 1961 and 1963, Turnure — a 21-year-old — would reportedly sleep with the President when her boss was away.
Kennedy liked women who resembled his wife but were, in the words of Parisian brothel-keeper Madame Claude, sexier than Jackie. Claude said she provided him with such a prostitute during the 1961 tour when Jackie wowed Paris and won over President de Gaulle. JFK quipped: ‘I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.’
But JFK showed little respect for his wife in his philandering. Mimi Alford, an innocent 19-year- old press office intern, said that, having got her tipsy on cocktails, Kennedy took her virginity in the First Lady’s bedroom. Jackie didn’t enjoy sex, he told her.
They had an 18-month affair during which she always called him ‘Mr President’, and even had sex on Air Force One.
Yet JFK’s worse betrayal of his wife allegedly involved her sister, Lee. According to two people in their inner circle, the two slept with each other one night while their families were holidaying together, soon after Jackie had given birth to their daughter Caroline.
JFK wasn’t — as he so feared — ruined by his compulsive womanising. But it would have been no less than he deserved.