These Few Precious Days (24 page)

JFK spent much of the evening teasing his wife. “Are you
sure
you did the right thing?” he asked, glancing over at the young empress. “You know, she’s pretty good-looking, Jackie . . . I bet her clothes bill is even more than yours.”

If there was a competition brewing between Farah Diba and Jackie, at least eighteen-month-old John left no doubts as to where he stood. When the Shabanou bent down to hand the little boy a daffodil, John shouted “No!” and pulled away. Nanny Shaw was mortified. Mom, apparently not so much.

Jackie had come to dread the first half of May, and with reason. These two weeks, more than any other, were packed with back-to-back breakfasts, lunches, teas, receptions, and ceremonies—a schedule that would, in Theodore White’s words, “have floored lesser mortals.”

After hosting a diplomatic reception and then sitting through lunches held in her honor by the Congressional Club and the Senate Ladies Red Cross, Jackie headed to the U.S. Navy submarine base in Groton, Connecticut, to christen the nuclear sub
Lafayette
before hosting a luncheon for the Norwegian prime minister the following day.

BY MID-MAY, JACKIE FELT SHE
had earned the right to flee to Virginia—ostensibly to indulge her true passion by competing in the Loudoun Hunt horse show. In truth, she was escaping the possibility of being humiliated on national television.

To celebrate the president’s upcoming forty-fifth birthday, a gala Democratic Party fund-raiser was held at New York’s Madison Square Garden on May 19, 1962. More than fifteen thousand party faithful showed up at the televised event to be entertained by the varied likes of Peggy Lee, Jack Benny, Ella Fitzgerald, Maria Callas, Jimmy Durante, and Harry Belafonte.

The president’s wife had planned to be there for the star-studded celebration as well. But when she learned that the evening’s entertainment also included an appearance by Marilyn Monroe, Jackie opted for the Virginia countryside. Taking her mind off the spectacle unfolding in New York by focusing on the competition, Jackie won a third-place ribbon riding Minbreno, a horse she co-owned with her hunt country neighbor Eve Fout.

Jackie had not retreated to Virginia before taking some precautions. Before departing, she made sure Rose, Ethel, and Jack’s sisters Eunice and Pat were going to encircle JFK on the dais. “I suppose that way,” Gore Vidal observed, “it looked a little less like the presidential stag party it was.”

After Marilyn missed several cues to make her entrance—the star kept people waiting as a way to build tension and anticipation—master of ceremonies Peter Lawford intoned, “Mr. President, the
late
Marilyn Monroe.”

The throng exploded with cheers when Marilyn, bundled in white ermine, suddenly materialized beneath a spotlight. Foggy from pills (talking to her later that evening was “as if talking to someone under water,” Schlesinger observed), Marilyn shed her furs to reveal a shimmering, flesh-toned gown that she had literally been sewn into moments before. Monroe later said she was dressed in “skin and beads,” but Adlai Stevenson, for one, claimed he “didn’t see the beads!” None of this was a surprise to Jack; the hair-obsessed president had even lent Marilyn his stylist, who blew up her platinum bouffant into an exaggerated flip.

Standing at the microphone, perhaps the greatest screen sex goddess of all time was suddenly seized by stage fright. “By God,” she later confessed thinking to herself, “I’ll sing this song if it’s the last thing I ever do.” Jack smiled broadly as Marilyn finally launched into her seductive, breathy version of the birthday song—“Happy Birthday, Mr.
Pres-i-dent
”—and a giant cake was wheeled out. “I can now retire from politics,” JFK announced with Marilyn standing beside him, “after having ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”

Even by JFK’s own standards, this moment, played out before a national audience, appeared incomprehensibly reckless. Yet Kennedy knew that, at least in the case of Marilyn, it was best to simply hide in plain sight. “At the time,” Salinger said, “it was just inconceivable. Remember, this is way before Ronald Reagan. Americans put the President of the United States in one box and a big movie star like Marilyn Monroe in another. I know I did.”

Salinger, who had virtually unrestricted access to JFK in the West Wing, conceded that he heard gossip but insisted that he “could honestly say I never caught him with another woman.” He also admitted that he assumed the president was unfaithful because he kept pressing his press secretary to cheat on his wife. “So,” Salinger concluded, “I took that to mean he was having affairs, too.” Those “dalliances,” said Tish Baldrige, were “kept hidden . . . I hadn’t the slightest inkling that anything was going on. None of us did. We were all just doing our jobs and, in retrospect, I guess we were ridiculously naive.”

It wasn’t just White House staff members who were kept in the dark. “I never saw any evidence of Jack’s cheating,” Charlie Bartlett said. “He hid his infidelity completely.” Similarly, Ben Bradlee wrote years later that he and Tony “were always able to say we knew of no evidence, none.”

Incredibly, the Washington press corps, for decades assumed to have actively shielded JFK from scandal, was also apparently unaware of Jack’s extramarital shenanigans. “I was right there every day,” UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas said, “and I didn’t know a thing. Period.” CBS correspondent Charles Collingwood, a particular favorite of the Kennedys, claimed he “never heard a word spoken about JFK cheating on his wife—not a word,” while
Washington Star
columnist Betty Beale said the press was “totally in the dark. I mean
totally.
” Legendary CBS producer Fred Friendly conceded that “John F. Kennedy had pretty much the whole world under his spell and the press was no exception. The bottom line is that they didn’t
want
to find out anything unflattering about the President so they didn’t go looking for it. But you really didn’t dig into people’s private lives in those days. It was such a different time then . . .”

It helped that Jack, perhaps more than any other president, had a genius for compartmentalizing his life—putting Jackie and the children in one cubicle, White House staffers in another, his Kennedy relatives in another, Administration officials in another, the press in another, close personal friends in yet another, and his lovers each in a compartment of their own. “I do not remember everything about him,” Ted Sorensen said, “because I never
knew
everything about him. No one did.”

That evening after the Madison Square Garden birthday gala, the president was among one hundred guests at a party thrown in his honor at the East Sixty-ninth Street home of United Artists chief Arthur Krim. Early on, Jack and his friend Bill Walton watched from their perch on a staircase as Marilyn, who had never been introduced to Bobby before, pressed the attorney general up against the wall. Bobby “didn’t know what to do or where to look,” said Walton, who along with Jack was “rocking with laughter” the whole time.

Marilyn’s precarious mental state became more apparent when Walton stumbled upon her standing in front of a bedroom window, entertaining guards positioned on the rooftop of an adjoining building with a “naked erotic dance. I couldn’t believe it!”

Marilyn ducked into Jack’s limousine and accompanied him back to the Carlyle just seven blocks uptown, entering the hotel through the garage. This was one of only several ways Jack learned to get in and out of his New York base of operations undetected.

Early in the 1960 campaign, when he gave his Secret Service detail the slip, agents had realized JFK was using a secret underground passageway beneath the Carlyle to call on some of Manhattan’s most desirable socialites in townhouses just a few blocks away. Chuck Spalding tagged along on several of Jack’s subterranean adventures, which he called “bizarre.” Flashlights in hand, Spalding and the president trudged through the passageway while agents consulted their underground maps. The president and his detail, Spalding theorized, “got a kick out of the cloak-and-dagger aspect of it.”

The night Jack spent with Marilyn following his famous Madison Square Garden birthday party would be their last together. That spring into summer, Marilyn was becoming increasingly unhinged. After word got back to Washington that Marilyn was openly boasting of her affair with the president of the United States, Jack asked George Smathers to intervene.

“Marilyn was surprised that Jack was upset,” Smathers recalled. “She was in a haze much of the time and, frankly, I don’t think she knew she was spilling the beans.” In the meantime, however, Jack was informed that the mob had taped his romps with Marilyn at Lawford’s house in Santa Monica—“and that was the final straw,” Smathers said. “He had to break it off and get as far away from Marilyn as possible.”

Monroe was not about to go quietly. When she could no longer get through to Jack, she began calling his brother. It was not long before Marilyn was telling friends that Bobby planned to leave Ethel and marry her.

The fling with RFK came as no surprise to singer Phyllis McGuire of the top-selling 1950s pop group the McGuire Sisters. Phyllis had replaced Judy Campbell as mob boss Sam Giancana’s girlfriend and was told by Giancana and others that Jack had, in “true Kennedy fashion,” passed Marilyn on to his younger brother. Apparently there was proof: audio tapes of Marilyn’s trysts with both Kennedy brothers, which found their way into the hands of J. Edgar Hoover. Bobby did not have to be told; realizing that he risked bringing down his brother’s administration, RFK cut off all contact with Marilyn.

BY THIS TIME, JACK WAS
involved with someone new—another Miss Porter’s alum named Marion “Mimi” Beardsley (later Beardsley Fahnestock Alford) who, at nineteen, was twenty-six years JFK’s junior. A tall, slender, preppy WASP, Mimi was only a high school senior when she came to the White House to interview Tish Baldrige for the school paper. Introduced to the president during that visit, she was offered a chance to work as a summer intern in the White House press office after her first year at Massachusetts’s Wheaton College. “He just couldn’t,” Mimi admitted, “resist a girl with a little bit of Social Register in her background.”

Her fourth day on the job, Mimi was invited by Dave Powers to join the president for a swim in the White House pool. While Fiddle and Faddle paddled around, sipping wine and giggling, Mimi put on one of the dozen or so women’s swimsuits always kept hanging on the dressing room wall and dove in. Within minutes, JFK appeared wearing a dark swimsuit, looking “remarkably fit for a 45-year-old man.” According to Mimi, he “slid into the water and floated up to me. ‘It’s Mimi, isn’t it? . . .’ ”

Nothing happened in the pool that day but small talk. Afterward, Mimi joined a small group—Dave Powers, Kenny O’Donnell, Fiddle, Faddle, and the president—for daiquiris in the West Sitting Room. Jackie and the children, Mimi was told matter-of-factly, had already left for Glen Ora. At some point during the proceedings, the slightly tipsy teenager was led upstairs by Jack for a personal tour of the family quarters, ending at the first lady’s bedroom. It was there, on the edge of Jackie’s bed, that Mimi lost her virginity to the president.

Only days later, 1.5 million people lined the streets of Mexico City just to catch a glimpse of Jack and Jackie as they arrived in an open car. “Mexican emotions literally exploded,” Baldrige said, “at the sight of a young, bareheaded John F. Kennedy.” But once again it was Jackie who stole the spotlight with her beauty, grace, and spectacular wardrobe (for this south of the border trip she had asked Cassini to design dresses in eye-popping “sun colors” of lime green, sky blue, and hot pink). Whether visiting children’s hospitals or lunching with Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos, she impressed her hosts with unscripted remarks delivered in impeccable Spanish.

Once the four-day visit was over, Jackie headed off for what wound up being a three-month vacation. No longer willing to spend her holiday cheek by jowl with the rest of the clan, she convinced her husband to rent a seven-bedroom house outside the Kennedy compound from popular tenor Morton Downey, who also happened to be an old friend of the Kennedy family. The Downey house was located on Squaw Island, less than a mile from the rest of the Kennedys, and Jackie made it clear that she intended to divide her time between there and Glen Ora.