All the president's women

All the president's women: Virgin interns. Prostitutes. White House pool sex sessions. 50 years after the murder of JFK, the jaw-dropping truth of the betrayal of Jackie

• British author Sarah Bradford updates her biography of Jacqueline Kennedy
• Reveals JFK's affairs including swimming pool frolics with two secretaries
• He 'said': 'I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of a** daily'
• People thought wife Jackie didn't mind infidelities as she showed no signs

By Sarah Bradford
PUBLISHED: 21:00 GMT, 19 October 2013 | UPDATED: 13:01 GMT, 20 October 2013
 

It is half a century since Lee Harvey Oswald aimed his rifle through a sixth-floor window  of the Texas School Book Depository and fired a shot which would echo round the world. In the days following John Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, his widow Jackie's grace and dignity defined her  in the eyes of millions around the world. At JFK's funeral, where she held the hands of their two small children, she became an icon, burdened until the day she died with the dreams and expectations  of millions of strangers.

To mark the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination, British author Sarah Bradford has updated her acclaimed biography of Jacqueline Kennedy and sheds new light on her complex relationship with the sexually voracious JFK and her sometimes waspish views of the major world figures she rubbed shoulders with...

Rare time off together: JFK and Jackie sailing off Rhode Island in 1962

It was Jackie's state visit to Paris in 1961 that made her an international superstar. She was, as one reporter put it, 'news 24 hours a day'. The fashion journal Women's Wear Daily could have been re-christened What Jackie Wears Daily.
The 'Jackie look' was a regular selling point on Seventh Avenue. Even behind the Iron Curtain a Leningrad fashion magazine carried advertisements for 'Jackie look' clothes, and the Polish magazine Swait wrote that she had 'entered the group of a few women in the world who set the style and tone of their epoch'.

It was at this point that Kennedy's Chief of Protocol, the worldly Angier Biddle Duke, told his future wife, Robin, 'The deck has shifted'. Indeed, the balance of power had tilted subtly towards Jackie, both in the eyes of her husband (which was all important to her) and the Kennedy entourage. If Jack was the Sun King, Jackie was by now most definitely America's Queen.
Gore Vidal recalls that Jackie had said: 'I never saw Jack until we got to the White House. He was always away and gone.'
Vidal added: 'I don't even think he thought anything about her until he began to see pictures of her in the paper, this glamorous woman who happened to be married to him. 

Beach boy: JFK in 1962, surrounded by admirers after a swim at Santa Monica

'And he started calling her "the sex symbol" - as in "Will you tell the sex symbol lunch is ready?".
He found that pretty funny and I think it awakened his interest.'
However, their relationship remained complex.
Jack was becoming like Jackie's idealised father 'Black' Jack Bouvier - the dashing womaniser who still came home to envelop his family with love. The birth of JFK's children had awakened a strong paternal streak in him, But he would not, and could not, give up his sexual habits; nor did he feel the least bit guilty about them.
As Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill was to tell Cecil Beaton in June 1968: 'Jack used to play around and I knew exactly what he was up to and would tell him so. And he'd have absolutely no guilty conscience. He said, "I love her deeply and have done everything for her. I've no feeling of letting her down because I've put her foremost in everything".'

Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill (top) was to tell Cecil Beaton (bottom) in June 1968: 'Jack used to play around and I knew exactly what he was up to and would tell him so. And he'd have absolutely no guilty conscience'

Jack had anticipated that the Presidency would limit his sexual adventures but, instead, high office meant that he could have virtually any woman he wanted and Jackie's frequent absences gave him plenty of opportunity.
Secret Service logs show that Jackie spent a great deal more time away from the White House than at the White House. She spent almost all the steamy summer months out of Washington and, even when she was there, regularly left on Friday afternoon for their rented Virginia horse farm Glen Ora, or to go to the Kennedy family seat at Hyannis Port in Cape Cod, and did not return until Monday or later.
Jack never left the White House until Saturday.
Jackie was a rebel and a free spirit at heart, and the White House seemed claustrophobic.
Furthermore, she could close her eyes to what Jack was up to when she was not with him.
'It's amazing - he used to do it in front of her,' said a well-known New York debutante several years younger than Jackie.
'In New York a great friend, one  of his ex-girls, organised an after-theatre party. He had obviously said to her, "Can you get me a bunch of young nice girls?"'

Jackie, wife of US President Kennedy

'I was invited and another great friend of mine was asked. The two of us were riveted so we both went. There were about four or five other friends, single girls we knew also. One by one, each of us was told, "The President would like to speak to you", and we were led over for about ten minutes.
'I wasn't as enamoured of him as other people were. I didn't think he was this great sex symbol. But what fascinated us all was that Jackie was sitting there and he actually said, ''I'll take that one."'
'I know exactly who won. She shall be nameless. This was a very shy, divine girl, Very pretty, very tall. The next time I saw Jackie was when they asked me to a party at the White House. It was the last party before he was killed.
'She was waltzing around, and he would dance with a girl for five  minutes and then they would disappear up in the lift and then they'd be back in 20 minutes. We just sat there watching, my friend and I.
'I was astounded. And Jackie paid no attention.
'Life with Kennedy must have been total hell because he never stopped, none of those [Kennedy] boys do. And they have to have every woman in the room.
'I remember when Kennedy was assassinated - I had this tiny flat just off Fifth Avenue and 80th Street. And the day after he was killed and everybody was watching the funeral I had four what you'd call ''widows'' in my tiny sitting room - all married - because they couldn't cry their eyes out in front of their husbands, all of whom thought they had been the only one.
'I swear to you, and this is absolutely true, at this point it was more chic not to have slept with the  President than to have slept with him. Every time Jackie walked into a room she must have known that half the women there had slept with him.
'One of the ''widows'' who was in my apartment talked about it the whole time to anyone who would  listen. She was snuck into the White House in the boot of a car, and  she was taken down to the swimming pool and he would join her for a swim.

Around the time Jackie visited Paris in 1961 and gained fame, Jack was starting to resemble her idealised father 'Black' Jack Bouvier (top) - the dashing womaniser who came home to envelop his family with love

'Then there was the famous Angie Dickinson who used to go up and down in the lift at the Carlyle Hotel, you know, at the back, the service lift. And there was Marilyn Monroe. What I couldn't understand about all these women was that they must have known that they were the lollipop for the day and who wants to be used as a lollipop?'
People thought that Jackie did not mind Jack's infidelities because she showed no signs of doing so.
Indeed, the President's notorious swimming-pool frolics with the two secretaries known as 'Fiddle' and 'Faddle' did not worry her, but his sleeping with her friends and women in her circle, did.
As Robin Biddle Duke, who married Angie in May 1962, said: 'She had a lot of reasons to be fragile and to feel fragile because it hurts.
'She marries Jack and he is the love of her life and he really does like, you know, fiddling around with other girls. I felt very sorry for her because public humiliation is devastating. Everybody knew that Jack was naughty. I mean, it was something that wasn't talked about but I think this woman was put through a very great deal.
'I think she loved JFK and she always thought he loved her. In his way he did, but his love had certain reservations and hers was total.

Famous Angie Dickinson (bottom) 'went up and down in the lift at the Carlyle Hotel'. And there was Marilyn Monroe

'Deep down Jack Kennedy would probably have liked to have been as good a husband to Jackie as he was a father to Caroline and John and in his own way he tried. When asked by a friend why he played around, he replied seriously: I can't help it.'
He shocked the eminently respectable, self-controlled British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, by  confessing to him that if he didn't have sex at least once a day, he had a headache.
To the far less respectable Bobby Baker, secretary to the Senate Democrats and provider of favours for senators, he said, according to Baker, 'I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of a** every day.'
To Jack, easily bored in this as in everything else, variety was the spice of life: he not only liked different women but three-in-a-bed sessions, sometimes with hookers. According to the Secret Service logs, appointments with women were made through Jack's old friend and closest personal aide, Dave Powers, whose name appeared in the official record. When Teddy Kennedy was being publicly unfaithful, Jackie told his disconsolate wife Joan, 'All Kennedy men are like that.'
'He just couldn't resist a girl with a little bit of Social Register in her background,' recalled one of JFK's young lovers, Marion 'Mimi' Beardsley. She was a tall, slender and beautiful 19-year-old at Jackie's old  school, Miss Porter's, Farmington, when she wrote to the White House requesting an interview with Jackie for her college newspaper.
A year later, Mimi was invited to join the White House staff as an intern. Within days she was introduced to the President over cocktails. 'Would you like a tour of the residence, Mimi?' he asked and proceeded to the bedroom he shared with Jackie where, without apparent compunction, he took the 20-year-old's virginity on Jackie's bed.
'The midday swim in the overheated pool was an inviolable part of his routine, and so it became part  of my routine as well,' Mimi wrote.
'I would swim with the President at noon or near the end of the work  day, race back to my desk, and  then wait for a call to come upstairs in the evening.
'The governing factor behind these calls... was the presence - or, more accurately, the absence, of Mrs Kennedy in the White House.'

Marion 'Mimi' Beardsley, the White House intern who lost her virginity to JFK on Jackie's bed

Like other people who knew JFK, Mimi talked of his 'genius at compartmentalising' his life, placing Jackie on a pedestal to keep her  apart from all the other women in  his life.
Jackie, however, kept hoping he would calm down, as she confessed to her friend Adlai Stevenson. 'I don't care how many girls [Jack sleeps with] as long as I know he knows  it's wrong and I think he does now,' she said.
The death (at two days old) of his youngest son, Patrick, in August 1963 was an unbearable blow for Jack.
Mimi wrote: 'I had never seen real grief until I saw the President  when he returned to the White House while Mrs Kennedy recovered for a few more days in hospital. He invited me upstairs and we sat outside on  the balcony in the soft summer evening air.
'There was a stack of condolence letters on the floor next to his chair, and he picked each one up and read it aloud to me.
'Some were from friends, others from strangers, but they were all heartfelt and deeply moving. Occasionally, tears rolling down his cheeks, he would write something on one of the letters . . . but mostly he just read them and cried.'
America's Queen: The Life Of  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, by Sarah Bradford, is published on  October 31 by Penguin, priced £14.99.

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How the Queen took 'revenge'

The plan for the Kennedys' London visit in June 1961 had been cooked up when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan visited the White House two months earlier.
In order not to offend French President Charles de Gaulle -  who was suspicious of the Anglo-American relationship - the official reason for the visit was the christening of Jackie's niece Anna Christina Radziwill. Macmillan was to give an informal luncheon and the Queen a dinner at the Palace.
Jack and Jackie had been asked beforehand by the Palace whom they would like to be invited. Jackie proposed the child's parents - her sister Lee and her husband Stanislaw Radziwill, a London-based Polish prince.
She also proposed Princess Margaret, whom she wanted to meet, and Princess Marina,  whom Jack remembered from his father's days in the US Embassy in London.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh with President John F Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline

Initially the Palace wanted to veto the Radziwills because they were both divorcees. After an intervention - presumably by Macmillan - they relented.
But Jackie joked: 'The Queen had her revenge. No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture they could find. The Queen was pretty heavy going.'
Jackie thought the Queen 'resented' her - in all probability she was intimidated by Mrs Kennedy's famous sophistication - and that Prince Philip was  'nice but nervous'.
'The Queen was human only once,' Jackie said. She had been telling Her Majesty about the Kennedy state visit to Canada and the rigours of being on view at all hours. Jackie recalled: 'The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said, ''One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.'' 
Then the Queen said: 'You like pictures?'
And she marched Jackie down a long gallery, stopping at a Van Dyck to say: 'That's a good horse.'