theatlantic.com
The relationship began on Alford’s fourth day on the job, when she was asked to the Kennedy residence for a new-staffer cocktail party. Dave Powers escorted her up to the deserted apartment, and she kicked around with a couple of other office girls, drinking daiquiris, nibbling cheese puffs, and waiting for the president. Within seconds of his arrival—signaled by the partygoers’ jumping formally to their feet, for this was part of the thrill of being in the inner circle: the fun and debauchery of the endless party, and the awesome formality of the American presidency—Mimi was in his thrall. When JFK invited her on a private tour of the joint she eagerly agreed, and before she knew it they were standing alone together at the open door to Jackie’s bedroom.
“This is a very private room,” John Kennedy said to her, and as she tried to comprehend what he meant by that puzzling remark, he maneuvered her smoothly into it. And then he nailed her—a virgin, a Wheaton sophomore, a girl who wore a circle pin and a side part, and who had ordered two drip-dry shirtdresses from the Johnny Appleseed’s catalog before coming to Washington—right there on his wife’s bed. The one with the horsehair mattress and the stiff board to accommodate his bad back.
The pastel portrait of Caroline looked on silently; the new-staffer cocktail party in the other room quietly disbanded. Kennedy realized that this new girl was a virgin.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and so he quickly passed the torch to a new generation and sent her home in a car. But she wasn’t discarded; she was worked into the rotation.
It was in many ways a giddy year and a half, marked by a variety of physical pleasures, and the 35th president schooled Mimi in all the skills a mistress must know, from performing fellatio to making scrambled eggs. He treated her every way it is possible for a man to treat a woman. He was by turns paternal, calling her at college and peppering her with fatherly questions—“What were the courses I was taking? Were the teachers good? What was I reading? Were the girls interesting? What did they talk about? What did I have for dinner?”—and childlike, sitting patiently while she helped him with his shirt, or rubbed amber-colored ointment into his scalp and then brushed his hair just so, while other staffers walked in and out of the Oval Office. He was romantic, sharing late-night dinners with her and putting love songs on the record player, and he was sexually sadistic, asking her to perform sexual services on his friend Dave Powers—the president’s “leprechaun”—which she once did (while JFK stood in the pool and watched), to her everlasting regret. Sometimes he treated her like the debutante she was, begging her to sing a Miss Porter’s School song and teasing her for dating a Williams boy; and sometimes he treated her like the kept woman she had become, peeling off $300 and telling her, “Go shopping and buy yourself something fantastic.”
Above all, she reports, he was playful. The two lovers especially enjoyed getting it on in his bathroom, which they turned into their own “mini-spa,” outfitted as it was with “thick white towels, luxurious soaps, and fluffy white bathrobes embossed with the presidential seal.” But there was something else in that wonderful, elegant bathroom of his that Mimi thinks reveals so much about his true nature, something she wants to tell us about for the unique insight it gives into the man. In addition to all the grown-up accoutrements, he also had his very own collection of—wait for it—rubber ducks! Can you imagine? The president of the United States collected rubber ducks. It turned out a buddy of his had sent them as a gag gift. And Mimi—unlike super-sophisticated Jackie—knew how to have fun with something like that. That was one of the special things she was able to bring to the relationship. She and Jack gave the ducks funny names, and they had bathtub races with them, and it was like a sexy playdate.
Every affair is a series of betrayals, some so huge that the betrayed can barely take them in, others so inconsequential that they would seem the simplest to dismiss when the bill finally comes due—yet in many cases these are the ones that hurt the most. On the one hand, once Jack Kennedy had begun a long-standing physical relationship with this girl, one that began on his wife’s bed and included flying her around the country along with his baggage so that he would have access to her whenever he wanted, telling her a fib about the how and the why of those rubber ducks is hardly a significant matter. Maybe it even constituted a weird bit of loyalty, keeping his wife and son entirely out of things. But I have to say that when I came across Mimi’s gushing account of the ducks, so soon after hearing Jackie explain how they symbolized something significant and lovely in her marriage, my first reaction was “What a bastard.”
“I grew up feeling I needed to protect her,” Caroline Kennedy writes poignantly of her mother in the introduction to Historic Conversations, discussing her own ambivalence about making the Schlesinger tapes public. Releasing them would “expose her memory to one more round of gossip and speculation,” and indeed Caroline had barely five months to enjoy the glowing new light that the tapes shed on her parents’ marriage before the next book to sully the memory came along, and the speculation begins all over again. The same old questions hound us: Just what did Jackie know about her husband’s extramarital life, and how did she feel about it? How did she make peace with the private life she lived with JFK, knowing that so much of it was implicitly mocked by his behavior? These are questions we will apparently be turning over until the end of time. |
