John F Kennedy’s numerous rumored affairs are arguably as much a part of the Camelot legend as his presidency, his alleged mafia connections and his subsequent assassination.
But JFK’s twisted romantic life might have turned about so very different had his father, the fiercely controlling patriarch Joe Kennedy, allowed his charming, quietly intelligent middle son to marry his first love, Inga Arvad, a woman Joe referred to as a ‘Nazi b***h.’
In the new book JFK: Public, Private, Secret, author J Randy Taraborrelli claims that JFK never truly got over the heartbreak and being forced to split from Arvad – and held it against his father until the day he died.
The young Jack Kennedy met Inga Arvad in October 1941. At 28, the Danish journalist was four years older than him and already twice married. But their attraction was electric, writes Taraborrelli.
‘He had charm that makes the birds come out of the trees,’ the book reports that Arvad wrote of Jack, ‘natural, engaging, ambitious, warm, and when he walked into a room you knew he was there, not pushing, not domineering but exuding animal magnetism.’
Arvad’s son, Ron McCoy, told Taraborrelli: ‘For my mom it was pretty much love at first sight. That’s how she described it to me anyway. She called it an “awakening,” her chemistry with Jack Kennedy being so instantaneous.
‘It was as if they’d known each other in some other life and were now picking up where they’d left off. It felt natural. It felt organic. Above all, she said, it felt real.’
For his part, Jack was apparently also smitten.
She had it all: brains, beauty, and the uncanny ability to see him for who he truly was. He could open up to her in a way he’d never been able to with anyone else. And, according to Taraborrelli, Jack referred to her as ‘Inga Binga,’ and they spent every night they could… in bed together.
But just two months into their passionate romance, America was on the brink of war, and Arvad found herself accused of being a Nazi spy.
The source of the accusation was an alleged photograph of her with Hitler. And when news reached Joe, he was incandescent. His son was going to carry the Kennedy name into the White House – he was sure of it – and this latest revelation was ‘bad for his future and bad for the future of their family,’ according to Taraborrelli’s book.
Unsurprisingly, the FBI – and its powerful director J Edgar Hoover – got involved, and Hoover demanded nothing less than weekly updates on the case.
Arvad was forced to admit that she had, indeed, met the Führer in Berlin six years earlier, when she’d interviewed him for a Danish newspaper.
The following year, Hitler invited Arvad to join him in his box at the 1936 Olympics, then to a private lunch, during which he’d presented her with a questionable gift: a framed photograph of himself.
‘She accepted it,’ writes Taraborrelli, ‘but it made her nervous because it was starting to feel to her that maybe he was interested in her.’
She had reason to worry. Hitler was likely infatuated with the bombshell, having described her as ‘the most perfect example of Nordic beauty.’
Arvad told Jack – and the FBI – that, following the lunch, ‘someone with strong Nazi connections suddenly tried to recruit her as a spy’ but she ‘immediately rejected the proposition.’
Terrified at the implications of her refusal, she escaped to Denmark, then Washington, where she met Jack.
While disturbed by the revelations, Jack believed his lover, according to Taraborreli. They’d been together only three months, but they’d already discussed marriage. He was determined to fight for her.
But Joe Kennedy was reportedly having none of it. During a heated showdown with his son, he demanded that Jack break it off with the ‘Nazi b***h’ immediately.
The FBI eventually dropped its investigation in August 1942, finding no evidence against Arvad. But, ultimately, it wasn’t enough to save the affair. Jack had caved under pressure and broken off the relationship five months earlier.
It would be 10 years before he was ready to commit again.
Like Arvad, Jacqueline Bouvier was incredibly intelligent, and disarmingly independent. And, while her dark hair and close attention to her perfect makeup were in stark contrast to the free-spirited Dane, what she had on her side was timing.
The family was all in agreement: Jack needed a wife if he was ever going to be president. They worried that he was ‘obviously lukewarm’ about Bouvier – but if not her, then who?
Joe reportedly responded: ‘I actually don’t care who, so long as she didn’t go to Hitler’s funeral.’
Jack proposed the following summer, but the author suggests that it took a long time – years, in fact – before it became a love match.
He reports Bouvier’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, asked her daughter, upon hearing of their engagement: ‘Do you love him?’
‘It’s not that simple,’ she replied.
‘It is, Jacqueline,’ her mother shot back. ‘Do. You. Love. Him?’
The future First Lady’s response remained non-committal: ‘I enjoy him.’
Taraborrelli also claims Bouvier confided in Betty Beale, the society columnist at the Washington Evening Star, around the same time, saying she felt ‘Jack had been pulling away ever since the engagement was announced.’
‘True to his character,’ writes Taraborrelli, ‘while they had been dating, he was interested in her on some days, less interested on others.’
‘She said she saw in him what she often noticed in his father toward his mother: indifference,’ writes the author, quoting Betty as saying: ‘This told me Jack wasn’t really in love with her, and that she was naïve to it, the poor dear. When she said, “He treats me the way his father treats his mother,” I said, “But, Jackie, have you seen their marriage, the two of them together? They’re miserable. That should be a warning to you.”‘
Indeed, just a few weeks before his wedding, Jack insisted on going on a boys-only vacation to the famous Cap-Eden-Roc hotel in Cannes where, if he’d had his way, he would have begun a torrid affair with a woman who bore more than a passing resemblance to Inga Arvad, according to Taraborrelli.
Gunilla von Post was Swedish, and just 21 when she met the future president in the south of France.
She was ‘definitely young,’ writes Taraborrelli, ‘but he didn’t see that as a problem.’
‘Fair and blonde, she was very different from the dark brunette he was supposed to marry in about a month. However, she was very much like the woman with whom she shared Scandinavian heritage, the one who’d captured his heart so long ago.’
Both blondes also bear an uncanny resemblance to the woman who would be forever inextricably linked to the Kennedy: Marilyn Monroe.
In von Post’s book about the affair – Love, Jack – she wrote that, on that trip they stopped short of having sex when she realized he was soon to be married.
She also claimed he told her: ‘I fell in love with you tonight. If I’d met you one month ago, I would’ve canceled the whole thing.’
However, Taraborrelli doubts that was the case.
‘While that may have been her memory,’ he writes, ‘it certainly doesn’t sound like Jack Kennedy, this man who rarely if ever expressed emotion for any woman after Inga. Besides that, would he really have defied his father and canceled the wedding to Jackie? That doesn’t seem likely, either.’
He adds: ‘But the flirtation with Gunilla [von Post] does underscore that what he had with Jackie wasn’t completely fulfilling. The question remained: If not for his and his father’s political aspirations, would he even be planning to marry Miss Bouvier?’
On Jack’s return to the US, he made the unusual step of asking his future mother-in-law to add his first love, Arvad, to the wedding guest list. But under questioning about this last-minute addition, he let it drop.
Taraborrelli notes: ‘While Jack hadn’t seen Inga in six years, apparently he was still in touch with her. Maybe it shows the bond he still had with her that he wanted her at his wedding, but it also shows a foolish lapse in judgment. Certainly not much good would come from Inga’s presence.’
Two years after his wedding, however, it seems Gunilla von Post’s rejection of his sexual advances was still very much on his mind.
And, in the wake of a devastating miscarriage, which left his now-wife with crippling anxiety attacks, Jack made the astonishingly selfish proposition that they go on separate trips: she to visit her sister in England, while he would attempt once more to get von Post into bed on her home turf.
Kennedy and von Post reportedly spent a week together in Sweden, with Jack’s partner in crime Torbert Macdonald as fixer. And this time, he got what he wanted, says Taraborrelli.
‘Some of Gunilla’s descriptions of her time with Jack that week – “We were wonderfully sensual. There were times when just the stillness of being together was thrilling enough” – sound a great deal more like some sort of starry-eyed, fictional version of JFK than a realistic one,’ reasons Taraborrelli.
‘Much of what she’d recall… sounds unlikely given what we now know of his remote personality of the 1950s. It does, however, maybe sound like the JFK of the 1940s, the more romantic version of him back in the days when he was with Inga Arvad. Maybe, in this case, the devil isn’t in the details, though.
‘There are enough witnesses to Jack and [Gunilla von Post’s] public outings, including close friends and relatives she identified by name, to confirm that they were definitely together.’
On the flight home, Macdonald told a friend that Jack suddenly felt the weight of what he’d done, and was filled with remorse.
‘This was a sh***y thing to do to Jackie,’ the book reports him as saying. ‘This was a mistake.’
While von Post was convinced it was just the start of their affair, in the end, the two never saw each other again.
‘Jack told intimates… that he’d been rationalizing his bad behavior for so long, it had become second nature to do so,’ writes Taraborrelli.
‘His father was to blame, he’d sometimes reason. After all, if not for Joe, he would’ve ended up with Inga Arvad, someone he truly loved, instead of Jackie, someone he married for political purposes and then grew to love.’
JFK: Public, Private, Secret by J Randy Taraborrelli is published by St Martin’s Press
