Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - JFK Special 3. | The Sex Life of JFK

Episode Date: November 28, 2023

“If I don’t have a woman for three days, I get terrible headaches.”That is what JFK allegedly told the UK prime minister, Harold MacMillan, after a meeting on nuclear arms. An interesting alternative to pain killers, right?Despite being in a high-profile marriage, JFK has been linked with many women. From Hollywood stars and White House interns, to potential Soviet Spies and Mafia wives.Kate is joined Betwixt the Sheets with Eleanor Herman to discuss the many alleged affairs and scandals, for the third instalment in our Kennedy Women series.You can find out more about Eleanor Herman’s book, ’Sex with Presidents’ here.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy. The producer was Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hey, but tricksters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here and you are here. These are both very, very good things. But what is a nice listener like you doing in a podcast like this? Because this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about doughty things, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now that you've wrapped your delicate look holes around that safety warning,

if you get upset by what follows, and you might, because we're talking about JFK's love life, and there is a hell of a lot of sex involved, if that happens to offend you, well, tough tits, quite frankly, because you were warned, fair do's. On with the show. The year is 1962, and we are in the White House in Washington, D.C., in a conference room, watching a meeting between the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy and the UK Prime Minister, Harold McMillan, and they are discussing nuclear armament. The Prime Minister has crossed the pond for a weekend and the schedule is packed with meetings. But in the breaks, JFK has put on fancy lunches and dinners to showcase the very best of the United States.

He's also given Macmillan a tour of the White House grounds to introduce him to his daughter, Caroline's, ponies, macaroni and techs. But back to the meeting on nuclear policy. As the other attendees get up to leave, JFK leans over the table and whispers something to the UK Prime Minister. It looks quite serious. Something confidential, information for only the ears of two world leaders. In fact, it was here that JFK apparently confided to McMillan that he has to have a woman every three days, otherwise he suffers from terrible headaches. Huh, poor baby. But it wasn't the first, or indeed the last time,

that McMillan was made aware of the president's voracious sexual appetite. Oh, no, no, no, no. He allegedly witnessed a lover hiding in the backseat of the Potus limousine and during JFK's visit to England, apparently saw him seeing Irish sea shanties to a woman sat on his name. Geopolitical crisis, potential nuclear war, a very sore back and migraines to boot, apparently,

and of course a very high-profile marriage, were not going to get in the way of Jack Kennedy and sex. From film stars to White House interns, potential Soviet spies to mafia wives, he had them all and many, many others besides. Today, we are taking a closer look at just some of the women linked to the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. The Kennedy dynasty, thought of by many as being the American royal family,

have a fascinating and tragic history with many famous members, JFK being one of the most well known, and he often eclipses the other members of that family, but there were some truly fascinating people there, in particular the women of the Kennedy family, not to mention the women that JFK got himself involved with. From a great grandmother with humble Irish roots and a quiet determination who dragged the family out of poverty

and set the foundations of a dynasty. So she was just like, boom, boom, boom, one thing after another, an entrepreneur at a time when that just wasn't a thing for widowed Irish maids. To the world famous scandalous affairs. I can now retire from politics. after having had a happy birthday sung to me. To a shy sister who was left without the ability to walk or talk after a disastrous lobotomy, ordered by her father.

60 years on from JFK's death, we are looking at some of the women attached to the Kennedy family. They were fabulous and they were flawed, you know, and some of them just doomed. This is the Kennedy Women, episode three, the many affairs of JFK. The latest ordeal for a family. that has endured so many of them over the years. Mrs. Kennedy comes forward with Caroline in a tableau that calls for no words. Its poignancy calls only for cheers.

I know it's such a long and often hopeless fight. We hope it will accomplish something. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. This November, it's 60 years since President John F. Kennedy was assassinating. And to mark the anniversary, I am going to be looking into the women in his life and in his family. Today, I am speaking to the glorious Eleanor Herman about JFK's many, many alleged affairs.

From a girlfriend who Hitler was also infatuated with to famous Hollywood stars. There have been many stories and a lot of gossip emerging from his time in office. Far too much for us to fit into the 45 minutes, really, this is only a sense. sample of what he was up to. We also have episodes in the Kennedy women series on JFK's sister Rosemary and his great-grandmother Bridget who started the Kennedy dynasty from nothing. And we have episodes on Jackie and the Kennedy curse all coming your way, so do keep an eye and an ear out for those. But now, let's go back to the mid-1930s in Boston to meet a good-looking teenage JFK who is just starting out on the dating scene.

back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's the one, the only, the rather fabulous. It's Eleanor Herman. How are you doing? Thank you, Kate. I am so happy to be back. I think this is my fourth time on your show. Oh, we can't get enough of you. We're talking about, we've got a little mini-series about the women in JFK's life and his family. And really, there was only one person that we were ever going to speak to about his sex life, about the women he was having an affairs with. And that's got to be you, Eleanor, because you, not only are you wonderful on this subject, but you have written a book about this. Yes, I did. It came out in 2020.

It's called Sex with Presidents. And it looks at the sex lives of all of the U.S. presidents going back to the 1790s. And I do believe that JFK's chapter is the longest. I'm going to say, is it like, there's just this huge chunk in the middle of JFK who was just shaggy. in everything, it seems. Everything. The man's sex drive was pathological. It was just not normal.

He needed sex several times a day, preferably with women that he had never met before. When he was campaigning for a president, he would send his aides ahead to the cities he would visit, and they would interview prostitutes, and they knew his type, and they'd have generally five standing on the runway when JFK's plane landed.

he would generally pick two of them and then go off with them. Holy crap. I've got to keep going with the interview now, and I think you might have just stunned me into absolute silence. Well, he said that he tended to get migraine headaches if he didn't get a strange piece of ass. Poor baby. I think by strange he meant like a new one, not like weird, but yeah.

My grandma was American, and when she passed away, one of the things that we found in her possession were all these little buttons where she'd, gone out in campaigns for Kennedy and she had all these little ribbons and everything. I'm like reading through your book, I'm like now thinking, he would have probably tried to shag my grandma. He tried to shag everybody. Prostitutes, society matrons, school girls, actresses, babysitters, students, employees, strippers, interns. I mean, if it was half decent

looking and it was female, he would try to get a piece of it. Christ. And was this known during his lifetime, or did they manage to keep a reasonable lid on this? Well, it was known certainly by those in the White House, by those who knew him, by his wife. It was certainly not known by the general public. And the reason is that the press absolutely refused to report it. And it has to do with the history of journalism in the U.S., which was, you know, a wild kind of tabloid journalism up until about 1900. And then it became more professional, more subdued, more dignified, and the newspaper editors absolutely refused to write anything salacious, particularly about public leaders, senators, and presidents. And in the case of JFK, this tradition was compounded

by the fact that it was the height of the Cold War. And so you had the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile crisis and the building of the Berlin Wall. And newspaper editors, felt that it would tarnish the national reputation, that he was a leader, the American public, and the world needed to respect in order to deal with all these international crises. So this was the case until Watergate happened, Vietnam happened, Teddy Kennedy killed a woman flying off a bridge in his car in Chapquittic. The press had known about Teddy Kennedy's reckless behavior for many years and never reported on it. And I think there was a collective a sense of journalistic guilt. So suddenly, by the time you hit 1973 or four, all of these

stories are coming out about JFK. I don't think my grandma would have voted for him if she'd known. Definitely. So I suppose what you want to do is when you're writing a biography or a history is the temptation is to kind of look back at the origin story. I know it's very difficult because you can't give somebody a psychological report if they're not here and you've got spoken to them. But did you get any sense of where did this come from with JFK? I mean, did he just, enter puberty and that was just it. He was just voracious. Was there any like early sexual experiences that might have created this monster? Well, part of it at least was his family upbringing. And it was part of the toxic culture of masculinity at the time. As soon as all of the boys in the family turned

14, their father, Joseph Kennedy Sr., would hand them a stack of pornographic magazines and grew up, believing that you're not much of a man if you don't try to have sex with every decent woman you come across. And sometimes two or three of the brothers would have orgies with women. I mean, can you imagine having, like, being naked with your sibling? I, you know, and then they would switch women. And so it was, it was completely disgusting, yeah. My sister will barely share clothing with me, let alone partners. That's horrendous. Yeah, it's really gross. All right, so yeah, that would fuck you up. That absolutely would.

So a father that hands over a load of pornography, you're raised in this culture of, you know, real men do this and there's a real sense of entitlement. Did he have girlfriends early on? Were there any significant relationships that he had? Well, he visited whorehouses, apparently, at an early age, maybe 16, 17. There is some evidence he may have contracted chlamydia, and then the kind that could not easily be cured by antibiotics,

there are some stories he may have given it to Jackie, and that's why she had such trouble giving birth. She had miscarriages and stillbirth. So there was that. I mean, the first long-term relationship that we're aware of was when he was in his early 20s. It was during World War II. He was in the Navy in an office in D.C. And he was having a relationship with a Danish reporter named Inga Arvad, who was this beautiful, statuesque blonde. And she was friends with Adolf Hitler. She wrote about his kind heart and what a wonderful guy he was. Hitler's kind heart? Yeah, she did. And so the FBI director here, J. Edgar Hoover, who knew about everything and everybody, right? He thought that she might be a Nazi spy,

sleeping with this guy who was the son of the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain the year before to obtain military secrets and wanted to fire. JFK, get him out of the Navy entirely, but because of his family position, he was not fired, and he ended up actually going into active duty in the Pacific. But he, at no time, did he stop his relationship with Inga Arvad because of the fears of espionage. I mean, he was incredibly reckless with regards to his own safety and to national security throughout his life. Was she a spy? No, it seems like she actually was not. But he continued to do this sort of thing when he was in the White House. He had an affair with a woman named Ellen Romach, who was a native of

East Germany. She worked in the communist government there. Then she ended up escaping. She married a West German Air Force guy, came to D.C. to work at the embassy. And J. Edgar Hoover determined that she was, in fact, a spy for the Soviet Union. And that was one of the few times when JFK did have her sent back to Germany, because he was really worried that. it was going to get out. When you're researching any kind of sex history, the difficult thing is sources and corroborate in this. What sources are you using? Like, to like learn about a teenage JFK being given porn by his dad.

Like, how did you manage to, I was going to say come across that, but that's the wrong turn of phrase. How did you manage to find that? You know, it's all out there. I mean, people who knew him talked about, and he would say something to his friend, who would say something to a jury. who couldn't report it until 1973. But there are just hundreds of these stories because obviously if you're Jackie Kennedy or if you're JFK, people are going to remember all of these bizarre statements you make and all of your incredible behavior.

And so this all came out in the 1970s. And many people involved wrote books about their time with him, you know, either working in the White House or as his mistresses. There was another national security. issue with a woman named Judith Campbell who was this beautiful brunette and she had affairs with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. And when she was having an affair with JFK, he was in the White House at the time, she was also the mistress of the Chicago mafia boss, Sam Giancana, who was Al Capone's successor.

Shit. Bear in mind that JFK's brother Bobby, who was U.S. Attorney General, was really coming down hard on the mafia. He wanted to stop their control of many different industries and all of the violence. And he had a hard time doing this because apparently they had tapes of JFK, the president of the United States having sex with this woman who was also the mafia mole, as they called her. And she wrote an autobiography later in life.

It doesn't sound like he's shy about this stuff. It doesn't sound like this is something he's desperately trying to keep secret or hidden. No, not at all. Well, first of all, he didn't make. a comment to somebody when, you know, one of his staff members said, you aren't you worried about this getting out in some way, shape, or form? And he said, ah, you know, it'll never get out until I'm dead. And at that point, why should I worry about it? But in terms of embarrassment, there's this wonderful anecdote I want to relate. This was the year before he married Jackie. So 1952, he was

at a white-tide benefit in Newport, Rhode Island. And he locked himself in the coat closet with a woman he had just met. And, you know, it was winter and people were trying to get their coats to leave. And the coat closet was locked for several minutes. And people were begging on the door. And finally, he opened it and he and the woman came out looking rather flushed and their hair was a mess and they were adjusting their clothing. And he was not embarrassed in the least. I mean, can you imagine that walk of shame? I would never show my face in public again. He just didn't. Yeah, I think he must have thought it was funny and he was more of a man than anyone else there. It's difficult to try and get your handle on what the mental state of mind is to not be embarrassed that you've been caught

shagging somebody in a coat closet, to like send your aides out to retrieve people that would be willing to sell sex and just have them on the runway. He doesn't think there's anything wrong with this behavior. No, he absolutely did not. And, you know, there are questions about his psychological state. Like what was going on with this guy? Right. He probably, had narcissistic personality disorder, which frankly, most people who run for president have something of that. I mean, they think they're the one that's going to save the country. I mean, most people would think, gee, maybe I don't know how to save the country, you know, if you have a normal psychology going on. And then there's also something called hubris syndrome, which

is narcissistic personality on steroids. And then you just, you don't listen to anybody who disagrees with you. In a way, you think that you're God. and you should be able to control everything. So I think he had both of those syndromes going on. He would definitely be diagnosed with the rather controversial sex addiction label. Yes. Otherwise, no, it's hypersexual disorder. I think that one's called.

Clearly. And I think that the most frightening thing from the standpoint of national security is that he didn't seem to really care. I mean, the French have a wonderful way of looking at politicians' sex lives, and they think it shows vigor and vitality if men have mistresses, but not to this level, right? And so women would show up at the White House. And Jackie traveled a lot just to get away from him. She'd take the kids and just go somewhere.

And so women would show up at the White House door. Back then it was pretty easy to just go up and knock. And they would tell the Secret Service, you know, the President is waiting for me. And the Secret Service could not vet them, you know. And the president was in no mood to wait. So the women would be allowed up. They would have sex. And then he would have had the staff prepare some meals in the kitchen in the presidential residence that he could just bring out.

Well, there were tons of knives lying around. And any one of these women could have stabbed him to death. And the Secret Service often talk to each other about which one of us is going to find the president's dead body in the shower. And sometimes he would run off out of the White House and go to a hotel with prostitutes. And he'd leave the guy that had the nuclear briefcase with the codes, you know, handcuffed to his wrist. He would just run off from him. And so nobody would know where the president was if the Soviet Union started, you know, launching bombs. There was nothing we could do to retaliate.

So, you know, there was a great deal of concern, you know, in those levels of government about what he was doing. Yeah, this isn't like, oh, our president has affairs, doesn't he have a real lust for life? And, you know, isn't it manly? This is pathologically dangerous behaviour that he's abandoning, like, the nuclear codes to go to a brothel. This is dangerous stuff. I'll be back to talk more about JFK's affairs after this short break. Tell me about Jackie, poor old Jackie. Did she have any idea of his reputation before they got married?

Or did she did. She did. And his best friend actually warned her off him. He said, you know, Jack just isn't normal. She probably thought that he may have had, you know, some affairs during a long marriage. Her father had. But, you know, nothing like what she ended up getting. And people of the time who knew her thought this was a challenge and was such a beautiful,

talented wife, he wouldn't, you know, need to have all those women, maybe one or two. she could put up with. But she was in for a rude surprise because on their honeymoon in Mexico, they were at a huge party and women were thrusting their phone numbers on little slips of paper to him and he gladly accepted them. And then he disappeared into the bedroom with a very attractive woman. And there's Jackie standing there by herself with a martini in her hand. And one of the other guests said later, you know, I felt so bad for her. So she knew early, early on. By 1958, before she had children, she wanted to divorce him. And the story is that her father-in-law, Joe Kennedy, Sr., who had this absolute obsession with one of his sons becoming

president, bribed her with a great deal of money to stay in the marriage because no divorced man had ever become president before. It had quite a stigma at the time. And also, they were Catholic. And so he thought that would also be a further stigma. So she stayed. in the marriage and then after she had two kids, she knew she could never divorce him while he was still in the White House. But she told her sister that she actually looked forward to divorcing him after he left. Did anyone look into whether or not Jackie was the one that actually assassinated JFK? Jesus Christ. But you know, she did have certain coping mechanisms, which I find to be interesting.

She had lived in France her junior year. She was perfectly fluent. She loved French culture and fashion. And so she changed herself into a kind of Madame de Pompadour, who was the prototypical royal mistress, the mistress of Louis 15th. And, you know, she was in charge of so many things for the king. And after a time, she had a chronic condition that prevented her from having sex. So she farmed out the sex part of the royal mistress role. And she controlled it to a great extent, you see. So she didn't give her. up her control to these women. So Jackie, as far as she could, would invite these women to White House dinners, seat them next to her husband. She hired many of them to work in the White House press office, including one of his mistresses, Pamela Tournier, was only 23 years old, had no experience with much of anything, and Jackie made her her personal press secretary. She actually turned out to be very successful. So that was one way of handling. this. Another way was that she threw herself into two very rewarding pastimes. One was motherhood.

She was just the best mother you could ever imagine. And the second one was redecorating the White House, which was a kind of shambles. It was a hodgepodge lodge. At the time, anytime a president left office, he could just take the pieces of furniture that he wanted with him. And so she had to go out and track down these valuable piece, you know, George Washington's table and all of these things. And so she did that. And she was very satisfied by that. But the infidelity truly hurt her. And she got back at him in little ways. For instance, she would spend wildly on clothing and French antiques. And it drove him crazy, but what could he do under the circumstance? And then at the last minute, she would announce, oh, she didn't feel like attending a presidential event.

And, you know, there'd be so many thousands of people there are wanting to see her. So that really upset him. Lady Bird Johnson, the vice president's wife, had to be ready at a moment's notice to stand in for Jackie. Because she did this about half the time. Oh, hell no, I'm not going, just to upset him. And Jackie had initially turned down that fateful trip to Dallas,

where he was assassinated. But she was pressured into going at the last minute. In other ways, you know, sometimes the pain was so much that she relied on a cocktail of drugs. She had a doctor, Max Jacobson, who was called Dr. Feel Good, and he would give her uppers, downers, antidepressants, whatever she needed. And then also she had her own affairs to get back at him. She flirted wildly at parties.

She had an affair with the actor William Holden before JFK became president. And then she had affairs his last year of his life with the Italian industrialist Johnny Anielli and Aristotle Onassis. I think well played, Jackie, that's my thoughts there, because like she can't get out of this thing now. And even though she may have been forewarned, he likes the ladies. From what you're describing, I don't think anyone could have prepared her for that. So she now is doing what most royal wives and presidential wives have done throughout history, which is that I'm going to take what I can get from this, and then you're just going to go

and do your thing. She took control of her own life. She was a person of great intelligence and kindness and dignity. And she did what she could to make her life worth living. There's a wonderful story. Most people don't know this. But she moved to Middleburg in the 1990s, which is maybe an hour outside of D.C. And she went in to get some kind of credit.

I think it was a CVS pharmacy or something. And she had to fill out a form. And the clerk did not recognize her. And so she didn't say, don't you know who I am? She just accepted the form. She sat down and she filled out name Jackie Bouvier, Kennedy, Onassis, right? And they could check her credit. And I just, I thought that just spoke volumes about her humility, her kindness.

She was really a wonderful person. It's interesting that Truman Capote was a great friend of hers and said after the assassination that her relationship with JFK had become. come an utter farce. By the time he had become president, and he said, I think she fell in love with him again only after the assassination. And then she developed this myth of Camelot, that it had been this fairy tale, and it was beautiful and fleeting. It was her gift to a grieving nation, to her children, and I think also to herself, the story, the true story was so brutal that she had to rewrite it so that it would not be as painful.

And it's also interesting to note that of JFK's last 63 days of life on this earth, she was away from him for 42 of them. Really? Wow. She was a nice person. JFK is not striking me as a very nice person. He would never have survived the Me Too movement. A lot of these women are very young.

There was the White House interns, Mimi Alfred, said that she lost her virginity to her. when she was 18, 19? That was the status story that I came across. You know, most of his lovers were women in their 30s and they were socialites or actresses. But there was a fresh-faced 19-year-old girl from New Jersey named Mimi Beardsley. And she was so excited to get an internship in the White House press office. After three days, she was invited to go swimming with the president and some of the staff.

there was a White House pool. And so they all went swimming, which she thought was sort of odd. But, you know, she was new to the White House and thought this must be some tradition. And then that evening, one of the president's aide said, oh, we're having drinks up in the residence. Why don't you come up and, you know, you can see the private presidential room. So she was excited for that. And pretty soon other people left. And Jack Kennedy said, why don't I show you, you know, our rooms?

And so before she knew it, she was pushed down on Jackie's bed, which I think is also gross. And he penetrated her. And she was just too shocked to say or do anything. And he put her in a cab to go home. And she remembered thinking very sadly, I'm not going to be a virgin on my wedding night. And then she got very much caught up in the limos and the travel. And he would fly her around the country for various events, even the night. though she didn't do any work.

So she wrote a book about it just a few years ago. It came out. That's incredibly sad. It's such an abuse of power as well. I mean, what a shit. He was. And so once he began having an affair with her, he did these cruel things. Like, he made her give one of his AIDS a blowjob in the swimming pool right in front

of him. He said, this is what I want you to do. And she was very embarrassed and the aide was embarrassed, but they went through with it. Then at another point, he had a capsule. a drug that he said, this will make sex a lot better. And she said, you know, I really don't want to do it. He snapped it under her nose and she inhaled this powder. And she almost had a heart attack.

Her heart was racing. She was in full panic mode. He did very cool things. And here's another thing that he did to Jackie, which I find hard to believe. But he would often have sex with his girlfriends on Jackie's bed. In the White House, in Buckingham Palace, I'm sure in most such places around the world,

the king and queen, the president and first lady, have their own sweets and rooms. So why wouldn't he take these women to his bed? Why would he take them to her bed? There's just like a little twist of the knife in there. And the terrible part about it, I don't quite know the answer to this question, but he would bring his age, his household staff, the cleaners in to pick hairs and bobby pins off of Jackie's sheets. Now, you know, at the time women had these tower hairdos with hairspray and bobby pins and Jackie was a brunette, but he often brought blondes there. So the staff would complain, why doesn't he just bring a brunette so that if Jackie saw brunette hairs and dark bobby pins on the sheets, that we wouldn't have to,

you know, comb them for this? But so what I don't understand is why wouldn't they just change the sheets? I was just thinking that. I mean, just washed the sheets. Did he tell them not to wash the sheets because he wanted Jackie to be on a bed he had soiled with a woman? Or did the White House not have enough sheets to keep up with them? They had so many women there every day. I don't know what the answer to that question is. Tell me about fiddle and faddle. Who were they? Fiddle and faddle, not their real names, but they were young women that worked in the White House. They were in their early 20s and they were both having affairs with him and they were in the among the crew that would go to the White House pool and when Jackie wasn't there they'd have these nude swimming parties

with his staff and all of these his employees that he was having sex with. There was one particular incident where Jackie had left to go to her hunting lodge in the country and she's forgotten something. So this alarm went off, she's coming back, and everybody had to jump out of the pool, dripping wet and naked and run off, and then the butlers had to come in and take all the martini glasses away, and it was, you know, Jackie picked up her whatever she had left there and went back, and then they all went back into the pool. Just wild, this stuff wasn't more widely known. I've got to ask you about some of his, like, the most famous affairs that people did know

about. And the one that sort of wasn't much of an affair at all, really, Marilyn Monroe. Well, it was an affair. They had apparently started it before he became president. I think he was out in Las Vegas at a Frank Sinatra event, and he was introduced to Marilyn there. They had sex in a bathtub, and she was smuggled onto Air Force, one, after he became president, and they would meet at the Carlisle Hotel in New York. How it ended was interesting.

I'm sure you have seen the video of her singing sort of drunkenly. It's embarrassing to watch, I think, Happy Birthday, Mr. President, in that skin-tight dress. And that was on live TV, and tens of millions of Americans saw that. And it was just so obvious to everyone that the two of them had been having a... And Jackie stayed away from it. She knew very well that Marilyn had been having an affair with her husband. Marilyn would call him in the White House, and sometimes Jackie would pick up the phone and just hand it to her husband.

They hope it's Marilyn. So she stayed away from the event. The photographers took a lot of pictures of the president looking at Marilyn Monroe's rather shapely behind. And all of those pictures disappeared from the newsroom files, by the way. But I think JFK realized he had to stop the affair with Marilyn, that it was just becoming. too obvious to the American people. What was he like as a lover? Do we know?

Yes, we do. It's being so prolific of being such a womanizer. And one would like to think that he'd put in enough practice to be good at the actual sex itself. Is that true? No, the actually opposite is true. The actress Angie Dickinson told a friend that sex with JFK was the best 60 seconds of her life.

Oh, no. And even Marilyn Monroe told a friend of hers that sex with him was a minute on and a minute off. He was brutal and perfunctory in bed. The mafia mole Judith Campbell said he was there to be serviced, and this was partly due to his bad back, but also because he had been spoiled by women. He wanted all the pleasure and none of the work. And even Marlina Dietrich, who was 60 years old at the time, She was getting an award from a Jewish refugee organization in D.C. at a major hotel.

And the president invited her over for a cocktail. So she goes over and he says, do you want to have sex? And she said, well, sure, I'm an old lady, but I want to have sex with the president. So they go into, this time I think it was his bedroom. And she said it just, it lasted a couple of minutes. And then he fell asleep. Meanwhile, she had to get out of there to go get the, It's a very funny story, but all the women that wrote about what it was like having sex with him all agreed he was the worst lover they ever had in their lives.

So that tracks for some reason. Like, I just, he's just falling into place as a very kind of toxic, narcissistic man, the one that, like, promises you. It'll be the last for hours, baby. I'm going to rock your world all night long. And then it's done in three strokes and he's falling asleep and you're just there going, oh. I think he was an incredibly selfish bastard. Yeah. Were there any positive accounts, or was it all everyone just going, it was very quick? No, in terms of the sex, it was always like that. He often wanted to be on his back.

And he did have a terrible condition. It's called Addison's disease, and the backbone starts to disintegrate. He was in pain much of his life. He was actually given last rights four times before he became president. That's something else the American public never knew. He wrapped himself. He had a, kind of corset, wrapped himself in bandages. He was often in a special rocking chair that was soothing to his back. And then, as if that wasn't bad enough, he injured his back in World War II when his ship was cut in half by a Japanese torpedo. And he really was a war hero. He helped save several men, and one of them he had to tow with a rope to an island. But his back was very bad, So that could have been part of it.

But, you know, most of the women just felt that he made no effort. He wanted them on top or he wanted to be given oral sex so that he didn't really have to do anything to them. Final question about JFK. Do you think he loved anyone? Was he in love with anybody? I think he loved his children. I think he admired Jackie because she was such a star and a good mother

and an amazing. first lady, everything she did for the White House. I don't know that he was truly capable of loving a woman, though. I don't think he was. But certainly capable of having sex with them in their thousands, it would seem. Perhaps he had a hole in his soul. You know, when someone is an addict, whether it could be alcohol or drugs or food or money or sex, it's to fill something up that's missing inside of them.

And at least for a few minutes, you feel whole. whole. Perhaps he was a man who just never felt completely whole in himself. It certainly felt a lot of other people's whole. There you go. And on that note, on that note, you have been incredible to talk to about this. It's really difficult now because he's such an American icon. I'm looking at him and he did his politics and all the things that he did. Then also you're going, he did also do all these things as well. It's very difficult. But you know, there's also his martyrdom. Like, no matter how awful a person was. If they get

assassinated, it sort of elevates them to the realm of sainthood. And I think that's another reason why for several years after the assassination, people just didn't really want to come down on it. Eleanor, if people want to know more about you and your research, where can they

find you? Oh, well, I'm all over the internet, Amazon, and all your local book dealers. My website is eleanorherman.com. And what would give us the full title of the book, where you can read about the presidents and their naughty ways. It's called sex with presidents. You're going to like this one, Kate. The ins and outs of love and lust in the White House. How's that for a pun?

Oh, I love it. Thank you so much. You've put it an absolute treat. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this installment in the miniseries on the Kennedy women. If you like what you heard, please drop us a review. We really do read them all. And as a final shout-out, I would like to say a big hello and thank you to Mrs Fairclough, who is teaching my 11-year-old niece, Izzy, history. Not only does she love your classes and tells me all about them, but she's told me apparently that you are a fan of this podcast. So I wanted to say hi, and thank you for not telling Izzy what we talk about on this podcast.

Appreciate it, Mrs. Fairclough. Cheers. The senior producer on this podcast was Charlotte Long. The producer is Stuart Beckwith. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.