These Few Precious Days (7 page)

Jack, who as a freshman somehow also managed to qualify for the Harvard swimming and boxing teams, never played college sports again. “Jack was always sick with one thing or another,” said his roommate, Charlie Houghton. “But this was different. This time he couldn’t just bounce back. He tried, but the poor guy couldn’t hide that he was in real misery.”

From that point on, Jack almost always wore a corset or brace beneath his shirt. Fearing the truth—that he was a rich boy who had been bested by the chauffeur—JFK also concocted a less embarrassing story to explain how he sustained the injury, claiming in interviews that no fewer than three burly linemen had piled onto him during practice. “I’ve never been free from pain,” Jack said, “since that day in practice.”

In his twenties, Jack stood over six feet tall and never weighed more than 145 pounds. If anything, his scrawny physique and sickly pallor made him more attractive to women. “Are you kidding?” said Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, arguably the closest friend JFK ever had. “He had looks, sympathy,
and
money!”

Taking his father’s advice to “get laid as often as possible,” Jack began by losing his virginity at seventeen to a prostitute in Harlem. According to Jack’s Choate buddy Rip Horton, Jack and Billings, who had also visited the prostitute, knocked on the door of his Manhattan apartment “in a total panic” over the possibility they may have contracted a sexually transmitted disease. Just to be safe, they rousted Joe Sr.’s personal physician out of a sound sleep so he could give them shots of penicillin.

Despite lingering fears that he would acquire a venereal disease, Jack went on to rack up an awe-inspiring string of sexual conquests during his four years at Harvard. “All he had to do,” said his classmate James Rousmaniere, “was snap his fingers.”

EVENTUALLY, JACK’S FEARS WERE REALIZED
when doctors treated him for gonorrhea in 1940. JFK, who routinely referred to his penis as “JJ” or “the Implement” in wisecracking letters to his buddies, was stunned. Just two years earlier, he had been circumcised—a painful procedure for a twenty-one-year-old to undergo—on the advice of doctors who told him his level of sexual activity warranted it. “Gee,” he told Billings, “I thought old JJ and I were in the clear.”

According to JFK’s urologist, Dr. William P. Herbst, sulfonamide drugs were used to successfully treat the disease. There were still to be long-term consequences, however. For the remainder of his life, Jack would suffer from persistent, drug-resistant urethritis, acute prostatitis, and recurring bladder infections. (Just before his marriage, Jack was concerned enough to ask Herbst if these problems would have an impact on his ability to father children.)

Had the women he encountered known his medical history, it’s doubtful it would have made any difference. “I was utterly dumbfounded,” said the actor Robert Stack, who shared an apartment with Jack for a time. “He’d just look at them and they’d tumble.”

Jack owed at least some of his appeal to the fact that so many women “wanted to mother him,” Patsy Mulkern said. “Every girl you met thought she was going to be Mrs. Kennedy.”

Of course, there was something else that made Jack irresistible to women. Black Jack had squandered the Bouvier fortune—a fact Jackie’s mother never tired of repeating—and Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, were left to play the poor relations following Janet’s marriage into the wealthy Auchincloss clan. “She was brought up with a father who lost his money and a mother who had to marry for security,” said Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who was working as a foreign policy researcher in JFK’s Senate office when Jack and Jackie were engaged in the spring of 1953. “It was drummed into her that she had to go out and find a rich man of her own.”

Pioneering NBC newswoman Nancy Dickerson, who dated JFK before he began seeing Jackie, agreed. “He was just so gosh-darn physically, animalistically attractive that it was hard to imagine,” said Dickerson, who berated Jack when he honked his car horn instead of coming to her front door on their first date. “And of course power is the ultimate aphrodisiac and with that combination he was really something.” But, Dickerson added, despite “that raw sexuality of his . . . there were plenty of other attractive, powerful men in Washington. There just weren’t many with as much money as Jack.”

Certainly not John Husted, the tall, handsome, Yale-educated investment banker Jackie was engaged to prior to JFK. “I thought she was heavenly looking,” Husted recalled. “She was not aloof at all. She had a devastating, cutting wit, and an innate sense of style that was obvious even then. I fell totally, completely in love with her.”

Not surprisingly, Husted, whose Wall Street salary was adequate but far from stellar, was “desperate” when Jackie jilted him amid rumors that she was dating JFK. Desperate, but not really surprised. “I knew he was a playboy, and so did she—but that was probably part of the appeal. Jack had to remind her of her father.” Besides, Husted said, “Jackie was very ambitious. Socially, I was fine, but financially I was not a great catch.”

“She was a very gracious, wonderful woman,” Chuck Spalding said. “But she wouldn’t have given Jack a second look if he hadn’t had the money.” JFK understood completely. “Jack grew up knowing that was part of his appeal to women. It didn’t bother him a bit. He
enjoyed
being rich.”

At the time Jack’s personal fortune easily exceeded $10 million, not counting his share of $400 million in total Kennedy family assets. But he never picked up the check if he could help it. When they took a cab, Jack would turn to Jackie and say, “Could you take care of that?” She paid for their popcorn at the movies, fished around in her purse for cash to pay for dinner and drinks, and when they went to church it was left to Jackie to dig up a few dollars for the collection plate.

“Jack never carried cash, and I mean
never
,” said George Smathers, another lady-killer who accompanied JFK on many of his skirt-chasing adventures. “One day I told Joe that people were getting pretty fed up picking up lunch tabs and the like, so he just told me to send him the bill and he’d take care of it.”

In sizing Jack up as marriage material, nothing was of more concern to Jackie than his reputation as a ladies’ man. Since his days at Choate, the exclusive prep school in Connecticut, Jack had cut a wide sexual swath through the worlds of high society and Hollywood—with countless coeds, waitresses, nightclub chorines, and cigarette girls thrown in for good measure.

Commissioned as an ensign in September 1941, Jack was assigned to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington and wasted no time trying to bed half the capital city’s population. “He was a typical Don Juan,” said JFK’s friend Frank Waldrop, then editor of the Washington
Times-Herald
. “You could almost imagine him checking off names in a book.”

One of Ensign Kennedy’s affairs during the period had the potential of ending his political career before it began. In 1942, Jack fell for Danish beauty Inga Arvad, unaware that she was a friend of Herman Goering and Adolf Hitler. She was also under surveillance by the FBI, which suspected her of being a Nazi spy.

Jack called Arvad “the Scandalous Scandinavian,” “Inga Binga,” and “Bingo,” and no one took more delight in listening to recordings of their steamy encounters (“If he wanted to make love, you’d make love—now,” Arvad later told her son) than FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Most important, the young naval officer’s indiscretion gave the Machiavellian Hoover leverage in his future dealings with the Kennedys. The affair ended only after Joe succeeded in getting Jack reassigned to active duty in the Pacific.

Returning from the war, Jack took full advantage of his father’s status as a force in the motion picture industry—one of many sectors of the economy where the enterprising Joe, whose torrid affair with silent screen star Gloria Swanson had tongues wagging on both coasts, had found a way to make a killing. In the late 1940s, Jack dated Joan Crawford, Lana Turner, Hedy Lamarr, Susan Hayward, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. (Years later, when she bumped into Jack and his fiancée in New York, Zsa Zsa joked, “She’s a lovely girl. Don’t dare corrupt her, Jack.” Jackie’s dead-serious reply: “But he already has.”)

The most serious of Jack’s Hollywood dalliances was with Gene Tierney, who shot to fame in the 1940s whodunit
Laura
. “I turned,” she recalled of meeting Jack on the set of her 1949 Gothic melodrama
Dragonwyck
, “and found myself staring into the most perfect blue eyes I had ever seen on a man. . . . Literally, my heart skipped.”

When she divorced her then-husband Oleg Cassini, the noted fashion designer warned Tierney that Jack would never marry her. “His family won’t stand for it,” Cassini told her. “Gene, be sure you know what you are doing.” Cassini was right. After Kennedy broke up with her, Tierney suffered a series of nervous breakdowns that led to her being institutionalized.

Scores of stunning women managed to seize Jack’s attention; none managed to hold it. “He liked women,” said Henry James, a friend he met during postgraduate studies at Stanford. “He needed women, but he didn’t want a commitment to a relationship.” As far as James could tell, Jack “was never in love.”

THERE WERE THOSE, EVEN IN
his own family, who doubted if Jack was even capable of falling in love. His sister Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, who died with her married lover in a 1948 airplane crash, once declared coldly, “The thing about me you ought to know is that I’m like Jack, incapable of deep affection.”

This seemed even more true after Kick’s sudden death and the loss of their brother Joe. Add to these tragedies Jack’s own Job-like suffering from a host of medical problems, and Joe’s second son was left with an impending sense of doom. “He was very fatalistic,” Smathers said. “When I first knew him, sometimes it seemed that women and death were all he talked about.” During one of those conversations, the two men discussed what they felt was the best way to die. Given a choice of shooting, freezing, fire, drowning, and poison, Jack picked poison. “The point is,” Jack concluded, “you’ve got to live every day like it’s your last day on earth. That’s what I’m doing.”

Jack was, according to Spalding, “obsessed with the idea that he only had a short time on the planet.” That conviction only intensified when, in 1947 at age thirty, he collapsed during a congressional fact-finding trip to London and was rushed to the hospital.

This time, doctors had finally landed on the correct diagnosis. The “wasting disease” that had brought him to the brink of death so many times was Addison’s, a condition that destroys the adrenal glands and the immune system, leaving its victim defenseless against infection.

The initial prognosis was grim. Pamela Churchill, who later married Averell Harriman and would go on to serve as U.S. ambassador to France, looked in on Jack when he was hospitalized in London. She was told by doctors that Jack had less than a year to live.

Although Addison’s is considered incurable and at that time often proved fatal, it was treatable in the late 1940s. At first, Jack was given daily injections of the synthetic hormone desoxycorticosterone acetate (DOCA). Later, to eliminate the need for daily shots, time-release pellets containing DOCA were surgically implanted in his thighs.

Still, doctors held out little hope for survival beyond a few years. There was almost no chance, the Kennedys were told, that Jack would ever make it to thirty-five—the constitutionally mandated minimum age for a president. The fact that Jack might never live to become president was a “crushing blow,” Arthur Krock said. “Joe started planning for Jack to win the White House the day after Joe Jr. died.”

Not that Jack or anyone in his camp ever admitted that he had Addison’s disease. As far as the world was concerned, young Kennedy was suffering a recurrence of the malaria he purportedly contracted in the Pacific. On the way home from London aboard the
Queen Mary,
Jack was given absolution but once again pulled through.

He was not out of the woods yet, though—far from it. Spirited off the ship on a stretcher, Jack was then transferred to a chartered plane and flown to Boston, where he spent weeks convalescing at the prestigious Lahey Clinic. Once he’d returned to work in Washington, Jack was surprised at how many people in his inner circle seemed to have bought the malaria yarn. “Yeah, he had malaria,” Patsy Mulkern insisted. “His skin was yellow, almost green, and he had these terrible chills where you’d have to wrap him up in a blanket. Hell of a thing.”