Joseph P. Kennedy Senior: “Old Man Joe”\“The Old Bugger”
About 20 years ago, I used to frequent the non-fiction section of the Central Brooklyn Public Library where, one weekend, I picked up a copy of Seymour M. Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot. Besides the scintillating details of John F. Kennedy's (JFK’s) infidelities, a footnote on page 27 about JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., left me gobsmacked.
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| Joseph P. Kennedy Sr |
In the footnote, Hersh noted that “Old Man Joe” (i.e., 69-year-old Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.), after a round of golf, had boisterous sex with his teen caddie from the French Riviera, which could be overheard by Old Man Joe’s wife Rose Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Baker.
No outsider can fully comprehend the dynamics of another family’s life, but outsiders were often shocked by what they encountered in the Kennedy household. In 1957 Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader, was asked to make a speech in Palm Beach. It seemed only natural when Rose Kennedy telephoned and invited him to come to the family’s beachfront home for lunch. Johnson, recovering from a serious heart attack, was accompanied on the trip by Lady Bird, his wife; Bobby Baker, his aide and confidant; and Senator George Smathers, of Florida.
“So we went over for lunch,” Baker recalled in an interview for this book.
Rose Kennedy, gracious and charming, was alone.
Suddenly, Baker said, “Old Man Joe comes in with a seventeen- or eigh-teen-year-old girl. Doesn’t say boo. Walks right in and goes upstairs” and engages in what, clearly and noisily, is sexual intercourse.
“Here you have the majority leader of the Senate and he and Jack had a great relationship,” Baker told me.
“I thought it was the rudest thing I’ve ever seen.”
The lunch went on as if nothing had happened. Baker learned later, he said, that the young woman was Joe Kennedy’s caddy from the French Riviera, where the Kennedys maintained a vacation home.
About ten years later, over dinner at a David Chang restaurant in midtown, a Berkeley professor suggested that I reference Truman Capote’s Answered Prayers, which has been described as a nonfiction novel.
In the book, Lady Ina Coolbirth shared that when she was 18 and a friend of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr’s daughter, she attended a sleepover at the Kennedy’s house where “the old bugger” sexually assaulted her while the rest of the Kennedy’s slept soundly.
Lady Ina Coolbirth, “Have I ever told you about the time he assaulted me? When I was eighteen and a guest in his house, a friend of his daughter Kek …”
“… the old bugger slipped into my bedroom. It was about six o’clock in the morning, the ideal hour if you want to catch someone really slugged out, really by complete surprise, and when I woke up he was already between the sheets with one hand over my mouth and the other all over the place. The sheer ballsy gall of it—right there in his own house with the whole family sleeping all around us.”
Coolbirth went on to excuse the old bugger’s audacious behavior by implying that Kennedy men just have to have sex with as many women as possible.
“But all those Kennedy men are the same; they’re like dogs, they have to pee on every fire hydrant.
Coolbirth even opined that the old bugger should be given credit for his audacious assault. And that when she volunteered not to scream, he was grateful.
“Still, you had to give the old guy credit, and when he saw I wasn’t going to scream he was so grateful …”
However, Coolbirth was very disappointed that Kennedy Sr did not acknowledge her post-sex with at least “a wink or a nod”. And that he didn’t reward her for pretending to enjoy the age-gap sex with at least a “bauble, [or] a cigarette box” as a “sentimental acknowledgment”.
“Afterward—can you imagine?—he pretended nothing had happened, there was never a wink or a nod, just the good old daddy of my schoolgirl chum. It was uncanny and rather cruel; after all, he’d had me and I’d even pretended to enjoy it: there should have been some sentimental acknowledgement, a bauble, a cigarette box …”
Interestingly, Capote based Coolbirth’s character on a New York City socialite whom reportedly shared the story in confidence with Capote.
John F. Kennedy
Mimi Alford wrote in Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath that when she was 18 and a student at Miss Porter's Boarding School, she visited the White House. Consequently, a year later, Mimi received an unsolicited phone call to do an internship at the White House.
Per Once Upon a Secret, four days after Mimi started her press office internship, the then-19-year-old received a phone call from Dave Powers. Powers was described as one of the President’s closest aides, his official title was Special Assistant to the President, he was known as The First Friend, and Mimi wrote: “Above all, Dave Powers’s job was to make the President happy.”
“Want to have a swim?” asked a male voice on the other end of the line.
“Who is this?” I asked, though the voice sounded familiar.
“It’s Dave Powers.”
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| Mimi Alford and President JFK |
After Powers assured Mimi that there would be other young women (i.e., Priscilla “Fiddle” Wear and Jill Cowan - former roommates at Goucher College) and bikinis at the pool, he arrived at her desk “within minutes” to escort her to the White House’s pool were Mimi followed enthusiastic then-23-year-old Fiddle and Jill into the dressing room. (Note: The pool's murals “with palm trees swaying in the breeze and puffy sailboats moving through turquoise water” were a gift of Joseph Kennedy Sr.”)
Fiddle and Jill didn’t waste any time wondering; they just started stripping down and leaping into suits. Their enthusiasm was contagious, so I reached for the first suit at hand.
After leaping into a bikini, Mimi “stole a glance” at herself and admired her “good posture” and “long legs” that “played up” her “[...] height and slimness.”
After JFK walked into the pool area, Mimi noted that he was: “[...] handsome, tan, in a suit and tie.”
“Mind if I join you?” he asked.
Fiddle, ever confident, said, “Our pleasure, Mr. President.”
After JFK changed into “dark swimming trunks”, Mimi noted that: “He was remarkably fit—flat stomach, toned arms—for a forty-five-year-old man.”
The President slid into the pool and floated up to me. “It’s Mimi, isn’t it?” he said.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Mimi Beardsley.”
After some brief bantering, JFK said, “Well, nice to see you, Mimi,” “and he floated away toward Fiddle and Jill.”
Minutes later, the pool party was over, Mimi changed out of her wet suit and returned to her desk. But before her hair could dry, Mimi received another call from The First Friend whom invited Alford to a “welcome-to-the-staff get-together” in JFK’s family residence, which Mimi wrote was: “[...] impossible to turn down.” Alford wrote:
For the second time in a few hours, I followed him to an unfamiliar part of the White House.
When the elevator door opened on the second floor it finally dawned on me that I was standing in the family residence. It was a grand, elegant space, an oasis of calm [...]
Naturally, Fiddle and Jill were already there. And strategically, Powers offered Mimi a daiquiri, and she did not protest when Powers strategically refilled her cold glass.
Strategically, Mimi learned from Fiddle and Jill that:
Mrs. Kennedy and the two children, four-year-old Caroline and eighteen-month-old John John, had left for Glen Ora, the house the Kennedys rented in Virginia, where the First Lady kept her horses.
When JFK entered the room: “[...] everyone rose to their feet, as if “Hail to the Chief” had begun to play [...]” Subsequently, JFK asked, “Would you like a tour of the residence, Mimi?” Mimi naively thought: “A private tour of the White House from the President of the United States. This was an extraordinary invitation.”
45-year-old JFK led 19-year-old Mimi across the central hall into Mrs. Kennedy’s “very private” bedroom.
“This is Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom,” he said.”
“Beautiful light, isn’t it?” he said. I agreed.
“This is a very private room,” he said.
Seconds later, JFK was undressing Mimi.
The next thing I knew he was standing in front of me, his face inches away, his eyes staring directly into mine. He placed both hands on my shoulders and guided me toward the edge of the bed. I landed on my elbows, frozen halfway between sitting up and lying on my back. Slowly, he unbuttoned the top of my shirtdress and touched my breasts. Then he reached up between my legs and started to pull off my underwear. I couldn’t believe what was happening.
Mimi wrote that she was surprised that she began to undress.
But more: I couldn’t believe what I did next. I finished unbuttoning my shirt dress and let it fall off my shoulders. He pulled down his pants and then he was above me.
Audaciously, JFK took Mimi’s virginity upon his wife’s private bed and, thereby, consummated their 18-month-long age-gap affair.
“He paused briefly when he felt some physical resistance.
“Haven’t you done this before?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
[...]
I nodded, propped up on my elbows.
After he finished and hitched up his pants, he smiled at me and pointed to a door in the corner.
“There’s the bathroom if you need it,” he said.
In the end, JFK bid Mimi adieu and ordered a car to take her home.
“Good night, Mimi,” he said as the door opened. “I hope you’re okay.”
“I’m fine, Mr. President.”
Downstairs, a guard showed me to the South Portico, and there, as promised, was the car to take me home.”
Mimi related on NBC’s Rock Center (2013) that when Jackie O asked President Kennedy to let her stay with him in the White House during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy summoned Mimi to the White House instead.
Michael Kennedy
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| Michael Kennedy and Marisa Verrochi |
About five years ago, I was reading the New York magazine feature “What Hope Hicks Knows” (March 18, 2018) when I read about Martin Gould, a New York based reporter, whom outed Hicks and Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary Hicks had been dating, in the Daily Mail, but more relevantly, I learned that Gould:
“[…] was charged with driving Victoria Gifford Kennedy, the estranged wife of Michael Kennedy, off the road in pursuit of a photo after she’d left her husband over his affair with [Marisa Verrochi] their [14-year-old] babysitter.”
According to Margaret Carlson’s CNN piece “Divorce, Kennedy-style” (May 12, 1997) Michael Kennedy’s five-year affair with MarisaVerrochi began when Marisawas Michael’s 14-year-old babysitter. Carlson wrote:
[...] Michael Kennedy, the sixth child of Robert Kennedy [and six-term Congressman], who once seemed to have his father's quiet passion without the Kennedy sense of entitlement [...] had a five-year affair with a girl who baby-sat his three children at the family home in Cohasset, Mass., beginning when she was a 14-year-old middle school student.
Carlson related that the Boston Globe reported (April 25, 1997) that Victoria Denise Gifford, Michael’s wife and daughter of ABC sportscaster Frank Gifford:
“[...] discovered [37-year-old] Michael in bed with the teenage babysitter in January 1995, an incident Michael blamed on alcohol.”
Michael blamed the age-gap adultery on alcohol, he enrolled in a rehab problem, naturally, the Prosecutor Jeffrey Locke did not press charges of statutory rape, and Michael continued seeing Marisa. So much so that the New York Daily News reported that when Marisa was 17: “[…] Kennedy flaunted the relationship by taking the teenager along on a whitewater rafting trip to Maine with friends where they shared a tent […]” Carlson elaborated:
The baby-sitter story broke in the Boston Globe on April 25, just as Michael and Victoria Gifford Kennedy, the daughter of ABC sportscaster Frank Gifford, were officially separating. The paper reported that Victoria had discovered Michael in bed with the teenage babysitter in January 1995, an incident Michael blamed on alcohol. He then enrolled in a rehab program. But apparently, the two continued to be seen together around the wealthy seaside town and, according to a report in the Herald, even went on a whitewater rafting trip, organized by his closest friends, and shared a tent.
Interestingly, Carlson reported that Marisa's father was a prominent businessman. Consequently, Marisa had: “[...] an upbringing that included a uniformed chauffeur.” And Carlson reported that Marissa’s family was so close with Michael Kennedy’s family that: "Michael Kennedy would [strategically] call her parents and say they were going to be out late and that she should just sleep over."
The age-gap affair ended after Marisa started her freshman year at Boston University.
And speaking of JFK and swimming pools, per Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince’s book Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame, 16-year-old Elizabeth Taylor had a swimming pool threesome with her A Date with Judy (1948) co-star 29-year-old Robert Stack and 31-year-old congressman John F. Kennedy.
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