I know (or at least I think I know) that JFK had a soft spot for sexy ladies, having flings with any number of non-famous women. I’ve got three sorta related questions.
Did he have an affair, or even a one-night stand, with Marilyn Monroe? This affair seems to be common knowledge. Maybe. Or maybe she was just doing Bobby. Or maybe they were both sleeping with her at different times. Can anyone untangle this with some degree of historical accuracy?
Is it true that Kennedy had sex with Blaze Starr the day of his famous debate with Richard Nixon, and gave her partial credit for his success in that debate? (I hadn’t heard this until recently, but it’s nice and juicy, isn’t it?)
Other famous names: Jayne Mansfield, Angie Dickinson and Tempest Storm. Truth to any of those? Anyone else famous in his little black book?
Basically, what’s the straight dope on JFK’s love life with the rich and famous? I posted this in GQ because I want to know what we actually know about his affairs and how much is mere rumor.
Not that it answers the OP, but the current edition of The World Weekly News exposes the truth behind Marilyn Monroe’s death. Apparently she had been bitten by a vampire, so J. Edgar Hoover had her killed before she could convert JFK to vampirism.
Funny you should mention that – that was actually a trivia question last night at our weekly quiz night. And that’s what started me wondering about whether or not Kennedy and Monroe really had a fling.
That “news” article is what brought us to this thread today!
Every other women is pure speculation and gossip. Just because someone says they slept with him, doesn’t mean it’s true.
And no, I don’t believe Jackie Kennedy was the only women he ever had sex with while he was married. There’s just no real proof of who the other women are.
If he had sex with other famous women during his marriage they were/are discrete enough to keep it to themselves. And these no class mobster women like Judith Campbell became famous because of their claims to having had sex with him.
To second kevja, I don’t believe there is a shred of actual evidence for a Kennedy affair with a famous woman. Nor have any of them come out and proclaimed one publicly, to my knowledge.
However, it seems certain that he did have an affair with Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law, Mary Pinchot Meyer, as admitted by Bradlee. I agree with the article cited that conspiracy theories about her death are ludicrous.
I recall seeing Judith Campbell Exner on Phil Donohue’s show years ago. The audience had pretty much the same opinion of her as you appear to have. She was very credible and discreet with the inside information she had been privy to and she pointed out that she had never spoken about her affair with Kennedy in all the years since (this was late seventies or early eighties) and never would have spoken of it except for the fact that the FBI itself had named her as one of Kennedy’s paramours and implied she had been a go-between between Kennedy, Giancana and Sinatra. Much of the information they released, according to her, was either false or erroneous, and so she went public to correct the record. She said she would have carried the fact of her affair with Kennedy to her grave otherwise.
Seriously, though, I’ve always believed that the Kennedy/Monroe affair was an urban legend (or maybe just American mythology) with no real basis in fact. Yet Everyone Knows that it happened, as Jackmannii’s comments indicate.
Is there compelling evidence either way? I realize that we don’t have a pornographic equivalent of the Zapruder film, but are the rumors about Marilyn or Blaze or other famous women based on anything other than perverse wish fulfillment? In other words, how credible is Dark Side of Camelot?
Evidence of an affair between Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy comes, among other things, from the records of numerous telephone calls she made to his office in 1962. As for Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy, see the memoir by her friend and confidant Susan Strasberg.
The evidence that Kennedy had extramarital affairs is very strong. Kennedy himself often told other people about the women he was having sex with. And several women told friends that they had slept with Kennedy. Admittedly, people will brag, somtimes about sexual conquests that didn’t happen. But when a man and a woman spend time alone together in a bedroom and each of them later say they were having sex, it’s reasonable to believe it’s true.