The Nation: Jack Kennedy's Other Women

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When Judith Campbell Exner said last week that she had "a close personal" relationship with Jack Kennedy, she was only confirming what had long been a matter of open and widespread speculation: that even after he entered the White House, the handsome and fun-loving Kennedy never stopped pursuing attractive women—nor they him. His privacy guarded by discreet Secret Service agents, his wife often away on vacations, his duties affording frequent travel, and the aura of his office proving nearly irresistible, Kennedy as President found the catching all the easier.

Inevitably, a legend of prodigious sexual activity would enwrap as romantic a figure as the wealthy, glamorous young President. Kennedy, moreover, seemed to enjoy the image. He never hid his fondness for attractive women, seeking them out for special attention as he moved into crowds to shake hands or spotting a comely campaign worker among his wide-eyed supporters. Once he startled two proper Britons, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan and Foreign Minister R.A.B. Butler, during a 1962 conference in Nassau by casually confiding that if he went too long without a woman, he suffered severe headaches.

Plenty of Fire. The eagerness of many women to cure his headaches may have stretched the legend beyond reality. Insists one woman who moved in Kennedy's show-business social circle: "If all women who claimed privately that they had slept with Jack had really done so, he wouldn't have had the strength left to lift a teacup." Yet under all that smoke, there was apparently plenty of fire.

At least two well-known beauties told close friends about their affairs with Kennedy. Before her accidental death in 1967, Actress Jayne Mansfield claimed to have carried on a three-year intimate and intermittent romance with Kennedy. There is little doubt that Marilyn Monroe also had a sexual relationship with the President. Show-biz Chronicler Earl Wilson claims without qualification in his book Show Business Laid Bare: "Marilyn Monroe's sexual pyrotechnics excited the President of the United States." According to Wilson, their intimate relationship began about a year before her death and was pursued in New York's Carlyle Hotel, the Beverly Hills Hotel, Peter Lawford's Santa Monica home, the White House, and even in Kennedy's private plane, Caroline. Once, Wilson relates, Monroe returned from a meeting with the President and confided to a friend: "I think I made his back feel better."

Other celebrities linked with Kennedy in gossip columns have either denied any intimacies with him, refused to talk at all, or in some cases said they had never even met him. They include Actresses Angie Dickinson, Kim Novak, Janet Leigh and Rhonda Fleming.

Sources familiar with the Kennedy White House contend that Kennedy's liaisons were mostly with relatively unknown young women. Most often cited are two women who displayed few secretarial skills but worked on his staff. Bright and charming, they were attractive—but were neither sensational beauties nor sultry playgirls. British Director Jonathan Miller, who once saw them around the White House, claimed that they looked "like unused tennis balls —they had the fuzz still on them."