Posted on 05/25/2009 9:31:30 PM PDT by pissant
Mimi Beardsley Alford may get a seven-figure sum for her story, Philip Sherwell reports from New York.
A FORMER White House intern who had a 17-month affair with president John Kennedy is to tell her story for the first time.
Mimi Beardsley Alford, now 66, a retired New York church administrator, will receive an advance believed to be worth nearly $US1 million ($A1.3 million) from publisher Random House for her memoir.
Mrs Alford, who is breaking her silence after more than 45 years, maintained the secret about her relationship with the womanising president until a new Kennedy biography was published in 2003.
That book revealed that he began an affair in June 1962 with Mimi Beardsley. The 19-year-old student working in the White House press office was described as "tall, slender, beautiful" by Kennedy's biographer, Robert Dallek.
Ms Beardsley was tracked down and identified as a divorcee working for a Manhattan Presbyterian church who had told nobody about the affair.
She gave a brief statement confirming a "sexual relationship" had lasted until Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, but has said nothing more since then.
(Excerpt) Read more at watoday.com.au ...
Kennedy said that he had to have sex once a day or he would get a headache
Among the elite young socialites of Wheaton College in the early 1960s, Mimi Beardsley was part of the most envied clique - the most attractive, wealthiest, brightest and most charming girls at the toney school south of Boston.
That she could sign herself out on weekends with the words that she would be traveling with ``The President of the United States’’ only added to her status.
No one then imagined the truth, that the demure former White House intern, now known as Marion ``Mimi’’ Fahnestock, was having an extended affair with President John F. Kennedy.
It was a secret she kept until last week, when she made the remarkable admission that she was indeed ``Mimi,’’ whose story is detailed by historian Robert Dallek in his new JFK biography.
Family and friends were quick to defend her last week, saying there is no comparison to a more recent White House sex scandal.
``This is not Monica Lewinsky,’’ said Mimi’s aunt, Anne Ellis, who lives in the wealthy New Jersey suburbs where Mimi was raised. While Monica’s gabbing was her undoing and she has capitalized on her notoriety, Mimi quietly went on with her life.
``She was a better catch for him (JFK) than Lewinsky was for Clinton,’’ said classmate Susan McGunigle Linell. Mary Cleaves Guignard said, ``If you knew her, you could understand why he was attracted to her. She was lovely, well-traveled, very charming, very bright.’’
But Jane Chittick noted, ``It was not common to be sleeping with someone. It was a different generation. She’s not someone I considered to be fast. I would not have picked Mimi at all.’’
Even her closest friends say they never suspected. ``She never said a word. Can you imagine that, in a dorm, in a women’s college?’’ said Kirke Dyett Huffard, a former roommate and lifelong friend. ``For 41 years, she has never said a word to anyone. It says to me that she had tremendous character.’’
Huffard would say little more, except to add, ``She has no reason to bow her head.’’
Mimi represented the height of society, from a wealthy New Jersey family, schooled at Miss Porter’s School. At Wheaton College in Norton, Mimi was considered one of the best catches.
Mimi used her connections to get an interview with another Miss Porter alumna, Jacqueline Kennedy. That led to the White House internship, where the young socialite caught JFK’s notoriously wandering eye. Dallek reports that the affair was widely known within the White House - and remarked upon by Jackie - as Mimi partied with JFK and accompanied him on trips, even as he defused the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The sexual affair began in June of 1962 and lasted until JFK’s assassination in November of 1963, by Mimi’s own account. She was dating her future husband, the late investment banker Anthony Fahnestock, a Williams College man, at the time. She has refused to comment on what she told her husband. She became engaged to him during the affair and married him six weeks after Kennedy’s assassination, the New York Daily News reported.
The grandmother of four had two daughters with Fahnestock, who learned of their mother’s tryst with history last week. At the upscale Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where Mimi is an administrator, the Rev. J. Oscar McCloud said, ``She’s the nicest person in the world. I have the utmost confidence in her.’’
Wheaton classmates consider the entire affair history now. ``It really shouldn’t matter,’’ said Diana Walker Clymer. ``This is the spice of life . . . I just hope she writes a book. I can’t wait for our reunion. I hope she comes.’’
It looks like JFK and John Edwards were both cut from the same cloth.
I think he suffered the ultimate headache in Texas.
“The Kennedy Camelot”
Complete BS, Jack would and screw anything male or female and Jackies cousin, my wifes uncle, called her the biggest whore in Washington.
Joe Kennedy was paying her $1mil/year to stay married to Jack and when he became incapacatsated she went to Rose and demanded her million.
Rose told her to go yo hell and she went upstairs and came back down a few minutes later and told Rose to shove the million that she was marying Onassas.
http://larrysinclair-0926.blogspot.com/
great song on this site
To the tune of the Candy Man
....Obama man can....
Or shame. I'm kind of surprised by all the church people that just act like adultery is no biggy.
Money’s money. My understanding is that her mother ‘arranged’ the marriage and their family didn’t have much money.
It's not like we're dealing with a rarity here....
The book, out in May, is the story of JFK and Jackie’s Washington life from his election to his funeral. It’s structured around the relationships in their inner circle: Kennedy and Bouvier family members, administration insiders from Mac Bundy to Tish Baldrige, and friends such as Ben Bradlee, Bunny Mellon, and Joe Alsop—not to mention hangers-on, mistresses, and, yes, White House interns.
“The idea was to look at it as a portrait of court life,” says the DC author, a former New York Times reporter. “I was surprised at how many people thought about it in those terms even before Camelot.”
Thus the book opens with the cast of the “Kennedy Court,” complete with the ages of the principals in January 1961—a detail the author considers particularly important.
“Today poor John Edwards, at age 50, is trying to convince people he isn’t a baby,” she says. “Of the 40-some people around Kennedy, four were in their twenties, 16 were in their thirties, 19 were in their forties, seven were in their fifties, and only two were in their sixties.”
At the center of the story are Jack and Jackie. Smith offers new insights into their marriage, his affairs, and Jackie’s apparent tolerance of them.
“My sense is that she may well have had an 18th-century European view of their marriage that accommodated the presence of other women,” Smith says. “It got her down, but she knew that it was happening.”
One Jackie confidant who hasn’t spoken to biographers until now is Frank Finnerty, a cardiologist and a neighbor of Bobby Kennedy’s. For two years Finnerty was the First Lady’s sounding board about JFK’s infidelity and their sex life.
Smith also interviewed presidential girlfriends who had never spoken at length about their involvement—such as Helen Chavchavadze, a young woman in the Kennedys’ social circle with whom JFK conducted an ongoing affair. A few weeks after the inauguration, he visited her Georgetown house in the middle of the day.
“He did not seem to consider it terribly reckless behavior,” Smith says, “and that had to do with the relationship he had with the press. There were members of the press who were eyewitnesses, who were aware of his relationships with people like Mimi Beardsley and Diana de Veigh—she was even having an affair with one of the men who worked in the Time bureau.
The book isn’t all affairs. Knitting together details from interviews as well as little-seen letters, diaries, oral histories, and other sources, Smith creates a behind-the-scenes narrative, from daily life to international events.
Quirky moments stand out, such as Jackie chain-smoking between takes on her White House TV tour, “flicking the ashes onto the expensive silk covering of the bench she was sitting on,” according to the show’s producer.
Then there’s Smith’s favorite anecdote: While entertaining Beardsley and two other female interns in the White House pool, JFK had them put down their wine, dry their hands, and help him pick out fur pelts for a bedspread he was giving Jackie for Christmas.
“The rules of everything were so different then,” Smith says. “The fact that the Kennedys could have elaborate and wild parties where people got drunk and tore their pants and landed on the floor and couldn’t function the next morning in the West Wing—that would never be tolerated now.
“They had fun—maybe a lot more fun than they ought to have had.”
For heaven’s sake, this was not an affair. When you think of an affair you think of 2 people pursuing the same desire and having a more or less “shared” interest and equal standing in pursuing the affair. He was a 45 year old president of the US and she was a 19 year old kid who admittedly had no reason to be there than to perform as Kennedy’s sex toy. The “affairs” Kennedy engaged in were sick, self-indulgent perversions with no sense of decency or decorum or respect for the high honor, distinction and responsibilities of being the POTUS. Same for Clinton.
Wrong, Jackie was very wealthy, she was from the Dodge/Braden Copper families.
Janet and Black Jack had a troubled marriage and they separated in 1936. They reconciled briefly in 1937 but were divorced in 1940. Jackie lived with her mother, though she did see her beloved father frequently. In 1942 Janet married Hugh Dubley Auchincloss, Jr., who was a lawyer from a prestigious old family. The Auchinclosses were much wealthier than the Bouviers, and Jackie and Lee lived with their mother and her new husband. The Auchinclosses had two more children, Janet, Jr., who was born in 1945, and Jamie, who was born in 1947.
It would seem that her STEP FATHER was the wealthy one.
Marion “Mimi” Beardsley Fahnstock, now sixty and living not far from Caroline on New York’s Upper East Side
She apparently spent a considerable amount of time with her grandmother, Mrs. Dodge according to her cousin Don Braden.
Well,,,I sure wish he was President today instead of Obama. And also, he would have been unable to get the Repub nomination on last years primary. His policies back then would have made him an extremist, and far too conservative for todays Repubs.
Thats just a fact.
John Kennedy's glamorous young wife was pained by his flagrant philandering, to the point where she made snide or angry remarks about it in dangerously public settings, the book says.
"Isn't it bad enough that you solicit this woman for my husband, but then you insult me by asking me to shake her hand!" she sniped at two aides after spotting one of her husband's sex partners on a receiving line.
Another day, during a tour of the White House, she told a shocked French journalist, "This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband."
http://tinyurl.com/qqr6uh
******
Dysfunctional, 'highbrow', white trash, comes to mind.
See the book called _The Bouviers: From Waterloo to the Kennedys and
Beyond_ by John H. Davis
In the front of the book is a genealogical table:
1 - Michael Bouvier (1792-1874) married (1) Sarah Anne Pearson (2) Louise C.
Vernou (mother of John Vernon)
2 - John Vernon Bouvier (1843-1926) married Caroline Ewing
John was one of 12 children
3 - John Vernon Bouvier, Jr. (1865-1948) married Maude Sergeant
4 - John Vernon Bouvier III (1891-1957) married Janet Norton Lee
5 - Caroline Lee Bouvier married (1) Michael Canfield (2) Stanislas
Radziwill (3) Herbert Ross
Children of her second marriage were:
6 - Anthony Radziwill (b. 1959) who married Carol Ann Di Falco (b. 1960)
Anna Christina Radziwill (b. 1960)
I quote:
“The Bouviers adopted unquestioningly the aristocratic pedigrees of the
Bouviers de la Fontaine and the de Vernous de Bonneuil and absorbed them
into their flesh and blood. One wonders why they felt so insecure. Just
how difficult had their road to social acceptance been?”
“The definitive birth of the family’s aristocratic image occurred between
1890 and 1898. It was in the 1890’s that John Jr. discovered the noble
Bouvier family from the province of Dauphine, the Bouviers de la Fontaine,
which he promptly appropriated as his own, adopting both its motto and its
coat of arms, and it was in 1898 that Alexine Bouvier wrote a little book
called _Our Grandmother’s Story_ about an episode of the family history,
already mentioned, with parenthetically awarded a most aristocratic pedigree
to the grandmother in question.”
“The ancestry was of Louis Vernou, reputedly the daughter of titled
nobility. With the help of several cooperative genealogists, the money to
pay them, and the fertility of Mary’s Alexin’s and and John Jr,’s
imagination, the Bouviers concocted a pedigree going back a dozen
generations and a set of crests and heraldic symbols brilliant enough to
impress the most haughty of blue bloods.”(pages 127-129)
http://archiver.rootsweb.ancestry.com/th/read/HERBARZ/2003-05/1051972817
Reminds me of Prince Charles and Princess Diana.
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