1400069106Secret Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Mimi Alford

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Hay House, Inc., for permission to quote two lines from Saved by a Poem: The Transformative Power of Words by Kim Rosen (Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, Inc., 2009), p. 188, copyright © 2009 by Kim Rosen. Reprinted by permission.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60344-3

  Cover design: Anna Bauer

  Cover photograph: courtesy of the author

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Everyone has a secret. This is mine.

  In the summer of 1962, I was nineteen years old, working as an intern in the White House press office. During that summer, and for the next year and a half, until his tragic death in November 1963, I had an intimate, prolonged relationship with President John F. Kennedy.

  I kept this secret with near-religious discipline for more than forty years, confiding only in a handful of people, including my first husband. I never told my parents, or my children. I assumed it would stay my secret until I died.

  It didn’t.

  In May 2003, the historian Robert Dallek published An Unfinished Life: John F.

  Kennedy 1917-1963. Buried in one paragraph, on page 476, was a passage from an eighteen-page oral history that had been conducted in 1964 by a former White House aide named Barbara Gamarekian. The oral history had been recently released along with other long-sealed documents at the JFK

  Presidential Library in Boston, and Dallek had seized upon a particularly juicy tidbit. Here’s what it said:

  Kennedy’s womanizing had, of course, always been a form of amusement, but it now gave him a release from unprecedented daily tensions. Kennedy had affairs with several women, including Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary; Mary Pinchot Meyer, Ben Bradlee’s sister-in-law; two White House secretaries playfully dubbed Fiddle and Faddle; Judith Campbell Exner, whose connections to mob figures like Sam Giancana made her the object of FBI scrutiny; and a “tall, slender, beautiful” nineteen-year-old college sophomore and White House intern, who worked in the press office during two summers.

  (She “had no skills,” a member of the press staff recalled. “She couldn’t type.”)

  I wasn’t aware of Dallek’s book when it came out. JFK biographies, of course, are a robust cottage industry in publishing, and one or two new books appear every year, make a splash, and then vanish. I tried my best not to pay attention.

  I refused to buy any of them, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t occasionally drop into bookstores in Manhattan, where I lived, to read snippets that covered the years I was in the White House. Part of me was fascinated because I had been there, and it was fun to relive that part of my life. Another part of me was anxious to know if my secret was still safe.

  The publication of Dallek’s book may have been off my radar, but the media was definitely paying attention. The Monica Lewinsky scandal, which had nearly brought down the Clinton Administration five years earlier, had stoked the public’s interest for salacious details about the sex lives of our leaders, and Dallek’s mention of an unnamed “White House intern” lit a fire at the New York Daily News. This was apparently a Big Story. A special reporting team was quickly assembled to identify and locate the mystery woman.

  On the evening of May 12, I was walking past my neighborhood newsstand in Manhattan when I noticed that the front page of the Daily News featured a full-page photograph of President Kennedy. I was already late to yoga class, so I didn’t pay much attention to the headline, which was partially obscured in the stack of papers, anyway. Or maybe I didn’t want to see it. I was well aware that tabloids such as the Daily News tended to focus on all things personal and scandalous about JFK. Such stories always made me queasy. They reminded me that I was not that special where President Kennedy and women were concerned, that there were always others. So I hurried past, pushing the image of JFK out of my mind. Keeping a secret for forty-one years forces you to deny aspects of your own life. It requires you to cordon off painful, inconvenient facts—and quarantine them. By this point, I had learned how to do that very well.

  What I missed, in my rush to get to yoga, was the full headline below the photo:

  “JFK Had a Monica: Historian Says Kennedy Carried on with White House Intern, 19.” Inside was a story, taking off from what was in Dallek’s book and featuring a new interview with Barbara Gamarekian, who said she could remember only the nineteen-year-old mystery intern’s first name but refused to reveal it. Her refusal, of course, only incited the Daily News team to dig deeper.

  The next morning, at nine o’clock, I arrived at my office at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, as usual. I hung up my coat, as usual. I took my first sip of coffee from C’est Bon café, as usual. And then I sat down and checked my email. A friend had sent me a message that contained a link to a Daily News story. I clicked on it, not knowing what it was. Up came a story with the headline “Fun and Games with Mimi in the White House.” He had sent it to me, he said, because of the “funny coincidence” of our names.

  For the first time in my life, I knew what people meant when they said they had the wind knocked out of them. I went cold. I quickly closed my door and scanned the article. Though my last name at the time—Fahnestock—was not mentioned, I felt a peculiar sense of dread, that everything was about to change. This was the moment I had feared my entire adult life.

  I tried not to panic. I took a deep breath and mentally checked off all the things that weren’t in the article. The Daily News didn’t know where I lived. They hadn’t contacted any of my friends. They hadn’t reached out to people from my White House days. They didn’t have my picture. If they had known any more about me they would have included it, right? And they certainly would have tracked me down for a comment.

  None of that had happened.

  Besides, I had lived through close calls before. A year earlier, the author Sally Bedell Smith had called me at home. She said she was doing a book about how women were treated in the sixties in Washington. It sounded innocent, but it was enough to put me on full alert, and I suspected a somewhat different agenda. I wasn’t ready to start peeling away the layers of secrecy and denial yet, certainly not with a woman I’d never met. I said I couldn’t answer her questions and politely asked her not to call me again, and she honored my request. My secret was safe.

  But this Daily News story felt different.

  The day after it ran, I arrived at work to find a woman sitting outside my office.

  She introduced herself as Celeste Katz, a reporter from the Daily News, and she wanted confirmation that I was the Mimi in the previous day’s story.

  There was nowhere to hide, and no point in denying it. “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “Mimi Breaks Her Silence,” read the headline the next morning.

  At this point in my life, I was sixty years old and divorced, living quietly, by myself, in an Upper East Side apartment a few blocks from Central Park. In the early ninet
ies, four decades after dropping out of college, I’d gone back and earned my bachelor’s degree at the age of fifty-one. I was a lifelong athlete and a devoted marathoner who spent many predawn hours circling the Central Park reservoir, and enjoying the solitude. My ex-husband, with whom I’d had a stormy divorce, had died in 1993. My two daughters were grown and married, with children of their own. For the first time in many years, I was feeling a measure of peace.

  I had spent time in therapy getting to this place, getting to know myself. After being mostly a stay-at-home mom, I had come to take a great deal of pride in my work at the church. I’d worked there for five years, first as the coordinator of the audio ministry (recording and producing the extraordinary sermons of Dr.

  Thomas K. Tewell, our senior pastor) and then as the manager of the church’s website. The audiotapes I produced had grown into a significant source of the church’s funding—and the work itself provided not just income but routine and solace. I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual one, and I loved my work at the church. I also loved my privacy.

  When the news broke, it broke everywhere—not only in New York but across the United States and in Europe, too. Here, unfortunately, was my fifteen minutes of fame. The headlines ran the gamut, from predictable to salacious to silly: “From Monica to Mimi.” “Mimi: Only God Knows the Heart.” “JFK and the Church Lady!” I was mocked by one of my favorite writers, Nora Ephron, on the op-ed page of The New York Times. Interview requests poured in, my answering machine full of messages from Katie Couric, Larry King, Diane Sawyer, and, of course, the National Enquirer, which actually slipped an envelope of twenty-dollar bills under my apartment door (which I gave to the church). Weekly magazines deluged me with letters. “Dear Ms. Fahnestock,” they all began, “I apologize for the intrusion. I know this isn’t an easy time for you, but …”—and then they got to the point. A Hollywood producer sent flowers before writing about acquiring the film rights to my story; he offered a million dollars in writing before meeting me. Literary agents descended, wanting to represent me. Edward Klein, author of not one but two scurrilous books about the Kennedys, called to say that if I let him ghostwrite my book I’d be rich and would “be able to live in peace.” Emails arrived from friends, well-wishers, celebrity stalkers, and critics. A college acquaintance provided some comfort:

  “Please remember that all of this is ‘this week’s news,’ ” she wrote. “It will go away. It’s just that JFK is like Elvis. We all think that we know him and we always want to hear more.”

  I turned down all the media requests. I thanked my well-wishers for their kindness. I ignored the critics, concluding that there was no way to reason with people who thought I was intentionally trampling on JFK’s memory or who thought I was making it all up. I reminded myself that it wasn’t my idea to go public; going public had been forced upon me.

  I had spent the last forty years in fear of being hunted down, found out, exposed. And now that moment had come. But it was unexpectedly liberating. A calmness came over me as the media storm hit full force. I realized I could handle it, that I had nothing to be ashamed of. I was through with hiding.

  To the throngs of reporters camped out in front of my apartment building, I handed out a simple statement: “From June 1962 to November 1963 I was involved in a sexual relationship with President Kennedy. For the last 41 years, it is a subject I have not discussed. In view of the recent media coverage, I have now discussed the relationship with my children and my family, and they are completely supportive.”

  And then I said nothing more.

  My full name is Marion Beardsley Fahnestock Alford. In many ways, those three surnames tell you everything you need to know about me and where I come from. I was a Beardsley for the first twenty years of my life, which included the time I was intimate with JFK. I was a Fahnestock for the next four decades, taking the name of the man I married in January 1964, two months after JFK’s assassination. Fahnestock is the name attached to the bulk of my adult life and the name my two daughters were born with. I am an Alford now, because of my marriage in 2005 to Dick Alford, the great love of my life, whom, ironically, I would never have met if I hadn’t been outed in 2003. It’s the only name I go by today, the only name on the jacket of this book.

  There’s a reason for that. I am no longer the sheltered nineteen-year-old Mimi Beardsley, who entered into a relationship with the most powerful man in the world. Nor am I the scared, emotionally crippled Mimi Fahnestock who spent a lifetime living with, and struggling to overcome, the consequences of that relationship.

  I am Mimi Alford, and I do not regret what I did. I was young and I was swept away, and I cannot change that fact. It’s been almost ten years since my secret was revealed to the world, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the intervening years thinking about this tender episode of my life, and how to express my feelings about it, or even if I should. I don’t have such doubts anymore. Until that day in May, there had been an emptiness inside me that I didn’t know how to fill. But since then, the happiness and contentment I have come to know as Mimi Alford have freed me—and taught me the importance of taking control of my story.

  At first, I wrote letters (never mailed) to my oldest granddaughter, to “set the record straight.” “Dearest Emma,” I began, “I have a story I want to tell you because someday when you are older there’s a chance you might come across my name in a book about an American President. I want you to know the facts.…”

  But there was so much more to the story than just getting the facts down for the record. Living with a secret had stunted me emotionally, and I realize now that my letters were only tentative steps at understanding. Taking complete control would demand intense self-reflection, and not just beginning and ending with my time at the White House.

  This book represents a private story, but one that happens to have a public face.

  And I do not want the public face of this story—the one where I will be remembered solely as a presidential plaything—to define me.

  It may be hard to accept that a chaste teenage girl can end up in bed with the President of the United States on her fourth day in the White House. But no story is as simple as that.

  It begins on a train to Washington, D.C.

  Chapter Two

  It was a hot, muggy Sunday in Trenton, New Jersey, June 1962. The train car I boarded was jammed past capacity and lacked air-conditioning, quickly turning my favorite madras dress into a mass of wrinkles. The air, as it always was then, was thick with cigarette smoke. But none of that bothered me. I was not yet a college sophomore, not yet twenty years old, and here I was, on my way to Washington, D.C., having landed the plummiest of summer jobs—an internship in the White House. The next morning, I would be walking through the West Gate and going to work in the press office of the Kennedy Administration.

  Of course, I had very little idea of what this actually meant. I knew some basic things: where I would be living, whom my roommate would be, where I was supposed to show up on the first day of my internship, and who I was supposed to ask for. I knew I was going to wear my favorite madras dress if it survived the train ride, or if I could iron it in time. But beyond that, I had no idea what the job would entail, or whom I would be working with. For that matter, I still had only the foggiest idea of how the internship had fallen into my lap in the first place.

  I would soon learn that most people at my level had secured their positions by pulling strings or calling in favors, even for the lowest-paid internships. Some interns had family connections or parents who were big party donors. That wasn’t me. There were also those who had such a profound passion for politics, they had landed their jobs through sheer force of will. That wasn’t the case with me, either. I hadn’t even applied for this internship. My knowledge of government was limited to what I’d learned in my freshman poli-sci classes. If I had a political affiliation, it probably leaned more toward the moderate Republicanism of my parents, who had loved Eisenhower and favored Richard
Nixon, not John F. Kennedy, in the 1960 presidential race.

  Like many young people in the early 1960s, however, I was not immune to the star power, and renewed sense of purpose, that the dynamic President from Massachusetts represented. He was younger than my father by twelve years.

  He was witty and charming and handsome on TV. He had a beautiful young wife who matched him step for step in style and glamour. And it was she—Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy—who, in a roundabout way, had gotten me this job in the first place. Let me explain.

  This wasn’t my first visit to the White House. The year before, during my senior year at Miss Porter’s—a boarding school for girls in Farmington, Connecticut—I had served as editor of the Salmagundy, the student newspaper. As it happened, Jackie Kennedy had also attended Miss Porter’s, class of 1947, and, like me, had worked on the Salmagundy. As an aspiring journalist, I had kept my eye on Mrs. Kennedy throughout the 1960 campaign. She was already our school’s most famous graduate (or “Ancient,” as we call them), and if she became First Lady, it would be a big coup to land an interview with her. I’d write to her and make a formal request. How could she say no to a fellow Ancient?

  A month after the inauguration, Hollis French, the school’s headmaster, helped me draft the letter, officially requesting an interview for the Salmagundy. I typed it on school stationery, sent it off, and spent the next few days—which felt like weeks—waiting for the mail, checking the mail, and being disappointed when the mail contained no response from the First Lady. Finally, on March 10, a cream-colored envelope engraved with “The White House” in dark blue landed in my mailbox. Although I was dying to rip it open on the spot, I ran into Mr. French’s study so we could read it together. Inside was a typed letter from Letitia Baldrige, the First Lady’s social secretary and chief of staff, and herself a Miss Porter’s alum, gently turning down my request. With grace and kindness, Miss Baldrige cited the First Lady’s hectic schedule and the “lineup of well over one hundred correspondents and journalists awaiting the opportunity for a personal interview with her.”