You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (73 page)

7.
        All King quotes from Michael Dyson,
I May Not Get There with You
(2001), pp. 162–164, 346–347.

8.
        Ralph Abernathy,
And the Walls Came Tumbling Down
(1991), p. 472.

9.
        Dyson,
I May Not Get There
, pp. 193–194.

10.
      Abernathy,
And the Walls
, pp. 433–441, 470.

11.
      Sect. largely from Wallace,
Intimate Sex Lives
, pp. 421–424.

12.
      Li Zhi-Sui,
Private Life of Chairman Mao
(1996), pp. 93–94.

13.
      Quote and Villa sect. largely from Wallace,
Intimate Sex Lives
, pp. 445–447.

14.
      Ray Robinson,
Famous Last Words
. . . (2003), p. 177.

This list is not meant to be comprehensive. Also, because of their private and consensual nature, extramarital sexual activities are difficult to discover and prove. If one requires irrefutable evidence in these matters, almost none of the following is valid. On the other hand, it is likely that numerous presidential activities have successfully been hidden from historians and journalists, particularly those from the United States’ first century.

George Washington
—There are no illegitimate children to prove that our first president committed adultery, however, that is not surprising since Washington was likely sterile. It is apparent that his true love was not the wealthy widow he married, Martha Dandridge Custis, but his friend’s wife, Sally Fairfax, with whom he exchanged passionate letters that only allude to adulterous consummation.
¹

Thomas Jefferson
—After much scholarly jousting over the issue of whether Jefferson fathered the children of his slave, Sally Hemmings, it now appears that he did not. It is more likely his brother, Randolph, did instead.
²
Jefferson promised his wife on her deathbed, when he was thirty-nine, that he would never remarry and he kept his promise. However, he made no promise to stay chaste and it appears that he did not. One of his relationships was in Paris, France, with the Italian artist Maria Hadway Cosway, who likely had an open marriage with her bisexual husband.
³

His best friend’s wife, Betsey Walker, accused him of pursuing her sexually for eleven years. This led John Walker to challenge Jefferson to a duel that never occurred. The eleven-year term is likely a gross exaggeration. However, in regards to the matter Jefferson did concede “that when young and single I offered love to a handsome lady. I acknolege [sic] its incorrectness.”
⁴

Grover Cleveland
—When Cleveland was a sheriff in Buffalo, New York, and known as “Big Steve,” he had an illegitimate son by a widow, Maria Crofts Halpin. Cleveland put the boy in an orphanage until foster parents could be found. When Halpin protested, she was committed to an asylum for five days. She later gave up on fighting for custody when Cleveland gave her a generous payment. When political opponents later tried to derail him with the story, his open honesty about the affair deflated the issue.

Later in life his law partner, Oscar Folsom, died and Cleveland became a father figure to Folsom’s eleven-year-old daughter, Frances. When “Frank” turned twenty-one, the forty-nine-year-old president married her in the White House.

Andrew Jackson
—Jackson met Rachel Donelson Robards while she was living with her widowed mother. They fell in love. Unfortunately, Rachel was still married to a Lewis Robards, from whom she was separated. Robards retrieved Rachel from her mother’s home in Tennessee. Jackson—a man who would eventually survive over one hundred duels—was not cowed, and he abducted Rachel from Robards’ home in Kentucky and took her back to Tennessee. Robards was going to conduct another raid, but Jackson and Rachel fled to Mississippi to avoid it. Robards then filed for divorce, and Jackson and Rachel were married. Unfortunately, the court denied Robards’ divorce, petition making Rachel a bigamist. Years later the divorce and wedding were finally repeated successfully.

James Buchanan
—Many believe that Buchanan was a homosexual.
⁵
As a young man, his fiancée broke off their engagement and then died shortly thereafter. Buchanan never married and lived with a man, William Rufus King, for twenty-three years. King was a bachelor as well, and served as vice president under Franklin Pierce. King was considered effeminate by his associates and referred to in the derogatory homosexual terms of the day.

Woodrow Wilson
—While married, Wilson had an affair with a Mary Allen Peck, whom he met while vacationing in Bermuda. His presidential opponent in 1912, Theodore Roosevelt, refused to use the affair against Wilson in his campaign saying, “It won’t work! You can’t cast a man as a Romeo who looks and acts so much like an apothecary’s clerk.”
⁶

Warren Harding
—Harding was aggressively wooed by a wealthy “unattractive divorcée” named Florence Kling DeWolfe, and married her.
⁷
Not being physically attracted to his wife, Harding turned to brothels and affairs for release. Florence would have him followed and would scold him with the evidence but he did not care.

Harding had a fifteen-year affair with his good friend’s wife, Carrie Phillips, and would write her love letters (some were over forty pages) describing her physical features and his overwhelming lust: “Carrie, take me panting to your heaving breast.”
⁸
When he ran for president in 1920 she used these letters to get hush money from the Republican National Committee.

As a fifty-two-year-old senator he took the virginity of a voluptuous twenty-one-year-old daughter of a family friend, Nan Britton. As president he continued their affair rather indiscreetly at the White House, most notoriously once having intercourse in a White House closet. Britton had a daughter by Harding, whom he supported financially.

Franklin Roosevelt
⁹
—Roosevelt had an affair with Lucy Mercer, the secretary of his wife, Eleanor. Five years into it, Eleanor found love letters and confronted Roosevelt. It is believed that he and Eleanor discontinued sexual relations around that time. It is probable that he later had sexual relations with his young secretary, Missy LeHand. Other partners are more speculative. (His paralysis did not hamper his sexual capability.)

It is also possible that Eleanor had her own affairs including one with a woman, reporter Lorena Hickock. Hickock lived at the White House for four years and some of their voluminous correspondence discusses passionate embraces. While there is uncertainty about Eleanor’s sexuality, Hickock was likely a lesbian.

Dwight Eisenhower
—Eisenhower had a relationship with his World War II driver, Kay Summersby. President Harry Truman confirmed that Eisenhower requested military leave after the war from General George Marshall so that he could divorce his wife, Mamie, and marry Summersby. Marshall refused the request and threatened to make Eisenhower’s life hell if he divorced.

Summersby claimed in her memoirs that their passion did not go beyond heavy kissing because Eisenhower had impotency issues that he blamed on Mamie. Summersby quoted Eisenhower as saying his marriage “killed something in me. Not
all at once, but little by little. For years I never thought of making love, and when I did . . . I failed.”
¹⁰
The ghostwriter of her memoirs, Sigrid Hedin, later said that Summersby confided in her that Eisenhower was not completely impotent, but that she did have to teach him lovemaking.

John F. Kennedy
—Kennedy lost his virginity in a Harlem brothel at the age of seventeen. As a young man he named his penis “JJ,”
¹¹
and had an affair with a married ex-Miss Denmark who had smitten Adolf Hitler and was allegedly a Nazi spy. After learning the FBI was wiretapping their trysts, Kennedy broke up with her.
¹²

As a single congressman he was always with women, however, he developed a reputation for being a quick sexual performer who preferred to stay on his back. (In his defense, he suffered from back problems his entire life.)

A senator with whom he shared an apartment for affairs said Kennedy had the most active libido of any man he had ever known, and that Kennedy enjoyed having sex with two women at once. Kennedy was nonchalant about his promiscuity and once told reporters, “I’m never through with a girl until I’ve had her three ways.”
¹³

After marriage his breezy attitude did not waiver. He entered one of his inauguration parties with the words, “Where’s the broads?” before picking a sex partner out of a lineup of six starlets.
¹⁴
When his staff panicked over a picture of him lying next to a naked buxom brunette he merely said, “Yes, I remember her. She was great!”

He liked to swim naked in the White House pool and of his numerous secretarial partners there were two prominent ones in the White House, known to Secret Service agents as Fiddle and Faddle. Fiddle and Faddle would sometimes join Kennedy in the pool sans clothes.

Kennedy was not averse to paying for sex either, reportedly using call girls as warm-ups before his famous televised presidential debates. Some of his more prominent trysts were with the stripper Blaze Starr, with whom he reportedly had intercourse in a closet while her governor fiancé hosted a party in the next room, and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.

Lyndon Johnson
—Johnson’s most prominent affair was with the socialite mistress of his mentor and benefactor Charles Marsh. Her name was Alice Glass and Johnson’s wife, Lady Bird, said of her, “She was very tall, and elegant, really
beautiful . . . I remember Alice in a series of long and elegant dresses and me in—well, much less elegant.”
¹⁵
Glass’ sister and best friend say she overlooked his big ears and nose, and fell for his expressive eyes, loving hands, and his aspiration to help people.
¹⁶
Although he would have future affairs, Glass appears to have been his true love and he probably would have divorced Lady Bird and married her if it would not have been political suicide.

Johnson was extremely blunt and open about sexual matters, for example in college he would frequently tout his naked penis, called “Jumbo,” in front of his roommates, saying things like, “Jumbo had a real workout tonight.”
¹⁷
Proud of its size, even in Congress he would ask fellows at the urinals if they had ever seen anything so big. He would openly pee in the House of Representatives parking lot in front of women, and once dropped his pants to show his staff, male and female, a hernia injury.

A frequent crotch-and-rear-scratcher/adjuster, he complained his tailor never gave him enough “ball room.”
¹⁸
He once fixed a staffer’s tie knot because it looked like a “limp prick,”
¹⁹
and in the White House instructed a staffer to assuage a female reporter critical of Johnson by taking her out on a date: “Give her a good dinner and a good fuck.”
²⁰
His repeated instructions regarding this strategy indicated Johnson was not joking.

As a congressman he had an open affair with fellow congresswoman/actress Helen Gahagan Douglas. Despite the fact they were both married, they would drive to Congress together in the mornings and walk in holding hands.
²¹
His poor treatment of the excessively shy Lady Bird extended beyond adultery to public disrespect: “You look so muley, Bird. Why can’t you look more like Nellie?”
²²
(Nellie was a friend of Lady Bird’s.) In college Johnson was open about wanting to marry a woman only for her money and it appears that he did.
²³

Ronald Reagan
²⁴
—Reagan’s first wife, the Academy Award-winning actress Jane Wyman, left him for being a boring stiff and an endless talker. When he was once rambling at a Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG) meeting, of which he was president, she shouted at him, “Oh, for God’s sake, Ronnie, shut up and go shit in your hat.”
²⁵
Wyman also claimed his sexual skills were as good as his acting. (He was only a B-level actor.) This evaluation was echoed by others.

Reagan was devoted to Wyman. He even publicly gave his blessing to an affair she had prior to their divorce. When his attempts at reconciliation failed he went on a two-year tear of trysts that began before his divorce was official. He slept with so many women that he found himself in bed one morning with a woman whose name he had forgotten, telling himself, “Hey, I gotta get a grip here.”
²⁶
During this time Reagan loved to drink heavily and when he was not having sex, he liked talking about it. Reagan went out clubbing with so many celebrity women that he was called a “wolf” by one movie magazine.
²⁷

Unfortunately, the non-celebrities who passed through his bed did not get the same treatment. One model, Betty Underwood, recalls that he would not even pay for her to take a cab ride from his apartment late at night and she had to take a bus. During the months of their affair he never took her out and when she called him one day to tell him she was pregnant, he pointed out they had never been seen in public together and hung up on her. Scared she would lose her SAG card if she pursued the matter, she got an abortion.