Book Review: Ladies' Man: The Careless Heart of John F. Kennedy
Imagine The Crown but set in Hyannis Port, narrated by every woman who ever had the misfortune of catching Jack Kennedy's eye, and filtered through the kind of tell-all intimacy that makes you simultaneously fascinated and furious. That's Ladies' Man in a sentence—and six-time New York Times bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer barely needs more than that elevator pitch to sell it.
Here's what sets this book apart from the avalanche of Kennedy mythology that has been burying us since 1963... Leamer isn't interested in rehashing Camelot. He's interested in dismantling it, brick by brick, with the voices of the women who built it and got absolutely nothing for their trouble. Leamer knew three of Kennedy's mistresses personally and that level of access translates into a narrative intimacy that no amount of archival deep-diving could replicate. This isn't a dry historical autopsy. It reads more like an extremely well-sourced confessional.
The cast of women here reads like the most exclusive and most exploited guest list in American history. There's the Danish beauty Inga Arvad, who managed to be both a suspected Nazi spy and one of the few women who seems to have genuinely seen something real in the young Kennedy. There's the ethereal Swedish aristocrat Gunilla von Post, who decades later would write her own account of their brief affair with a kind of romantic longing. Jackie, of course, gets her due as well, though the book wisely resists reducing her to a victim. She played the hand she was dealt with extraordinary calculation and grace, and Leamer honors that without softening the circumstances that required it.
Then there are the women the casual Kennedy biography tends to footnote or skip entirely. Pamela Turnure. Diana de Vegh. The mafia-adjacent Judith Campbell Exner, whose entanglements with both Kennedy and Sam Giancana have Cold War thriller energy. East German spy Ellen Rometsch, whose deportation from the U.S. reads as a story with implications so alarming that the Warren Commission probably should have had a subcommittee. And Marilyn Monroe, whose relationship with Kennedy the book handles with more nuance and sadness than the breathless tabloid treatment she's typically afforded.
Some of the book's most unsettling territory involves the women least known to the public. "Fiddle" and "Faddle" (the actual nicknames given to the teenage girls who worked at the White House) are addressed with the gravity that designation deserves. As is Mimi Alford, whose story, when it finally surfaced decades later, prompted a collective national reckoning that lasted approximately one news cycle before we all moved on. Leamer does not let us move on.
The media suppression angle is jaw-dropping even for those of us who consider ourselves conversant in Kennedy lore. There's a particularly striking episode involving a couple named the Katers—an older Republican pair who, having caught Kennedy slinking out of a young woman's apartment building during his Senate days, made it their personal mission to follow him around to public appearances, waving an enlarged photograph of the moment. They were essentially proto-citizen journalists doing what no professional journalist of the era would do. The story went nowhere. The photograph appeared in no papers. This was not an accident. The machinery protecting Kennedy's image was so well-oiled that a couple wandering around with photographic evidence of a sitting senator's infidelity couldn't even generate a footnote in the next morning's editions.
Leamer acknowledges the cultural context of those chauvinistic times without using it as an absolution. Kennedy didn't just stray. He collected women with genuine enthusiasm for acquisition and no particular interest in what happened to them once they left his orbit. The pattern, as the book traces it from his boarding school years through the White House, is consistent enough to constitute character.
What Leamer has accomplished that so many Kennedy books have not is the construction of a fully dimensional portrait of both the man and the women. They were, in many cases, remarkable people who got caught in the gravitational pull of one of the most charismatic and careless men of the twentieth century. Leamer gives them back their specificity. That's the book's real achievement.
Ladies' Man is fast-paced, exhaustively researched, and written with a novelistic fluency that makes it genuinely hard to put down, which is no small feat for a biography covering ground this well-trodden. It will tell you things you didn't know. It will confirm things you suspected. It will make you slightly more annoyed than you already were at the selective amnesia of American political hagiography.
Many thanks to NetGalley and G.P. Putnam's Sons for the digital ARC.
= = = S.L. Wilson