John F. Kennedy’s Multiple Affairs — Including With Marilyn Monroe
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and MuseumJohn F. Kennedy allegedly had multiple affairs, including with movie star Marilyn Monroe.
After Jackie Onassis Kennedy walked in on John F. Kennedy receiving oral sex from an office temp in the Senate Office Building while he was a junior senator for Massachusetts, she went to his father and told him she wanted a divorce. Joe Kennedy offered her $1 million to remain in the marriage.
Jackie stayed. But she told her father-in-law that if her husband brought “home any venereal disease from any of his sluts” then she wanted $20 million.
Kennedy enjoyed multiple affairs during his marriage. He allegedly courted strippers, college students, White House interns and secretaries, and socialites.
But Kennedy’s most famous affair — never definitively proven — was with movie star Marilyn Monroe.
Wikimedia CommonsMarilyn Monroe with John F. Kennedy in 1962, shortly after she sang him “Happy Birthday” at Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Rumors about Kennedy’s affair with Monroe began on May 19, 1962, when the movie star sang “Happy Birthday” to the president at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Monroe breathily offered birthday wishes to Kennedy while wearing a figure-hugging dress covered in shimmering crystals.
After she finished, Kennedy quipped: “I can now retire from politics after having had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome way.”
But the television audience at home saw nothing “wholesome” at all. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen described Monroe’s performance as “making love to the president in the direct view of forty million Americans.”
The actual facts of Monroe’s relationship with Kennedy are hazy, however. They likely met in 1961 at a dinner party, and possibly had a sexual encounter in March 1962. Monroe’s masseur and close friend Ralph Robert claims he heard a “Boston accent” while on a call with Monroe one night, and that the movie star passed the phone to the president.
“Marilyn told me that this night in March was the only time of her ‘affair’ with JFK,” he said. “Marilyn gave me the impression that it was not a major event for either of them: it happened once, that weekend, and that was that.”
In the end, only Kennedy and Monroe know what happened for sure. But both met untimely ends — Marilyn Monroe died of a barbiturate overdose on Aug. 4, 1962, and an assassin killed John F. Kennedy less than a year later on Nov. 22, 1963.
