Revealed: JFK’s Romps With Kinky Call Girl Exposed In New Book
March 5 2014, Published 7:57 a.m. ET
John F. Kennedy’s flings with a teenage call girl in New York while he was President-elect connected the skirt-chasing politician to the notorious sex and spy Profumo scandal that brought the British government to the brink of collapse, a new book reveals.
Anthony Summers and Stephen Dorril detail in their new book, “The Secret Worlds of Stephen Ward,” how the British osteopath and sketch artist groomed numerous young women and introduced them to men in high society.
One of the women he met and sketched, play-for-pay girl Mariella Novotny, wound up going to New York as a prostitute. There, she was introduced to the Kennedy circle.
In a bombshell excerpt from Summers’ and Dorril’s book provided to RadarOnline.com, the authors expose how Novotny entered the Kennedys’ world of power and lust.
SHORTLY after her arrival in New York, Novotny wrote in her unpublished memoir, she had been squired to a series of lunches and parties. She was introduced as “the new import from swinging London.” The first lunch date, she recalled, had been at the venerable Luchow’s restaurant on East 14th Street, and “there I met Peter Lawford, one of the leaders of the Kennedy clan...Then, I was shot into the whirl of parties and was introduced to JFK, the President-elect. I heard several stories of his escapades and met some of the girls he had had affairs with.
“The first time I met JFK was at a large party held at the Hampshire House. Vic Damone, the singer, was the host...The suite contained a number of rooms,” Novotny wrote. “JFK was simply called the Senator and we were shown into an empty bedroom…it seemed quite natural to be taken aside for a quiet talk. He talked about England briefly, but locked the door and undressed as he chatted…”
Novotny recalled a hurried sexual encounter, followed by a discreet return to Vic Damone’s party. The gathering abruptly broke up, she recalled, when Damone’s Asian girlfriend locked herself in the bathroom and slashed her wrists. “I have never known a party to finish so quickly. JFK disappeared with a group of close associates – I was bustled out among a crowd of nervous guests.”
In a second document, apparently written later, Novotny corrected what she said was an error. Her initial meeting with John Kennedy, she said, had been in an apartment in New York’s Gracie Square. It was the first encounter involving sex, she explained, that had taken place at the Hampshire House, and the tryst had been arranged by English actor and Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford.
Was Novotny’s story true?
These days, only the most devoted keepers of the flame deny that John F. Kennedy was a chronic philanderer. “He had the most active libido of any man I have ever known,” said his close friend and confidant Senator George Smathers. As another politician put it: “Traveling with him was like traveling with a bull.” Kennedy, who was forty-three when he allegedly bedded the nineteen-year-old Novotny, had no qualms about paying for his pleasure on occasion. In the months that followed, a White House staffer was to recall he was once turned away by a Secret Service agent with the explanation: “The president has got a hundred-dollar hooker with him right now.” (In the early 1960s, that was expensive.) A Los Angeles District Attorney’s investigator got used to requests from Secret Service colleagues to “find a woman for the president.” Sometimes the order would be for two young women at a time.
Peter Lawford, who Novotny said was her first contact with the Kennedys, was married to Kennedy’s sister Patricia. He was himself a debauched figure, a devotee of group sex and something of a masochist, a trait that may have made Mariella Novotny seem especially interesting. One former female associate recalled that, rather than making love, Lawford “wanted me to bite his nipples till they bled.”
“I saw Peter,” Dean Martin’s former wife Jeanne told one of the authors, “in the role of pimp for Jack Kennedy.”
The time frame in which the escapade allegedly occurred is plausible. Kennedy was elected to the presidency in November 1960 and inaugurated on January 20, 1961. He stayed at the Carlyle Hotel, his usual base when in New York City, during the first week of January. As has been well-established, Kennedy had his own escape route from the hotel, a series of tunnels that connected the Carlyle with nearby apartment houses and other hotels. Novotny had arrived in New York in December, and did not leave the country until the end of May.
The alleged encounter at the Hampshire House aside, Novotny also recalled an occasion on which she took part in a group sex game with Kennedy. The scenario played out involved two other prostitutes, who pretended to be nurse and doctor to Kennedy as patient. It was again Peter Lawford, Novotny claimed, who had recruited the prostitutes. They duly arrived, “an attractive blonde with a stern face... and a younger girl with a kind, fresh look.” One of the women said she had indeed studied medicine at the University of California. After a teasing session with the girls in hospital uniforms, they all had sex together. Subsequently, according to Novotny, she not only visited the president at a house in Washington but also had sex with the president’s brother, Robert.
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While it is possible Novotny fabricated her story, it is not inherently implausible. John Kennedy had long been ill with chronic back and glandular ailments, and had Addison’s disease – a condition of the adrenal glands that reduces the ability to resist infection. (It has been suggested that the medication he took for the disease contributed, as it did in other patients, to heightened sexual desire.) Kennedy was no stranger to hospitals, and if he was to have a fetish, a nursing scenario seems as likely as any. Anecdotes of his sex life, from women and from law enforcement sources, leave little doubt that he enjoyed group sex. Robert Kennedy, meanwhile, though long regarded as a sexual puritan, did have some extramarital dalliances.
In her contacts with the FBI before slipping out of New York, Mariella Novotny produced an address book containing a list of names of men from the worlds of politics, law and business who – she said – had been her clients. According to the Bureau, the address book was later destroyed.
About the authors: ANTHONY SUMMERS is the award-winning author of eight best-selling books, including “Not in Your Lifetime,” his definitive 2013 book on the JFK assassination. Recently updated with new material, it contains an interview with the late Cuban exile Reinaldo Martinez Gomez, who indicated to Summers that his best friend, anti-Castro fighter Herminio Diaz Garcia, may have fired at the President in Dallas in November 1963. But Summers notes on his website: “There is no way now to assess the credibility of his account.” Summers also wrote “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” “Official and Confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover” and “Sinatra: The Life.” Summers was named a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book “The Eleventh Day: The Full Story of 9/11.” He was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for nonfiction in 2012 and is the only person to have won two Gold Daggers. STEPHEN DORRIL is the author of several books, three of them on the British intelligence services, and is a senior lecturer in the journalism department of the University of Huddersfield.
