1400069106Secret

by Unknown

  I talked to Dr. Tewell the day the “Mimi” story appeared, and he had generously offered to pay for me to travel to Lisa in Virginia and Jenny in San Francisco.

  But I didn’t believe I had enough time to do that. The Daily News already had my first name; it wouldn’t be long before they found me.

  Later that day I telephoned my daughters, haltingly articulating the string of words that I had carefully scripted in my head: When I was an intern in Washington in 1962 I had had an affair with President Kennedy. The relationship lasted for nearly eighteen months and, yes, I had told their father, although he and I never talked about it after November 22, 1963.

  I’ll always cherish their responses.

  Lisa said, “Mom, I can’t believe you were nineteen and you couldn’t tell your own mother.” She had immediately envisioned me as I was back then: young, naïve, vulnerable, and isolated by a secret, even from my parents.

  Jenny asked, “What did it do to you to hide the truth for so long?” She had immediately focused on the burden I had carried.

  With my daughters in the loop, I wasn’t worried.

  The next day I went to work. Nothing happened at first. No unusual phone calls, emails, or messages. Around noon, Dr. Tewell told me he was going to be away for a few days and had asked Associate Pastor Janice Smith Ammon to watch out for me, to step in should I need help. Jan and I had a wonderful talk later that afternoon about how this story might release something inside me and change my life in ways I couldn’t imagine, for the better. I felt good. Although I didn’t relish the idea of being stalked by the press (who would?), I knew that telling the truth was not only my sole option but possibly my salvation.

  I returned to my office on the church’s first floor to find Celeste Katz, the Daily News reporter, waiting outside my door. She asked me point-blank if I was the Mimi who had been mentioned in the News article the day before.

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  I invited her to join me in the church sanctuary next to my office. I had a favorite seat in the ninth pew, so I guided her there. As we sat in the vast silent space, my serenity stayed with me. She asked me some basic fact-checking questions—my age, my job, my marital status, the year I graduated from Miss Porter’s. I answered them calmly and asked her to leave. She asked if the paper could take a picture. I politely declined.

  The remaining hours of that day were spent in a comical tango with the media.

  Jan alerted me that there was a Daily News photographer hanging around the church’s side entrance on Fifty-fifth Street with orders to get a picture of me.

  So after some fumbling around for the key, she and I decided to unlock the church’s massive front doors and exit where nobody would be expecting us: the main entrance on Fifth Avenue. We were holding hands as we ran down the steps and raced toward Madison Avenue to catch a bus to my apartment. We had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.

  At my apartment building on Ninetieth Street, a brazen reporter from the National Enquirer had snuck in, gone up to the seventh floor, and knocked on my door, to no avail. He was stepping out of the elevator as Jan and I were stepping in. The door closed before he realized who we were, and we rode up to my apartment in peace. I called the superintendent, who escorted the reporter off the premises. Inside the apartment, the telephone began ringing and ringing, I let the calls fill up my answering machine—and privately noted that news travels fast.

  Dr. Tewell had warned me that unless I was going to hold a press conference at my building—no, thank you—I should prepare a statement to keep the media at bay when the story broke. I wrote it and went over the wording on the phone with Tom and my daughters that evening.

  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 that 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.

  I have no further comment on the subject. I would request that the media respect my privacy and the privacy of my family in the matter.

  I thought it was short and dignified, with enough specific information to feed the media beast. Tom preferred saying “love affair” rather than “sexual relationship,” but I didn’t want any ambiguity in the statement, which would only lead to follow-up questions. If I was going to be besieged by the press, I’d simply hand them the statement and be done with it.

  The next morning, Thursday, May 15, I checked the Daily News online, and there was the front-page headline: “JFK Intern Admits All: City church worker, 60, says, ‘I was the Mimi.’ ” I savored the peculiar locution of “the Mimi”—as if I were some kind of evil alien being. I called my building’s super, who informed me that a flock of reporters was waiting for me on the street, including a camera crew from CNN. Jan came over, as we had arranged, to accompany me to work. After we emerged from the building, I handed out the statement and we jumped into a waiting taxi. As it pulled away, I saw Celeste Katz peer into my window, mouthing the words “I’m sorry.” But she had nothing to be sorry for. Everything she wrote was accurate, and I was convinced she had done me a big favor.

  The media nonsense was so much worse at the church—phones ringing, reporters pestering my colleagues as they showed up for work, seeking tidbits about me—that by noon we all agreed that I should return home, close the blinds, and ride the frenzy out.

  So I did. I went home and committed myself to “house arrest” for as long as necessary.

  My confinement wasn’t unpleasant. My apartment was cozy and comfortable. I caught up on my reading and knitting. Friends brought me food and good company. I stayed in touch a few times a day with Lisa and Jenny. My gallant super guarded the front door of the building and reported on the whereabouts of reporters and photographers who hung out across the street. We wondered why they didn’t leave. The super, who by now had developed a friendly but firm relationship with the reporters keeping me captive, told me that they thought I had somehow escaped through a back door and had been whisked off to New Jersey by a family member.

  I received dozens of emails and letters from family members and friends. It was hard not to feel supported with messages like this on my computer: I cried as I read the article in the Daily News. I cried because of your honesty, your courage, and maybe most of all your self-confidence. You are a wonderful person and have incredible strength. I am proud to be your friend. I love you very much.

  Voicemail messages from reporters around the world and hand-delivered letters requesting TV interviews continued coming in.

  I didn’t respond to any requests—not even those from personal favorites, such as Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer. I trusted my inner voice which said, “Stay quiet. Stay peaceful. You are in charge here.”

  After five days, the reporters disappeared from the street below my apartment and it was safe to take a run in Central Park and do my own food shopping. The media requests slowed down to a trickle, and then they, too, stopped. Soon I was back to work, business as usual. I had survived.

  My house arrest had been good for my emotions, my self-esteem, my state of mind, and my decision to not hide from the truth and yet maintain my privacy and dignity. And I savored how utterly unshaken I was about letting the secret out. My calm response to an event I had dreaded for years had been hard-earned. But your life can change overnight when you are the subject of tabloid headlines. And mine was about to change in a way I never dreamed of.

  One of the letters I received was from a man named Richard Alford. Though his name sounded vaguely familiar, I couldn’t remember anything about him, and I was certain I didn’t know him. But when he read the story on the front page of the Daily News, he contacted me. This is what he wrote: Dear Mimi,

  Since you are smart I’m sure you anticipated that your brief and to the point comment would bring a lot of exposure. As a friend I hope you stick to your statement and just ride out the storm. I don’t have to
tell you that all sorts of people will send you proposals for books, TV appearances (Larry King, Barbara Walters etc.), TV movies etc. etc. I hope you don’t need the money as a lot of money will be mentioned up front. I would guess in the millions. As a friend I hope you stick to your guns.

  I have spent the last 7½ years in India and Tokyo starting (in India) and running offices for IMG. Mark McCormack the founder of IMG and a friend and boss of mine died just hours ago having been in a coma for 4 months. All very sad … I live at 91st Street and Madison and would love to see you when the dust settles (it always does). If you have a question you would like friendly and free advice on give me a call at home. I don’t go to the office much.

  Take care and good luck.

  Dick

  I didn’t respond to his note. But his words made a distinct impression in a couple of ways. For one thing, I appreciated his shrewd warning about all the offers and big dollar numbers that would be tossed at me in the coming days.

  But mostly I thought it was odd to receive such personal advice from a stranger who took the liberty of referring to me as a “friend.” I didn’t know the man.

  How could he say he knew me? I filed it away with all the other letters.

  I had turned sixty a week before the news broke. I had been single and living alone in Manhattan for thirteen years. I had been through an ultimately fruitless on-again, off-again relationship with a man for much of that time. I say ultimately fruitless because he was never the man I was hoping for: someone who shared my interests and with whom I knew, deep down, I could share my life forever. Our relationship continued from year to year largely on inertia, almost as if we hadn’t noticed time slipping by. It fizzled out for good in 2002. I wasn’t sad or discouraged. I was ticked off at myself for wasting so much time and having ignored how I really felt about our relationship. I wasn’t getting any younger.

  But I never gave up hope. I wanted what everyone wants: to love and be loved.

  Friends suggested a Manhattan dating agency, but after paying the up-front fee of $2,500 and filling out my profile I noticed a serious flaw in their business model: They matched you up with the so-called right man and they determined whether or not you got to meet him—which took all of the control out of my hands and, let’s face it, most of the fun, too. What good is broadcasting who you are and what you’re looking for in a relationship if you can’t sift through the responses and decide the next step by yourself? It’s the most personal decision; no one should make it for you.

  I knew the major online dating services offered more options, and I decided to post my profile on Match.com. I included the usual personal statistics, adding that my favorite movie is Witness. I ended by writing, “I’d love to be with a man who wants to cook together.”

  The act of writing a profile forced me to articulate what I was looking for in a man. I didn’t find that fellow among the five men I met online. Each date was pleasant enough but featured an odd unexpected moment that I found off-putting. The first man, by sheer coincidence, had worked for an old friend of mine who had fired him. The man still harbored sore feelings about it and voiced them persistently over dinner. I told him that I wouldn’t tolerate hearing anything bad said about someone I admired—or our date would be over.

  Another date arrived two hours late at my office to pick me up for dinner. I remember eagerly jumping into his car (perhaps because I was starving by then), enjoying our meal together, and just as eagerly jumping out when he drove me home and invited himself up to my apartment. (No way was that going to happen.) With each date I was learning to assert myself and not settle for anyone who wasn’t right for me.

  My fifth and final date was the revelation. By then I had learned the wisdom of beginning with a “coffee date,” not lunch or dinner. We met at a Greek diner. He was slim and athletic, an avid biker. I could have overlooked his nervous laugh and clammy handshake, but not the fact that he ordered three courses while I sipped my coffee. Even worse, he spent the entire time talking about himself, which is surely why, outside on the street, he told me what a great time he’d had.

  “Let’s do this again,” he said.

  “Let’s not,” I said, and abruptly turned 180 degrees and walked away.

  When I turned the corner onto a side street, out of the man’s view, I felt exhilarated, pumping my fist as if I’d just won a close, crucial point in tennis. (If I wore a hat, I probably would have tossed it into the air like the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.) Yes, I had been rude, but this tiny act of self-assertion was a huge step forward for me. I immediately dialed my sister Deb in Oregon on my cellphone to share the moment with her. She, more than anyone, understood how stifled and passive I had been with the men in my life.

  “You’ll never believe what I just did.…” I told her, and then described the date note for note.

  “Congratulations!” was all Deb could say. At that moment, I felt like someone should have handed me a diploma for finally being the person I wanted to be.

  A few weeks later, the Dallek book and Daily News story splashed into my life and I removed my profile from the Internet.

  Three months later on a warm Saturday afternoon in August, I was reading in my living room. August weekends in New York City are different from the rest of the year. The city is blazing in pavement-melting heat. The streets are eerily quiet because a lot of people have left town for the weekend. I often visited my married friends in Connecticut on such days, but on this weekend I had decided to stay home. Being alone was therapeutic; for years I kept an old-fashioned steno pad next to my favorite overstuffed chair, jotting down thoughts and making lists of things to do—endless lists. Fall was around the corner. What did I want to do? How did I see my life unfolding? What were my goals? These were my questions that Saturday afternoon. I reached for the steno pad to start writing when a thought, almost like a voice, entered my head. Perhaps being home alone reminded me of the enforced solitude I had enjoyed after the Daily News piece. Perhaps I wanted to recapture the self-confident feelings that I had handled everything so well. Whatever it was, I was drawn to the file drawer in my closet and pulled out the folder on all that had happened in May. There was the note from Dick Alford.

  I sat down at my desk and wrote to him. Ten days later he answered and said he would give me a call in mid-September when he returned from a two-week trip.

  When we spoke on the phone, I suggested my standard first-date ploy—a cup of coffee—but Dick convinced me that he was interesting enough to risk a full meal.

  Although he claimed to know me, I didn’t recognize him when we met for dinner at a neighborhood restaurant halfway between his apartment and mine.

  My first impression was positive. He was my height. He had chiseled facial features, silvery blue eyes, and bushy, professorial eyebrows. Despite his stark white hair, he had a vigorous, athletic spring in his step. Plus, he held the door for me as I entered the restaurant: always a good sign.

  We started with small talk, amazed that we had lived two blocks apart and had never noticed each other on the street or at an ATM or a grocery store. Dick explained that for the past eight years he had been living and working in India and Japan, returning to New York only for vacations. But he was back for good now. I learned that he had been divorced for nearly thirty years, that he had two grown children, and that we had many friends and interests in common. We had both been marathon runners, loved New York City and the country, and regarded Central Park as a sacred civic shrine.

  The similarities didn’t stop there. I learned that, like Tony, Dick was a graduate of Williams College and Harvard Business School. Also like Tony, his first job out of college was at Morgan Guaranty. Although Dick had not been in the same class or a close friend, he had known Tony and remembered seeing us at parties on the Upper East Side in the mid-1970s. He had spent most of his career in sports marketing and, for several years, had worked on developing corporate sponsorships for the New York City Marathon and a race called t
he Fifth Avenue Mile. That’s how he had met me in the early 1980s at the New York Road Runners Club offices when I worked there. I liked that he remembered me, although I struggled in vain to recall meeting him—a fact that did not seem to faze him.

  Then something clicked that brought me closer to Dick. I recalled a small coincidence that happened back in May. Dick had written his note to me on the day his boss and friend of forty years, Mark McCormack, had died. If I didn’t remember Dick’s face, at least I remembered his boss’s name. A week after receiving Dick’s note, on the first day I returned to work after my “house arrest,” Dr. Tewell had come into my office to discuss the audio taping of a memorial service to be held later that morning in the sanctuary. It stood out because Arnold Palmer and Jean-Claude Killy—big sports stars for my generation—would be giving eulogies and the great soprano Renée Fleming would be singing Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” The memorial service was for Dick’s boss. It occurred to me that Dick must have been in the church that day while I was overseeing the taping.

  It was a slender strand of synchronicity, to be sure, but it was enough to convince me that this would not be our first and only dinner together.

  On our second dinner date, we made a seemingly silly connection over Brussels sprouts. Dick announced that they were his favorite vegetable. It’s possible that was the moment I felt the first stirrings of love for him. What could be better, I thought, than a man whose enthusiasm for Brussels sprouts matched mine?

  Soon we were seeing each other two or three times a week. We walked and talked to exhaustion in Central Park. We traded memories about races that we might have unknowingly been in together. He told me how in the 1970s as a divorced single father he would pick up his two very young children in Delaware, drive back to New York City for the weekend with them, and spend endless hours in the park. He showed me the rocks at the park’s north end where he taught them to rock-climb. He reminisced about taking care of his kids—one in diapers—all by himself, fearing he couldn’t pull it off, and then pulling it off. I saw a sensitive, responsible, loving man and I liked what I saw.