When a desk in John F. Kennedy’s crowded press office was occupied by a nineteen-year-old intern named Mimi Beardsley, who spent a good deal of time waiting to be called to the President’s side so he could swim in the White House pool and have sex with her, other women in the office were angry. They were right to be. There was a good deal of work to be done, and it got harder when, on Presidential trips, one of the seats on the plane was also taken by Beardsley, who was told to wait quietly in rooms in hotels or a lodge in Yosemite or a pink-painted motel near the Kennedy home in Palm Beach until he felt like having her in his bed (or, frequently, bathtub). Mimi was not much help with the press. The anger of the women, captured in White House oral histories (“Mimi had no skills. She couldn’t type”) and interviews with biographers, has a seething quality. It was unfair that their rage was directed at Beardsley, rather than at the President. It is also very understandable—what one says at the end of a few years of frantic hard work that end with your boss’s murder.
But the rest of us are not in that position, and so the tone of Janet Maslin’s review of “Once Upon a Secret,” by Mimi Alford, as she is now known after two marriages, is genuinely unpleasant, for reasons that go beyond Alford’s story. Maslin mocks Alford as a debutante who knew what she was up to, and writes that she doesn’t deserve sympathy:
Thinking of the president lying beside the first lady did make her feel “like an intruder,” she admits. So the etiquette lessons of her cotillion days at least taught her something.
Alford’s age comes up in the review, but the President’s—forty-five—does not. The main point, for Maslin, is that Mimi was not a good girl.
Alford herself acknowledges her complicity. She writes that every friend to whom she described her first sexual encounter with the President (on her fourth day of work, he got her drunk on daiquiris, led her into an empty bedroom, and began undressing her) asked if she considered it rape. She does not, and her reasons for that are fair. But it’s not pretty—forget the age difference; he was her employer and (to put it mildly) a powerful man.
A powerful man who was exceedingly reckless: if Alford’s book makes less news than it might, it is not really because she has, in Maslin’s words, kept the story “under wraps.” She seems to have been a favorite anecdote—a punch line in amusing stories about Kennedy’s womanizing. She mentions one that has crept into books, in what she says is distorted form. Her story is already being told; she has every right to tell it. This memoir isn’t great literature, but it’s less cloying than a lot of the Kennedy hagiography out there.
Maslin compares Alford’s memoir to the one written by Andrew Young, John Edwards’s aide, and adds, “Like Mr. Young, Ms. Alford seems to have little idea how badly her stories reflect on herself.” Here’s a difference: Young helped cover up Edwards’s affair with a forty-year-old woman. Alford, as a teen-ager, was procured and then essentially pimped by the President and his aides. By her account, Kennedy asked her to perform oral sex on an aide while he watched. She did, and their contact continued for more than a year; it ended soon after she turned down a request to “take care” of Ted Kennedy. Maslin does pause to call this “vile,” before going back to rolling her eyes at Alford.
What shouldn’t be as surprising as Maslin presents it is that Mimi didn’t turn to anyone who might have got her out of the situation she was in. Instead, there was a Presidential aide who kept an eye on her and gave her contact information for an illegal abortionist. (She says she didn’t have to use it.) When she told her fiancé, he responded with anger and what she calls an act of “sexual violence,” to which she passively submitted. “From the wedding onward ‘Once Upon a Secret’ becomes increasingly crazy and sad,” Maslin writes. Sad, yes, but crazy? If she is cheerful she is bad; if she isn’t, she’s crazy. She wouldn’t be the only woman, in an office with a predatory middle-aged man, to choose between those options.
“She writes about weekly budget-balancing with her husband as if it were more fun than lolling around in the president’s bathtub,” Maslin says. Maybe it is.
Engagement photograph courtesy Mimi Alford.
