Skirts were always the Kennedys' weakness. And Robert Kennedy's wife knew it well.
A new biography about the New York senator by Larry Tye, journalist and writer, claims that Ethel Kennedy decided to put up with her husband's infidelities but assumed it as part of the contract, as a kind of tradition, or rather the opposite. knowing that there was no custom of monogamy in the most illustrious family on the American social scale.
She loved her husband more than she would have thought possible and that is why she was able to pretend that she knew nothing. about his partner's constant love affairs. In that sense, what is offered is a confirmation of what was published a few years ago about the list of her lovers, among which there were names such as actress Kim Novak, Lee Remick and Claudine Longet. She also had an affair, supposedly, with the most important person in the industry at that time, the tormented Marilyn Monroe, they say at the same time as her brother, President John F. Kennedy.
His taste for Hollywood actresses may come from his father, Joseph, who had an affair with the silent film actress Gloria Swanson, star of Twilight of the Gods, and who also had his chain of lovers despite being a man. married.
Tye tells in his book, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, that the patriarch of the Massachusetts clan instilled in them a philosophy that spoke of the need for boys to play while girls prayed, in a play on words in English. with a clear inclination towards infidelity as a lifestyle.
Tye also claims that despite being a puritan man, the oldest of all the Kennedys, he chose a prostitute for his first s- experience, a girl from Harlem that he met when he was 21 years old after his father paid for her services so that he could have an experience. with a black woman. His opinion after testing was that she had been fine, "but not anything fabulous."
By then it was already clear that his tastes were in other directions, that he liked white, rich women of a certain social position, like Jackie Kennedy, his sister-in-law, a woman with whom he had his most delicate affair and more documented. According to FBI files, the brother of the American president had an understanding with the wife of Aristotle Onassis after the president's death in Dallas on November 22, 1963.
The two had an affair from 1964 to 1968, a relationship based on the pain of the loss of JFK and a friendship that had been forged years before. Tye explains in his book that they even visited his grave together on the night of his state funeral for his unexpected farewell.
An in-depth interview with Ethel Kennedy is the basis of this book. She did not want to comment on the possibility that this affair had actually occurred. Her relationship with the former first lady was never entirely good, but she did declare that it may have been her friendship with Jacqueline Lee Bouvier that helped Bobby Kennedy get out of the depression caused by the death of her brother. hands of Lee Harvey Oswald.
Apparently, that death affected him like few things in her life. In the months following the assassination in Dallas, Kennedy entered a state of depression from which it took him some time to emerge. He surrounded himself with photos of him, books and memorabilia in his office, and even sported his brother's pilot jacket constantly, visiting his grave in Arlington Cemetery very frequently. The consequences of that assassination were very visible in Kennedy's physique. He lost several kilos, started biting his nails and some say he even lost his mind a little. He liked to visit that tombstone as if he were still alive.
Ethel, whom he married in 1950 and with whom he had 11 children, witnessed all of this. The widow Kennedy, who is now 88 years old, has been able to live for 50 years with the pressure of all those rumors about her husband's parallel life. The author of her new biography explains that he tried to block them, without ever talking about the suspicions that circulated around her, knowing that her husband always returned home in the end, not so much because he was a responsible father but attracted to her. In her own way, he always loved her.
"She also understood that no matter what church you went to and what they said about having s-x outside of marriage, there was no tradition of monogamy in the Kennedy clan." She has clearly returned to being in this new exercise on the manners of the American aristocracy.
