The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [103]
In late September 1940, Jack took a small apartment at The Cottage, a modest complex popular among graduate students. “Still can’t get used to the Co-eds,” he wrote Lem, “but am … taking it very slow as do not want to be known as the beast of the East.” That aspect of Stanford had its unique appeal to the handsome heir. It was a tonic watching the book-toting, chattering coeds hurry across the quad in their obligatory silk stockings.
Jack may have been unformed in other parts of his life, but he had established his adult sex life. His bad back required him to sleep on a bed board. That was an ideal excuse to have women do what he wanted them to do.
“Because of his back he preferred making love with the girl on top,” recalled Susan Imhoff, one of the first coeds to make a visit to Jack’s room at The Cottage. “He found it more stimulating to have the girl do all the work. I remember he didn’t enjoy cuddling after making love, but he did like to talk and had a wonderful sense of humor—he loved to laugh.”
Jack had a taste for gloriously attractive, smart women, but as eagerly as they entered into their affairs with him, they usually left with a sense of disquiet. They may have had other affairs that did not end well, but there was something deeply unsettling about Jack. He swept down on women, wooing them with his charm and wit, and then flew off again, never having been touched, leaving only a whiff of emotion.
Jack was no crude predator who lured women to his room, but a sly, sophisticated gamesman who seduced by seeming not to seduce. Once a woman succumbed, he quickly and efficiently disposed of the matter. As much as he might pretend otherwise, the fact that a woman slept with him showed that she was no better than all the others. “I’m not interested—once I get a woman,” he told his Stanford friend Henry James. “I like the conquest. That’s the challenge. I like the contest between male and female—that’s what I like. It’s the chase I like—not the kill!”
Jack pursued one coed, Harriet “Flip” Price, more than any of the others. Harriet was beautiful, intelligent, wellborn, and athletic. For all his desire to score yet another conquest, Jack was not the sort to promise eternal fidelity or to vow that when he looked into Harriet’s eyes he heard wedding bells. They laughed and joked together and had sweet good times riding around in Jack’s new Buick convertible.
As much as Jack wooed her, and as much as she felt herself “wildly in love,” Harriet would not sleep with him. Virginity was part of her capital. She was not going to exchange it for anything less than marriage. Beneath it all, they shared the belief that marriage was too serious a business to leave solely to the whims of romance. “I think Jack knew what he was doing all the time,” Harriet recalled. “And I think he knew exactly what kind of woman he wanted to marry, and did exactly what he set out to do.” And so, indeed, did Harriet.
Jack hid from Harriet how troubled he was about his health, though he could hardly disguise the fact that after an hour of driving his back hurt so much that he had to stop for a while. Jack was chosen high in the draft in October 1940. He was fully aware of the irony of what a war it would be if it were fought with the likes of him. “This draft has caused me a lot of concern,” he wrote Lem in November. “They will never take me into the army, and yet if I don’t it will look quite bad. I may be able to work out some sort of thing.” He understood that his very manhood was at stake, and he could not sit on the curb waving a flag while other young men paraded off to war.
Jack often did not show up for class and rarely participated in discussions, and by that measure he appeared little more than a silly dilettante and playboy. Harriet saw that beneath the veneer of frivolity and merciless wit Jack was deeply concerned with the world around him. He struggled to forge his own ideas, and in doing so he struggled