The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [112]
There was a mystery about her that Jack could hope to fathom, but in the end he was the one whose mysteries were unraveled, not hers. Of all the women he had ever known, Inga was the one who saw him, with her shimmering blue eyes, not only largely as he was but as what he might become.
Jack knew immediately that this woman had a history. Most of her past he knew nothing about, and much of it he never would know. Inga called herself an “adventuress.” She had a courtesan’s subtle style and cunning. Inga had been born into a well-to-do Danish family in 1913, or so she said. Her father died when she was only four, and her mother seems to have seen her beautiful daughter as a vehicle for her own advancement. Inga told Jack that she had been such a natural actress that “the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen declared that I probably would be a second Pavlova.”
Instead, at the age of fifteen, with her thirty-six-inch bust, eighteen-inch waist, and thirty-five-inch hips encased in a pink Empire-style dress, she won the Miss Denmark contest. In Paris for the Miss Europe contest, sixteen-year-old Inga met a young Egyptian student and diplomat with whom she eloped. The man was rich largely in debts, and Inga employed her theatrical skills fending off creditors. She traveled with her husband to Cairo and Alexandria, where she left him and returned to Denmark.
In 1935 Inga met Paul Fejos, a film director nearly twice her age. Fejos starred her in a film shot in the Norwegian fjords. Disillusioned with filmmaking, Inga traveled to Berlin. Despite her lack of experience in journalism, she arrived in the German capital with credentials from Berlingske Tidene, the leading Danish paper.
Beauty is its own calling card, and Inga quickly gained access to the Nazi elite that any journalist would have envied. She interviewed Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goring, and Hitler himself. She attended the 1936 Berlin Olympics and on one occasion sat in Hitler’s box. The Führer gave Inga a signed photo of himself in a silver and red leather frame with the peculiar inscription: “To an indefinite Fr(au).” Hitler generally did not hand out such special photos to any but his intimates, and by any measure, it was extraordinary that Hitler gave one to Inga.
Inga married Fejos in 1936, and after leaving Germany in circumstances as mysterious as her arrival, she and her second husband journeyed to the East Indies to do some anthropological explorations. There, in remote villages, Inga said that she was worshipped as a goddess, and a primitive statue was built to replicate her blonde beauty. She left, however, because this life left her with hardly more fulfillment than the life of an actress. She arrived in New York with her mother in February 1940.
In the fall, Inga entered the Columbia University School of Journalism. She had a way of arousing both jealousy and suspicion in people, especially women. In November, one of her classmates wrote a letter to the FBI after spending an evening at Inga’s apartment, where “the conversation slid into a discussion of the large number of Jews in the class, and the danger of civil war in this country. We left very late, dazed by her charms, but with the uncomfortable feeling that we had been somehow threatened.” Her accuser said that, although she had no evidence, she believed that Inga had been set up at the school for the purpose of “influencing morale in this country for the benefit of the German government.”
Inga was doing little more than reiterating opinions she had casually picked up on the social circuit in Berlin and elsewhere. Her beauty was a magical amulet that she could use only among men. At the journalism school she may have had detractors among her classmates, but she nonetheless developed useful friendships with several professors. At the same time, although she was still married to Paul Fejos, she was carrying on an affair with Nils Blok, a Dane of artistic bent who was working for the Danish consulate. Her mother found her daughter’s behavior reprehensible