JFK’s secret trailer park lover: The sex was so ‘wild’ that Kennedy let slip his marriage to Jackie was ‘ARRANGED’… now read the full story, revealed for first time in her bombshell unpublished memoir

Standing in front of a Wurlitzer jukebox in a Californian beach bar called the Sip And Surf, the shapely young brunette with a generous smile and striking green eyes realised that the handsome man sitting just a few feet away from her was Senator John F. Kennedy.

His back leaning up against the bar as he sucked on a cigar and nursed a cocktail, he seemed an unlikely figure to find in this dive, with its sand on the floor, fish mounted on the walls and nets swooping down from the ceiling. But anyone who knew Jack – as his family and friends called him – knew he loved frequenting these kinds of joints, the seedier the better.

He’d always meet the most interesting people in such places, ‘real-life Americans’, as he called them. The women, in particular, were usually a real slice of life – wild life, that is – and one thing was certain: his wife Jackie would never be caught dead in the Sip, which somehow made it all the more attractive to him. As his glance caught the young woman’s, she offered a furtive look. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him stand and start toward her.

‘What are you gonna play?’ he asked her.

‘I was thinking Elvis Presley but what would you like to hear?’ she asked.

‘Something so I can concentrate on you,’ he said.

‘I’m Joan,’ she replied, extending her hand. ‘Joan Lundberg.’

So began the extraordinary love affair which would pose the biggest of all threats to John F. Kennedy’s turbulent marriage and can now be revealed in full for the first time, thanks to the generosity of Joan Lundberg’s family in sharing with me her unpublished memoirs.

First, a little backstory. That encounter in the Sip And Surf took place in August 1956, just a month before Jackie Kennedy was due to give birth to their first child. According to Joan, he admitted that he and Jackie were the product of an ‘arranged’ marriage, one which he said was ‘fine. Not great, but OK’.

When he and Jackie first met in 1951, at a dinner party in Washington DC, 33-year-old Jack was still regretting the end of a relationship ten years earlier with Inga Arvad, the first love of his life.

A divorced Danish beauty queen, she had sat next to Hitler in his box at the 1936 Olympics and was described by the Fuhrer as ‘the most perfect example of Nordic beauty’. But there were rumours that she was a Nazi spy.

Living out his political ambitions through his son, Jack’s father Joe warned him that he needed to find a more suitable wife if he was ever going to be president. And in cold, hard, political terms, 22-year-old Jackie was the perfect asset. Well-bred, educated and travelled, she also looked great on his arm.

Like Jack, she had a domineering parent – her mother, Janet who had divorced her father Jack Bouvier because of his drinking, gambling and philandering. Since they were young girls, Janet had been preaching to her two daughters that the secret to happiness was money and power. And although Jackie was engaged to a stockbroker when she met Jack, he wasn’t earning as much as her mother had thought so Janet persuaded her to break it off and that was the end of him.

Two years after their wedding in September 1953, Jackie had suffered a miscarriage and fallen into a deep depression. But instead of staying around to comfort her, Jack had suggested that they go on separate holidays, she to visit her sister in England and he to Sweden. There he hooked up with 23-year-old Gunilla von Post, a Scandinavian beauty who later described their week together as ‘wonderfully sensual’.

When he returned home and reports that he had been with some other woman in Sweden reached Jackie, they had an argument during which she struck him so hard that she heard his neck crack as his head whipped to one side.

In the end, although he never actually admitted to an affair with Gunilla, he did at least make an effort to be more solicitous toward his wife and, by March 1956, Jackie had announced that she was pregnant again. Although fatherhood was now in the offing, that didn’t stop Jack going on a Mediterranean cruise with some friends and his brother Teddy.

En route, he stopped off in Santa Monica where his sister Pat and her husband, the Hollywood star Peter Lawford, had an opulent seaside mansion. It was there, in the Sip And Surf, that he met Joan, a milkman’s daughter from Wisconsin who worked as a flight attendant and lived in a trailer park nearby.

‘Perfect body, perfect looks,’ is how her son Zachary described her to me. ‘She may have been from the other side of the tracks, but she was also an incredible, naturally beautiful woman who put Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe to shame.’

They flirted for a while before he invited her to a party that would be held at the Lawfords’ mansion when he returned from Italy in two weeks’ time.

He was only five days into his cruise when he received the news that Jackie had had an emergency caesarean, during which the baby – a girl – had been stillborn. Over the phone, his brother Bobby told him to return home immediately but he refused. ‘The baby is lost,’ he said. ‘What’s done is done. I don’t think there’s any reason for me to return.’

His friend and fellow Democrat senator George Smathers felt he must be in shock. ‘Stop it, Jack,’ he told him. ‘If you ever want to be president, we need to get you back to your wife. Otherwise, every woman in America will vote for a rock before they vote for you.’

Despite this warning, another five days had passed since the death of the baby, named Arabella, before her father returned to the US to see his wife in hospital near her mother and stepfather Hugh’s home in Newport, Rhode Island. Jackie was smoking in bed, her lip trembling, and her stepsister Nini described how the couple were ‘polite’ but had little to say to each other.

No mention was made of Jack having been absent. After a few moments, he got up to leave. ‘I’ll see you soon,’ he told her.

‘I saw her heart sink,’ recalled Nini. Jackie’s mother was so unhappy with Jack that she wouldn’t let him sleep in the main part of her house, instead banishing him to the servants’ quarters over the garage, an unlikely place for a US senator. Even a disappointed Bobby didn’t want anything to do with him and neither did his mother Rose.

She couldn’t believe she had a son that heartless and refused to speak to him when he called. Feeling the sting of banishment, he left for Pat’s house in Santa Monica, for the party he had mentioned to Joan, and, as planned weeks earlier, she turned up.

She later remembered feeling insecure and out of her element. And, although she looked stylish in an outfit from Jax in Beverly Hills, a boutique favoured by Marilyn Monroe, she couldn’t help but wonder how she had found herself surrounded by such glamorous, affluent people.

When she found Jack, he kissed her cheek and spent the rest of the evening at her side, immediately feeling a connection to her. He had certainly never known anyone who lived in a trailer park but he wasn’t an elitist.

He just knew from the start that Joan was fun, lively and sexy. He was also taken by her candour and optimism. She drank a lot, too; he noticed her downing three cocktails in rapid succession. She was a spitfire.

At about midnight, Jack drove Joan to a nondescript 1930s spot called the Sunset Motel, a dozen cheaply furnished cabins overlooking the ocean. Spending money extravagantly was never his strong suit.

‘What makes you think I’m that kind of girl?’ Joan said as they sat in the car park. He was a little dumbfounded. Then, she smiled and said, ‘Oh, who am I kidding? I am exactly that kind of girl.’

The sex that night was ‘wild’, claimed Joan. And, sex being a great lure for him, Jack was quickly hooked. The next morning over breakfast, he unburdened himself. He must have felt comfortable with her because, although he’d always had trouble being open, he now poured out his fears, his insecurities, his problems. It was as if she was so removed from his circle, he could share anything with her and know it would never touch his ‘real’ life.

They spent the next day together and when he told Pat he was bringing Joan to her home for dinner, he didn’t get the welcome he’d hoped for. Pat was torn. Her husband, Peter, was a driven philanderer and she had learned to live with it, but this didn’t mean she approved.

Pleasant enough to Joan, but no more than that, she decided to tell Jackie about her. And, after the rendezvous with Gunilla von Post and his abandonment after Arabella’s death, Jackie decided she was finally done with Jack.

Two days later, she told him she wanted a divorce and retained a lawyer, only to be invited to lunch by Jack’s father Joe. He told her that if she agreed to stay in the marriage he would offer her $100,000 – the equivalent of around $1.8 million today – on the birth of her and Jack’s first child.

There then followed days of discussion between Jackie, her mother and her stepfather as to how to proceed. In the end, she concluded that there was no way Joe, who knew that a divorce would scupper his son’s political ambitions, was going to allow one anyway.

Fighting the Kennedys would be a losing battle and, since she had no money of her own, Joe’s proposal would provide her with a nice nest egg.

Within a week she had signed the deal. We don’t know if she ever told Jack about it but, even if she didn’t, it seems unlikely that his father wouldn’t have told him.

While his infidelity was obviously hurtful to her, she now knew she would never change her husband. She felt she had no choice but to accept him for who he was, especially given the deal she’d just made with his father. Therefore, she established a permission structure. ‘Show me some respect,’ she told him, ‘and don’t you dare rub it in my face.’

In the nine months between January and September 1956, it would seem she had gone from ‘this does not happen to me’ – which is what she had told her mother after Gunilla – to ‘this does happen to me, but only because I allow it’, which is how she felt after Joan.

‘I had to choose,’ she told her mother. ‘Either it was marriage to an honest man, or marriage to a great one. Once I figured out the game and was able to set the rules, it was quite liberating.’

Since his wife now seemed to want as little to do with him as possible, Jack continued his affair with Joan, not just in Los Angeles but in other cities across the country.

His handlers, especially his friend Dave Powers, catered to Joan’s every need. She had begun to think Dave was a very caring person until it occurred to her one day that his job was really to keep her from engaging with others. He was ‘handling’ her, as was everyone else around the senator, making sure she didn’t want for anything, lest she draw attention to herself by approaching someone to ask for it.

Jack’s managers were also adamant that she never be photographed with him. Once, spotting a photographer snapping a quick shot of Joan talking to the senator as he held a baby in his arms, Dave grabbed the camera from his hands, ripped out the film, and smashed the camera on the ground.

One Kennedy associate reported seeing Jack and Joan sitting side by side and having a whispered conversation while also pretending to read newspapers.

Living in their secret world, Joan recalled that they got along well, ‘aside from normal lovers’ tiffs between two high-spirited people’. And, in contrast to his strained relationship with his wife, Jack began to enjoy a kind of domestic intimacy with her that actually resembled a marriage.

They delighted in little things like enjoying a Greyhound – their favourite alcoholic drink which was made from grapefruit juice and vodka – or spending hours on the beach or in the ocean.

They loved dingy beach-town restaurants, places where diners couldn’t believe their luck in running into Senator Kennedy, places Jackie would never patronise. He would read about politics while Joan read about showbusiness. They watched a lot of television together, mostly Western-themed shows like Gunsmoke and Wagon Train. Again, programmes Jackie would never watch.

Joan also challenged his sense of privilege. For instance, he’d never taken a taxi cab and had no idea how to even pay the cabbie. ‘Either I drive, or I have drivers,’ Jack told her, ‘always have.’

Joan never deluded herself into believing he’d leave his marriage. She always knew divorce was out of the question and had accepted their arrangement. But still, she felt herself falling for him.

‘I want him to know I love him,’ she told one of her relatives. ‘Because I think he needs to know someone does.’

They had been seeing each other for more than a year when, after the birth of the Kennedys’ first child, Caroline, in November 1957, she began to notice a distinct change in him.

When she was on the phone with him, he couldn’t stop talking about the baby, and also about Jackie who he no longer saw as the woman he had married only for political purposes.

Now that she was the mother of his only child, he seemed to be attached to Jackie in an entirely different way. He couldn’t say enough about how caring she was to their daughter, and how hard she worked at making a lovely home for them. His face lit up when he talked about her.

When they’d first met, Joan had asked him if he loved Jackie. ‘I don’t know that I love anything,’ had been his dark response. It now felt to her that maybe he was actually falling for his own wife, especially when he decided that he and Joan shouldn’t share a bed on a night together in Tucson, Arizona. That was a first.

Although they did sleep together again when he was in Minneapolis in late April 1958, things were definitely different between them.

And then, in June that year, she gave Jack some shocking news. She was pregnant. She recalled that her announcement was ‘like a knife to Jack’s heart’. But as they didn’t use contraception, he shouldn’t have been surprised.

He couldn’t help but wonder if Joan had purposely planned the pregnancy, given that she had seen his devotion to Jackie after Caroline’s birth. She denied it but, still, the charge hurt. They arranged to see each other in July, but then Jack phoned and cancelled, saying he was going to be with family for the holidays.

One friend with first-hand knowledge of Jack’s thinking about the situation with Joan said, ‘I knew someone was pregnant, but I didn’t know who. He was distressed about it. He said he couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid.

‘This could be the end of everything, and he knew it, so close to the election for his second term in the Senate. He also knew there was no way Jackie was going to stick around if she found out about it.’

At one point in July, Jack finally called Joan to talk things over. She wanted to see him in person, but he told her it was impossible. He didn’t want to see her face-to-face.

Sounding edgy and not like himself, he told her he had decided she couldn’t have the baby. He couldn’t do it to his wife or his family and told her he’d mail her $400, begging her to use it for an abortion.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Being a politician is who I am. Politics is all I know. If you take that away…’

His voice trailed off and, before she could respond, he disconnected the line.

Though she was more than three months pregnant, she didn’t fight it. The abortion went ahead and when he rang to check on her afterwards, she told him that she needed to put some distance between them.

He understood. ‘I owe you so much,’ he told her.

After they had hung up, they never spoke to each other again but the relationship had a lasting impact on Joan, according to her son Zachary.

‘Her love for JFK endured,’ he told me. ‘And her feelings about what she went through with him, the abortion and all that, became more fuelled by alcohol.

‘She’d get sad and would sob when we talked about him. It turned into a kind of obsession in our household.

‘But she began to understand that Jack Kennedy was a man of his time and that there were no limits for men like him, no matter how much they betrayed the women in their lives.

‘Not just the ones who were supposed to be there like Jackie, but the ones who weren’t supposed to be, like Mom.’

As for Jack, he had escaped a close call with Joan Lundberg, but he would never forget it. He vowed never to get into a similar situation again but, as I will describe in tomorrow’s Mail on Sunday, it was only a matter of time before he put his marriage in jeopardy all over again.

Was JFK’s ‘sex addiction’ caused by a cocktail of drugs? 

Some experts have speculated that JFK was an untreated sex addict, a psychological dysfunction not really recognised until the 1980s.

Others have suggested that his sexual compulsion may have been caused by the testosterone-based drugs he took to treat his Addison’s disease, a failure of the adrenal glands which afflicted him throughout his life. The latter is the opinion of Dr Nassir Ghaemi, the first psychiatrist and one of the few physicians ever to access JFK’s complete medical records.

‘The steroids were making Kennedy manic,’ he said in 2024. ‘While this may have given him the creativity, energy, spark, flair, and charisma we associate with his personality, it also had a boomeranging effect which wasn’t good.’

Suffering from muscle spasms, which caused agonising back pain, he was also being injected with Novocaine, a synthetic alternative to cocaine that had the same euphoric highs and lows.

Then there were the various amphetamines and barbiturates prescribed by Dr Max Jacobson whose ‘IV Special’ was made up of 15 per cent vitamins and 85 per cent speed and earned him the nickname of ‘Dr Feelgood’ among his celebrity clientele. It’s difficult to imagine how Jack was ever able to function as commander in chief. Jackie was also being treated by ‘Dr Feelgood’. This was initially for the postpartum depression which set in after the birth of son John Jnr, in November 1960 and was no doubt compounded by problems within the marriage.

On May 1961, according to Max Jacobson’s unpublished memoir, he flew to the Kennedys’ estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where Jackie agreed to try one of his injections. ‘Her mood changed completely,’ he said.

Jackie had several more injections at the White House before they left for Europe. Then, according to Jacobson’s friend Chuck Spalding, Jack was injected on the Air Force One plane just before they took off.

Once the Kennedys were in Paris, they were greeted by massive crowds waving French and American flags on the motorcade route, all the while shouting out ‘Jacquiii! Jacquiii! Jacquiii!’.

It was clear that the First Lady, and not the American president or even the French president, was the real attraction. It was the first time in her eight-year marriage that Jackie caused more of a frenzy in public than her husband, and she liked it. Back in the US, Jackie’s mother knew just by watching the television news coverage of her glassy-eyed daughter that she was high.

Soon Jackie began to rely on the injections almost as much as did Jack, who was getting as many as four a week. But in the autumn of 1962, after the president’s brother Bobby ordered an analysis of his injections and warned him of the dangers, Dr Feelgood’s services were dispensed with.

Adapted from JFK: Public, Private, Secret by J. Randy Taraborrelli (August Books, £25). © J. Randy Taraborrelli 2025. To order a copy for £22.50 (offer valid until November 29, 2025; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.