Scott Farris - Inga: Kennedys Great Love, Hitlers Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoovers Prime Suspect

Scott Farris is the New York Times best-selling author of Kennedy and Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure and Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race but Changed the Nation . A former bureau chief for United Press International and political columnist, he has also worked for the governors of Wyoming and California, a U.S. senator, and the mayor of Portland, Oregon. He appeared on the 2011 C-SPAN television series The Contenders , and has been a guest on, among other programs, MSNBCs Morning Joe and Melissa Harris-Perry . His work has been published in the New York Times , Washington Post , and Wall Street Journal .

A LSO BY S COTT F ARRIS

Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation Kennedy & Reagan: Why Their Legacies Endure

An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

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Copyright 2016 by Scott Farris

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ISBN 978-1-4930-1755-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4930-1756-0 (e-book)

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/ NISO Z39.481992.

For Patti, my coauthor in all things

I N F EBRUARY 1941 , MONTHS BEFORE BEGINNING A TORRID ROMANCE with John F. Kennedy that would draw the attention of the FBI, Inga Arvad was the subject of a fulsome profile by the New York World-Telegram . The cause of this media attention was an adventure fit for a Saturday matinee serial; Ingas current (and second) husband, the brilliant Hungarian filmmaker-turned-anthropologist Paul Fejos (fay-hoash), had just announced his discovery of two lost Incan cities in the jungles of Peru. To anyone else, the World-Telegram observed, such an achievement by a spouse would be the climax to a lifetime. But it was routine to Inga; she took it as something to be expected.

Inga, who was twenty-seven but told the newspaper she was twenty-three, was considered newsworthy not only because of her husband but also because she had had her own incredible career, the newspaper noted, as a film actress in her native Denmark and as a foreign correspondent in Nazi Germany. She had won exclusive interviews and been honored by a private luncheon with Adolf Hitler, who notoriously proclaimed her the perfect Nordic beauty. Inga did not confide to the World-Telegram that the Nazis had also asked her to be a spy.

To avoid a confrontation with the Gestapo, she had fled Germany and joined Fejos in the Far East, where they lived with a tribe of head-hunters and allegedly saved the life of the worlds richest man, Swedish industrialist Axel Wenner-Gren (venner-gren), who had become fabulously wealthy by popularizing the home vacuum cleaner before becoming an international arms dealer. Inga told the newspaper Fejos had first killed a poisonous snake that landed on Wenner-Grens neck, then shot a panther as it lunged in attack. Stories flow from Mrs. Fejos as from a book of adventures, the World-Telegram writer sighed in admiration. Some people live those lives.

Ingas life was so extraordinary, a friend of Kennedys once said, that she seemed a fictional character almost, except most novelists would not have the audacity to make up such a character. Inga Arvads life... was the sort of true-life tale that Hemingway and his ilk could never get away with putting in their made-up stories, author Dan Simmons said. Simmons, therefore, simply made the real Inga a character (as he did the real Hemingway) in his 1999 thriller The Crook Factory , a tale of espionage in the Caribbean that also featured Wenner-Gren, whom the U.S. government had, in fact, put on a blacklist as a suspected Nazi agent. The narrator in Simmonss novel surveys Ingas voluminous FBI file and muses, It bordered on the unbelievable... [she] didnt seem old enough to have done all that was attributed to her here. And yet it was all truemost of it, anyway.

Near the end of her life, which came too young from cancer at the age of sixty, Inga acknowledged that friends and family had been begging her for twenty years to write her lifes story. But she never did. I have always had the capacity that when Im finished with something, Im finished, she said. I sort of close the door behind me.

But that wasnt entirely true. She had never completely closed the door on her relationship with Kennedy, and that was the real reason she never wrote an autobiography. She could not write about her life without writing about him, and their relationship had meant too much and its end had hurt too deeply for her to share the details with the world, even years after Kennedys assassination.

Their romance had also meant a great deal to Kennedy. Perhaps because Jack gave her the playful nickname Inga Binga, many Kennedy biographies treat Inga as just another of his innumerable sexual conquests, a casual fling. She was anything but. Those who knew Kennedy well have said that Inga was the love of John F. Kennedys life. Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times columnist Arthur Krock, a Kennedy family consigliere, sent Inga a letter of condolence after Kennedys 1963 assassination to assure her that Kennedy had never forgotten her. I think I told you before that every time I saw President Kennedy he would say to me with a twinkle in his eye, Hows Inger? Krock wrote, mimicking Kennedys famous Boston accent.

Kennedy should have often thought of Inga while he was in the White House since she had helped put him there. Their romance came at a pivotal time in young Kennedys life. It began in the weeks before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, when Jack was still finding himself in the world and feeling overshadowed by his older brother. Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., not Jack, was the son the Kennedy family had already declared would become president one day.

As we picture the handsome and urbane President Kennedy, it is difficult to imagine this time in his life, not quite twenty years before he took office, when he appeared disheveled, uncertain, and insecure. It was to Inga that Jack first confided his desire to go into politics and seek the presidency; his family had no cluethey didnt believe Jack had any political ambitions or skills.

But Inga looked upon the vital, appealing man four years her junior and saw that he had the kind of charm that makes birds come out of their trees. She had no doubt that he had all the tools necessary, far more than his older brother, to achieve the goal of the presidency. Put a match to the smoldering ambition, and you will go like wild fire, she said, telling Jack with absolute conviction that he was destined to travel the unequalled highway to the White House.

Inga longed to accompany Jack on that journey, but it was not to be. Talented and accomplished in her own right, Ingas lifelong quest was nevertheless to find a man with whom she could be a full and equal partner. Taught to be self-sufficient since childhood, her longing was to be part of a team of two. Love? Inga once said. Oh, its wonderful. Im a firm believer in the power of the woman behind the man.