04/24/2017
A mysterious woman who captivated powerful men gets a dramatic portrayal in this lively, sometimes swoony, biography. Journalist Farris (Kennedy and Reagan) details the picaresque life of Inga Arvad, a Danish-born pageant queen, actress, and journalist deemed “the most perfect example of Nordic beauty” by Adolf Hitler, who gave her exclusive interviews. When she moved to America in 1940, her Nazi associations sparked suspicions that she was a German spy and provoked a comic-opera FBI investigation with phone taps, bugs, and break-ins. Farris’s focus is the married Arvad’s months-long affair with young ensign John F. Kennedy. He portrays their relationship as sparking Kennedy’s presidential ambitions and then falling victim to them, as marriage to Protestant divorcée Arvad would have ruined his political career. Farris makes this a colorful, entertaining piece of Kennedy-clan gothic—the FBI recorded Inga and J.F.K.’s lovemaking; gruesome patriarch Joseph P. Kennedy manipulated everyone from offstage—but the romantic weight he accords it (J.F.K.’s “Inga Binga” was the only woman “worth the price of fidelity,” he writes) seems overstated: the “great love” feels like a mere hiccup in Kennedy’s history of callous womanizing, while the good-natured Arvad is overshadowed by more charismatic personalities around her. Photos. (Nov.)
In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre. She was a genius with people, she was daring and adventurous, and she was their equal. Like Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Clare Boothe Luce, Inga Arvad led a life that both sheds light on and defies the stereotypes of women of her time.
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Inga: Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
In addition to her romance with Kennedy, Arvad married four times - including to an Egyptian prince, the brilliant filmmaker Paul Fejos, and the famed cowboy movie star Tim McCoy. She had affairs with Wall Street financier Bernard Baruch, the noted surgeon Dr. William Cahan, and Winston Churchill's right hand man, Baron Robert Boothby. But by all accounts her admirers among the European and American elite loved Inga not for her physical beauty, but for her joie de vivre. She was a genius with people, she was daring and adventurous, and she was their equal. Like Isak Dinesen, Beryl Markham, and Clare Boothe Luce, Inga Arvad led a life that both sheds light on and defies the stereotypes of women of her time.
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Inga: Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
Inga: Kennedy's Great Love, Hitler's Perfect Beauty, and J. Edgar Hoover's Prime Suspect
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Product Details
BN ID: | 2940175548229 |
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Publisher: | Dreamscape Media |
Publication date: | 10/30/2016 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
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