Jack particularly enjoyed Lem’s comic songs, his favorite being Lem’s impersonation of Mae West singing “I’m No Angel”: “Aw come on, let me cling to you like a vine,/ Make that low-down music trickle up your spine./ Baby I can warm you with this love of mine.” Many photos show him roaring with laughter. Jack’s letters to Lem are full of endearments and jokey deprecations he addresses Lem alternately as “you slimy fuck,” “you filthy-minded shit,” “my sweet,” and “You bitch!” Sometimes he just tells him, “You’re swell!” Billings was “a big, attractive guy who told wonderful stories and cheered everybody up,” according to Pitts. He wiggled it suggestively and I rolled ’em in the aisles by saying ‘you have a good motion’!!” I just blushed because you know how it is. “Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. “They give me enemas till it comes out like drinking water which they all take a sip of,” he wrote. “Nobody is able to figure out what’s wrong with me,” he wrote from hospital. ![]() Jack’s medical tribulations are a frequent subject of his amusing early letters to Lem, some of which are quoted in Nigel Hamilton’s 1992 book JFK: Reckless Youth. Lem knew how to help Jack with all his old problems-and keep them confidential. Throughout his life, Jack Kennedy coped with incapacity and severe pain from his various ailments-Addison’s disease, colitis, hepatitis, malaria, recurring infections, and a bad back. When circumstances determined that Lem and Jack would attend different colleges, they kept in touch by telegram, sometimes dispatching up to seven a day, and they spent their weekends together in New York City. I’m not that kind of boy.” With that out of the way, their relationship continued essentially unchanged until JFK’s assassination thirty years later. Early on in their friendship, Lem sent Jack such a note and Jack replied in their usual jocular way, adding in parentheses, “Please don’t write to me on toilet paper any more. Lem and JFK at Choate, 1934Īt Choate, boys who were interested in sexual involvement with other boys were courteous and discreet, writing notes on toilet paper so they could be easily swallowed or flushed. Within days of meeting, they were best friends, and their censorious housemaster was grinding his teeth over their “silly giggling” hijinks in the showers and their annoyingly “inseparable companionship.” Lem soon became part of Jack’s family and a huge favorite of both Kennedy parents. ![]() They shared an insatiable intellectual curiosity, a robust sense of humor, and a disdain for petty rules. Lem Billings, from a distinguished old American Protestant family, was taller, bigger, stronger, with a high-pitched voice and a loud laugh. He was also skinny, sickly, and frail, continually falling ill and being subjected to various medical tests. Jack, the son of a self-made Boston Irish millionaire, was a wealthy, bright, good-looking boy with a wicked sense of fun. ![]() Young Jack met the boy who was to be his lifelong best friend when they were prep school classmates together at Choate. “That John Kennedy maintained a deep friendship with a man whom he knew to be gay, and did so in an age of homophobia-at great potential risk to his political career and reputation-is an extraordinary demonstration of loyalty and commitment,” writes David Pitts, author of the first full account of what he characterizes as “a love story unknown to most Americans.” But, he reminds us, “risk avoidance was not part of Jack Kennedy’s DNA.” LeMoyne Billings, his best friend and intimate companion. Kennedy, future president of the United States, and K. They appear to be a gay couple with their little dog. The one with glasses is squinting into the light. THE OLD black-and-white photograph shows two good-looking young men sitting close together on the back bumper of a car, their fingers touching gently as they fondle a dachshund pup. Jack & Lem: The Untold Story of an Extraordinary Friendship, John F.
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