London - Marilyn Monroe isn't the only blonde beauty to have caught John F Kennedy's eye.
The president had an affair with Swedish aristocrat Gunilla von Post while he was married to Jacqueline Bouvier, and their love letters have been sold at auction.
Doyle New York sold the letters on November 23 for $15 000 (about R212 000), according to their website.
Kennedy was a 35-year-old senator just three weeks away from marriage in the summer of 1953, when he met 21-year-old Von Post on a trip to Cannes, France.
They spent one evening together in which, she recalled in her memoir: “He turned and kissed me tenderly and my breath was taken away. The brightness of the moon and stars made his eyes appear bluer than the ocean beneath us.”
For the next three years, the two exchanged letters back and forth across the Atlantic, with Kennedy even planning to leave his wife for Von Post, according to her 1997 memoir Love, Jack.
The letters that went on auction are the second batch of love letters found in von Post's estate, following her death in 2011 at the age of 79. The previous collection sold for $115 000 in 2010.
The earliest letter included in this batch is from a year after the two met, and in it Kennedy asks to meet up with Von Post on an upcoming trip to Stockholm.
“Is there any chance you shall be there as I would like to say hello,” Kennedy wrote.
However, that trip was cancelled when Kennedy underwent spinal surgery.
He tries to organise a get-together again a year later, saying: “I am anxious to see you - is it not strange after all these months? Perhaps at first it shall be a little difficult as we shall be strangers - but not strangers... It is a long way to Gunilla - it is worth it.”
The following letter starts with Kennedy saying Von Post “looked well and happy” in a photo she sent of him and his plans for an upcoming trip to Sweden.
The two spent a week together in 1955, according to Von Post's memoir.
She wrote of the affair: 'I was relatively inexperienced, and Jack’s tenderness was a revelation. He said, “Gunilla, we’ve waited two years for this. It seems almost too good to be true, and I want to make you happy”.
But JFK's plans to divorce Jackie and bring Von Post to America were circumvented by his father, as well as his wife's 1955 miscarriage and subsequent pregnancy a year later.
The final letter between the two comes in 1956 when Kennedy reacted to Von Post's announcement that she was getting married to a wealthy Swedish landowner.
“If you don’t marry come over as I should like to see you,” the letter reads. “I had a wonderful time last summer with you. It is a bright memory of my life - you are wonderful and I miss you.”
The two were reunited only once more, by accident at a gala at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York in 1958. By then, Von Post with pregnant and Kennedy was just three years away from the White House.
At the benefit, Vn Post scribbled a note to Kennedy and had a waiter pass it along to the senator, who then signaled to meet him the in corridor.
“He just gave me a huge hug. And then he said ‘It’s wonderful to see you. I love you’.” She said “it was lovely.”
Von Post's first husband Anders Ekman died in an accident, and she later moved to America after marrying Weisner Miller, an American IBM executive.
That marriage ended in divorce, but she continued to live in Florida.
Daily Mail