AN AUSTRIAN-BORN octogenarian has become the latest in a long line of women to claim she had an affair – and a child – with John F Kennedy.
Ms Lisa Lanett, now 87, has told Vienna’s Kurier newspaper how, when she was 21, she met Kennedy in Arizona and bore him a son the following year.
“In spring 1945 I realised I was pregnant. I went to Kennedy to tell him. He offered to marry me,” Ms Lanett told the newspaper. She says she declined his offer because she didn’t want to give up the “very nice, free life she led” at the time.
Ms Lanett offered no conclusive proof of her affair but son Tony, who lives in California, says the story is “perhaps true”.
“She was a very beautiful woman so it wouldn’t surprise me,” he said. His six-times-married mother told him as a child that his father was her first husband, a Mexican man, and only told him the story about Kennedy in the 1970s.
Ms Lanett, a former dancer and actress, was born in Vienna in 1921 and was visiting Rome with her mother when Hitler marched into Austria in 1938. They decided not to return home and left for the US, settling in Phoenix, where her mother ran the “Monterey Lodge” motel.
Ms Lanett says it was here in 1944 that she met the 25-year-old future president, who had just been discharged from the US navy.
Kennedy’s official biography shows that, after undergoing two operations for back injuries sustained in combat, he was classified as “unfit for service” and sent to recuperate in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1944 and 1945. Other than that, Ms Lanett has provided no compelling evidence for her claim. Nevertheless, she says that they kept in contact until his death in 1964 and that Kennedy paid for her son’s education.
Ms Lanett knows a lot about affairs in high places: her father was born from an affair between her grandmother, a dancer in the Viennese court opera, and Duke Otto, a nephew of Austro-Hungarian Kaiser Franz Joseph.
If Ms Lanett’s claims about her affair are true, the Kennedys, the uncrowned royal family of the US, would be related to the Habsburgs, Austria’s deposed royal family. It’s not the only claim to the Kennedy name: two years ago a Vancouver-based financier, Jack Worthington, came forward, claiming to be a son of the late president.