The Press: An American Genealogy

(12,427) DURIE (Kerr) MALCOM (Isabel O. Cooper, 11,304). We have no birth date. She was born Kerr, but took the name of her stepfather. She first married Firmin Desloge, IV. They were divorced. Durie then married F. John Bersbach. They were divorced, and she married, third, John F. Kennedy, son of Joseph P. Kennedy, one time Ambassador to England. There were no children of the second or third marriages.

This brief item appeared in a 1957 book that belongs on any alltime worstseller list: The Blauvelt Family Genealogy. It was one of some 25,000 capsule biographies, taking up 1,100 pages, of the descendants of Gerrit Hendricksen (who later became known as Blauvelt), a Dutchman who helped settle New York in 1638. Yet it was to set off a great search—one that tried to distinguish between fact and fiction, between records and rumors. For in its deadpan way, the item plainly said that John Kennedy had been married secretly to someone before he wed Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.

Declining to Deny. Just who first spotted the paragraph about Family Member No. 12,427 remains unknown. But around the spring of 1961, photostatic copies of the page from The Blauvelt Family Genealogy began to be passed around. The person showing the page usually knew no more than was printed on it, and, depending on who he was, he either accepted it as fact or thought it a good joke. Newsmen heard about it and, understandably, became curious. The best, fastest, most direct way of checking seemed to be by asking the parties involved: President Kennedy and Mrs. Durie Malcolm Bersbach Desloge Shevlin.

Both sides declined to deny. White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger even put his refusal to comment off the record. Durie Malcolm, now Mrs. Thomas H. Shevlin, either scoffed at the whole thing as too “ridiculous” to discuss or dismissed queries with the comment: “I’m bored with this.” The White House reasoning, no doubt, was that a categorical denial would acknowledge the story and get it into print, whereas off-the-record “no comments” would leave it in a vague limbo where it might eventually die.

All this only whetted interest. In the absence of forthright denials, the story—and the rumors—grew. Last March, The Realist, a shabby Greenwich Village periodical, published the fact of the Blauvelt genealogical entry as an “expose.” So, a bit later, did Birmingham’s antiSemitic, anti-Negro circular, The Thunderbolt (“The White Man’s Viewpoint”). So, in June, did The Winrod Letter, a oamphlet put out by the Rev. Gordon Winrod of Little Rock. Racist organizations in the South and crackpot groups everywhere photostated these pieces and sent them out as junk mail by the scores of thousands; it is estimated that at least 100,000 were received by mailbox holders in Massachusetts alone.

Beyond Crackpots. By last July, the whole affair had become a subject for widespread conversation—and speculation —throughout the U.S. It had gone far beyond crackpots. U.S. journalists were in a dilemma: if they did not check and it was true, they would look foolish; if they checked too hard on an obvious phony, they were running the risk of smearing the President. British newsmen, perhaps recalling how they had been criticized for suppressing the news about Edward VIII’s romance with Wallis Warfield Simpson, now privately chided the U.S. press for staying silent. Last Sept. 2, recognition in a mass U.S. publication was given for the first time to the fact that the question even existed. The Sunday supplement Parade (circ. 10 million) published a reader’s letter asking about the truth of the Blauvelt genealogical item; Parade’s answer was a flat refutation. London’s huge Sunday papers, including the respectable Sunday Telegraph and Observer, promptly picked up the Parade question-and-answer as a way of getting the story into print.

By this time, it was plain that the lid would not stay on much longer—if, indeed, it was still on at all. And it was natural that the White House might want the “official” version to break in the friendliest possible fashion. As it happened, Philip Graham, proprietor of Newsweek and the Washington Post, is a good Kennedy friend. Last week, just after Graham returned from a trip to Europe, his publications broke the story. It denied, on its own responsibility, that Kennedy and Durie Malcolm had ever been married.

The Beginnings. The whole story, however, had its fascinating aspects from the very beginning, combining a dry-as-dust search through records along with the discovery of some eminently flesh-and-blood personages, especially Durie Malcolm.

The Blauvelt genealogy, printed under the auspices of the Association of Blauvelt Descendants and sold at $30 a copy, was the work of a quiet and patient man named Louis L. Blauvelt. By occupation he was a skilled General Electric toolmaker in Bloomfield, N.J. By preoccupation he was the family historian—and he spent 35 years compiling his tome. He recognized the possibility of error in his preface. Wrote he: “There no doubt will be errors in this work. For the most part these will be the fault of imperfect information that has come to me from one source or another. For this I cannot be blamed, unless it is for accepting it at all.”

Louis Blauvelt died in 1959, at the age of 79, just two years after his genealogy was published.

Surviving Blauvelt family members say that “Uncle Louis” was a meticulous researcher and record keeper. For each entry in his genealogy, he kept an index card that referred to the source of his information. The card on Durie Malcolm cites only a letter from Howard Ira Durie of Woodcliff Lake, N.J. Howard Durie says his letter was “conversational,” merely stated that he had seen a society column which noted that Durie Malcolm and Jack Kennedy had attended football games together in Miami in 1947.

Blauvelt’s daughter, Mrs. William Smith, insists that her father “wasn’t sloppy in his work. He worked very hard and conscientiously on this genealogy. He cross-referenced, and was very thorough.” But, she says, “I have no idea where the item about a Durie-Kennedy marriage came from. My father must have made a mistake.” He was indeed slipshod in the paragraph in question. He spelled Durie’s maiden name Malcom instead of Malcolm, reversed her first two marriages., and neglected to mention that for a decade before the publication of his genealogy she had been Mrs. Thomas Shevlin.

Bouquets & Corsages. Durie was born on Dec. 30, 1916 to Mr. and Mrs. Fred Kerr. By the time she was four, her mother had been divorced and was married to George H. Malcolm, a wealthy Otis Elevator Co. executive. Durie grew up in Chicago’s suburban Lake Forest, attended Virginia’s Chatham Hall, was a member of the Chicago Junior League. Slim and attractive, she was popular at parties in the early ’30s at the Racquet Club, the Service Club-and as a charity-fashion-show model.

Durie’s debut in 1934 occurred at an outdoor dance on the family estate, where, society columns recorded, there was “half a ton of gorgeous bouquets and corsages,” and “Dede” was “radiant, with golden-brown hair, blue-green eyes and a sunny smile.” At the age of 20, on April 3, 1937, in a Presbyterian ceremony, she married John Bersbach, grandson of Judge Theodore Brentano, onetime Minister to Hungary. They honeymooned in a yacht off Florida, tried to settle down in Lake Forest.

The marriage lasted only 14 months. Recalls Bersbach, now a Chicago printing executive: “You know how these divorces are. Somebody testified that they saw me slap her twice. Actually, I’ve never slapped a woman in my life. She was a darn attractive girl, very vivacious, but she liked to bounce around.” The divorce was granted on June 11, 1938.

Just four months later, Durie became engaged to Firmin Desloge IV, scion of an old, wealthy Roman Catholic family in St. Louis. They were married on Jan. 2, 1939, at the winter home of her parents in Palm Beach. After a Nassau honeymoon, they lived in St. Louis for eight years, had one child, also named Durie.

Routine Charges. This marriage ended in divorce on Jan. 24, 1047, based on charges of “general indignities” that are routine in Missouri. Durie claimed that Desloge was “cold and indifferent,” refused to take her “to places of amusement,” told her that “he did not love her, that he did not want to live with her, and that he wished she would leave him.”

Not quite six months later, Durie married Thomas H. Shevlin, son of a famed Yale football end (1902-05) and wealthy Minneapolis lumberman, Thomas Leonard Shevlin. The marriage, at Fort Lee, N.J., on July n, 1947, was Shevlin’s second. His first wife, Lorraine, was the daughter of Pasadena Socialite Princess Laura Orsini; she had first been married to Robert McAdoo, son of President Wilson’s Treasury Secretary. She is now married to Kentucky’s Republican Senator John Sherman Cooper, and is a good friend of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s. In divorcing Shevlin, Lorraine was ultimately granted a lump settlement of $525,000.

The younger Shevlin prepped at the Hill School, attended Yale only briefly. Says a relative: “Tommy might have been at Yale a week—not even long enough to get his golf clubs unpacked.” He worked briefly in the family lumber business, skippered a PT boat during World War II. A friend of the late Ernest Hemingway, Shevlin is an avid big-game hunter, polo player, deep-sea fisherman and golfer. Durie and Tom Shevlin now own a white colonial mansion across North Ocean Boulevard from the Joseph P. Kennedy estate in Palm Beach.

Oscar for Romance. Durie had known the Kennedy family even before moving to Palm Beach; she dated young Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. before the war. No one is now inclined to reminisce on how long she and Jack knew each other, but they dated each other in the winter of 1946-1947.

At that time, Kennedy was 29, a freshman Congressman and an eminently eligible bachelor. Durie was 30, separated and soon to be divorced from Desloge. The two were linked romantically in at least one society column. Wrote the New York World-Telegram’s Charles Ventura on Jan. 20, 1947: “Jack (John F.) Kennedy, who won the Navy’s highest award for heroism by swimming through a sea of flame to rescue two of his PT boat crew, has just been voted another outstanding decoration. Palm Beach’s cottage colony wants to give [him] its annual Oscar for achievement in the field of romance . . . giving Durie Malcolm Desloge the season’s outstanding rush. The two were inseparable at all social functions and sports events. They even drove down to Miami to hold hands at football games and wager on the horses. Durie is the daughter of the George H. Malcolms of Palm Beach and Chicago. She is beautiful and intelligent. Tiny obstacle to orange blossoms is that the Kennedy clan frowns upon divorce.”

“Environment of Strangers.” In 1948, shortly after Durie’s marriage to Shevlin, ex-Husband Desloge filed suit contesting her custody of the only daughter of their marriage. He charged that Durie had “failed to give said child motherly love and affection by reason of extended absences,” was raising the girl “in an environment of strangers,” and “was being courted by various and sundry men” before her marriage to Shevlin. An out-of-court agreement split the custody.

Mrs. Henry Huelskamp, who was the child’s nurse at the time, says that Durie met Jack Kennedy in the winter of 1946-1947 in Palm Beach. No admirer of Durie, she recalls that Durie was then being squired by “at least three or four other eligible men.” Mrs. Huelskamp derides the notion of any marriage. Says she: “We didn’t see enough of him to give me the idea that anything like that could have happened. She was very frank with me, and after all I have eyes, and it doesn’t strike me that she was very much interested.”

“Absolutely False.” Just a few days ago, Durie Shevlin herself, for the first time, denied the whole story in detail. Vacationing with her husband at the Grand Hotel e la Pace in Montecatini, Italy, she said: “It’s absolutely false and ridiculous. I’m not even sure how the story began. I’ve been married to Mr. Shevlin for 15 or 16 years, and previously I was married for a short time to John Bersbach and then to Firmin Desloge, by whom I had a daughter who’s 20 now. I know the President’s family well and have known him for a long time, and saw him years ago at Palm Beach and once went with him and his family to an Orange Bowl game in Miami. I’ve rarely seen him since.” She said that she has never discussed the Jack-and-Durie matter with the Kennedys because “it’s too embarrassing.”

By now, thousands of people have asked for the most accessible copy of The Blauvelt Family Genealogy—in the local history and genealogy reference room of the Library of Congress; hundreds of others have examined a copy in the Washington headquarters of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The White House, in turn, has had hundreds of inquiries as to the authenticity of the paragraph.

To each inquirer goes a carefully worded reply. “The President,” it says, “has been married only once—to his wife Jacqueline Kennedy.”