Inga

April 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.