John F. Kennedy was off with a mistress when his wife, Jackie, delivered one of their children, singer Carly Simon revealed in a new interview.
The “You’re So Vain” songstress, who befriended the former first lady in the last decade of her life, writes in a new memoir how Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was “unbothered” by her husband’s affairs.
“I think that some of the things had more effect on her than [his affairs],” Simon, 74, told NBC News on Tuesday in an interview about her book.
“For instance, his not being there for the birth of a child. For his being off with a mistress while she was in the hospital. There are various things that he did that, by comparison, must have hurt more.”
Kennedy was present for the birth of children Caroline, John Jr. and Patrick, who died as an infant. But he was reportedly off on a yacht in the Mediterranean in 1956 when his wife gave birth to a stillborn child.
“With his cool detachment, he saw no reason to rush back — the baby was already lost,” Steven Levingston, author of “The Kennedy Baby: The Loss That Transformed JFK,” wrote in the Washington Post in 2013.
Jackie’s second husband, shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, was also a philanderer, Simon said.
“[Jackie] learned the fact that it didn’t necessarily mean anything more than ‘wham bam thank you ma’am,’” Simon said.
“She was similarly unbothered by Jack’s affairs,” Simon continued, quoting from her memoir.
“In a cheerful but resigned way she told me that of course she knew about them. She just didn’t mind their presence as much as she might have, because she knew he [Kennedy] loved her much, much more than any of his dalliances.”
The women met in 1983 on Martha’s Vineyard when Simon was 38 and Jackie was 54.
“She gave me advice like nobody else did,” Simon recalled. “Other people would be too nervous to tell me what they really thought about certain things … But Jackie was forthright.”
The musician said Jackie was “the mother that I never had.”
She was one of the few people invited to Jackie’s home in 1994 to say goodbye to the former first lady, who was suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a type of blood cancer.
“I held her hand and told her I loved her,” Simon said.
“The record of the Gregorian chants was playing in the background,” Simon continued. “And it was just one of those moments that you just can’t — I couldn’t believe I was there — I couldn’t believe that my friend was slipping away.”
Simon’s memoir, “Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie,” came out Tuesday.