Jack certainly got plenty of reminders on the trip of how valuable Jackie could be to him in his dealings with world leaders. She translated for him during a meeting with senior French officials and won accolades from them and others for her elegance and her obvious familiarity with the country’s history and art. “She had all the wit and the seductive charms of an eighteenth-century courtesan,” Clare Boothe Luce later commented of Jackie’s interactions with Old World luminaries. “Men just melted when she gazed at them with those gigantic eyes. The Europeans were not immune to this.”13
According to von Post, Kennedy called her a few weeks later from Poland and said he had spoken with his father about divorcing Jackie so he could marry her, to which the elder Kennedy, he said, had responded, “You’re out of your mind.”14 That Jack Kennedy might have said this to his Swedish lover on the phone is plausible; that he actually had such a conversation with his father is much less so. In the middle months of 1955 his political prospects were bright, brighter than they’d ever been before. The top rung of the ladder might even be within his reach at some point. Jack did not need his father to tell him that divorcing his young wife (of just two years, no less), especially after all the glowing press coverage their union had received, would almost certainly cause it all to fall apart. For a Catholic politician, whose church insisted on the inviolability of the marital vow, the risks were greater still. If father indeed spoke to son, he only stated what the son surely already knew.
Von Post’s parents, sensing their daughter would likely be consigned to permanent mistress status, now intervened and compelled her to end the relationship. Soon thereafter, Gunilla became engaged to a Swede and in short order married. As he had with Inga Arvad after that relationship ended, Kennedy continued to keep in touch. “I had a wonderful time last summer with you,” read one letter, penned on U.S. Senate stationery, in 1956. “It is a bright memory in my life—you are wonderful and I miss you.”15