But as Kissinger was about to lean in for a kiss, his beeper went off. It was the president. The same man who had set them up was now blocking his national security adviser from getting to first base.
“Henry, come back immediately. I need you,” Gabor later recalled the president saying to Kissinger.
Nixon killed the vibes, and Kissinger scrambled to drop off Gabor and peeled out of her driveway toward San Clemente, Calif., the home of the president’s “Western White House,” The Washington Post reported years later.
As Kissinger drove off in a rush, he got the black sedan entangled in the electronic gates surrounding Gabor’s home, scraping and denting the car. “Oh my God,” Kissinger said, according to Gabor’s book, “this is President Nixon’s car!”
“He screwed up that one kiss,” Gabor said of Kissinger to David Letterman in a 1987 interview.
Letterman paused before joking how Kissinger missed his chance, while also offering a sarcastic dig at the diplomat’s decision-making: “You know, I think that’s about all he screwed up.”
The story and career of Kissinger, who died Wednesday at the age of 100, was marked by both achievement and criticism — a Jewish refugee who fled Nazi Germany with his family, a prominent practitioner of realpolitik who served Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford, a polarizing figure deemed amoral and unprincipled by critics, and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize under controversial circumstances. But when it came to his personal life, there was another dynamic that was perhaps most surprising: Women were drawn to the man known in social circles as the “Playboy of the Western Wing.”
At a time when Kissinger was shaping foreign policy for years, he was also seeing stunning starlets of the era. He even befriended Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner, who gifted Kissinger a subscription to the magazine after he learned the diplomat showed up to a party carrying an envelope of classified information and told everybody it was his copy of Playboy. (In reality, it was Nixon’s 1969 “silent majority” speech.)
While some questioned the validity of Kissinger as a sophisticated sex symbol, he publicly embraced the persona. The New York Post described him as “the swinging bachelor of the Nixon administration” until he met his second wife, Nancy Maginnes, whom he married in 1974. Before marriage, Kissinger acknowledged he liked the attention that went with being “Washington’s greatest swinger,” meaning a serial dater in 1970s parlance.
“That’s no compliment,” he said of the title in a Women’s Wear Daily (WWD) profile in 1971. “That’s faint praise.”
He confirmed his dating appetite to Time magazine in 1972: “I go out with actresses because I’m not very apt to marry one.”
So, how did Kissinger the playboy — short, plump and graying with a deep voice and German accent — become a thing? Well, The Post is perhaps responsible for bringing to light Kissinger’s social life, which mostly consisted of dinner parties, soirees and brunches. At a 1969 cocktail party at the home of D.C. gadfly Barbara Howar, Kissinger, who was in his first year as national security adviser under Nixon, was nursing a drink when he was approached by The Post’s Sally Quinn.
“You really are a swinger, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I told her, ‘I can’t admit that I’m a swinger without getting into trouble. I can’t admit that I’m not a swinger, so why don’t we say I’m a secret swinger?’” Kissinger recalled of the night to The Post in 1979.
After Quinn printed her story, the narrative surrounding Kissinger changed, with newspaper and magazine articles becoming more interested in whom he was dating rather than his views on foreign policy. Although he’d later joke in a call to Quinn that he thought it was “suicidal to talk to you,” he also made it clear she was responsible for the newfound attention that he enjoyed, according to the New York Post: “You made me what I am today.”
“He is worldly, humorous, sophisticated and a cavalier with women,” Joyce Haber, a Los Angeles Times columnist and friend whom he visited on the West Coast, told WWD at the time. Gloria Steinem, a feminist icon and another friend, described him to the magazine as “the only interesting man in the Nixon administration.”
Around the time that Hefner printed a poll claiming that Kissinger was the most desired man to date among Playboy playmates, the diplomat was connected to Jill St. John, an actress best known as the first American Bond girl of the James Bond film franchise. The pair made tabloid headlines when they inadvertently set off the alarm at St. John’s Hollywood mansion late one night as they walked out to her pool.
“What did you expect?” he said to WWD. “I was teaching her chess.” They both denied a TV report that they had “secretly married.”
“There has never been a romance,” St. John told the magazine in 1971. “It has not been and will never be a great romance.”
Others, such as Candice Bergen, noted years later how Kissinger “was highly intelligent, very charming.” But there was a lack of romance that came, in part, because of his work.
“I was always home by midnight,” Marsha Metrinko, a former actress who dated Kissinger “dozens of times” in New York, California and D.C., said in 1974. “There always seemed to be a crisis. In San Clemente, he’d always get called away from the table a lot.”
Even after Kissinger messed up the kiss with Gabor, she sent him flowers, which prompted a thank-you call from the diplomat: “My whole staff looks at me differently since I got flowers from you.” She accepted his invite for another date, but Kissinger had to cancel the night of the meetup. When Gabor asked why, Kissinger again blamed his boss.
“I can’t fly down because we’re invading Cambodia tomorrow,” Kissinger said, according to The Post. “It’s a big secret, you are the first person outside the White House who knows about it.”
But some people who knew him best rebutted that Kissinger truly recognized himself as a playboy.
“He never was a playboy!” Lenore Fleischer Reich, his former sister-in-law during his first marriage to Ann Fleischer, told the New York Post in June 1974. “Never, never, never!”
“That swinger stuff is bunk. He never was a good mixer,” retired Harvard professor Carl Friedrich, a mentor to Kissinger, told the newspaper. “Nixon said, ‘My God, Henry, you’ve got to have a human quality.’ He went along with it because he was obedient.”
Even his friends joked that Kissinger wasn’t built to be a true playboy.
“Henry’s idea of sex is to slow the car down to 30 mph when he drops you off at the door,” Howar recalled in 1974.
Five years into their marriage, Maginnes tried thinking about her husband’s time as a playboy when she was interviewed in The Post. By that time, she could only laugh at the idea of her husband as Henry Kissinger the swinger.
“Henry’s so square,” she said. “He’s always been square.”
