Los Angeles: Today, the image would have gone viral in an
instant: The president of the US, dripping wet in swim trunks before a throng
of excited beachgoers, trading a look and a laugh with an attractive woman in a
polka-dot bikini.
But well before the internet’s relentless rationing of
spontaneous fame, the 1962 photo of President John F. Kennedy at the beach in
Santa Monica, California, made quite a splash. For a Los Angeles woman named
Eva Ban, its effect lasted a lifetime.
Ban was the woman in the two-piece swimsuit, which was
called a bikini in news accounts but was modest by today’s standards. When she
took her children to the beach that hot August day, she hadn’t counted on
meeting the president — or on appearing in a famous Los Angeles Times photo
that spoke to the world of the vigorous Kennedy and his admiring American
public.
A few days after the photo ran in newspapers and on TV
broadcasts around the world, Ban revealed what she and Kennedy were laughing
about.
It was a woman in the crowd clustering around the tanned,
bare-chested, 45-year-old president.
“Mabel,” the woman was yelling to her friend, “I touched
him!”
Ban, who was raised in Hungary and studied classical dance,
died on March 8 at a care facility in Oakland, California. She was 94 and had
Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter Agi Ban said.
For several years, Ban had been in nursing homes and
hospitals and the photo had gone along with her, displayed as prominently in
her room as it had been in her home.
“People treated her differently because they knew who she
was,” Agi Ban said. “They had conversations with her,” she said, rather than
perfunctory, sunny exchanges.
Born Eva Charlotte Boross in Long Branch, New Jersey, on
November 18, 1919, Ban, the daughter of a Hungarian mother and an American
father, grew up in Budapest. Fleeing the Nazis, she moved first to London and
then the US.
She appeared as an extra and a dancer in several movies,
including a 1945 Cisco Kid movie called “South of the Rio Grande”. Raising her
family, she taught at a West Hollywood, California, nursery school and was
active in youth and neighbourhood organisations.
In mid-August 1962, Kennedy was relaxing poolside at the
beachside home of his brother-in-law, actor Peter Lawford, during a three-day
swing through California. It was an open secret that he was there, and hundreds
of sunbathers hoped to catch a glimpse of him.
Late in the afternoon, Kennedy strode across the sand,
plunged into the surf and swam 100 yards offshore as a band of frustrated
Secret Service agents waded in behind. Times photographer Bill Beebe handed his
shoes to a reporter, tucked his wallet into his suit coat breast pocket and ran
into the waves, his camera held high.
“It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” the 87-year-old
Beebe said last week. “Sure, I got my suit wet.”
Back ashore, Ban was looking for her 13-year-old son, Peter,
who had jumped into the surf to see if he could shake the president’s hand. The
boy didn’t succeed — Kennedy told him he wanted to swim — but his mother wound
up in an image that would be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, testament to a
buoyant spirit in America 15 months before Kennedy’s assassination.
Kennedy was pleased with his escapade, although, according
to Beebe, his press secretary Pierre Salinger asked the Times not to print any
photos of it.
The Times ran its celebrated photo on the front page, with a
story that was over-the-top enthusiastic:
“‘Here he comes!’ the crowd of 300 gasped.‘It’s him! Look
how handsome! Hurrah, Jack!’”
As the Secret Service held back the surging crowd, Kennedy
“returned to the lounge chair beside the pool, picked up his sunglasses and his
book and said contentedly, ‘That was the best swim I’ve had in months’,”
according to “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye,” a 1970 book by former JFK aides
Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers.
Ban declined offers in the wake of her sudden fame. Her
husband, architect Alexander Ban, wasn’t crazy about Dick Cavett’s asking her
to appear on his television interview show in her bikini, Agi Ban said.
“Fine: If you are in your bathing suit, then Dick Cavett
must be in his,” she recalled her father saying.
Eva and Alexander Ban retired to the Sierra Nevada foothill
town of Three Rivers, California, in the 1970s. Alexander, whom Eva married
after a courtship of just weeks, died in 1998. Her previous marriage had ended
in divorce.
In addition to her daughter Agi, Ban’s survivors include
another daughter, Andrea Ashley, and her son Peter Nathen Banne.