Was JFK secretly married to another woman before Jackie?

John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis were one of America's most beloved and widely recognized couples — but their marriage wasn't without scandal — even before they wed.

It's possible that Jackie was Jack's second wife.

It is rumored that he and socialite Durie Malcolm eloped after a drunken party in Palm Beach in 1947. But John's father, Joseph P. Kennedy squashed the marriage and possibly even made the records disappear.

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh delved into the wicked idea in his book "The Dark Side of Camelot" published in 1997. In it, two priests claim that the late Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston — who was a close friend of the Kennedy family — once confided to them that he arranged for the Vatican to annul the Kennedy-Malcolm marriage.

And John Edgar Hoover, who was the first Director of the FBI and certainly not a fan of JFK, kept declassified FBI files that claim the two eloped in 1939 and then divorced in 1953 — the same year Jack wed Jackie.

But the Kennedy brothers allegedly used their influence to stop any journalists from investigating the story.

Even Malcolm may have been pressured by Washington lawyer Clark Clifford, one of JFK's legal fixers, to sign an affidavit swearing that there had been no marriage.

The socialite famously once said "I wouldn't have married Jack Kennedy for all the tea in China."

But Kennedy never denied being involved with Durie -- he only admitted to briefly dating her and nothing more.