According to The Palm Beach Post, Karin Adele Gunilla von Post, who went by Gunilla, was born in Stockholm, Sweden, on July 10, 1932, to a wealthy aristocratic family. She attended the exclusive Ecole Lémania in Switzerland, where she found a passion for the hospitality industry. Gunilla went on to study at both hotel and culinary schools. She loved to travel, especially throughout the United States and Europe, and learned to speak English, French, and German (as well as her native Swedish, of course) through her various itineraries. “I feel as if home is mid-Atlantic; I love me [the] United States and Europe,” she once said.
Gunilla even confessed in her memoir, “Love, Jack” that she had actually first met JFK on the French Riviera because she had been hoping to improve her French. At the time, Kennedy was a fresh-faced 36-year-old senator from Massachusetts who was engaged. But even though the chance encounter occurred just weeks before his wedding, it did not stop the couple from beginning an affair (per The Daily Mail).