Jackie After O (4 page)

By 1940, Jackie's parents were going through a bitter, public divorce that Manhattan society columns relished reporting. After the split, Black Jack moved into a room at the Westbury Hotel. On Sundays he would toot a special horn signal from his convertible when it was time to pick up Jackie and Lee. Perhaps because he had no sons, or because his daughters were adventurous spirits, he encouraged them to climb trees, ride a handle-free bike, play in the outdoor sculling seats at Columbia University, or watch baseball tryouts there. When the activities made them hungry, he treated them to predinner sweets, like pistachio ice cream.
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When Jackie wanted a pet rabbit, he indulged her by allowing it to live in the bathtub in his Park Avenue apartment.
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Whether he was instilling or nurturing their rebellious spirits, Black Jack soon saw some familiar traits, especially in Jackie, who looked very much like her father. In the first grade at the Chapin School in New York, Jackie was regularly sent to the principal, Miss Stringfellow, and when Janet found out about the disciplinary action she asked her daughter what was going on.

“What happens when you're sent to Miss Stringfellow?” Janet pressed one day while walking home from Central Park.

“Well, I go to her office and Miss Stringfellow says, ‘Jacqueline, sit down. I've heard bad reports about you.' I sit down. Then Miss Stringfellow says a lot of things—but I don't listen.”
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Miss Stringfellow made it her mission to bring the girl in line, telling her, “I know you love horses and you yourself are very much like a beautiful thoroughbred. You can run fast. You can have staying power. You're well built and you have brains. But if you're not properly broken and trained, you'll be good for nothing. Suppose you owned the most beautiful race horse in the world. What good would he be if he wasn't trained to stay on the track, to stand still at the starting gate, to obey commands? He wouldn't even pull a milk truck or a trash cart. He would be useless to you and you would have to get rid of him.”
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It was an analogy that Jackie, who spent most weekends in equestrian gear, even winning her first fashion prize for coordinating her jodhpurs and cravat, could understand. The words penetrated and many years later, after she had become First Lady, Jackie would credit Miss Stringfellow as being the “first, great moral influence” on her life.
¹⁰

In 1942, Janet remarried, to the gentle and twice-divorced Hugh D. (“Uncle Hughdie”) Auchincloss II, whose grandfather was a founder of Standard Oil. Hughdie already had a smattering of kids: a son, Hugh D. III, nicknamed Yusha, from one ex-wife; another son, Tommy, and a daughter, Nina, as well as a stepson—an aspiring writer named Gore Vidal—from another ex-wife. Janet and Hughdie went on to have two children of their own, “Little Janet” and Jamie. In the summer of 1942, the blended family moved from New York City into Merrywood, his neo-Georgian estate in McLean, Virginia. That property, on a hill with forty-six acres of woods near the Potomac, was complete with a swimming pool, an enclosed badminton court, and a small stable.
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Starting the next year, the family spent their summers at Auchincloss's other property, the twenty-eight-room shingled “cottage” called Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, the Gatsbyesque community that had its own tight-knit high society, much like the Hamptons. The Gilded Age mansions built by the bank, steel, and railroad barons were monuments to money and power, and constant reminders of the enduring appeal of both.

Given the upscale path she was on, Jackie was enrolled in Miss Porter's, a finishing school in Farmington, Connecticut. It was one of the obvious choices for prep schools for young women at the time. Jackie flourished there, joining students in boosting the 1944 presidential campaign of John Dewey, the Republican challenging FDR. She dutifully enrolled in the drama club, and whenever she could, rode her horse, which she had convinced her grandfather to send up to her. But her literary life was what truly blossomed at Miss Porter's. She wrote for the school newspaper, the
Salmagundy
, and earned a literary prize in her senior year for “consistency of effort and achievement.” The award should not have been surprising. Jackie was always a precocious reader and writer even by age six, when one day, she remarked, “Mummy, I liked the story of the lady and the dog.” Her mother, momentarily confused, discovered that instead of napping, Jacqueline had been reading a book of Chekhov's short stories, their sophisticated plots and names no problem for the girl's comprehension.

“Did you understand all the words?” Janet asked.

“Yes—except what's a midwife?”

“Didn't you mind all those long names?”

“No, why should I mind?”
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By age eight, Jackie was writing sophisticated poetry, such as this one on Christmas:

By eleven, she had read
Gone with the Wind
three times.
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Her grandfather encouraged her to write—as he often wrote to her—and once, when she was twelve, she asked him to edit a poem.

“My dear Jacqueline,” he wrote in response, “Holy Writ informs us that it was a futile labor to paint the lily white, and it is equally fatuous for me to attempt the perfecting of the perfect, in any suggested emendations to your delightful lines.”
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But Jackie was not encouraged only by her grandfather. Her father also pushed her to excel in school.

“I do so, Jackie, want you to be a standout at school. In fact, I've such high ambitions for you,” Black Jack wrote to her at Miss Porter's. “I know you've got it in you to be a leader. But what's more, I know you've ‘got what it takes' to make your schoolmates like and admire you … Just make it come out and show them.”

Jackie's mother also saw the girl's academic potential and labeled her daughters accordingly. “Jacqueline is the intellectual one, and Lee will have twelve children and live in a rose-covered cottage,” Lee remembered her mother saying.
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Jackie's love of words and art blossomed, and fed her academics at Miss Porter's, a venerable training ground for women in a man's world. There, her favorite classes were art history, literature, and English. Her average grade was an A-, but the headmaster always told her parents she could do better. She was still mischievous, dumping a pie in a teacher's lap on a dare, stealing cookies from the kitchen for herself and her roommate, Nancy “Tuck” Tuckerman, who would play an important role later in Jackie's life, as her White House social secretary.

On weekends, Jackie would sometimes visit her nearby uncle Wilmarth “Lefty” Lewis (her stepfather's brother-in-law),
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an impossibly intellectual literary scholar whose specialties were the romantic poet William Blake and the father of gothic fiction Horace Walpole. She'd browse his rare book library and often received an art book for Christmas from him.
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But while she thirsted for information, she often tried to hide her intelligence, especially around men. Once, at a Yale football game, when it was fourth down and five yards to go, she turned to her friend Jonathan Isham and said, “Oh, why are they kicking the ball?”

“Come on, Jackie, none of that,” he said, believing she probably knew more about football than he did.
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Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy's presidential historian who spent a significant amount of time with her at Hyannis Port, watched her intently read books such as
Remembrance of Things Past
. “I realized that, underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence, she concealed a tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment.”
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In her Farmington graduation yearbook, Jackie defined her “ambition” as “never to be a housewife.” Although she likely meant the remark as a rebellion from the presumption of a stultifying bourgeois life—her family had enough money to ensure she would probably never be doing her own vacuuming or cooking—the sentiment was the opposite of what most young women then aspired to.

As Jackie prepared to graduate from Miss Porter's, all around her she saw what Betty Friedan would later confirm in
The Feminine Mystique
: a postwar plunge in women going to college. In fact, the proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958. The women who applied to universities seemed to be there until they found husbands, as Jackie's sister, Lee, did with her first marriage to Michael Canfield. Some women even thought getting too much of an education would be a hindrance to marriage. Colleges built dormitories for married students, with the wives working toward a “Ph.T.”—putting husband through.
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Jackie still considered secondary education an important goal. She scored in the ninetieth percentile on the college entrance exams and was off to Vassar, the all-girls college in New York's Hudson Valley, right after her debutante party at Hammersmith Farm, with no fewer than three hundred guests. Cholly Knickerbocker, the famous Hearst columnist and brother of fashion designer Oleg Cassini, summed her up in a headline:
QUEEN DEBUTANTE OF THE YEAR
1947.

After her first year at Vassar, Jackie traveled to Europe with three friends and a teacher on the
Queen Mary
and attended a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace, where they shook hands with Winston Churchill. They then toured chateau country in France, and made their way through Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome. She was enthralled.
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Jackie enjoyed what she was learning at Vassar, later saying that “all my greatest interests—in literature and art, Shakespeare and poetry—were formed because I was fortunate enough to find superb teachers in these fields.”
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But Poughkeepsie was a sharp contrast with Europe. She grew restless and applied for a junior-year-abroad program in France, where she lived with a family in Grenoble before heading to the Sorbonne. (Her friend Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, three years ahead of her at Miss Porter's, was working at the French embassy at that time.) There, Jackie took a photography course, and soaked up the language. She loved France. But she also missed her homes, which to her had their own souls, memories, secrets, and stories. They were places that embodied and nurtured her life.

“I always love it so at Merrywood—so peaceful—with the river and the dogs—and listening to the Victrola,” she wrote to her stepbrother Yusha from the Sorbonne. “I will never know which I love best—Hammersmith with its green fields and summer winds—or Merrywood in the snow—with the river and those great steep hills. I love them both—whichever I'm at—just as passionately as I loved the one I left behind.”
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When the school year was over, she stretched her European travels through the summer and then, not wanting to return to campus in New York, enrolled at George Washington University, close to Merrywood.

“Most of my friends had left Vassar to get married,” Jackie later explained. “And I wanted to be closer to my family, who were living in Washington.”
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One day, at Merrywood, Janet was flipping through the pages of
Vogue
and came across a writing contest—the Prix de Paris. She tore out the notice and sent it to Jackie, urging her, between her studies at GWU, to enter. “It's something you'd do well and find amusing,” Janet said encouragingly.
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After surviving an initial round of
Vogue
judging, Jackie sat down and typed, with only a few grammatical errors, twenty pages of finalist material, including a plan for an entire issue built around the theme “nostalgia,” which described clothes that she would soon be famous for wearing. In response to the call for five hundred words on “People I Wish I Had Known,” including favorite people in “art, literature or other milieus, no longer living,” she named the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the British author and playwright Oscar Wilde, and the Russian ballet dancer Sergei Diaghilev, whose famed Ballets Russes George Balanchine had choreographed in the 1920s.
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“If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space, it is their theories of art that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and paintings and ballets composed to. And they would each make good stepping stones if we thought we could climb any higher,” she wrote.

She also told the magazine that it should not abandon its mix of drawings, models, and celebrities to show off clothes, because without such visual variety “
Vogue
would be a bore if it offered nothing but poker faced mannequins posturing through its pages. It would have the commercial deadliness of some wholesale buyers [
sic
] magazine. It is fun to come across Marlene Dietrich brooding in a great cape or Mrs. R. Fulton Cutting II sitting in a pink cloud of William Winkler nylon tulle,” she said.
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For her self-portrait part of the entry, she wrote that she has: