Jackie After O (9 page)

“May I take your coat?” Jackie asked her.

“No, I'm fine, thank you,” Beckelman said, suddenly too self-conscious to take off her coat in the bright-yellow entryway.

Jackie led her into the living room overlooking Central Park. Her apartment was furnished mostly with pieces from the family quarters at the White House, including some of the favorite things she inherited from two men she loved: a Louis XVI bureau on which Kennedy had signed the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and an ormolu-mounted Empire fall-front desk that was her father's. Billy Baldwin, her serial decorator, placed the pieces just so, arranging on the wall her drawings of animals and some small Indian paintings. Baldwin had covered Jackie's bedroom walls in ivory silk, and the bookshelves were lined with literature and Persian miniatures. Her bed was an extravagant gift from her longtime friend, the socialite Bunny Mellon. On the bed lay a rare guanaco fur spread that Jack had given her.
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In the living room, Beckelman took note of John Jr.'s drum kit and the warmth of the space as she sat on the couch, handing Jackie the letter.

“Are you sure I can't take your coat?” Jackie implored.

“Oh, no thank you,” stammered Beckelman, not one to typically be starstruck. She explained the reason for the letter, and the plans the Municipal Art Society had for a very public campaign to save the terminal. Jackie signed.

“My husband's ill,” Jackie said matter-of-factly. “I'll be here. I want to get involved with something.”

Beckelman was elated. She raced back to the MAS office.

“Kent,” Beckelman gushed, “you've got to get her on the board. I had a great conversation with her. She's interested!”

If there was going to be a cause as part of Jackie's third act in life, the fight to save Grand Central had all of the elements that would appeal to her. Architectural enthusiasm and a love for the city of New York ran in Jackie's blood. Her maternal grandfather, James T. Lee, who had made a couple million dollars in real estate and banking in Manhattan before he was thirty, had won several awards for building designs, including 740 Park Avenue, which then, as now, was popular among the city's most elite.
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New York was home, and Jackie embraced it, especially its architectural richness and history. Having spent summers at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, where she and Jack were married, and having lived at Merrywood, her stepfather's Virginia estate, she respected old places and their craftsmanship. She had also traveled the world and seen the temples in Greece and Egypt, the ruins in Rome, Mexico, Ireland, and Cambodia, the Taj Mahal in India, and the mosques in Spain. She understood the enduring appeal of old buildings, what they said about the societies that created them, and how they became the very symbols of the places where they stood. Grand Central was no different. Who would come to Manhattan to see another office tower?

But most important, she understood the iconographic power of a building, the power of place, the feelings that could be evoked by the history of a facade, the precise tone of a paint color, a perfectly placed portrait, the scale of a room, or the balance of a public park. And there was one place more than any other that had drawn on all of her talents: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, her home for a thousand days.

Jackie first saw the White House when she was eleven on an Easter trip with her mother. “From the outside I remember the feeling of the place. But inside, all I can remember is shuffling through. There wasn't even a booklet you could buy,” Jackie recalled.
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Her impression did not improve when she returned as an official guest, when JFK was a senator and they attended receptions and lunches there together.

“The minute I knew that Jack was going to run for President I knew the White House would be one of my main projects if he won,” she said.
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And it was.

“I'd read in the paper that it was customary for the First Lady to show the new one around,” Jackie recalled in 1964. “And it was the last thing I wanted because, as I say, I was about to have this child. So I asked Tish [Baldrige, her Farmington friend whom she had chosen to be the new White House social secretary] to get in touch with Mary Jane McCaffrey, Mrs. Eisenhower's secretary. Mrs. Eisenhower told Mrs. McCaffrey not to give our people any help. But Tish knew her or somehow, so she used to meet Mary Jane, sneak away for lunch somewhere. And Tish liked Mary Jane very much, and she'd tell her, you know, things that you ought to know.”
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Meanwhile, Jackie had also contacted Sister Parish, the decorator who had worked on the Kennedys' Georgetown house on N Street, as well as their Hyannis Port residence and their soon-to-be rental, Glen Ora, a country estate in Middleburg, Virginia.

“Can you help me with the ‘house with the columns'?” Jackie playfully wrote Parish. She even wondered if Parish would pose as her aunt for the walk-through with Eisenhower.

“First of all,” Parish responded to Jackie, “I think I must tell you that for your sake I think it would be wrong for me to be your aunt. I am so afraid you might get into trouble. I assume they take names, etc. and probably go so far as checking. I may be wrong.”
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Instead of visiting, Parish obtained some miniature blueprints at the New York Public Library. “And it was from these tiny documents that I did my initial thinking and planning about the White House, the interiors of which I had never seen,” Parish said. “I had very little to go on except my knowledge of the President and Mrs. Kennedy's taste and the additional request from her that I try to duplicate as closely as possible the feeling of the rooms in the [Kennedy] house on N Street.”
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Mamie Eisenhower initially refused to see Jackie, exclaiming, “This is my house, and nobody's going to see it!”
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But the press pushed her to invite Jackie for a tour, a private walk-through on December 9, 1960, at noon, the same day Jackie was being released from Georgetown Hospital with baby John and just a few hours before the Kennedys were due to leave for Palm Beach.

“Like a fool,” Jackie recalled, “I said I'd go.”
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Mrs. Eisenhower instructed White House usher J. B. West to “please have the rooms in order, but no servants on the upstairs floors. And I plan to leave [the White House] at 1:30, so have my car ready.”
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West told Eisenhower that he had already received a call from Jackie's secret service agent, requesting a wheelchair be there for the incoming First Lady when she arrived for the tour.

“Oh, dear. I wanted to take her around alone,” Eisenhower frowned, drumming her fingers on the nightstand. The truth was the grand woman did not want to push around a political enemy. “I'll tell you what. We'll get a wheelchair, but put it behind a door somewhere, out of sight. It will be available
if she asks for it
.”
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President-elect Kennedy wheeled Jackie and their newborn out of the hospital through a throng of reporters and photographers to a waiting white sedan, where a Massachusetts nurse who had worked with sixteen of Rose Kennedy's seventeen grandchildren held the baby swaddled tightly in the backseat next to Jackie. They went home, where Jackie changed out of her black-and-white checked suit and red beret, put on a black dress, three-strand pearls, a purple coat, black gloves, a small black fur hat, and slipped out the back to avoid reporters.
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A secret service agent drove her, in the front seat next to him, straight for a private tour of the White House, which was decorated for Christmas. When they pulled up the circular drive of the south portico, a doorman helped her out of the car.

Jackie was thin and pale, but as West approached to introduce himself he noticed that she also appeared shockingly young, thirty years younger than any First Lady he had served.

“I'm Mr. West, the Chief Usher,” he said.

“I'm Jacqueline Kennedy,” she whispered.

She walked hesitantly through the Diplomatic Reception Room, taking in all the furnishings—the rugs, the walls—and continued to the elevator.

“Mrs. Eisenhower is waiting upstairs,” he said.

They took the elevator to the second floor and Jackie took a deep breath as Mamie Eisenhower came into sight in the hall.

“Hello, Mrs. Kennedy,” the First Lady said, extending her hand. “I do hope you are feeling much better now. And how is the baby?”

With the wheelchair hidden in a closet by the elevator, West excused himself. Jackie walked slowly—and painfully—around the White House. Eisenhower showed her all the floors and rooms, referring to it as “my house” and “my carpets” and never offered to have her sit.
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The decor was revoltingly institutional. There were water fountains sticking out of the walls—and Jackie knew she had to do something to fix it. She had good reason to want to properly renovate and preserve the White House. Not only did she have to live there (and its disheveled state was below her standards), but it was also symbolically the nation's home. Furthermore, the Kennedy White House would mark a turning point in the political use of television to communicate with the public, and Jackie knew that 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue would be the president's stage. It needed to inspire.

The White House had been burned, doused, trashed, picked apart, and callously revamped. Abigail Adams hung her wash in the East Room. James Madison, presiding over the War of 1812, was forced to flee with his wife, Dolley, in 1814 when the British stormed the building, ate the president's meal, and then lit the place on fire, reducing it to a blackened sandstone shell before rain eventually drenched the flames. Within three years James Monroe—who had been minister to France—reopened the White House with $500,000 in restoration funds from Congress, sneaking in the European pieces to avoid any “buy American” political backlash. There was more: Andrew Jackson's wild farewell reception had overwhelmed the building; Civil War soldiers, dressed in soiled uniforms, had snipped swatches from the draperies as souvenirs; and the bad design taste of more than a few presidents had left its mark. In 1881, President Chester Arthur, a widower, auctioned twenty-four wagonloads of old furniture and hired Louis Tiffany to dress the mansion in lavish Victorian fashion. In 1902, Theodore Roosevelt hired architect Stanford White to undo the damage. But then, in the 1920s, despite his reputation for being a proponent of smaller government, Calvin Coolidge added eighteen rooms to the third floor, damaging the structural integrity of the place. The White House had become so run-down that Harry Truman gutted the mansion in 1948 and put it back together, adding a balcony—to much criticism—off the third-floor private quarters, dispensing bits of the old place (like a marble mantelpiece) to his political cronies, and filling it with reproduction furniture from B. Altman.
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The Eisenhowers, who lived in the White House next and for two terms, hadn't helped much. Mamie liked pink.

The “house had been run like a military camp the past sixteen years or so and lacks female taste,”
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Baldrige reported to Jackie after her own visit with Eisenhower's staff.

Not only did the Eisenhowers typically eat their dinner on trays in front of the television but the furnishings were also a haphazard collection of leftovers that reflected the different tastes of every four- or eight-year occupation—as well as the surprisingly different economic, geographic, and social backgrounds that the presidents until then had come from.

Exactly an hour and ten minutes after Jackie's White House tour with Mamie Eisenhower had begun, the usher was buzzed, signaling the end.

The two women walked out of the mansion together, shook hands, posed for a picture, and said a Spartan good-bye. Mrs. Eisenhower, wearing a gray broadtail coat and black satin pillbox hat, stepped into the backseat of her Chrysler limousine, on her way to play cards. Jackie lowered herself gently into her three-year-old station wagon. West approached the car to hand blueprints to Jackie, but the pain was evident on her face. Jackie had not seen the wheelchair and so never requested it.
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“Could you please send them to Palm Beach for me?” she asked, referring to the documents. “We're going to rest there until Inauguration Day.”

Jackie headed to the Kennedy family's waterfront retreat in Florida later that day. She was on the verge of exhaustion and most likely postpartum depression.

“I couldn't stop crying for about two days,” Jackie recalled. “It was something that takes away your last strength when you don't have any left. So that wasn't very nice of Mrs. Eisenhower.”
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Although Jackie was a veteran consumer of interior design services, renovating a typical home—even large and luxurious ones like those to which she had been accustomed—paled in comparison to the overwhelming task of restoring the White House. And, to top it off, she was recovering from the cesarean and worried about John Jr., who was born prematurely. Her husband was about to become president, and she had to move. For most women, any one of those issues would have been enough to cause panic. Jackie had to deal with all of it, and look gorgeous in the process. Despite feeling overwhelmed by the job that she was thrusting on herself, Jackie met the challenge in a way that was both familiar and comforting, by delving both into books and the archival material that West had given her, including a collection of pictures of all the various rooms and what they were like at the time. In Palm Beach, Jackie wrote down what she wanted done and sent it to the decorator. She began firing off memos to West while Sister Parish sent her samples.
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