Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (16 page)

The better part of two truckloads of baggage that the Kennedys had brought with them to Paris consisted of Jackie’s wardrobe, which was comprised largely of costumes created for her by the American designer Oleg Cassini. On the occasion of the Kennedy–de Gaulle dinner on the second day of the state visit, however, she departed from her Alsop-inspired made-in-America rule and appeared at the Palace of Versailles in a beaded and embroidered white satin evening gown and matching coat designed by the French couturier Hubert de Givenchy. The next day’s headlines blazoned the news of Jackie’s triumph: “Paris Has a Queen” and “Apotheosis at Versailles.” Addressing journalists at a farewell press conference, JFK displayed the ability to laugh at himself that admirers had long found irresistible about him. “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience,” America’s leader dryly declared. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” To some perceptions, however, afterward, JFK was not without ambivalence, even annoyance, about the tremendous amount of attention Jackie had received. Still, he seems to have been enough of a pragmatist to appreciate the advantage to himself of her success.

In Vienna, Jackie drew more hyperbole and headlines. “First Lady Wins Khrushchev, Too,” trumpeted
The New York Times
. “Smitten Khrushchev Is Jackie’s Happy Escort,” concurred
The New York Herald Tribune
. In what looks to have been a burst of mimetic desire, the crowds in the street were almost as eager to see Jackie as the French had been, though she certainly had never declared herself a daughter of Austria. On one occasion, as the president’s car approached the Soviet embassy, a waiting crowd called for Jackie and was disappointed to discover that JFK and Secretary of State Dean Rusk had arrived without her. “Rusk,” the president jested, “you make a hell of a substitute for Jackie!”

In London as well there was universal fascination with the first lady when the Kennedys arrived, ostensibly to attend the christening of the child of Jackie’s sister Lee (now the wife of the Polish prince Stanislas Radziwill), but actually so that JFK might confer with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan about what de Gaulle and Khrushchev had told him. “In the pubs,” reported
The New York Times,
“the talk is more of ‘Jackie’ … than of her husband and international politics.” Joe Alsop encountered the Kennedys at the christening party at the Radziwill residence, and though Alsop had had much to do with preparing Jackie for public life, today it was a “visibly shaken” and “strangely preoccupied” President Kennedy who riveted the journalist’s attention. In cryptic conversation with Alsop, JFK alluded to the threat that, as yet unbeknownst to the world, Khrushchev had made in Vienna. Determined never again to face a unified Germany, and most especially not a unified anti-Communist Germany, Moscow was threatening to cut off Western access to Berlin, even if that meant igniting a new world war. Kennedy, for his part, worried that his own lack of firmness in Vienna had lent credence to Khrushchev’s opinion, formulated in the wake of the Cuban fiasco, that America’s callow new young leader would accept almost anything to avoid a nuclear confrontation. In private, Jackie saw her husband lapse into “a gloom” that he refused to talk about, but which caused her on more than one occasion to feel what she later described as “a little shooting pain of fright” that even Jack would not be able to make this turn out for the best.

At the same time, she arrived back in the United States with new personal confidence and new clout. Confidence, because of the completely unexpected reception she had had abroad. Clout, because the trip had transformed her into a figure of international appeal. In the months that followed, she used the spotlight to help her husband’s beleaguered presidency. She who had attracted the first negative press coverage of the administration reinvented herself as among its greatest public relations assets. She presided over exquisite state dinners and hosted high-profile arts events. Not so long before, candidate Kennedy had wondered aloud whether it might be best to run her through subliminally in a quick-flash TV spot. Now she starred in an immensely successful program aired on all three networks,
A Television Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy
, which showcased the work she had undertaken in collaboration with the French decorator Stéphane Boudin. Far from the iconoclast many people had feared early on, Jackie proved to be a champion of historical restoration and preservation. Far from striking America as too fey and too fancy, she delighted viewers with a full-out performance of the role she had been groomed to play at Miss Porter’s: the cultivated wife who uses her painstakingly acquired knowledge and graces in the service of her husband.

In the present case, at least, the husband returned the favor by continuing to betray her with other women, often frolicking with them (JFK had a fondness for threesomes) in Jackie’s own bed in the White House family quarters while she was at Glen Ora, the couple’s rented country house in Virginia. He even embarked on an affair with a recent Miss Porter’s graduate, Mimi Beardsley, whom he had met when the teenager came to the White House to interview Letitia Baldrige about Jackie for her proud alma mater’s student newspaper. “It’s not that he cheated on her,” observed Larry Newman, one of the Secret Service agents assigned to guard Jackie, “but that everybody knew about it, and then she’s got to appear with him.” Nor did the president necessarily confine his sexual indiscretions to the times when his wife was away. In addition to the state dinners, Jackie arranged a number of dinner dances, which, according to Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr., she conceived “as a means of restoring a larger social gaiety to her husband’s life. When several months of unrelenting pressure had gone by, she would feel that the time had come for another dancing party.… The President seemed renewed by them and walked with a springier step the next day.” No doubt he did. At one such gala, on February 9, 1962, which was attended by Kennedy friends, administration members, foreign diplomats, and other Washington notables, Jackie danced the twist with defense secretary Robert McNamara in one of the crowded state rooms, while JFK enjoyed a tryst with another of his numerous mistresses, Mary Meyer, in his daughter’s schoolroom upstairs.

The contrast between refinement and dissipation that was among this administration’s salient characteristics began to play out in public with the juxtaposition of two lavishly publicized but otherwise distinctly different events in May of 1962. The first, held at the White House on the eleventh, was the Kennedys’ dinner in honor of French Minister of State for Cultural Affairs Andre Malraux, who had been kind to Jackie at the time of the state visit to Paris. Jackie had long labored over the guest list, which, at the suggestion of France’s ambassador in Washington, Hervé Alphand, included some of America’s most esteemed artists. There were the playwright Tennessee Williams, the critic Edmund Wilson, the novelist Saul Bellow, the director Elia Kazan, the painter Mark Rothko, the dancer and choreographer George Balanchine, and the conductor Leonard Bernstein, among many others. The evening culminated the first lady’s efforts over many months to establish “Kennedy Washington,” as her mentor Alsop liked to call it, as the world capital of culture and taste.

Less edifying, perhaps, but in its way equally typical of the Kennedy years, was a Democratic fund-raiser in the form of a forty-fifth birthday tribute to JFK, which was held a week later in New York. Instead of Jackie, who chose not to attend, the star of the occasion was Marilyn Monroe. The actress sang “Happy Birthday” in a manner that Jackie’s old nemesis, Dorothy Kilgallen, described to newspaper readers as “making love to the President in direct view of 40 million Americans” watching on TV. Marilyn had in fact been one of Kennedy’s sexual partners, and his hubristic decision to allow her on that public stage seemed to dare journalists to investigate his philandering in a way that they simply had not before. Realizing the damage he had caused himself, he put out word to various press people that there was no truth to claims that he had slept with Marilyn. Unfortunately, however, the actress had shared his bed that very night at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, and she followed up with a series of frenzied calls to the White House in hopes of being invited to visit him in Washington. “He liked her,” remembered George Smathers, “but she liked him
more
.” And with Kennedy, of course, that “more” always presented a problem. Marilyn, having transformed herself into one of the countless women in his life who “won’t leave me alone!”, thereupon became persona non grata. Determined to stop her from phoning, the president dispatched Bill Thompson, one of his procurers, to Los Angeles to control her. In the meantime, Kennedy refused Marilyn’s calls. Finally, “she quit bothering him,” reflected Senator Smathers, “because he quit talking to her.”

What did not quit, however, was the speculation in certain quarters about presidential promiscuity. In the past, both JFK and his father had been known to dismiss suggestions that his unfaithfulness to Jackie might damage him politically. Despite the swirl of rumors about the marriage that had materialized after Jackie’s stillbirth in 1956, as well at other points, nothing substantive had yet to appear in print. Now the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe singing to JFK had put a familiar face on everything that people had heard or imagined. Suggestive of the sense of foreboding that pervaded Washington in the months that followed were the remarks about JFK that the French ambassador confided to his diary at the time: “He loves pleasure and women too much. His desires are difficult to satisfy without making one fear a scandal and its use by his political adversaries. This may happen because he doesn’t take sufficient precautions in this puritan society.” In a similar vein, there was mounting anxiety among the Kennedyites that Republicans would make JFK’s womanizing an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign.

Rather than ask the president to restrain himself, however, his consultants cast a worried eye on Jackie. After a great deal of entertaining and additional foreign travel in her capacity as first lady (including two Latin American trips with the president, as well as a solo mission to India and Pakistan), she was planning to spend a few weeks in Italy with Caroline. In the present climate, his political experts worried that such a trip, undertaken for no reason other than Jackie’s personal pleasure, would be read as evidence of unrest in the marriage. The White House sought to avert any such perception by announcing that her Italian sojourn had been scheduled to take place in a period when JFK, set to speak in various parts of the nation, would not be able to spend weekends with her at Cape Cod. The implication was that the first lady hoped to assuage her loneliness abroad.

In accord with White House instructions that she keep her stay in Ravello “low-key,” Jackie made it clear to the limited staff accompanying her to the chic Italian resort that every possible propriety must be religiously observed. “She was very concerned about who she was and how she acted and how the people around her acted,” recalled Mary Taylor, whom the U.S. embassy in Rome had assigned to be the first lady’s assistant during her stay in Italy. “She wanted everyone to comport themselves in a good manner.” Despite Jackie’s best efforts, however, it soon became apparent that the advisers’ anxiety had been far from unfounded. After the first lady, the Radziwills, and other friends were the guests of Gianni and Marella Agnelli on the couple’s two-masted racing yacht, photographs appeared in the press that made it seem as if Jackie had been alone on the boat with Agnelli, with only a lone guitarist to serenade them. In fact, Agnelli’s wife as well as various guests, not to mention Jackie’s Secret Service protectors, had been there at all times, but the carefully framed and cropped photographs suggested to the world that Jackie and her host were having an affair. On the contrary, the Agnelli cruise had never been anything less than “a proper trip,” attested Secret Service agent Larry Newman. “It was just beautiful people enjoying themselves.” Newman, when he guarded President Kennedy, had been present on numerous occasions when JFK cavorted with other women. The agent found Jackie to be another story entirely: “I never saw anything of untoward desire or activity on her part toward another man.” Nor, in his view, was she inclined to attempt to spite her faithless husband by misbehaving with Agnelli in Italy, as some would later represent her as having done. “She was above all that,” Newman declared. “She didn’t burn that kind of fire.”

Neither JFK nor his team believed that Jackie was really misbehaving with Agnelli. They were, however, concerned about the potential political consequences of the pictures. Nor, importantly, can the press have believed any of it. Besides broaching the idea that all was not well in the Kennedy marriage, the contrived images appealed to popular sentiment that while it was acceptable for the first lady to use her rarefied tastes and graces in the service of her husband, it was another matter to play on her own, however blamelessly, among the international super-rich. Ironically, at one point during the ensuing media tempest, JFK had been a guest at the Santa Monica residence of his brother-in-law the actor Peter Lawford, where, as was their custom, the president and Dave Powers diverted themselves with various women provided by their host. Meanwhile, it was Jackie whom a group known as the Concerned Citizens of America was threatening to picket when she returned to the White House. “Would you not better have served the nation and the President by remaining at home by his side?” Jackie’s critics asked her in an open letter. “We have honored you greatly with the position of First Lady of our land. We ask only that you not violate the dignity of that title.”

Jackie came home on August 31 to a husband who was indeed preoccupied with a series of surreptitiously taken photographs, though not the ones she had been hearing about. And, much as President Kennedy might have wished otherwise, there could be no doubting or denying the reality these new pictures disclosed. As it happened, hours before Jackie had been reunited with him, JFK had received hard evidence, in the form of photographic intelligence, showing that the Soviets were constructing missile sites in Cuba. Three months previously, as Kennedy frolicked with Marilyn Monroe in New York, the Kremlin had been quietly launching a plan to force JFK to agree to major concessions in Germany. That day, Khrushchev had spoken to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and others of his idea of installing Soviet missiles in Cuba. As soon as Khrushchev had the missiles in place, he planned to appear in New York, probably in the latter part of November, and demand that Kennedy agree to pull Western troops out of Berlin, as well as abandon any idea of a reunified Germany. On the basis of Kennedy’s weak performance in Vienna, where the American leader had been “savaged” by his Soviet counterpart, Khrushchev calculated that rather than risk all-annihilating war, Kennedy would quickly cave. JFK as yet knew none of this at the end of August, only that the missile sites were being built, and that he would soon have to make a decision about how, if at all, to react to the information.