Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (5 page)

Jackie inhaled all that enthusiasm and encouragement as if it were opium. By contrast with White, John Husted, who was known to cheerfully make the rounds with her on weekends as she asked people lighthearted questions and took their photographs, viewed her new position as “insipid.” Which it was, of course, but in the scheme of things that was far from the point. The threat White posed to Husted therefore was not so much sexual as aspirational. Jackie drew substance from White’s talk as she simply did not from that of her fiancé. Curiosity was among her salient characteristics. For Jackie, evenings at the cave were, in the words of William Walton, a forty-two-year-old artist and former
Time
magazine correspondent who sometimes encountered her there, “just a glimpse into another world.” Surrounded by the books that cluttered the cave, Jackie reveled in the dizzying rush and range of the older men’s conversation. If her new role required her to play against type, to be sunnier and more outgoing than was natural to her, it was also much more fun and rewarding than the part she had recently been cast to play in Bedford Hills.

Walton, who, among other oft-recounted adventures, had liberated the bar at Jackie’s beloved Ritz Hotel in Paris after the war with his friend Ernest Hemingway, was not the only ex-newsman she saw at John White’s. One evening, she again found herself in the presence of Jack Kennedy, who, in 1945, had called the British general election in favor of the Labour Party at a moment when Churchill still seemed invincible. Hired to report the news from a serviceman’s perspective, Kennedy, in a series of eye-opening dispatches from London, had warned American readers to prepare for the unthinkable. He laid out the reasons why Churchill might soon be hurled from power, chief among them the British electorate’s dismay at social and economic conditions under Conservative rule. Though Kennedy had since abandoned journalism for politics (where he again emphasized his status as a returning serviceman), White and his journalist friends persisted in viewing him as one of their own.

White’s personal relationship with Kennedy was fraught. In the course of Kathleen’s short life, no one had been closer to her than Jack. So when John White grew besotted with Kathleen, he initially saw Jack’s twin-like intimacy with her as an obstacle to his own designs. He claimed never to have liked Kathleen’s brother in any case, and he felt Jack recoil from him as well. Nevertheless, these two men whose hearts had been cut to pieces by Kathleen’s death had since been irresistibly drawn to and fascinated by each other. In postwar Washington, White chased some of the same women as Jack Kennedy, and he had made a point of quizzing these bedmates about him. Previously, White also had gleaned a good deal from Kathleen and Inga, the latter a married Danish woman in her late twenties who had set herself up as the then-twenty-four-year-old Kennedy’s sexual instructress. Inga also had taken an interest in Jack’s struggle to become a writer; she read and commented on the pages of his that Kathleen also sometimes passed on to her mentor, John White, to critique. In wartime Washington, Jack and Inga on one side, and John and Kathleen on the other, would go out as a foursome in an effort to conceal Jack’s liaison with another man’s wife, who, in a further complication, was falsely rumored to be a German agent.

Jack’s father, who never flinched from interfering in his children’s love lives, had initially approved of Inga in her capacity as sex tutor, but when the Nazi rumors materialized, he moved to snuff out the relationship before it damaged his son’s political future. Thus, the two couples would begin and end the evening together in public, allowing Jack and Inga to slip off at some point in between. Given his frustrations with Kathleen, none of this had been easy for John White. And Kathleen, for her part, later admitted to having been jealous of Inga’s relationship with her brother. Though John White and Inga Arvad had never been lovers, they were, in his phrase, “comfortably close,” and she spoke to him extensively of Jack Kennedy. Inga absolutely adored Jack, thought him beautiful and brilliant, with, as she described it, “the charm that makes the birds come out of the trees.” Still, Inga declared: “I wouldn’t trust him as a long-term companion, obviously.”

When Jackie Bouvier saw Jack Kennedy again in 1952, Patsy Field assumed they were meeting for the first time. It is easy to see why White’s sister would have made that mistake, for the episode did contain overtones of a first encounter. The recent infusion of a certain amount of tragic-romantic backstory had encouraged Jackie to perceive Jack Kennedy with new eyes. And he, in turn, was having his first glimpse of her in the role John White had undertaken to direct her in. Evidently, Kennedy liked what he saw. In the days that followed, he pursued her avidly—“without much success,” White was not sorry to observe. But for a man known to love the chase, difficulties would only have been an incentive. In the present instance, Kennedy was sufficiently successful that he and Jackie were seen out together in Washington enough to cause her to worry about her fiancé’s reaction. By this time, the engagement had been announced in the press and she had conferred with a priest about her wedding day. She wrote John Husted, urging him to ignore any “drivel” he might hear about her and Kennedy. “It doesn’t mean a thing.” But that was only to postpone the cataclysm. With each passing day, Mother Husted’s ring seemed to weigh a bit more heavily on Jackie’s left hand. In another letter, Jackie suggested to John Husted that they wait a little longer to get married, because they would be so much happier if they knew each other better. Crazily in love, Husted had no doubt that he knew her well enough already.

Finally, her fiancé was preparing to leave Washington after a weekend visit in March 1952, when, without warning, she discreetly dropped the ring into his pocket at the airport. That small, silent gesture was probably imperceptible to anyone but the two people involved, yet on Jackie’s part it required all of the resolve that the girl in Louis Auchincloss’s new novel lacked. Kinder than she had been to Bev Corbin, she offered the excuse, to which John Husted clung for the rest of his years, that Janet Auchincloss believed his family did not have enough money and that he did not earn enough on Wall Street. The explanation had the advantage of being true, as far as it went. Better that than to be informed that, in addition to her mother’s objections, Jackie saw the life he offered as a trap.

So long as Jackie had been tethered to that ring, she had resisted Jack Kennedy’s overtures. Their relationship entered a new phase when, at the suggestion of Martha Bartlett, Jackie invited him to accompany her to a dinner party at the Bartlett residence in May. As it happened, a great deal had changed in Kennedy’s life in recent weeks. At the beginning of April he had announced his intention to seek the Democratic nomination to oppose Henry Cabot Lodge, the popular incumbent Republican senator from Massachusetts. By the evening of the Bartlett dinner, there was no question but that the campaign, first for the nomination and then for the seat itself, would often keep Kennedy away from Washington in the coming months. In that sense, it was hardly an optimal moment to begin dating him.

Looked at in another light, however, the timing could hardly have been better. If Kennedy went on to win a Senate seat, at some point in the very near future he was going to be in need of a wife. Like it or not, and Kennedy most certainly did not like it, that was a fact of political life. Upon leaving John White’s basement apartment of an evening, one needed only to glance across Dumbarton Avenue for confirmation of that uncomfortable but unavoidable reality. Another newspaperman lived across the street. He too was passionate about the business, revered books and ideas, and constantly entertained guests whose talk was some of the best in town. Strange to say, he too had been a great admirer of Kick Kennedy’s. But there the similarities between the neighbors, John White and Joseph Alsop, ceased. The influential forty-one-year-old
New York Herald Tribune
political columnist armored himself in Savile Row suits and an ersatz upper-class British accent. His modern house was stuffed with fine art and antiques. His guests included some of the most powerful active political figures in Washington.

After the war, Joe Alsop had first encountered the former Kathleen Kennedy in London, when she was the recently widowed Lady Hartington. He subsequently described her as “one of the most enchanting women” he had ever known, mighty praise from a man who prided himself on his intimate, affectionate, gossiping friendships with such grandes dames as Lady Diana Cooper, Odette Pol Roger, Pauline de Rothschild, and Lady Pamela Berry. Touted to Alsop by Kick, Jack Kennedy became a regular at the journalist’s carefully choreographed Washington dinner parties until he committed the sin of grousing that there never seemed to be enough pretty girls at his host’s table. The remark conveyed to Alsop—who, it must be said, was very easily angered—that the young congressman, however “ornamental” and intelligent he might be, was not serious, and from then on Jack Kennedy’s invitations to these evenings halted.

Alsop’s decision to cut him off reflected a wider view that prevailed in many quarters of Washington that Jack Kennedy was a playboy and a lightweight, unambitious and uninterested in politics, who held office solely because his rich father, in an obnoxious act of political puppeteering, had put him there. Indeed, when this endlessly self-deprecating young man, who often dressed and acted like a lackadaisical frat boy, first sought a congressional seat, in 1946, his reluctance to run had been at the heart of his own campaign narrative. Jack Kennedy painted himself as having been drafted to take up the family flag that ought to have been carried by his older brother, Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., who had died in Europe as a flier in August 1944. In any case, it is suggestive that Alsop did not reinstate Jack Kennedy to his guest list until the latter gave proof of his new seriousness and maturity when he married Jackie Bouvier in 1953.

But in the spring of 1952, that day was still a ways off. Jack Kennedy liked Jackie well enough, but it could not be said that he was in love with her. He regarded her as just one of many, whereas for her he was already the one. In the past, she had conceived of the future more or less in negatives. She did not want to end up as a cake-baking housewife or a society wife. Yet she had lacked any clear picture of what she
did
want. Now, she believed, she knew. She had seen her future in the tousle-haired, insouciant person of Jack Kennedy. He was the Interesting Boy and the Sexy Boy in one compelling package. His darting conversation was of the sort she had learned to savor at the cave. His family possessed fabulous wealth, no small consideration for a young woman who had grown up in privileged circumstances but without money of her own. Through friendships cultivated with various young noblemen in London on the eve of the Second World War, as well as through his sister’s marriage to the heir to the Devonshire dukedom, he had the aristocratic associations Jackie prized. The particular gifts he gave Jackie—books, principally English, that had helped him to define himself—were catnip for her imagination. Chief among those writings was the glittering literary portrait of Raymond Asquith in the memoir
Pilgrim’s Way
by John Buchan, which Jack had spoken of on one memorable occasion at John White’s. Reading of the unflappable young World War I hero who had been prepared to sacrifice everything for his ideals, even his own life, she began to understand the kind of man Jack Kennedy wanted to be; to see him, as he no doubt wished to be seen, in a heroic light.

Even those personal qualities that some women might regard as deal breakers only made Jack the more attractive to Jackie. She thought him excitingly unconventional and unpredictable, full of angles and surprises, in the way that her father had been. And if, like Black Jack Bouvier, Jack Kennedy was also a little dangerous, so much the better; at least he was not bland and boring like the fellow she had almost married. At the same time, it struck certain of Kennedy’s friends that Jackie thought she could succeed with him where her mother had failed with Black Jack; that drawn as she was to the bad boy in Kennedy, she believed she was the one to change him.

Whether he would ever allow her to get close enough to try was another matter. He had chased after her while she was engaged to another man, but hardly was she free again when he became elusive. Was it simply that he was preoccupied with the Senate race, or was there some other explanation? In his absence, he left her to commune with Raymond Asquith. Jack would call her if he was to be in Washington, but only if he did not intend to see someone else. Amid a crash of coins deposited in what she imagined to be a pay phone at some oyster shack on Cape Cod, Jack, whose voice sounded as if he were pressing his finger against his nose, would invite her to a movie or to dinner with friends.

Finally, he asked her, as he had asked other girls in summers past, to visit his parents’ shingled waterfront home in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod for the weekend. Since Jackie was a child, Joseph P. Kennedy had been spoken of often and passionately in the Bouvier family circle. The name “Kennedy” fanned Black Jack’s fury no less than the name “Auchincloss” would later do. In 1934, President Roosevelt had made Joe Kennedy Wall Street’s policeman when, on the principle that it takes a thief to catch a thief, he designated the former stock market operator as chair of the newly established Securities and Exchange Commission. Black Jack would long attribute his financial fall to Kennedy’s decision to ban the very trading practices by which Kennedy, “the Judas of Wall Street,” had himself previously made a fortune. It is all the more curious, then, that when Jackie Bouvier met Joe Kennedy in 1952, this same figure who had supposedly ruined Black Jack in the 1930s would at length prove to be the making of Black Jack’s daughter. Jackie saw marriage to a man like Jack Kennedy as a way out of becoming just another society wife. Joe Kennedy saw Jackie as precisely the society wife Jack needed for his career. Jackie wanted to escape Newport. Joe Kennedy sought a Trojan horse into Newport. This son of a Boston-Irish saloon-keeper was fueled by no small amount of savage indignation of his own. The wound in Joe’s case consisted of the innumerable social snubs and slights endured in life from the time when he was an undergraduate at Harvard. For Joe Kennedy, Jackie’s double-barreled appeal was that she was a Catholic who, through her mother’s strategic second marriage, also had the aura of the Wasp patriarchate he was determined to upend. “It’s not important what you really are,” old Joe was known to tell his sons. “The only important thing is what people think you are.” Appearances being everything to him, it mattered not at all that Jackie was not really an Auchincloss, not really rich.