Just Jackie (13 page)

The first anniversary of Jack’s assassination was a couple of months away. In the past ten months, 7,740,000 people had visited the slain President’s burial place—more than all the tourists who visited the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument combined. Sixty books about JFK had already been published, and more were on the way. Two dozen phonograph records had been issued, most of them containing the text of his speeches. The mania for all things Kennedy continued unabated.

So did the family’s penchant for tragedy. In June, Bobby’s younger brother Ted was in a plane crash in Massachusetts. Two of those on board lost their lives—Ted’s legislative assistant, and the pilot, Ed Zimny, who had flown Janet Auchincloss to Rhode Island on the day Baby Girl Kennedy’s body was exhumed. Ted fractured his back, and was still recuperating.

Bobby found Jackie and Nancy in the master bedroom, putting away books. The walls were covered in ivory silk, as were those in the adjoining master bathroom. Bookcases held Jackie’s collection of Persian miniatures. The iron four-poster was a gift from Bunny, who had ordered it from her own ironsmith on her estate in Middleburg,
Virginia. It was covered by a rare guanaco fur spread that had been given to Jackie by Jack. A photograph of Jack rested on the bedside table next to a small vase with fresh flowers. Apart from Caroline’s clippings, it was the only picture of the dead President in the entire apartment.

Nancy went over to shake Bobby’s hand, and he winced in pain. His hand was swollen and tender from campaigning.

Bobby’s campaign for the Senate was his first attempt at winning elective office. He was running on an idealized version of his brother’s legacy. Whereas Jack had been a give-and-take politician comfortable with compromise, Bobby preached the liberal ideals of youth and public service.

“President Kennedy,” Bobby told the New York crowds, “was more than just president of a country. He was the leader of young people everywhere. What he was trying to do was fight against hunger, disease, and poverty around the world. You and I as young people have a special responsibility to carry on the fight.”

Jackie was delighted with Bobby’s noble message. She had attended the Democratic Party’s national convention that past summer in Atlantic City, and was thrilled when the crowd gave Bobby a twenty-three-minute standing ovation. His emotional reception was interpreted as a humiliation of President Johnson. Everyone in the convention hall was aware that war had broken out between Bobby and Johnson. Bobby was eager to score a landslide victory in the 1964 New York Senate race so that he could challenge Johnson for the presidential nomination in 1968.

As the art director of Camelot, Jackie played an important role in Bobby’s political plans. She had recently learned that, despite her efforts to stop him, Jim Bishop intended to publish a book called
The Day Kennedy Was
Shot
. She wrote Bishop, appealing to him to abandon the project.

Bobby objected to Jackie’s use of the words “hired” and “reimbursed,” and so she sent a second letter to Bishop.

That, of course, was untrue. Jackie had called in Manchester for the express purpose of stopping Jim Bishop. As always, she was trying to be the puppeteer who controlled the strings of history. She envisioned Manchester’s book not only as a beautiful and brave account that reflected her version of her husband’s murder, but as one that would also serve as a manifesto for Bobby’s long march to the White House.

“You must win,” Jackie told Bobby of the Senate campaign. “You
will
win.”

One way of assuring an impressive victory was for Jackie to campaign by his side.

“You could do it with dignity,” Bobby told her. “An appearance here, a few TV spots there.”

But Jackie, who occasionally showed up for private fund-raisers for Bobby, had other ideas.

“What if I attend some of your rallies in disguise?” she asked. “You know, wearing a wig or a turban or something? I could lend moral support.”

“That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” Bobby said. “What about the children? Can I use Caroline and John?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“This campaigning is a lot tougher than I expected,” Bobby said. “All that smiling …”

“You could turn on a very low-level smile,” Jackie said. “It’s the really broad smiles that wear you out. A gentle little smile would wear better.”

A
smiling Oliver Smith was waiting for Jackie when she arrived by limousine at his yellow town house on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was the dead of winter in 1965, and Jackie was wearing a tailored wool coat that looked like it came from Halston. She stepped past the ornately carved black door that Oliver Smith held open for her, and entered his house.

“Welcome to the house that Sam Goldwyn built,” Oliver Smith said, helping her off with the coat. “I bought this place with the earnings from my first Hollywood film,
Band Wagon.”

Oliver Smith was a theatrical designer, and everything about him was theatrical in an understated sort of way. A tall, lanky figure with closely cropped hair, he was dressed in a custom-made double-breasted blue suit from Dun-hill. A cigarette dangled from a long, delicate hand that emerged from a cuff fastened with a small gold cuff link. He looked like a Noel Coward creation, a man who knew how to live in grand style.

He led Jackie into the living room, and began mixing martinis. He had spent the past ten years restoring the four-story, Federal-style house, and the place was a marvel of visual imagination. The high-ceilinged room featured a spectacular spiral staircase, a silver chandelier, and an ornate Chippendale mirror over a black Belgian marble fireplace. Two cats snoozed in front of a blazing, stagy fire.

Oliver Smith handed Jackie her drink, then sat down facing her. Once he had a martini in hand, he needed a cigarette, and he lit another Marlboro. When he crossed one long leg over the other, it touched the floor.

Jackie came to Oliver Smith’s house once a week to take drawing lessons. She had always possessed a talent for drawing amusing figures in the children’s-book style of Ludwig Bemelmans, the creator of the
Madeline
series. In fact, Jackie and Bemelmans had once corresponded about collaborating on a children’s book, possibly with Madeline visiting the White House. Bemelmans had also urged Jackie to keep a daily journal with her personal thoughts and illustrative sketches.

Bemelmans died before he and Jackie had a chance to carry out their project. After she moved to New York, she embarked on a self-improvement kick with another visual artist, Oliver Smith.

“What’s new with Truman?” Jackie asked.

“Pardon me?” Smith said. He was hard of hearing.

“
Truman
,” Jackie repeated, louder.

She was referring to the writer Truman Capote, not the ex-President.

Jackie and Smith had been introduced by Truman Capote, though introductions were hardly necessary for two such well-known people. Oliver Smith was a legend in the theater. He had scored his first major success back in 1942, designing the scenery for Agnes de Mille’s
Rodeo
. He then went on to do the sets for
On the Town, My Fair Lady, West Side Story
, and
The Sound of Music
, as well as for a number of productions of the American Ballet Theatre, where he was now codirector.

A little over a year before, Smith had brought the American Ballet Theatre to Washington, where Jackie and the President saw the company perform in a decrepit movie theater near the White House. Jackie was dismayed by the contrast between the evening’s brilliant performance and its down-at-heels surroundings, and it got her to thinking about a center for the performing arts in Washington that would be modeled after Lincoln Center in New York City.

“The arts had been treated as a stepchild in the U.S.,” she later recalled. “When the government had supported the arts, as in many WPA projects, artists were given a hand and some wonderful things emerged. I had seen in Europe how proud those countries were of their arts and artists. Of course, they had a longer tradition of patronage, going back to kings, popes, and princes, but modern governments continued this support. Our great museums and great performing companies should be supported, but the experimental and the unknown should also be thrown a line.”

After her famous 1961 trip to Paris, when she had met President Charles de Gaulle and his culture minister, Andre Malraux, Jackie was determined to create an American department of the arts. As a first step in that direction, she persuaded her husband to appoint August Heckscher as a “special consultant to the President on the arts.” And
Kennedy had been scheduled to sign an executive order realizing one of Jackie’s greatest goals: the appointment of Richard Goodwin as the first special assistant to the President for cultural affairs. Her dream was ultimately realized when President Johnson created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The notion that government should take a leading role in promoting the arts became a permanent part of the American cultural landscape.

Oliver Smith’s most celebrated accomplishment was his over-the-top design for the Lerner-Loewe musical
Camelot
. When Jackie told Teddy White “there’ll never be another Camelot,” she was thinking of Smith’s pastel jousting fields and golden castles. She shared Smith’s talent for turning reality into a stage set.

Oliver Smith’s ability to create the perfect mise-en-scène was on permanent display in the garden in the back of his house. The garden was a masterpiece of landscaping, with its splashing fountain, heavy slate patio, and arbor laden with thick, twiny wisteria. In the spring and summer, the feeling was very Southern, like a miniature Tara, and indeed the house appealed to many Southern writers, such as Truman Capote, who for a time lived in the basement apartment on Willow Street with his lover Jack Dunphy. Billy Baldwin helped Capote decorate it with dark green wallpaper, and a pair of gold mirrors in the shape of butterflies.

“He was just an alley cat that wandered around the neighborhood eating whenever he could,” Oliver Smith said of Truman Capote. “He was thin—very thin—and he would stand on the porch looking wistfully into the kitchen. He was determined to get into the house, but I didn’t want him. I had four other cats, which was a big enough feline population.”

“Do you remember?” Jackie said. “At lunch in your
dining room, Truman told me, or at least strongly implied, that the whole house was his.”

“I remember,” Smith answered.

“And then in the middle of lunch I got the idea that it wasn’t his,” she said. “That it was yours.”

Oliver Smith’s house figured prominently in the social life of New York’s influential community of homosexual artists, writers, and musicians. Smith gave famous parties, and he was known as a brilliant raconteur, a man brimming with the latest bawdy gossip. He had a dry wit, and talked in a slow, thoughtful way about art, style, and having a good time.

Many of the friends Jackie made after she moved to New York were gay. There were, of course, heterosexual men in her cultural circle, too, men like Mike Nichols, Jason Epstein, and Norman Podhoretz. But with gay men, there was no layer of sex, which meant that there was one less thing for Jackie to worry about. Once, for example, when Truman Capote visited Jackie in her Fifth Avenue apartment, she invited him into her bedroom while she dressed to go out for the evening.

Jackie’s friendship with gay men like Oliver Smith, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Leonard Bernstein had a profound effect on her outlook. When she was a young girl, she had heard her father heap contempt on “faggots.” The nuns and priests taught her that homosexuality was a sin. Later, the Kennedys scorned any behavior that lacked manly strength and purpose.

As part of her New York education, however, Jackie saw all the harm that was done by this effort to stigmatize homosexuality. She came to believe that no good would ever come from trying to sanitize or standardize behavior.

She was growing more broad-minded and tolerant, even about herself. She started to accept the fact that, like homosexuals, she herself was not what most people
considered “normal.” In a way, she was “almost normal,” just like her gay friends.