Just Jackie (5 page)

Erikson’s personal experiences made him an especially appropriate therapist for Jackie’s children. When Erik was three—exactly John’s age—his Danish mother married a German-Jewish pediatrician named Theodor Homburger, and little Erik Homburger was raised believing that he was Jewish, and that his stepfather was his birth father. “This loving deceit,” as the psychoanalyst later put it, was a prime reason for his interest in identity problems, and it gave him a deep empathy for children who had lost their fathers.

He had other identity confusions as well. Was he Danish or German? Jewish or Gentile? His anti-Semitic German classmates considered him Jewish, and rejected him.
His peers at synagogue called him “the goy” because of his Nordic features, and did not accept him, either. Finally, setting out for Boston in 1933 to escape the Nazis, he created a new identity, and gave himself the name Erikson, becoming Erik the son of Erik—his own creation.

Through his practice and teaching, Erikson had met many famous people, but none as famous as Jackie. She was an interesting study for him—a shy, vulnerable woman with the determination of a drill sergeant. He had written about the particular struggles women had in establishing their identities. He said that married women who hoped to find their identities through their husbands, without first establishing a firm sense of self, often ended up woefully unhappy.

“What seems to be the problem with your children?” he asked Jackie, knowing full well that her answer would reveal a great deal about herself.

“M
ore than anything else,” Jackie told Erikson, “I want life to go on as normally as possible for my children. They were born in the same week, three years apart this month, and after the assassination I held birthday parties for them in the White House. But since then, things seem to have unraveled.”

For Jackie, it had become a major effort to get through each day. She was taking large doses of the tranquilizer Amytal, which left her speech slurred and her mind disoriented.
Erikson could see, without being told, that Jackie was existing in a shell of grief. She evidently felt guilty that she was neglecting her children at the very moment they needed her the most.

Jackie told Erikson that the assassination had transformed Caroline from a bright and lively little girl into a dour and lethargic child. Jackie was concerned about Caroline because of her daughter’s deep attachment to her dead father. Even under normal circumstances, Caroline was not nearly as outgoing as John, but now she walked around with her hands clenched in angry little fists. She refused to play with other children, and at dinnertime she toyed with the food on the plate. She did not say much, or show any emotion, and she seemed to be pulling away from her mother.

Jackie had read many of Erikson’s books, including
Childhood and Society
, and was familiar with his theories. He believed that there were eight stages of human development, and that each of them involved an “identity crisis.” It was necessary for a child to resolve each crisis successfully in order to go on to the next stage, and become a whole person.

At age six, Caroline was entering stage four, which Erikson characterized as reflecting the conflict between “industry” and “inferiority.” The little girl was beginning to figure out the rules of the larger society beyond the walls of her home. But how did a six-year-old integrate personal lessons of right and wrong with the moral outrage she must have felt about her father’s assassination? Was this the beginning of a conflict between a public and a private self that would bedevil Caroline for the rest of her life?

Jackie identified with the sudden change in her daughter’s personality. The same thing had happened to her when she was a child. Jackie had grown up in a home torn by bitter discord. She often saw her father, John
Vernou Bouvier III, sprawled drunk on the living-room sofa. Dressed in nothing but his underwear, socks and garters, and shoes, he ranted against “kikes” and “micks” and “wops.” He cursed God for the unfair way the world had treated him, and hurled abuse at Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier.

Janet generally gave as good as she got, hurling the family china at her husband. She denounced him in front of Jackie and her younger sister Lee as “a no-good drunk,” and constantly threatened to leave him. Sometimes the fights went beyond words, and there were blows, blood, and black eyes.

As the older, more responsible daughter, Jackie was expected to help her mother carry her drunken father into the bedroom and undress him. Before they put him to bed, they had to clean up the mess left by his night of debauchery—his semen, vomit, and urine. The next morning, Jackie would watch in shame and pity as her father poured out his tearful apologies and begged his wife for one more chance.

When he was sober, her father was a totally different man. He was especially warm and compassionate toward Jackie, whom he favored over Lee. Jackie responded to his affection by secretly siding with him in the explosive marital battles. She came to see her father as a victim. If she had been his wife, she would not have driven him to drink. She would have known how to make him happy.

In later years, Jack Kennedy joked that Jackie had “a father thing.” Her friends agreed; they said that the men Jackie found attractive bore a striking resemblance to her roué of a father, whose dark good looks accounted for his nickname, Black Jack. She was drawn to older men, piratical types with rampant sexual appetites.

However, that was only part of the story. Black Jack Bouvier was Jackie’s first and greatest mentor in the art of life. He had an eye for color, shape, and form, and he delivered lectures to his daughter on everything from architecture
and art to antiques, interior decoration, and fashion.

For Black Jack the most interesting art of all was the mating game between men and women. Pay attention to everything a man says, he told Jackie. Fasten your eyes on him like you are staring into the sun. Women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men.

He called her “Jacks”—a sexually ambiguous term that stuck as her family nickname. And in many ways they were more like sexual confidants than father and daughter. He engaged her in sexually stimulating conversations and bragged about his conquests. Jackie was flattered, because her father made her feel as though she was his most important girl.

When Jackie was a teenager, her father visited her at her boarding school, Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. They played a lewd game in which Jackie would point to the mothers of her classmates.

“That one, Daddy?” she would ask.

And if Jack Bouvier had not slept with the woman in question, he would reply to his daughter, “Not yet.”

And Jackie would point to another mother and ask, “That one, Daddy?”

“Oh, yes,” he would say, “I’ve already had her.”

“And that one, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“And that one, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

As the child of an alcoholic—and a verbally incestuous alcoholic at that—Jackie sought ways to deny the existence of the painful and ugly. She did not hear things she did not want to hear; she did not see things she did not want to see.

“If something unpleasant happens to me, I block it out,” she once said. “I have this mechanism.”

Jackie’s father provided her with the mechanism: style.

“Style is not a function of how
rich
you are, or even
who
you are,” Black Jack told Jackie in what was his most important lesson. “Style is a habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It’s
what
you are. It’s your essential self. It’s what makes you a Bouvier.”

It was the Bouvier in Jackie that had prompted her to enter
Vogue
magazine’s famous Prix de Paris writing contest when she was in college. The first-prize winner was offered a trial period as a junior editor on French
Vogue
, and a permanent position on the staff of New York
Vogue
if she made good.

Asked by the organizers of the contest to write an essay on “People I Wish I Had Known,” Jackie chose three unusual artists: the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the Irish author Oscar Wilde, and the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Her choices reflected her father’s influence.

“If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space,” Jackie wrote in her essay, which won first prize, “it is [the theories of Baudelaire, Wilde, and Diaghilev] that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and painting and ballets composed to.”

Here, in her own words, was the best definition the world would ever get of Jackie. She saw herself as a detached observer safely suspended in space, a sort of celestial figure who employed the power of male gods to make things turn out her way.

“It was a sensibility best described as ‘artistic’ in that it was her own ‘version’ of things,” wrote her stepsister Nina Auchincloss Straight. “Sometimes it was caught in her caricatures—simple, yet detailed, intimately funny pen, ink, and watercolor sketches of family and friends. But her singular view of life could best be seen in a photograph. Pictures were about being beautiful, brave;
they were about family relations and friends. Her photograph of choice would have been the kind selected for a postcard: what to
look
like in life. Jackie knew what kind of a ‘postcard’ she wanted to send, as well as what message she wanted to deliver on the flip side.”

Jackie’s genius for staging artistic effects was apparent from the moment she entered the White House, her “chair hanging in space,” where she reigned as a supreme, if detached, first lady. She became an inspiration to a generation of postwar Americans, who yearned to be shown what to do with their newfound affluence. She taught these ambitious but socially insecure Americans how to dress, decorate their homes, raise their children, and become confident consumers of culture.

In years to come, it became popular to dismiss Jackie as a woman of great personal style but little real accomplishment. She was no Eleanor Roosevelt, it was said. Some people sneered at her interest in interior design, flower arrangement, and fancy sit-down dinners.

But that was not only unfair, it was untrue. Jackie wielded great power. But she wielded it indirectly, like an art director, and through men. If the primary role of a president’s spouse is to generate popular support for the man who occupies the Oval Office, then Jackie had to be ranked as one of the most effective first ladies in American history.

With her art director’s skills, she became John Kennedy’s most potent political ally. She transformed a White House that brimmed with rampant sexual infidelities and secret assassination plots against foreign leaders into a storybook place called Camelot. She established for all time the ideal of a golden age in American politics, making people yearn for the kind of heroic leaders who were probably no longer possible. And, in the words of the poet Archibald MacLeish, she “made the darkest days the
American people had known in a hundred years the deepest revelation of their inward strength.”

All this was done on such a grand scale that it was easy to overlook Jackie’s other great achievement, which came
after
she left the White House. In her private years, Jackie suffered an ordeal by the media such as no other woman in this century, with the possible exception of Britain’s Princess Diana, has had to undergo. But even as the public’s image of Jackie was dulled by gossipy sludge, the private flesh-and-blood Jackie developed into an ever more appealing, self-confident person.

Over the next thirty years, Jackie struggled to recapture her old life, with all the power and the glory, only to discover that the key to her happiness lay where she least expected to find it: in the simple pleasures of family, friendship, work, and nature.

“It’s queer how her public persona and her real self are so unlike,” one of her oldest friends, Charles Whitehouse, told the author toward the end of Jackie’s life. “I’ve given a lot of thought to this, and I think it is because she didn’t become connected in the public mind with any virtuous cause. She is not perceived like Lady Bird Johnson, planting and making things beautiful, or like Barbara Bush with reading. And, you know, being involved with a national problem might have eased Jackie’s situation.

“So why didn’t she do it?” Whitehouse continued. “It may have been connected in some way with her being fiercely independent, and not willing to be involved superficially in something just for the sake of the press. Jackie is clearly not gripped by children with rickets. What she is, is a fascinating, somewhat perplexing human being—lively, sporty, affectionate, youthful. Not at all like the acquisitive monster that was portrayed in the press.”

Erik Erikson was fascinated to listen to Jackie talk about herself and her children. Rarely had he encountered a woman who seemed so soaked in guilt.

“There are children who mourn invisibly,” Erikson told her, speaking about her feelings as much as those of her children. “These children may show little emotion, but they are often concerned with the idea that some aggressive or sexual act or wish of their own might have been the cause of the death.”