Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (15 page)

The late spring of 1951 was a heady time for young Jackie. On April 25 she was informed that she had been chosen as a finalist for the prize; a few days after her final exams in May, she received notice that she had
beaten out 1,280 applicants from 225 colleges to win the 1951 Prix de Paris. She was in New York the next Monday morning to sign with
Vogue
and pose for studio portraits, which would be reproduced in the August issue. Then, on June 7, she set sail for Europe yet again—this time with Lee, who had graduated from Miss Porter’s that spring. The trip was a graduation present from Janet and Hughdie. The sisters would visit London, Madrid, Provence, Venice, and Florence. They later collected their memories, along with photographs, poems, and drawings, in a book called
One Special Summer
and presented it as a gift to Janet. The whirlwind trip was, for Jackie, a final taste of childhood before starting her career at
Vogue
that fall.

Just a few days before she left for Europe, in early June 1951, she accepted a dinner invitation at the home of family friend and Washington columnist Charlie Bartlett. There, Bartlett and his wife introduced Jackie to another friend of theirs: the thirty-four-year-old Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

“After the dinner, why, I walked her out to her car,” Charlie Bartlett remembered. “And Jack Kennedy came sort of tailing after, and he was muttering shyly about, ‘Shall we go someplace and have a drink?’ And Jackie at that stage noticed in the back seat that some man had—a young friend, had been walking along the street and he’d gotten in her car, and crawled into the back seat and was waiting there. So she was forced to tell the Senator that she couldn’t join him for a drink.” That night Jack and Jackie went their separate ways and she, a few days later, left for Europe with Lee.

By the next January, Jackie would be back in the States and, having turned down the
Vogue
job, be working a newspaper job in Washington. She would also be engaged to a tall, handsome young man with money and a promising future—a man named John Husted, Jr.

3

The Career Woman and the Distinguished Gentleman

Why Jackie eventually turned down the Prix de Paris, something
for which she’d worked so hard and which seemed so in line with her interests, is something of a mystery. Historians and biographers offer several theories. Barbara Perry lists some possibilities: “Perhaps her mother and stepfather feared that she would fall back under the spell of Black Jack during the prize’s six-month stint in New York. Or they may have been concerned that she would become an expatriate if she moved to Paris for another long stay. Janet might have believed that her daughter . . . was falling behind in the ‘race’ to find a suitable mate . . .” Sarah Bradford quotes a source as saying that Jackie started the job at
Vogue
’s New York offices but didn’t even last the morning: An encounter with a flamboyantly gay staff member convinced Jackie that
Vogue
was no place to find a husband.

Instead, Jackie headed back to McLean, and the Auchinclosses. Eager to establish an income and a life beyond Merrywood, and interested in a career in writing, she used Auchincloss connections to secure an interview at the
Washington Times-Herald
. Starting with secretarial duties, she quickly agitated for a more substantial role at the paper. After much back and forth with the editor-in-chief, who worried that she was just marking time until the inevitable marriage proposal, she acquired the position of “Inquiring Photographer.” Jackie, trained in the use of a professional-quality camera, hit the streets asking citizens (and sometimes, members of Congress) their opinions on questions that she devised.

“You could make the column about anything you wanted to,” she said. “So I’d find a bunch of rough, salty characters and ask them about a prizefighter just so I could capture how they talked.”

More often than examining boxing, questions she asked seemed designed to playfully engage the age-old battle of the sexes. “Do you think a wife should let her husband think he’s smarter than she is?” she asked. “When did you discover that women are not the weaker sex?” “Are wives a luxury or a necessity?” She’d ask young women if they’d rather be “an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave?” It was not just her own family history that made her desperate to secure a fortune; every element in her milieu was urging marriage. The subject was undoubtedly on her mind. Which was only appropriate: By the time she took on her “Inquiring Photographer” job, she was engaged to be married.

There are differing accounts of when Jackie met and began a serious relationship with John Husted Jr., but we know that she accepted his proposal of marriage around Christmas, 1951. Husted was “tall, well-built, urbane, very handsome in a WASPish way,” said Mary de Limur Weinmann, who claimed to have introduced them in late 1951. A Yale-educated Wall Street investment banker, he seems to have fallen decisively for her, but the engagement was not to last very long. In mid-March, Husted visited Merrywood. When Jackie dropped him off at the airport, she silently took off the engagement ring and deposited it in the pocket of Husted’s suit jacket. “She didn’t say much and neither did I,” Husted would remember. “There wasn’t much you could say.”

A few factors contributed to the brevity of the engagement. Janet, having herself been disastrously married to an urbane, Yale-educated Wall Street man, was not in favor of the union. And Jackie confided her fears to friends that being married to an investment banker would be boring. But the biggest force that eclipsed John Husted was Jack Kennedy, the thirty-four-year-old senatorial candidate she’d met at Charlie Bartlett’s the previous summer. He’d found his way back onto Jackie’s radar.

Jack Kennedy was born in 1917, Joe and Rose’s second child. Growing up between Brookline and Hyannis Port, he enjoyed the intellectually
and physically vigorous family life insisted on by his parents. As a boy he learned to sail and took part in the family’s famous touch-football games, known for their fierce, rough-and-tumble competitiveness. And the Kennedy family dinner table was always a place for spirited debates regarding the issues of the day. (Jackie would observe of the Kennedy dinner table: “If you didn’t get on the offensive, they’d have you on the defensive all night.”)

He was a bright, precocious child, and he attended some of the nation’s top schools: Boston Latin, Choate, Harvard. But he was never that great of a student. His consistently mediocre academic performance could be attributed to an intellect that was in need of constant stimulation. Another factor was almost certainly his poor health.

Chronically ill, Jack Kennedy was in and out of hospitals and clinics throughout his life, where doctors treated symptoms while attempting to diagnose the shifting constellation of his underlying ailments: gastroenterological problems, a serious adrenal deficiency called Addison’s disease, a degenerative back condition. Staying healthy would remain difficult as treatments for one condition would aggravate another. For example, steroids prescribed for digestive problems may have triggered his Addison’s disease and caused osteoporosis in his spine. His digestive problems kept him rail thin throughout his childhood and early manhood, and they gave him a gangly, sometimes gaunt appearance as he grew to just over six feet tall.

His back problems were exacerbated by the PT 109 incident. After returning from the war and spending much time dealing with stomach, back, and adrenal problems, Jack turned his attention to politics. In 1946 he campaigned for, and with the help of his father’s millions won, a seat as representative from Massachusetts. Though his record as a congressman was unexceptional, he was popular in his district and was reelected twice. Almost as soon as he took office in the House, he began eyeing the Senate, and he ran for the Senate in 1952. He was assured of victory by his own star power and his father’s considerably deep pockets.

JFK was an incredibly handsome and charismatic young man. The history books bulge with friends and acquaintances trying to define what made him so personally magnetic. American composer and conductor
Leonard Bernstein, who socialized with both Jack and Jackie during their White House years, put it this way: “A remarkable combination of informality and stateliness—that’s not precisely the word—casualness and majesty. . . . It’s a funny thing: he could say, ‘Pass the salt,’ and I was deeply touched. It’s that quality he had which I am still hard-put to define . . . the thing that made him precious, beyond calculation.”

By the time Jackie met him, John F. Kennedy was one of the most sought-after men on the East Coast, a junior congressman with an eye on a Senate seat. She was to fall for his many virtues, and in time come to learn about the darker components of his complex personality.

4

A Sporadic Courtship, A Celebrity Wedding

Though we know that Jackie and Lee visited the Kennedys in
Palm Beach in late 1951—around the time she was to become unenthusiastically engaged to John Husted—both Jackie and JFK would mark another dinner at Charlie Bartlett’s house, on May 8, 1952, as when they started dating.

In many ways, they were well matched. Their similarities gave each an amount of instant understanding of the other, while their differences added frisson. Both came from at least ostensibly wealthy Catholic families, in which the charming, philandering fathers were beloved by the children. Both also had complicated and ambivalent relationships with their mothers.

But where Jack Kennedy’s family, though dysfunctional in its own way, was strong and tightly knit, Jackie had seen hers fragment bitterly before she was even ten years old. And where a crowded, competitive childhood and a burgeoning political career had inured Jack to a great deal of clamor and bustle, Jackie’s disposition was more retiring and contemplative. Barbara Perry catalogs the differences that made them, in some ways, a genuinely odd couple:

He had no facility for languages; she was multilingual. . . . He cared not a whit for fashion, including his own; she was the queen of couture. . . . He was allergic to horses and dogs; she had grown up surrounded by equine and canine pets. He had never owned a home and had no interest in or
taste for decorating; she had a natural eye for the finest decorative arts. His idea of the perfect night out was to see a movie Western and grab a hamburger and malt; she loved the ballet, opera, and symphony and maintained her taste for French cuisine and wine. . . .

To these differences, there were strong and compensating similarities: Each had a sly, wicked sense of humor and tremendous personal magnetism. But perhaps what matched them most was that they shared a wry, stoic demeanor. The violence of war, the premature deaths of his brother Joe and sister Kick, and his own precarious health had bred in Jack a fatalistic streak. For Jackie, the very public and humiliating disintegration of her family had forged her implacable poise.

Lem Billings, Jack’s lifelong best friend and the consummate Kennedy insider, felt he understood their bond, saying: “He saw her as a kindred spirit.They both had taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and learned to
make themselves up
as they went along. They were both actors,” he added, “and I think they appreciated each other’s performances. . . . Both of them had the ability to make you feel that there was no place on earth you’d rather be than sitting there in intimate conversation with them.”

Jack and Jackie’s dating life was relatively conventional for the time. They played parlor games at the Bartletts’, went to the movies (Jackie gamely went to the Westerns), and double-dated with Bobby and Ethel. It was a sporadic courtship: Running for the Senate, Jack was frequently out of town. “He’d call me from some oyster bar up on the Cape with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday,” Jackie remembered.

Certainly he appreciated her exceptional book smarts. Both were avid readers of history and poetry. She took part in his intellectual and professional life, editing his senatorial position papers and translating books for him on Southeast Asia from the original French.

In the summer of 1952, Jack invited Jackie to the Hyannis Port compound, where the Kennedys were welcoming, but formidable. “How can I explain these people?” she would later write. “They were like carbonated water, and other families might be flat.” Leisure time with the Kennedys
was highly energized. A parlor game could become a debate on current events, which could continue through one of their strenuous touch-football games. They sailed, they played tennis, they swam, they played golf—all of it as competitive as their dinner-table conversations.

Jack’s sisters, Eunice, Pat, and Jean, joined by irrepressible sister-in-law Ethel, were just as competitive as the men, and during that summer they subjected Jackie to something like a sorority hazing. Jackie called them the “Rah Rah Girls” and told Lee that, “when they have nothing else to do, they run in place. Other times they fall all over each other like a pack of gorillas.” They made fun of her cooing lilt and her delicate manners, calling her “The Deb.”

Whatever the sisters thought, the patriarch, Joe Kennedy, loved her. “Joe Kennedy not only condoned the marriage,” Lem Billings said. “He ordained it. ‘A politician has to have a wife,’ he said, ‘and a Catholic politician has to have a Catholic wife. She should have class. Jackie probably has more class than any girl we’ve ever seen around here.’” She was, in Joe’s eyes, the perfect package: well-spoken, photogenic, and poised—and tough enough to handle marriage to Jack.

Jack also dutifully presented himself to the Auchinclosses. “I remember the first time Jackie asked Jack to Merrywood, to pick her up for some dinner,” Lee remembered. “You couldn’t mention the word ‘Democrat’ in my stepfather’s house or even presence—nor in my father’s for that matter—and I felt Jack was in for a rough ride. But he was a senator, so he already had a kind of authority as well as a dazzling personality. He won them over pretty quickly.”

Jack Kennedy was without a doubt reluctant to marry. He enjoyed life as the dashing, rich, young Capitol Hill playboy, and his compulsive womanizing would have made the idea of “settling down” unattractive, if not downright disturbing. But Jack was no fool, and he knew that a wife would be a necessity if he aspired to higher office. And whatever mixed feelings Jack had at the prospect of marriage, Jackie had clearly captured his imagination. “He really brightened when she appeared,” said Chuck Spalding, one of Jack’s oldest friends. “You could see it in his eyes; he’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie
interested
him, which was not true of many women.”

For her part, Jackie went in with an awareness of some of the challenges that would face her and Jack as a married couple. She knew that he had troubles with his back and stomach. “The year before we were married, when he’d take me out, half the time it was on crutches,” she later said. “You know, when I went to watch him campaign, before we were married, he was on crutches. I can remember him on crutches more than not.” And she had heard rumors of his womanizing. But it’s hard to imagine, given her relationship with her father, that she’d have found anything irregular or unforgivable about that. “She wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like old Black Jack,” Spalding posited. “It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations.”

The importance of the Kennedy fortune in Jackie’s calculus should not be downplayed. She saw what happened as the Bouvier family fortune declined, and she experienced a new level of lush living after her mother married Hughdie. But while Hughdie’s biological children were given enormous trusts, no such provisions were made for her or Lee. If she wanted her own fortune, she’d have to marry into it. Though Jackie Bouvier was gaga over Jack, as Sarah Bradford wrote, “she would never have married a poor Jack Kennedy.”

While Jackie continued her work at the
Washington Times-Herald
, she was ready for a change. In the spring of 1953, she headed to London to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The stories, sketches, and photos she filed showed her creativity. A telegram from Jack in America read, “Articles excellent but you are missed. Love, Jack.” When she returned, Jack gave Jackie a two-carat diamond-and-emerald engagement ring. The engagement hit the papers in June 1953, and
Life
magazine wrote a cover story on the couple later that summer.

The wedding was, at Joe’s direction, a star-studded media event: Fourteen hundred invitations were sent and a crowd of three thousand showed up to spectate on September 12 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Newport. Jackie wore the rosepoint lace veil that Janet’s mother and Janet had both worn for their weddings. While Jackie would have preferred to wear a more contemporary wedding dress, she acceded to the wishes of Jack,
who had asked her to wear “something traditional and old-fashioned.” Her mother and father-in-law also argued for something frillier than Jackie wanted. “Joe reportedly was particularly pleased at the potential political capital to be earned by Janet Auchincloss’s commissioning of her African-American seamstress, Ann Lowe, to create the gown.” For Joe, using Lowe rather than a French designer, for example, added a humble and progressive touch that would play well with the public.

One shadow fell over the otherwise joyous occasion. On the morning of the ceremony, Black Jack was found in his hotel room, too drunk to stand up unassisted, much less walk his eldest daughter down the aisle, as he had hoped. Over the weeks preceding, he had conscientiously sobered up. He donned a special rubber suit and ran around the Central Park reservoir to slim down for the big day. But when he arrived in Newport, he barely had time to see Jackie before Janet made it plain that he was not welcome.

“He was on his best behavior,” remembered Gore Vidal. (Vidal’s mother had been married to Hughdie before Janet; he and Jackie shared half-siblings.) “But, inspired by who knows what furies, Janet decided that although she could not bar him from the church, she could disinvite him from the reception. . . . Janet ordered Mike [Canfield, Lee’s husband] to go to Black Jack and tell him he was not to come to the wedding reception. Black Jack went straight to the bar.”

“The only time I ever saw him really drunk was at Jackie’s wedding,” Lee remembered. “My mother refused to let him come to the family dinner the night before. So he went to his hotel and drank from misery and loneliness. It was clear in the morning that he was in no state to do anything, and I remember my mother screaming with joy, ‘Hughdie, Hughdie, now you can give Jackie away.’ During the wedding party I had to get him onto a plane back to New York. . . . It was a nightmare.”

Jackie betrayed none of her heartbreak during the ceremony or the reception, held at Hammersmith Farm. A
Life
magazine photographer apparently caught photos of Jackie impishly blowing smoke rings; Jack spent their two-week Acapulco honeymoon worrying they’d be published.

The couple stayed in a villa set into a cliff overlooking the sea. “This is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen—Jack adores it too,” Jackie wrote
to Rose and Joe. Jack “is absolutely HELPLESS—which is such fun—because he doesn’t speak a word of Spanish.” As the help didn’t speak English, Jackie did all the translating. The maids found Jack “beguiling and are convinced we are NOT MARRIED!” She wrote about their water-skiing and deep-sea fishing adventures and rhapsodized about married life. “I want to tell you how perfect it is being married,” she wrote. “And how unbelievably heavenly Jack is.” For his part, Jack wired his parents that “at last I know the true meaning of rapture. Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart. Thanks mom and dad for making me worthy of her.”

Enshrined she may well have been, but Jack had no intention of putting a stop to his womanizing. As early as a couple of weeks into their marriage, he was making excuses to get away from Jackie and flirting with any attractive woman who came his way. Jack’s compulsive skirt chasing revealed a darker side of what was, in other ways, a genuinely heroic character.