Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (16 page)

5

Jack’s Dark Side

Not every woman was vulnerable to Jack Kennedy’s charms—
only those attracted to good looks, extreme wealth, animal magnetism, intelligence, and wit.

“I had designs on John F. Kennedy,” Pulitzer Prize–winning author Margaret Coit admitted in a 1966 oral history. “Everybody in Massachusetts did. He was the golden boy, the most eligible bachelor in New England.” In the spring of 1953, research for her biography of financier/philanthropist Bernard Baruch took her to Washington and gave Coit an excellent excuse to introduce herself to JFK. Her account of that meeting, and a subsequent date, is at times unpleasant to read, but it offers a succinct glimpse into Kennedy’s womanizing. This compulsive, reckless, at times cruel aspect of his personality, so difficult to reconcile with his many virtues, is something anyone who reads about JFK or Jackie has to wrestle with. And Jackie’s response to it says much about her strength, her grit, and the way in which her childhood prepared her (as much as any woman could be prepared) to be married to such a man.

That spring of 1953—the same spring he became engaged to Jackie—was a difficult time healthwise for Jack, and the exhaustion brought on by his poor health was noticeable to Coit. When she first met him, Coit’s “overwhelming impression was of something gray,” she remembered. “His eyes were gray, and his suit was gray and his hair was gray at that time. His lips were gray, and his skin had a grayish tinge. His eyeballs were very, very white. He had very piercing eyes, and a hard, harsh kind of voice, small stubby fingered hands.”

After the interview in Kennedy’s Senate office, he invited her to a party at his Georgetown home. At that party Coit, a Republican, ran into a guilty-looking Richard Nixon: “I gave a gulp, and he gave a gulp. He said, ‘I won’t tell on you if you don’t tell on me.’” At the end of the party, most of which he spent talking in a corner with Senator Stuart Symington, JFK finally approached Coit and suggested a date in the immediate future. A few days later, she agreed to drop by his Senate office at four o’clock in the afternoon.

There, she found him hard at work on Senate business, correspondence, and signing “glamour-boy pictures of himself—hundreds of them.” Coit sat on the sofa and perused his bookshelves while he conducted phone business and signed letters in the sweltering, non-air-conditioned office. Finally, after over an hour, he finished his work for the day. He joined her on the couch, and she was impressed by how dangerously exhausted he suddenly seemed. “He just looked more gray than ever, and his eyes were closed,” she recalled. “I thought he was going to faint, and I was so scared I didn’t know what to do. It was late. Everybody had gone home.”

The two agreed that Jack was too tired for a date that night, but he rallied to give her a ride home. Grabbing his crutches, JFK escorted Coit to his car, “a little open topless convertible, absolutely all jammed up, and dented, and marked,” and drove her to her rooming house in Southeast Washington.

“Where I made my mistake,” Coit said, “was inviting him in.”

He threw himself down on the sofa. It seemed all right to me. Then he tried to drag me down beside him. So I struggled, and I said, ‘Wait a minute. I made up my mind that I was not going to kiss you on the first date.’ He said, ‘This isn’t a first date. We have been making eyes at each other three times now.’ Then he lunged for me . . . I began to cry.. . . I rose and got up to get a glass of water. He watched me. ‘You have pretty legs,’ he said. . . . ‘Well, you are not bad looking for a senator,’ I said, thinking that was what he wanted. He looked very rueful. Then he sprang up. He grabbed me. . . . ‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘Don’t be so grabby. This is only our first date. We’ve got plenty of time.’ He lifted his head
and his gray eyes just drilled into mine. ‘But I can’t wait, you see, I’m going to grab everything I want. You see, I haven’t any time.’

It’s an incredibly bald statement on his part that provides a great deal of insight on the existential panic that lay behind Kennedy’s aggressive womanizing. He was a man who, throughout his life, had good reason to believe he wouldn’t live much longer. Besides his health problems and the dire prognostications he’d beaten back time and again, here was a man who, at war, had seen lives ended in an instant. The loss of his brother and sister had shown him in very intimate terms how capricious, sudden, and permanent death was. He wanted to “grab everything” as a way of assuaging a profound panic, of asserting life in the face of death.

This panic did not bring out the best in Jack, at least not where women were concerned. “He was so cold,” Coit continued,

It was as if he had shifted gears. We had been talking about books and ideas. . . . He had seen me as a mind; and now he saw me just as something female. He couldn’t fit the two together, and it was as if he were two parts. It was the cold machine-like quality that scared me so . . .

Looking back on the incident more than ten years later, Coit would say that “he frightened me more than the facts warranted.” Nevertheless, she added, “I was afraid he would [call me], and I got out of Washington as soon as I could because I didn’t know what to do about it. I didn’t quite know how to cope. I went home.”

Besides his fatalism and sense of mortality, Jack’s promiscuity can be attributed to how he was raised. He grew up in a home where his father chased women fairly openly while his mother, for the most part, tacitly accepted it. But the simplest reason may be one of the more compelling: Jack was rich, and Jack was handsome, and women were readily available to him. Certainly at that time—and maybe at all times—that was all the license a man like Jack Kennedy needed.

Jackie would never know about all of Jack’s conquests, but throughout their life together she’d learn of enough of them to be shocked and hurt. She tried to be philosophical. “I don’t think there are any men who are
faithful to their wives,” she said. “Men are such a combination of good and evil.” But according to Robert Dallek, one of Jack’s friends remembered that “after the first year they were together, Jackie was wandering around looking like the survivor of an airplane crash.”

6

The Senator’s Wife

Jackie returned from her honeymoon to a new role: senator’s
wife. Right away she got a crash course in Massachusetts politics.

“I was taken immediately to Boston to be registered as a Democrat by Patsy Mulkern, who was called ‘the China Doll,’ because he was a prize fighter once,” Jackie later remembered. “And he took me all up and down that street, and told me that ‘duking’ means shaking hands, and things. And then there was another man with ‘Onions’ Burke named ‘Juicy’ Grenara. Well, I mean those names just fascinated me so. You know, to sort of see that world, and then we’d go have dinner at the Ritz.”

It was a new world for her, and one which offered little time to sit still.

“It just seems it was suitcases [and] moving,” she said of the first year of their marriage. They rented in Georgetown from January to June and then spent the summer living at Merrywood during the week and escaping to Cape Cod on the weekends as much as they could. In the fall they lived in Massachusetts—at Hyannis or Jack’s tiny apartment in Boston. “It was terrifically nomadic. . . . Such a pace, when I think of how little we were alone, or always moving.”

The novelty of the nomadic lifestyle was fleeting, and that they were so rarely alone frustrated Jackie. She learned, very early in their marriage, that Jack for the most part preferred the company of men. One pillar of his personal cadre was Paul “Red” Fay, a skipper in the same PT squadron during the war. The second leg of their honeymoon was spent with Fay and his wife in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, where Jackie found herself sharing Jack with his old naval buddy. While Jack and Fay attended a 49ers game, Fay’s wife drove Jackie around the Bay Area, showing her
the sights. And once they were back in the east, Jack’s closest friend since his Choate days, LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, became “a nearly permanent houseguest, along with his large poodle.”

She also had to share Jack with his large and boisterous family. Having never known much in the way of discipline, either with regard to their behavior or in relation to money, the Kennedys took a great deal of getting used to. In Palm Beach over Christmas, 1953, Jackie gave Jack a very expensive oil painting set. “Almost immediately, all the Kennedys descended upon it,” Lem Billings remembered, “squeezing paint out of the tubes, grabbing brushes, competing to see who could produce the greatest number of paintings in the least amount of time. . . . Jackie was stunned. She stood there with her mouth hanging open, ready to explode.”

It took time for Jackie to find the right posture toward the Kennedy family ethos. While the Kennedy men instantly adored her, the hazing she’d endured at the hands of the women had done nothing to thaw them to her. “I don’t think she ever felt comfortable with the sisters,” Doris Kearns Goodwin said. “They were fiercely competitive women and she wasn’t like that—she didn’t want to play touch football.” Not only did she not fit into the culture of Rose, Eunice, Pat, Jean, and of course Ethel; as the shiny new darling of the men, she was competition, provoking envy in Rose and the girls. Nurturing a young marriage was difficult when Jackie had to compete for attention with so many of Jack’s constituencies.

After Jack’s death, Jackie would put a better face on it. “So he loved the Irish, he loved his family, he loved people like you,” she told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in her 1966 oral history. “He loved me and my sister in the world that had nothing to do with politics. . . . He loved us all. And you know, I don’t feel any jealousy.” At the time, though, it hurt. In addition to their rarely being alone together, Jack was frequently away during the first part of their marriage, criss-crossing the country to introduce himself to the electorate, traveling around Massachusetts on Senate business, or working long hours in Washington. “I was alone almost every weekend,” she later said. “It was all wrong. Politics was sort of my enemy and we had no home life whatsoever.”

The alacrity with which Jack returned to womanizing after their wedding also surprised and wounded Jackie. Lem Billings remembered that
Jackie wasn’t “prepared for the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.”

Without a place to call her own, and feeling lonely without much focused attention from her husband, Jackie found ways to keep herself busy and distracted. When volunteering with other Senate wives, who were mostly much older than she (she was twenty-two when Jack joined the Senate), proved less than stimulating, she took classes in US history at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She tried, somewhat hopelessly, to learn housekeeping and cooking from her maid, and, with greater success, to improve Jack’s wardrobe. She took JFK, a notably slovenly dresser since his youth, and remade him into the stylish, effortlessly elegant man that history remembers. “After their marriage his suits fit perfectly, were conservatively cut and pressed,” remembered Evelyn Lincoln, who would remain his secretary until his death. Jackie transformed him “from a fumbling person who couldn’t tie his own tie, and it was always too long, to an immaculate dresser.”

Jackie also helped Jack in the political arena, not just by attending the usual speeches, rallies, and receptions, but by improving the mechanics of his public speaking. According to Jackie biographer C. David Heymann:

[Jack] tended to talk on and on, usually much too quickly, never knowing when to take a breath or how to make a point. His voice was rasping and high-pitched. Drawing on her theater training at Miss Porter’s and her natural bent for the dramatic, Jackie slowed him down, helped him modulate his voice and give clearer expression to his thoughts. . . . She taught him the benefits of body language and trained him to harness his overabundant energy.

Beyond the stresses of politics, Jack’s family, and his absences, the early years of their marriage were further complicated by Jack’s health problems. His 1947 diagnosis of Addison’s disease explained a lot of his digestive and immune problems but did nothing to ease the steady recurrence of medical complaints. Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek wrote: “He consulted an ear, nose and throat specialist about his headaches, took
medication and applied heat fifteen minutes a day to ease his stomach troubles, consulted urologists about his bladder and prostate discomfort, had DOCA pellets implanted and took daily oral doses of cortisone to control his Addison’s disease, and struggled unsuccessfully to find relief from his back miseries.”

His back pain, by the beginning of 1954, “had become almost unbearable,” Dallek continued. “X rays showed that the fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, most likely a consequence of the cortico steroids he was taking for the Addison’s disease. He could not bend down to pull a sock on his left foot and he had to climb and descend stairs sideways.” In August, a team of physicians explained that a complicated surgery could offer the hope of relief, but that the risks of a fatal infection—especially for a patient with Addison’s disease—were substantial.

“Jack was determined to have the operation,” Rose Kennedy later said. “He told his father that even if the risks were fifty-fifty, he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.”

On October 21, a metal plate was inserted into Jack’s back to stabilize the lumbar spine. In the aftermath, a urinary tract infection nearly killed him. After he sank into a coma, a priest administered the last rites—not for the first or the last time in JFK’s short life. By mid-November, he was off the critical list, but he remained very ill.

“Jackie was magnificent with him,” remembered Charlie Bartlett.

She had this almost uncanny ability to rise to the occasion. She sat with him for hours, held his hand, mopped his brow, fed him, helped him in and out of bed, put on his socks and slippers for him, entertained him by reading aloud and reciting poems she knew by heart, bought him silly little gadgets and toys to make him laugh, played checkers, Categories and Twenty Questions with him . . . Anything to distract him from the pain.

It’s not outlandish to imagine Jackie relishing the chance to spend so much time with Jack, largely removed from the frustrations of their Washington life—or the opportunity to prove to him that she had the toughness requisite for success as a Kennedy.

After a few months, Jack was able to beat back the infection, but he required another operation in February to remove the plate, which doctors feared had itself become infected. He was discharged within three weeks but was forced to spend his Palm Beach recovery time on his stomach: The operation left him with a “huge, open, oozing, very sickly-looking hole in the middle of his back,” according to Florida senator and JFK intimate George Smathers. “I realized then that I’d misjudged Jackie,” he added. “Anybody who could look at that festering wound day after day and go through all that agony with her husband had to have backbone.” Her devotion and toughness in the face of Jack’s illness earned her respect from Jack’s mother and sisters.

She’d later refer to early 1955 as “the winter of [Jack’s] back,” so much did his struggle define that period for her. Looking to occupy his mind during his long and painful convalescence, and hoping to boost his name recognition and credibility as a leader in the event of a presidential run, Jack wrote
Profiles in Courage
, a study of moments of political courage in US history. The book, which would win the Pulitzer Prize, had many helpers. Robert Dallek wrote that “Jack did more on the book than some later critics believed, but less than the term
author
normally connotes.” Dallek calls the book “more the work of a ‘committee’ than of any one person.” Jackie was certainly part of that committee, editing and critiquing along the way as Jack and Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, as well as Georgetown history professor Jules Davids and other academics, hammered out drafts. Jack dedicated the book to Jackie, “whose help during all the days of my convalescence I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.”

As Jack’s recovery hit its stride, the idea of a permanent home for them became more important to Jackie. In October they closed on Hickory Hill, a large, Georgian-Colonial estate in McLean, Virginia, only a couple of miles from Merrywood. “I thought it would be a place where he could rest on weekends the year where he would be recovering from his back,” Jackie later said. She set about making the house comfortable for them and the children they hoped to have. Jackie was pregnant, and she
was planning a nursery when she miscarried in mid-1955. She also broke her ankle in a touch football game at Hyannis Port that November.

Meanwhile, Hickory Hill was not panning out as she had hoped. Speaking engagements had Jack gone every weekend, and it was too far outside of Washington to offer him much relaxation during the week. Her ankle injury, plus the hour commute time from McLean to Washington, meant more isolation for Jackie. During this time and through the end of 1959, Jack kept a suite on the eighth floor of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he entertained his sexual conquests. She most likely did not know about the extent of his philandering; she just knew that he was absent.

New Year’s 1956 brought great news, though: Jackie was again pregnant. She spent much of the year transforming the house at Hickory Hill, paying special attention to the nursery. In August, seven months pregnant and in the midst of a heat wave, Jackie accompanied Jack to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. There, despite feeling weak, she attended rallies, speeches, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. At the convention, where the Democratic party again nominated Adlai Stevenson for president, Jack made a sudden, failed last-minute play for the vice presidential nomination. (It would go to the somewhat less glamorous Estes Kefauver.) It was perhaps here that Jackie’s impatience with the press first began to show. After being pursued across the convention floor for a quote by journalist Maxine Cheshire, the very pregnant Jackie “hiked up her dress and broke into a run.”

After the convention, both Jackie and Jack returned to the East Coast exhausted. Jackie headed to Newport to relax in the lead up to her delivery date. Jack departed for France to spend time at his father’s rented villa on the Riviera before heading on a Mediterranean cruise with George Smathers and several women. As far as Jackie knew, Jack was relaxing with his dad and a couple of friends in the south of France, and nothing more. JFK’s main mistress at the time—a tall blonde socialite who referred to herself as “Pooh”—joined them for the voyage.

Jack was enjoying himself enough that it didn’t occur to him to return home when he was notified that Jackie had delivered a stillborn baby girl, via Caesarean section, following an internal hemorrhage on August 23. It was a particularly horrid example of the way his decency so often deserted
him when it came to the women in his life—especially his wife. Jackie, unconscious during the Caesarean, was informed of the child’s death by Bobby, who was sitting at her bedside when she awoke. Jack didn’t speak directly to Jackie until he reached Genoa on August 26, and he flew home two days later. Only after Smathers warned him that a divorce would destroy Jack’s presidential ambitions did he agree to cut short his vacation and return to the States.