Mary's Mosaic (27 page)

Achieving a new level of understanding requires one to look a number of heretofore unseen details—events, experiences, and people—that formed the tesserae of a rich, complex mosaic that would finally illuminate Mary’s life and death.

I
n their seminal 1976 article “The Curious Aftermath of JFK’s Best and Brightest Affair,” Ron Rosenbaum and Phillip Nobile were the first to pay homage to the relatively obscure woman who had made more than a considerable impression in the life of John F. Kennedy. How influential her impact may have been was unknown; but the authors, at the conclusion of their investigation, refer to her as “the secret Lady Ottoline of Camelot.”
¹
They relied on an unidentified source who, the authors claimed, was “in a unique position to comment authoritatively [about Mary Meyer’s relationship with JFK]” and who, until 1976, had “never before spoken to the press about it.” The unidentified source had “agreed to entertain a limited number of questions about the affair.”

“How could a woman so admired for her integrity as Mary Meyer traduce her friendship with Jackie Kennedy?”

“They weren’t friends,” he [the unidentified source] said curtly.

“Did JFK actually
love
Mary Meyer?”

“I think so.”

“Then why would he carry on an affair simultaneously with Judy Exner?”

“My friend, there’s a difference between sex and love.”

“But why Mary Meyer over all other women?”

“He was an unusual man. He wanted the best.”
²

How and why Mary Meyer and Jack Kennedy became intimately involved during the last few years of their lives is only part of the focus of Mary’s mosaic.
Both seem to have been deeply affected by their union, sometimes taking enormous risks, in part for the sake of a better, hopefully more peaceful world in the future. How their paths intriguingly—and repeatedly—crossed, suggests some mysterious force at work: perhaps a trail of destiny, a shared fate, or the engagement of the force of redemption entwined in love.

W
as it encoded in Mary Meyer’s DNA to be so independent, strong-willed, even courageous? Quite possibly yes. According to folklore, Mary’s French great-grandfather, Cyrille Constantine Désiré Pinchot, as a nineteen-year-old captain in the French army, had set out to rescue his hero, Napoléon, from the island of St. Helena, where he had been exiled following his defeat at Waterloo. But the plan failed, and young Captain Pinchot escaped on a fishing boat to England.
³
From there, he and his father, Constantine, and his mother, Maria, made their way to the United States in 1816, hoping that the New World would be a safe haven. Captain Pinchot’s father immediately reestablished his mercantile business in New York, enabling him to purchase four hundred acres of prime farmland outside Milford, Pennsylvania. Constantine and Cyrille, the father-son team, embarked on a series of entrepreneurial projects that over time brought them considerable wealth and standing, using the crossroads of Milford as their hub.

Mary’s great-grandfather Cyrille Pinchot married and had five children.

His second son, James Pinchot, migrated back to New York during the late 1840s and made a fortune in the wallpaper business. In addition to his business acumen, James Pinchot possessed a highly developed social conscience—he created no slums, fouled no rivers, and accepted no deals with corrupt politicians. He never wasted any valuable resources, nor did he enslave any workers. His philosophy and worldview embraced the utilitarian vision of John Stuart Mill, defining social good as “the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.” James Pinchot had such a deep love and respect for the natural world that he became one of its guardians, sponsoring the first real conservation movement in the United States and endowing the School of Forestry at Yale University. James’s oldest son, Gifford, would later refer to him as the “Father of Forestry in America.”
⁴

Wealthy James had married Mary Jane Eno of New York in 1864, and after their son Gifford was born in 1865, they had a daughter, Antoinette, in 1868, and a second son, Amos (named after Mary’s father) in 1873. Retiring at the age of forty-four, James began concentrating his wealth on philanthropy. The family transformed the town of Milford in the early 1870s “from a fading
entrepôt to a booming tourist mecca.”
⁵
The Pinchot money also built the family “a country estate.” In the late 1880s, James Pinchot conceived Grey Towers, a Norman-Breton bluestone manor with a fortress-like exterior, “complete with three 60-foot turrets.” The interior consisted of “a medievalized great hall, 23 fireplaces, and 44 rooms,” each filled with luxurious furnishings that matched those “of the old baronial days.” The manor’s panorama captured the entire village of Milford and the Delaware River valley, stunning any onlooker with the sheer size and scale of the mansion. Referred to as a “summer castle,” it “drew all eyes—tourist and local alike—upward. In lifting them up, James Pinchot acknowledged his own elevation.”
⁶

The sons of James Pinchot—Gifford and Amos—were both Yale educated and members of the secret society Skull and Bones. President Theodore Roosevelt eventually named Gifford Pinchot the first chief of the newly created U.S. Forest Service in 1905, in which post he served for five years. Gifford ran for the U.S. Senate in 1914 as a Progressive, vociferously campaigning for reforms considered radical at the time: a woman’s right to vote; a graduated income tax to be determined by the ability to pay; workers’ compensation for injuries on the job; recognition of labor unions for collective bargaining; and prohibition of the sale and use of alcoholic beverages.

Gifford would lose the senate race against Boies Penrose, but would subsequently become the governor of Pennsylvania in 1922 and again in 1930. In between campaigns, he managed to marry Cornelia Bryce, the daughter of a wealthy and prominent family from Newport, Rhode Island. Cornelia, affectionately known within her family and friends as “Lelia,” was an outspoken woman who greatly influenced her niece Mary Pinchot as she grew up. During Gifford’s campaigns, Cornelia had addressed hundreds of housewives, urging them to demand the right to vote. She also marched in picket lines and supported factory workers and miners seeking safety, decent wages, and job protection in their work.

Writing in the
Nation
, Cornelia Bryce Pinchot defined herself as a woman who essentially knew no boundaries: “My feminism tells me that a woman can bear children, charm her lovers, boss a business, swim the [English] Channel, stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord—all in a day’s work!”
⁷
Cornelia was yet another female role model for Mary and her sister, Tony.

Mary Pinchot Meyer’s mother was the journalist Ruth Pickering. Born in New York in 1893, she attended Vassar College and Columbia University, before becoming a journalist in New York, and working mostly for left-wing publications. An ardent, self-styled feminist who wrote for the
Masses
, the
New
Republic
, and the
Nation
, she became the associate editor of
Arts and Decoration.
Ruth, too, came from a family of courageous liberal thinkers. Her paternal grandfather, whom she referred to as Grandfather Haynes, reportedly lost his life in an underground railway while freeing slaves.
⁸

Ruth’s commitment to feminism entailed a rejection of the traditional female culture of the day. She was the kind of rare woman who dared to define herself, resisting the prescribed roles that most women found themselves playing. She became very active in the women’s suffrage movement, and for many years shared a house with political socialist activist Max Eastman, his sister, Crystal Eastman, and Eugen Boissevain, who later married poet Edna St. Vincent Millay.

In 1919, Ruth married Amos Pinchot. She was twenty-six; he was twenty years her senior. Amos was by then a wealthy lawyer who supported a number of liberal left-wing causes. It was Amos’s second marriage; he had divorced his first wife of nineteen years, Gertrude Minturn, who was from a prominent New York family. Whatever the cost to him socially, Amos was apparently willing to bear it in order to be with Ruth. An ardent pacifist, Amos exerted considerable influence in reformist circles and did much to keep Progressive ideas alive in the 1920s. A member of Teddy Roosevelt’s inner circle during the Bull Moose Party campaign of 1912, Amos sometimes exasperated the former president with his moralistic criticism and views on the role of big business in America. He believed that World War I had, in fact, been caused by American and European imperialists, many of whom were bankers.

As a leader of the Progressive wing of the Republican Party, Amos always worked toward industrial and labor reform. He would become one of the founders, along with Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin, of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920. Always outspoken, Amos was a champion of causes, no matter what it might cost him politically or socially. That year, he and Ruth welcomed their first child. Her full birth name was Mary Eno Pinchot; she was born in New York City on October 14, 1920.

The 1920s were a heightened, progressive era for feminism and a wide spectrum of progressive causes. With the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in August 1920, women were granted the right to vote in all United States elections. Ruth Pickering Pinchot and Cornelia Bryce Pinchot became the grand dames of the Pinchot clan they had married into, shaping their family’s values and mores. In 1926, the
Nation
invited Ruth, Cornelia, and fifteen other women to explore and comment on the nature of their personal feminism. Cornelia considered herself a “public
feminist,” committed to women’s issues from a political and civic perspective. Ruth called herself a “new-style” feminist of the 1920s, though she spoke out when she felt that it was warranted.
⁹

Many of the
Nation
women, including Ruth and Cornelia, emphasized their privileged status by membership in an organization called the Heterodoxy Club of Greenwich Village, a New York feminist society organized in 1912 by the Unitarian minister Marie Jenny Howe. Virtually every prominent suffragist, activist, and woman professional in New York attended its meetings, including such notables as Agnes de Mille, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Mary McLeod Bethune (mentor to Dovey Roundtree). The Heterodoxy Club’s biweekly lunch meetings became a model for the Women’s Liberation Movement of the late 1960s. At early meetings of Heterodoxy, members would openly risk revealing their deepest feelings about their experiences growing up. Personal sharing and mutual support prevailed, and the resulting gatherings set the standard for the women’s movement’s consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s and 1970s.
¹⁰

Mary’s parents were therefore the kind of role models who would encourage her to become as politically and culturally engaged as they themselves were. The Pinchot home environment fostered personal exploration of all kinds. To be sure, wealth and privilege played their parts in this—there were no worries about day-to-day survival, and Mary enjoyed more opportunities to engage her developing self than she might have under more straitened circumstances. But privilege didn’t deserve all the credit; there was something innate in Mary that made her extraordinary. Her mother, Ruth Pinchot, recognized it early on. When Mary was just a toddler playing on a Long Island beach, her mother noted the confidence and sense of self-worth that her daughter possessed. These characteristics would serve her well her entire life. In a letter that Ruth wrote to Amos, she joked that their self-possessed child “is a perfect little bully. She knows she can make Elizabeth cry easily and teases her all the time. She’s an aggressor and the devil.”
¹¹

The Pinchot family shuttled between New York City and Grey Towers, the family estate in Milford, Pennsylvania. Women in the Pinchot clan grew up surrounded by an extended “family” of some of the day’s most prominent thinkers and newsmakers: people like Max Eastman, Reinhold Niebuhr, Wisconsin populist and presidential candidate Robert La Follette, and Teddy Roosevelt. Mary was shaped and molded by all of these influences, as well as by her suffragist aunt Cornelia and her mother.

At age twelve, Mary was enrolled in the Brearley School, a posh private school for the WASP aristocracy on the Upper East Side of New York, just blocks from her family’s Park Avenue apartment. Brearley boasted rigorous academics for the daughters and granddaughters of many well-known figures, including Margaret Mead, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Eugene O’Neill, and eventually John F. Kennedy. As a preparatory school for young women, it espoused well-roundedness. Self-expression and exploration were given top priority, complementing and supporting Mary’s family life.