These Few Precious Days (11 page)

When she regained consciousness several hours later, Bobby Kennedy was at Jackie’s bedside, holding her hand. It fell to Jack’s brother to tell Jackie that doctors tried but failed to save the life of her stillborn daughter.

Jackie had also almost died in the process, hemorrhaging so badly that she required several blood transfusions. At one point her condition was so grave, Bobby told her, a priest had been called to her room. Not wanting to upset her, Bobby made no mention of the fact that he had already made arrangements for the unnamed baby to be buried in Newport. (Jackie and Jack had actually already picked out names, and if it was a girl, they agreed she would be named Arabella, after the ship John Winthrop took to New England in 1630.)

Out to sea and out of radio contact, Jack was blissfully unaware of the tragedy—and of the desperate attempts to reach him. While Bobby issued a statement citing “exhaustion and nervous tensions following the Democratic National Convention” as the cause, the
Washington Post
carried a dramatic front-page headline:
SENATOR KENNEDY ON MEDITERRANEAN TRIP UNAWARE THAT HIS WIFE HAS LOST BABY.

Devastated and feeling abandoned by her husband, Jackie waited for three days before Jack put into port in Genoa and called home. Incredibly, he still hadn’t been told of the baby’s death; even that sad and emotionally draining task was left for Jackie to bear.

“Oh, Jack, Jack,” she wept into the phone, “I’m so sorry. I know how much you wanted this baby.” Janet Auchincloss was “horrified” at Jack’s callousness in going in the first place and now tried to persuade her daughter to leave him. But rather than lashing out, Jackie seemed intent on blaming herself for both the miscarriage and the stillbirth.

Just two days after Jackie lost her baby, Pat Lawford gave birth to her daughter Sydney. Ethel would deliver her fifth child, Courtney, just two weeks later. To Jackie, these were not only painful reminders of her own loss, but proof that what the other Kennedy women had been whispering to one another was true: the haughty-seeming Miss Bouvier wasn’t up to the physical demands of carrying a child full-term.

Jack would have none of it. According to Smathers, his friend looked “as if he’d been smacked in the face” when he learned the news. “It was a blow, a real blow. Jack didn’t show his feelings if he could help it, and he didn’t cry or anything, but it was clear he was in a state of shock. After that, he wasn’t thinking clearly.”

That became obvious when he informed Jackie he saw no reason to abandon his friends and fly home. “I’m not sure what that would accomplish,” he told her over the phone. “I don’t want to disappoint Teddy and the others. Why don’t I finish up the last four days of the trip and fly back from Nice?”

Incredulous, Jackie lashed out over the phone. How could he be so callous and unfeeling? She lost the baby because he insisted she go to the convention. Now he wasn’t going to interrupt his vacation over something as minor as the death of a child?

At first Jack remained silent, taken aback by his wife’s sudden outburst but also trying to absorb all that had happened while he was literally out to sea. “Now Jackie . . .”

“This time I’m serious, Jack,” she interrupted him before hanging up. The breathy little-girl-lost voice was gone, replaced with a steely resolve. “I cannot live like this. I need you here with me—right now.”

Moments after hanging up the receiver, Jack relayed the details of the exchange to Smathers. “You better get your ass back there right away,” Smathers told him bluntly, “if you plan on staying married—or on getting to the White House.”

Jack wasted no time commandeering a car and taking the wheel himself. “We drove like a bat out of hell to the airport,” Smathers said. By this time, apparently, it had dawned on Jack that the place for him to be was by Jackie’s side. Conceding that it was “a shame” Jack didn’t come to that realization immediately, Smathers also insisted that Jack “cared deeply” for Jackie and “felt terrible about hurting her feelings.” In his own, guarded way, Jack “was concerned,” Smathers said. “He was concerned.”

It was too little, too late. “Jackie was miffed,” Jamie Auchincloss said. “She gave him the silent treatment. She could be the warmest person in the world or so cold that it made your teeth chatter.”

In contrast to Jackie’s sulking, dark moods, and grudge-holding (“She could stay mad at you
forever
,” George Plimpton said), Jack’s temper would flare “but that was it. He’d blow sky-high over something, pound his fist on the desk, the whole deal,” Pierre Salinger said, “and then five minutes later it was like it never happened.” Smathers agreed that “even though Jack had a hell of a temper, he never held a grudge. It wasn’t his style. Now, Jackie was something else entirely.”

JACK ARRIVED IN NEWPORT THE
day after their phone call, but it was too late. Jackie felt betrayed and abandoned, and held Jack accountable for her ill-fated pregnancies. Had it not been for the hectic pace of Jack’s political career and the demands made on Jackie when she was at her most vulnerable, at this point in their married life they would already be the parents of two healthy children.

Within days Jack was back at work in Washington, making the most of his new post-convention status as a rising star of the Democratic Party. Jackie, meanwhile, divided her time between Newport and New York, giving rise to rumors of a split. But this wasn’t just idle gossip; for at least the second time in their brief marriage Jackie was seriously considering divorce.

Joe, with whom Jackie had always shared a warm and joking relationship, would have none of it. When
Time
magazine claimed that the infamously ambitious Joseph P. Kennedy had offered Jackie $1 million not to divorce his son, Jackie phoned and cracked, “Only one million? Why not ten million?”

The offer was real and, according to Joe’s longtime friend Clare Boothe Luce as well as Gore Vidal and others, she accepted it. “Yes, Joe did offer Jackie the money to stay with Jack,” Vidal said, “and she took it. Happily.”

Joe also agreed to rent a house for Jack and Jackie at 2808 P Street in Georgetown while they looked for a new home. There was no way, she told Jack, that she could return to Hickory Hill—not with its nursery so lovingly decorated for their baby. A few months later they sold Hickory Hill to Bobby and Ethel, who over seventeen years wound up having eleven children. “Wind her up,” Jackie quipped, “and she becomes pregnant.”

In March 1957, Jackie learned that she, too, was pregnant again. By now Jack had—with Joe’s blessing, of course—decided to run for president in 1960. As much as she wanted to be part of her husband’s life, Jackie made it clear that this time she would not subject herself to the strains of politics.

While her husband traveled the country making speeches (144 in the span of just ten months), Jackie busied herself decorating their new home—a redbrick Federal townhouse at 3307 N Street in Georgetown. Jackie instantly recognized the building as “an architectural gem” that she could turn into a warm yet stately home. Jack was drawn to the house for one very specific reason. “He bought our house in Georgetown,” Jackie said, “because the doorknob was old, which he liked.”

Jackie flooded the rooms with expensive eighteenth-century French furniture (all on Joe’s tab) and, to Jack’s surprise, had no qualms about decorating the third-floor nursery in a style similar to the one at Hickory Hill.

Any hope of somehow avoiding a stressful pregnancy ended when Jackie learned that Black Jack Bouvier was upset with her for not calling with the news that she was expecting. “I’m the grandfather,” he complained bitterly, “and I have to read about it in the
New York Times
?” A recluse living in a four-room apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, the once-dashing Black Jack now spent weeks on end drinking alone.

Jackie, who was at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, flew straight to New York to tell her father how sorry she was and beg his forgiveness. But instead of accepting his daughter’s apologies, Black Jack lambasted her for turning her back on him in favor of the Auchinclosses and the Kennedys. “We may not have as much money,” he told her. “But what we do have is considerably more valuable: breeding.”

Throwing up her hands, Jackie flew back to Cape Cod. When Black Jack checked into New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital complaining of stomach pains on July 27, the eve of Jackie’s twenty-eighth birthday, she called to check on him. She was told her father was resting comfortably, he was likely to be released soon, and there was really no need for her to make a special trip to visit him.

Just five days later, Black Jack Bouvier lapsed into a coma. It was then that Jackie was informed for the first time that her father was suffering from terminal liver cancer.

Jackie and Jack rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. Black Jack died just forty-five minutes before they got there. He was sixty-six. As difficult as it was for Jack, he put a comforting arm around Jackie while the nurse on duty told them that Jackie’s name was the last word on her father’s lips.

“I know she cried a great deal when her father died,” Yusha Auchincloss said. “It took her completely by surprise, and she was terribly, terribly hurt.” Guilt-ridden over not being there for her father at the end, Jackie assumed the burden of making all the funeral arrangements—from writing the obituary to picking out the flowers and the coffin.

Matters only got worse when Jack was admitted to New York Hospital suffering from another virulent staph infection in his back. He quickly recovered but Jackie, now five months along, was beginning to buckle under the strain. “She was a basket case,” Evelyn Lincoln said. “Everyone, including Jack, was worried about the baby.”

On November 27, 1957—the day before Thanksgiving—Jackie gave birth by caesarean section to a seven-pound, two-ounce girl at the Lying-In Hospital of New York–Cornell Medical Center. Janet Auchincloss was especially struck by Jack’s reaction, given the callousness he had shown over her daughter’s stillbirth the year before. “I’ll always remember Jack’s face when the doctor came into the waiting room and told him that the baby was fine,” she said, “the sweet expression on his face and the way he smiled.” She was also impressed that Jack “seemed perfectly at home with babies,” and marveled at the “sheer, unadulterated delight he took in Caroline from that first day on. The look on his face, which I had never seen before, really, was . . . radiant.”

As Jackie came out of anesthesia, the first sight she saw was Jack walking toward her, their baby in his arms. A nurse propped Jackie up and then helped Jack hand the baby to her. This was a feeling that, until this very moment, she feared she might never experience. “Oh, Jack. Isn’t she gorgeous?” she asked him. “Isn’t she the prettiest baby girl you have ever seen?” They named her after Jackie’s sister, Lee, whose full name was actually Caroline Lee.

Members of the Kennedy, Bouvier, and Auchincloss clans trooped in for a peek at little Caroline, and then friends began to arrive. Lem Billings was the first. Looking at the babies lined up in the hospital nursery, Jack clasped a hand on his friend’s shoulder and asked, “Now, Lem, tell me—which of the babies in the window is the prettiest?” Lem, without hesitating, pointed to the wrong infant. “He didn’t speak to me for two days,” Billings recalled. “Jack was more emotional about Caroline’s birth than he was about anything else.”

Everyone was surprised at how effortlessly Jack had taken to fatherhood. The impact of Caroline’s birth was so profound, in fact, that it enabled him to connect with others in a way he had not been able to before. “Caroline’s birth was a magical thing for Jack,” Lem observed. “It changed him. I’m not sure he ever would have had what it takes—that extra sparkle—to make it all the way to the White House. And her arrival really changed the whole situation with Jackie—made it stronger, at least for a while.”

Other friends saw the changes, too. “Jack was able to release some of his emotions to her,” Betty Spalding said, “and it freed him from the fear of it.” That meant he could communicate with Jackie “better, and she with him. Until he had Caroline, he never really learned how to deal with people.”

If Caroline’s birth rekindled the romance in her marriage, it was in large part because it bolstered Jackie’s flagging self-esteem. She no longer felt inferior to the prolific Kennedy in-laws, or in the shadow of either her own domineering mother or the equally domineering Rose.

In fact, no one took child-rearing more seriously than Mrs. JFK. “If you bungle raising your children,” Jackie later said, “I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”

Once back at the house on N Street, Jackie took charge. Now that she was wife, mother, and mistress of the first home she considered entirely her own, Jackie called the shots—and hired a staff to implement them: a valet, two upstairs maids, a cook, a full-time chauffeur, a laundress, her own private secretary, and a personal maid who would remain with her for years to come, Providencia “Provi” Paredes.

Then, of course, there was the nanny, Maud Shaw. It was up to Nanny Shaw to change diapers, wake up for the midnight feedings, and make sure that the master and mistress of the house were not unduly disturbed by the presence of a newborn in the house. Still, Shaw gave credit to Jackie for paying attention to her children from the very beginning. In the coming years, Jackie would “do a lot of little things for Caroline,” Shaw said, “dress her, and take her out, and play with her in the garden.”