These Few Precious Days (8 page)

Despite the legions of women who were eager to care for him, Jack was in no hurry to marry. Each time he learned that yet another Navy buddy or college roommate was getting hitched, Jack shook his head and glowered. “Jesus Christ,” he would invariably say to Red Fay or Lem Billings or whoever happened to be around, “another one bites the dust.”

Given the miserable example set by his parents—in particular the way Joe’s flagrant infidelity had destroyed his mother’s spirit—Jack didn’t see much reason for women to get married, either. Priscilla Johnson McMillan had expected Jack to congratulate her when she told him she was getting married. Instead, he shook his head. “Why?” he asked. “There are so many unhappy marriages.”

In the end, it was made clear to Jack that if he ever wanted to win the White House, he would have to settle down and start a family. If he didn’t, his father pointed out bluntly, he ran the risk of letting people jump to the wrong conclusions. “Old Joe told him he’d better get married,” Jack’s longtime secretary Evelyn Lincoln recalled, “or people would think he was gay.”

NANCY DICKERSON WONDERED IF, BEFORE
he met Jackie, Jack had ever really made an emotional connection with a woman. “All his life,” she observed, “he was trained to view women as objects to be conquered, possessed. Jack really had no respect for women. You can hardly blame him. After all,” she added with a nod to the lecherous Joe Sr., “Jack learned at the foot of the master.” As for JFK’s boundless appetites: “But to Jack sex
was
just like a cup of coffee—no more or less important than that.” Another onetime girlfriend, Gloria Emerson, vouched for JFK’s “Speedy Gonzales” approach. “It was strictly ‘Up against the wall, Signora, if you have five minutes.’ That sort of thing.”

Even the most cynical of Jack’s friends conceded that the thirty-five-year-old Senate candidate was captivated by the twenty-three-year-old Vassar graduate with the breathy voice and wide-set eyes from the moment he met her. It was easy to see why.

“To meet her was never to forget her,” said Tish Baldrige, a classmate of Jackie’s at Miss Porter’s and then at Vassar. “She was a natural beauty, no globs of neon purple lipstick, no thick layer of Pan-Cake makeup.” Even more important, Baldrige said, was her voice—“unforgettable in its soft, breathy tones. It was a sound that forced you to draw close and listen well.”

Vassar classmate Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, later chief of protocol in the Reagan administration, was equally impressed by Jackie’s curious mystique. “She had this almost starlike quality—when she entered a room you couldn’t help but notice her, she was such an exquisite creature.” At the same time, said Roosevelt, “she seemed so very private.”

Perhaps, but Jackie had clearly enjoyed riding the avalanche of publicity when, at nineteen, she was crowned “Queen Deb of the Year” by Cholly Knickerbocker. (At the time the “Cholly Knickerbocker” column was written by Igor Cassini, designer Oleg’s younger brother.) Miss Bouvier, wrote the society columnist, was a “regal brunette” with “classic features and the daintiness of Dresden porcelain.” Even Walter Winchell, easily the most powerful and widely read columnist of the age, chimed in. “What a gal!” he gushed, adding that Jackie was “blessed with the looks of a fairytale princess.”

Socially, Jackie’s credentials were impeccable. With its implied connections to European aristocracy, the Bouvier name still carried a certain cachet, giving Jackie standing with the New York Social Register types whose estates dotted Long Island’s north shore. As the stepdaughter of Hugh Auchincloss from the age of twelve, Jackie divided her time between two lavish properties: Hammersmith Farm, the twenty-eight-room shingled “cottage” with its sweeping views of Newport’s Narragansett Bay, and Merrywood, an imposing Georgian mansion set on forty-six rolling acres in Virginia’s hunt country. (At Merrywood, she moved into the third-floor room previously occupied by her stepbrother Gore Vidal. The writer’s mother had been married to Hugh Auchincloss II before “Uncle Hughdie” married Jackie’s mother, Janet.)

Yet Jackie had also proved she wasn’t afraid of work—not even when the job paid just eleven dollars a day. Hired as the Washington
Times-Herald
’s “Inquiring Camera Girl,” Jackie headed out each day armed with a bulky Graflex Speed Graphic camera and a reporter’s notebook. Her man-in-the-street interviews, highlighting a single “Question of the Day,” quickly became one of the paper’s most popular features. “Do the rich enjoy life more than the poor?” she asked one day. “Should men wear wedding rings?” the next. Many of the questions, asked well before she began dating JFK, could not have been more prescient: “Which first lady would you most like to have been?” “If you had a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?” “What prominent person’s death affected you most?”

As far as Charlie and Martha Bartlett were concerned, Jack Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier were a perfect match. Trouble was, the Bartletts never could seem to bring them together. JFK and Jackie had actually bumped into each other for the first time in 1948, on a train from Washington, D.C. to New York. Jackie seemed impressed enough to jot something down in her notebook about this brief encounter with a “tall, thin young congressman with very long reddish hair.”

Nevertheless, nothing came of it until the following year, when Charlie Bartlett pulled Jackie by the hand through a “giant crowd” at his brother’s wedding—only to discover that by the time he got to the corner where Jack had been standing, “he’d vanished.”

There would be another abortive try two years later, in June 1951, when Jack and Jackie hit it off at a small dinner party thrown by the Bartletts. Unfortunately, when JFK walked Jackie to her car that evening asking, “Shall we go somewhere for a drink?,” John Husted popped up in the backseat to surprise her. Jack, understandably, did not call to ask her out the next morning.

Despite these two false starts, Martha persisted; she simply chose to ignore the inconvenient fact that, at the time, Jackie was still very much engaged to another man. Since Husted was in New York and couldn’t make it to the dinner party the Bartletts were hosting, Martha urged Jackie to invite Jack as a substitute. Although Jack would later claim he “leaned over the asparagus” and asked Jackie out that night, technically it was Jackie who, at the Bartletts’ behest, had already invited Jack out on their first date.

Their ensuing courtship didn’t keep Jack from seducing other women. Mary Gallagher, who was on Senator Kennedy’s staff in the early 1950s and later worked as Jackie’s private secretary, recalled another actress who sailed quickly in and out of Jack’s life: Audrey Hepburn. The elegant, swanlike Hepburn was only twenty-three but had already made the film that would win her an Academy Award for Best Actress—the romantic comedy
Roman Holiday,
with Gregory Peck. Also a muse for Paris’s top fashion designers and for photographers on both sides of the Atlantic, Hepburn was universally praised for her talent, charm, and unique sense of style.

YET THERE WAS SOMETHING ABOUT
Jackie that set her apart from the others—even from Audrey Hepburn. “I have never met anyone like her. Do you want to see what she looks like?” Jack asked Dave Powers as he pulled out a strip of black-and-white photos taken in a photo booth. “She’s different from any girl I know.” The snapshots, Powers said, “clearly show two people in love.”

It was only when Jack took him aside and asked him about the wisdom of marrying someone so much younger that Powers realized Jackie might be the one. Powers pointed out that he himself was twelve years older than his wife—exactly the difference in age between Jack and Jackie. “Apparently that wasn’t enough,” Powers recalled. Jack needed more reassurance than that. “Well,” JFK continued, “you two get along fine, don’t you?”

Powers wasn’t the only friend who saw no problem with the age difference. “Jackie was wise beyond her years,” George Plimpton said. “The way she looked and the way she sounded sometimes was at odds with her intellect, which was formidable. Jackie liked people to underestimate her, I think. That was how she survived in that rather rarefied world. Jackie was one very smart cookie even then, and Jack saw that in her.”

But marriage? The Kennedys’ Hyannis Port neighbor and longtime friend Larry Newman said he “didn’t think Jack would ever get married. I think he did love Jackie, but it was never in his makeup to be monogamous.”

George Smathers shared Newman’s conviction and told Jack to be “damn sure that he was ready to give up his rather meandering ways and settle down to being a good husband.” Jack’s reaction? “He just laughed.” Like most people who knew JFK, Smathers believed Jack was “a great politician, a great author, a great social guy, a great friend. But you never thought of him as a great husband or a great father.”

The age difference was certainly of no consequence to their mutual friend Oleg Cassini, who had forgiven Jack for stealing Gene Tierney away from him. The designer pointed out to Jack that in Europe the formula for determining the ideal age for a bride was half the groom’s age plus seven years. “They were perfectly matched in that sense,” Cassini said, “although in some ways she was actually older than he was. She was a very well-read, cultured, charming person. . . . She had a devastatingly wicked sense of humor, and a kind of natural grace. Strangely, he was remarkably rough around the edges, especially for someone who grew up under such privileged circumstances and was so brilliant in other ways. They had much to offer each other.”

Nevertheless, Jack’s infirmities—particularly his incapacitating back trouble—at times made Jackie keenly aware of the age difference. “The year before we were married,” she later said, “when he’d take me out, half the time it was on crutches. When I went to watch him campaign, he was on crutches. I remember him on crutches more than not.” (Physician-pharmacologist Janet Travell, who treated JFK’s back and became the first female White House physician, confirmed that for long stretches he averaged four days on crutches per week.)

If anything, Jackie was struck by the fact that, despite the intense pain he was in almost constantly, Jack never complained. “What’s the exact opposite of a hypochondriac?” she once asked. “That was Jack.” Dr. Travell agreed. “It was difficult,” she said, “to get him to state his complaints.”

Equally impressive was the way in which he managed to convey an image of strength that belied his significant medical issues. “It was so pathetic to see him go up the steps of a plane on crutches, because then he looked so vulnerable,” Jackie said. “And once he was up there and standing at the podium, then he looked so in control of everything. . . . So tanned and fit and powerful.”

Only a few of JFK’s Senate colleagues were aware of his condition. When the bell rang for a Senate vote, it was up to George Smathers to literally pick Jack up and carry him down to the underground train that led to the Senate chamber. Once there, Smathers recalled, Jack somehow managed to make it to the Senate floor on his own. Then JFK returned to his office, “where he was wiped out from the sheer pain and physical exertion. Complain? Not once.”

Whatever the cost, Jack went to great lengths to dispel Capitol Hill gossip that he was, in Gore Vidal’s unkind words, “decrepit—practically an invalid.” Jack played golf, swam, and even played softball at a Georgetown park with his Senate colleagues. “And he always would play touch football,” Jackie later recalled, “but he couldn’t run—I mean, he could run enough, but he could never be the one to run for the touchdown. He would pass and catch and run around a little . . .”

Although Jackie often joked about his allergies (“Can you imagine
me
with someone who’s allergic to horses?”), Jack tried to impress his fiancée by riding bareback with her across a field near Hammersmith Farm in Newport. “He was wheezing so badly when they returned,” Jackie’s mother recalled, “I thought he was going to pass out.”

Not all of Jack’s physical antics were designed to impress. Like all the Kennedys, he often exhibited a disregard for consequences that seemed unwise, even reckless. Jackie “held on for dear life,” for instance, whenever Jack took the wheel of a car. Jack was “wicked, wicked, wicked” as a driver, Patsy Mulkern said. “Fast, very fast. Wild man.”