These Few Precious Days (9 page)

Jack seemed in no particular hurry, however, to propose. Even after Jackie had broken off her engagement to John Husted, the senator from Massachusetts stalled for more than a year. To make matters worse, he was not exactly showering her with affection while she waited. “When he wanted to put his arm around her and kiss her,” Red Fay said, “well, he didn’t want to do it in front of me!”

Or in front of anyone else, for that matter. “Jackie was from a world where people greeted each other with hugs and kisses on the cheek—even if they hated each other,” Cassini said. “It was difficult for her to put up with his inability to show affection in front of others. She knew it made him look cold, unfeeling toward her in the eyes of others, so she worked hard at getting him to warm up.”

As for the usual romantic gestures and tokens: “Flowers? Candy? Valentine’s cards? Forget it!” Jackie joked. “He doesn’t even hold the door open for me. Jack did send me a postcard once, from Bermuda. It read: ‘Wish you were here. Jack.’ ”

No one was more frustrated with Jack’s foot-dragging than Joe, who was more convinced than ever that Jackie was perfect first lady material. The elder Kennedy had developed a fondness for Jackie, who, both in style and substance, contrasted sharply with the loud, boisterous, gung-ho Kennedy women—the “Rah-Rah Girls,” Jackie dubbed them. “They fall all over each other,” she reported back to her sister, Lee, “like a pack of gorillas.” (The gorillas weren’t about to go easy on the young woman who insisted her name be pronounced “Jock-
lean
.” They even slammed into Jackie during one of their famous football matches, breaking her right foot. “They’ll kill me before I ever get to marry him,” she told her mother. “I know they will.”)

Unlike the others who were cowed by the curmudgeonly patriarch, Jackie was not afraid to tease Joe. When Joe boasted at the dinner table that he had given each of his children $1 million when they turned twenty-one, Jackie piped up, “Do you know what I would tell you if you gave me a million dollars? I’d ask you to give me
another
million.”

Jackie finally decided to take matters into her own hands by traveling to London to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II for the
Times-Herald
. It was only then that Jack mustered the courage to propose to Jackie—over a crackling transatlantic phone line. Lem Billings thought it was the only way his friend could have done it, without having to actually look Jackie in the eye. “I couldn’t visualize him actually saying ‘I love you’ to somebody and asking her to marry him,” Billings said. “It was the sort of thing he would have liked to have happen without having to talk about it.” When she returned, Jack sealed the deal with a two-carat diamond-and-emerald engagement ring.

Were they truly in love when Jack asked Jackie to marry him? Evelyn Lincoln thought not. “He was a politician who wanted to be president and for that he needed a wife. I am absolutely certain they were not in love. At least not at the time.” (As the blindly loyal secretary who for years had fielded Jack’s calls and made his excuses to the multitude of women he juggled at any given time, Lincoln was one of those key people Jack knew he could count on to do anything for him. “If I called her in here and told her that I had just cut off Jackie’s head,” Jack later joked, “and then said to her, ‘Mrs. Lincoln, would you bring me a nice large box so I can put Jackie’s head in it?’ she would say to me, ‘Oh, that’s lovely, Mr. President, I’ll get the box right away.’ ”)

Notwithstanding Evelyn Lincoln’s view that Jack wasn’t in love with Jackie when he married her, many of their friends believed that what they
did
have—what her half brother Jamie called “an intensity, an electrical current between them”—deepened over time. “If he was capable of loving any woman, and I believe he was,” Dickerson conceded, “that woman was Jackie.”

Getting to know him intimately was not easy. There were many parts of him . . . that he never revealed to anybody.

—KENNETH O’DONNELL, JFK AIDE AND CONFIDANT

Jack was no Boy Scout, but then a Boy Scout would have bored her senseless.

—CHUCK SPALDING

4

“I Hate It, Hate It, Hate It!”

AUGUST 1956

I
t was a revealing moment the nation would not get to see. Jack was grateful for that. Wearing a tasteful triple strand of pearls and a blank expression, Jackie, nearly eight months pregnant, sat ramrod straight in the living room at Hickory Hill, the historic Virginia mansion they had bought for $125,000 ten months earlier. She was answering questions on the NBC prime-time TV news program
Outlook
about what it was like to be the wife of a rising star in the Democratic Party.

There was no hesitation when Jackie was asked if she wanted to be with her husband, who was making a dramatic eleventh-hour bid at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago to become presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson’s running mate. The answer was an unequivocal, if thoroughly predictable, yes.

Then the interviewer interjected a casual observation of his own. “You’re pretty much in love with him,” the interviewer asked, “aren’t you?”

“Oohh,
no
,” she replied emphatically. For several excruciatingly awkward moments, Jackie stared into the camera, smiling inscrutably but totally aware that she had made a Freudian slip of epic proportions.

“I said ‘no,’ didn’t I?” Jackie said calmly.

Clearly delighted, the reporter allowed that he was hoping Jackie wouldn’t say anything. Her refreshingly unexpected, unblinking response was, he said, “wonderful.”

Jackie knew, of course, that Jack wouldn’t find her goof so wonderful. For another few unnerving moments, she continued to sit in total silence.

“Great,” the interviewer continued. “You
are
pretty much in love with him, aren’t you?”

Instead of rushing to set the record straight, Jackie hesitated
again
before finally murmuring a tepid response. “I suppose so . . .,” she said. Mercifully, the exchange was edited out of the final broadcast.

In the three years since their Newport, Rhode Island, wedding and the whirlwind Acapulco honeymoon that followed, their love had been tested many times. Jackie had nursed her husband through two disastrous back surgeries—operations that, doctors warned him from the beginning, were highly risky because of his Addison’s disease.

As predicted, the first operation resulted in a massive staph infection that left Jack in a coma. As he drifted in and out of consciousness, Jackie could hear Jack call out her name, but doctors and nurses physically barred her from entering his hospital room. A second operation months later was also a catastrophe, leaving Jack in even worse shape than before. In both instances, a priest was summoned to Jack’s bedside and he was given last rites.

“He didn’t even
need
the operations,” Jackie fumed. “They said, ‘We can’t tell if it will help or not.’ It just made me so mad how doctors just let people suffer . . . it’s just criminal.”

HIS OWN UNCOMPLAINING NATURE ASIDE
, Jack grew so dejected that for the first time Jackie saw “tears fill his eyes and roll down his cheeks.” (She would only see him cry twice more, after they moved into the White House.)

In the wake of both failed back operations, Jackie seldom left Jack’s side. She read to him, relayed messages from colleagues and well-wishers (most notably Vice President Richard Nixon, who had been one of Jack’s closest friends in Congress), even arranged to have screen beauty Grace Kelly dress up in a nurse’s uniform and pay Jack a surprise visit in the hospital.

Jackie also overlooked the fact that, to cheer himself up, Jack had taped a pinup of Marilyn Monroe to the back of his hospital room door. Priscilla Johnson McMillan, who visited Kennedy several times, recalled that the poster was especially suggestive because it was hung upside down and Marilyn’s legs were “you know, up in the air.”

The Monroe poster wasn’t the only evidence of Jackie’s forbearance during this period. In addition to the parade of attractive young female visitors he identified to hospital personnel as his “sisters” and “cousins,” more than once Jack somehow mustered enough strength to slip out of his room for a night on the town sans Jackie.

“Jackie was confident that she was the only truly important woman in Jack’s life, his one true love,” Dickerson said. “But he was hard-wired to go after women, and she dealt with it. It added to the sexual tension between them.” During her visits to Jack in the hospital, Jackie was “playful and kittenish—frolicking on Jack’s bed, jumping up and down on her knees,” Priscilla McMillan said. The objective, McMillan concluded, was “to keep him
interested
—and she did, even though he was unfaithful to her.”

McMillan got a glimpse of this just before Jack underwent his first operation. At a dinner party in the legendary New York restaurant Le Pavillon, Jack was seated next to McMillan. Directly across from them sat Jackie with the host. “You know,” Jack told McMillan without ever taking his eyes off Jackie, “I only got married because I was thirty-six and people would think I was queer if I wasn’t.”

McMillan was shocked, not only because Jack seemed to be making little effort to lower his voice, but because he never stopped staring at his wife, “literally drinking her in with his eyes. . . . He was obviously proud. In some incredible way he had assimilated her.”

While her husband battled for his life in the hospital, Jackie had more to do than just boost the patient’s morale. She finally decided to take matters into her own hands, striking out on her own to find a doctor who could end Jack’s pain once and for all—without surgery.

She took Jack to see Janet Travell at Travell’s offices on West Sixteenth Street in New York. When Dr. Travell said she could give Jack a shot that would end his pain permanently but leave him feeling nothing from the waist down, his response was hardly surprising. “Well,” Jack scoffed, “we can’t have that now, can we, Jackie?”

Travell offered another solution: Novocain, injected directly into Jack’s back. These shots, which offered immediate relief, were only a stopgap measure; the effects wore off after a few hours. But that was enough. “Well, she could fix him,” Jackie recalled. “I mean, life just changed then. Jack was being driven crazy by this pain. If it hadn’t been for Dr. Travell . . .”