Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (13 page)

“Jackie was put through her paces by the whole family,” says family friend Dinah Bridge. “And she stood up ex- tremely well to the Kennedy barrage of questions, and that was quite a barrage. You had to know the form to keep up, you know, because the jokes went so fast, and the chitter- chat.”

It’s often been reported over the years that Jackie worked hard to win the Kennedys’ acceptance, that she longed for

their approval; yet this was an inaccurate assessment. While she did want to make Jack happy, and hoped his family would accept her, Jackie had the self-confidence to know that they would have no choice. “She already had Jack,” says Lem Billings. “She didn’t need the rest of them. That was her attitude. If they like me, great. If not, the hell with them. I am who I am. They’re lucky to have me in the fam- ily at all.”

At one Kennedy outing on one of their yachts, Eunice opened the picnic basket she always packed for the family and began handing out thick peanut-butter and jelly sand- wiches to all aboard.

“I put extra strawberry jam on this one for you,” Eunice said as she handed Jackie a sandwich, the messy jelly drip- ping out of its sides and down her hands.

“Oh my God, no,” Jackie said, looking at the offering with disgust. She hated jelly. “I brought my own lunch.” She opened her own wicker picnic basket and pulled from it a plate of
pâté
, a vegetable quiche, and a bottle of white wine. “Anyone care for some?” she offered, as family members around her shared not-so-secret looks of exasper- ation.

“
Pâté
? Hell, yeah,” Joseph said enthusiastically. “I’d love some.” From the start, Joseph liked Jackie and appreciated her individuality and sense of flair. “Who else do we know who speaks French, Spanish, and Italian?” he would say. “That’s going to come in handy for Jack, believe me.” For her part, Jackie would say of Joseph, “When I first met him, I did not realize that I was supposed to be scared of him—so I wasn’t. That may have been
lèse-majesté
—but it was a wonderful way to start.”

By the summer of 1953, Jackie had won over the rest of

the Kennedys. “I’m so glad we’ll be sisters-in-law,” she told Ethel one afternoon at a pre-wedding party at Joseph and Rose’s. After Bobby proposed a toast to the soon-to-be- newlyweds, Jackie gave a small speech to those present at the table: Rose and Joseph, Bobby and Ethel, Ted, Eunice, Pat, Lem Billings, and a few others. She loathed the idea of getting up and speaking, but it was a Kennedy tradition that everyone had to give a toast, whether he or she liked it or not.

“Ethel and I couldn’t be more different,” Jackie said, her toast directed to her future sister-in-law. She continued to say that if all of the family members were of the same dis- position, “we’d be a very prosaic bunch, now wouldn’t we?” In conclusion, she added that in the short time she had known the family, she’d come to realize that the Kennedys “are nothing if not the most exciting family, perhaps in the world.”

“Hear, hear!” Joseph said, laughing. “That’s the truth, isn’t it, Rose?”

“Hear, hear!” Rose repeated, smiling approvingly.

She sat back down next to Jack, who smiled warmly at his fiancée, who had once again dazzled his entire family.

“Okay then. Here’s to Jack and Jackie,” Ethel said, raising her glass and seizing some attention for herself in the process. “Long may they be happy.”

“Long may they be happy,” everyone repeated as they clicked glasses.

In time, Jackie began to reveal concerns about her future husband’s philandering. Estelle Parker, the fashion designer who fitted Jackie for her trousseau, recalls Jackie asking her for her opinion about men who cheat on their wives. “She

seemed confused, undecided,” said Parker. “She also real- ized that if she married into that family she would be ex- pected to cater to their every whim. Kennedy women were treated like second-class citizens. Jackie wasn’t prepared to tolerate that sort of treatment.”

However, Jackie dismissed her apprehension and decided she could handle any problems she might encounter with her husband and his family. She was the type of woman who could look at a problem from all sides, make a decision about its solution, and then follow through with it. “I’ll find my own place in this family,” she told Lem Billings. “Don’t worry about me.”

So the wedding was on. “I’ll never forget when I got a let- ter from Jack asking me to be an usher,” recalled his good friend Paul “Red” Fay. “It said, ‘I guess this is the end of a promising career in politics, which has been mostly based on sex appeal.’ ”

On September 12, 1953, in a lavish ceremony at St. Mary’s in Newport, Jacqueline Bouvier and John Fitzgerald Kennedy were wed. No one was happier than Jack’s father, Joseph. Not only did his son have a beautiful new wife who would one day make the perfect First Lady, but the media coverage was all that the publicity-hungry Kennedy patri- arch could hope for.

While Janet Auchincloss had hoped for a small, elegant wedding, Joseph wanted it large and showy. For Joseph, this ceremony was not just a social event, it was part of a politi- cal campaign. In the end, Janet gave in. It was important to her that her daughter marry well. If the Kennedys weren’t as aristocratic as she would have liked (she had hoped that Jackie would marry a French nobleman, or at least a Rocke- feller), they did have money, and right now she didn’t. Her

husband was cash-poor, even though he and his wife were still somehow living like royalty.

Bobby was the best man, and Ethel was one of the brides- maids. Jackie’s sister, Lee, was matron of honor. Among the six hundred invited guests were prominent politicians and influential newspaper and magazine writers. Boston Arch- bishop Richard Cushing celebrated the nuptial mass, as- sisted by four other prominent Catholic clergymen. As an added bonus, Cushing read a telegram from Pope Pius XII, who also approved of the marriage. The church was deco- rated with pink gladioli and white chrysanthemums, and three thousand spectators converged upon it to get a glimpse of the thirty-six-year-old groom and his twenty-four-year- old bride.

“It was a beautiful, fairy tale of a wedding,” recalls Sancy Newman, who attended all three of the brothers’ weddings. “Everyone said the most perfect things, wore the most per- fect clothes, and had the most perfect manners. It was pic- ture perfect.”

After the ceremony, Jack and Jackie spent their wedding night at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York before departing for a honeymoon in Acapulco and then, on the way back, at the bucolic San Ysidro Ranch outside Santa Barbara, Cali- fornia.

Upon their return, the newlyweds rented a two-bedroom home in Georgetown, a short distance from where Ethel and Bobby lived. Ethel loaned drapes and slipcovers to Jackie for the new house, and even though their tastes were com- pletely different, Jackie still appreciated Ethel’s thoughtful- ness.

As Kennedy intimate Chuck Spalding recalled, “People have always said how different they were, and in terms of

their personalities, yes, that was true. But as wives, they had a lot in common. For instance, it’s been thought for years that Ethel was the greatest housewife in the world. Untrue. That was a myth created, I think, because of all the children. She was a mess, though, a sloppy mess. She had a lot of help around the house, maids and servants, whom she treated very poorly but who were there just the same, picking up after her and her kids. Jackie was just as bad. She was a woman who had never scrubbed a floor a day in her life. And as a cook? Forget it! Women of her class never cooked their own meals anyway.”

One morning, according to Spalding, newlywed Jackie pulled sister-in-law Ethel aside at a family gathering to ask a question. “Now, just how do you make that delicious fried chicken of yours?” she wanted to know.

“Whoever said I made delicious fried chicken?” Ethel asked.

“Well, Jack says you make the best fried chicken in the world.”

Ethel laughed. “No, it’s his sister Eunice. She’s the one who makes fried chicken. All I did was get the recipe from her and give it to my cook. And now
she
makes the best fried chicken in the world, too. I can lend it to you if you like.”

Jackie thought it over, then asked, “Do you think you could lend me your cook instead?”

All of This, and More

J
ust a little over a year into their marriage, the newlywed Kennedys were faced with their first major challenge as they dealt with Jack’s serious health problems. Ten years earlier, in 1944, Jack had undergone spinal surgery, partly because of injuries he had sustained when the PT boat (the famous PT-109) that he commanded during the war was rammed and split by a Japanese destroyer. After a night in the water, and with his back crippled by the crash, the heroic JFK swam five hours to land, towing the boat’s badly burned en- gineer behind him. Kennedy had already suffered from back problems even before 1944, however, dating from a football injury at Harvard.

In October 1954, Jack was admitted to the Hospital for Special Surgery at Cornell University Medical Center in New York City for more spinal surgery. At that time, doctors performed a double-fusion operation on his spine, in hopes of strengthening his back. It didn’t go well, and for the next three days he would be on the critical list.

Lem Billings recalled, “Jackie was usually the type to never show fear, but she was scared, very much so, about all of Jack’s illnesses. Not only did he have Addison’s disease [caused by underactive adrenal glands], he had a variety of back problems. He was on different drugs and medications, so many you couldn’t keep track of them all, including cor- tisone shots to treat the Addison’s. [One of the side effects of cortisone is an increase in libido, which likely exacerbated an already existing problem of hypersexual activity for

JFK.] He had muscle spasms, and was being shot up with Novocain all the time. He was always very sick.

“After that first operation, he was in bad shape, critical condition for, I think, three weeks. They had to give him the Last Rites while Jackie stood there. His face was pale and swollen, his breathing heavy and irregular. I remember Jackie placing her hand on his forehead and saying, ‘Help him, Mother of God. Oh, help him.’ ”

So frightened was she that while she stood at her hus- band’s side, Jackie barely heard the priest as he intoned the Last Rites, “
Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna
. . .” Af- terward, slumping into a plastic chair in the hospital corri- dor, she said to Lem Billings, “What if Jack can’t take all of this? What if we lose him?”

Billings put his hand on her shoulder. “Listen, he’s too goddamn stubborn, Jackie,” he told her with a smile. “I’ve known him too long to think otherwise. He’s not going any- where. I promise you that.”

Jackie looked up at her husband’s good friend with tears in her eyes. “If I ever lose him, Lem, I’ll die,” she said, and she seemed to really mean it.

Later that day, after news had gotten out that the senator was on his deathbed, reporters began to congregate at the hospital. Most were contained in the lobby, but one man- aged to sneak up to Jack’s floor. He confronted Jackie as she was fretting to Ted about her husband’s condition. “Mrs. Kennedy, is it true that your husband is dying?” he asked. Jackie was stunned by the question. Ted turned and, with tears in his eyes, snapped at the reporter, “Look, my brother’s darn sick, that’s all. But he’s going to pull through, you wait and see. His name is Jack Kennedy—
Kennedy
— and he’s going to pull through. You got that?” Then Ted took

Jackie’s hand and led her away. Edward DeBlasio, a writer who tells this story, adds: “The expression in her eyes was one of pure love, for what Ted had said, for what he had done, for how he had helped her in this, her most trying hour.”

“When Jack began to recover, Jackie was at his side every moment,” recalls Kennedy friend Charles Bartlett. “She re- ally rose to the occasion, spending every second trying to entertain him, calm him, show him her love for him. Playing games, checkers, Twenty Questions, whatever it took to keep his mind off his pain. The family was very impressed with the way she hung in there. She even brought Grace Kelly to his bedside, for goodness’ sake.”

Grace Kelly, in an oral history she gave for the JFK Li- brary in June 1965, recalled, “I had been to a dinner party where I met Mrs. Kennedy and her sister for the first time. They asked me to go to the hospital with them to pay a visit and help cheer him [Jack] up. They wanted me to go to his room and say I was his new night nurse. Well, I hesitated. I was terribly embarrassed. Eventually, I was just sort of pushed into the room by the two of them. I introduced my- self and he had recognized me at once, and he couldn’t have been sweeter or more quick to put me at ease.”

A few days after Jack’s surgery, Jackie arrived to find a poster of a movie star taped above Jack’s bed. It was Mari- lyn Monroe, in shorts and a tight sweater.

“Now, what is that doing up there?” Jackie wanted to know.

“I like her,” Jack said with a grin. “I find her rather at- tractive, don’t you?”

Two doctors would later say they noted an uncomfortable silence in the room, after which Jackie said, “You know, I