Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (18 page)

ally even about their children; that they should understand this and be prepared from the very beginning, otherwise, they might be very unhappy.”

It is said that the Kennedy sons admired the way their mother turned a blind eye to her husband’s infidelities. The sons viewed their mother’s determination to keep her mar- riage together as a confirmation of her great strength and re- solve, and also as her way of respecting her husband’s desire to do just as he pleased.

Jack’s Affair with Marilyn

J
ackie Kennedy may not have felt threatened by most of the women with whom her husband became involved, but Mar- ilyn Monroe was another matter. In terms of her private life, at least based on the best evidence we have, nothing both- ered Jackie more than her husband’s assignations with Mar- ilyn.

Even today, no one seems sure when Jack’s affair with Marilyn began. Some have said that he had been introduced to her by his sister Pat and her husband, Peter Lawford, in 1955, and the affair commenced immediately. Others insist the two met a year earlier.

At the time, Marilyn Monroe was a personality as famous and, in her own way, as prominent as John F. Kennedy. In the show business world there was as much public interest and scrutiny about the life of the blonde movie star as there was in the political arena about the Kennedys. As a result

there was a very real possibility that the affair could become public knowledge and that the scandal could destroy the ca- reers of everyone involved. “Yes, there was concern,” says Peter Summers, one of Kennedy’s political advisers with the job of handling relations with the TV networks during the 1960 campaign. “And Marilyn was spoken to very frankly about it. The President was spoken to very frankly about it.” “There were actually some good times with Marilyn,” re- calls George Smathers. “Jack, Marilyn, I, and other friends would all get aboard the
Honey Fitz
and go sailing down the Potomac, and then turn around and come back. That would get you back at around eleven-thirty at night, just in time to get Jack to bed. This kind of thing went on frequently. Mar-

ilyn felt a part of the family, I think.”

In the summer of 1961, Marilyn apparently thought it would be interesting to wangle a formal White House invi- tation. Jackie was in the midst of planning a state dinner to be held in honor of Pakistan’s President Mohammed Ayub Khan at George Washington’s Virginia estate, Mount Ver- non, just outside of the capital. Marilyn called Jack to tell him she wanted to attend, but he did not return her telephone call. Bobby, who didn’t really know Marilyn at this particu- lar time, intercepted a message from her. When he men- tioned it to Ethel, Ethel alerted Jackie. Jackie pondered the notion of inviting Marilyn, wondering aloud if perhaps Jack “should be forced to face his little mistakes.” In the end, however, it was decided not to extend an invitation to the ac- tress.

Jackie had an eye toward history that seemed to over- shadow any personal matters. According to those who knew her best, she was concerned—for her husband, her children, and herself—that Jack’s relationship with Marilyn might be

a political liability. “What would happen if news of the af- fair leaked out before the presidential election in 1964?” asked George Smathers rhetorically. “Sure, she was both- ered by the prospect.” Apparently, Jackie actually felt great pity for Marilyn and thought her husband was acting irre- sponsibly by engaging in an affair with a woman who clearly could not control herself. “She’s a suicide waiting to happen,” Jackie said of Marilyn.

One woman who worked for Jackie throughout her time at the White House and for many years afterward (and who does not wish to be identified) overheard a conversation be- tween Jack and Jackie regarding Marilyn Monroe. She re- calls, “I was walking through the East Wing, and the two of them were having a discussion. I overheard just a piece of it, but enough to let me know there was trouble.”

She reports that Jackie said to Jack, “I want you to stop it. I don’t like it one bit, Jack. This one is different. This one worries me. She’s trouble.” She adds that Jackie used graphic language, which she never used unless she was upset. “She wanted Jack to knock it off with Marilyn,” says the source, “leave her alone, have some pity on her.”

Jack denied being anything more than Marilyn’s friend. “Sure,” he told his wife. “If you want me to stop being friends with her, that’s no problem.”

In the era of the late 1950s and 1960s the public was com- pletely unaware of what was going on with the President and the movie star. Today, Jack would never get away with such an affair, nor with his other womanizing. The impeach- ment of President Bill Clinton and the publicity surrounding his personal affairs illustrates that it’s a different America today, and the media is different as well. These days, the public consequences of illicit behavior in the White House

can be grave. As Jack’s own son, the late John Kennedy, Jr., said in 1998, “Hellish torment awaits those who mix an undisciplined libido with a political career.”

Recalls Helen Thomas, “In the sixties, it was a different time, and you had certain unspoken agreements. It wasn’t like today. . . . The media is different, more invasive now. JFK and Marilyn would be in all the papers today, on all the tabloid shows. The affair would be huge news. But back then, we were more polite.”

Michael Selsman, Marilyn’s press agent at the time through the Arthur Jacobs Agency, recalls a time when members of the press had a covenant not only with the White House but with publicists and one another to protect the highest office in the land. Selsman says, “Reporters knew where to draw the line, and it was a matter of doing business. What I would do, as a publicist, was trade ‘exclu- sives’ about my other clients in order to keep the Marilyn- JFK stories quiet and everyone in the press happy. No one in the media ever caused a problem. You really didn’t attack a sitting president back then with his personal life, only his politics.”

“We were respectful of the First Lady,” concludes James Bacon, a veteran reporter working in Hollywood at the time and a good friend of the Kennedys and Monroe. “You wouldn’t have written about such a thing just out of respect for Jackie, never mind what he was doing.”

Jackie’s Expensive Diversion

“
O
kay, now how many more pieces are we looking at?” Jackie Kennedy asked a young White House curator, Jim Ketchum. America’s glamorous First Lady was sitting cross-legged on top of a two-drawer file cabinet, a clipboard in one hand, a pen in the other. In tight blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail with a white bow, she was the picture of wholesome perfec- tion—including the giant ink blotch on her left cheek. She and Ketchum were in the Broadcast Room of the White House, which was used for storage those days. They were keeping track of some invaluable antiques being returned to the White House after an exhibition in New Jersey.

“There’s a lot left, Mrs. Kennedy,” Ketchum answered, as he too checked the inventory sheet. “Looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”

“Really?” Jackie said, looking up from her list, a sur- prised expression on her face. “Well, I have things to do. I have a state dinner to plan. Come with me. We don’t have all day.”

“She then jumped down off the cabinet, walked out to the truck, and for the next hour, helped six rather amazed movers carry valuable pieces of furniture into the White House storage area,” recalls Ketchum, a smile on his face at the memory even now, so many decades later. “Later one of the guys asked me, ‘Who was that lady?’ When I said, ‘The
First
Lady,’ his jaw slackened. I don’t think we who were involved in White House restoration ever saw her as the

symbol of pristine elegance that the rest of the country saw,” he concluded. “To us, she was Mrs. Kennedy, the go-getter. Jackie, the kid.”

Ketchum recalls, “That wasn’t the only time she ever went out there and unloaded a truck with the boys. It was a regular routine for Jackie, who was the most energetic and smartest person I have ever worked for. And holding it all together was a wild sense of humor which played a vital role, I think, in her surviving some of the slings and arrows that she had to suffer during the White House years. I re- member that she had dictated a letter saying that she wanted to help the tourists understand the significance of some of the pieces in the state rooms. So to achieve that, she said in her memo, she wanted to place ‘tastefully designed vitrines’ in the East Wing, which would hold pamphlets and that sort of thing. Her handwriting was sometimes hard to read, and the architect wrote her back saying that he was confused. Did she really want him to come up with ‘tastefully de- signed latrines’ for the East Wing? Jackie couldn’t stop laughing when she got that letter. She showed it to everyone she came in contact with for days.

“She loved her work,” Ketchum adds, “and didn’t take herself that seriously, and loved it if you didn’t take yourself that seriously, either. Whatever was going on in her personal life—and I have no idea what that was because she never, ever presented it to me—she lived her own life in the White House, and in a fulfilling way.”

She realized early on that she owed it to herself to not compromise her goals, and to tend her own needs as well as those of her children. So, even though in the public con- sciousness she and Jack were inseparable, she actually built a life for herself separate and apart from her husband’s.

Bobby Kennedy, who always seemed to have a bit of a crush on his sister-in-law, recognized as much when, in 1961, he said to writer Laura Bergquist Knebel, “Jackie has always kept her own identity. That’s important in a woman. She’s poetic, whimsical, provocative, independent, and yet very feminine. What husband wants to come home at night and talk to another version of himself? Jack knows she’ll never greet him with ‘What’s new in Laos?’ ”

Larry Newman, who joined the Secret Service in 1960 and in the fall of 1961 was promoted to presidential detail, was assigned to Jackie along with Clint Hill. Because the essence of his job had to do with observing Jackie’s activi- ties, he can say with authority, “The way she was validated my wanting to protect her. . . . There was a sadness there . . . but she made it work somehow. She definitely channeled her energy and any frustration she had into special projects.”

“She survived because of the interests she had,” observed Dorothy Tubridy, a Kennedy family friend from Ireland, “in ballet and art and those kinds of things that the Kennedy sis- ters weren’t particularly interested in. She had her own life, she made her own interests, and she created this atmosphere about herself. I think it helped.”

One of the accomplishments for which Jackie Kennedy will always be highly regarded was her restoration and re- furbishing of the White House. The well-traveled Jackie had always considered European culture the most artistic in terms of style and aesthetics, but as First Lady she refocused her devotion for “the finer things” in her native land. In the process of refurbishing the White House, she would learn a great deal about American history and art, and she passed that knowledge on to millions of citizens. Comments Jackie made to her sister-in-law Joan during a luncheon in Wash-

ington, when Joan complained about Ted’s philandering, would seem to indicate that Jackie had other motives for her work at the White House. She told Joan that she would “find something for you to do at the White House. That’ll keep you busy. You won’t give Teddy a second thought.”

“I think Jackie wanted to make her mark, keep herself busy,” said Mary Barelli Gallagher, who was Jackie’s per- sonal secretary. “Any woman in her circumstances would understand. I think she needed an outlet for whatever that natural female instinct is to put her stamp on things.”

As has been widely reported, Jackie’s first reaction, when Mamie Eisenhower took her on a tour, to the presidential quarters had been one of utter disbelief. She could not un- derstand why the most important family in the country should have to reside in such a cold and dreary place.

With her newfound position, Jackie had the power to make changes happen, and happen quickly. There were 132 rooms in the White House at this time, and during Jack and Jackie’s stay there, their second-floor living quarters con- sisted of a living room, kitchen, dining area, and five bed- rooms. The Secret Service was not permitted in the family’s quarters so as not to intrude upon their privacy, and also so that the living area would not look like an official govern- mental office but like a home.