Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (11 page)

What he did not tell Jackie was that during all that time in New York and Palm Beach, he had been building castles in the air, writing and calling Sweden from his sickbed, presumably at those moments when his wife was out of the room. He urged Gunilla to send him her photograph. He obsessed aloud on the telephone about their lying on an Italian beach together. In a period when by any realistic measure such a trip remained well beyond his physical powers, he sought to arrange a rendezvous in southern Europe. Finally, when his Scandinavian pen pal, wary like Jackie before her of seeming too eager, demanded that he at least make the gesture of coming to her, he had little choice but to assent. As soon as the Senate adjourned, he could conveniently stop off in Båstad for a week en route to meet his wife in the South of France.

What he did not tell Gunilla was that, as in a farce, he was also arranging to have a backup, a married Swedish airline stewardess, waiting for him in Stockholm in the event that he chose not to remain the entire week in Båstad. At length, Jackie did travel to London, where the Canfields hosted a party in her honor at their Belgravia mews house, and where old friends of Jack’s such as Hugh Fraser, Jakie Astor, and William Douglas-Home danced attendance on her. When, on account of her frequently being out to dinner with various grandees, stories circulated that she had left her ailing husband, it was Jack who tended to come off as the injured party. In fact, he had arranged to keep Jackie nicely distracted when, with Torby MacDonald accompanying him in the capacity of a beard, he sailed for Europe on August 5. Lest anyone think it frivolous of Senator Kennedy to schedule a luxurious European vacation with his wife so soon after his long absence from Washington, he traveled under the guise of a congressional fact-finding mission to Poland and the member nations of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. In the official version, the senator was going abroad “to work and learn, not rest and play.”

Jack Kennedy had long been calibrating the dates, venue, and other details of his love idyll. Such is the human comedy that the objectives of seeing the Swedish girl, on the one hand, and of completing a new book, on the other, were both integral to the story of his convalescence. Aboard the USS
United States
he by turns telegraphed Gunilla to say that he would soon be with her and contacted his father with the news that he was sending on the first and last chapters of the final draft of
Profiles in Courage,
Rose Kennedy having previously hand-delivered the rest of the manuscript when she joined her husband in the South of France at the start of their summer holiday. Also in the message to Joe, Jack fine-tuned the details of where he and Jackie would stay in Cap d’Antibes following the week he was to be on his own in Sweden. Eager that his wife enjoy herself on this second leg of her trip as much as she had during the first, he calculated that Jackie would like it best if they stayed at the Hôtel du Cap rather than in the rented house where Joe and Rose were in residence. That way, Jackie would be near her sister as long as Lee was there. Jack Kennedy seemed to have every element in place when, on crutches and in considerable pain, he arrived in southwestern Sweden on August 11. Soon, however, he found himself facing a good many more chess pieces than he can possibly have anticipated, Gunilla’s mother and father, along with numerous other members of their large extended family, including the Swedish ambassador to Poland, cousin Eric von Post, also being on holiday in Båstad at the time.

What had begun as a tryst arranged in secrecy was suddenly transformed into a relationship conspicuously conducted in front of Mama Brita, Papa Olle, who was nearly two decades his wife’s senior, and various other people. However improbably, the tumult of Jack’s social life that week in Sweden nearly rivaled that which his wife had been delighting in elsewhere in Europe. Stranger still, all the Swedes seemed to know that Gunilla’s lame lover was an unhappily married U.S. senator who aspired to be president someday. The senator, meanwhile, cunningly played his game. He assured Gunilla that he still loved her. He insisted to Brita that he wanted to leave Jackie in order to marry Brita’s daughter. He pledged to discuss the matter with his father as soon as he left Sweden. Gunilla, speaking confidentially to Torby MacDonald, acknowledged that Jackie must love her husband and that she certainly seemed to have been kind to him throughout his ordeal. Torby replied that while Jackie had indeed visited at the hospital, “I don’t think she was that concerned.”

Jack and Jackie were reunited in Cap d’Antibes, where they made up a merry group with the Canfields and William and Rachel Douglas-Home, even as the senator diligently and discreetly maintained his Swedish contacts. On August 22, a day when he and Jackie, along with their companions, were lavishly entertained by the Kennedys’ Palm Beach friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman, Jack also managed to draft two letters, both in red ink on Hôtel du Cap stationery. In one missive, he reported to Gunilla that he had been doing nothing in the South of France but sit in the sun, look at the sea, and think of her. For some reason, he also felt the need to lie that he had just that day received word that his wife and sister-in-law were about to arrive in Cap d’Antibes, and to predict that when he saw them presently “it will all be complicated the way I feel now.” In his second letter, lest the stewardess’s door be closed to him in future, he politely sought to explain why he had failed to call her. Reporting that he had spent the entire week in Båstad, he emphasized that he had seen “nobody as nice” there as he had during his previous visit to Sweden, the latter a reference to an affair Kennedy had had with another airline employee, a close friend of the stewardess’s, in Stockholm in 1949. There followed several calls to Gunilla, whom he hoped to persuade to meet him in Capri. He had already put in motion the plan that promised to free him up.

Due in Poland presently, he told Jackie that she must not accompany him because it would seem less than “serious” were he to arrive in Warsaw with his wife. No sooner had Jackie left Cap d’Antibes with her sister in anticipation of joining him later in his official travels than he headed directly for Capri. In the course of several phone calls, he implored Gunilla to come to him there. She, however, did not desire merely a second rendezvous with the senator. This time, she was playing for marriage. When Jack arrived in Warsaw, he went to the Swedish embassy to speak to Ambassador von Post both of his passion for Gunilla and of his desire to leave Jackie. It was a safe bet that the diplomat would pass on to his young cousin all that Jack said. Subsequently, on the phone to Gunilla, Jack claimed also to have spoken at last to Joe Kennedy. According to Jack, the old man had angrily refused even to listen to his reasons for wanting a divorce. Whether or not Jack had really had that conversation with Joe, the sad story in which he weakly (or was it shrewdly?) portrayed himself yet again as a mere pawn in the hands of his controlling father stirred the hapless, smitten Swedish girl, who finally agreed to meet him in Copenhagen. The senator, however, soon called back to cancel. Set to visit the NATO countries with his wife, he reported that Copenhagen was going to be, as they say, “difficult.”

Jackie, when she traveled with her husband to Rome, Paris, and London, among other destinations, was beginning her third year as Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The marriage, it need hardly be said, was not everything she might have hoped for. Even in a period when the couple had seemed to achieve a modicum of tranquility as Jackie assisted him with his manuscript and otherwise ministered to his needs, the wheels in his brain had persisted in tirelessly spinning out plans for future assignations. Jack also kept significant other areas of his life carefully curtained off from her. As she later came to understand, in the period after the Kennedys returned to the United States on October 11, 1955, she had known almost nothing about how his mind was working with regard to the immediate political future. It was also during this time that the senator had made a point of instructing Janet Travell, when she came to see him in Palm Beach: “It’s best if you don’t go into my medical problems with Jackie.”

All in all, then, Jackie was operating blind when she seized on the notion of acquiring a home near Merrywood, in McLean, Virginia, as a salve to the perturbations of her marriage. Originally, she had thought of building a one-story house atop a cliff on her mother and stepfather’s land overlooking the Potomac. But the expense of bringing in water proved to be too great, and she abandoned the idea after Janet told her about a nineteenth-century Georgian-style brick house nearby that had come up for sale. Set on five acres, the property was known as Hickory Hill. Immediately, Jackie saw it as the anchor her marriage had been lacking, a place in the country where she could enjoy quiet weekends with her husband, who, she assumed, would welcome the opportunity to rest and recover from his public exertions. Jackie did not require a pain specialist to tell her what she already knew experientially: The senator’s back problems were still far worse than he was prepared to disclose. After the couple purchased the property in October, she set to work overseeing the renovations with an eye toward Jack’s comfort. In his bedroom and dressing room, for instance, drawers and shoe shelves had to be specially installed at a level that would not require him to lean over when he wished to get at them. But even as she was attending to all of this detail, she perceived that something was amiss. At the end of the workweek, instead of secluding himself with her at Hickory Hill, Jack was ever on the move again, chasing a new goal of which he had previously given her no inkling.

During the time that he had been in the South of France with Jackie, word had come from the States that he was under consideration to be Adlai Stevenson’s running mate in the 1956 presidential election. Jack was, in his father’s words, “very intrigued” by the rumors, whereas the old man for his part feared that being on a ticket with Stevenson could damage Jack’s long-term presidential ambitions. Sorensen wrote to him at the Hôtel du Cap to report on a front-page story in the
Boston Post
confirming that the Stevenson people were indeed looking at him. When Jack returned to the States, he had wasted no time notifying Stevenson that he planned to formulate a public statement of support for the latter’s candidacy, to be released whenever Stevenson judged it would be most helpful to him. Jack wanted the second spot, but he did not wish to seem too eager. Instead of staking his prestige on an open campaign for the number two position, he preferred that Stevenson make the gesture of coming to him. The challenge to Kennedy was how to get Stevenson to make his move. He therefore undertook what one presidential biographer has aptly described as a “surreptitious candidacy.” He traveled, he gave speeches, he fought for control of the Massachusetts Democratic Party. But he was loath to disclose his real objective, either to the public or to his wife.

As Jackie came to understand only after she established herself at Hickory Hill and began to spend solitary weekends there, Jack was already utterly caught up in the furious momentum toward the August 1956 Democratic convention. The battle for the Massachusetts party leadership, which pitted the senator against the present chairman, a plump, pugnacious onion farmer named William “Onions” Burke, was actually about who would control the state’s delegation to the national convention. As Burke was opposed to Stevenson, were the current leader to be left in place, Kennedy would appear weak at the convention. Never before had Jack permitted himself to participate in a full-out local political mud-fight. But in the present emergency, it was clear that if he did not stoop, he could not conquer. His political operatives had never known him “so angry and frustrated” as he was during the fight, which came to a head when, at the close of a large fractious party meeting involving much booing, pushing, and grabbing at the gavel, and which threatened at several points to erupt in fisticuffs, the anti-Onions faction prevailed. At home as well, Jackie could not help but be struck by her husband’s high agitation in the course of an internecine struggle that she gauged to be constantly in his thoughts.

Early in 1956, Jackie learned that she was pregnant. The baby was due in October, two months after the Democrats congregated in Chicago. News of the pregnancy was very pleasing to Jack, who made no secret of his desire for a large family like the one he had grown up in. Though Bobby and Ethel, who had four children and a fifth on the way, already enjoyed a substantial lead, Jack insisted that he and Jackie meant to catch up with them soon enough. For Jackie, children were integral to the life she hoped to have with Jack at Hickory Hill. She methodically set about assembling a nursery and otherwise equipping the house. For all of Jackie’s great plans, however, her mother thought her just “too lonely” in the country, Jack being away so much. Nor, it turned out, did he intend to come home after Chicago. Whether or not he succeeded in becoming his party’s vice-presidential nominee, he planned to go abroad immediately. The previous August, he had vacationed with Jackie in the South of France following his pas de deux with Gunilla. This year, as he wrote to his father on June 29, he expected to go with George Smathers right after the convention. When Jackie learned of her husband’s plans, she asked him to forgo the trip, but Jack was unconquerable.

Finally, in a Chicago steak house on Friday, August 17, 1956, the last day of the weeklong Democratic convention, Jackie, twenty-seven years of age and seven months pregnant, broached the unhappy subject of the South of France with the big, brash, oily, jocose self-described “redneck” known to legions of Washington women as “Gorgeous George.” Jackie disliked Smathers intensely. Smathers for his part had thought little of Jackie Bouvier when he first met her, and he had gone so far as to advise Jack that he believed he could do better, but the Florida senator had revised his opinion entirely when he saw the wonderful care Jackie Kennedy had given her husband during his long medical ordeal. In the recently published
Profiles in Courage,
which had been an immediate bestseller and a critical success, Kennedy had left unnamed the fellow senator who had unashamedly acknowledged to him that he always voted with the special interests in the expectation that they would remember him positively at election time and that the public would never know about, much less recall, his vote against their welfare. That politician had been George Smathers, now the chairman of the Florida delegation at the Chicago convention. He represented everything Kennedy had been writing against in his new book, yet it was he whom Kennedy asked to put his name into nomination at the International Amphitheater. Jackie’s fraught encounter with Smathers took place after her husband, in the words of
The New York Times,
had come before the convention “as a movie star,” when he narrated a slick Hollywood-produced documentary about the party; after Jack had nominated Stevenson in a speech painstakingly crafted to prove that the speaker was not just sexy but smart; after Stevenson had made the unexpected move of leaving the VP choice to the convention; and after the Kennedy contingent had stayed up all of Thursday night scrambling for delegates’ votes.