Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (13 page)

On August 3, 1957, Jackie, accompanied by her husband, rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but sadly by the time they got there, it was already too late. Moments before they entered the hospital, Black Jack Bouvier had died of cancer of the liver, aged sixty-six. While the Canfields, who had been in Italy at the time, traveled to the States, Jackie, now six months pregnant, oversaw the arrangements for the funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and the burial in East Hampton, Long Island. Confronted with the signature sunlamp tan from which the appellation “Black Jack” derived, the undertaker, assuming he was only doing what the family would want, painted the corpse over with flesh-toned makeup. Upon seeing the professional’s handiwork, a dismayed Bouvier nephew—who as chance would have it possessed some competence in the mortician’s art—set about to restore Black Jack to his customary swarthiness. There was a modest turnout at the funeral Mass, where the entire rear pew consisted of women in inky-black veils, who, though largely unknown to the family, were said to be some of Black Jack’s lovers. Prior to the closing of the casket, “the most beautiful daughter a man ever had” undid a bracelet from her wrist and tenderly deposited the trinket, which Black Jack had given her as a graduation gift when she was a girl, in his hand.

Three months later, Jackie gave birth at New York’s Lying-in Hospital on November 27, 1957. This time, her husband could hardly have been nicer or more attentive. It was Jack who wheeled in the newborn when Jackie first saw their daughter. “I don’t think he really knew what loving someone was like until he had Caroline,” remembered Betty Coxe Spalding. “He was adorable with her from the beginning.” Jack was unreserved in his love for the child, intent, he later told his friend Debo Devonshire, on being physically affectionate, as Rose Kennedy had never been when he was a boy. As a parent, Jackie proved to be the more physically reserved of the couple. Nonetheless, a shared passion for their daughter, and subsequently for John Junior, would do much to help sustain the marriage in some exceptionally difficult times. The birth of Caroline was also politically useful. Senator and Mrs. Kennedy posed on the cover of the April 21, 1958, issue of
Life
magazine, with Jack holding the infant in his lap. The image satisfyingly, if belatedly, filled out the trajectory that had begun with the engagement pictures in
Life
and had been followed by the photographs in
McCall’s
of the happy young marrieds at their rented Georgetown residence. By the time this new cover image appeared on newsstands, the Kennedys at last owned a home of their own, a three-story redbrick edifice on N Street in Georgetown, where more often than not Jackie remained with their daughter, while the senator traveled in anticipation of 1960.

It was during this signal period, from 1958 to 1960, that Jackie embarked on the next major phase of her Washington education. The first had taken place on Dumbarton Avenue, under the somewhat erratic but nonetheless highly effective tutelage of John White. This time her classroom moved across the street, where Joe Alsop, having recently returned from a year in Paris, proved eager to take her on. Hoping to serve Jack’s interests by becoming the wife she believed he wanted and needed right then, Jackie in turn proved an apt pupil. Afterward, she remembered Alsop’s tutorials with affection and appreciation. To look at, the curmudgeonly stager and the chirpy young Washington wife made a curious couple. Both used cigarettes, his ripped in two and screwed, at times a bit frenziedly, into a yellowing holder, as theatrical properties. Both spoke in an excruciatingly affected way, Joe’s strangulated accent and intonation causing him to evoke, as someone once said, Charles Laughton essaying the role of Oscar Wilde; Jackie’s mannered, whispery voice suggesting a repressed version of Marilyn Monroe. And, not least, Joe and Jackie were both perilously thin-skinned public people whose gifts of ridicule and raillery at once shielded and subverted them.

As Alsop surveyed a guest over his trademark massive circular dark horn-rimmed spectacles, he liked to cup his sagging, spotted face with his hands, giving him the appearance of someone suffering with a toothache in both jaws. At the outset, he saw Jackie as a “starter” who despite anything she had done or endured to date was suddenly at the very beginning of the particular race she had been designated to run in life. He judged that of all the starters he had seen and worked with in the course of his career, there had never previously been another who merited, in his phrase, “a higher handicap.” Despite her immense potential, however, he also perceived that she possessed nowhere nearly enough self-confidence. That was where Joe came in. Joe, the cousin of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. Joe, the political and social arbiter. Joe, the aesthete and intellectual snob. Joe, who had briefly removed himself to Paris because he feared that his best years professionally might already be past. Joe, who saw a Kennedy candidacy as a chance not just for the country’s renewal, but, equally if not more importantly, for his own.

He was the person to go to for the facts and statistics regarding the deficiencies of Eisenhower’s defense posture, but he was also the man who could tell you, with equal ardor, which restaurant was to be avoided because the owners did not systematically rotate the wine bottles in their racks. During Churchill’s postwar administration Alsop had been the first newsman in Washington to learn that the prime minister had secretly suffered a stroke, but he could also be depended on to know all the choicest details about the European grande dame whose ornate dress had been intercepted by the customs authorities because of the danger of fowl pest being carried in its pheasant feathers. Such was the mentor who set about to help prepare Jackie Kennedy for what he was to call her “high role” in history. Now he spoke to her of power and politics, now of food and furniture. He gave her carefully chosen books, and regaled her with gossipy accounts of previous Washington wives who had experienced challenges similar to hers. Seeking to toughen Jackie against the myriad petty vexations of political life, he offered perspective when she was distressed; and, though known when upset to chew on his knuckles until they bled, he encouraged her to view her own challenges dispassionately. By turns, he sat with her, telephoned her, wrote to her, walked with her, and sailed with her.

Jackie had other counselors as well. A former Los Angeles shopgirl, Jayne Wrightsman was the the second wife of the Oklahoma oil tycoon Charles Wrightsman, whose social ambitions were said to be “as sizable as his fortune.” Spurned by the old guard in Palm Beach in the 1940s, the couple set about to win social acceptance by reinventing themselves as free-spending connoisseurs of art and antiques, with an emphasis on eighteenth-century France. Mrs. Wrightsman, in particular, pored over art history books; conferred with curators, dealers, and other experts; and taught herself to distinguish between, in Alsop’s words, “objects that are merely good of their kind, and objects of truly great quality.” She imbibed the principle that the highest test of a collector is not whether the collection includes only things of the best quality, but rather whether the owner has composed the collection “as a true, independent work of art.” And that, Alsop proclaimed of her Fifth Avenue apartment, where the decor fairly screamed magnificence and museum-quality, she had assuredly accomplished.

Alsop was no less in awe of Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, Jackie’s other, even more significant adviser in matters of style and fashion. The Listerine mouthwash heiress, whose second husband, Paul Mellon, was the heir to a great banking fortune, subscribed to an aesthetic, if not to a form of snobbery, that could hardly have been more different from the Wrightsmans’ approach. Jayne Wrightsman’s personal narrative highlighted the infinite labor devoted to perfecting her taste and amassing her collections. Bunny Mellon, though equally painstaking and attentive to minutiae (such as the weeds she contrived to grow to precisely the right height between carefully irregular patio stonework), preferred to be admired for her ease and artlessness. She exemplified the idea that naturalness is perhaps the greatest affectation. Jayne Wrightsman’s homes were all about show and splendor. Bunny Mellon lived by the dictum “Nothing should be noticed.” Ostentation was anathema to her. Her raincoat was sable-lined, the fur being for her pleasure alone, not for display. Master gardener; art and rare-book collector; creator of beautiful, resolutely comfortable and serene homes in Upperville, Virginia, and other settings; devotee of the couturiers Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy, Bunny Mellon did not hesitate to pour vast sums of money into her projects—she simply thought it vulgar if the effort and expenditure were apparent. She also religiously shunned publicity as degrading to one’s personal dignity, a notion that, however appealing to Jackie personally, was fundamentally at odds with the whole Kennedy ethos, indeed, with some of the practical advice Alsop was to offer her in this period.

As Jackie shed the last lingering vestiges of the “sloppy kid” that Bill Walton fondly remembered her as having been during her John White phase, the question presented itself: Would the rarefied tastes and attitudes, the particular styles of dress and decor, that she had been cultivating help or hinder politically? There was no sense, as she made it clear to Alsop, in which she wanted to be perceived as acting “at cross purposes” with Jack. However it might sometimes appear, she really did mean to be a political plus. According to Walton, who, as an artist, was also known to advise Jackie on visual matters, she wanted so to please Jack: “She got elegant for him.” But how would this increasingly chic young woman be received by the American people? What would voters make of her bouffant hairstyle, couturier costumes, and penchant for all things French? How would the country react to the sprightly remarks that always played so well in the deep-red-lacquered dining room at Joe Alsop’s? Jackie’s comments in this vein often had a lurking sting. What, someone wanted to know, did the French motto “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Evil to him who evil thinks) inscribed in gold on her belt mean? “Love me, love my dog,” she helpfully explained. Told of the religious prejudice that threatened to torpedo her husband’s presidential hopes, she returned: “I think it’s so unfair of people to be against Jack because he’s a Catholic. He’s such a poor Catholic. Now, if it were Bobby, I could understand it.” Asked where she thought the upcoming Democratic national convention ought to be conducted, she deadpanned: “Acapulco.” The matter of Jackie’s political viability was fervently discussed within the Kennedy camp, and for all of her snark and sophistication, these conversations were capable of cutting her to the quick. When, in conference with his political team Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, the senator wondered aloud if America was “ready” for Jackie, indeed, if it might be best to run her through subliminally in a quick-flash television spot so no one would notice her, she ran out of the room in tears.

The question of whether, in his oft-repeated phrase, Jack’s wife had “too much status and not enough quo” would be merely academic, however, if he failed to make a compelling case for why Americans should vote for him. He began to find his voice as a presidential candidate in the summer of 1958, when, soon to run for another Senate term, he assailed Eisenhower for permitting the United States to become dangerously weak in the face of soaring Soviet military strength. In a landmark August 14, 1958, Senate address, Kennedy forecast (inaccurately, as it turned out) an imminent “missile gap” when Washington would cede nuclear superiority to Moscow. Alluding to Churchill’s 1936 speech “The Locust Years,” one of the addresses collected in
Arms and the Covenant
that had so fascinated Kennedy as a young man in London, he made the case that the Eisenhower years had been “the years the locusts have eaten.” Kennedy argued that the present Republican administration had put fiscal security ahead of national security, and that that policy would soon bring the United States into even graver danger. Yet, he maintained, it was still possible to catch up. “In the words of Sir Winston Churchill in a dark time of England’s history, ‘Come then—let us to the task, to the battle and the toil—each to our part, each to our station.… There is not a week, nor a day, nor an hour to be lost.’” With the missile gap speech, Kennedy began to run for president, as Harold Macmillan later said, “on the Churchill ticket.” Here and in subsequent addresses, the candidate asked voters to examine present international problems through the prism of interwar Britain, when the Nazi threat had been foolishly ignored. Kennedy portrayed himself as a statesman in the tradition of Churchill, prepared to tell the unwelcome truth and to demand the sacrifices necessary to guard American supremacy against the Soviets, who, he emphasized, hoped to bury the United States not only militarily, but also economically, politically, culturally, and in every other sphere of interest. He argued that under Eisenhower the United States had lost ground in each of these areas.

JFK finally had a chance to meet Churchill when he and Jackie vacationed in the South of France after the Senate adjourned. It is at this point that a celebrated or, depending on how one views it, notorious vessel, part secure residence, part floating pleasure palace, materializes however briefly in Jackie’s story for the first time. The senator’s unhappy encounter with the hero of his life took place aboard the
Christina,
the former wartime escort frigate owned by the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Churchill had first met Onassis at Roquebrune, near Monte Carlo, in 1956, when they were introduced at dinner by Churchill’s son, Randolph. Two years later, Churchill, who had been staying in Cap d’Ail since the end of July 1958, was about to embark on his first cruise on the
Christina,
which was scheduled to begin in late September. Onassis had the well-earned reputation of a celebrity-hunter who loved to play host to the Greta Garbos of this world. For the moment, anyway, he regarded Churchill as the greatest trophy guest of them all. Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, wondered in his diary whether it was “the man or the yacht” that appealed to Churchill. “He is a little fellow,” the doctor dryly noted of Onassis, “not as tall as Winston when they stand side by side.” Clementine Churchill worried, by no means for the first time in a half-century of that difficult but delightful marriage, that her husband had fallen in with a bad element. She disapproved not so much of Winston’s love of luxury as of his willingness to countenance the personal and ethical shortcomings of those in a position to provide the good things and surroundings he craved. Hilariously, Churchill’s Cap d’Ail host Lord Beaverbrook, whom Clementine had been known to scorn for precisely this reason, shared, perhaps even exceeded, her indignation about Winston’s new friend and benefactor, over whom such an air of disreputableness hung. Unmentioned in any of this, of course, was that a similar air had long hung over Churchill, who like his father before him had been widely regarded as an opportunist and adventurer.