Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (2 page)

After numerous martinis, he would sprawl on his living room sofa dressed in baby-blue boxer shorts and black patent-leather shoes, inveighing against all the people he blamed for the shipwreck of his life. High on the list were Janet and Hughdie, as Janet’s second husband was known. Black Jack was sure that Janet had married again principally to spite him. He was certain the Auchincloss clan intended to steal away his daughters. Of the two girls, Jackie, who resembled him facially, was his favorite. He called her “the most beautiful daughter a man ever had.” At his two-bedroom, fourth-floor apartment on East Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan, her ubiquitous image stared out from walls, tables, bookshelves. But all the photographs on earth could not alter the fact that, as he believed, he was slowly losing her. How could he compete with all that Auchincloss money? Though Black Jack continued to work on Wall Street, his personal finances had never recovered from the Great Crash of 1929, after which he had burned through capital and borrowed from relatives in order to maintain a frail veneer of wealth. In the narrative he constructed of his life, he traced his inability to right himself to the tough new trading rules introduced by the fledgling Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934.

Before Janet remarried, he had insisted that her cash demands were suffocating him. Now that she had attached herself to riches, he resented any implication that he was incapable of providing for his own children. In the perpetual scramble for funds, he did business with several bookies, notably a Lexington Avenue butcher who took bets in a room-sized freezer thick with hanging carcasses. Black Jack always seemed to have money on various sporting events and followed the scores on four radios that blasted simultaneously in his apartment. He was ever at daggers drawn with his father about the latter’s will, never grasping until it was too late that the old man had spent much of what he had on annuities that assured substantial returns during his lifetime but would stop paying when he died. Tellingly, while the forty-six-acre Auchincloss family estate in McLean, Virginia, where Jackie lived during the year when she was not at boarding school, gave long views of the Potomac, and while the seventy-five-acre Auchincloss estate where she spent her summers was perched high above Narragansett Bay, Black Jack’s apartment faced a sunless ventilating shaft.

He was right to perceive that her stepfather’s world had begun to envelop her. Yet she loved Black Jack no less for her attraction to that world. Years later, Jackie’s first husband would laugh that she still suffered from a major father-crush. Since girlhood, she had worshipped Black Jack for the very things that her disciplined, driven, mercenary mother was not. Janet was a survivor who had done whatever was necessary for her and her girls to get on in life. By contrast, louche, self-pitying Black Jack was one of the beautiful losers. Jackie savored the worst in him, especially the compulsive womanizing that had doomed her parents’ marriage from the outset. Through the years, she would speak with cringe-inducing glee of his having bedded another woman during his and Janet’s honeymoon. She loved that, on a subsequent occasion, he had been photographed affectionately holding a pretty girl’s hand while, a few inches away, poor oblivious Janet smiled idiotically and stared in the other direction. When, as often as possible, he visited Farmington, Jackie delighted in quizzing him about which of her classmates’ mothers he had already slept with and which he had in his sights. Many years afterward, when she was herself a wife and mother, she liked to reminisce about how all her boarding school friends had adored Black Jack. They regarded him, in Jackie’s telling, as “a most devastating figure.” Had she been aware that a number of the girls thought him a cartoonish dirty old man? When certain of her classmates laughingly shook their backsides at him, did she register that they were making cruel fun of the parent they regarded as a repulsive lecher? Had she really been oblivious to the insult? Or had she just pretended not to notice? Such perhaps was Jackie’s craft that, then and in retrospect, her father’s tormentors could never be sure.

A Yale man himself, Black Jack delivered Jackie in his black Mercury convertible in time for her to meet her date before the 1:30
P.M.
kickoff. Previously, she had confessed to being rather nervous in anticipation of the big day, which was to conclude with dinner and dancing in New York. Though she had yet to choose between John and Bev, she would be attached to one of her suitors for the course of the day while the other tagged along. The choreography threatened to prove awkward. At the Yale Bowl, which had attracted a smaller crowd than anticipated due to icy temperatures, she and her Harvard friends watched the Elis trounce their team by a score of 28–0. When it was over, Jackie’s group took a yellow trolley to the train station. En route to Manhattan, Jackie, a smoker since she was fifteen, made a game of lighting up whenever the conductor was not looking. In New York, John dropped her off at her father’s apartment so she could change. That night, the couple’s first stop was the Maisonette, an East Fifty-fifth Street supper club where the singer Dorothy Shay, known as the Park Avenue hillbilly and a particular favorite of New York debutantes and post-debutantes, was performing. Jackie to this point seems to have had little trouble navigating between the Interesting Boy and the Sexy Boy. But everything changed when she and John joined Bev at his table and she discovered that Bev had acquired a date in the interim. Worse, she spotted his prep school ring, as she later said, blazing away on the young woman’s left hand. Seated between the two boys at dinner, Jackie reveled in the amount of attention she received from Bev, though technically he was with someone else. Still, she needed only to glance at that ring for her pleasure to be spoiled.

By the summer of 1946, when Jackie turned seventeen, glands had trumped mind. The physical attractions of Bev Corbin won out over John Sterling’s intellectual appeal. Tall, lean, and muscular, with a long neck, high cheekbones, and a handsome face whose only flaw was a weak mouth, Bev seemed nothing if not cocky and confident. It struck her that gossipy banter about New York, its nightspots, and the people he knew there was about as serious as he was capable of getting. But then, she had not anointed him for the quality of his conversation. Besides, he made her laugh, and “sweet” was a word she used about him repeatedly. Late one night after a dance in Newport, Jackie brought Bev back to the Auchincloss estate. In the kitchen of the twenty-eight-room gabled Victorian house, she scrambled some eggs for him. Jackie seemed so at home at Hammersmith Farm, yet there was an element of illusion in that picture of ease and entitlement. From the first, she and her sister, Lee, four years her junior, had not been on the same footing in Hughdie’s establishments as his three children from two previous marriages. As Jackie was not blood, the riches that surrounded her were not and never would be hers. Her monthly fifty-dollar pittance came from Black Jack, who also paid her tuition at Farmington, as well as medical and dental expenses. Appearances to the contrary, Jackie was a poor relation. The rambling house on the hill, with its faded crimson carpets, comfortable old furniture, and walls covered with looming moose, bear, and reindeer heads, was but a vast stage set for her.

When Jackie and Bev began their senior years at Miss Porter’s and Harvard, respectively, they regarded themselves as a couple. For some girls, Miss Porter’s functioned, as it long had, as a finishing school. Upon graduation they considered themselves finished—that is, ready for a proper husband. Other seniors preferred to continue their schooling, whether at a junior college, an art school, or a full-fledged four-year college. In Jackie’s day, Miss Porter’s placed new emphasis on college preparation. Still, for those who chose college, as for those who did not, the nearly universal objective was marriage. Few girls saw college as the prelude to a serious career of one’s own. Seniors like Jackie who, though they had yet to be introduced to society, had already had established boyfriends appeared to be on a fast track to married life. For them, college could be a good place to wait until the boys were ready to become husbands. As Jackie solemnly advised a friend, the reason so many boys resisted marrying immediately was that they needed time to establish themselves in business. Besides, she stressed, marriages were so much more likely to last when the boys had had a chance to “sow their wild oats first.” For her part, Jackie was keen to attend Sarah Lawrence, mainly, it appears, because of the school’s proximity to Manhattan and its nightlife. Black Jack insisted that she select the rather more isolated and inconvenient Vassar. Though after a preliminary visit Jackie despairingly described Vassar as a huge lonely place, in the end Black Jack gave her no choice but to capitulate.

Meanwhile, addressing Bev as “darling” and “dearest,” she recorded her ever-shifting feelings for him in blue ink on pale blue monogrammed stationery. Since she rarely saw Bev now that they were both at school, there was a sense in which the relationship existed more on paper than in reality, more in her head than in the flesh. She spent many hours alone, reading about romantic love, contemplating what it means to be in love. Keenly, she dwelled on the pleasures to come when she and Bev could be together. Yet when she was actually with him, more often than not he was a disappointment to her and she pulled back. In the beginning, Jackie had admitted to being ashamed of liking him as much as she did. Now it was Bev’s turn to be embarrassed.

Jackie had not seen him for a good many weeks when, on a Saturday afternoon in October, he materialized at Farmington in the role of a caller. In accord with tradition, Bev arrived at two
P.M.
and departed after tea at the headmaster’s residence. At some point in between, the twenty-two-year-old made a blundering attempt to kiss Jackie, who refused him. Writing afterward, she sought to assuage his hurt. “I do love you—and can love you without kissing you every time I see you and I hope you understand that.” As Christmas drew near, her fantasy of Bev seemed to recover from the ambivalence that a dash of reality, in the form of actually seeing him, had provoked. Suddenly, she could hardly wait to be with Bev in New York during the holiday break. Yet when at length she did meet him there, the experience proved as awkward and unhappy as before. At Rockefeller Center, Bev again tried to kiss her, and again she pulled away. He charged Jackie with not loving him.

“I do think I’m in love with you when I’m with you,” she wrote initially. “But it’s awfully hard for me to stay in love with someone when I only see them every three months and when the only contact I have with them is through letters.” Unfortunately for Bev, there was worse in store. The more opportunity she had to reflect, the less willing she was to try to talk herself into believing that she loved him. At the outset of their correspondence, she had aimed to fashion a voice that was “devastatingly witty.” A year and a half later, her words of January 20, 1946, were simply devastating. “I’ve always thought of being in love as being willing to do anything for the other person—starve to buy them bread and not mind living in Siberia with them—and I’ve always thought that every minute away from them would be hell—so looking at it that [way] I guess I’m not in love with you.”

Behind his back, Jackie was even harsher. Bemoaning to another girl that Bev would never be much in the world, she predicted he would be content to be a party boy for the rest of his life. Despite Jackie’s complete disillusionment, she and her first real boyfriend continued to correspond. He still visited her at Farmington, and in anticipation she merrily urged him to smuggle in cigarettes, chocolate, and even a hip flask, the latter expressly to shock the housemother charged with keeping order in the dormitory. Bev’s passion for Jackie showed no sign of abating. On her side, however, fire had turned to ice. For Jackie, as for other Farmington girls, everything ultimately was about marriage and the future. Bev seemed incapable of a future she might actually want to share. Pointedly, Jackie had once asked him if he could think of anything worse than living in a small town like Farmington all one’s life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake. She made it clear that she had higher ideas for herself than such a hidebound existence, yet she remained fuzzy about specifics. At seventeen, she was able to conceive of the future largely in negatives. Called on for the purposes of her class yearbook entry to state her life’s ambition, Jackie flung back: “Not to be a housewife.”

In Newport that summer, Jackie officially entered the marriage market. Positioned alongside Janet and Hughdie, who were also celebrating the christening of their second child together, Jackie “met” three hundred of the couple’s friends at a tea dance at Hammersmith Farm. No matter that Janet’s newborn son, as well as a daughter born two years before, bore a completely different relationship to the household than Jackie did. The optics of Jackie’s debut seemed to confer upon her the Auchincloss imprimatur. Daughters of divorced parents often had two separate debut parties. For example, Jackie’s friend Helen Bowdoin, known as “Bow,” was formally presented by her very rich father at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, before being feted in Newport by her mother and stepfather. Both events were listed in the same notice in
The New York Times
. By contrast, on the occasion of Jackie’s debut, it was as if her real father did not exist. He was not even mentioned in the
Times
announcement.

Black Jack’s exclusion from anything to do with his daughter’s social emergence was a triumph for Janet. Despite her status as the chatelaine of two estates, she remained imaginatively invested in the futile, unending war with her failed, frenzied ex-husband. As far as Janet was concerned, in the financially desperate pre-Auchincloss years when the girls lived with her and spent weekends with their father it had been easy for him to arrange to be the parent they always had fun with. In those days, Jackie had spoken of wanting to run away and move in with her father, and she had often gone so far as to tell Janet that she hated her. Long afterward, Janet, forgetting apparently that she had been a drinker, a yeller, a carper, a spanker, and a slapper, persisted in brooding about the injustice of Black Jack’s favored status. At the time of Jackie’s debut, when he reproached Janet for having presented their daughter under the Auchincloss banner in Newport, Janet retorted that he was free to give his own party for Jackie in New York. With an additional twist of the knife, she asked whether that was not the custom among divorced parents. What could Black Jack say? Obviously, financing such an event was beyond him.