Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (3 page)

In the fall semester of 1947, the photograph of Black Jack Bouvier taken in the 1920s went up in a college dormitory room, which was soon deluged with engraved invitations addressed to his eighteen-year-old daughter. Rarely spending seven consecutive days at “that goddamn Vassar,” as Jackie referred to her school, she was observed at nearly every major event of New York’s debutante season. She appeared among weeping willow branches and strings of clematis at the Tuxedo Autumn Ball. She posed at a table decorated with pink carnations and pompon chrysanthemums at the Grosvenor Ball. She danced before a background of artfully arranged tropical tree ferns at the first Junior Assembly. Genteel New York, as she experienced it that year, was a whirligig of large, lavish parties, intimate dinners beforehand, midnight champagne suppers, and special breakfasts for those revelers who stayed out all night. Despite the appearance of sybaritism, the purpose of these rituals was something other than pleasure. Tacitly understood by all, the objective of a debutante year was twofold: first, to show the suitable marriageable girls to the suitable marriageable boys, and vice versa (when Jackie was not in Manhattan for the weekend, there was further opportunity to consult the menu of possible husbands during football outings at Harvard and Yale), and second, to provide the debs with a preview of their future lives as wealthy, leisured married women who would be expected to pour their energies into volunteer work. Most of the classic cotillions therefore were fund-raisers. Exchanging the strapless gowns she wore at night for boxy sober suits that made her look like the young society matron she was expected soon to become, Jackie served on a number of junior committees. In November she was appointed to lead a committee tasked with organizing a night at the opera to benefit a free milk fund for ill and indigent children.

Every year, Igor Cassini, who wrote a gossip column for the Hearst newspapers under the pen name Cholly Knickerbocker, designated a leading debutante. Typically, Cassini focused on one of the showier, better-looking society girls who had made their debuts in New York that season. This time, however, the arbiter did something different. He named Jackie Queen Deb because he had perceived what certain of her rivals also had seen. She was shy and reserved, at times to the point of standoffishness, yet she had a knack of compelling attention, of getting herself noticed.

For rich American girls, as well as for those merely pretending to be rich, a European grand tour had long been part of the momentum toward marriage. They went to view the art and antiquity, to see and appreciate everything, and thereby, in theory at least, to become more entertaining companions for their future husbands. Bow, Jackie’s Newport friend, was set to travel to Europe that summer of 1948, accompanied by a younger sister and another girl. At length, it was arranged that Queen Deb would go with them. A chaperone was hired; hotels, cars, and local tour guides were reserved; and nearly every hour of the seven-week trip to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland was blocked out and accounted for in advance. The goal was for the quartet to be able to explore the continent without ever having to emerge from a protective bubble. Still, so soon after 1945 there could be no shielding the young travelers from sights and sensations well outside their accustomed sphere of life. England, where the wreckage of war remained everywhere evident, made the strongest impression on them. The American girls, with their wide-brimmed straw hats and elbow-length white gloves, happened to be traveling at a moment of acute international tension, when the Soviet decision to sever Western road and rail access to Berlin threatened to spark a third world war.

At a garden party at Buckingham Palace (to which Bow’s stepfather, Edward H. Foley Jr., undersecretary of the Treasury in the Truman administration, had secured an invitation for them), Jackie and the others went down the receiving line twice in order to shake the hand of Winston Churchill, like de Gaulle one of Jackie’s particular heroes. Though widely regarded as the savior of his country, Churchill had been hurled from power in 1945. At the time Jackie saw him, in 1948, Churchill, ignoring demands that he retire as head of the Conservative Party, was maneuvering to become prime minister again. He hoped to “round out” his career by settling the unfinished business left at the end of the war when the last of the Big Three meetings, the Potsdam Conference, had broken off without resolving the matter of the ongoing Soviet presence in Eastern and Central Europe.

Jackie came home at the end of August and spent the last days of summer at Hammersmith Farm. She was nineteen and her year was over. Ostensibly, as Number One Deb she had been more successful than most of her peers. Yet in the one way that really mattered, the deb experience had backfired for her. At length, having seen all the suitable bachelors, Jackie balked. “Not because of them,” she later said, “but because of their life.” The distinction was crucial. Previously, she had cast off Bev Corbin because of his individual limitations, as she perceived them. Now she was inclined to rule out the entire group of young men that had just been confidently presented to her as the cream of the haut bourgeois crop. Most were in business, finance, or law. It was by no means the idea of marriage she had rebelled against, just marriage to any of them. It certainly was not their money she objected to, just how they and their families chose to live with all that wealth. Having previewed what it would be like to be the committee-minded wife of one of these vanilla fellows, all with the right pedigrees and jobs, she realized it was not for her. There was a bland predictability to what they offered, and she was eager for an alternative. As to what that other option might be, she had yet to form a definite conclusion. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” Jackie said years afterward of the quandary that beset her when she was nineteen. “I was still floundering.” In conventional terms, her grand tour also had failed to work out quite as it was supposed to. Abroad, she had had her first hurried but tantalizing glimpses of some unfamiliar vistas. What she sought now was the chance for a more leisurely look.

She found it in the form of a notice on a bulletin board at Vassar, where she had begun her sophomore year. Smith, another of the elite Seven Sisters schools, offered a junior year of study in Europe. In the absence of such a program at Vassar, Jackie sought permission to join the Smith group. Her partner in the endeavor was another Miss Porter’s graduate who had gone on to Vassar, Ellen Gates. Puffin, as everyone called her, had been one of the Farmington girls who had thought Black Jack Bouvier a cartoonish dirty old man. At college, Puffin had sustained a friendship with Jackie based in part on the fact that both were exceedingly restless in Poughkeepsie, the Hudson River town where the campus was set. The friends also shared an interest in art. Unlike Jackie, however, Puffin had a steady boyfriend. Russell D’Oench Jr., who had attended the same prep school as Jackie’s old Newport beaux, was then working in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When he learned that Puffin intended to go to Paris for a year, he proposed that she marry him instead. In keeping with the perception of college as a convenient place to park oneself for a few years, it was routine for girls of their caste to drop out before completing a degree. Faced with the choice of Paris or a husband, Puffin chose the latter. Previously in letters to Bev, Jackie had flashed disdain for the insular, unadventurous life. Now again, she voiced her contempt in a poem addressed to Puffin. In the past, she had targeted cake-baking Farmington housewives. This time, she aimed her shafts at Puffin’s future mode of life. The mocking text read in part: “Instead of boating on the Seine, alas, Puffin’s floating down the drain in Pittsfield, Mass.”

And it was not just Puffin. Other girls Jackie knew were beginning to marry precisely the sort of young men she was so eager to elude. Clearly, the rites and rituals had not failed to work for everyone. It was only natural that this year a good number of the invitations accumulating in Jackie’s dormitory room were to engagement parties and weddings. Notable among the impending marriages was that of her friend Bow, with whom she had traveled to Europe the year before. In June 1949, Jackie served as Bow’s bridesmaid. As it turned out, she would not be available to do the same for Puffin. In August, Puffin was awaiting her September nuptials when Jackie sailed for France.

The Smith group went first to Grenoble for an intensive six-week language course. In October they moved on to Paris to study French civilization and history at the Sorbonne. Rather than live in a dormitory, Jackie preferred to board in a household where only French would be spoken. During the war, she had followed press accounts of the French Resistance. Now she landed in the apartment of a woman who, along with her late husband, had participated in the struggle against the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Eventually, both the Count and Countess de Renty had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where he perished. Four years after the war, the countess survived financially by taking in boarders. Fuel was so expensive that her rooms were often almost unbearably cold. Swathed in sweaters, scarves, earmuffs, and woolen stockings, Jackie, writing in graph-paper notebooks with mittened hands, did much of her schoolwork in bed. At sixteen, she had monitored the trial of Marshal Pétain and its aftermath. At twenty, she found herself in an environment where some of the very questions the Pétain affair had raised, about France’s anguished recent past, but also about its postwar future, were being played out daily. She loved experiencing Paris as she could never have done when she visited under more guarded and gilded circumstances. She enjoyed spending part of the day as a university student and then, as she wrote home, “like the maid on her day out, putting on a fur coat … and being swanky at the Ritz.” She prized the sense she had in France that in her dealings with others, men included, she need not conceal that she had a mind. Prior to her year in Europe, Jackie had lamented the stultifying sameness of the young men she knew and of the futures they seemed to offer. Paris suggested a bouillabaisse of other options. She dated authors, titled aristocrats, junior diplomats, political aspirants. The significance of these men in Jackie’s story is not that she actually considered marrying any of them. It is that by their very existence, they confirmed that there were positive alternatives to the life she had seen looming ahead of her in Newport and New York, a life she remained determined to avoid.

Still, that life continued to beckon when she returned to Newport late in the summer of 1950. There were new engagement announcements, new wedding invitations, and requests that she serve as a bridesmaid. Puffin, who had chosen not to accompany Jackie to Paris, had just had her first child. By the standards of her group, Jackie was simply not where she ought to have been at the age of twenty-one. By this point, many of the most sought-after men of her year had already been taken. To make matters worse, another massive wave of debutantes—younger, fresher, less familiar to the eye—was about to break in New York. Highlighting the pressure of fleeting time in Jackie’s case was that her sister Lee had already begun her deb year. The Bouvier girls had long been rivals, with Lee almost always cast as the lesser light. Nineteen fifty, however, was very much Lee’s period overall. Presented by her mother and stepfather at Merrywood, the family’s ivied Georgian-style winter home in Virginia, Lee made a second formal bow to society at the Junior Assembly in New York. Like her sister before her, she was crowned Queen Deb, but Lee differed from Jackie in being smaller, more fine-boned, and more exquisitely featured. At the time, she also tended to be the more stylishly dressed. Regarded as the prettier, sexier, and more accessible of the Bouvier girls, Lee was hugely popular with the young society men of whom Jackie claimed to want no part.

Loath to return to Vassar, Jackie transferred to George Washington University, where she majored in French while living at Merrywood. She had been in no hurry to come back from Europe, and now she yearned for the more flavorful life she had had there. In October she entered
Vogue
magazine’s annual Prix de Paris contest for female college seniors. The top prize was a yearlong junior editorship: six months at the New York office and, crucially from her point of view, six in Paris. Her submission materials included an arch account of herself (“As to physical appearance, I am tall, 5'7", with brown hair, a square face and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose”) and an essay on the three figures of history she would like to have known: Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Sergei Diaghilev. Jackie beat out more than a thousand girls from more than two hundred colleges, and was asked to report for her first day of work in the fall. In the meantime, Hughdie, under pressure from Jackie and Lee, had agreed to send the sisters to Europe for the summer, in honor of their graduation from George Washington and Miss Porter’s, respectively.

Before Jackie sailed in June, she accepted an invitation to dine at the home of friends in Georgetown. Charles Bartlett, a thirty-year-old correspondent for
The Chattanooga Times,
had first met Jackie some years before in East Hampton, Long Island, where the Bouviers summered, and he had dated her briefly in the interim. Now he and his wife, Martha, who had married the previous December and were expecting their first child, sought to play matchmaker. The purpose of the dinner party was to introduce Jackie to a thirty-four-year-old congressman from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy. As it happened, she had previously met her voluble, boyishly attractive, dryly humorous dinner partner, who had long, skinny arms and legs, long, pale lashes over ice-blue eyes, and a mop of reddish hair, and looked substantially younger than his age: When she was still at Vassar, Jack Kennedy, as he was known, had flirted with Queen Deb on a train between Washington and New York. At the time his efforts had come to naught, and so it was again in 1951 when at evening’s end he followed Jackie outside. “Shall we go someplace and have a drink?” Kennedy’s murmured invitation fell flat. While Jackie was at dinner, a male friend of hers had spotted her battered convertible parked in front of the Bartlett residence and had concealed himself in the backseat to surprise her. Having found him there, Jackie declined the drinks offer and drove off with her friend. Kennedy, an incorrigible skirt chaser, had made the effort expected of him by his hosts, but he was not so smitten that he attempted to call Jackie afterward. In any case, for all of Charles and Martha’s enthusiasm for the match, it hardly seemed to matter that Kennedy did not follow up. Jackie was soon off to Europe, and on her return was due to be away from Washington for at least a year.