Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (6 page)

Never perhaps was it clearer that Jack would be wise to find a wife than it was during the poisonous 1952 presidential campaign, which overlapped with the Senate race. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee, was a bachelor, recently divorced. Republicans pumped out rumors that he was homosexual; that he had been arrested in two states on sex charges; and that he was known to friends by the female name “Adelaide.” At one point during the election contest, Senator Joseph McCarthy planned to allude to some of this material in public, but he backed off after Democrats threatened to retaliate by releasing hard evidence of the extramarital affair that the Republican candidate, Dwight Eisenhower, had conducted during the war when he was Allied Supreme Commander in Europe. While the Stevenson rumors were unfounded, Eisenhower had indeed once contemplated leaving his wife for his mistress. In any case, even Jack Kennedy, allergic to the very idea of marriage as he was, eventually acknowledged that his bachelor status was a liability; given his age and presidential ambitions, he had better marry lest his political opponents suggest that he too was homosexual.

Meanwhile, acute pain due to an unstable back caused Jack to be on crutches a good deal during the campaign. When Jackie traveled to Massachusetts to hear him speak, she marveled at the contrast between the “pathetic” sight of him struggling to ascend the steps to the speaker’s platform and the exhilarating sight of a man in full possession of his powers when he addressed the crowd. Such episodes made him seem so “vulnerable” to her, and so gallant. In 1952 just about anybody running as a Democrat seemed as if he might be politically vulnerable as well. After twenty years in power, the party of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman was widely thought to be paralyzed. A visit by Dwight Eisenhower to Massachusetts was meant to confer the savor of power and historical inevitability to the Lodge campaign. Undaunted, Joe Kennedy invested so much money in his son’s candidacy that it was jestingly said that a man could retire comfortably for the rest of his life on old Joe’s billboard budget alone. Robert Kennedy, Jack’s younger brother, oversaw a statewide campaign machine. The women of the family pounded on doors, presided over luncheon parties and teas, and harangued television viewers on Jack’s behalf. Members of the aristocratic cousinhood that had adopted Jack in prewar London came to lend support and watch him campaign, as he had observed certain of them during the British general election of 1945. Targeting right-wing displeasure with the politically moderate Eisenhower and Lodge, an ardent Republicans-for-Kennedy organization painted the Democrat in the Massachusetts race as a more militant and more reliable anti-Communist than Lodge. Jackie undeniably had a huge personal stake in the state contest. Quite simply, should Jack Kennedy fall victim to what threatened to be a nationwide Democratic rout, there would no longer be any immediate need for him to marry. If Lodge triumphed in Massachusetts, her hopes of becoming Mrs. John F. Kennedy were probably at an end. On election day, Eisenhower won 442 electoral votes to Stevenson’s 89. Republicans would be in charge in the Senate and House of Representatives as well. Massachusetts, however, marched to the beat of its own drum. “The first Irish Brahmin,” as Kennedy was called, defeated Lodge, “the Yankee blue blood,” by 70,000 votes. The senator-elect invited Jackie Bouvier to accompany him to Dwight Eisenhower’s inaugural ball in January 1953.

Nevertheless, in the months that followed, Kennedy persisted in dating various other women—including the actress Audrey Hepburn—and the hoped-for marriage proposal failed to materialize. Jackie could hardly any longer suggest to others, let alone tell herself, that her inattentive lover was too busy campaigning to undertake anything like a conventional courtship. Yet, at least in his presence, she continued to smile and chatter as if all were exactly as she wished it to be. She surprised him at lunchtime in his new Senate office with meals for two. She featured him in her “Inquiring Camera Girl” column, as it was now called, and on other occasions she peppered interviewees with weightier-than-usual questions (“Malenkov said all issues between the United States and Russia are solvable by peaceful means. Do you agree?”) that promised to draw Jack’s interest and impress him with her range. She pounced on every opportunity to sustain and strengthen her bond with his father. She stayed up late many nights at Merrywood reading and summarizing various French-language books that touched on the Indochina question in an effort to assist Jack in his work. “He has got to ask me to marry him after all I have done for him,” she later remembered assuring herself apropos of these translations. The danger, however, was that her actions threatened to put him on his guard. When it came to the women in his life, he did not like to feel that he was being pushed into anything. He expected to be the pursuer, not the pursued. In the latter case, desire all too easily turned to distaste. No matter how beautiful they might be, he had an aversion to women who, in his phrase, “won’t leave me alone!”

During this period, a number of people who cared about Jackie spoke to her about her predicament and offered advice. Frank Waldrop, who thought of her as just a kid, warned that Jack Kennedy was too old and experienced for her. John White, though he was certainly no monk himself, worried about the sort of life she would have were she to succeed in ensnaring a fellow as sexually promiscuous as Jack Kennedy. Since the two men had hunted some of the same prey, White was in a unique position to know just how promiscuous that was. In one of their conversations at the cave, Kennedy had described himself to White as a sexual maximalist, determined to snatch as much pleasure from life as he could in his allotted time. As a husband, he would no doubt be as faithless as his father had long and notoriously been to Rose Kennedy. White counseled Jackie not even to think of marrying Jack Kennedy. When she refused to be turned from her purpose, he bet her a dollar the wedding would never take place anyway.

Janet Auchincloss also thought Jack Kennedy unlikely to marry her daughter, but in contrast to John White, she very much wanted him to, given all that splendid Kennedy money. In the aftermath of her daughter Lee’s April 1953 marriage to Michael Canfield, who worked in publishing in New York and was rumored to be the illegitimate son of the Duke of Kent, Janet had begun to worry that Jackie had been using the wrong approach with Jack Kennedy. Jackie was always impatient to see him, always, as her mother lamented, much too obviously waiting for his call. On this one point, if on no other, Janet was in full-throated agreement with Black Jack, who had taught his daughters to play hard to get with young men and never to seem too eager or too available. In Janet’s view, Jackie would do well to stand somewhat aloof, to show Jack Kennedy that she had an interesting life of her own quite apart from anything he had to offer. To that end, the concerned parent shared some news of Jackie’s old Newport set. In the summer of 1945, the wedding of Aileen Bowdoin, the elder sister of Jackie’s friend Bow, to a returning serviceman and bearer of the Distinguished Flying Cross had been one of the premier events of the Newport social season. Many of the young people had attended the ceremony at Trinity Episcopal Church, and Jackie’s then-aspiring boyfriend Bev Corbin had served as an usher. Aileen had since divorced and was in need of a companion to travel with to London for the coronation. Janet suggested to Jackie that the
Times-Herald
would probably be happy to send her over to cover the crowning of Elizabeth II. If Frank Waldrop refused to supply a ticket, Janet was prepared to pay for it herself as an investment in her daughter’s future.

Jackie indignantly refused even to consider going abroad. Though it would not do to make Jack feel that he was being watched, she was not prepared to leave him entirely alone either. Besides, the trip would mean missing the wedding of Eunice Kennedy, with whom Jack had long shared messy and ill-furnished Georgetown living quarters that were said to resemble a fraternity house on the morning after an especially raucous party. There would never be any love lost between Jackie and “the Rah Rah Girls,” as she snidely referred to Jack’s sisters Eunice, Pat, and Jean, who mocked her in turn as “the Deb.” Still, it was only natural that Jackie would have hesitated to miss such an important family event at a moment when she was so desperately maneuvering to become part of the family.

In the end, however, Janet, a proven expert in the art of hunting down a rich husband, prevailed, and Jackie sailed to England after all. The stratagem appeared to work, for by the time Jack Kennedy met Jackie’s plane in Boston, on her return trip to the United States in June, he had proposed by telegram. There being considerable urgency on the Kennedy side to make the engagement public, Jackie supplied the same bridal portrait that had been used in the newspaper announcement of her engagement to John Husted. It could only be hoped that devotees of the society pages would not realize they had seen the picture before. In any case, as she was to discover, there would be plenty of time to take all sorts of interesting new photographs when she had her first joyous visit to Hyannis Port as Jack’s bride-elect.

Jackie sailing with her future husband, Jackie affectionately mussing Jack’s hair, Jackie discussing her recent marriage proposal with Eunice and Jean, Jackie playing softball and touch football with various Kennedy siblings, Jackie posing barefoot on the veranda—it is not too much to suppose that the happiness of the twenty-three-year-old woman in these images is authentic, though the situations were staged for the
Life
magazine photographers whom Joe Kennedy had wasted no time inviting in. Why should she fail to be pleased? Refusing to compromise or capitulate, she was finally about to get what she was after in life, was she not?

Not every aspect of the weekend was as bright as she might have hoped. Joe Kennedy had rather crassly transformed what ought to have been a private family celebration into a photo opportunity, and Rose Kennedy had condescended to lecture her on how to pose to maximum effect for the
Life
cameramen and even on how to pick out an engagement ring. Not for a moment, however, could Jackie afford to display any of the characteristic hauteur she had unrestrainedly shown in Bedford Hills the previous year. Writing afterward from Hammersmith Farm, she assured Jack’s mother, “Very few people have been able to create what you have—a family built on love and loyalty and gaiety. If I can ever come close to building that with Jack I will be very happy. If you ever see me going wrong I hope you will tell me—because I know you would never find fault unless fault was there.”

The photograph of the young lovers posed together on Jack’s sailboat, perhaps the most striking image in the series, appeared on the cover of the July 20, 1953, issue of
Life
magazine, along with the heading “Senator Kennedy Goes A-Courting.” Dedicated to Jackie’s visit to the Cape the previous month, the generous four-page photo spread within was Joe Kennedy’s way of blazoning to the world that “the handsomest young member of the U.S. Senate,” as Jack was referred to in the text, was a frivolous playboy no more. The theme of the piece was that while their courtship had officially ended with the engagement announcement, young Kennedy was so ardent that he was still courting her in the days that followed. Forty-eighty hours after publication, Joe Kennedy acted to ensure that Jack did not promptly undo all this fine repair work on his image. Aware that in fact Romeo was planning a spree in the South of France as soon as the Senate adjourned, Joe assigned a friend of Jack’s to watch out for him. “I am a bit concerned that he may get restless about the prospect of getting married. Most people do and he is more likely to do so than others,” he wrote to Torby MacDonald, who had been Jack’s roommate at Harvard, as well as a suitor of Kick’s. “As I told you, I am hoping that he will take a rest and not jump about from place to place, and be especially mindful of whom he sees.” Knowing that for his son such a trip inevitably meant girls, Joe Kennedy was determined that nothing be permitted to go wrong now that the countdown toward Jack’s September wedding day had begun.

Meanwhile, Torby also had been drafted to accompany “jittery” Jack whenever he visited his fiancée at Hammersmith Farm, and on the less frequent occasions when Jackie came to see him in Hyannis Port. The constant, looming presence of the former captain of the Harvard football team, talking confidentially to Jack, telling jokes, discussing sports and politics, and otherwise dancing attendance on him, can have added little to the romance of these weekend encounters between the bride- and groom-to-be. Torby’s mission on the impending trip to the South of France was clear. He was to protect Jack from exposure, an assignment that often meant picking up girls on his behalf and otherwise serving as a beard. But what exactly was there to shield Jack from at Hammersmith Farm? Apparently, the need to talk at any length to the partner of his future bliss. To his wife, Phyllis, who was pregnant at the time and not especially pleased about his prolonged absences, Torby spoke of his participation in these visits as if it were a solemn duty it had befallen him to fulfill. “You understand,” he declared, “I have to be with Jack now.” When they first saw Jackie, certain of Jack’s other friends were mystified by how all this had come about. To Jewel Reed, the wife of Jack’s Navy friend Jim Reed, she appeared “almost homely … an odd choice for him.” Similarly, Betty Coxe Spalding, who was married to his friend Chuck Spalding and had shared an apartment with Kick in wartime Washington, expressed astonishment that Jack had selected a bride so unlike the strikingly beautiful women he tended to favor.

Whatever one might say about Joe Kennedy, there can be no denying he knew his boy. In August, when much-thumbed-through copies of the July 20 issue of
Life
magazine were informing a whole new audience in barbershops and doctors’ waiting rooms throughout the United States that the recently engaged Senator John F. Kennedy was “like any young man in love,” the senator himself was in Cap d’Antibes speaking of love to precisely the sort of individual his father had been worried about. That afternoon, at a moment when Jack Kennedy happened to be fleeing from yet another of the myriad women in his life who, to his perception, refused to leave him alone, he had met a languidly lovely, twenty-one-year-old Swede named Gunilla von Post. This time, he claimed, his persecutor was an Italian contessa who had been chasing him in Antibes on a Vespa scooter. “I don’t know how to get rid of her. She’s driving me crazy.” Hours later, seated beside the delightfully less aggressive Swedish girl on the edge of a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean, Kennedy told Gunilla both that he had fallen in love with her in a matter of hours and that he was due to go back to the United States in a matter of days to get married. Not for the first time in his career, he emphasized that his destiny was what his father intended it to be. Portraying himself yet again as a reluctant participant in the signal events of his own life, Jack Kennedy wistfully declared that if only he had met Gunilla just one week before, he “would have canceled the whole thing.”