Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (7 page)

As she made her way back from the altar on September 12, 1953, en route to face the swarm of press photographers outside, the newly minted Mrs. John F. Kennedy turned to look at something in the rear of St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Newport. There had been moments in recent weeks and days, even in the past few hours, when she too might have been tempted to call off “the whole thing” had it been possible. First, there had been the tense tango between her mother and Joe Kennedy. Janet insisted that the wedding be small, sedate, and, above all, private. Old Joe, of course, demanded big and splashy, with as much newspaper and magazine coverage as possible. It had hardly been a fair contest, for in Joe Kennedy Janet had finally confronted a superior will. By the day of the wedding, all of the various and tangled family factions seemed to be looking askance at one another. Jackie’s mother and stepfather were indignant at the vulgarity of the show occasion that had been foisted upon them. Janet, who purported to be of an old and illustrious Southern family when in fact her Irish grandparents had come over at the time of the potato famine, left no doubt of her opinion that Jack Kennedy was “not good enough” for her daughter. The Bouviers, proud of what they misguidedly believed to be their own noble origins, shared Janet’s view of the bridegroom’s family as “social-climbing upstarts.” But that did not prevent Janet, obsessed with ancient grievances, from communicating to her former husband that while she could hardly ban him from the church, he should know that he would be most unwelcome at the reception afterward at Hammersmith Farm.

Joe Kennedy, in turn, had contempt for the lot of them. For all the pains he had taken to show his son being welcomed into the bosom of the Wasp establishment, he sniffed that the wealth in Newport tended to be from a past era and that most residents were deeply in debt and just keeping up a front. Alert to any form of fakery because he was such a magnificent fake himself, he insisted that were one to pull the carpets up in many of the great houses, one was likely to find all the summer dirt swept underneath. The owners, it delighted him to point out, simply could no longer afford enough help to keep those enormous places running properly. On his son’s wedding day, it fell to old Joe to notify the press that the bride’s father had become ill at the last minute, requiring Hugh D. Auchincloss to walk her down the aisle in his stead. Joe mentioned something about the flu, but in truth Black Jack Bouvier had simply had too much to drink at his hotel the night before he was to face both sets of tormentors, the Auchincloss people and the Kennedy people, on enemy ground. Instead of providing courage for the fight, Bacchus incapacitated him before he reached the battlefield. Her father’s absence was a source of sorrow to Jackie, and that sorrow unavoidably tinctured the proceedings until the strange pregnant moment shortly after the ceremony when the sight of a familiar pair of wild eyes in the rear of St. Mary’s broke through the tension. The people around him began to laugh uncomprehendingly when John White waved a single dollar bill at Jackie, and soon the bride was laughing as well.

She had won the bet. She had brought it off. Jack Kennedy had married her after all.

 

Three

“How perfect it is being married,” Jackie exulted at the close of her honeymoon stay in Acapulco.

In the weeks before the wedding, she had mentioned to her future father-in-law that she had once glimpsed a house that seemed as if it might be an ideal setting for a honeymoon. Jackie had spotted the pink villa, which sat atop a red-clay cliffside overlooking a bay, while she was traveling in Mexico with her mother and stepfather. The image had beckoned in her thoughts ever since, though she had only seen the place at a distance and had no idea of its precise location. Before long, however, Joe Kennedy had found the property and arranged with the owner, a former president of Mexico, for the newlyweds to have it, along with a staff of three servants—Noisette, Margarita, and Angelica—for as long as Senator and Mrs. John F. Kennedy might wish to remain. So this apparently was what life promised to be like now that Jackie had comfortably established herself under the warmth of the wings of the Kennedys.

The pink stone house when she saw it again did not disappoint. On the contrary, she judged it the most beautiful place imaginable. She and Jack were immensely happy there, though, as she wrote, her new husband did seem a bit shy about showing how much he liked it. Sensing that he might be nervous on his first honeymoon, she assured his parents that she was being careful to leave him alone a few hours each day. Otherwise, Jackie spoke of their two weeks in Mexico mainly in superlatives. To her, Jack was just “unbelievably heavenly.” When they went deep-sea fishing together, the sailfish he caught was the most enormous seen in Acapulco all summer. When they water-skied around the bay, the sight of Jack leaping over the wake behind the boat prompted her to compare him to a lifeguard on the Riviera. (This, luckily, was one of those interludes when his unstable back was giving him a minimum of trouble.) She adored that the trio of Mexican maids found her husband beguiling and that for some reason the women refused to think the couple could really be man and wife. She delighted in the comic spectacle of Jack’s unaccustomed helplessness whenever he needed something from the servants but had to wait for her to translate his requests. He in turn teased her about her anxiety over how she would look in their wedding pictures in the new issue of
Life
magazine, a copy of which he and Jackie had yet to see. He jested that he might have to leave her in the event that when they reached the West Coast, Jackie’s appearance in the published photographs was not what it ought to be.

From Acapulco, the sojourners went on to Mexico City to attend a bullfight, before flying to Los Angeles, where Jack’s father had arranged for them to have the baroque Beverly Hills hilltop residence of the film actress Marion Davies, who had been a guest at their wedding. There, they watched their first movie together as a married couple, a silent comedy starring Miss Davies, in one of the mansion’s private screening rooms; took walks in the lush terraced gardens; and swam in a turquoise pool, which was bordered by ornate statuary and Venetian columns. The possibility that there might be a worm in the apple did not really present itself until the couple moved next to one of the vine-covered bungalows at San Ysidro Ranch in Santa Barbara, en route to San Francisco.

The worm seems to have appeared to Jackie by degrees. First, Jack arranged to join forces with another couple, his Navy friend Red Fay and Red’s wife, Anita, abruptly and unilaterally ending the only sustained period he and Jackie had ever been alone together. Then he began to spend a good deal of time speaking confidentially to Red, much as he had huddled with Torby MacDonald at the time of the engagement. Then he suggested that Jackie return to the East Coast, while he stayed on for a bit in California. Jack may have been shy about showing how much he liked their honeymoon house in Acapulco, but he displayed no such bashfulness when proposing that his young bride go home without him.

Jackie related the story of his strange request to Anita Fay, though she knew Anita hardly at all.

“What shall I do?” Jackie asked.

In the end she refused to fly home by herself, but not two weeks after she had remarked on how perfect it was being married to Jack Kennedy, perfection was a memory at most.

When she and Jack arrived in Hyannis Port, it became evident that rather than buy a house of their own, Jack intended for them to live indefinitely in the poky room in his family’s house that he had previously occupied by himself. He expected her to remain at the Cape during the week while he was off working in Washington. These living arrangements troubled her very much. Not only would she and her husband be apart most of the time, but also they would have no privacy when he came home for the weekend. Besides, to Jackie’s eye that awful room was really “only big enough for one.”

But none of this seemed to concern Jack. His priorities lay elsewhere. Now that he was a married man, suddenly everything in his political life was flying forward on greased wheels. He had accomplished little as a congressman, and his senatorial career to date had been equally undistinguished. Apparently all that was due to change, but rather than hear her husband’s plans directly from him, Jackie tended to learn of them in overheard fragments of family conversation. No one would tell her anything, not even when she inquired. On one occasion during that fall of 1953, she walked in on Jack and his father at a moment when the men seemed to be speaking of the vice presidency. Afterward, when she asked Jack point-blank, “Were you talking about being vice president?,” his only response was laughter. The ability to laugh at himself was part of Jack’s charm. And in this case laughter adroitly deflected Jackie’s query, as it no doubt was intended to do.

Though her questions went pointedly unanswered, it was hardly as if no one would talk to her. Joe Kennedy could scarcely have spent more time contentedly parleying with his new daughter-in-law. Indeed, he talked to her more than to his own daughters, which may have accounted in part for the Kennedy sisters’ coolness toward her. Kick while she lived had been “the only one” of his daughters he believed he could really talk to. At least to all outward appearances, the other sisters “bored” him. Now he and Jackie regularly indulged in what an observer described as long “wonderful” conversations reminiscent of those he had once enjoyed with Kick. Whether or not John White’s efforts to groom Jackie had had anything to do with it, old Joe seemed to have discovered in her something very much like “a substitute for Kick.” She bantered. She teased. She presented herself as someone unwilling “to take any guff” from him or any other member of the Kennedy tribe. (A merciless mimic, Jackie perfected a cruel imitation of Rose Kennedy, whose voice was said by one family friend to call to mind “a duck with laryngitis.”) At the same time she made it clear that she absolutely adored Jack’s father, and he in turn left no doubt that he was enchanted by her.

As Jackie was to learn, however, behind her back he was capable of speaking of her in tones of arctic expediency. Once, when she overheard her father-in-law conferring with Jack and his younger brother Bobby about Jack’s political future, she was surprised to hear herself mentioned as well. And the experience was by no means comfortable to her. “They spoke of me as if I weren’t a person,” Jackie said years later, “just a thing, just a sort of asset, like Rhode Island.”

All her life, Jackie had been very picky, very proud. Inclined to believe that she ought to have things exactly as she wanted them, she had waited until she saw just the type of man she would like to marry. And when that man had proven to be rather less than eager, she had not rested until he made his move at last. All of her maneuvers and travails in the marriage market, all of her efforts to escape the traps that the world she grew up in had contrived to set for her, had finally landed her in this small, spartan room on the first floor of her in-laws’ house where she slept alone most nights. A little bookshelf held certain of the volumes, many with mauve bindings, that Jack had first read when he was a sickly boy who was often confined to bed. These, she came to understand, were some of the books that had shaped her husband. Jackie could not help but be fascinated by them and by the tumultuous family drama in which they had played a part.

Early in life, Jack Kennedy had experienced what it is like to lay close to death. His first potentially fatal episode, a bout of scarlet fever, had occurred when he was just two years old. Rose Kennedy had been pregnant at the time, and having gone into labor on the day Jack’s ordeal began, she had been unable to come to his room. Nor had she visited him afterward lest she or the newborn be exposed. In Rose’s place, Joe had cared for the little invalid. He cradled Jack in his arms and faithfully lingered at his bedside. He left the child in no doubt that nothing else mattered except his survival and recovery. Joe subsequently reflected that he had been unprepared for the magnitude of his emotions when he grasped that it was possible Jack might die. Unable to comprehend why Rose had stayed away, the child bonded powerfully and permanently with his father. Rose may have had a reasonable excuse for absenting herself in this instance, but it was also the case that even in the best of times, she was just not physically demonstrative with her children. In later years, Jack would bitterly declare that he could not recall so much as a single hug from Rose. For parental affection, the boy had learned to rely on his father. Joe Kennedy, wonderfully, uninhibitedly emotional and tactile, was all that Jack had in this respect. To the child’s dismay, however, he was by no means all that his father had. Joe Kennedy had dedicated himself to Jack’s welfare when the boy was near death. Otherwise, more often than not he made the eldest son, Joe Junior, his priority. It was certainly not that Jack’s father did not really love him, only that he seemed to prize the robust young Joe, twenty-two months Jack’s senior, so much more.

To the father’s thinking, young Joe was the model boy, healthy, handsome, and strong. In this regard, frail Jack, with his ever-lengthening record of illnesses both grave and routine, could scarcely compete. If old Joe did not overtly encourage the bullying to which the smaller, weaker brother was routinely subjected, he surely countenanced it. But Joe Junior was not the only instigator of these brutal encounters, which often ended with the older boy smashing the younger one’s head against a wall. Despite the odds, Jack was known to incite countless fistfights with his brother. Jack longed to disrupt the pecking order by proving to their father that he too was the fierce, hardy kind of boy old Joe preferred. But in view of old Joe’s maxim, “We want winners, we don’t want losers around here,” Jack’s efforts were inevitably for naught. In these ludicrously ill-matched physical confrontations, he always seemed to get the worst of it. Yet, contrary to all reason, Jack, as stubborn as he was slight, kept rushing in for more.

Jack despised being restricted to bed, as he often was during his boyhood and teenage years. In any case, he managed to extract an advantage from these mortifying but unavoidable interludes. He used the time to read. The legends of King Arthur and the Round Table appeared on the shelf beside his bed. Then came works by Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, and Thomas Babington Macaulay. And then, titles by Winston Churchill, John Buchan, David Cecil, Duff Cooper, Edmund Burke, and others. Already physically out of harmony with the Kennedy atmosphere, Jack by his reading widened the breach. He also steadily, stealthily confirmed his belief that he was superior to his brother. Recasting delicacy in the form of refinement, he established himself, as Jackie would perceive years afterward, as the more imaginative of the two boys.

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