On November 29, 1963, a week after the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy in Dallas, his widow, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, summoned presidential chronicler Theodore H. White to the Kennedy family compound in Hyannis Port, on Cape Cod in Massachusetts. She wanted White to write an essay about her husband for Life magazine.
Jackie Kennedy spoke for four hours, with a “calm voice” and “total recall.” It was a rambling monologue about the assassination, her late husband’s love of history, dating from his sickly childhood, and her views on how he should be remembered. Well versed in the classics, she said she felt “ashamed” that she was unable to come up with a lofty historical metaphor for the Kennedy presidency. Instead, she told White, her “obsession” was a song from the popular Broadway show Camelot, by Alan Jay Lerner (a J.F.K. friend from boarding school and college) and Frederick Loewe, which had opened only weeks after Kennedy was elected. Jackie recounted to White that at night, before going to sleep, Jack Kennedy listened to Camelot on his “old Victrola.” “I’d get out of bed at night and play it for him when it was so cold getting out of bed,” she said. His favorite lines were at the end of the record:
White spent only 45 minutes writing “For President Kennedy: An Epilogue,” a 1,000-word reminiscence for *Life’*s December 6 issue. With close editing by Jackie Kennedy, the piece set forth the Camelot metaphor, which has defined the Kennedy presidency for four decades. At an exhibition of Jackie’s designer clothing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 2001 and 2002, the Lerner and Loewe tune played over and over, a soothing loop of background music.
“Jackie wanted to do Versailles in America,” said Oleg Cassini, her official dress designer. “She said this many times. She had realized some very smart women encouraged a court throughout history.” In particular Jackie admired Madame de Maintenon, who presided over a legendary salon before marrying Louis XIV, and Madame de Récamier, the early-19th-century hostess famous for the wit and intelligence of her gatherings.
Jackie organized her life in the White House according to what interested her, handing off many of the ritual obligations to others and delegating the paperwork to subordinates. “My life here which I dreaded & which at first overwhelmed me—is now under control and the happiest time I have ever known—not for the position—but for the closeness of one’s family,” Jackie wrote to her friend William Walton in mid-1962. “The last thing I expected to find in the W. House.”
Video: Exclusive JFK Clip: John and Jackie, the Early Years
On any given day, President Kennedy would be managing what veteran Democratic adviser Clark Clifford called “the cockiest crowd I’d ever seen in the White House,” a group of West Wing aides that National-Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy likened to “the Harlem Globetrotters, passing forward, behind, sideways and underneath.” During breaks, J.F.K. might swim in the White House pool (heated to 90 degrees for his ailing back) with his trusted factotum Dave Powers and a couple of fetching West Wing secretaries, or have a tête-à-tête lunch (grilled cheese, cold beef, consommé) with Jackie, or clap his hands three times to welcome his three-year-old daughter, Caroline, into the Oval Office.
Jackie, meanwhile, might be at the long table in the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House, smoking her L&M filtered cigarettes and scribbling memos on foolscap, or composing a letter to French culture minister André Malraux, one of her mentors. Perhaps she would be curled up with Marcus Cheke’s The Cardinal de Bernis: A Biography, or ducking into the White House school, in the third-floor solarium, where the squeals of children competed with the yelps of five dogs and the chirps of two parakeets.
In the evening Jack and Jackie would typically host a dinner for eight—a collection of close friends with an imported New York artist or writer as a “new face”—as Italian songs played softly on the Victrola. The Kennedys gave memorable private dinner dances as well—a half-dozen in less than three years—where waiters carried large trays filled with such exotic mixed drinks as the Cuba libre, a combination of rum, Coca-Cola, and lime juice. “They served the drinks in enormous tumblers,” recalled the writer George Plimpton. “Everybody had too much to drink, because they were excited.” State dinners set new standards for culinary excellence (with menus in French for the first time) and cultural entertainments, featuring Shakespeare’s sonnets and Jerome Robbins’s ballets. “It was Irish, which made it fun,” wrote television correspondent Nancy Dickerson, “and blended with the spirit of Harvard and the patina of Jackie’s finishing schools, the mixture was intoxicating.”
Behind the scenes, Kennedy engaged in private sexual escapades in the White House, Palm Beach, Malibu, Manhattan, and Palm Springs. Jackie knew what was going on, and confided as much even to certain administration officials such as Adlai Stevenson. But publicly she stoically chose to ignore her husband’s infidelities, which gave her greater latitude in her own life of foxhunting and hobnobbing with jet-set friends in Europe.
Some, like her friend Eve Fout in Virginia, saw occasional evidence of Jackie’s sadness and noticed that “she didn’t have the easiest marital situation.” Many assumed that Jackie simply shared the European aristocratic view that it was natural for husbands to stray. “All Kennedy men are like that,” she once told Ted Kennedy’s wife, Joan. “You can’t let it get to you, because you shouldn’t take it personally.” Jackie adored her father and her father-in-law, both of whom had been openly unfaithful to their wives. “She had made a bargain with herself,” said her longtime friend Jessie Wood. “She discovered Jack was a real philanderer, but she decided to stick it out. I think she loved him.”
Jackie’s instinct was to surround herself with familiar and trusted staff, starting with her secretary, Mary Gallagher, formerly employed by Jackie’s mother as well as by J.F.K. at his Senate office. For her social secretary, Jackie selected Tish Baldrige, who had been three years ahead of her at Miss Porter’s (often called Farmington, for the Connecticut town where the school is located) and Vassar, and was a friend of Jackie’s family.
Raised a Republican like Jackie, Baldrige had worn a VIXEN FOR NIXON button during the campaign, but quickly shifted her allegiance, praising J.F.K.’s “spunk and agility.” In the weeks following the election, Baldrige fielded a blizzard of handwritten memos (many illustrated with fanciful drawings) and a barrage of phone calls from Jackie, who was immersed in moving, selecting her wardrobe, planning White House cultural events, and mapping out what Baldrige called “a complete makeover of a tired, undistinguished, frumpy White House.” Jackie would call it a “restoration” based on scholarship because, she said, “redecorate” was “a word I hate.”
The day she came home from the hospital after giving birth to John junior on November 25, Jackie took a tour of the White House. She was struck, she later said, that it looked “so sad.” She immediately phoned her interior designer, Mrs. Henry Parish II—known to all as Sister—with her report. “Jackie did not have two big eyes,” recalled Parish. “She had a dozen. Every room was observed, down to the last detail.”
Jackie had grown up in an atmosphere of understated elegance at Merrywood in suburban McLean, Virginia, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, the homes owned by her stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss II. Gore Vidal, Jackie’s relative by marriage, once described Merrywood as “a bit Henry Jamesian ... deliberate quietude removed from 20th-Century tensions.” Jackie, he said, “tried to recreate Merrywood’s heavenly ambiance.” Good taste was in Jackie’s bloodstream, along with a basic knowledge of historic periods in the decorative arts. She was determined to bring history to life in the White House, but she also resolved to inject some liveliness. “I felt like a moth banging on the windowpane,” she said. “The windows ... hadn’t been opened for years.”
Jackie was equally preoccupied with her personal image. After studying sketches and fashion magazines, she corresponded with Oleg Cassini. Only days after her son’s birth, Cassini met with her for nearly four hours in her hospital room. At a time when women wore big skirts, pinched waists, and puffy sleeves, Jackie favored the clean lines and slender silhouette of Givenchy and his mentor, Balenciaga. She designated the 47-year-old Cassini as the designer of her official wardrobe. He would not be her exclusive supplier, although that was left unstated. In the authorized biography of her White House years, Jackie explained that she had wanted “a single person, an American and a man whom she had known for some years” so that “all information about her costumes could be controlled by a single source.” She could converse with Cassini in French, his first language, and he was steeped in the culture of 18th- and 19th-century Europe. When she asked for a dress in “Veronese green” or “Nattier blue,” he would instantly understand.
The Washington Post called Cassini a “wise-cracking ladies’ man” when his new position was announced. In Palm Beach and Manhattan, Cassini was friendly with Joe Kennedy, whose table at La Caravelle Cassini would fill with models and society girls. Jack’s father blessed his friend’s appointment by Jackie; he told Cassini, “Don’t bother them at all about the money, just send me an accounting at the end of the year. I’ll take care of it.”
From the first, Jackie had declined to meld into the overpowering Kennedy clan, where “Hey, kiddo” was a standard greeting. Jack Kennedy had married late, at age 36, and his family worried that “he’d be drawn away from them” by Jackie, who was 12 years younger than he. The Kennedy sisters “called her ‘the Deb,’ made fun of her babylike voice,” said Jack’s close friend Lem Billings, and tried to pull her into their high-intensity sports competitions. But Jackie resisted, figuring “why worry if you’re not as good at tennis as Eunice or Ethel when men are attracted by the feminine way you play tennis?”
Jackie and the sisters eventually accommodated each other, but she felt the greatest kinship with her 24-year-old sister-in-law, Joan, who struggled to become a Kennedy. Joan was musically talented, beautiful, with a curvy figure and a cascade of blond hair, but she could never shake her insecurity. “If only she had realized her own strengths instead of looking at herself in comparison with the Kennedys,” Jackie lamented years later.
Few visitors to the Kennedy household could bear Joe Kennedy’s cold, disapproving stare. Once, in Hyannis Port, Joe shot “the look” Jackie’s way when she arrived at lunch 15 minutes late. Joe was in what Jack’s friend Chuck Spalding called “one of his Emperor Augustus moods.... He started to give her the needle, but she gave it right back. Old Joe was always full of slang, and so she told him, ‘You ought to write a series of grandfather stories for children, like “The Duck and the Moxie” and “The Donkey Who Couldn’t Fight His Way out of a Telephone Booth.” ’ ” The table fell silent as everyone anticipated an angry reaction, but instead Joe “broke into an explosion of laughter.”
Perhaps because of Joe’s unabashed outspokenness, Jackie could talk frankly to him. Sitting together on the porch at Hyannis or the patio at Palm Beach, “they would talk about everything, their most personal problems,” Bill Walton said. “She relied on him completely, trusted him, and soon adored him.”
Joe went out of his way to please Jackie, not only because he liked her but also because he knew she was an asset for his son. When she wanted to buy a horse, Joe stepped up to pay for it, a gesture she accepted with care. Before proposing a “very quiet and beautiful” bay mare, she made numerous trips to Virginia and vetted 23 horses. “Honestly I can’t see the point of saving a couple of thousand dollars and not having a winner,” he wrote her. “You know all of us Kennedys don’t like second prize. So get the horse you like and send me the bill.”
After the exertions of the inaugural events, “I couldn’t get out of bed for about two weeks,” Jackie recalled. She often made such remarks for dramatic effect. In fact, Jackie left her room frequently. Wearing a casual white shirt, jodhpurs, and low riding boots, she propped herself on a large desk to greet the entire White House staff. She took walks around the 16 acres of grounds, poked through storerooms, removed “horrors” from the state floor, met with designers and consultants, and entertained friends. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead,” she said with a “conspiratorial twinkle” to J. B. West, the Executive Mansion’s household manager. “I want to make this into a grand house!”
Jackie was rigorously selective in her White House activities. “I was tired & I wanted to see my children,” she confided to Bill Walton, “so I just told Tish—who nearly died from the shock—that I would never go out—lunches, teas, degrees, speeches etc. For two months there was a flap. Now it is a precedent established.” She had been advised that there were “ninety-nine things that I had to do as First Lady,” and she later proudly boasted to Nancy Tuckerman, her oldest friend, that she had not “done one of them.”
From the outset Jackie wanted to bring Tuckerman into the White House. Brunette and blue-eyed but slightly mousy in both appearance and temperament, “Tucky” was to Jackie what Billings was to Jack: fiercely loyal and dazzled by Jackie’s “charismatic presence.” Tuckerman was a product of Manhattan and Southampton society, where she learned to play “all the accepted games competently.” She and Jackie had met at the Chapin School as nine-year-olds.
The White House restoration was the most obvious symbol of Jackie’s reinvented role. Obtaining high-quality antiques, art, and accessories was paramount, and Jackie moved quickly to assemble a group of wealthy collectors to help her—the Fine Arts Committee for the White House. Jackie’s most important decision was to appoint 80-year-old Henry Francis du Pont as chairman. His mansion at Winterthur, the 1,000-acre du Pont estate in Delaware, had been turned into a museum with more than 175 rooms of Americana—the finest collection in the nation. The involvement of a prestigious connoisseur such as du Pont conferred instant legitimacy on Jackie’s project.
Jackie’s aides had to meticulously plan du Pont’s visits to the White House from the minute he arrived in what he called “my cozy little Rolls.” “He would leave and we would have our tongues hanging out,” said Janet Felton Cooper, the secretary of the Fine Arts Committee. Over nearly three years, Jackie and du Pont would exchange more than 100 letters. His tone was invariably tactful and courtly, while hers was more outspoken and occasionally fretful: “That hall was getting so on my nerves I put anything decent I could find in it. It looks like a rather shabby shoproom now—but at least not like a hotel lobby.”
Their committee was not the formal organization it appeared to be: “purely a creation of my friends,” Jackie said later, “and some people I did not know but whom I thought ... would give donations!!” A New York doctor recounted how Jackie “talked with me for hours, showing me how sad and forlorn various White House rooms looked. She never once asked me to ... give her anything. But when I left, I found myself promising her a mirror for which I had turned down a $20,000 offer.”
In the course of three years Jackie would pull in more than $1.5 million (approximately $9 million at today’s values), and she also obtained gifts of specific furnishings and artwork, including priceless portraits of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, as well as a Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale. The Peale was her favorite, and it meant even more because the donor was Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, one of Jackie’s two close friends who served on her Fine Arts Committee. Bunny and her billionaire husband, Paul Mellon—renowned art collector, philanthropist, and Thoroughbred breeder—were the 20th-century equivalent of Edith Wharton’s van der Luydens, who “stood above all of them” and “faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight”: shy and gentle, the ultimate in discernment, seldom seen on the party circuit.
Bunny and Jackie were bound by background and deep affinities. The daughter of Gerard Lambert of the pharmaceutical family (“the man who used to own Listerine,” Rose Kennedy once said after a golf game with him), Bunny was an heiress who had lived at Carter Hall, a columned mansion on a large plantation in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. She was educated at Foxcroft, a southern version of Farmington. She had a pretty, fine-featured face kept defiantly unadorned, and she wore classic clothes created by Jackie’s favorite designer, Hubert de Givenchy.
Shortly after the birth of Caroline, when Jackie was 28 and Bunny was 46, they were introduced over tea by their mutual friend Adele Douglas, the sister of Fred Astaire and the wife of Kingman Douglas, who owned an estate next to the Mellons’. “I loved your house, but I don’t like mine,” Jackie said to Bunny after their first meeting. Jackie worshipped Mellon’s balance of elegance and comfort. Oak Spring, the cheerful Mellon “farmhouse” in Upperville, Virginia, with its “natural shabbiness” and French accents, sparked Jackie’s imagination. “I even loved the stale candies in the antique jars,” she told Mellon. “Bunny was pleased and flattered,” said Tish Baldrige, “to have this beautiful young woman hanging on her every word.” They were temperamentally compatible as well—controlled, soft-spoken, and instinctively private. “What appealed to Jackie was the easy way Bunny handled everything, and her peace of mind,” said Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill.
Less obvious was the model Bunny offered for a marriage with ample space for separate lives. In many ways the Mellons were a devoted couple who revered each other’s intelligence and aesthetic sense, but their relationship was complicated. Although Paul was naturally reticent, his hobbies, particularly foxhunting and Thoroughbred racing, kept him engaged in the outside world. Bunny became more remote even as she indulged in frequent travels, especially to Paris. “She has a moat and drawbridge around her,” said Baldrige. Both Paul and Bunny consulted Freudian psychoanalysts to help them deal with their emotional inhibitions.
With the arrival of Jackie at the White House, Bunny had a new mission that kept her more frequently in Virginia and Washington. Her signature contributions were redesigns of the Rose Garden and East Garden, but she was constantly on call for advice. “What does Bunny use to replace ghastly brass doorknobs?,” Jackie asked in one of her numerous memos. At Bunny’s suggestion, the Eisenhower era’s “lugubrious Victorian palms” gave way to “topiary trees in Versailles tubs.” She often supplied blossoms for White House events from her own greenhouses.
Jackie’s other mentor was a less intimate but comparably influential friend. Jayne Larkin Wrightsman had the same compulsion for privacy as Bunny Mellon, but while Jayne was supremely refined she was also self-invented. If Bunny preferred expensive simplicity, Jayne represented the “Louis Louis” opulence of ormolu, parquetry, and gilded boiseries. Like her husband, Jackie put her friends in compartments. In this instance, she looked to Mellon on matters of taste and to Wrightsman for rigorous scholarship.
A midwesterner from modest circumstances who had worked as a shopgirl in Beverly Hills, Jayne had flair that attracted the attention of oilman Charles Wrightsman. After their marriage in 1944, Charlie and Jayne set out to conquer society as collectors of fine French furniture and objects, as well as old-master paintings. With a net worth of $100 million, Charlie had plenty to spend. He drove Jayne relentlessly to learn about art and décor, and to master the French language. She read books and quizzed experts such as famed art critic Bernard Berenson.
Jayne’s most important tutor was Stéphane Boudin, who headed Jansen on the Rue Royale, an antiques dealer as well as atelier that employed 650 craftsmen and designers. In 1959, Charlie Wrightsman, a committed Republican, asked Boudin if he would work with Jackie on her Georgetown house. Charlie advised that it could be useful to meet her because “who knows—she may someday be First Lady.” During his visit that May, Boudin sold Jack and Jackie two antique rugs that they paid off at $100 a month. “I’m still in a glow over the day with him,” Jackie reported to Jayne, pronouncing Boudin “an enchanting, brilliant man.”
With Sister Parish, the ultimate in Wasp chic, as her decorator of record, and Harry du Pont as her official consultant, Jackie seemed to have her team in place. But Jackie wanted Boudin’s imprimatur as well. Having worked on the great houses of Europe, among them Buckingham Palace and Josephine Bonaparte’s Malmaison, he was accustomed to grand historical settings. As early as February 3—three weeks before the formation of the Fine Arts Committee—Boudin arrived at the White House for a secret four-day visit with Jackie. He suggested changes from top to bottom “to represent the United States in a bit more elegant and refined way.”
After word of the visit leaked into the press, Jackie decided to keep his involvement from the public even as she considered him her “primary visionary.” Chattering and sharing jokes in French, Jackie got along famously with the 72-year-old Boudin, who was diminutive, effervescent, and impish. Jayne Wrightsman was Jackie’s co-conspirator in an elaborate minuet with Boudin, du Pont, and Parish. Both Jayne and Jackie were skilled at presenting Boudin’s ideas as their own, to avoid offending Parish and du Pont. When Boudin had the brown stone mantels in the East Room painted to resemble white marble, du Pont praised Jackie for her “stroke of genius.”
Jack Kennedy took a keen interest in the restoration. He had not been raised to appreciate the decorative arts—nor the visual and performing arts, for that matter. The Kennedys had large houses with furnishings “that could survive the marauding swarms of children who wrought havoc there,” recalled Oleg Cassini. “They didn’t even own any paintings anywhere until very late,” said Walton.
When Jack married Jackie, “he really had no idea about how you should decorate a room, or what was the difference between a pretty house and an ugly house,” said David Ormsby Gore, Britain’s ambassador during the Kennedy years. At first, J.F.K. resisted Jackie’s insistence on “fancy stuff,” but according to Gore, “gradually he came to appreciate good taste” and to admire Jackie’s “instinct for excellence.” When two dust-covered side chairs originally made for President Monroe arrived, Kennedy was so delighted that he asked that they be wrapped and tied with bows so that he could present them to Jackie himself.
Jackie structured her life to allow her to spend as much time with Caroline and John as she wished. The Kennedys enjoyed the luxury of an English nanny named Maud Shaw, who had been with the family since Caroline was 11 days old. Shaw lived in a spartan room between the children’s bedrooms, on the second floor. “She won’t need much,” Jackie cracked to J. B. West. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.” Red-haired and droll, Shaw oversaw daily logistics, reinforced Jackie’s emphasis on good manners, and was the principal disciplinarian.
Jackie’s involvement with her children was striking for a woman of her class, where formality and emotional distance were the rule. In Georgetown, Jackie had participated in a playgroup that mothers took turns hosting at their homes. “She was a remarkable mother, the way she spoke and engaged the children,” said Sue Wilson, who had also known Jackie at Vassar. Jackie declined to “talk down” to children. As a surprise for Jack, she taught Caroline at age three to memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig” and “Second Fig,” two short poems with more sophisticated language than standard nursery rhymes. Yet Jackie also had what White House curator James Ketchum called “a tremendous sense of play.” “Let’s go kiss the wind,” she would say to Caroline. Jackie valued the imagination of children—“a quality,” she noted, “that seems to flicker out in so many adults.”
In order to shield Caroline from prying eyes, Jackie asked the playgroup mothers—who included Jane Saltonstall, daughter-in-law of the Republican senator from Massachusetts, and Cathy Mellon Warner, daughter of Paul Mellon and wife of John Warner, the future Republican senator from Virginia—to move their gatherings to the White House. “Jackie thought it would be more natural for Caroline,” said Sue Wilson, “to demystify the place, to make it less cold and formidable, to have kids scampering in the long hallways.”
The mothers were wary at first, fearful that publicity would violate their privacy. But J.F.K. promised that the names of the seven children would be tightly guarded, so the playgroup was organized as a cooperative, with the parents paying all expenses. For the first four months, Anne Mayfield, a graduate of the Bank Street College of Education, supervised the group. The following fall she was joined by Jaclin Marlin, who had a master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Marlin and Mayfield ran the White House nursery school—expanded to 14 children—for two mornings a week during its first full year. Jackie designed a playground on the South Lawn and a schoolroom in the third-floor solarium.
Video: The Best-Dressed Women of All Time: Jackie Kennedy
Jackie had breakfast on a tray (orange juice, toast and honey, coffee with skim milk), surveyed the morning papers, and played with John on her bed. After pushing John in his pram, she liked to take a brisk walk, play tennis, usually with her favorite Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, or jump on a canvas trampoline on the South Lawn that she surrounded with seven-foot holly trees for privacy. She avoided the White House pool because the 90-degree temperature was too warm for her taste, although she did train with light weights in the adjacent fitness room. (“Typically,” columnist Stewart Alsop wrote to a friend, “when Jackie surprised [J.F.K.] and two other men swimming bare ass ... the other men were reporters.”) At first she had toyed with the idea of an office in the East Wing, which reminded economist John Kenneth Galbraith of “the reception room in a Radcliffe dorm.” But like her predecessors, she chose the seclusion of the private quarters.
The Kennedys had their own bedroom suites, in keeping with the upper-class practice of the day. Jackie’s was the larger, accessible through a doorway on the living room’s south side. The main entrance to Jack’s was from the Center Hall, opposite the children’s bedrooms. Jack’s and Jackie’s bedrooms were connected by a dressing room that Jackie furnished with a stereo system for her husband’s nighttime listening. The immediacy of the First Couple’s most intimate quarters sometimes startled visitors, especially when they were directed to use the president’s bathroom. Many dinner parties wound down in J.F.K.’s bedroom as he walked around “without the slightest embarrassment,” noted journalist Ben Bradlee, removing his socks and trousers and unbuttoning his shirt as “the last guests [were] bidding one another witty farewells.”
Jackie usually spent several hours in the late morning plowing through folders neatly stacked in a straw basket by Tish Baldrige, writing memos and personal letters in her refined, rounded hand, and dictating instructions on household matters to Mary Gallagher. She never kept a journal, remarking, “I want to live my life, not record it.” She had a light lunch of broth and a sandwich and rested after her maid had changed the sheets from the previous night.
Since her teens, Jackie had followed a meticulous beauty regimen that included sprinkling cologne on her hairbrush (“fifty to one hundred strokes ... every night”), glistening her eyelashes with a pinch of skin cream, and applying powder before and after lipstick (“should stay on through ... corn on the cob”). She was disciplined about her weight—120 pounds—and watched the scale “with the rigor of a diamond merchant counting his carats,” said Tish Baldrige. If Jackie added just two pounds, she would fast for a day, then confine herself to a diet of fruit while increasing her exercise time.
Jackie was, however, hopelessly addicted to the filtered L&Ms that she kept in a barrel-shaped gold cigarette case containing a small lighter—a gift from her brother-in-law Stas Radziwill. “She was always smoking, ever since I can remember,” said her longtime friend Vivian Crespi. “Even if she would take a few puffs and put it down, she sort of needed it. She smoked all through her pregnancies, but we didn’t know at the time that it was harmful.”
Afternoons for Jackie were given over to reading, painting watercolors on an easel in a corner of her bedroom, or going on outings with the children in her blue Pontiac station wagon. Camouflaged by a headscarf and an old trench coat over her jeans and sweater, she moved about the city unrecognized, taking her children to the circus or theater, with several Secret Service agents unobtrusively nearby. At Caroline’s ballet recitals, “Jackie had a way of rendering herself anonymous,” recalled Anne Truitt, whose daughter attended the White House school.
Even when Jackie made a commitment, she could easily duck out, confident that Baldrige would find an instant substitute from a group of women “on call” that included Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, as well as Rose Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and J.F.K.’s sisters. Once when Ethel Kennedy was filling in, Barbara Gamarekian of the press office heard that Jackie was playing tennis on the White House court. “I was lying through my teeth, saying Jackie wasn’t feeling well,” she recalled. “I had visions of someone walking along the Ellipse, where the tennis court was visible, visions of being caught in a lie, and I resented being put in that position.” From time to time Jackie got caught “playing hooky”—as she did to Kennedy’s embarrassment when he told June Havoc and Helen Hayes that she was ill, only to have the newspapers disclose that Jackie had been riding in Virginia with the tony Orange County Hunt instead.
Jackie spent more than three months—two in Hyannis Port followed by nearly six weeks at Hammersmith Farm—away from Washington in the summertime. She had also become accustomed to staying for as long as a month at a time in Palm Beach at Christmas and Easter. Jack would join her for weekends, and at Newport for his vacation of several weeks.
With the help of Bill Walton, Jackie secured herself a refuge at nearby Glen Ora, a 400-acre estate the Kennedys rented in Middleburg, Virginia. (Jackie preferred the verdant hunt country to Camp David, the rustic mountaintop presidential retreat in Maryland.) The early-19th-century six-bedroom house of beige stucco was “comfortable and unpolished,” said Ken Galbraith, “in the trim countryside of the farming and non-farming rich.” The Secret Service fortified the estate with gates and guardhouses, and built a heliport. Jackie belatedly discovered that the property was also a pig farm, so she had to wait until the stalls had been cleared before she could stable her horses, Bit of Irish, a frisky bay gelding, and the more seasoned piebald, Rufus.
Unlike the White House, where tourists peered through fences at the First Family’s activities on the South Lawn, and waiters served the children hamburgers on silver trays, Glen Ora offered the illusion of down-to-earth freedom. “Jackie wanted her kids to have what she grew up with, and to make their lives normal and fun,” said Eve Fout. “She applied effort and ingenuity to that.” Within the spacious boundaries of Glen Ora, Caroline rode her pony, Jackie took the children on picnics in a cave, and in the evenings she enjoyed “giving them baths & putting them to bed—reading—the things I have no chance to do in the W. House.”
The unencumbered life in Virginia was crucial to Jackie. She could buy a cup of coffee in town without being gawked at, slip over to Bunny Mellon’s for a visit, or grill steaks in the fireplace at the home of Eve Fout and her husband, Paul. “I do not consider myself a part of the hunt-country life,” she told Eve. “I appreciate the way people there let me alone.” The Fouts were Jackie’s quintessential country friends. She had known Eve since she was a teenager, when Eve attended Miss Hall’s, a girls’ boarding school in western Massachusetts, and they competed on the horse-show circuit.
Most Thursdays, Jackie would leave for Virginia with Caroline and John, not returning to the White House until Monday afternoon. Accompanied by friends, Jack would join the family for Saturday and Sunday. Jackie was passionate about horses and foxhunting, which appealed to her romantic spirit and allowed her to lose herself in the excitement of galloping behind baying hounds. She was a fine and fearless rider, “very, very good,” said Janet Whitehouse, whose husband, Charlie, hunted with Jackie for four decades. “She would jump anything and go very fast.”
Jack Kennedy, however, barely tolerated the countryside and what Ben Bradlee described as the “hunt-country hangers-on.” J.F.K. liked to visit the Mellons and Adele Astaire Douglas, but otherwise he spent his time taking long naps and playing backgammon with Lem Billings, who came along most weekends to keep him company. The two old friends would often escape boredom by driving around the countryside to look at old houses and check out where various people lived.
Kennedy welcomed having a place to entertain friends away from the White House, but he far preferred to sit with them on the fantail of the 92-foot presidential yacht, Honey Fitz, in Nantucket Sound. “The whole reason for Glen Ora was to be nice to Jackie,” said Paul Fout. At first Jackie tried to entice her husband to ride, and outfitted him with a jacket and jodhpurs from Miller’s in New York. “He looked like Ichabod Crane with his legs flying,” recalled Ben Bradlee. “I think he liked the idea of it, but didn’t know what he was doing.”
Jackie arranged their White House social life in tiers from the least to the most formal. The Kennedys’ intimate dinners—with one to three other couples—were usually hatched late in the day after Jackie had assessed her husband’s frame of mind. “He was seldom sure in the morning what his mood would be in the evening,” she said. Jackie would signal Evelyn Lincoln, Jack’s secretary, to phone the invitations, sometimes as late as six p.m. The atmosphere at these get-togethers was so nonchalant that Bill Walton took to calling the White House “the pizza palace on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Jackie’s more elaborate dinner parties, which she gave every 10 days or so, invariably included “stimulating people”—diplomats, artists, actors, writers, summoned from as far as California and Europe, the names often supplied by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Oleg Cassini. Jackie preferred such gatherings to the “social treadmill” of cocktail parties. The small dinner could be “awfully valuable,” in Jackie’s view, because “men can talk to each other afterwards.... The French know this.... If you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere where the surroundings are comfortable, the food is good, you relax, you unwind, there’s some stimulating conversation.... It’s part of the art of living in Washington.”
The capstone of one visit made by Lee and Stas Radziwill was a White House dinner dance, on Wednesday, March 15, 1961. Besides friends, family, administration insiders, and favored journalists, the list of 70 invitees included such exotic personalities as the Aga Khan and the artist Ludwig Bemelmans. Guests mingled in the East Room for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before drifting into the Red Room and State Dining Room, where nine round tables for eight were covered in yellow linen with white, embroidered organdy top cloths, and decorated with low vermeil baskets of spring flowers. After a dinner of saumon mousseline à la normande, poulet à l’estragon, grilled tomatoes, and casserole marie blanche, everyone danced in the Blue Room to Lester Lanin’s orchestra until three a.m.
Lee wore a red brocade gown, and Jackie was in a “dramatic white sheath.” Jackie danced just once with Jack, who typically felt uncomfortable on the dance floor. Instead, he “moved from one group to another, a glass of champagne in his hand,” wrote Schlesinger. “Never had girls seemed so pretty, tunes so melodious, an evening so blithe and unconstrained.” Stewart Alsop observed that, with “champagne flowing out of every available crevice,” the evening had a “slight speakeasy quality since the whole thing was supposed to be kept quiet because of Lent.”
Even more revealing, although only in retrospect years later, was the choice of Jack’s two dinner partners, which made “the Beautiful People from New York seethe with disbelief,” according to Ben Bradlee. Sitting on either side of the president were the famous Pinchot sisters, Bradlee’s wife, Tony, and her sister Mary Meyer, two of Washington’s most alluring women. Tony already knew that Jack Kennedy was attracted to her, because he had made several unsuccessful passes.
“Jack was always so complimentary to me, putting his hands around my waist,” she recalled, “I thought, Hmmmm, he likes me. I think it surprised him I would not succumb. If I hadn’t been married maybe I would have.” Kennedy was equally drawn to Mary, but it would be months before he would instigate their clandestine affair. That evening he was in a jovial mood as he chatted during dinner. Afterward he linked arms with Mary and Tony, and when they entered the Blue Room he exclaimed, “Well, girls, what did you think of that?”
The “girls” Kennedy entertained in the State Dining Room were the least of his dalliances in the spring of 1961. His amorous life included Judith Campbell, the lover of mobster Sam Giancana, and, farther out on the periphery, Marilyn Monroe, with whom J.F.K. had been linked since they were seen during the Democratic convention dining at Puccini’s, an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills.
But J.F.K. also had lovers who were part of his inner circle, including Helen Chavchavadze, a 27-year-old brunette divorcée with two young daughters. She was the first cousin of John Husted, the man Jackie had thrown over to marry Jack, as well as a classmate of Jackie’s sister, Lee, at Farmington. Helen “was just gorgeous,” said Ben Bradlee, “totally pretty, well educated, and interesting.”
During the summer of 1960, Chavchavadze was teaching part-time and finishing her college degree at Georgetown University when she got a call from Charley Bartlett (the journalist who had introduced Jack and Jackie) inviting her to a dinner party. Kennedy, who was then only weeks away from the Democratic nomination, had specifically requested her presence. After dinner, as she was driving home to Georgetown in her Volkswagen Beetle, J.F.K. pulled up beside her in his white convertible. “He followed me home,” she said. “I had an affair with Jack, and it began then.”
J.F.K. once sent her a note from the campaign scribbled on Butler Aviation stationery saying he planned to see her the following week. “One of the reasons is to discuss the education matter,” he wrote. “There are, however, other reasons.” “A little innuendo,” Chavchavadze recalled. “I was surprised he pressed me, but I was up for it, too.”
A few weeks after the inauguration, he walked into her house, which was across the street from his church in Georgetown, with Florida senator George Smathers. “By his appearance he was saying, ‘I am a free man. The Secret Service are not going to stop me,’” she said. Kennedy would invite her for intimate evenings when Jackie was away, and Jackie would include her on the guest lists for dinner dances and small dinner parties—the last of which was nine days before the assassination. “I never knew if Jackie knew, but I felt uncomfortable about her,” said Chavchavadze. “I always felt ambivalent and wanted to end it.... I was never someone who had extramarital affairs. It was not my style, but it was irresistible with Jack.”
Both Jack and Jackie insisted on absolute loyalty from their friends, yet J.F.K.’s profound disloyalty defined their marriage. While she would cut friends who had violated her trust, Jackie feigned ignorance about her husband’s behavior. Arthur Schlesinger said many years later that he believed the Kennedys had exercised “reciprocal forbearance,” and that, for the sake of harmony, “Jackie didn’t press” her husband. Still, she had great antennae and was far more aware of his activities than she let on.
On one occasion Jackie was taking a reporter from Paris Match on a White House tour. Jackie “walked into Mrs. Lincoln’s office and said hello to Mrs. Lincoln, and [Lincoln’s assistant] Priscilla [Wear] was sitting there,” recalled Barbara Gamarekian in her oral history at the Kennedy Library. “Mrs. Kennedy turned to him and said, ‘This is the girl who supposedly is sleeping with my husband’ in French.”
The idea of taking her own lovers had crossed Jackie’s mind when Jack was in the Senate. “She told me she knew Jack had affairs,” said Tony Bradlee. “She was pondering maybe doing it herself. I don’t think she did, but she seemed a little sad at that point.” Once Jack became president, the risks of such behavior escalated. Instead of lovers, Jackie sought friendships with some of J.F.K.’s closest advisers.
Robert McNamara periodically had dinner with Jackie, who introduced him to the work of Gabriela Mistral, the Chilean Nobel laureate known for passionate poems about love and nurturing. The First Lady and secretary of defense read Mistral’s poems together, and Jackie admired McNamara because “he was very quick and very affectionate,” said Lee. There was also something vaguely romantic about the hint of torment behind his crisp smile. “Men can’t understand his sex appeal,” Jackie said. “She was flirtatious,” recalled McNamara.
Jackie also sought the company of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson, who was old enough to be her father. He frequently escorted her to the ballet and opera in New York, entertained her at his apartment, and called her “my little friend Jackie.” For Valentine’s Day one year she gave him a painting she had made in his honor. “There was genuine affection,” said Stevenson adviser John Sharon. “They always kissed whenever they met.” Stevenson’s sister, Elizabeth Ives, believed Jackie “had troubles that she liked to discuss” with Stevenson.
Jackie’s most unusual relationship with a man outside her marriage was completely secret—and therapeutic in its purpose. Denial worked only up to a point; Jack’s promiscuity caused her anxiety and depression, and she needed to talk about it. Because of her position, Jackie could not seek professional counseling, so she managed to find help through a serendipitous encounter with Dr. Frank Finnerty, a friend and neighbor of Bobby Kennedy’s in McLean, Virginia. Finnerty was a 37-year-old cardiologist and professor of medicine at Georgetown University—good-looking, charming, and Catholic.
In the spring of 1961, during a visit to Bobby’s home at Hickory Hill, in Virginia, Jackie got lured into one of the family touch-football games. While trying to catch a pass, she tripped and sprained her ankle. Bobby asked Finnerty to treat her, and Jackie was taken with his warm and straightforward manner. When she called the following week to report on her progress, “she startled me by asking if I would mind if she called me once in a while, just to talk, to get an independent opinion,” recalled Finnerty.
In her whispery voice Jackie concentrated initially on her concerns about J.F.K.’s infidelity. “She wanted me to know she was not naïve or dumb, as people in the White House thought,” said Finnerty. “She did know what was going on. This conversation shocked me.” She said the Secret Service was covering up for her husband, and she was bothered that many people, especially reporters, “thought she was strange and aloof, living in a world of her own.” She reeled off the names of J.F.K.’s various women, none of whom Finnerty recognized, with the exception of Marilyn Monroe, who “seemed to bother her the most.”
Eventually Jackie acknowledged that sex with J.F.K. was unsatisfactory because “he just goes too fast and falls asleep,” and she wondered if she had somehow failed him. Using clinical words he feared would offend her, Finnerty offered specific advice about helping Kennedy to make sex more enjoyable for her by engaging in foreplay. “Nobody had ever talked to her this way,” said Finnerty. Together they scripted an approach she could use with J.F.K. to discuss their sex life without offending his masculinity. She would portray herself as being “left out” of the sexual experience and talk in a factual way about how he could help her.
As planned, Jack and Jackie had the conversation over dinner, and she reported to Finnerty that their sexual relations became more satisfying as a result. When J.F.K. asked how she could speak so authoritatively, she told him a priest in confession had recommended she consult her obstetrician, who had suggested several books. “Kennedy never thought she would go to that much trouble to enjoy sex,” said Finnerty. “This impressed him.” J.F.K. didn’t abandon his womanizing ways, but Jackie no longer had reason to believe that their difficulties with sexual intimacy had been her fault.
The Washington social whirl peaked in the fall of 1961. Jackie was more finicky than ever about the social ambience she created. “She crawled on the floor among diagrams as she arranged the complex seating. She went over menus minutely,” wrote Hugh Sidey, of Time magazine. Her judgments could be severe, as when she rejected Tish Baldrige’s plea to include Scottie Lanahan, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s daughter, in a state dinner. “The 2 times I’ve seen Scotty [sic] she has gotten quite tight & really made a slight spectacle,” Jackie scribbled on the guest list. “Some other time.”
Out at Glen Ora, Jackie frequently rode with both the Piedmont and Orange County Hunts. In November, her frisky mount, Bit of Irish, tossed her over a post-and-rail fence. Her fall was captured by a local photographer and would later be splashed across two pages of Life. At the hunt breakfast following the meet, no one knew about the First Lady’s spill. “Jackie didn’t look the least disheveled or shaken up,” recalled her hostess, Kitty Slater. Jackie arrived with Eve Fout, shed her cork-lined velvet cap and riding coat, and stood in her shirtsleeves and canary vest, sipping Dubonnet on the rocks.
Jackie now began to put her strong cultural imprint on state occasions, arranging a Shakespeare performance on a new East Room stage for President Ferik Ibrahim Abboud of the Sudan, and a concert by cellist Pablo Casals for Governor Luis Muñoz Marín of Puerto Rico. In response to a White House request for “red meat” after dinner, the Shakespearean excerpts included the murder scene from Macbeth as well as passages from comedies. The presentation evoked “the polite drawing room evenings of Shakespeare commanded by Queen Victoria,” The New York Times reported.
The Casals evening inspired similarly royal allusions, with Time comparing it to “a concert led by Haydn at the court of the Esterhazys.” The 153 guests included major American composers and conductors in white-tie and tails. “English royalty entertains movie stars,” said composer Gian Carlo Menotti. “Our president entertains artists.” Wearing a chartreuse beaded gown by Cassini, Jackie presided over the evening like “a willowy medieval princess who had stepped down from a painting, with her topknot of hair interwoven with black velvet and pearls.”
Lee came on November 7 for an extended stay. As they had the previous March, the Kennedys decided to throw a dinner dance “in honor of” Jackie’s sister as well as Fiat auto baron Gianni Agnelli and his wife, Marella, who were visiting from Italy. The Kennedys had met the Agnellis during trips to the South of France and at the Wrightsman home in Palm Beach. They also had a connection through Franklin Roosevelt Jr., who was the American representative for Fiat. At the black-tie candlelit dinner dance for 80 on November 11, Lester Lanin played, and Oleg Cassini introduced the twist, the hip-gyrating dance sensation that was sweeping the country. The twist, which had originated at New York’s Peppermint Lounge, was considered so improperly suggestive that Press Secretary Pierre Salinger denied it had been part of the evening’s festivities. The champagne flowed until four a.m., and many partygoers got hopelessly drunk. Lyndon Johnson fell on Helen Chavchavadze as they were dancing. “He slid to the floor and lay like a lox,” recalled Mary Bailey Gimbel, a guest from Manhattan.
On Monday, January 15, 1962, Jackie took the unprecedented step of appearing in front of eight television cameras from CBS for nearly seven hours, taping a tour of her White House restoration. The hour-long program had been in the works since October, when Blair Clark, a CBS executive who had known J.F.K. since Harvard days, persuaded Jackie to cooperate.
The First Lady was a disciplined performer. She rehearsed each take, including responses to the questions Charles Collingwood would ask in the conversational format. “She knew her stuff,” said Perry Wolff, the CBS producer. “Nobody was cuing her. No curators were there feeding her. That was how meticulous she was with language.”
Between takes “she smoked all the time,” said Wolff. “She kept missing the ashtray and flicking the ashes onto the expensive silk covering of the bench she was sitting on. I knew there was tension there.” Despite the strain, she maintained her energy throughout the demands of the day and even had to be reminded to eat lunch. The taping concluded in the second-floor Treaty Room, which Jackie described for the cameras as a “chamber of horrors” because it was a work in progress. She said the room would eventually be a comfortable place for the men “who now sit in the hall with the baby carriages going by them. So they can sit in here and have a conference around this table” while waiting for the president.
Jackie was exhausted by the taping, but she entertained columnist Joseph Alsop and his wife, Susan Mary, for dinner that evening. At the Kennedys’ request, Wolff screened some of the rushes in the White House theater. Instead of the sculpted bouffant she had worn for the cameras, Jackie’s hair now hung straight down, and she had a big glass of scotch. “When the lights went up, the president looked at her with adoration and admiration,” Wolff recalled.
Just a week later, on a wintry Monday evening while Jackie and the children were at Glen Ora with Lee and her son, Anthony, Mary Meyer and Jack began their affair at the White House. Although she was as free a spirit as her friend Helen Chavchavadze, Meyer became more deeply enmeshed with Kennedy from the outset. Unlike Chavchavadze, who kept her liaison secret, Meyer confided in Anne Truitt a couple of months after the affair began—and later that year to Anne’s husband, James. “I was surprised but not too,” said Anne. “Mary did what she pleased. She was having a lovely time.”
Like Jackie, Mary had an elusive quality. But Mary also exuded a frank sexuality, alluringly draping herself in her clothes in a manner that suggested spontaneity and independence, compared with Jackie’s rather armored and meticulous persona. Mary “had an eager charm,” said Anne Truitt. “She liked to give it a run. Mary sought attention the way a nymph rises to the surface of a stream. Wherever she went, she attracted it, and that gave her pleasure.” Truitt characterized Mary’s affair with J.F.K. as an “amitié amoureuse,” a romantic friendship. “He saw that she was trustworthy. He could talk to her with pleasure, without having to watch his words.”
On Valentine’s Day, America fell more in love with Jackie Kennedy than ever, as both CBS and NBC broadcast her White House tour in prime time to 46.5 million people—about 75 percent of the viewing audience. (ABC would show the program the following Sunday, adding 10 million more viewers.) The presentation was thoroughly beguiling, from Jackie’s bowlegged walk down a corridor toward the camera to her soft, low voice with its hint of breathiness. Her accent was distinctly upper-class New York—“mahvelous” and “rawther” and “hahbor”—yet her style was unaffected. As she spoke of her favorite acquisitions, she enthusiastically arched her eyebrows, and her eyes sparkled with a suppressed merriment. She cleverly mentioned by name such prominent donors as the Walter Annenbergs, Henry Fords, and Marshall Fields.
In the spring, Jackie presided over selected high-profile events—a congressional reception, a youth concert on the South Lawn, a state dinner for the Shah of Iran and his wife, and a celebratory evening for 49 Nobel Prize winners. Even with 175 guests, the Nobel dinner struck a surprisingly informal note. The host and hostess had nut-brown tans, and Jackie wore a long dress of pale-green jersey. During the cocktail hour, “a stupendous amount of liquor was flowing around,” reported the writer Diana Trilling. Her “pleasantly looped” husband, Lionel, consumed six martinis and was overheard telling Jackie, “When you were at Vassar you weren’t much of a student but always personable.”
At dinner J.F.K. sat next to Ernest Hemingway’s widow, Mary, who contributed one of the evening’s three readings by actor Fredric March: a chapter from an unpublished novel by her late husband about a young American fighting Nazi submarines from his fishing boat. She managed to irritate Kennedy profoundly by lecturing him about how to deal with Castro. Kennedy later told Walton she was “the biggest bore I’ve had for a long time.” Rising for his remarks, Kennedy “at once had the place in his hands,” noted Diana Trilling, when he said, “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”
As the official entertainment wound down, the Kennedys invited about a dozen guests upstairs to continue the party—“Jackie’s personal part of the evening,” Diana Trilling recalled, “her turn to have fun.” The Yellow Oval Room “was filled with cigar smokers and their lady companions,” the author William Styron wrote. “One would have thought the entire Nobel dinner had been arranged to produce this fragrant climax.” J.F.K. sat in what Jackie described as his “health rocker” with a lit Havana, “wreathed in smoke,” wrote Styron, “relaxed and contented.”
At 12:30, Bobby Kennedy squeezed the Trillings, Robert Frost, and other guests into the elevator. With mock horror of the perils of overcrowding, Jackie said, “Think of the headlines tomorrow morning, with all these distinguished people dead at the bottom of the shaft!” “Hold on, Mr. Frost!” said Bobby as he closed the gate and Jackie waved good-bye.
As the summer holiday approached, Jackie wrapped up the latest additions to her restoration project. In May the Rose Garden redesign by Bunny Mellon was completed. It was, in fact, more Jack’s inspiration than Jackie’s. He had enlisted Bunny the previous August during a picnic at the Mellon beach house in Osterville, Massachusetts. At the Casals dinner in November, J.F.K. had gazed at her across the table and said, “Bunny, where is my garden plan?” It was still in her head, and shortly afterward she committed the scheme to paper—the four bare corners of the new garden anchored by magnolia trees, and a broad lawn defined on either side by what Mellon described as a “tapestry of flowers that would change with the season,” accented by the garden’s signature roses. Mellon dug up the old garden in March and had it ready two months later.
Jackie unveiled the new White House library in June. With its palette of soft colors and suite of Duncan Phyfe furniture, the library was intended to capture the classical period of Jefferson and Adams. The room bore the strong imprint of Harry du Pont, although Boudin had advised Jackie on the paint color and antique Aubusson rug. The 2,500 volumes still needed to be assembled by a committee of scholars including Arthur Schlesinger—a “working library,” said Jackie, not a collection of priceless editions for “a frozen assemblage in a museum display.” But Jackie decided to make borrowing privileges “tacit,” with someone on hand to supervise the circulation. “You can dress in 18th century costume & sit there all day ... reading Civil Disobedience,” she wrote Schlesinger.
Staff as well as friends detected heightened friction between Jack and Jackie over money. At dinner with the Bradlees in mid-November 1962, the First Couple openly squabbled about her $40,000 (more than $240,000 today) in department-store bills which he had been “boiling” about all day. While Jackie was scrupulous about getting good prices for the White House restoration project, she had been personally extravagant since adolescence. The residue of her “poor relation” status in the Auchincloss family was an impulse to spend lavishly on herself whenever she had the opportunity. “She didn’t shop all the time,” said Tony Bradlee, “but whatever she got was expensive, and Jack thought so, too.” Jackie had a weakness for costly clothes, antiques, and paintings. “If Jackie liked something, she ordered it and coped with the bills later,” according to Mary Gallagher.
While Joe Kennedy paid for her Oleg Cassini wardrobe, Jackie bought European clothing surreptitiously through “clothing scouts”—Lee in London and friends Letizia Mowinckel in Paris, Irene Galitzine in Rome, and Molly MacAdoo in New York. In the autumn of 1962, Jackie splurged on a custom-made black, double-breasted mink coat that even her husband admitted was “terrific.”
But during his second year in office, Jack said her habits were getting out of hand. In 1962, Jackie’s spending climbed to $121,461 (about $750,000 in current dollars, or $62,000 a month), an increase of 15 percent over the previous year—and more than J.F.K.’s annual presidential salary of $100,000, all of which he gave to charities such as the United Negro College Fund, the National Association for Retarded Children, and the Boy Scouts of America. With trust funds worth an estimated $10 million (some $60 million today), Kennedy could certainly afford Jackie’s purchases, but he was careful with money and disliked the appearance of financial excess.
Jackie promised to economize, and Jack backed off. Whether out of guilt or indulgence, he invariably “would agree with almost anything to please her,” said Gallagher. Lem Billings believed that Kennedy was simply trying to prevent Jackie from sulking, which he couldn’t bear. For Christmas, J.F.K. bought his wife a drawing of two nude women by Renoir and a painting by Maurice Prendergast. Jackie’s gift to Jack was a piece of a sperm whale’s tooth into which the presidential seal had been carved by artist Milton Delano, who spent 240 hours creating the scrimshaw.
The latter part of 1962 signaled new beginnings for Jack and Jackie. On weekends they excitedly showed various intimates—Lee, Lem, Bunny, and Charley Bartlett and his wife, Martha—the progress of Wexford, a 3,500-square-foot ranch-style house in Virginia that was being built from designs Jackie had sketched on graph paper. And within weeks of Caroline’s fifth birthday and John junior’s second, at the end of November, Jack and Jackie conceived another child. “I am taking the veil,” Jackie announced to Mary Gallagher on Friday, January 11. In a memo to Tish Baldrige that day, Jackie declared her intention to significantly curtail her activities as First Lady and devote more time to her family.
Scarcely a month later, on February 20, the White House announced that Baldrige would leave at the end of May. Baldrige didn’t yet know that Jackie was expecting, but she understood that her forceful style no longer fit with Jackie’s plans. By early 1963, Baldrige had endured having her “ears pinned back”—as White House arts adviser August Heckscher described it—by Jackie one too many times. Baldrige felt overworked and underappreciated.
As soon as Janet Cooper heard that Baldrige was planning to leave, she called Jackie and said, “Nancy is ripe to come and work for you.” Jackie had remained in close touch with Nancy Tuckerman and had periodically invited her to White House events and Virginia getaways. Before one weekend, Tuckerman had archly asked Jackie whether she should bring blue jeans or a “cotillion ball gown.” Between their shared humor and total discretion, Jackie and Tuckerman were compatible professionally as well as personally. Jackie told Tuckerman about her pregnancy and “convinced Nancy that after her child was born life would be quiet,” said James Ketchum.
The Kennedys had their sixth and what would be their final dinner dance at the White House on Friday, March 8, 1963. During dinner in the Blue Room, a dozen violinists played “gently and wildly Viennese and Hungarian music,” Adlai Stevenson recounted to his friend Marietta Tree. The Red and Green Rooms were illuminated by fireplaces and soft lighting, and the Blue Room was cleared for dancing to Lester Lanin. Although Kennedy appeared to be in a “lighthearted mood” at the dance, something went awry with Mary Meyer that night. Her date was Blair Clark, J.F.K.’s old friend from Harvard. At some point in the evening, Meyer “simply disappeared for a half-hour,” Clark recalled two decades later. “Finally I went looking for her. She had been upstairs with Jack, and then she had gone walking out in the snow. So there I was, ‘the beard’ for Mary Meyer.”
Whether Kennedy tried to break it off with Meyer that night is unknown. But a stray remark he made to Bradlee may offer a clue. Surveying the “females imported from New York,” Kennedy said, “If you and I could only run wild, Benjy.” Jackie startled Adlai Stevenson, her dinner partner, by confiding that she and Lee had “always talked about divorce as practically something to look forward to,” and that “I first loved you” when she and Stevenson met back in Illinois just after she married Jack. Jackie may have been indulging in her tendency to exaggerate for effect. But, more revealingly, she told Stevenson, “I don’t care how many girls [Jack sleeps with] as long as I know he knows it’s wrong, and I think he does now. Anyway, that’s all over, for the present.”
For J.F.K.’s 46th birthday, on May 29, Jackie arranged a dinner cruise on the Potomac with two dozen guests aboard the Sequoia. Friends and family included Bobby and Ethel Kennedy, Sarge and Eunice Shriver, the Bartletts, the Bradlees, and Mary Meyer, as well as British actor David Niven and his wife, Hjordis.
Jackie instructed everyone to wear “yachting clothes” for an 8:01 departure, and Kennedy wore his nautical blue blazer. After drinks on the fantail, dinner was served in the cabin—beginning with roast fillet of beef and ending with 1955 Dom Pérignon champagne. It was a hot evening, with thunder, lightning, and torrential rain. The mood was raucous and boozy, especially throughout the toasts, which were greeted by jeers in typical Kennedy-family style.
A three-piece band played mostly twist music that Kennedy kept requesting for the dancers. “It was a wild party,” Tony Bradlee recalled. “People were shouting and laughing.” David Niven was “whispering in my ear all night, three sheets to the wind,” said Martha Bartlett. “I loved it!” Everyone was “more or less drenched,” Ben Bradlee recalled. Teddy Kennedy was “the wettest,” and during some “fairly strenuous Kennedy games,” he lost the entire left leg of his trousers—“ripped off at the crotch,” Niven recalled, “with white underpants on the port side flashing.”
But it was Jack himself who misbehaved in an especially reckless fashion. With Jackie nearby, not to mention Mary, he zeroed in on Tony Bradlee. “Oh, Jack, you know you always say that Tony is your ideal,” Jackie had said jokingly at dinner a month earlier. “Yes, that’s true,” J.F.K. had replied, pausing before adding, “You’re my ideal, Jacqueline.” Twice since then Kennedy had urged Tony to join him on a state visit to Europe at the end of June. Both times she had refused.
Several hours into the birthday cruise, as Tony made her way to the bathroom, she realized Jack was following her. “He chased me all around the boat,” she recalled. “A couple of members of the crew were laughing. I was running and laughing as he chased me. He caught up with me in the ladies’ room and made a pass. It was a pretty strenuous attack, not as if he pushed me down, but his hands wandered. I said, ‘That’s it, so long.’ I was running like mad.” Tony said Kennedy was not drunk. “The atmosphere probably influenced Jack’s chase,” she said. “I guess I was pretty surprised, but I was kind of flattered, and appalled too.” Tony would eventually tell Ben, but not until much later. She never told Mary, however.
The next morning Kennedy marked Memorial Day by placing a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery’s Tomb of the Unknowns. At midday he, Jackie, the Bradlees, and the Nivens flew to Camp David for swimming, skeet shooting, golf on the front lawn, and conversation. Tony and Jack acted as if nothing had happened the night before—not a hint of either awkwardness or coolness.
Video: Becoming Jackie Kennedy with Natalie Portman
On arriving at the Osterville stables on Cape Cod with Caroline and John at 11 a.m., on Wednesday, August 7, 1963, Jackie felt the first stabs of labor pain. Her Secret Service agent sped her back to Squaw Island, where she told her physician John Walsh, “I think I’m going to have that baby”—three weeks before the due date. They climbed into a helicopter at 11:28 and landed at the Otis Air Force Base hospital 20 minutes later. At 12:52 p.m., Patrick Bouvier Kennedy was born by Cesarean section and was immediately placed in an oxygen-fed incubator. Weighing only four pounds ten and a half ounces, he was suffering from hyaline-membrane disease, a lung condition that blocked the supply of oxygen to the bloodstream.
Seventeen minutes after he was alerted about Jackie’s condition, Kennedy was en route to the Cape with Nancy Tuckerman, Pierre Salinger, and Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary. Nobody even had time to grab a toothbrush. Kennedy “was completely withdrawn,” Turnure recalled. “He just kept sitting and staring out of the window, and obviously his thoughts were completely with her.” Kennedy arrived at the hospital at 1:30 p.m., while Jackie was still in surgery. Following a conference with doctors, he agreed to send Patrick to Children’s Hospital in Boston for treatment. “The First Lady never once held little Patrick in her arms or heard him cry,” noted The Washington Post. The infant died of cardiac arrest at 4:04 a.m. on August 9, after a life of 39 hours and 12 minutes.
When Patrick was still struggling, Jack had said to Janet Auchincloss, “I just can’t bear the effect [the infant’s death] might have on Jackie.” Over the next four days, he visited Jackie in her hospital room twice a day. Caroline went, too, clutching a bouquet of freshly picked larkspur, black-eyed Susans, and pink trumpet flowers. Jackie was also consoled by her mother and Lee, who arrived on Friday after J.F.K. located her in Greece.
On Saturday, Cardinal Richard Cushing celebrated a “Mass of the Angels” for Patrick in the chapel at his Boston residence. Joining the president were his siblings and their spouses, Lee, and a quartet of Auchinclosses: Janet, Hughdie, and their two children, Jamie and Janet. Rose Kennedy was on a holiday in Paris, and Jackie was too ill to attend.
J.F.K. took a gold Saint Christopher medal money clip that Jackie had given him as a wedding present and put it inside the little white casket as a relic representing them both. After the service, Kennedy wept “copious tears” and was so “overwhelmed with grief that he literally put his arm around that casket as though he was carrying it out,” Cushing said. The burial took place at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline, the first in the large family plot purchased by Joe Kennedy.
On August 24, Jackie received a cable from Lee, who was cruising the Aegean with Aristotle Onassis and his longtime lover, the opera diva Maria Callas. Lee’s affair with Onassis had begun several months earlier, and she went aboard the Christina, the 325-foot Onassis yacht, immediately upon her return from Washington. “I was astonished she hadn’t stayed with her sister,” Callas told a friend. “She repeatedly told us how undone Jackie was by the death of her baby. Both Aristo and I felt badly about it, so he extended an open invitation to the president and Mrs. Kennedy to join us on a cruise.”
J.F.K. clearly could not go, and he had deep misgivings about letting Jackie keep company with Onassis. Jackie, however, was adamant. She couldn’t yet face Washington, and “she just wanted to get away.” Although Bill Walton thought that Kennedy had yielded to her wishes that weekend, the matter was far from settled.
On Labor Day, Jackie coaxed her husband into calling Franklin Roosevelt at his farm in upstate New York. “Lee wants Jackie to be her beard,” Kennedy told Roosevelt. But Jack needed “someone from Washington to provide cover,” said Justin Feldman, who was with the Roosevelts that weekend. “You are the only one she has agreed to have come along,” Kennedy told his friend. The Roosevelts would “give an air of respect,” recalled Sue Roosevelt. “I don’t think Jack wanted Jackie to go. I think he was appalled by it, so he arranged for us to make it look less like the jet set.”
The next weekend in Hyannis, Kennedy was still trying to dissuade Jackie. “Jack went down on one knee, begging Jackie not to go,” said houseguest Martha Bartlett. “Neither of them was giving in. When she wanted to do something, she did it.” Kennedy put on the best face, defending Jackie’s decision. “Well, I think it will be good for Jackie,” Kennedy told Turnure, “and that’s what counts.”
Kennedy nevertheless decided to hide Onassis’s involvement as long as he could. Early in September he fussed over a proposed press release stating that Stas Radziwill had “secured” the Onassis yacht for the cruise. Kennedy explained to Stas that the choice of words was purposely “ambiguous” to suggest “you have possession of it during that period and Jackie is your guest and not Onassis’.”
As it turned out, the White House announcement in late September mentioned neither the cruise nor Onassis, only that Jackie would be leaving on October 1 for a two-week holiday with her sister and brother-in-law at a rented villa in Greece.
Jack and Jackie celebrated two milestones in the month of September. The first was Joe Kennedy’s 75th birthday at Hyannis on September 6. Cruising on the Honey Fitz the next day, Kennedy mused about life after the presidency, although he bristled when Jackie joked, “I don’t want to be the wife of a headmaster of a girls’ school.” “At first it used to depress him,” Bartlett recalled. But that weekend, “it depressed him less.” He pondered becoming ambassador to Italy, because “Jackie would like it.” His main concern was being out of the way when his successor took over—a sentiment he expressed to Bill Walton, who was supposed to be Kennedy’s front man in buying a Georgetown home. “We may spend a couple of years in Cambridge, maybe travel some, but then we’ll come back here when the heat is off,” Kennedy had told Walton.
The next weekend marked Jack and Jackie’s 10th anniversary, which they celebrated at the scene of their marriage, Hammersmith Farm, with a candlelit dinner for 10 on Thursday the 12th. Cocktails were served in the spacious Deck Room, with tall French windows overlooking Narragansett Bay and high, vaulted ceilings ornamented by ribwork of dark beams. “It was a happy sort of evening,” recalled Janet Auchincloss. “I felt that all their strains and stresses, which any sensitive people have in a marriage, had eased to a point where they were terribly close to each other. I almost can’t think of any married couple I’ve ever known that had greater understanding of each other.” Ben and Tony Bradlee had a similar reaction when they witnessed “by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other.”
Jackie’s most revealing comments were to Charley Bartlett in a letter written a week after the anniversary. She told him that the weekend could have been so much happier if Patrick had lived, but that it also could have been tragic. Jack made the difference, Jackie told Charley, because he had helped “re-attach me to life,” and enabled her to appreciate “all the lucky things” they shared. She thanked Charley especially for the thoughtfulness of his matchmaking a decade earlier. She said that Jack could have enjoyed “a worthwhile life without being happily married.” But without Jack as her husband, she told Charley, her life would have “all been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.”
Excerpted from Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House, by Sally Bedell Smith, to be published in May by Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.; © 2004 by the author.*
