Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (11 page)

John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier, Jackie’s father, was a personable and self-confident man, a world-class rogue who had always exuded a sensual charisma. Devilishly hand-

some, with dark, slicked-back hair and a Clark Gable mus- tache, Black Jack earned his nickname because of his potent sex appeal and his legendary womanizing, not to mention his year-round suntan. Although his father, known as The Major, was a much-admired lawyer, and Jack himself had a seat on the stock exchange, he was not an erudite, serious person. A man who insisted on living his life recklessly, he gambled compulsively, drank to excess, squandered his money, and borrowed from nearly everyone he knew in order to maintain his lavish lifestyle. His charm was so great, though, that both men and women tended to forgive him his excesses—as well as his debts.

Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, was a sometimes con- founding woman whose love for money and status practi- cally ruled her life. Janet had created a fanciful story about her family tree, saying she was of French aristocratic back- ground, and then handed the myth down to Jackie. For Jackie, just as it was for her mother, even in the early days image was everything. Janet had even managed to put to- gether a phony genealogy to prove her heritage to skeptics. She was actually just following the lead of her father, James

T. Lee, who had claimed he was the son of a high-ranking Confederate officer in the Civil War, and also that he was born in New York City. Neither assertion was true.

Janet passed down to both her daughters the imperative to improve their social standings and acquire wealth. Her own father had risen from the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and made a fortune in real estate development. Merely having money, however, wasn’t enough for Janet; she yearned to be a part of high society. So she overlooked Black Jack’s shady reputation and accepted an offer of mar- riage from him, mostly because of the reputation of his fa-

ther and the prestige he held in social circles. Marrying into the Bouvier family was likely to improve her station in life. Ironically, while she married him because of his family’s pedigree, he married her for her family’s money: Sometimes he had his own, sometimes he did not, so it was a good idea for him to marry into wealth. Janet didn’t let on to Black Jack that her family’s wealth was also overstated. Still, she and her new husband managed to settle in the wealthy resort town of Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

John and Janet would have two daughters: Jacqueline, born on July 29, 1929, just months before the stock market crash decimated the fortunes of so many Wall Street fi- nanciers; and Caroline Lee (known as Lee), born three and a half years later.

From all accounts, Jackie was a headstrong, precocious child. Her mother imparted her own love of riding to Jackie, and both mother and daughter rode in horse shows together. Jackie started competing at five years of age and was as competitive as any Kennedy when it came to winning blue ribbons.

Even as a child, Jackie learned out of necessity not to re- veal her feelings. In September 1936, Janet insisted on a six- month separation from Black Jack that later resulted in divorce. In those days divorce was not the common occur- rence it is today, and Janet made it appear even more lurid by leaking a story to the newspapers that she was divorcing her husband because of adultery; she even identified his mistresses by name. Jackie, who quickly became the object of much schoolgirl gossip, immersed herself in her studies and spent more time than usual on her riding lessons, as though nothing unusual was happening.

In 1940, when Jackie was eleven, her parents divorced. Janet soon bettered her social position by marrying an even wealthier man, Hugh Dudley “Hughdie” Auchincloss, an in- vestment banking attorney whose fortune was seemingly se- cure. Auchincloss had three children from his previous marriages and would have two more with Janet.

In her new life with her stepfather, Jackie would experi- ence a lifestyle even more lavish than the one to which she had grown accustomed, and she would take full advantage of the resources her privileged world afforded her. Attending the best schools available, she excelled in her studies. Be- cause she was able to travel, she mastered four languages and acquired a vast knowledge of foreign cultures. Sur- rounded by the finest things in life, she developed impecca- ble taste and an appreciation for art, music, literature, and architecture.

The Auchinclosses divided their time between two es- tates. The first was Hammersmith Farm, overlooking Narra- gansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island. This was a sprawling, twenty-eight-room mansion with thirteen fire- places and a working farm that supplied the Newport naval base with eggs and milk. Because so many of the local farmhands had gone to war, all of the children were put to work; Jackie was responsible for feeding two thousand chickens each day. The other Auchincloss home was Merry- wood, located on forty-six acres and fronting the Potomac River in Virginia. The property included an indoor bad- minton court, stables, an Olympic-size pool, and a kitchen with enough facilities to serve three hundred people. Yet the opulence was all a charade. Just as Black Jack could never hang on to his money and was always in debt, Auchincloss had similar financial problems due to bad investments and

poor management. Whether the family had enough money to support its lifestyle was always a big concern, and Jackie learned to live with it. If she was going to marry for wealth, she would be sure that the gentleman she was marrying truly
was
wealthy and not just
acting
wealthy.

Although there was a rancorous tug-of-war between Jackie’s mother and father for the beautiful, dark-eyed child’s affections, Jackie and her natural father shared an al- most obsessive love for one another. When she went to Vas- sar College (making the Dean’s List in her first year), she kept photos of her father in her room and spoke of him con- stantly. For his part, Black Jack’s New York apartment was filled with many stunning pictures and expensive oil paint- ings, some of Lee, but many more of Jackie. John Davis re- calls, “Jackie so loved being with her father, it was as if she just bathed in his compliments of her. Janet would notice this, and it would drive her completely up the wall. She was very jealous of the way Jackie idolized her father.”

The love Jackie had for her father, along with the social ambition inspired by her mother and the penchant she had for the finer things in life, all came together to form the model of what she wanted in a mate. Unlike her mother, Jackie would not marry only to improve her status, though that was a consideration. Instead, she would wait until she met a man with whom she could actually fall in love and who also happened to embody the qualities she was looking for: a wealthy person who would match her in intelligence and ambition, yet someone who also had the swagger and panache of her adored father. She had dated a number of men and was even briefly engaged to one—John Husted, a handsome investment banker—before settling on a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The two met

in May 1951 at a party hosted by newsman and Kennedy family friend Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha. Al- though Jackie was still in college, she had enough poise to interest Jack, twelve years older and a man who reminded her very much of her own father. “Jackie, who was a college senior at the time, couldn’t have been attracted to a man un- less he was dangerous, like her father,” Lem Billings once observed. “It was Freudian. Jack knew about her attraction to Black Jack and even discussed it with her. She didn’t deny it.” They were immediately drawn to one another, and thus the storybook tale began.

Jack conducted an unromantic courtship: He was un- demonstrative in public, did not send flowers, gifts, or love letters, and, like his brothers, barely made it clear that he was interested. Notorious for not carrying money with him, he expected whomever he was with to pick up the tab for taxis and meals. So when they dated, this chore fell to Jackie. Still, she knew a good thing when she saw it, and she saw it in Jack: She was swept away by him.

The package that Jackie presented to her beau was cer- tainly an appealing one to the politically ambitious John Kennedy and his family. Joseph Kennedy’s lifelong obses- sion was to have a son in the White House. After his first son, Joseph Jr., was killed in an air mishap during World War II, the elder Kennedy put all his attentions into the next in line, Jack, whom he began grooming for the Presidency. When thirty-five-year-old Jack won a congressional seat in November 1952 by defeating three-term Massachusetts sen- ator Henry Cabot Lodge, he was encouraged by his father to change his playboy image and find a wife, a partner for pub- lic relations purposes as well as for mating, a potential First Lady.

There were many women in Jack’s life, some of them fa- mous actresses such as Lee Remick, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Sophia Loren, and some of them not as well known, like Ruta Lee; but they were always sexy, young, and ready to follow him anywhere. Entire books have been written about his life and times before he knew Jackie.

Because Jackie had the sophistication and class that wives of heads of state were supposed to project, along with beauty and glamour equal to the movie stars to whom father and son had always been attracted, she soon became a front- runner in the marital race. Also in her favor was the fact that she had a “proper” upbringing and her reputation was untar- nished, which was expected of political wives at the time; for the most part, Jack’s other girlfriends were anything but demure. Jack had also said in one interview that what he was looking for in a spouse was someone “intelligent but not too brainy.” As insulting as that comment may have been, Jackie, a woman of her times, understood it. “No man wants a woman who’s smarter than he is,” she said, so typically 1950s in her attitude about male-female relationships.

“She was also funny. People always tend to forget her wicked sense of humor,” said Sancy Newman, a neighbor of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port who knew Jack and all of the Kennedys as children. “She was completely different from anyone he had ever dated, not your average pretty girl. She had great wit and could give it right back to him just as quickly as he could throw it at her.”

Stephen Smith, Jean’s husband and Jackie’s future brother-in-law, once recalled, “Jack always said how smart Jackie was, and she really was. What they had going be- tween them was this sense of humor. And she could cut him down, and did—no question about it. When she felt strongly

about something, she let him know it and let everyone else know it, too.”

“She’s the one,” Joseph told his son. “I have a good feel- ing about this girl, Jacqueline. Trust me. She’s the one.”

While Jack and Jackie were dating, John Davis met with his cousin for lunch at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Jackie was working at the time for the
Times-Herald
news- paper as “The Inquiring Photographer,” a job that found her snapping pictures of people after asking them questions about current events. She would then combine photos and text for a column.

He recalls, “Jackie thought that Jack was rather vain. She talked about how he had to have his hair done all the time, how he had to always look just right. I laughed to myself be- cause, certainly, she was very much the same way. She said that he would sulk for hours if he was at a party and hadn’t been recognized. Again, I laughed to myself. That, too, was very much like Jackie. Then she said to me, ‘Really, John, I think the Kennedys are terribly, terribly bourgeois.’ I laughed to myself, again . . . for obvious reasons.”

Jackie began devoting time and energy to Jack’s work by helping him edit and write senatorial position papers on Southeast Asia, and even translating several books for him, including the work of French writer Paul Mus, who was an expert on France’s involvement in Vietnam. (Fluent in French, Jackie had attended the Sorbonne after her two years at Vassar.)

“Whenever he came across something in French, the sen- ator would think, ‘My wife could translate the research ma- terial,’ ” recalls Kennedy friend and speechwriter Ted Sorenson. “I don’t think she herself regarded herself as a po- litical savant or counselor. She had judgments of political

figures as people, as individuals, but usually not related to their political positions—except that she loved Jack and people who liked him, and who he liked, she liked. People who were mean to him, she didn’t like. There was some- thing there between them, and it was good.”

Others perceived Jack and Jackie differently. “I could see Jack behaving very badly with Jackie very early on, at the beginning of their engagement,” recalls Betty Beale, who was a columnist for the
Washington Evening Star
. “I talked to Jackie on the phone shortly after they announced the en- gagement so that I could write about it. She told me in an offhand way that he was going to Eden Roc [with his friend Torby McDonald and father, Joseph] for a vacation on the French Riviera without her. The men had chartered a boat, and off they went for a wild time. You’d think that an en- gaged man would be lusting after his fiancée and want to be with her. She didn’t express any concern or annoyance about him going, however, she just told me matter-of-factly, ‘Jack is going away. He’s gone every year, and he’s going back.’ She minimized its significance.”