Just Jackie (3 page)

Camelot
, as Teddy White knew, was adapted for the musical stage by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner from
The Once and Future King
, the fantasy masterpiece written by T. H. White, a British author with the same initials and last name as his own. It just so happened that White and the lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner, were good friends. They were often invited to the same parties in New York and Washington, where White had heard Lerner boast on more than one occasion that he had attended Choate and Harvard with Jack Kennedy. Yet White could not recall Lerner ever mentioning that his old schoolmate
and friend, the President of the United States, went to sleep at night listening to a recording of
Camelot
.

That was enough to make White suspicious of Jackie’s story. And it was not the only thing that bothered him about it. If anyone knew Jack Kennedy’s mind-set, it was White. While he was researching
The Making of the President 1960
, White concluded that of all the Kennedys Jack was the toughest, the most intelligent, the most attractive—and down deep, the least romantic. “Life is one continuous choice between second bests,” Kennedy was fond of saying. And his favorite songs were “Heart of My Heart,” “Bill Bailey (Won’t You Please Come Home?),” and “That Old Gang of Mine.”

White suspected that the metaphor of Camelot said more about Jackie than it did about Jack. She was a woman with an artistic temperament, one who knew little and cared less about politics. She had not even bothered to vote before she married John Kennedy, and her political influence had seemed so slight to White that he had mentioned her only three times in his exhaustive chronicle of the 1960 campaign.

During her husband’s thousand days in office, Jackie had avoided official functions as much as possible. But she had taken charge of the furniture, the paintings, the flowers, and the food. And she had invited a host of great artists and Nobel Prize-winners to state dinners, transforming the President’s House into a glittering showcase of American culture.

Before Jackie became First Lady, most Americans looked across the Atlantic for their serious art, literature, music, and dance. They felt culturally inferior to Europeans, especially to the British and French. But after Jackie entered the White House, all that began to change. She made everyone aware that America was not only the world’s major military power, it was its cultural superpower as well. More than anyone else at the time, Jackie
was responsible for awakening Americans to their rich cultural endowment.

While Jack was engaged in the pragmatic business of the presidency, Jackie was creating a brilliant illusion—a stage set upon which gallant men danced with beautiful women, and great deeds were performed by heroes who changed history. “There’ll never be another Camelot,” Jackie had said, and White sympathized with her desire to portray the Kennedy years as the sundown of chivalry.

But White had been educated at the prestigious Boston Latin School and at Harvard College, and he was familiar with the classics. Stripped of its knightly ideals and courtly romance, Camelot was the tale of flawed humanity. At the heart of the legend was the story of how King Arthur’s wife Guinevere betrayed him with his best friend, Lancelot, and brought disaster and ruin to her husband’s magic kingdom.

What, White wondered, was a storyteller to make of that?

A
round midnight, White disappeared into a maid’s room and began the job of sorting out his notes. As he wrote years later in his memoirs, he saw himself at this juncture of his career as a sort of court musician, a modern troubadour, who sang his stories for attention, applause, and a fee. His immediate audience was composed of the millions of middle-class, middlebrow readers of
Life
, but in his heart of hearts he knew that he was
singing for the men of politics, diplomacy, and finance who ran America.

Many of these men were White’s close friends, and they expected him to lay a respectful wreath on the grave of John F. Kennedy. And so, as he sat down in front of his portable typewriter, White made an important decision. He would not expose Camelot as a misreading of history. Nor would he try to explain Jackie’s comparison of herself to Guinevere, a woman who was responsible for betrayal and disaster. He would leave the riddle of Jackie’s true identity to her future biographers.

Instead, Jackie’s farewell to Camelot would stand as a sad good-bye to a golden age of America, a time never to be recaptured. White had always been attracted by the notion of such a golden age. He liked to quote the lines in Archibald MacLeish’s poem
Conquistador
, in which Bernal Díaz, MacLeish’s storyteller, is made to say: “but I… saw Montezuma: I saw the armies of Mexico marching, the leaning Wind in their garments: the painted faces: the plumes…. We were the lords of it all.”

Americans had felt like the lords of it all during the brief reign of John F. Kennedy, and the storyteller who had made them feel that way was Theodore H. White. In 1959, after writing two novels that received lukewarm critical receptions, White returned to his first love, public affairs, and embarked on a nonfiction book about the coming 1960 presidential campaign. He cast Richard Nixon as the villain of his story. The hero who emerged from White’s yearlong adventure on the campaign trail was John F. Kennedy, who, as White wrote,

White, of course, was the physical opposite—a homely little man with short arms and thick glasses. And from the moment he laid eyes on the tall, gleaming figure of John Kennedy descending the steps of the
Caroline
, his campaign airplane, White fell into a journalistic swoon. The future President was all the things that White wished to be, but was not: graceful, immaculate, wry and witty, and irresistibly attractive to women.

What was more, White had grown up as a poor Jewish boy in the ghettos of Boston, and like millions of people who felt that they had been excluded from the American Dream, he admired Kennedy because he had unlatched the door of opportunity. Through that door, as White wrote in a typically hyperventilating passage,

White would always remember that he was lunching with an old war-correspondent acquaintance when a waiter came over to their table, and told them, “The radio says Kennedy has been shot.” At that moment, White believed, America passed through an invisible membrane of time that divided one era from another. Kennedy’s murder marked a great divide in history, separating an era of hope and idealism from an era stained by assassination, Vietnam, racial strife, sexual permissiveness, Watergate, and national disillusionment.

Or so White chose to believe.

But like so many other Americans who adored John Kennedy, the awestruck White had shut his eyes to certain facts. During most of his presidency, Kennedy was a grave disappointment as a leader. He was an inexperienced
executive who was woefully unprepared for great office. It was only through a series of missteps and blunders that he began to learn the complicated art of statecraft. And just when it looked as though he was finally getting the hang of it, he was struck down in Dallas.

It was those facts that concerned Jackie. She did not want her husband to be judged as a president who had been cut off at the promise, not after the performance. Camelot was her effort to rescue John Kennedy from the merciless inquest of history. And White became a willing collaborator in her fanciful version of history.

W
hite took a long snort of whisky, then began pounding out the first draft of his story:

His clacking portable woke up Clint Hill, Jackie’s Secret Service man, who had gone virtually sleepless for days. Hill burst into the room.

“For Christ’s sake,” he snarled, “we need some sleep here.”

Forty-five minutes later, White was finished. He returned to the living room and handed the manuscript to Jackie.

She wrote across the top of the first page: “A Conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy.” Then she crossed out the first two paragraphs, including the pretentious literary reference to the French poet Paul Verlaine. Soon she was slashing out lines, adding words, changing tenses, sharpening phrases. On the last page, she found that White had ended his story with the line:

This did not satisfy Jackie at all. And so she added a new kicker in her own handwriting:

From a wall phone in the kitchen, White placed a call to David Maness,
Life’s
articles editor, who was standing by in the Time-Life Building on Fiftieth Street in New York City. Maness immediately patched the call through to the magazine’s fastest stenographer-typist, who was stationed on a different floor, and to Ralph Graves, the assistant managing editor, who was in his own office.

As White began to dictate the piece, Jackie leaned against the kitchen wall, smoking a cigarette. When White was finished, he asked his
Life
colleagues:

“As a friend of the Kennedys, is there anything you think is in bad taste, or will give a bad impression?”

He held the phone away from his ear so that Jackie could hear the response from New York.

“Yes,” said Graves, “I think the gesture of kissing his foot is too intimate for good taste.”

White must have found Graves’s objection ludicrous, given the fact that he had left out Jackie’s far more shocking gesture with an intimate part of the President’s anatomy.

“Just a minute,” he said.

He put his hand over the mouthpiece, and discussed the editorial request with Jackie.

“Right,” he said when he came back on the line. “Take out the foot kissing.”

“Hey,” said Maness, “is she listening to this now with you?”

White ignored the question.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yes.” It was the voice of assistant managing editor Ralph Graves again. “I think Camelot is mentioned too many times in such a short story—at least one time too many. I suggest that you delete the last reference in the last paragraph.”

White muffled the phone again, and conferred with Jackie. Did she want to soften the focus on Camelot?

She shook her head violently.

“No,” White told his editor, “that last Camelot stays in.”

BEYOND HER
WILDEST DREAMS