Just Jackie (7 page)

“You need a place to live while you get your act together,” Marie told Jackie.

It was a generous offer, and Jackie immediately accepted it. But she knew that the Harriman house, like all the houses she had lived in since her marriage, would be just one more way station in her life. She clearly yearned for something more permanent.

During the Depression, when her father lost most of his money, the family had been forced to move a number of times. They lived a rootless existence until Janet Bouvier’s father, James T. Lee, a real-estate investor whom everyone called Old Mister Lee, let them borrow an apartment he owned in Manhattan, a grand Art Deco
duplex at 740 Park Avenue, which had been designed by the famous architect Rosario Candela.

“Remember, you’re living rent-free in my house,” Old Mister Lee barked at Black Jack, humiliating him in front of Jackie.

After Jackie’s parents divorced, Janet had married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., an heir to the Standard Oil fortune and a prominent member of the hereditary WASP ruling class that had set the standard of behavior in America for nearly three centuries. But Janet and Black Jack had continued to carry on their bitter feuding. Mostly, they argued about money. As one of Jackie’s biographers wrote:

Jackie’s teenage years were spent at Merrywood, the Auchinclosses’ storybook estate in Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. But even there, she was aware of the disparity between her luxurious surroundings and her own fragile financial state. Five of the seven children at Merrywood were the direct descendants of her stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss; they bore his family name, and they received trust funds from the matriarch of the family, Grandmother Auchincloss, the former Emma Brewster Jennings. By contrast, Jackie and her sister Lee were impecunious Bouviers.

Jackie considered herself an outsider. Born into an aristocratic Catholic family, she never felt at home in the narrow-minded world of the WASPs. But as much as she wished to be emancipated from that world, she
loved Merrywood—and everything it stood for. To her, Merrywood was a golden place of idealized beauty, splashed with sunlight and provided with every comfort and convenience.

What she remembered most about this lost Camelot of her youth was her bedroom. It was located on the third floor of the imposing Georgian mansion. The ceiling of the room slanted sharply beneath a gambrel roof, which gave the space a cozy feeling. The furnishings were simple: a few pieces of painted furniture, twin beds, and fleur-de-lis wallpaper that also ran across the low ceiling. An easel stood near a window. On the dresser, there were scrapbooks bulging with newspaper clippings, society columns, and hundreds of photos of Jackie.

After John Kennedy’s assassination, the place that made Jackie feel the safest was the bedroom in her home in Hyannis Port. It was an almost exact replica of her bedroom at Merrywood: gambrel roof, patterned wallpaper on the ceiling, bulging scrapbooks. There was even an easel, which Jackie used when she and Caroline painted in the afternoons.

With only three days to go before she would move into the borrowed Harriman house, Jackie asked her maid Provi Paredes to bring the President’s clothes to the third floor. After Provi put them on racks and laid them out on couches, Jackie looked them over, deciding what to keep and what to give away. It made her even more depressed to see Jack’s things go.

“I suppose I was in a state of shock, packing up [in the White House],” Jackie said. “But President Johnson made you feel that you and the children [could stay], a great courtesy to a woman in distress…. It’s funny what you do in a state of shock. I remember going over to the Oval Office to ask [President Johnson] to name the space center in Florida Cape Kennedy. Now that I think back on it, that was wrong, and if I’d known [Cape Canaveral]
was the name from the time of Columbus, it would be the last thing that Jack would have wanted.

“The reason I asked was, I can remember this first speech Jack made in Texas … that there would be a rocket one day that would go to the moon. I kept thinking, That’s going to be forgotten, and his dreams are going to be forgotten. I had this terrible fear then that he’d be forgotten.”

Ever since Jack’s murder, Jackie had been searching for ways to secure his place in history. She had asked her old friend Teddy White to write the authorized account of the death of the President. But White had respectfully declined, as had another Kennedy family favorite, Walter Lord, the author of
A Night to Remember
, the story of the sinking of the
Titanic
, and
Day of Infamy
, an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Jackie finally settled on William Manchester, who had won her trust with a fawning book on JFK,
Portrait of a President
. Unlike White and Lord, Manchester was willing to sign an agreement ceding to Jackie and Bobby Kennedy the right to approve his manuscript before it was published. He gave every sign of being a malleable author.

But Jackie’s desire to art-direct her husband’s death had begun even earlier. It was on the flight back from Dallas that a picture had formed in her mind—a beautiful, brave picture of what Jack’s funeral should look like. She recalled seeing an old woodcut in a bound copy of
Harper’s Weekly
in the White House library that showed the East Room during Lincoln’s funeral.

She observed parallels between her husband and the assassinated Civil War President. Both were inspiring leaders; both had died victims of hate. She sent instructions to Angier Biddle Duke that she wanted the President “laid out as Lincoln had been,” with the same black cambric fabric. Jack’s funeral was to be a carbon copy of Lincoln’s.

In the course of his research, Duke learned that before
Lincoln became president, he had lost a child, just as Jack had lost a child when he was a senator. While in the White House, Lincoln had lost a second child, just as Jack had lost Patrick Bouvier. And when Lincoln died, he was buried next to his children at Oak Ridge Cemetery in Springfield, Illinois.

As Jackie packed away Jack’s things, she decided to follow Lincoln’s example one more time. She made two telephone calls—one to her mother, in Georgetown, and the other to Richard Cardinal Cushing, in Boston.

Exhume the bodies of my dead children from their graves in New England, she instructed them, and have them reburied beside their father at Arlington National Cemetery.

J
anet Auchincloss was met at Washington National Airport the next morning by Ed Zimny, a veteran World War II aviator. Zimny was used to flying charters for wealthy people, but he was unprepared for Janet, a woman with lovely pink-and-white skin and dark eyes, her face framed by a thick head of hair. She was wearing a pair of white kidskin gloves, and looked as though she was on her way to a lady’s tea rather than to a grisly exhumation.

Janet was not squeamish. She had spent many nights cleaning up Black Jack’s mess. But the idea of digging up the bodies of dead children was too grotesque for words. Janet told Zimny that she had tried to talk her
daughter out of her bizarre scheme, but nothing she said could change her mind.

Zimny was flying an Aero Commander 600, a small twin-engine six-seater, and it took him less than two hours to reach Newport, Rhode Island. There Janet was greeted by John F. Hayes Jr., the director of the Hayes-O’Neill Funeral Home. They drove in his hearse to St. Columba’s Cemetery, overlooking Narragansett Bay.

At the entrance, a few stubborn leaves still clung to the branches of the maple trees. The cemetery looked gray against the gray sky. The hearse made its way along a winding drive to Section 40, a gentle hillside where Jackie’s stillborn girl had been buried on August 25, 1956, by Father Murphy, a priest from St. Augustine’s Church, in the presence of Bobby Kennedy and Kenny O’Donnell, Jack’s right-hand man.

Two gravediggers were waiting in front of the marker, an upright headstone, about thirty inches high. Jackie had picked out a name, Arabella, for her stillborn daughter, but the gravestone simply read “Baby Girl Kennedy.”

At a signal from Hayes, the gravediggers shoved their spades into the ground, and earth began flying over their shoulders. While they dug away, Hayes removed a brand-new infant’s casket from the back of his hearse and placed it near the hole that was appearing in the ground.

It was a shallow grave, and the workmen quickly reached the lid of the coffin. They dug around its sides, creating a trench, then tried to lift it out of the ground. The moldy wood crumbled in their hands. Inside, maggots and beetles crawled over what remained of Arabella—a few muddy shards of bone, and tiny bits of soft tissue. The decomposed body was so thoroughly leached by water and bacteria that it was hard to identify any part of the skeleton.

Piece by piece, the gravediggers dragged out whatever they could. Everything went into the new casket. The
small mass of putrefying matter gave off a horrifying stench. John Hayes, the undertaker, attempted to engage Janet in conversation to distract her during the gruesome proceeding. But she refused to speak. Nor did she utter a word as Hayes sealed the new coffin and slid it back into his hearse.

Janet spent the night at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss country seat in Newport. Once Janet had acquired the Auchincloss name and money, she had become quite grand. She had always been a mercurial woman with a cyclonic temper, but during Jackie’s teenage years, Janet’s violent outbursts seemed to know no bounds. She thought nothing of strafing Jackie across both cheeks with her open hand.

After witnessing examples of Janet’s cruel behavior, many of Jackie’s school friends assumed that she hated her mother. But that was not true. Jackie admired her mother’s spirit and courage (Janet’s nose had been broken three times in horseback riding accidents), her passion for art, her personal discipline in diet and grooming, and her talent for household organization. Jackie may have loved her father more, but she spent her life trying to please her mother.

Her parents’ messy divorce left a lasting mark on Jackie. She was ashamed that her schoolmates could read newspaper accounts of the divorce, in which her father was described as an adulterer. Her shameful feelings of exposure would color Jackie’s attitude toward the press for the rest of her life.

Once a carefree and happy-go-lucky child, Jackie became stiff and introverted. She began a lifelong habit of biting her nails. She retreated into a life of fantasy and seemed to relate better to books than to people. She identified with legendary heroines who were sought after by powerful men, and whose beauty brought betrayal, war,
and disaster: Helen of Troy; Persephone, the mythological queen of the underworld; and, most of all, Queen Guinevere.

It was difficult for Jackie to show her feelings. She found it even harder to form attachments. She became a loner; she had no real friends. People said it was almost impossible to get to know her. One young woman remembered being introduced by Jackie as “my best friend,” when in fact they had not seen or spoken to each other in years.

Jackie’s shyness never left her, and her childhood wounds started to heal only after Caroline was born. She began to develop the capacity to get outside herself, to understand pain and joy, kindness and pity, and to interpret them more movingly than she ever could before. Through Caroline, she came to realize that someone other than herself was real.

The night of the exhumation of Baby Girl Kennedy, Janet called Jackie and in some detail described her ordeal at the cemetery. It must have sounded hellish to Jackie, who had tried so hard to be a good wife and mother, but whose own life was spoiled and corrupted, just like the tiny bodies that were being disinterred from their graves.

Jackie had been pregnant five times in the ten years of her marriage. She lost one child in a miscarriage. The second, Arabella, was stillborn. The third, Patrick, died shortly after delivery. Two more—Caroline and John—survived, John only barely. Over and over, Jackie asked: Why, God? Why?

Whether she wanted to admit it or not, Jackie must have known the answer to that question. After Jack’s assassination, Jackie had not wanted the doctors who performed the autopsy on his body to mention any diseases that might have been present. She feared that a thorough examination would uncover evidence of the President’s chronic venereal disease.

From the earliest days of her marriage, Jackie was aware that Jack took enormous amounts of antibiotics to eradicate the bacteria that caused his sexually transmitted disease—nongonococcal urethritis, or chlamydia. She lived in deadly fear that he would infect her.

“Where you have a man who carries nongonococcal urethritis,” according to Dr. Atilla Toth,
*
a specialist in the relationship between infections and infertility, “… after the first intercourse, the woman always becomes infected, and the bacteria usually stays behind and multiplies, and her subsequent pregnancies can be affected. Her second baby might come to term immature, and subsequent pregnancies can be miscarried.”