Kennedy Wives: Triumph and Tragedy in America's Most Public Family (14 page)

“What we liked to do was run around and shake our behinds at him because he was an absolute lecher, absolute ravening, ravenous lecher,” remembered one of Jackie’s schoolmates, Ellen “Puffin” Gates. “And Jackie, of course, knew it, and it amused her, but I don’t think she was aware—she might have been, she didn’t miss anything—of the extent to which we were teasing her father and making fun of him. . . . This man was decidedly repulsive. He came through as this sort of cartoon example of a dirty old man.”

During the week, however, Jackie split her devotion between her studies, Danseuse, and her friends. And throughout, the Miss Porter’s ethos was inculcating something just as important. Wrote journalist Evgenia Peretz:

From its very start, in 1843, Miss Porter’s has been committed not just to the old-fashioned values of charm, grace, and loyalty but to another, unspoken value as well: the ability to tough it out. Deeply ingrained in the school’s DNA, it makes the school a kind of upper-class, social Outward Bound. Throughout its history, Miss Porter’s has tested girls’ personal fortitude in a variety of ways: through academic rigor, strict rules, and rituals designed to produce anxiety and intimidate. Whatever their problems, Miss Porter’s girls were expected to buck up, not to go crying home to Daddy.

This toughness was something that Jackie would have occasion to rely on in her adult life, time and again. Through a philandering husband, a challenging set of in-laws, an intrusive press, and many tragedies large
and small, Jackie maintained a regal stillness, an impenetrability, a quiet but powerful resolve.

At Miss Porter’s, her childhood strain of mischievousness didn’t disappear; it simply matured. “She really had a very dirty sense of humor,” Puffin Gates told Sarah Bradford. “I had more fun with Jackie than almost anybody because of that streak in her which was so naughty and irreverent about almost everything.” She took up smoking, which was to be a lifelong habit, and wrote hectoring letters to Lee. (One advised her twelve-year-old sister that smoking would help her lose weight.) She graduated in 1947, a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, with an A-minus average, the Maria McKinney Memorial Award for Excellence in Literature, and the ambition to “never be a housewife.”

That summer, a Hearst columnist pronounced her “Deb of the Year.” The Auchinclosses threw two events for her society debut; Black Jack was invited to neither. It was during this summer, according to Barbara Perry, that Jackie began affecting the “breathy, cooing tone” that would characterize her speech as first lady. Her self-possession and charisma around men were becoming evident, as well. “I remember that talking with her was very different,” remembered writer George Plimpton. “She sort of enveloped you—rare for someone of that age to be able to learn how to. She had a wonderful way of looking at you and enveloping you with this gaze.” Plimpton would not be the last man to find Jackie utterly bewitching—and she was about to spend four years refining, among other things, her feminine magnetism. That autumn she was to take her poise and self-possession to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.

2

That Damn Vassar

“I spent two years at Vassar,” Jackie wrote in 1951, “and cannot
quite decide whether I liked it or not.”

Situated on one thousand acres outside of Poughkeepsie, New York, Vassar College was one of the “Seven Sisters,” a group of elite, progressive, all-women’s colleges that included Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Wellesley. Its remote location and lack of young men would come to bother Jackie, but perhaps its biggest deficiency, as she would later see it, was that it was not Paris. She would not end up finishing at Vassar, but the two years she spent there were none the less formative. It was where she became interested in journalism, where her appreciation of art and literature deepened, and where she started dating. More importantly, it was where she realized that she was not content with the limits of her sheltered world.

Jackie arrived at Vassar in the fall of 1947 preceded by the buzz conferred upon her as “Debutante of the Year,” which she seems to have considered a dubious honor. “I knew about her Deb of the Year title, but I don’t remember her ever bringing it up,” Charlotte Curtis told Jackie biographer C. David Heymann. “I think it rather embarrassed her.” Curtis lived next door to Jackie in Main Hall with Selwa Showker (later Selwa Roosevelt), who also characterized Jackie as modest. Both mentioned her beauty, but both also stressed her intellect, and something else—a curiosity about other cultures and varieties of experience.

“She was intellectually very curious,” Roosevelt said.

She constantly asked me about my family. I was of Lebanese extraction and had grown up in a small town in Tennessee. These aspects
of my life fascinated Jackie. She wanted to know all about how my father stowed away on a boat as a young boy to come to America. She wanted to know about Lebanon. I had pictures of my family in my room and Jackie would scrutinize the faces and ask questions about various members of the family, almost like a reporter gathering material for a story. She had a way of focusing on a person that left one dazzled; it was most flattering.

In addition, Jackie did not lack for classroom stimulation. She enjoyed her classes in studio art, art history, and English—she enjoyed her Shakespeare class especially. Her roommate Edna Harrison took Spanish with her and remembered that she had a particular gift for languages. “I was struggling like mad,” she told Sarah Bradford. “She whizzed through the class, she got all A’s and she was just trying to coach me through it.” This was on top of her extracurriculars, which included drama and the college newspaper.

It was at Vassar that she began dating, and the Deb of the Year had no shortage of suitors. Her stepbrother Yusha, an upperclassman at Yale, would set her up with friends from various Ivy League schools. “It was a transitory period of her life,” Yusha later said. “She liked playing the field, meeting a variety of types—varsity swimmers at Yale, Harvard pre-med candidates, up-and-coming New York lawyers and stockbrokers.” Whether that list represents a “variety” in any meaningful sense is debatable, but it is true that she refused to settle on any one man to date seriously. Instead she seemed to approach dating as a sort of rehearsal, a way of honing her skills with the opposite sex.

“Jackie was learning the American geisha technique of attracting or, rather, not frightening men,” wrote Sarah Bradford. “Clever women of the time learned to conceal their intelligence. ‘I remember a man telling Jackie he was afraid he was going to fail his exams,’ [classmate] Zup Campbell James said, ‘and Jackie saying cooingly, “I have that problem too,” knowing that she had succeeded.’ It was a technique she honed to perfection.” She certainly didn’t take any of these men very seriously, referring to them as “beetle-browed bores,” emphatically not marriage material. A member of the family who would later host Jackie during her
year in Paris would observe, “She couldn’t tolerate weak men. If she didn’t esteem and admire a man, if she didn’t look up to him, she dropped him immediately.”

Despite the light touch she brought to her collegiate dating life, it seems clear that the prospect of losing her disturbed Black Jack. “I suppose it won’t be long until I lose you to some funny looking ‘gink,’ ” he wrote to her, “who you think is wonderful because he is so romantic looking in the evening and wears his mother’s pearl earrings for dress-shirt buttons, because he loves her so.” After she’d begun skipping weekends with him to stay at Yale, his letters dispensed with the jovial tone. “A woman can have wealth and beauty and brains, but without a reputation she has nothing,” he wrote in one deeply felt, sincerely sexist missive.

Edna Harrison, who would occasionally accompany Jackie home for the weekend, remembered, “If I was dressed up and ready to go out on time, [Black Jack] said, ‘Oh, you should never be ready on time, that’s just ridiculous, you should always make a young man wait!’ He always said, ‘Play the game.’ ” His advice to Jackie and Lee was even more direct. “You just remember, Jacqueline, All Men Are Rats. Don’t trust any of them,” Lee remembers him saying. “I guess he felt it was his obligation to warn us,” she added.

Losing Jackie to some “gink” was only one source of anxiety for Black Jack at that time. In January of 1948, his father, The Major, died of prostate cancer. His “last will and testament contained some unpleasant surprises, particularly for Black Jack who received no inheritance whatsoever, his accrued loans cancelling his share of the estate.” Most of what little was left went to Black Jack’s twin sisters, Maude and Michelle. Wrangling over the management of that money, as well as the investiture of the measly three-thousand-dollar trusts left for Jackie and Lee, created a great deal of stress and fallout. The turmoil was not only within the languishing Bouvier clan, but between Black Jack and Janet as well. “The precipitate decline of the Bouviers’ fortunes provided Jackie with an illustration—if she needed one—of the precarious nature of family prosperity and the
importance of money in the social equation,” wrote Sarah Bradford. “For her, the Bouviers were now history.”

Her father’s struggles led him to rely more on, and be more demanding of, his daughters’ affection. It’s perhaps no surprise then that, in the summer of 1948, instead of spending July and August with her father as she normally did, Jackie took a seven-week trip to Europe—her first. Taken with the children of some of Janet and Hughdie’s friends, and chaperoned by one of Jackie’s old Latin teachers, the whirlwind trip included stops in Provence, the Riviera, Switzerland, Italy, London (where she met one of her heroes, Winston Churchill), and most importantly, Paris, where she was able to meet up with Yusha and which she described as filled with “glamour, glitter and rush.” “I’ve had a glimpse,” she wrote her mother. “Next time I want to soak it all up.”

That school year, she discovered that Smith College had a yearlong program at the Sorbonne in Paris. Accepted by the program, she left on August 23, 1949, for Paris and what she would later call “the high point of my life, my happiest and most carefree year.”

The first month of her trip was spent in the south of France, in an intensive French course at the University of Grenoble. She and the members of her program lived with a French family and spoke no English. In October, it was off to Paris, and the Sorbonne. Though most American students lived together in Reid Hall, Jackie chose instead to live with a family of French aristocrats, the de Rentys, which included Claude de Renty, a daughter Jackie’s age. The two were to become lifelong friends. Though her hostess, Guyot de Renty, was indeed a countess, this status did not necessarily translate into the creature comforts to which Jackie was accustomed. “Like most French residences, the Avenue Mozart apartment had no central heating,” Countess de Renty remembered. “During the winter months Jacqueline did her homework in bed wrapped like a mummy in scarf, mittens, sweater and earmuffs. There was a single antique tin tub for all seven of us, but hot water was rare.” Further, in 1949 there were still many postwar shortages of basic groceries like sugar and coffee. Jackie “was fearless, a trooper in the truest sense of the word.”

Nor did her Spartan living arrangements stop Jackie from enjoying all the culture that Paris had to offer. “The most wonderful thing here is all the
theaters and operas and ballets and how easy they are to get to,” she wrote to Yusha. “You could go out every night all winter and still not have seen everything that is playing.” Over the Christmas break, she visited London and stayed with one of Black Jack’s former mistresses, Ann Plugge.
*
Jackie also used the break to travel through Austria and Germany. Having felt on her previous European trip that “it was just too luxurious and we just didn’t see anything,” this time she traveled “on second- and third-class trains, sitting up all night talking to people and hearing their stories.”

By the time she returned to Paris, she was planning even broader tours in Europe. (“Don’t you ever intend to come home?” Black Jack wrote plaintively.) Further, she had decided that she did not want to return to Vassar, much to Black Jack’s dismay. “You may hate the thought of going back to that damn Vassar, as you call it,” he wrote. “But perhaps going back as a senior, and one who can relate all her travels, you may not find it half as bad as you think.”

By the spring, Jackie had established herself, with the help of friends like Claude and the Compte Paul de Ganay, a charming French aristocrat, as something of a society party girl. She attended soirees at the home of writer Louise de Vilmorin, the mother of a Vassar classmate who was known for parties where you could spot everyone from Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth to Jean Cocteau, Max Ophuls, and Jean Anouilh.

Jackie finished her Sorbonne exams by the middle of June but hung around for the summer, enjoying Paris and taking excursions all over France and England with Yusha, Claude, and others from their set. She finished off her summer by spending August in Ireland and Scotland with Yusha. “Jackie’s favorite activity was to stop to talk to strangers, whether shopkeepers, pub crawlers, tinkers, tramps or farmers,” Yusha said. “She was endlessly fascinated by ordinary people and the stories they had to tell.”

The two sailed back to New York together aboard the French liner
Liberté
. Black Jack met them at the dock. To compound the heartbreak of her decision not to return to nearby Vassar, Jackie stayed with her father only two days before rushing home to Merrywood, where she would
live while she completed her college education at George Washington University in Washington, DC. Transferring her credits from Vassar, she enrolled as a senior and majored in French literature.

Her courses included journalism and creative writing. “She was an extremely intelligent young woman, but she also possessed a brilliant imagination,” one of her teachers would later recall. “This was coupled with a genuine talent for the craft of writing. She had a gift as a writer and might have become prominent in her own right as a writer had she followed another path. . . . She didn’t need to take my classes.”

Even so, winning the 16th Annual
Vogue
Prix de Paris was by no means a sure thing. The competition required the completion of several sections, including “an autobiography; technical papers on modeling, fashions for coeds, beauty treatments, and the marketing of a perfume; a plan for how to teach women about men’s clothing; a proposal for a complete issue of
Vogue
; and an essay on ‘People I Wish I Had Known.’ ” She spent most of the second semester of her senior year hard at work on the assignment. The prize itself was a yearlong stint at
Vogue
—six months apiece at its New York and Paris offices.

“As to physical appearance,” she wrote in her autobiographical essay, “I am tall, 5'7", with brown hair, a square face and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose. I do not have a sensational figure but can look slim if I pick the right clothes.” As for the historical figures she wished she had known, Jackie chose three artists: poet Charles Baudelaire; poet, playwright, and all-around wit Oscar Wilde; and Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Jackie wrote that Wilde and Baudelaire were both “poets and idealists who could paint their sinfulness with beauty and still believe in something higher.” In Diaghilev she saw a synthesizer of Eastern and Western artistic traditions, and a tireless perfectionist.