These Few Precious Days (19 page)

AT EVERY STOP, CHURCH BELLS
rang, boats blew their horns, and locals turned out in force to cheer the American first lady. Rather than depart for Mykonos on schedule, Jackie and the Radziwills popped into a local hangout for a quick drink. When the other patrons began dancing the spirited
kalamatianos
popularized in the United States by the films
Never on Sunday
and
Zorba the Greek,
Jackie leapt up and joined right in.

Once back in Athens, Jackie, trailed by a pack of tourists and photographers, toured the Acropolis and the Parthenon before having a private luncheon with King Paul and Queen Frederika. As she left, the dashing Crown Prince Constantine, twenty-one-year-old heir to the throne, took her on an impromptu joyride in his new dark blue Mercedes convertible. Caught by surprise, Clint Hill and the other Secret Service agents gave chase in a follow-up car, careening along the tortuous roads toward the port of Piraeus and on to the villa in Kavouri where she was staying. Jackie was beaming when the Secret Service caught up with her. “She knew she had put us to the test,” Hill wrote in his memoir,
Mrs. Kennedy and Me,
“and she loved it.”

In stark contrast to Jackie’s sun-splashed escapade, Jack was having anything but fun. The trouble began on the flight home from London. Unable to fall asleep aboard Air Force One, he ambled into the main cabin wearing his nightshirt and asked Jacobson if he could do anything to help. Dr. Max dove into his battered black medical bag, filled another syringe—this time with Librium—and administered the shot to the president “to help him sleep. He wanted,” Jacobson said, “to be in his best form for the return to the USA.”

Once he was back in the Oval Office, however, Jack was coping with more than just affairs of state; he was dealing with ever-more-crippling back pain triggered by the tree planting in Ottawa. Ordered by his physicians to go to Palm Beach to recuperate, Jack brought along Dr. Travell, Chuck Spalding—and two attractive staffers in their twenties known to everyone as “Fiddle” and “Faddle.”

Priscilla Weir, who acquired the nickname “Fiddle” because as a young child she couldn’t pronounce Priscilla, was yet another Miss Porter’s alumna. Jill Cowan, a member of the wealthy Bloomingdale’s department store family, inevitably became “Faddle” after the two women shared an apartment in Georgetown. Hired during the 1960 presidential campaign—they thought it would be amusing to introduce themselves as Fiddle and Faddle and wear the same dress—Weir now worked for Evelyn Lincoln, while Cowan clipped wire copy and answered telephones for Pierre Salinger.

Fiddle and Faddle often swam with the president in the White House pool, and their easygoing, flirtatious manner raised eyebrows. Rumors flew, but Jackie seemed very matter-of-fact about the giggly pair. Once, while giving a foreign journalist a White House tour, she stuck her head in Salinger’s office and blurted out in French, “And this is one of the young ladies who is supposed to be sleeping with my husband.”

IRONICALLY, ANOTHER OF HER HUSBAND’S
reputed White House lovers—Jackie’s press secretary Pam Turnure—was on the road with her boss in Greece while JFK “relaxed” in Palm Beach with Fiddle and Faddle. “The only indication I ever had that Jackie knew about all of Jack’s women,” Betty Spalding said, “was when they were in the White House and she asked me if I knew if he was having an affair with Pamela Turnure. I said I didn’t know, but even if I did I wouldn’t tell her.”

More than once when she felt her back was against the wall, Jackie took action. “Jackie put up with the situation because she loved him, in her way,” Gore Vidal said. “However, she would not accept being humiliated—and he was very careful that she
not
be humiliated.” However, “when things started to leak out, when she became threatened, she sent him a message.”

One of those times occurred, George Smathers remembered, after Jackie found a pair of panties peeking out from under a pillow in JFK’s bedroom. “Would you please shop around and see who these belong to?” she asked him. “They’re not my size.”

In Palm Beach, Jackie was overheard firing off another zinger when she returned from the beach. “You’d better get down there fast,” she told Jack. “I saw two of them you’d really go for.”

JFK confided in Smathers that, more than once, Jackie—“the only person during the whole time in the White House who ever told Jack off”—asked him flat out if the stories were true. “Jackie,” the president replied in one instance, “I would never do anything to embarrass myself.”

“Well,” she shot back angrily, “you’re embarrassing
me
!”

JFK’s Air Force aide, General Godfrey McHugh, had dated Jackie before she met Kennedy and was well aware of the president’s extramarital activities. Early on, McHugh said, “Jackie knew about his women.” Her friend Ralph Martin agreed. “You know, in the end Jackie knew everything. Every girl. She knew her rating, her accomplishments . . .”

That didn’t mean she took Jack’s cheating lightly. “She didn’t like Jack’s fooling around. She was damn mad about it,” Smathers conceded. “But she was willing to look the other way as long as he was careful.”

As it happened, Jackie was never really satisfied with this “arrangement,” and had taken steps to do something about it. Unbeknownst to even their closest friends, the first lady was regularly sharing the most intimate details of her marriage—including the devastating emotional toll of her husband’s rampant infidelity—with someone far outside the Kennedys’ social orbit. In May 1961, after spraining her ankle playing touch football with Bobby’s brood at Hickory Hill, Jackie was treated by RFK’s neighbor, a young, square-jawed cardiologist and professor of medicine at Georgetown University named Frank Finnerty. Jackie was so captivated by Dr. Finnerty’s bedside manner that she asked if she could call him every now and then just to talk about things that had been troubling her.

Flattered, Finnerty agreed. For the rest of JFK’s presidency, Jackie essentially treated the physician as her therapist, calling twice a week to unburden herself about problems in her relationships with friends and family, the stresses of living life in the public eye, and—most alarmingly—her complicated marriage.

“She wanted me to know she was not naive or dumb, as people in the White House thought,” Finnerty recalled. “She did know what was going on.” She did not, he added, want people to think she was “strange and aloof, living in a world of her own.”

Jackie conceded that her husband was so promiscuous and his extramarital conquests so numerous there was no way either she or he could possibly identify them all. She had no compunction about listing the names she did know, confident that they would mean nothing to Finnerty. The mention of one name, however, took the thirty-seven-year-old doctor’s breath away. More than any of JFK’s other lovers, Marilyn Monroe “seemed to bother her the most”—in large part because Marilyn was a loose cannon who could go public at any time, causing a scandal that would obliterate her husband’s reputation, destroy her marriage, and hold her up to public ridicule. (Even after JFK’s assassination, Jackie confessed to the Reverend Richard T. McSorley, a Catholic priest, that she was still deeply troubled and confused by her husband’s affair with Marilyn.)

Over a period of weeks and months, Finnerty listened as Jackie calmly outlined her theory about Jack’s philandering—that he had inherited this “vicious trait” from Joe Kennedy, that he was simply driven by hormones, and that he had no real feelings for any of these women. Motivated less by jealousy than by frustration and despair, Jackie had no illusions about getting Jack to stop. But she did wonder if her own sexual inadequacies had pushed Jack away.

To a gob-smacked Finnerty, Jackie described her husband’s usual modus operandi in bed: “He just goes too fast and falls asleep.” Was there something she could do to change that? There was, and after some understandable hesitation Finnerty spelled out in clinical detail how foreplay could be used to improve their sex life.

It was essential that, in trying to persuade Jack to change his approach in bed, no mention be made of Jackie’s unconventional therapist-patient relationship with Dr. Finnerty. So Jackie concocted a tall tale that she told her husband over dinner at the White House. It began with Jackie confessing to her priest that something was lacking in her sexual relationship with her husband. The priest, she went on, then referred her to her obstetrician, who recommended several illustrated books on the subject. As a result, Jackie was now full of new information about how they might spice things up in bed. Surprised and obviously pleased at his wife’s newfound expertise—and, said Finnerty, that she would “go to that much trouble to enjoy sex”—Jack happily obliged.

The ploy worked, and Jackie informed her co-conspirator that relations between the president and first lady had improved significantly—although not enough to stop Jack’s skirt-chasing. If nothing else, from this point on Jackie had no reason to blame herself for her husband’s sexual compulsions.

As Jackie’s Grecian idyll drew to a close in June 1961, she was on the phone with Jack every night consoling him about his badly injured back. Apparently his Palm Beach interlude, punctuated by long swims in the Wrightsmans’ heated saltwater pool with Fiddle and Faddle, did nothing to alleviate the agonizing pain. On his return to Washington, Jack was not even capable of climbing down the stairs of the presidential aircraft on crutches. In a dramatic and humbling turn of events, JFK had to be lifted off Air Force One on a cherry picker.

To be sure, the papers were full of stories about JFK’s back troubles. But the public remained largely unaware of just how crippling those problems really were. “People don’t understand just how bad off Jack was during his presidency,” Smathers said. “He could barely stand up much of the time, much less walk. He leaned on Secret Service agents all the time.”

“Look closely at the photographs,” Jacques Lowe said. “He tried to avoid it when someone was taking a picture, but occasionally he is caught off guard, leaning. He was always leaning—on tables, on desks, on windowsills, the backs of chairs.” According to Tish Baldrige, JFK “had this uncanny knack of leaning up against a wall and going to sleep. He could sleep
standing up,
which always astounded me.” Moreover, Jack “had this little trick,” she continued. “He would put on his sunglasses, and people thought he was watching a parade or whatever, and the whole time he’d be sleeping behind those glasses! I’d catch him doing it all the time.”

Although no one ever heard him complain, there were times when, according to Salinger, JFK would “wince, or go absolutely white.” It was at moments like those, he said, that “you knew he was feeling pain that would make anyone else scream. Not a word of complaint about his health or how he was feeling, ever.”

There were many times when the pain was so severe the president “could hardly dress himself,” Smathers recalled. Just prior to attending a political banquet in Miami, the Florida senator had to put JFK’s shoes and socks on for him. Like Franklin Roosevelt, who hid the fact that he was wheelchair-bound from the general public, Jack successfully concealed the extent of his crippling back trouble. What made this achievement even more remarkable is that, unlike FDR, he accomplished this subterfuge without the cooperation of the press. “Jack even managed to hide it from them,” Smathers said.

That first summer of his presidency, JFK spent long weekends in familiar surroundings at Hyannis Port, seeking what respite he could from mounting crises both foreign (Khrushchev’s shocking decision to build a wall dividing East and West Berlin, mounting tensions in Cuba and Southeast Asia) and domestic (civil rights protesters attacked and beaten in Alabama). “The Cape was his escape hatch,” said Ted Sorensen, who admitted that during this period JFK was “agitated and deeply disturbed” by the belligerence of the Soviet leader. “Hyannis Port was where he felt most at home, and where he could regroup mentally and physically.”

For Jackie, life at their four-bedroom “cottage” in the Kennedy compound offered such a welcome escape from the pressures of being first lady that she planted herself there for the entire summer and early fall. With the exception of a few forays back to Washington, usually to check on the restoration or host an official dinner, Jackie, Caroline, and John would not return full-time to the White House until late October.

Until then Jackie enjoyed unnerving her Secret Service agent, Clint Hill, by showing off on water skis behind Ambassador Kennedy’s fifty-two-foot cabin cruiser, the
Marlin
. (She pushed the envelope even further by having four-year-old Caroline ski with her.) There was also swimming in the surf and in Joe Kennedy’s pool, tennis matches, golf at the nearby Hyannis Port Club, nude sunbathing, and the inescapable rough-and-tumble of Kennedy-style touch football.

During the week, after the president’s sprawling entourage departed and she was finally alone with the children, Jackie liked to paint on a small easel set up on the porch while listening to chamber music. Other times, she grabbed one of the books recommended by the erudite Arthur Schlesinger and lolled poolside wearing a skimpy bikini and oversized dark glasses, her hair tied back with a brightly colored kerchief. “She was gorgeous,” their neighbor Larry Newman said. “It made you sad seeing her there all alone, knowing what he was up to back in Washington. Why Jack bothered to look at any other woman, I’ll never know.”