Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  Bemelmans died before he and Jackie had a chance to carry out their project. After she moved to New York, she embarked on a self-improvement kick with another visual artist, Oliver Smith.

  “What’s new with Truman?” Jackie asked.

  “Pardon me?” Smith said. He was hard of hearing.

  “ Truman,” Jackie repeated, louder.

  She was referring to the writer Truman Capote, not the ex-President.

  Jackie and Smith had been introduced by Truman Capote, though introductions were hardly necessary for two such well-known people. Oliver Smith was a legend in the theater. He had scored his first major success back in 1942, designing the scenery for Agnes de Mille’s Rodeo. He then went on to do the sets for On the Town, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music, as well as for a number of productions of the American Ballet Theatre, where he was now codirector.

  A little over a year before, Smith had brought the American Ballet Theatre to Washington, where Jackie and the President saw the company perform in a decrepit movie theater near the White House. Jackie was dismayed by the contrast between the evening’s brilliant performance and its down-at-heels surroundings, and it got her to thinking about a center for the performing arts in Washington that would be modeled after Lincoln Center in New York City.

  “The arts had been treated as a stepchild in the U.S.,” she later recalled. “When the government had supported the arts, as in many WPA projects, artists were given a hand and some wonderful things emerged. I had seen in Europe how proud those countries were of their arts and artists. Of course, they had a longer tradition of patronage, going back to kings, popes, and princes, but modern governments continued this support. Our great museums and great performing companies should be supported, but the experimental and the unknown should also be thrown a line.”

  After her famous 1961 trip to Paris, when she had met President Charles de Gaulle and his culture minister, Andre Malraux, Jackie was determined to create an American department of the arts. As a first step in that direction, she persuaded her husband to appoint August Heckscher as a “special consultant to the President on the arts.” And Kennedy had been scheduled to sign an executive order realizing one of Jackie’s greatest goals: the appointment of Richard Goodwin as the first special assistant to the President for cultural affairs. Her dream was ultimately realized when President Johnson created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The notion that government should take a leading role in promoting the arts became a permanent part of the American cultural landscape.

  Oliver Smith’s most celebrated accomplishment was his over-the-top design for the Lerner-Loewe musical Camelot. When Jackie told Teddy White “there’ll never be another Camelot,” she was thinking of Smith’s pastel jousting fields and golden castles. She shared Smith’s talent for turning reality into a stage set.

  Oliver Smith’s ability to create the perfect mise-en-scène was on permanent display in the garden in the back of his house. The garden was a masterpiece of landscaping, with its splashing fountain, heavy slate patio, and arbor laden with thick, twiny wisteria. In the spring and summer, the feeling was very Southern, like a miniature Tara, and indeed the house appealed to many Southern writers, such as Truman Capote, who for a time lived in the basement apartment on Willow Street with his lover Jack Dunphy. Billy Baldwin helped Capote decorate it with dark green wallpaper, and a pair of gold mirrors in the shape of butterflies.

  “He was just an alley cat that wandered around the neighborhood eating whenever he could,” Oliver Smith said of Truman Capote. “He was thin—very thin—and he would stand on the porch looking wistfully into the kitchen. He was determined to get into the house, but I didn’t want him. I had four other cats, which was a big enough feline population.”

  “Do you remember?” Jackie said. “At lunch in your dining room, Truman told me, or at least strongly implied, that the whole house was his.”

  “I remember,” Smith answered.

  “And then in the middle of lunch I got the idea that it wasn’t his,” she said. “That it was yours.”

  Oliver Smith’s house figured prominently in the social life of New York’s influential community of homosexual artists, writers, and musicians. Smith gave famous parties, and he was known as a brilliant raconteur, a man brimming with the latest bawdy gossip. He had a dry wit, and talked in a slow, thoughtful way about art, style, and having a good time.

  Many of the friends Jackie made after she moved to New York were gay. There were, of course, heterosexual men in her cultural circle, too, men like Mike Nichols, Jason Epstein, and Norman Podhoretz. But with gay men, there was no layer of sex, which meant that there was one less thing for Jackie to worry about. Once, for example, when Truman Capote visited Jackie in her Fifth Avenue apartment, she invited him into her bedroom while she dressed to go out for the evening.

  Jackie’s friendship with gay men like Oliver Smith, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Leonard Bernstein had a profound effect on her outlook. When she was a young girl, she had heard her father heap contempt on “faggots.” The nuns and priests taught her that homosexuality was a sin. Later, the Kennedys scorned any behavior that lacked manly strength and purpose.

  As part of her New York education, however, Jackie saw all the harm that was done by this effort to stigmatize homosexuality. She came to believe that no good would ever come from trying to sanitize or standardize behavior.

  She was growing more broad-minded and tolerant, even about herself. She started to accept the fact that, like homosexuals, she herself was not what most people considered “normal.” In a way, she was “almost normal,” just like her gay friends.

  After Oliver Smith and Jackie finished their drinks, they went upstairs. On the second floor there was another guest apartment, which was frequently used by Tyrone Guthrie, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

  “Tyrone must be six foot six, and his wife is a big woman, too,” said Smith. “It is always a puzzle to me how two such huge, flamboyant figures can fit into such a small room.”

  Smith’s studio was on the third floor, and it was here that he and Jackie worked side by side at his drafting tables. Smith had studied architecture, and was an accomplished illustrator. But his real skill was as a teacher.

  “What do you think of this?” Jackie asked, pointing to the landscape she was working on. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Not at all,” he said. “Just a trifle primitive. It looks like a fried egg.”

  “A fried egg!” Jackie said, horrified. She looked at her work again, and started laughing. “Well, I suppose it does,” she said.

  While they drew, Smith spoke of art and literature. Art was his whole life, and his words flowed in a languid, unforced stream of consciousness. He was a great traveler, too, and extremely well read in most of the world’s literature, and his conversation jumped without a hitch across centuries and disciplines and cultures.

  Before Jackie knew it, their time was up. She put away her things and stole a glimpse at Smith’s drawing.

  “Why, that’s wonderful, Oliver,” she said.

  “This?” he said with a vehemence that Jackie rarely heard in his voice. “This doesn’t mean a thing. It won’t last. What I do is fleeting, and I’ll be forgotten tomorrow. A great painter or writer—now their work will last forever.”

  YOU CAN’T KNOW ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER

  In April of 1965, Lee gave Jackie a New York coming-out party. She cleared away the furniture in her dining room and placed a five-piece Lester Lanin ensemble at one end of the room beside the windows. She brought in huge bouquets of multicolored spring flowers, and lots of champagne. And she invited all the beautiful people to toast “Her Elegance,” as Women’s Wear Daily had recently christened Jackie.

  By ten-thirty, however, all but one of the guests had departed.

  “The party was a flop,” Lee moaned.

  She was
standing in the kitchen of her Fifth Avenue duplex, dressed in a lime-green silk crepe Yves Saint Laurent ball gown. She and Stas lived in what many people considered to be the most spectacular apartment in all of New York. Friends were stupefied when they entered the drawing room, which was like a stage set worthy of an Italian opera. Created by the interior designer Renzo Mongiardino, the room had elaborate carved wood paneling and walls upholstered in raspberry-colored velvet, with a painted band of scrollwork up and down the corners and around the top and bottom of the room.

  “Oh, God, the party was such a flop!” Lee repeated.

  “Well, darling, it was just one of those evenings,” said the actress Kitty Carlisle Hart, who was a regular panelist on the television program To Tell the Truth and knew when to be candid with friends. “Something just didn’t click.”

  “It was a big flop, all right,” Stas agreed. “Jackie’s presence put a crimp on things.”

  Lee did not want to admit it, but Stas was right. Jackie had put a crimp on things. For the few hours that she had deigned to stay at the party, Jackie had acted like a queen, making everyone feel self-conscious and uncomfortable. It was almost as if Jackie had wanted Lee’s party to fail. Jackie could never stand to share the spotlight with Lee.

  “Lee was utterly impatient with the public sentiment that had turned her sister into a monument,” wrote Diana DuBois, Lee’s biographer. “As Jackie’s sibling, she knew all too well the weak spots in her character, and the chinks in her psyche. If the key to Lee was held by her relationship to her sister, then the reverse was true, and one could never truly know the one without knowing the other. Once, in an unguarded aside, Lee told a friend, ‘You should see that woman! She wakes up in the morning, and goes through all the newspapers looking for her name, and if she doesn’t find it, she just throws them all away, and when she sees her name, she cuts it out immediately!’ ”

  “How about some champagne?” Stas asked. He popped open a fresh bottle.

  “I’ve got wonderful news,” Kitty said, trying to inject a note of gaiety. “I’m going to play Marriage-Go-Round in summer stock. Stas, how would you like to be in it with me?”

  “Of course,” Stas said, going along with the joke. “I would be very good.”

  “But you’ll have to learn your lines, Stas,” said Kitty, a veteran trooper, who had appeared with the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera, and whose recently deceased husband, the famous playwright Moss Hart, had directed the musical Camelot.

  “Oh, I can’t be bothered learning lines,” Stas said.

  “Then you can’t be in my play,” Kitty said. “How about you, Lee?”

  “Oh, Kitty, I would love to be in it,” said Lee. “Desperately. Why don’t you send me the script so I can read it.”

  Caught off guard, Kitty took another sip of champagne.

  “Well, darling,” she said, “you should be on the stage. I’m sure you’d be marvelous. I’ll send the script around tomorrow morning.”

  Lee did not know what to do with herself these days. Her marriage to Stas was on its last legs. And she was falling farther and farther behind in her competition with Jackie.

  When they were growing up, Lee had been the beautiful one, and the one with a firmer grasp of fashion and style. As a young woman, she worked as a special assistant to Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Harper’s Bazaar who later moved on to run Vogue. Then Lee lived in England, traveled with the jet set, and had the richest and most glittering friends. Even when Jackie was First Lady, and went around trying to look like Audrey Hepburn in Givenchy interpretations made by Oleg Cassini, Lee consoled herself with the thought that it was she, not her older sister, who lived the life of a true sophisticate.

  Now, however, everything was topsy-turvy. Lee was about to become an impoverished divorcee, and Jackie was being celebrated as the most beautiful and stylish woman in the world. A poll of American newspaper publishers disclosed that the story that would get the widest readership among their female readers would be entitled, “Jacqueline Kennedy Remarries.”

  Magazines were not waiting for that day. Photoplay, the magazine of Hollywood celebrities, put Jackie on its cover with the headline TOO SOON FOR LOVE? Movie TV Secrets featured her in a piece called “Jackie’s New Neighbors Tell All … WHERE SHE GOES, WHO SHE SEES, WHAT SHE DOES!” Modern Screen’s March issue offered “Jackie Kennedy Changes—Her New Life, Her New Look, Her New Love….”

  Jackie was stealing all of Lee’s old friends: Vivi Stokes, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland, Rudolf Nureyev, Baron and Baroness Fabrizio Serena. The gossip columns kept track of Jackie’s escorts: economist John Kenneth Galbraith, set designer Oliver Smith, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, British diplomat Sir William Ormsby-Gore, man-about-town Roswell Gilpatric, and director Mike Nichols, who had brought her to tonight’s party at Lee’s apartment.

  People said that Jackie was more famous than any movie star, perhaps the most famous woman of the twentieth century. She was asked to lunch by United Nations Secretary General U Thant. She was invited to England by Queen Elizabeth II, who planned to dedicate a square mile of Runnymede, where the Magna Carta was signed, as a memorial to President Kennedy. Jackie had become such an important figure that even her private decision not to vote in the 1964 presidential election became a major political issue.

  “People in my own family told me I should vote,” Jackie explained. “I said, ‘I’m not going to vote.’ This is very emotional, but maybe you can understand it. You see, I’d never voted until I was married to Jack. I guess my first vote was probably for him for senator, wasn’t it? Then this vote would have been—he would have been alive for that vote. And I thought, ‘I’m not going to vote for any [other person], because this vote would have been his.’ … Bobby said I should vote, and I said, ‘I don’t care what you say, I’m not going to vote.’ It was just completely emotional.”

  Lyndon Johnson, who viewed Jackie as the dowager queen in the Kennedy government-in-exile, did not see it that way. And his fears seemed justified when Jackie turned down his invitation to attend the dedication of the White House Rose Garden in her honor.

  “I’d rather go to Dallas than ever return to Washington while Lyndon Johnson is in the White House,” she told friends in confidence.

  “She is a queen in exile on Fifth Avenue, who waits for the restoration of the dynasty,” noted a British journalist.

  “Suddenly there [is] a new, beautiful, internationally famous polestar to whirl about, a new peer-person to play status hide-and-seek with, a new ‘In’ personality to invite and hope to be invited by,” Liz Smith wrote about Jackie. “More than anyone else in New York, Jacqueline [typifies] the new society of the metropolitan Eastern Seaboard.”

  Lee was driven crazy by the thought that she would have to spend the rest of her life in Jackie’s shadow. She was desperate to steal back some of the spotlight. A career in the theater sounded like just the ticket. After all, hadn’t Kitty Carlisle Hart said that she would be marvelous on the stage?

  AUDITION

  Early the next morning, Lee called Kitty.

  “Where’s the script?” she asked. “I’m going to try out for a part.”

  “It’ll be right over,” Kitty said.

  Kitty then called Lee Guber, the producer of Marriage-Go-Round, who owned a string of summer playhouses.

  “Lee Radziwill intends to come for a tryout,” she warned him.

  To her surprise, Guber sounded interested. “I’m producing a play in Chicago,” he said, “and there’s a cameo role she might be able to do.”

  A few days later, Lee Radziwill showed up at the Morosco Theater in a driving rain, clutching a damp copy of the script that Kitty had sent her. She got up on the stage and did a reading for Guber, who was sitting in the empty auditorium.

  “I could sell out instantly if I announced your name,” Guber told her when she was through. “But I think it’s important that you don’t go out and fall on your face. Do some studying first,
and acquire technique.”

  Lee promised to start taking acting lessons. Truman Capote had told her that he could get Milton Goldman, who represented Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud, to be her agent. There was nothing like starting at the top.

  That same day, Kitty received a call from Jackie.

  “Lee told me that you arranged for her to get a part in a play,” Jackie said.

  “Yes,” Kitty said brightly, anticipating a thank-you.

  But Jackie was not amused. She thought Kitty was her friend, not Lee’s. Why was Kitty going out of her way to help Lee? Why would anyone help Lee become a professional actress? Lee did not have the slightest chance of making a go of it on the stage. She had no talent. She was trying to steal the spotlight, literally and figuratively, from Jackie. It was just one more example of that old stupid sibling rivalry rearing its ugly head.

  “Kitty,” Jackie said, “what the hell are you doing!”

  It was hard to tell which sister was the more jealous of the other.

  CAROLINE’S MOUSE

  Jackie had enrolled Caroline as a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on Ninety-first Street and Fifth Avenue. The school was housed in a large Italian Renaissance-style mansion that once served as the home of millionaire Otto Kahn. One day in the fall of 1965, Jackie came by, along with the other mothers, to pick up her daughter.

  “This is Teresa Gorman from Great Britain,” the mother superior told Jackie, who was dressed in a cream-colored Chanel suit. “She’s a gift from God. We were all praying for a science teacher, and here she is.”