Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  “It would probably be best if you didn’t make me choose,” Jack warned her.

  Oatsie recalled, “As the rain pounded on the rooftop of their vehicle, Janet told Jack, ‘I dislike you so much.’ He smiled and said, ‘No, actually you don’t, Janet.’ He was so goddamn smug, that guy. She told me it was maddening.”

  In that moment—at least to hear Janet tell it—she could feel her affection for Black Jack begin to lift from her. Janet bundled up her coat and, without warning, exited the car into the driving, lashing rain. She slammed the door closed behind her. When she turned around and looked into the vehicle’s backseat window, she saw Jack’s startled expression staring back at her. Then she spun around and walked away.

  It was so cold, Janet later recalled, she began to shiver convulsively. She hunched her shoulders against the driving wind. She walked and walked and walked, without an umbrella, in what had to be one of the worst storms of the year. She cried the entire time. By the time she got back to her apartment, she was soaking wet from head to toe, and all cried out. Apparently, she was also finished with Jack Bouvier. “It was as if the rain had washed me clean of that no-good son of a bitch,” she would recall.

  When Janet walked into the apartment, her maid rushed to her, alarmed to see her so bedraggled, her clothes soaking wet, her makeup running down her face. “Madam, what in the world happened?” the maid asked.

  “I came to my senses,” Janet answered as she stood in the entrance hall, dripping wet. “That’s what happened. I came to my senses.”

  “This is the only way for me to get on with my life and the lives of my daughters, Jacqueline and Lee,” Janet Bouvier later explained to the judge who finalized the divorce in 1939. “All I care about are my girls. That’s it.”

  After she left the courthouse victorious, she telephoned one of Jack Bouvier’s sisters and, during their conversation, couldn’t help but gloat just a little. “I didn’t think it was possible for Satan to be overthrown,” she said, “but I darn well did it, didn’t I?”

  Jack Kennedy

  It was the summer of ’53. Fourteen years had passed since Janet Lee Bouvier secured her hard-earned independence from Jack Bouvier. Her daughter Jackie was now just one year older, at twenty-three, than Janet had been when she divorced her father, and the question of romance was on the minds of both mother and daughter. “I’m just so frustrated by this man,” Jackie told Janet, according to what Janet would later recall to Joan Braden for her oral history at the JFK Library. She said the two were sitting on Jackie’s bed at Merrywood talking about Senator Jack Kennedy. This certainly wouldn’t be the last time she would find herself exasperated by him. They’d been dating for about a year, after having been introduced at a party by the journalist Charles L. Bartlett, a friend of Jack’s.

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy—known to most of those in his life as Jack, just like Janet’s first husband—was a good-looking, charismatic war hero. Now thirty-five, he was an extremely engaging man. He was just a tad over six feet tall and about 170 pounds, with hair that was almost red but mostly brown. His eyes seemed either gray or green depending on the light. Lighthearted and funny, his sense of humor appealed to Jackie. He was also, obviously, intelligent; when he spoke of history, she couldn’t help but fall under his spell.

  “He’s a Democrat, you know,” Janet warned Jackie of Jack. It seemed as if she was looking for reasons to disapprove. Though she was Republican, as was the whole family, citing politics was pushing it. Jackie was not a political animal and wasn’t even registered to vote. “But you didn’t mention the word ‘Democrat’ in my mother’s house,” Lee would say, “or even in my father’s.”

  As Lee suggests, there was some long-standing grievance against Democrats like the Kennedys, especially from the Bouvier side of the family. Back in the 1940s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed Jack Kennedy’s father, Joe, as the chief operating officer of the newly created Securities and Exchange Commission. This commission was formed to monitor stock trades and prevent the kind of wild speculating that had put money in the pockets of the wealthy while wiping out pretty much everybody else. Since this was exactly how Joe had made a great part of his fortune, it was ironic that he was now charged with policing such activity. He immediately enacted dozens of restrictions on speculative trading, all done with an eye toward ruining anyone who’d ever crossed him in the past—and their number was legion.

  Black Jack had made a lot of money buying and selling large blocks of stocks for other brokerage firms. However, with Joe Kennedy’s new regulations in place, he was unable to continue this lucrative practice. With his hands now tied by Kennedy, he lost big in the stock market—$43,000 in 1934 alone. In fact, he would earn barely $5,000 that year in dividends, and half that much in brokerage commissions. “Because of what Kennedy had done, men like Black Jack loathed him,” said John Davis, “so Jackie and Lee knew from an early age that the name ‘Kennedy’ was never to be so much as whispered in their household. Black Jack would earn and lose a lot more money from this time in his life and onward, but he would never really bounce back from the downslide caused by Joe Kennedy and his running of the Securities and Exchange Commission.”

  “I was a chubby, somewhat snobby six-year-old in black velvet shorts, silk shirt, lace cuffs, and black patent-leather shoes with brass buckles,” recalled Jamie Auchincloss of his appearance when JFK first came to call. “The day Jackie brought him home, I already had an opinion of him. A Catholic, Democrat, perhaps liberal, Irish, and a politician, he was, in every way I had heard anyway, definitely an outsider. I stood at the top of the long staircase, glaring down the flight of red carpet at him as he entered the house. I coughed loudly to draw attention to myself and then snorted in my haughtiest voice, ‘Hello, Kennedy.’ Jack looked up at me and retorted in exactly the same tone, ‘Hello … Auchincloss.’”

  Though he had a great sense of humor and terrific charisma, Jack was still usually a bit reserved when with Jackie. Maybe he sensed it best that he hold back. There’s little doubt that if he had been aggressive and demonstrative, he would have scared her away. Jackie, like her mother, was anything but effusive with her emotions; Lee was more impulsive. Though Jack didn’t represent head-over-heels love at first sight for Jackie, she didn’t really want that kind of passion in a new relationship, anyway. Some felt she had never really reconciled that “quickie” she had with John Marquand in an elevator so long ago. Now she seemed to be looking for something deeper. As she learned more about him—a Harvard graduate from a close-knit family, his maternal grandfather the former mayor of Boston, his father the former ambassador to Great Britain—Jackie became even more interested in Jack. The Kennedys were noteworthy, exciting, and, apparently, also tragic—she soon learned that Jack’s brother and sister were both killed in plane crashes.

  “Are you sure about him, Jacqueline?” Janet asked her daughter in front of her family members at Merrywood. She found him charming if not exactly polished. She said that he certainly had an impressive pedigree, but that he seemed rather unkempt. Jackie had to agree. He did appear to need a good haircut, she said, and maybe a nice meal because he was so thin. However, she was drawn to him, just the same.

  In so many ways, Jack Kennedy was a study in contrasts. He was strong, vital, and smart, alive with ideas for the future, ambitious in his political goals—he’d been a congressman for five years and had his eye on a Senate seat. However, he also suffered from a bad back partly as a result of war injuries as well as a deficiency of the adrenal glands called Addison’s disease. Despite these health challenges, he always seemed hearty and full of life. He was also wealthy, as Jackie soon found out (and she did ask around, as did Janet). The Kennedys were worth at least $500 million thanks to Kennedy patriarch Joe’s investments in the stock market (and no small share of bootlegging operations over the years). Jack had a $10 million trust fund from which he received a nice annual income.

  As Jackie began to travel with Jack, joining his se
natorial campaign in Boston and listening to his speeches in small surrounding towns, she continued to feel herself drawn to him. She had known, though, pretty much from her first conversation with Jack that he was not interested in settling down. Her intuition told her that he was probably just a playboy. However, he was also fun and exciting and even took her to the Eisenhower inauguration, which was pretty thrilling. But, afterward, he wouldn’t return her phone calls. Then they had another date; he took her to meet his family in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. After that, there was even more silence from him. She was beginning to feel that maybe he just wasn’t interested in her. “Well, you are too available to him, Jacqueline,” Janet said, “that’s the problem. You need to disappear for a while, and if he still pursues things, then you’ll know he’s interested. If he doesn’t, you’ll know where you stand there, too.”

  Earlier, in the spring of ’53, Janet happened to have a conversation with one of her socialite friends, Emily Foley, during which Emily said that her daughter Aileen was going to London in June to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. “Why don’t you suggest that Jackie go along with her,” Emily said. Janet thought it was a good idea, especially since Jackie was now working for the Washington Times-Herald as a columnist. “I should think the newspaper would be happy to send you and another reporter to write up the coronation,” Janet told her daughter, “and if they don’t want to, I’d like to give you the trip because it would be a great experience for you.”

  Jackie didn’t want to go. The more Janet pushed, the more Jackie pushed back. “Mummy, I said no,” she said, annoyed. “I really do not want to go.”

  “But why?” Janet wanted to know. Then it hit her. “You don’t want to be away from Jack, do you?”

  Jackie nodded.

  “Do you love him?” Janet asked.

  Of course, that was not the kind of question Jackie would directly answer; she was just not that open a person. However, Janet knew from her expression that it might be the case. She was surprised, but if this was what was going on with her daughter she would accept it. “If you’re so much in love with Jack Kennedy that you don’t want to leave him,” she told her (and, again, all of this is per her memory as she recalled in her JFK Library oral history), “I should think he would be much more likely to find out how he felt about you if you were seeing exciting people and doing exciting things instead of just sitting here waiting for the telephone to ring.”

  Finally, Jackie agreed to go to London after convincing her newspaper’s editor to let her cover the royal event there. “Her drawings of the coronation appeared on the front pages of the Times-Herald three or four times, and they were very good, very clever,” Janet would recall. Janet felt that, surely, Jack had seen them and been impressed by them. Hopefully, they made him wonder about Jackie and maybe even want to see her.

  Janet’s hopes were confirmed when, on the exact same day Jackie was returning to the United States, her telephone rang—Jack calling from the Cape. He wondered if she knew what flight Jackie would be on, and what time. Janet gave him the information and told him that she would be landing in New York and then flying down to Washington. Jack said he happened to know that this particular flight had a stopover in Boston. He said he was going to meet Jackie there, and surprise her. “It was the first time that I felt that this was really a serious romance,” Janet would recall, “at least on his part. I had suspected Jackie cared a lot, although she had never really said so because she is the sort of girl who covers her feelings. Anyway, he did meet her at Boston.”

  Happily, Janet approved of Jack Kennedy in a way that she’d not of John Husted or Michael Canfield. At least Kennedy had a promising future. He also had money; Janet had checked out his family’s finances thoroughly. For her part, Lee thought Jack was “terrific.” She said Jackie should snap him up and added that if she didn’t, “I might!” She was kidding, of course. (Or was she?)

  It was difficult for Janet to raise too many objections about Kennedy—that is, until she began to ask around about his father, Joe. What she learned about him gave her pause. Joe was widely known to have been unfaithful to his long-suffering but tough-as-nails wife, Rose. As Janet dug a little deeper, she learned that Jack was also known for his many assignations with women, which was to be expected since, after all, he was young and handsome and also single. The fact that some of those ladies with whom he was known to have been involved were married is what caused Janet concern.

  Of course, money mattered to Janet. However, because of what she’d been through with Jack Bouvier, she also had some pretty strong views about unfaithful husbands. Rose—and, it would seem, at least from what Janet could gather, her daughters and even daughters-in-law—felt that as long as philandering behavior wasn’t flaunted, it was acceptable. Janet vehemently disagreed. In her mind, it simply wasn’t tolerable. If a man could not be faithful, as far as she was concerned, he should not be married, especially not to one of her daughters, no matter how much he and his family had in the bank. There was no latitude in her thinking; it was absolute.

  About a month before his planned wedding to her daughter, Janet was upset to learn that Jack Kennedy had gone sailing in the Caribbean with his friend Senator George Smathers. The trip had been planned months in advance, and the two were not about to cancel it. “Throughout the time we were gone,” Smathers later recalled, “we were bombarded with telegrams from Mrs. Auchincloss wondering when we would be back, all in the guise of asking questions about the planning of the wedding—none of which Jack would have had the answers to, anyway. I remember that Jack said, ‘She’s not going to be easy, that one.’”

  In fact, Janet was gravely troubled. Why would a man who was in love take a vacation without his fiancée so shortly before their wedding? She saw trouble on the horizon. Therefore, she couldn’t in good conscience completely endorse the marriage, her default mechanism being to protect her eldest daughter. She didn’t know what to do. She decided to go to St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode Island, where the wedding was to take place. (Though unable to receive the Catholic Church’s sacraments because of her divorce, she still belonged to St. Mary’s.) She would recall that she went early in the morning before there were any parishioners present, lit a candle, and then sat in the empty church for about an hour, thinking about her daughter’s happiness and wondering what was best for her. After prayer, she would feel more certain that Jackie was making the right decision, and that she should not stand in her way.

  Jackie felt she had the coping skills in place to deal with someone as unpredictable in fidelity as Jack. Jack had the potential to be something great and maybe powerful (and maybe richer), and Jackie saw it in him and was willing to overlook everything else. She didn’t want anything to get in the way of her future as a Kennedy, not Jack’s reputation and certainly not Janet’s concern about it. The fact that the Kennedys loved Jackie from the start also helped things along. Was she of French ancestry? They thought she was, with a name like Bouvier. They weren’t quite sure, though, the mystery of it all somehow seeming more exotic to them than the truth. (In fact, breaking it down, she was just one-eighth French, three-eighths English, and half Irish, the Irish strain being what she most had in common with the Kennedys.)

  “Jackie had impressed them all—especially the powerful Joe—with her great beauty, rare humor, and keen intellect as well as what they viewed as her distinguished background,” recalled her half brother, Jamie Auchincloss. “When they combined what they knew of her education at Miss Porter’s and Vassar with the fact that she’d once been Debutante of the Year, as well as with her many travels abroad along with what appeared to be her wealth, she was the perfect aristocratic fit for the role of senator’s wife. Of course, Jackie had no wealth of her own. Our family lived well, but she had little to no money in her bank account.”

  The Kennedys would be in the dark as to the specifics of Jackie’s financial situation for quite some time to come. They would believe that Jackie’s f
ather, Jack, was wealthy and that Jackie would stand to inherit half of his estate. They also thought her grandfather Jim T. Lee would make her wealthy at his passing. None of it was true, though. Jackie wasn’t well off at all—which is why, while she knew she could’ve stopped the wedding if she’d elected to do so, Janet made the decision to abandon her reservations. After all, she knew what it was like to worry about day-to-day expenses. She never wanted to revisit that trying time, and she most certainly didn’t want such a life for her daughter.

  Janet’s Tough Times

  Flashback to January 1941.

  Janet Lee Bouvier would tell anyone who asked that she was exhausted by her penny-pinching existence after her divorce from her husband, Black Jack. In truth, while she thought she had it tough, most people likely would have disagreed.

  Janet would awaken to breakfast in bed of toast and jam, sometimes eggs, with coffee and freshly squeezed orange juice served by the maid. Then she would sit at the antique French Louis XV–style oak fall-front writing desk in her bedroom and try to cope with a stack of bills. Shaking her head in bafflement while pounding away on a small adding machine, she would do her best to balance her account while meeting her fiscal duties. Jack was paying her a little over a thousand dollars a month. Still, it was never enough, especially given that Janet had a full-time personal maid and a governess for the girls. (She wanted a cook, too, but couldn’t afford one, which was why the governess served breakfast in the mornings.) There were all sorts of financial responsibilities with which to deal, from the regular household bills to her personal maintenance—hairstyling, manicures and pedicures, new clothing, always couture—to the girls’ ballet classes, art classes, piano and horseback-riding lessons, as well as dental expenses. In that last regard, because Jackie’s teeth were coming in misaligned, Janet had a battle with Jack—who was supposed to cover dental—over braces, which were quite expensive in the 1940s; in the end the couple split the cost. Somehow, Janet always found a way to pay for everything, even if it meant swallowing her pride and borrowing from her father, which she had to do many times. She even appealed to her mother to talk to him about a weekly allowance so that she wouldn’t have to keep going back to him. “But when has your father ever gone out of his way to help anyone,” Margaret asked, “especially one of his children?” She had a point.