Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Janet told Hugh that she was sorry about his problem but that it would not stand in the way of their relationship. He was a wonderful man, she said, with much to offer in place of physical intimacy. Therefore, yes, she said, she would eagerly marry him. “He couldn’t believe his luck,” said one of his relatives, “because he really did love Janet but was fully prepared to let her go if she would not have him. When she said yes, it was as if he was now given a whole new lease on life. He thought she was beautiful, smart, and someone who would be a great partner in his life. It was like a merger was about to happen, really, more than a marriage. However, he was happy about it, just the same.”

  In December 1941, Hugh invited Janet, Jackie, twelve, and Lee, nine, to Merrywood so they could get to know one another. “It was a nice visit,” Hugh’s son Yusha, who was fourteen at the time, once recalled. “The girls were polite, yet still fun. The mother was strict, a no-nonsense kind of woman.” (Yusha would end up with a bit of a crush on Jackie. They were always content to be in each other’s company, usually to the exclusion of poor Lee, to whom they tried to give the slip at every opportunity.)

  Six months passed. If they were going to marry, it had to happen fast, Janet and Hugh decided, because Hugh had just enlisted in the U.S. Navy; he was about to be shipped off to Jamaica with the British intelligence. Therefore, in early June, Janet sent her girls off to spend the summer with their grandfather “Grampy Lee”—Janet’s father, Jim—in East Hampton. On June 21, 1942, while they were away, she married Hugh. Apparently, Janet suspected the girls would never allow a peaceful transition from their beloved father to the new man in Janet’s life, so she decided to do the deed while they weren’t around. “We were at our grandfather’s house in East Hampton,” Lee would recall. “My mother telephoned to say she had married Hugh Auchincloss. I felt my world crashed.” After it was all over, Janet sent for her daughters so that they could all then move into Merrywood. Soon after, Hugh was unexpectedly reassigned to the War Department in Washington, which meant that he was, for the most part, living at home.

  Jackie would recall Merrywood as an “exciting and lovely place.” She would say, “Every day was wonderful. Horses and other animals and so many people all over, so much to do and learn. It was a special time with Mummy.” She and Yusha flirted, too, though it was all harmless. One night, according to what Yusha told his friend Robert Westover many years later, she came into his room and said, “Yusha, I have such big lips. Who would ever want to kiss me?” He said, “But I want to kiss you, Jackie!” And he did. “So I think Jackie got her first kiss at the age of about thirteen from Yusha,” says Westover. “It was a sweet, innocent, and fun time for her.”

  Not so for Lee: “I was left alone at this enormous house of my mother and stepfather in McLean, Virginia. They were off deep-sea fishing in Chile. I was just so lonely, all I did was play in the woods with my dogs day after day. [Jackie was at boarding school.] A very fat cook called Nellie was my only friend. And so I decided I couldn’t stand it any longer and I looked up in the yellow classified pages ‘orphanages.’ And I took my pathetic allowance, called a taxi from the yellow pages, nearest to our house. And so the taxi came, we went to the orphanage. I asked him to please wait and walked in and said to the Mother Superior at the desk, ‘My name is such-and-such and I have come to adopt an orphan. And I have a lovely place where she would be terribly happy. Horses and dogs and walks and she would really love it.’ And she [the nun] looked at me absolutely stunned and she said, ‘I’m so sorry, my dear, but you’re just too young for us to allow you to adopt a child.’ When my mother came back about a week later, I just got such hell for this—‘How you could upset me … how you could torture me the way you have … we were so worried about you!’ I couldn’t figure out quite why that was the case since they were in Chile the entire time on a motorboat!”

  Lee’s unhappiness aside, it must have felt like a sweet victory to Janet when she invited her parents to Merrywood for the first time. As he grew older, Jim—now sixty-six and still wildly successful in real-estate development with properties all over Manhattan and, also, the director of the Chase National Bank—had become more distant in his relationship to Janet and her two sisters. Janet kept waiting for the day when he would soften, when he would want to repair their relationship. She liked to tell people that there was more to him than met the eye, that deep down he was a good man who loved his daughters but didn’t have the capacity to express it, like many men of his generation. Perhaps that was true of Jim. The sad reality, though, is that Janet never knew for certain because never did he change, never did he open up to her—never did he in any way endeavor to mend the strained relationship he had with her or her sisters. “I keep waiting for that armor to crack,” she told Hugh, “but I guess people have armor for a reason.” When Jim met Hugh shortly before he and Janet married, he wasn’t impressed. “The breeding is there, but not the stamina,” he said, as if describing an aging stallion.

  Merrywood was considered among the country’s preeminent estates. It was fifty bucolic acres of rolling hills upon which sat an enormous two-story, ivy-covered mansion that had been constructed in Georgian-style architecture. Its terraces wrapped around the back of the property and overlooked the Potomac. Amid the gently splashing fountains and formal gardens, Janet pointed out to her parents that the caretakers, who lived in a five-bedroom cottage out in the distance, kept the grounds meticulously cared for with no concern about expense, money not being anyone’s worry, let alone the help’s. She took pride in explaining all she had learned about the property’s history from the estate superintendent (who lived in a separate guesthouse), such as the fact that George Washington had once surveyed it. Near the main house was a four-car garage, above which was a large five-bedroom, four-bathroom apartment. Beneath it was a full indoor gym and badminton court. There was also a shooting range, tennis court, Olympic-sized swimming pool, and, of course, stables for the horses. There was even a dog kennel. Inside the main house it seemed as if there were powder rooms every few feet. There was also a paneled library, an enormous banquet-style kitchen, with two garbage disposals—a device that had just been introduced that year—a butler’s pantry, and two large dining rooms, one for the family and their guests and one for the help.

  “Just how big is this place?” Jim asked as he, Margaret, Janet, and Hugh played pinochle after dinner at Merrywood. Janet said she had no idea, considering the many guesthouses and other structures. In totality, there were just too many rooms to count! After a moment’s thought, Jim then said he imagined Janet would no longer be coming to him for money. Janet agreed that this was probably true. Then, according to family history, Jim fixed his daughter with a crippling stare. “You may have money now,” he told her, “but not power. You don’t have power. Don’t forget that.”

  As he sat watching the scene unfold, Hugh Auchincloss probably couldn’t help but smile to himself, as if he knew what was coming. “Yes, but Hughdie has it,” Janet told her father. She then reached over and took her husband’s hand. “Therefore,” she concluded, “so do I.”

  An Unconventional Pregnancy

  A couple of years after Janet Bouvier became Janet Auchincloss, she started having a longing for more children. She was surprised; she’d truly thought she was finished with kids. She had to ask herself, at least according to her relatives, if she would have still married Hugh had she known she would’ve wanted more children, given what she knew about his sexual dysfunction. If she was being honest with herself, the answer was still yes. After all, he had provided her with a marvelous lifestyle, was extremely indulgent of her, and treated her like a queen. He was also kind to her daughters. Still, she had her mind made up about having more children and, in fact, now said she wanted two boys. She hoped for sons, she said, because she felt that maybe she would be a better mother to them than she’d been to her girls. She always felt a strange sort of competition with her daughters, she’d confessed. It was difficult for her to have c
omplete clarity about it, but she felt that maybe the reason she was sometimes at odds with Jackie and Lee was because both girls were always so defiant. She felt that sons might be more easily pliant, not as complex to raise. Being a good mother mattered to Janet; she wanted another chance.

  Obviously, having children with Hugh was not going to be easy, if even possible. When Janet told Hugh of her desire, his position was that he’d been clear and honest with her about his problem and that there was no way he was going to father children. His children from previous marriages—Yusha, Tommy, and Nini—had been conceived, he said, during a time when he was willing to try. He had long ago, he told Janet, abandoned the idea of even trying; he simply was not open to it. He’d had years of psychoanalysis to try to figure out his problem, and nothing worked. Just the mere idea of sex was humiliating, he said, and he would not go through it, even for Janet.

  Anyone who might have imagined Janet Auchincloss allowing Hugh’s personal problem to get in the way of her goal to have children would not have known her very well. Janet did her research and investigated the possibility of artificial insemination, which was relatively new at the time; babies born of this procedure were commonly called “test-tube babies.” She was fascinated to know that there were, as she put it, “ways to get around Mother Nature.” The more research she did into it, though—and she also consulted two doctors at the New York University School of Medicine who were just developing a fertility program there—the more she viewed it as unnecessarily complex. In her mind, it was quite simple: Even though Hugh was not able to sustain an erection, he was able to produce sperm, though Janet had no idea how viable it was. As long as she got it into the right place in her body, though, she felt she would get pregnant. Therefore, she did what a growing number of women were doing at the time in experimenting with artificial insemination in the home: she used a kitchen utensil along the lines of a turkey baster—though it would be incorrect to say that this was the specific instrument she used; no one can quite remember. What is known is that one doctor suggested that a syringe might be more efficient, but she decided she preferred her own way. Though Hugh felt the process would be too embarrassing, Janet viewed it as strictly a clinical experiment in the bedroom. It worked. She wasn’t even surprised, actually; she somehow knew it would work, and it did. The only thing that didn’t pan out as planned was that, after a relatively easy pregnancy, she gave birth to a girl, not a boy, Janet Jennings Auchincloss, known as Janet Jr., born on June 13, 1945.

  While Janet obviously loved her daughter, she still wanted a son. Therefore, she and Hugh did the procedure again and, after numerous times, it seemed clear that this time it would not work. Somehow, though, Janet became pregnant, anyway. No one was sure how it happened, only that it wasn’t by the previous means. Though Janet wouldn’t discuss it, Hugh did tell a close friend that he and Janet were intimate “once and one time only,” and that the happy result of what was likely not the best experience for them was the son Janet had wanted, James Lee Auchincloss, born on March 4, 1947.

  Of course, Janet considered the way she had conceived to be private between herself and her husband, though many people in the family—in particular, Hugh’s first two wives, Maya and Nina—suspected artificial insemination. Nina spread the word throughout the family that Janet had used a spoon to inseminate herself. In fact, Nina was, apparently, speaking from experience, since she told her son Gore Vidal that this was how she had been inseminated with each of her two children—Nini and Tommy—during her own marriage to Hugh. (Vidal would then publish the anecdote in his memoir, Palimpsest.)

  Janet’s children with Jack Bouvier, Jackie and Lee, were baptized Catholic. However, her children with Hugh Auchincloss, Janet Jr. and James Lee—Jamie—would both be baptized Episcopalian.1 Along with marrying Hugh came a happy revelation for Janet regarding religion in her life. During a Sunday service at the Episcopalian church Hugh and his children had always attended, Janet had stayed behind when they went up for Communion. When Yusha asked why, she explained that she had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church because of her divorce from Jack. Much to her surprise, Yusha told her that all Christians were allowed to receive Communion in an Episcopalian church, even those who have been divorced. Janet was elated. Given this new information, she decided to learn more about the Episcopalian religion and, for the rest of her life, would attend churches of that faith. This did not mean, however, that she didn’t consider herself to be Catholic; she would also attend Catholic Church services quite often, especially on Holy Days such as Christmas and Easter.

  It’s also worth noting that Jackie and Lee never referred to Janet Jr. or Jamie as their “half” siblings, or even to Hugh’s children from his previous marriages—Yusha, Tommy, and Nini—as their “steps.” All of them always thought of one another as just brothers and sisters, and referenced each other that way in conversation.

  PART TWO

  A MOTHER’S DUTY

  What Mummy Did

  It was September 12, 1953. Early morning dawned as Janet Auchincloss walked alone on a stretch of pebble-covered sand along the shoreline of the second of the Auchinclosses’ grand estates, Hammersmith Farm. Her arms wrapped tightly around herself, she steeled her small frame against a crisp southwest ocean breeze. This was her daily morning ritual, which she would describe as “exercise to keep the body fit and the mind nimble.” Facing the bay, she tilted back her head and arched her spine, a part of her daily isometric exercise, a regimen to which she was now completely devoted. Sometimes she would find a sand dune, lay down with her back on it, and do sit-ups. Not on this day, though. It was too cold for her to take off her coat, and trying to do sit-ups with it on was too cumbersome. Staying fit was important to her. Now forty-five, Janet had a good life, one of privilege and entitlement, the kind to which not many Americans during the Cold War could stake claim.

  Hammersmith Farm was quite the showplace. It was almost one hundred acres of scenic rolling green hills that rose up in an undulating sweep upon which the Auchinclosses had built enormous barns, stables, and guesthouses with names like the Castle, the Windmill, and the Carriage House. It was located on the site of the first farm in Newport, established in 1639 by William Brenton, one of the city’s founding fathers. (Brenton called the farm Hammersmith after his birthplace, Hammersmith, England. The main house was originally called “The House of Four Chimmnies” [sic].) John Winthrop Auchincloss, Hugh’s uncle, purchased the property and built the main structure in 1887 and then, a couple of years later, sold it to his younger brother, Hugh Dudley Auchincloss, Hughdie’s father. Hughdie would then inherit the estate after the death of his mother, Emma Brewster Jennings, in 1942.

  The main house—called the Big House—was a sprawling, brick-stone-and-wood Victorian mansion typical of classic New England architecture with its artfully shingled roof, its aesthetically pleasing gables, its towering turrets, and its large picture windows overlooking Narragansett Bay. With its twenty-eight rooms and thirteen fireplaces, the Big House sat atop an elegantly manicured sloping lawn amid rolling pastures. It was surrounded by stables for horses and ponies and, since it was the oldest working farm in Newport (which supplied milk and eggs to a local naval base), all manner of animals were present, from sheep and goats to chickens. Years ago, Hugh’s mother, Emma, had affixed to the front door a plaque that featured the family’s coat of arms with the language Spectemur agendo, which translates from the Latin to “Let us be judged by our actions.”

  While they enjoyed Merrywood, Hammersmith would be the preferred home for Janet’s daughters, both of whom had grown into beautiful women. Jackie was now twenty-four, Lee twenty. The girls had been living a pampered life ever since their mother married Hugh. The family’s staff was loyal and capable; no one ever wanted for anything.

  Among those in Janet’s employ at this time was the newly hired Adora Rule, just eighteen. She’d been sent to Janet from Russell Kelly Office Services, a company that provided temporary secretari
al office help, called Kelly Girls. Though she’d just started with Janet that very week, Janet already appreciated Adora’s work ethic—the fact that she had a tablet always at the ready and constantly took notes no matter what was going on around her. “Jackie and Lee weren’t fond of me simply because they felt I was spying on them,” Adora would recall. “Oh, they hated me, those two,” she would say many years later with a chuckle.

  This day—September 12—was a joyous one for the family. After all, Jackie was marrying Senator Jack Kennedy today at Newport’s St. Mary’s Catholic Church. Though the story of what Janet did at Jackie’s wedding has been told often, it does bear some repeating in order to further understand the relationship between mother and daughter.

  It comes down to this:

  Janet Auchincloss knew full well that Jackie’s father, Black Jack Bouvier, had never liked Joe Kennedy. Therefore, because of her own long, conflicted history with Jack, Janet didn’t trust him around Joe or any of his family members. She didn’t want him at Jackie’s wedding. “My mother had written to him [Bouvier] telling him she hoped he realized that he was far from welcome and that he might then change his mind and decide not to come,” Lee Radziwill recalled, “and she felt that this would be a far more appropriate thing for him to do.” Jack didn’t agree. This was Jackie’s big day; there was no way he was going to miss it.