Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As a politician, Jack was on the rise. However, as a husband, he left a good deal to be desired. Jackie had made her peace with the fact that he was going to be unfaithful to her and that there wasn’t much she could do about it. Despite that realization, Jackie still felt that Jack was a good man who was usually there for her when she needed him. Plus, she enjoyed the power and prestige that came along with being a senator’s wife. Also, she had money—“real money,” as she would call it—and was living well. She felt certain that when children came into their lives Jack would become even more committed to her and to their family. Therefore, when she became pregnant, she was overjoyed.

  Jackie shared the news of her pregnancy with Janet during a visit to Merrywood while Jack was in Manhattan on business. Of course, Janet, too, was elated. The two then called Lee in London with the news. This baby would be Janet’s first grandchild, and she’d longed for one ever since her daughters had gotten married. She suspected that Jackie was having problems in her marriage, but true to their relationship, she would not pry. She would wait for Jackie to come to her.

  As it happened, Janet didn’t have long to wait. Having just lost the vice presidential nomination, Jack decided to go on a Mediterranean cruise around Capri and Elba with a few friends, some of whom were women. Janet had to wonder why a married man would go on a cruise with his friends while his wife was home, almost seven months pregnant. It sounded fishy. It was at least some consolation to her that Jackie would now be spending quality time at Hammersmith with her, Hugh, Janet Jr., ten, and Jamie, eight. On the afternoon of August 23, however, Jackie was napping when she was awakened by terrible pain. Alarmed, Janet rushed her to Newport Hospital, where Jackie then had to undergo an emergency cesarean section. Tragically, the baby she delivered was dead. It was a crushing blow to everyone, but no one suffered, of course, more than Jackie.

  With the unfolding of such tragedy, Janet fully expected Jack to return to comfort his wife. He did not, however. Janet couldn’t understand it. How could he be absent from Jackie’s side in such a dire time of need? When Lee said she wanted to fly to the States to be with Jackie, Janet talked her out of it. She said that if Jackie woke up to find Lee at her side, it would be too alarming. She promised to put Jackie on the phone with Lee as soon as she was able to talk. However, Jack was another story; she definitely felt he should have been present.

  After a couple of days of stewing over the situation, Janet got on the phone with Bobby Kennedy and let him have it. She would never be afraid to confront the Kennedys, never the least bit intimidated by any of them. “You tell your no-good brother to get here, now,” she demanded. Bobby promised to get back to her. When he called her a few hours later, he told her that Jack said he didn’t see much reason to return to the States. “What’s done is done,” Bobby said, quoting his brother. “The baby is lost.” Jack was sure, Bobby said, that Jackie was under the best medical care possible. Janet found this reasoning to be inexcusable.

  By the 26th, Jackie was finally well enough to hear the terrible news of the stillbirth, but who was going to tell her? One might have thought Janet would have wanted to give her daughter the bad news. However, she decided to stand on ceremony and insist that it be Jack, maybe in hopes that it would compel him to return.

  Janet called Rose Kennedy to see if there was anything she could do about her son. Back in September of ’53, after the wedding, Rose had written Janet, “Joe and I want to thank you again for Jackie. She was so beautiful to look upon. So charming to meet, that she again captured our hearts. I am sure she and you know by now how deeply we all love her—and with what affection we shall always cherish her.” Based on that correspondence and on her other pleasant interactions with Rose, Janet felt certain the Kennedy matriarch would empathize with her and maybe even do something about her wayward son. It was not to be, however. “I’m quite sure Jack knows what’s best,” was Rose’s dispassionate response. “We have had tragedy in our own lives, you know?” Janet thanked her and hung up, deeply disappointed.

  When Janet called Bobby again, he wasn’t home. She ended up commiserating with Ethel, who said she was going to send Bobby to be with Jackie as soon as she had a chance to talk to him. After getting off the phone, Janet then went to church to pray not only for her daughter but for the soul of her grandchild. She would say that she then felt at peace with the baby’s passing, that she realized that, as she put it, “it was part of God’s plan and there’s no point in even questioning it. We’ll never understand it.”

  Later that evening, Janet went to the hospital with Bobby, barely saying a word to him on the way lest she make a statement about his brother, or even worse, his mother, that she would later regret. She stayed outside Jackie’s room when Bobby went in to tell her what had happened. Jackie wanted to know whether the baby was a boy or girl. Bobby told her it was the latter. “I had decided that if I had a girl, I wanted to name her Arabella,” Jackie said through her tears. (Though the baby was never christened or legally named, in years to come Jackie would often refer to her as “Arabella.”) Bobby lied and told Jackie that they were having a difficult time reaching Jack, “but Eunice is trying her best to locate him.” When Bobby left the room, Janet replaced him. Jackie looked up at her mother from her bed and asked about Jack’s whereabouts. He would be arriving shortly, Janet assured her. Now Janet was truly angry at Jack. “Mummy saw her job as being Jackie’s protector,” said Jamie Auchincloss, “and she felt she had failed miserably where this man was concerned. Miserably!”

  Ultimately, Jack didn’t return to the States until the 28th, and that was only after his friend Senator George Smathers and his father, Joe, warned him that if he ever wanted to run for President and hoped for support from female voters, he’d better get back to his wife. Upon his return, Jack was asked by a reporter if he’d spoken with Jackie. He said he hadn’t and then weakly theorized that she hadn’t been in touch because she didn’t want to ruin his vacation. According to one of her maids, when Janet read her son-in-law’s comment in the paper, she folded it and smacked it angrily on the kitchen table. “He is unconscionable,” she said. Upset, she then got up and walked to a cabinet, found a bottle of pills—it’s not known what they were—and quickly downed a couple with a glass of water. “I’m not sure what Mummy was taking but a lot of women back then had different diet pills that were amphetamines,” recalled Jamie Auchincloss, “and they didn’t even realize the harm it was doing.” It was true that, when depressed, Janet would sometimes lament, “I think my diet pills are wearing off!”

  Because Jackie was so distraught about the loss of the baby, at first Janet couldn’t bring herself to have an in-depth conversation with her about Jack. The closest they came to it was when Jackie was released from the hospital and was in the company of some trusted relatives at Hammersmith. She wept at the breakfast table and said, “How could I have been so stupid?” Janet reached out and took her daughter’s hand. “You’re not stupid,” she told her. “You just put your trust in the wrong person.” Janet told Jackie that she blamed herself. After everything she had gone through with Jackie’s father, she said, she never should have allowed Jackie to marry Jack. She was completely to blame, she fretted, not Jackie. Janet also knew what Jackie had to do, which was to end her marriage. However, she was tormented by the idea.

  “She was a little frantic about the whole thing,” Janet’s longtime Newport friend Eileen Gillespie Slocum once recalled. Slocum lived in the Harold Carter Brown House, a Gothic Revival–style mansion built in the 1890s. Married to journalist and diplomat John Jermain Slocum, she was hosting a dinner for the Republican State Central Committee at her home when Janet pulled her aside to talk about Jackie’s dilemma. “She said, ‘She doesn’t have any children and she doesn’t have any money of her own. I told her she should divorce Jack, and now I don’t know that this was the best advice.’ She was concerned not just about Jackie’s marriage but by the notion of maybe giving her more bad advice. ‘What do you think?
’ she asked me. I told her to stick to her guns. If she thought Jackie should end her marriage, she should encourage her to do so. ‘Jacqueline will always find a way to end up on her feet—just like her mother,’ I told her.”

  Differing Views About Infidelity

  In November 1956, because Jackie had been feeling depressed about the loss of her child and by her husband’s recent betrayal, she went to London to visit Lee. Biting her nails to the quick and chain-smoking, Jackie seemed on the verge of a breakdown. She said what she really needed was just some quality time with her sister. Lee could be comforting and a good listener, no matter the sisters’ “little competition,” as they sometimes called it. Lee wanted to be present for her sister during this extremely difficult time. However, when Jackie told her that she’d been thinking of ending her marriage, Lee wasn’t convinced that it was such a good idea. Jack had so much going for him, she reminded her sister. He had power, money, was good-looking, and had, thus far, afforded her a good life. Lee said she wished she had a spouse like Jack, someone in whom she could have total faith that he would do something big with his life and, by extension, hers. It didn’t matter to Lee that Jack was unfaithful in his marriage. “Daddy did it to Mummy and it all worked out fine,” she told Jackie.

  It all worked out fine? For who? It could be argued that none of it had worked out “fine” for anyone. Jackie was astonished by Lee’s logic. It was the first time she’d ever heard her sister say that adultery was acceptable. In Jackie’s mind—as in Janet’s—it was completely verboten. Jackie did go through a strange phase in college at Vassar, where she tried to make light of her father’s penchant for women. She would point out the mothers of different classmates—most of them married—and ask Black Jack whether he’d had sex with them. “That one, Daddy?” she would ask. He would say yea or nay. “Well, how about that one over there?” In the end, though, she realized that she didn’t approve of it at all, and that she didn’t think it was funny, either.

  How could two women who’d been raised by the same mother and exposed to the same cheating father have such differing views of infidelity? Obviously, Jackie took after her mother in this regard, and Lee her father. It caused Jackie to wonder what kind of marriage her sister had with Michael Canfield. She wouldn’t have to wonder about it for long, though.

  One afternoon while Jackie was visiting, the Canfields received an invitation to go shooting at the estate of Lord and Lady Lambton, who had a country home in Wooler, Northumberland. A jolly group was organized, which included, as well as Jackie, Lee, and Michael, two people Lee and Michael had just met through the Lambtons, Prince Stanislaw Radziwill and his wife, Princess Grace. They were all to travel by railway car together to the Lambtons’ for the weekend. Once at their estate, everyone had a restful and fun weekend. Lee was immediately attracted to the courtly Prince Radziwill, though she would later admit to also being intimidated by him. “Stas [pronounced “Stash,” as he was known to his friends and family] was so brooding, so serious, I was absolutely terrified,” she would recall. “I didn’t say one word to him the whole weekend. But then our hostess organized a game of charades and dressed him up in one of her old slips. He wasn’t so terrifying anymore—this dignified, masculine figure in all of those pink lace frills. I discovered he had a marvelous sense of humor, a great sense of the ridiculous.”

  Despite the fact that Lee recalls she didn’t “say one word” to Stas, others present remember it differently. They remember them as having a natural rapport while isolating themselves and getting to know each other. Jackie couldn’t help but notice Michael’s unhappy reaction to his wife’s growing fascination with Radziwill. She was troubled by it; something didn’t seem quite right.

  After the weekend was over and all had returned to London, Jackie had a conversation with Michael about his marriage. It was then that she learned that he believed Lee was cheating on him. “She couldn’t believe it,” said one Bouvier relative. “She got into an argument with Michael, saying that her sister would never do such a thing. ‘That’s not how we were raised,’ is what she told him even though she’d certainly started having some doubts about Lee by this time. Through his tears, Michael said, ‘Well, I don’t know how Mummy raised you, I only know that Lee has been unfaithful, and more than once.’ He was devastated.”

  Jackie and Lee never really aired their differences relating to Michael Canfield. They were beginning to fall into a pattern of not discussing issues between them, just glossing over them. Though this behavior would cause them to harbor resentment and suppress anger, it was becoming their way. By the time Jackie left London, she wasn’t speaking to Lee. She returned to the States feeling more uneasy than she had when she left, but now not only about her marriage but her sister’s as well. At a Mother-Daughter Tea with Janet she told her that she was angry with Lee, but decided not to go into detail about the reasons. If Lee wanted to confide in Janet about what was going on in her marriage, it would have been fine with Jackie. She just knew that she didn’t want to have to be the one to tell their mother that Lee was probably cheating on her husband.

  At the beginning of December ’56, Lee and Michael flew to the States to spend the holidays with the family at Merrywood. The environment at the Auchincloss homestead was about as chilly as the weather, what with the two sisters freezing each other out. By this time, Michael and Lee were also not speaking. Janet didn’t know what was going on, why everyone was so upset. She didn’t like it one bit, though, especially for this week. At great expense to her and Hugh, she had sent for a favorite chef from France to come to prepare holiday meals for the family. He had planned an extravagant menu for every night of the week, beginning with tonight’s feast of beef bourguignon and chocolate soufflé. It seemed a shame to ruin the evening. Therefore, Janet gathered everyone into the parlor and told them that she, Hugh, and the rest of the family—Janet, Jamie, and any other relative who came to call—only had the opportunity to see the sisters once in a while, and that whatever was troubling them would have to wait until after the holidays. She wasn’t going to allow it to interfere with their time together, especially given the expense of flying the chef over from Europe, paying for his services for a week, and keeping him at Merrywood. She then poured all of the adults a glass of wine and, standing in the middle of the living room, ceremoniously raised her glass and asked everyone to do the same. “We are all we have,” she said, “and, thusly, it’s always going to be us against the world. So … to family,” she proclaimed. Hugh agreed. “To family,” he repeated. Jack Kennedy raised his glass and repeated, “To family. God bless America.” Michael then added, “Oh, and God save the queen, too. Let’s not forget about her!” Though everyone laughed, there was still something about the moment that seemed forced and halfhearted.

  Even without the familial upheaval, Janet was already on edge; she had just quit smoking in deference to Hugh, who’d been forced to stop due to his asthma. She’d been a chain-smoker, so it wasn’t easy. Sometimes she would take a cigarette and hold it under her nose horizontally and inhale deeply, just to breathe in its scent. Jamie would say that he believed his mother began to drink more after she stopped smoking, and others in the family have agreed. Of course, as always, there was a lot of pill-popping going on, too.

  Later that same evening, Janet found Michael out on the beach, diving into the sea while lit only by the moon. As he got out of the water to greet his mother-in-law in his baggy, checkered swim trunks with a big smile on his face, his hair slicked back, he must have looked like a teenager. Janet would later say it was in that moment that her heart went out to him. He was barely thirty and didn’t have a clue as to who he was or what he wanted to do with his life. Ordinarily, this kind of man would infuriate her, but for some reason Michael brought out the motherly instincts in her, as he did for most women. As they sat on a blanket together she bummed a smoke from him.

  “You can’t imagine how much I need this right now,” Janet told Michael as she took a deep drag on
the cigarette. As he would later recall it in separate accounts to his friends Michael Guinzburg and Terrance Landow, it was then that Janet had a good talk with her son-in-law. She told him she genuinely liked him, but that she felt he was going to have to work much harder to keep “my Lee” interested. “You’re probably the best thing that’s ever happened to her,” Janet allowed. “We’re all so glad you are around.” Michael would recall that Janet smiled at him as he put his head on her shoulder. He said that as the two then sat quietly with each other, they watched the stars shoot across the horizon.

  Prince Stanislaw Radziwill

  “I have always wanted to really visit Poland,” Lee Canfield dreamily observed. “I mean, really visit it, you know? Get to know its culture, its art.” She was curled up on a sofa in her home at 45 Chester Square with Prince Stanislaw Radziwill lying on the floor in front of her, his head on the couch just inches away from her lap. Meanwhile, sitting next to him was his wife, Grace. Next to her, also stretched out on the floor, was Michael Canfield. On a nearby chair were seated their friends Terrance and Betty Landow, Betty on her husband’s lap. Lee looked down into Stas’s eyes and observed that one really doesn’t know a country until one lives there. She added that when she had the opportunity to live in Paris she began to understand its culture and its ways. She said that she now wanted to live in Poland. Looking at her with admiration, Stas said it was a lovely thought. All of this romanticism was a little more than Michael could take, and he could usually take a lot! “Not once, in the entire time I’ve known you have you ever mentioned wanting to live in Poland, of all places,” he said, not even glancing at his wife. “You’re so full of shit, Lee,” he added. “Poland? Please. Poland? Oh my God! Poland?” Lee took umbrage at his condemnation of her. She angrily told him that she’d said in the past a hundred times—“a million times, even!”—she wanted to live in Poland. Then, turning to Stas, she told him that Michael didn’t know what he was talking about: “I’d adore to live in Poland.” Stas just smiled. It didn’t really matter, he said, since he’d been exiled from Poland, “and we’ll likely never be living there.”