By early afternoon, Stas finally arrived at the hospital, desperately wanting to see his wife and child. In the end, the baby, named Anna Christina—later known as just “Tina”—would be fine, though it would be touch and go for some time; she would actually have to remain in an incubator for months. It would take even longer for Lee to fully recover, not only physically but emotionally. In fact, she would suffer from postpartum depression for at least the next half a year, maybe longer. At the time, the condition wasn’t treated as it is today; the medical profession didn’t know much about the reasons for it, and some professionals thought of it as nothing more than “the blues.” When Lee was finally able to leave the hospital and go to Merrywood with Janet to recover, she was muted, her personality dimmed. Everyone suspected it would take some time for her to return to her normal, spirited self.
On November 2, Janet hosted a tea at Merrywood with the Democratic Women’s TV Committee for her son-in-law’s campaign; by this time she was an official Democrat, finally having changed her voting status in honor of Jack. The guests enjoyed a viewing of a Kennedy documentary called New Frontiers, as well as the program Coffee Hour with Senator and Mrs. Kennedy. Jackie and Ethel Kennedy were both present to greet the guests. Lee was also there, but not at all well; for some reason, she seemed to be having trouble speaking. She just sat in a corner in a white wool sweater and matching straight-legged linen pants looking wan and unwell—so much so that Janet was afraid she might put off the guests and asked one of the maids to please take her up to her room. A couple of days later, Stas arrived. He took one look at his wife and decided he needed to get her back home to London as soon as possible, even though the baby was still in an incubator at New York Hospital. Janet would continue to check on her granddaughter as often as possible until the infant could be released and then transported to England.
Less than a week later, on November 8, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President of the United States, defeating his Republican opponent, Richard M. Nixon, in one of the closest presidential elections of all time. Jackie and Jack had waited for the election results in Hyannis while Janet and Hugh watched from Merrywood. Meanwhile, Lee was in the UK with Stas, so anxious that she was now even having trouble breathing. She hadn’t seen her baby since the day she left the hospital and was extremely worried about her. Stas had his hands full, trying to figure out what to say to her and how to say it. Everything he did set her off into crying jags. It seemed hopeless. “Still, the family had just experienced an incredible victory and, though everyone was worried about Lee, they had reason to celebrate,” recalled Chauncey Parker III. “There was a lot of bitter and a lot of sweet at that time,” he said, and then correcting himself, he added, “or maybe better stated, sweet and bitter.”
On election night, Janet called Jackie to congratulate her, with Jamie and other family members standing by to get their exciting moment on the phone with her. “You are America’s First Lady,” Janet exclaimed. “I just can’t believe it, Jacqueline! I am just … I am just…” Janet couldn’t find the words. She put her hand over the receiver, listened for a moment, and then told the others, “She said that I made her the woman that she is today!” She was truly moved. Apparently, Jackie then wondered if Lee had heard the news in England. Janet said she was going to call her. Jackie asked her mother to make sure Lee got in touch with her, saying that she really needed to talk to her sister.
A few weeks later, on November 25, Jackie gave birth to a healthy son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. It remained an extraordinary life for the Kennedys, Radziwills, and Auchinclosses, everyday occurrences such as the exciting births of new children set against what could only be viewed as a historical panorama. Correspondence from this time underscores as much. For instance, Janet invited Rose to lunch in January when she and Hugh planned to be in Palm Beach, and Rose responded on December 30 that she “should love to see you.” However, “my schedule is very crowded and it would be much better for me to wait until a later date.” She added that “Jackie seems stronger and gayer every day, and John Jr. has put on two pounds.” She closed, writing, “My love to you, dear Janet,” and said that she and Joe “hoped to catch a glimpse of you and Hugh next week.”
Betrayal
“Well, Jackie’s going to be First Lady now,” Lee Radziwill said, her eyes moist. “Why don’t you just call her and talk to her if you love her and her husband so much.” She was with Stas at their home on Buckingham Place. It was the end of the first week of the new year of 1961 and the Radziwills were hosting an intimate gathering. Because Lee had been too unwell to host a big New Year’s Eve party, Stas organized an impromptu event in its place. Somehow, he and Lee had gotten off on the wrong footing and were arguing in front of guests. These days, Lee could be explosive one moment, depressed the next. She’d even said she didn’t have the will to live, that’s how bad it was for her. Everyone was concerned, but there didn’t seem to be anything anyone could do. She wouldn’t talk to Stas, and the subject of their lack of communication had been broached by Stas at the party, which was when she made that statement about Jackie.
Because of her various duties and the many miles between her and her sister, Jackie wasn’t able to be involved in the day-to-day concerns of Lee’s emotional health at this time. When she talked to Lee by telephone, Lee seemed distant and disengaged. Many people in Lee’s circle felt that her depression was a reaction to Jackie’s ascension to First Lady, especially when Lee made statements such as “How can anyone compete with that? It’s all over for me now.” In John Davis’s 1969 book, The Bouviers, he noted that Jackie’s “accession to the White House promised to magnify a problem Lee had had to cope with for some time, the problem simply of being Jackie’s sister. Although she was abundantly gifted herself … she had often been obscured by the shadow of her sister’s prominence, and now that shadow threatened to eclipse her identity.” Compounding things, Lee was also sure that in the competition for Janet’s affection, she was still the loser. “Of course Mummy loves Jackie more than me,” she again said at this time. “I understand it.”
The depth of Lee’s despair was greater than anyone knew. She truly felt alone. If one more doctor told her she just had “the blues,” she said, she was going to scream. It was more profound than just sadness or melancholy, and she knew it. Something was seriously wrong with her; she just didn’t know what it was or what to do about it. She felt fragile and defeated every day. Unfortunately, partly because of Lee’s troubled state of mind, her marital happiness would be short-lived. From the birth of Christina onward, she and Stas would be at odds. Then the unthinkable happened.
According to family history, a young woman had often been coming to the Radziwill home and going off with Stas for a day of errands. There were so many people working for the Radziwills, it was difficult to keep track of them all, especially in Lee’s present emotional disarray. However, something about this woman bothered her. One day, from her bedroom, Lee watched Stas as he opened the door of his car for this person, and that’s when she knew. The observance of a simple act that would mean little to most people was all it took for her to know that Stas was having an affair. It was such a shock for her, to hear her later tell it, her heart started pounding and her knees turned to water. She had to immediately sit down and compose herself, she was just that shaken. Even considering the current rough patch in their marriage, Lee never would have imagined that Stas would be unfaithful to her. And while she was experiencing postpartum depression? What was he thinking?
For the next few days, Lee suppressed her anger and sadness until, finally, it boiled over and she confronted Stas. Caught red-handed, he was immediately remorseful. He didn’t even try to deny it. However, it wasn’t serious, he told her—just a young woman he’d “met along the way.” For Lee, his explanation just made things worse. That he would jeopardize everything they had for someone who didn’t even matter to him was difficult for her to accept. It was easy to rationalize her having cheated on Michael
Canfield. She risked her entire marriage to him because she loved Stas. What Stas had just done wasn’t at all the same, not in her mind, anyway. Plus, she felt stupid; her pride was hurt. “This doesn’t happen to me,” she told one confidante at that time. Unfortunately, she couldn’t confide in her mother or sister, since both had lectured her incessantly about her cheating on Michael. What she didn’t need now was Janet saying what she often liked to say in such cases, “Finally, the chickens have come home to roost.” It would never be the same, though, between Lee and Stas. This was a betrayal Lee would not be able to get past.
Like Jackie’s, Janet’s communication with Lee was sporadic at best; Lee stayed clear of her phone calls because she just didn’t want to deal with her. Jackie and Janet were even more concerned when they learned that Lee would not be able to come to the States on December 12 to collect baby Tina from the hospital. Janet had scheduled one of their Mother-Daughter Teas on the 13th, and was disappointed that Lee wouldn’t make it. She was worried about her and felt they needed time, with Jackie, to sort things out. Janet then said she would bring the infant to England, but Lee wouldn’t hear of it. She said she wanted to send a nurse because she was so afraid that the baby might have an urgent health issue en route. Janet said that was fine, she would tag along with the nurse. No, Lee insisted, the nurse would be just fine on her own.
On the day the baby was to arrive, Lee and Stas got to London Airport two hours early simply because Lee couldn’t stand the suspense another second longer. She paced nervously at the gate until, finally, the plane landed. One by one, passengers disembarked, meeting loved ones as Lee looked on anxiously. At last, an elderly woman appeared in a starched white uniform holding an infant in a blue blanket. Lee ran to her and took the baby into her arms. “She looks so much better,” she said, tears streaming down her face. Tina was now six pounds, still small but at least able to make the long flight. Lee, Stas, the nurse, and the baby were then driven to Buckingham Place, where the nurse spent the night before departing the next morning. Though Lee and Stas had plenty of help—from nursemaids to cooks to maids and butlers—it would be Lee who would be primarily responsible for the care of little Tina. It was therapeutic for her and, though it would be some time before she would return to her former self, it did seem as if she was on her way back. Her feelings for Stas had changed, though.
“Stas was filled with regret about the affair,” said one of his relatives. “He worshipped Lee. It was a slipup. He felt pushed out by her and reacted badly. He promised her it would never happen again. However, from what he told me, she said, ‘But what happens tomorrow when you wake up and don’t want me? I don’t trust you, now. I may never trust you again.’ He became dedicated to making certain that this would not be the case. ‘I broke her heart,’ Stas told me. ‘I can’t change that. I can only try to win her back.’”
PART FOUR
THE WHITE HOUSE YEARS
Inauguration
January 20, 1961. Inauguration day.
The weather was miserable, snow coming down in white sheets, the wind blowing harder than at any time in recent memory. The climate was sure to impact the number of people who could travel into Washington, D.C., for the inauguration of the country’s new president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Janet and Hugh and the rest of the immediate family had to miss out on the pre-inaugural galas. Janet would never forget this unnerving time, its memory vivid in her mind for years to come. “We were snowed in the night before the inauguration,” she would recall to the JFK Library for her oral history there. “I remember Hughdie getting stuck in the snow. Jamie flew down from school; he was attending the Fay School at Southborough, Massachusetts. The blizzard began at two-thirty in the afternoon and Jamie’s plane was the last one that got in to the National Airport.”
Driven by the family’s butler, James Owen, Hugh went to meet Jamie at the airport. Afterward, on the way back to the Auchincloss home, they found that the George Washington Memorial Parkway was completely snowed in with no cars moving. Impatient about the whole mess, Hugh told Owen to just pull over to the side of the road and said they would walk the rest of the way. He suggested that Owen could pick up the car the next day, if he could even find it underneath all the snow. “Owen and Jamie tried to persuade Hughdie to stay in the car because with his emphysema he is not supposed to get pneumonia,” Janet recalled. “But Hughdie did walk something like five miles through the deep snow that afternoon.
“Yusha, Nini, Tommy, Janet, Jamie, and Alice [Yusha’s wife]—well, I don’t know how many people we eventually had in our house that night—none of us got out because the two government cars that had been assigned to us to take us to the Inaugural Concert at Constitution Hall could not get up the driveway,” Janet remembered. “I think if we hadn’t had the government cars, we might actually have got there. But they blocked the driveway! So, the two soldiers [drivers of those cars] were also snowed in at Merrywood because they couldn’t get out. So, none of us got out that night.
“The great thing was that Mr. Carper, the local snowplow man, appeared at six o’clock in the morning with the snowplow and got us all out, including the government cars, so that we could finally get to the Capitol for the Inauguration.”
This was a hallmark day in the family’s storied history. Janet’s son-in-law was being sworn in as President of the United States—the first Roman Catholic to hold that office—making her daughter the nation’s First Lady and, at thirty-one, its third youngest. “It was hard to fathom,” said Jamie Auchincloss. “Maybe people thought we took it for granted as a family or just went along with the flow without realizing how absolutely monumental the whole thing was. We didn’t. We were acutely aware of the great honor, the great privilege, and, also, the great responsibility.”
The many Auchinclosses all piled into two cars, the one with Janet, Hugh, Jamie, and Janet Jr. driven by James Owen, the butler. Though Stas, as Jack’s close pal, was one of the first to donate to JFK’s campaign, he and Lee would not be present at the Inaugural. Lee was too sick; Stas decided to stay at her side. “It was heartbreaking because I knew how much it meant to him,” Lee would later say.
“In the car, we started looking at our tickets,” recalled Jamie, who was thirteen at the time, “and we realized that, based on the numbers, all of us weren’t going to be seated together. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ Mummy said. She figured she and Hughdie would be in front with Jackie and we kids would probably be scattered throughout.”
When the Auchinclosses got to the Capitol and started walking toward the inaugural stand, there was some confusion as to where everyone should sit. An usher took Janet and Hugh one way, another usher took Jamie, Janet Jr., Nini, and the other family members another way. After everyone sat down and got their bearings, Janet was in for a surprise. “Hughdie and I were in the stand in back of the President [Dwight D. Eisenhower] and the President-elect,” she later recalled. “All of the children were in seats facing him.” In other words, she and Hughdie were not sitting with Jackie or with any other dignitaries. Instead, they had seats in the peanut gallery behind JFK.
“I’m looking around and who do I see next to me? Eleanor Roosevelt,” Jamie Auchincloss recalled. “So, clearly, I have great seats, as do my siblings, all of us facing Jack as he would be sworn in. I’m completely excited by this turn of events and I want to wave to Mummy and Daddy so they can see how terrific my seats are. I look way down front for them where I figure they would be seated, also facing the presidential podium. But they aren’t there. Then I look all around the huge place for them, and can’t find them anywhere. I actually think that, somehow, they haven’t gotten in! Finally, way off in the distance, I see them. There they are, little dots out in the distance, facing the back of the President and Jackie. I couldn’t believe their seats! I knew Mummy would be infuriated by this slight. It seemed so wrong.”
How could this bizarre seating arrangement be explained? “We were at a loss when we all came back together after the swearin
g in,” Jamie Auchincloss recalled. “Mummy didn’t know what to think. Even later, Jack told me he was looking all over the place for Mummy and Daddy and couldn’t find them. Mummy was deeply hurt, but it seemed like an unintentional slipup. So what could she do? This breach came close to ruining the day for her.”
Janet could barely contain her disappointment about the obvious seating arrangement snafu. In turn, Jackie was completely horrified. She said couldn’t understand it and promised to get to the bottom of it. Janet told her that if such a terrible situation could occur to her own mother, anything could happen during her time as First Lady. She told her that she would have to redouble her efforts to avoid further embarrassment. “Mummy felt it a responsibility to make sure that a lesson had been learned,” said Jamie. “‘Despite the efforts of all of the people who work here, in the end, it falls upon you,’ she told her. My sister may have been First Lady now, but her station in life would never preclude her from getting a thorough dressing-down from Mummy when necessary.
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 13
