Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Maybe Janet herself summed up her evolving feelings about Jack when she said, “I suppose there’s good in the worst of us. But bad in the best of us.”

  The night after Jack’s arrival, Janet regaled him with stories about the raising of Jackie and Lee. It was just the three of them alone in the Deck Room—her, Hugh, and Jack—enjoying the view and the night air. The next day, Sunday, Jack spent the morning entertaining his young namesake while giving Maud Shaw time off to walk on the beach and collect her thoughts. Later, Janet did her exercises as Jack worked at Hugh’s small desk in the study that adjoined Janet and Hugh’s master bedroom. “He signed a good many bills there on the antique partners desk,” Janet would later say. Among them were bills appropriating funds for the Peace Corps and the USS Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor. (Later, Jackie would have a plaque made to commemorate the spot; a large, gold-framed oil painting of Jack sitting in front of an American flag in 1961 would be hung on the wall next to the desk.) Afterward, Jack and Hugh played golf at the Newport Country Club. Then they cruised in the presidential yacht, the Honey Fitz—named after Jack’s grandfather John Francis Fitzgerald, former mayor of Boston—on Narragansett Bay, with Janet, Jamie, and Janet Jr. They then all piled into a white convertible rented for the President, and headed to Bailey’s Beach—with Jack driving—where they went swimming. That night, the family enjoyed another delicious meal prepared by the Hammersmith waitstaff. Jack then retired to the guest room on the top floor of the house, making his way up the steps slowly with the aid of the Irish blackthorn walking stick he kept at Hammersmith for those times when his back bothered him.

  On Monday morning, it was time for the President to go back to work in Washington, scheduled to meet with his cabinet to discuss problems in the Middle East. He hated to leave. Before departing, he presented Hugh with a gift: the President’s flag that had flown at Hammersmith down at the boathouse along with the American flag during his first stay there as Commander in Chief back in ’61. Hugh had tears in his eyes as he accepted the gift. The flag would later be encased in glass with a plaque, the inscription of which would read: “The President’s Flag Flown at Hammersmith Farm, Newport, Rhode Island, Presented to Hugh Dudley Auchincloss by John Fitzgerald Kennedy, President of the United States—1961.”

  While the green-and-white presidential helicopter revved its engines on the gravelly beach in front of the estate, Janet and Hugh walked toward it with the President. Shouting because of all the noise, Jack asked Janet, “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble, I might like to come back next weekend!” The following Friday, Jack returned to Hammersmith with Jackie and Caroline, who had just gotten back from Italy. This time, Janet and Hugh stayed in the Castle, giving Jack, Jackie, Caroline, and John (who had arrived earlier with Maud Shaw) as well as the Secret Service full run of the Big House. The President and Jackie spent that weekend in Janet and Hugh’s master bedroom.

  It’s worth noting that when they got a little older, Caroline and John both always had their own rooms at Hammersmith, on the third floor, where the governesses also slept. There were five bedrooms on this floor, including those of the Kennedy offspring, across the hall from each other; these had formerly been used by Nini when she was at the farm, and also by Lee. Jackie’s old room was up there, too, with its stunning view of Narragansett Bay and Jamestown on the island across the bay. Tommy’s old room was on that floor as well, with its twin beds, as was Yusha’s room with its magnificent ocean view. Once Yusha, Tommy, Nini, Jackie, and Lee were all permanently out of the house, their rooms were used by whichever children came to visit, but only Caroline and John had their own special rooms. One can’t help but wonder what Lee might have thought about the fact that Tina and Anthony did not also have designated rooms for their occasional visits. “Mummy did play favorites,” said Jamie. “You had to get used to it because that’s the way it was, and Lee knew it.”

  The Kennedys would return in mid-September to watch the America’s Cup races with the Auchinclosses from aboard the USS Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., destroyer. At a dinner held for the yachtsmen at Hammersmith Farm on September 14, the night before the race, Jack made some comments that would long be remembered: “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it’s because in addition to the fact that the sea changes, and the light changes, and ships change, it’s because we all came from the sea. And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins, the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.”

  During the time that Jackie and Jack spent at Hammersmith, they seemed happy, though, as was their custom, just a little frosty with each other. They were never really effusive with each other; it’s just not who they were as people. Jack, as we now know, had other outlets for intimacy. Jackie didn’t. However, that didn’t mean she wasn’t tempted. It didn’t mean that at all.

  A New Love for Jackie?

  It was a warm night in October 1962. The location was the British embassy. They made a striking couple, she tall and svelte, he even taller with broad shoulders. While the orchestra played, couples all around them danced in perfect time, the women wearing elegant evening gowns, the men decked out in finely tailored tuxedos. However, no matter the glamour and sense of entitlement around her, all eyes were on them and she knew it. After all, there was only one First Lady, and it was she who happened to hold that distinction: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Anyone on her arm other than the President himself would only be basking in her reflected glow.

  Tonight, Jackie would enjoy a dinner of London broil and red-cherry cheesecake and then dance the night away at the British embassy. Tomorrow she would present plans for one of her most valued pet projects, the saving and restoration of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. It was a center of town across the street from the White House where vintage nineteenth-century brownstones—such as the one that had been owned by Dolley Madison—had been targeted for demolition by the Eisenhower administration to make way for new, more modern white marble constructions. Jackie had made it her personal mission to see to it that no such destruction of this square would ever take place. She valued those homes and understood their importance to Washington culture and spoke of “lovely buildings being torn down so that cheesy skyscrapers could go up.” “Perhaps saving old buildings isn’t the most important thing in the world if you are waiting for the bomb,” she said, “but I think we are always going to be waiting for the bomb and it won’t ever come and so to save the old and to make the new beautiful is terribly important.” To that end, Jackie would hire a world-class architect to help her find ways to restore those dwellings, build others in the same style that might complement what was already there, and then get governmental approval and funding to actually do the work. After all, she knew she had substantial influence as First Lady, so she figured why not use it to do something worthwhile? At first, she would be met with bitter resistance from the Fine Arts Commission as well as members of the elite architectural community. She would stay the course, though, determined to see it through. For tonight, though, she was happy and in a good mood, and in the arms of someone strong and exciting.

  “Are you happy?” her dance partner asked her.

  “Oh, Jack, now, what kind of question is that?” she asked as she looked up into his eyes. She was being coy and flirtatious. It was all in fun. Why not allow herself to be just a little swept away by Jack. Not Kennedy, either. Warnecke. Jack Warnecke—the architect she’d hired to work with her on Lafayette Park.

  John Carl Warnecke—“Jack,” as he was better known—was a man of great distinction, someone to whom she couldn’t help but be attracted. A recent divorcé in his early forties, he was good-looking, with blue eyes and striking features. He was six foot three, about 215 pounds, and broad-should
ered, a ladies’ man, too; he was dating the actress Joan Fontaine at the time. He was also accomplished, having quickly become one of the most famous architects of his generation, his recent design of the American embassy in Thailand garnering him international acclaim. The son of prominent architect Carl Ingomar Warnecke, Jack had homes in Georgetown, San Francisco, and Hawaii. He also owned an enormous, three-hundred-acre ranch on the Russian River, one on which he told Jackie she was welcome to ride horses anytime she liked.

  It wasn’t what he had acquired in life, though, that impressed her. What Jackie recognized on this night of their first meeting was his ability to make her laugh. She found herself opening up to him, which was unusual for a woman like her who liked to keep her own counsel. He told her that they could perhaps one day travel the world and find places that needed sprucing up. They would then do what he believed they were put on this earth to do, which was to leave it in better shape than they’d found it. He was so forward about forging at the very least a friendship with her that she was a little taken aback. After all, though they’d been communicating by telephone and letters for many weeks in discussions relating to Lafayette Square, they really didn’t know each other. Yet, oddly, it felt to her as if they did.

  Jack Warnecke had long been a friend of the Kennedy family or, as his personal assistant, Bertha Baldwin, put it, “The Kennedys were everything to him. He had known JFK since at least 1940 when he audited writing classes at Stanford University in California. At that time, Jack [Warnecke] was a star football player on the undefeated Stanford team that had made it all the way to the Rose Bowl. The team was so good, they were nicknamed the Wow Boys.”

  Though Kennedy had great admiration for Warnecke, as did most of his fellow students, it wouldn’t be until ’56 that Warnecke’s Stanford fraternity brother Paul “Red” Fay (who would later be undersecretary and then secretary of the navy) would introduce Kennedy to him. “By that time, my dad was already a successful architect, having graduated from the Harvard Graduate School of Design,” said Jack’s daughter, Margo Warnecke Merck. “He’d become well known for his avant-garde way of conceptualizing design, his work at the University of California campus at Berkeley first distinguishing him.”

  He was having a good life. The question he posed to Jackie remained: Was she? Jackie may have suspected that the reason Jack asked the question was because he had some inside knowledge of the way her marriage was unfolding just based on previous experience as JFK’s wingman: “I was a friend of Jack’s. I knew him well. I knew all of the Kennedy men well. The first time I met JFK I was acting as a beard for him, back when he was a senator. Red Fay had set him up with a girl at a party. He asked me to tag along and act as if I was her date when, of course, she was actually Kennedy’s girl. So, from the beginning you could say that I was sort of involved in some of JFK’s private affairs. And I had my own monkey business, too.” Or, as his daughter, Margo, would put it, “My handsome dad loved the ladies; and they loved him right back.”

  PART FIVE

  TROUBLE BREWING

  Lee’s Annulment

  Back in 1958, Stas Radziwill had wanted a Catholic wedding to Lee Bouvier Canfield but wasn’t able to have one because her divorce from Michael Canfield had not been recognized by the Church. Therefore, an annulment would be necessary. The couple had started the arduous process by filing the proper papers with the Church. But the procedure was suddenly interrupted when Lee became pregnant and felt forced to marry Stas, which she did before a judge in 1959. That civil marriage so piqued the Catholic tribunal charged with the decision about Lee’s marriage—it dubbed it “an indignity”—that it threatened to never grant the annulment. Still, Lee and Stas remained hopeful. Then in ’61, all hope was dashed when Church officials said they would definitely refuse it. The only person who could reverse the decision would be the Pope himself, John XXIII. Hopeless? Maybe for most people, but not if one’s brother-in-law happens to be the President.

  Now with Jack in office, more than ever Lee’s attorneys began working with the Catholic Church to see what could be done to secure the annulment. Bobby took charge of the matter. “You supply the prayers, we’ll provide the pressure, and God will deliver the miracle,” he had told Lee. It was then arranged for Jackie to be interviewed by the ecclesiastical tribunal of New York about the sanctity of Lee’s marriage to Stas. One can only imagine how she felt about being asked personal questions about her sister’s personal life by a board of priests, but Jackie did what she was asked to do. Lee even then convinced Michael Canfield to swear that when he married Lee he never intended to have children with her. Was this true? If so, his lack of attraction to her started to make a little more sense to some observers. “I think the inference was obvious,” Jamie Auchincloss would say. “Either Michael was gay, shy, or didn’t want offspring. Whichever the case, it was grounds for annulment.”

  Lee then petitioned the Pope himself, writing a long, detailed, and quite passionate missive, dated July 18, 1961. “After my sister testified, I was fervently hoping that one day I would be admitted again into the Church, that my husband and my children would no longer be unhappy because I was the source of their pain and of the pain to my sister, Jacqueline Kennedy.” Exaggerating the situation just a little, she continued, “I know that my sister is as desperate as I am. She tells me that, in a way, as the wife of President Kennedy, she feels responsibility for the apparent injustice of my trial. I would really like her to feel unloaded of all responsibility! If I could have a right of an appeal, then my suspicions and those of my sister [of a political motivation behind being declined] would be dissipated.” Lee also alluded to her postpartum depression by writing, “Faith and hope in justice gave me unquenchable strength and saved me twice in my lifetime. I was gravely ill, mortally ill, in these last two years. Perhaps my faith was the miracle that saved me.”

  It was then arranged for Jackie to visit the Pope during the time of her and Lee’s trip to India and Pakistan. She wasn’t to say much to him and was not even to mention the annulment. All she was to do was stop off in Rome, visit the Vatican, kneel before the Pope, get his blessing, and exchange some kind words. This papal audience took place on March 11, 1962. The White House press office made certain that Lee was not in any of the photographs taken during that day, however. If, at any time in the future, Lee was able to secure an annulment, the White House didn’t want it to appear as if the President or First Lady had had any influence over the process. Unfortunately, after meeting Jackie, the Pope still wouldn’t grant the annulment.

  Many more months of paperwork followed until, finally, the aging Pope got sick and, with his illness, came a bit more latitude. On November 24, 1962, Lee suddenly got her annulment. Could the timing have been any worse, though? Her marriage to Stas continued to be on shaky ground. She was still seeing Taki from time to time, though they both agreed it was not serious. However, she had also been dating Onassis for the last eight months, and this romance was definitely heating up by the end of ’62. The two would rendezvous as often as possible in London, Paris, and Greece. Every second she spent with him she found blissful—and complicated. She had two small children, after all; making arrangements so that she could take off and be with Ari at a moment’s notice was complex—but worth it to her.

  Lee had also heard that Stas was now having an affair with Charlotte Ford, daughter of Henry Ford II, the grandson and namesake of the founder of Ford Motors. She told Taki she was sure about it but didn’t want to ask too many questions of Stas, lest he start asking some of his own. Whatever the case, the prince still quickly made plans for a Church wedding in London to Lee. It would be small and private, he said. Lee knew that his father, Prince Janusz Franciszek Radziwiłł, a devout Catholic, was insisting upon it. Unfortunately, Stas had the same relationship with him that Lee had with Janet, meaning that he was a domineering force in Stas’s life and expected his son to do as he was told.

  After everything everyone had gone through to secure the an
nulment so that the prince and princess could finally marry in the Catholic Church, Lee now felt pressured by time and circumstance to follow through with those plans. She had to wonder how she had gotten herself into such a mess

  The wedding was set for July 3, 1963.

  She had eight months to figure things out.

  “You Will Always Come First”

  The holidays of 1962 were stressful but somehow Lee got through them. She and Jackie and the kids spent them together, as usual. However, she and Stas were more distant than ever toward each other. She couldn’t take her mind off her new obsession, Aristotle Onassis. The biggest problem with Ari, though, was that he was still involved with Maria Callas, and Lee wasn’t sure how this relationship would affect her future with him. Ari and Maria continued to have a soulful, passionate, but also famously tortured romance. Everyone knew about it; all one had to do was check the gossip columns for weekly updates. He had told Lee several times that Maria had exhausted him. Every time he attempted to end it with her, he claimed, she would try to commit suicide. Lee didn’t doubt it. She knew Maria fairly well and had always felt she was just a little unhinged. It would not surprise her that she would hasten her demise over a man, though Lee would never think to do such a thing. She thought Maria was weak. She also believed Ari needed strength in a woman, not weakness.