Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  While Jamie and Janet spoke, Jackie and Lee walked into the bedroom. “Oh, my! You look so beautiful,” Lee exclaimed as she took both her mother’s hands into her own. Jackie smiled and nodded her head. “Mummy, are you absolutely sure about this?” Jackie then asked. Janet shook her head in annoyance. “Yes, Jacqueline,” she said. “As I have said a million times, I know exactly what I’m doing.”

  Nothing could have surprised or disturbed Janet’s daughters more than her decision to marry for a third time. However, when one thought about how happy she’d been with Hugh for almost forty years, it made sense that Janet would want to continue to have a partner in her life. About a year earlier, she’d heard from an old friend, someone she had briefly dated almost fifty-five years ago, that he’d just lost his wife. Janet was only thirteen when she first met this gentleman. “She hadn’t thought about him or his wife, Mary Rawlins—who had been a bridesmaid at her wedding to Jack Bouvier—for decades,” recalled her son, Jamie. “However, she remembered that he’d always been a nice, amiable fellow. They had dated when she was a teenager at St. George’s School. She was a friend of the woman he went on to marry, and in fact was a bridesmaid at their wedding. This man called to tell Mummy that his wife had died, after having been an invalid for many years with diabetes that had resulted in the amputation of her legs. The newspapers had been on and off strike at this time and Mummy thought maybe he hadn’t heard that Hugh died. So they commiserated over their late spouses. His name was Bingham Willing Morris. Soon they were enjoying meals together at the Castle prepared by her waitstaff.”

  Bingham Willing Morris, born on June 23, 1906, in New York, was educated at St. George’s and Harvard. He was also a member of the Native American confederacy and the Iroquois, as well as the Racquet and Tennis Club and the Harvard Club of New York. He and Janet had a great many common interests; both were fascinated by Civil War history, for instance. Like her, he also enjoyed music and dancing. When Janet told him that she was related to Robert E. Lee, he just accepted it with no questions asked. Janet felt comfortable in his presence. “The fact that he was from a distinguished and influential family in Philadelphia helped a lot,” said Jamie.

  Nicknamed “Booch,” Bingham Morris was an eccentric character, always appearing slightly disheveled and nothing at all like someone Janet Auchincloss might consider as a companion. He wore T-shirts, casual slacks, floppy straw hats, and always had a towel wrapped around his neck because, apparently, he perspired a great deal. His appearance caused Yusha to proclaim, “That man looks absolutely ridiculous.” At seventy-three, Morris owned a nice home in Southampton on Edge of Woods Road called Pra-Qua-Les. He also had a little money put away. He’d been lonely for a long time, he explained, especially since he and his late wife didn’t have any children.

  Even at the age of seventy-one, Janet was still desirous of physical intimacy. The longing for passion she felt when she gave up sexual attraction for financial security by marrying Hugh Auchincloss had never really dissipated over the passing of so many decades. The entire time she was married to Hugh, she never found sexual fulfillment. “Daddy, suffering for twenty-three years with emphysema, had his limitations in the bedroom, but that was the case even before he was sick,” said Jamie Auchincloss. “After Daddy died, Mummy wanted to date,” recalled Jamie. “She still felt young and vital. However, the men she came across always seemed to be widowers who didn’t want to reattach or were gay. Booch offered a heterosexual lifestyle to Mummy that she craved. He was good-looking, an outdoorsman who liked dogs and long walks, and they were compatible in every other way, too. They were also lonely. So, on paper, it seemed to work.”

  In August of 1979, Bingham asked Janet to marry him. She agreed. Understandably, some members of her family were concerned. Who was this man, and what did he have up his sleeve?

  Jackie flew to Newport with her daughter, Caroline, now twenty-one, to try to talk her mother out of the marriage. The three of them sat down in the library of the Castle—Janet behind Hugh’s enormous desk and Jackie and Caroline seated in front, as if in a business meeting—and tried to hash it all out. It was always so dark in there—no windows, low lighting—they could barely see one another. However, Janet was adamant. At one point, she became upset enough at them to storm from the room and out to the adjoining courtyard. Jackie went to join her and was astonished to find Janet smoking; she hadn’t smoked in years. Jackie bummed a cigarette from her. The two then sat at a bistro table enjoying their smokes and trying to come to terms. A week later, Lee tried as well. She also got nowhere. Janet Jr. was in Hong Kong and talked with her mother on the phone, but she, too, also made no progress. Yusha tried; no luck. Jamie, now living in Washington, knew better than to even bother. “Booch was a tough nut to crack,” he said. “He hated the Kennedys. He hated Democrats and liberals. He was gruff and, in my eyes, maybe not very kind. Luckily,” he laughed, “it was not I who had to marry him.”

  Despite her bouts of confusion, Janet’s thought process around Bingham Morris seemed clear. She was going to marry him, and no one was going to talk her out of it. “I am the mother and you are the daughters,” she told Jackie and Lee one evening at the Castle when they gave it one last try. “I tell you what to do. Not the other way around.” It had all happened so fast, Janet Jr. didn’t even have time to make plans to fly home from Hong Kong for the wedding!

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” Jackie finally decided. Her feeling was that at least there would be someone at the Castle to watch out for Janet because the rest of the family obviously couldn’t be there all the time. Jamie now lived in Washington and was working as a photojournalist. Lee was spending less and less time at Hammersmith. Tommy and Nini had their own families and were barely around. Yusha divided his time between Hammersmith and his own apartment at Eighty-ninth and Park in Manhattan. Jackie thought it would be best if someone was with Janet full-time.

  If Janet’s family was worried about her money, they didn’t have to be concerned. Janet had a prenuptial agreement in place with Bingham. After her insistence that Lee do the same with Newton Cope less than six months earlier, there was no way that she would ever do otherwise, if only to lead by example. Whatever she and Bingham brought into the marriage would be considered theirs and theirs alone, and anything they acquired during their union would then be considered community property—except anything having to do with Hammersmith Farm. If any changes were made to the property during the course of their marriage—for instance, if another portion of it was to be sold—that money would be Janet’s alone. Alexander Forger had worked out the agreement; Jackie, Lee, and Yusha had read it and all three were satisfied with it. (There was no need for Bingham to give Janet a monthly maintenance fee, as had been requested of Newton Cope.) So why shouldn’t Janet marry Bingham Morris? One reason: Jackie didn’t trust him. There was just something about him she didn’t like, and she couldn’t put her finger on it. When she raised her suspicions to other family members, they thought she was being either too cautious or protective, or maybe too controlling. “But she had good instincts, and we all knew that about my sister,” said Jamie. “So we were sort of on high alert from the very beginning.”

  Before they could get started with the ceremony, Jackie pulled Yusha aside and had a word with him. “Yusha, you need to talk to him and make sure he knows who’s boss around here,” she told him, motioning to Bingham Morris. Yusha did what Jackie asked; he took Bingham Morris down to the Windmill to have a heart-to-heart with him. Years later, in a letter to Bingham, Yusha would remind him of what he had said to him at that time: “I told you at the Windmill before the marriage of the deep devotion I felt toward her [Janet], both as a stepmother and friend, ever since I had been best man in her wedding to my father,” he wrote, “and the promise I had made to my father before he died, that I would watch over her at Hammersmith.” After the two men finished talking, they shook hands and walked back up to the Castle where Janet was waiting, ready to get married for the th
ird time.

  Janet and Bingham Marry

  “The deed is done,” said the priest as he finished the brief ceremony between Janet and Bingham. Everyone applauded as the newlyweds gave each other a quick kiss on the lips. There was then a lovely reception on the grounds. Jackie took a quick look around at the few friends and family members in attendance and noticed someone she didn’t recognize. “Him, over there,” she said to one of the ushers sent over by the Trinity Episcopal Church to assist in the ceremony. She pointed to a sheepish-looking man in a corner. She said she’d seen him earlier, nosing around the premises. Sure enough, the man turned out to be a writer for the National Enquirer who had somehow snuck onto the property. He was immediately ejected.

  “Let us welcome Bingham Morris to our family,” Yusha said as he raised his glass of champagne, and everyone followed suit. “And let us welcome him to Hammersmith on a”—he paused for a moment before adding—“more … permanent basis,” he concluded. It was awkward. Still, everyone clinked glasses.

  “So I imagine you’ll be moving into the Castle here with Mummy,” Jackie later said to Bingham as she tried to make small talk. By this time, the little party had moved out to the bluestone courtyard behind the Castle. In the distance, on the other side of a wooden fence, could be seen a herd of Black Angus steers as they grazed in the bucolic green hills. Janet was sitting at the small dining set, trying to prevent her dogs from jumping up onto her lap and mussing her dress. Yusha was at the table with Janet, as was Jamie. At another nearby table sat Louise Faria drinking a cup of coffee, along with her daughters, Joyce and Linda.

  “We’ll see,” Morris said to Jackie in answer to her question about his moving into the Castle. From his lackadaisical expression, he was not at all impressed to be having a conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It wasn’t as if Jackie expected to be treated with deference. However, people who didn’t know her well were inevitably excited and impressed to be in her presence. She’d gotten used to the public’s reaction to her many years ago. Being in the company of someone who clearly didn’t care who she was or what she meant to the world bothered her a little. Booch’s nonchalance was off-putting and just served to add to her discomfort about him.

  Morris took a swig of beer from the bottle in his hand and, looking around, added, “This place is pretty big, don’t you agree?”

  “Yes. But Mummy’s comfortable here,” Jackie said, according to one witness to the conversation. “I would hope that you two would stay here, and at O Street, too.”

  “O Street’s also too big,” Bingham said. “Look, we’re two old farts, Jackie. We can’t climb all of those stairs.”

  “Well, that’s what the elevator is for, Mr. Morris,” she said, now truly annoyed.

  “I love your mother,” Bingham said, equally irritated. “I’ll do what I think is best. And by the way, call me Booch,” he suggested, offering his nickname.

  “Indeed,” Jackie said as she studied him with cold eyes. “Mr. Booch,” she muttered as she walked away.

  The job had fallen to Jamie, the family’s resident photographer, to take pictures of everyone on this momentous day. At one point, Janet said to her son, “You should get in a picture, too, Jamie!” He then handed off the camera to someone else and stood with the family for a group photo. As the photographer instructed them all to “say cheese,” Jamie threw out his arms dramatically as if to say ‘Ta-da!’ In the resulting photograph, everyone is smiling broadly except for Jackie, who is glaring at her half brother.

  As it happened, Jackie was unhappy with Jamie at this time for having cooperated with the author Kitty Kelley in the writing of an unauthorized book about her. Of course, Kelley would go on to have quite a reputation as a scandalous biographer, but when she asked Jamie for an interview (around 1977), she hadn’t yet written a book. No one knew anything about the “Kitty Kelley” brand at that point, but the world would learn about it soon enough with the publication of Jackie Oh! Even Janet and Yusha gave interviews for the book, which shows that they really didn’t understand the magnitude of what they were doing. One would have thought they would have known how Jackie felt about these things, though. After all, when JFK’s good friend Paul “Red” Fay Jr. wrote a book about his friendship with Kennedy, The Pleasure of His Company, in 1966, Jackie was upset about it. When the author sent a check from the book’s proceeds to the Kennedy Library as a donation, Jackie sent it right back! (Years later, though, she would have a change of heart about this particular book, telling Fay she felt it was probably the best of the books ever written about Jack.)

  Among the revelations in Kitty Kelley’s book Jackie later blamed on Jamie was the fact that the blood-stained pink suit she’d worn in Dallas in ’63 had been stored for safekeeping in the attic of Janet’s Georgetown home, next to another box containing her trousseau for her wedding to Jack. After Kelley’s book was published, the treasured mementos had to be relocated to the National Archives because the family was so afraid someone would break into the house and steal them. Lee was also angry at Jamie for inadvertently confirming for Kelley that Anthony had been conceived out of wedlock. (It’s not as if Kitty couldn’t have done that arithmetic for herself, though—Lee and Stas married in March and Anthony was born in August.) Therefore, it was tense between the siblings, which was why Jackie was in no mood for Jamie’s humor.

  After the reception, Janet and Bingham were off on their honeymoon by automobile across New England, visiting sights Bingham had planned out for them in advance. “Things were off to a rocky start because Mrs. Morris was used to wearing evening gowns every night, without exception,” said Michael Dupree, her chef along with Jonathan Tapper. “So she packed all of her gowns and all of her white gloves only to find that, for their first night together, Bingham had taken her to a little log cabin in the middle of the woods. She was shocked. ‘No dancing? No fine dining? No … people?’ It was a surprise, all right.”

  “She later told me she got dressed for dinner anyway,” said one relative of Janet’s. “In my mind’s eye, I saw poor Janet in her lovely evening gown and gloves sitting at a simple metal card table in the middle of a dusty log cabin across from Booch, in his jeans, flannel shirt, and floppy straw hat.”

  Things only got worse when, before bed, Janet knelt down to say her prayers—which she’d done for many years—and was inadvertently kicked in the face by her new husband, who was already sound asleep. Of course, it was an accident, but Janet was still upset about it and would later say she viewed it as “a bad sign.”

  “They drove through Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine in November when there were no longer any leaves on the trees, there was snow on the ground, it was just miserable,” said Jamie. “Mummy came back from the two-week honeymoon frigidly cold and rather shell-shocked, wondering what the hell she’d gotten herself into.”

  Upon her return, Janet said she woke up one night, took one look at Bingham, and decided then and there that she didn’t want to be with him.

  “Making things a little worse, Mummy couldn’t find anything appealing about Booch’s completely masculine home in Southampton,” said Jamie. “His home was like a shrine to his dead wife. He even had her old Karmann Ghia still in the garage. So, as his wedding present to Mummy, Booch offered to allow Lee to completely redecorate the house to Janet’s taste, and then send him the bill. Lee went to town, of course, so much so that, soon, Booch didn’t even recognize his own house. He also didn’t like it. Finally, he told Mummy and Lee, ‘Look, this is my den. Let me at least have it the way I like it, and you can have the rest of the house for yourselves.’ After the job was done, Lee sent him an enormous bill. By this time he felt she’d completely ruined his house, and he was now banished to its den.”

  One day soon after Janet and Booch returned from their honeymoon, Jackie went to the Castle for a fitting; Janet had a dressmaker who, every week, came to the house to alter evening gowns. This week, Janet had one in mind for Jackie and asked her to come by. Jackie s
howed up in blue jeans with a sweatshirt, her hair pulled back, saying she wanted to be a “blank slate” for the dressmaker.

  As she was being fitted, Janet confided in Jackie that the marriage hadn’t been consummated. Somehow, Jackie wasn’t surprised. Janet wondered if it was grounds for annulment. Jackie certainly hoped so; she said she would have Alexander Forger look into it. Meanwhile, Janet decided to talk to a priest at Trinity Church. He, apparently, told her that, under the circumstances, an annulment would be not only appropriate but understandable. Because she was a churchgoing woman, the priest said he felt the decision to marry had been made prayerfully, not carelessly. Afterward, when Janet also talked to Yusha about it, he said he felt an annulment was probably for the best. “But Janet thought it would look bad,” Oatsie Charles recalled, “and, she told me, ‘I don’t want people to think I have lost my marbles.’ Rather than have people talk about her, she was willing to stay in the marriage and make the best of it.” Also, Janet just didn’t want to be alone. She’d been married for most of her life, was used to the companionship, and was frightened by the prospect of being on her own. Therefore she said she’d do her best to just learn to live with Bingham Morris, faults and all. “That is what marriage is all about,” she concluded. In the end, Booch wasn’t so bad, she decided. He just wasn’t Hughdie.