by J. B. West
Relaxed and uninhibited, she was always popping up anywhere, wearing slacks, sitting on the floor, kicking off her shoes, her hair flying in every direction. We all had fun along with her. Yet she also drew a line against familiarity which could not be crossed.
It was only with the cameras grinding or guests coming in the front door that the seriousness, the poise, the coolness that were also part of her, began to appear.
She had a total mastery of detail—endless, endless detail—and she was highly organized, yet rarely held herself to a schedule. For others, she insisted upon order; for herself, she preferred spontaneity. She took advice readily, but only when she asked for it, and she strongly resisted being pushed.
The trick was to read her correctly, to accomplish everything she wanted, and not to oppose her in anything. And it was a trick, because sometimes she was so subtle she needed a translator.
I saw her move swiftly into three different roles: wife and mother to her young children; commander-in-chief of the White House restoration; and chatelaine of the Great Hall.
The changes in the White House began on Inauguration Day, 1961.
“Please put me in the Queen’s Room,” Jacqueline Kennedy had told me the week before, “and my husband will stay in the Lincoln bedroom. We’ll move into the family quarters as soon as they’re done over. But I do wish there were some way we could get the decorating finished before the Inauguration!”
The morning of January 20, Mrs. Eisenhower read in the newspaper that Jacqueline Kennedy would sleep in the Queen’s Room.
At our breakfast meeting, she confronted me:
“Who suggested that sleeping arrangement? … You, I suppose!”
Mrs. Eisenhower kept the Queen’s Room as a special guest room, and you had to be a Queen to sleep there. She didn’t think Mrs. Kennedy fit that requirement.
Inauguration Day is easily the busiest day of the year for the entire Executive Mansion staff. While the changing-of-the-guard takes place officially a mile away at the Capitol steps, it happens physically at the White House. Not only do we gear up for receiving important visitors from all over the country, sometimes with a formal reception after the Inaugural Parade, but we also must move the outgoing President’s belongings out, and the incoming President’s belongings in during the two hours of Inaugural activities at the Capitol. Every carpenter, plumber, electrician, engineer, doorman, butler is put to work.
The rule, of course, is that one Head of State occupies the mansion until his successor takes the oath of office. But White House tradition also has it that not one box, not one dressing table, not one book of the new President’s must enter the mansion until he is duly sworn in. And we make it a point of pride to do all the moving, unpacking, hanging-up and putting-away, installing the new President in his home within those two hours of his Inaugural ceremony.
So, at noon on January 20, 1961, while President John F. Kennedy stood in front of the Capitol steps urging his fellow Americans to “… ask what you can do for your country …,” we were doing. Two sets of vans rolled down to the tradesman’s entrance underneath the North Portico: One to carry what was left of the Eisenhowers’ furniture to their Gettysburg farm; the other to bring in the Kennedys’ clothing and personal effects.
Actually, very quietly and at the request of Mrs. Kennedy’s social secretary, I had been receiving numerous boxes of toys and children’s furniture from the Kennedys’ Georgetown home during the two weeks prior to Inauguration. Lest anyone accuse me of breaking tradition, I stored them in the Usher’s dressing room until noon, Inauguration Day, when a helicopter spirited away the last of Mamie Eisenhower’s treasures, the portrait of her mother and a small electric organ.
When Mrs. Kennedy returned, exhausted, from the Inaugural Parade, I accompanied her up the stairs. Her tired eyes twinkled conspiratorially.
“I understand you and Tish [Baldrige] have been sneaking things into the White House under cover of night.”
I laughed. “All those things now have been put in storage rooms on the third floor.”
“Good. We’ll bring them out as soon as the children’s rooms are ready.” She smiled as she stepped into the Queen’s Room. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead, Mr. West. I want to make this into a grand house!”
To begin that work, Mrs. Henry Parish II, known to all as “Sister,” arrived the very next day, with swatches of material, paint chips, closet designs. During the previous month, the New York interior designer and the new President’s wife had pored over the color photographs I had sent via Secret Service to Palm Beach.
Mrs. Kennedy had done her homework well. By the time she moved in, she knew every inch of room space, every piece of furniture she would bring with her, every detail of where her family would live in the White House, and every penny of money in the federal budget to take care of the transformation.
Beginning on January 22, crews of White House painters, carpenters, plumbers, and electricians worked simultaneously in the seven family rooms on the second floor of the White House. As the paint in each room dried, the same workmen hung pictures and rolled down rugs, unloaded furniture and arranged it according to the decorator’s instructions.
The household staff stood awed by all the changes.
“I can’t believe what they’re doing,” housekeeper Mabel Walker told me.
At every step, Mrs. Kennedy roamed the mansion, discovering “treasures” and removing “horrors.” (“If there’s anything I can’t stand, it’s Victorian mirrors—they’re hideous. Off to the dungeons with them,” she declared, laughing.)
Within the next two weeks, while the President and his wife reigned from the Queen’s Room and the Lincoln suite, the “Mamie pink” of upstairs disappeared, the Grand Rapids furniture and heavy Victorian mirrors were packed away in storage. The carpenters and painters changed the dark walls to soft white, a background for the paintings, drawings, and prints from the Kennedys’ private collection, and a new sophisticated blue dominated the President’s living quarters.
The hotel-suite decor of Truman-renovation guest rooms made way for Caroline Kennedy’s pink rosebuds, white-canopied bed and rockinghorses. A wine-floral guest room became John-John’s blue-and-white nursery, with white crib and playpen, and stuffed animals.
Between their bedrooms, we changed a dressing-room closet into a room for the nurse, Maude Shaw. (“She won’t need much,” Mrs. Kennedy whispered merrily. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.”)
After a disastrous first-night dinner in the White House, when the Kennedys learned that the State Floor, even with its Family Dining Room, could not lend itself to the intimacy of their private entertaining, Mrs. Kennedy determined to install a dining room on the second floor.
“I want my children to be brought up in more personal surroundings, not in the State rooms,” she told me. “That ‘Family’ Dining Room is just too cavernous.” (Previous First Families had thought so, too, I told her.) Because of the location of the servants’ elevator, I advised her to place the dining room across the hall from her bedroom, where she had originally wanted the nursery. In this arrangement, the children were down the hall, giving the President and his wife more privacy.
“We’ll need a kitchen up here,” she mused. “Do you think that could possibly be done?”
“Certainly,” I said, looking at our shrinking budget. “Would you like to see some kitchen designers?”
“Heavens no,” she laughed. “I couldn’t care less about the kitchen! Just make it white and ask René what he wants in there.”
René Verdon, the new French chef, Mrs. Parish and I designed a stainless-steel-and-white kitchen, with commercial-size ovens and refrigerators, which I ordered from a local wholesaler. Within two days it replaced the dusty-rose bedroom where President Eisenhower’s mother-in-law had slept.
Hallmark of the new upstairs was Art: Gallery walls, filled with paintings and watercolors, original art i
n every corner: in the President’s bedroom, in Mrs. Kennedy’s bedroom, in the children’s rooms, and in the halls.
From the Smithsonian, she “borrowed” twenty portraits of proud American Indians, painted by George Catlin. She selected the frames herself and displayed the paintings prominently on the walls of the wide center hall upstairs. And she set about to retrieve some magnificent Cézanne landscapes originally bequeathed to the White House, which President Truman had placed in the National Gallery of Art.
One morning during those first whirlwind days of redecorating, Mrs. Kennedy poked her head in my office. “Guess what?” she announced. “Mrs. Vincent Astor is presenting us with some fantastic wallpaper for the President’s Dining Room, and….” She stopped in midsentence.
“Oh, Mr. West, you have a Grandma Moses!” she exclaimed, indicating the Fourth of July scene by the famous American painter, presented to the Trumans. President Eisenhower disliked the primitive oil painting so much that he banished it from sight, and it hung exiled on my wall.
“No, Mrs. Kennedy, you have a Grandma Moses,” I replied. “It belongs to the White House.”
“What a marvelous discovery—how I’d love it for Caroline’s room,” she said. “Would you mind terribly, Mr. West?”
We hung the colorful painting on Caroline’s wall, across from another American primitive and a French Impressionist landscape.
The President’s bedroom lost the murky green of the Eisenhower years, and acquired the canopied four-poster from the wine-floral guest room. For the old bed, Mrs. Kennedy ordered a special, extra-firm mattress to ease the President’s back. She also ordered an identical, horsehair mattress for the President to take on trips, and another for one side of the queen-sized bed in her own bedroom.
In a note to me, she vetoed the first design for the First Lady’s bedroom, the big room the Eisenhowers had shared. Although she realized the decorator was thinking of a room “severe enough for a man to share,” she explained, “it is mainly my room and I do not want it too severe.”
Her room was French in style, decorated in light blue chintz, accented with leopard-skin throws and good pictures—a boudoir fit to entertain a President. It was soft, relaxed, and elegant.
By the end of two weeks, we had used our entire $50,000 appropriation just to redecorate the family living quarters. Because the exterior of the mansion had been dressed in its four-year coat of white paint the previous summer, there was absolutely no money left to put grandeur into the State rooms.
“I know we’re out of money, Mr. West,” she said wistfully, “but never mind! We’re going to find some way to get real antiques into this house.”
During those first weeks, I had discovered two things about Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy: her innate sense of organization and planning, and her irrepressible humor. Every day, she said something that was just plain funny.
Comic metaphors cropped up in all her notes to me, amusing me no end. She thought the bedroom curtains were “seasick green,” their fringe like a “tired Christmas tree.” The ground-floor hall was a “dentist’s office bomb shelter,” the East Room floor a “roller skating rink.” Guests had to use “Pullman car ashtray stands,” but the lobby, finally, was “just like De Gaulle’s.” When she despaired of ever being able to adjust the thermostats, she thought surely “the greatest brains of army engineering can figure out how to have this heated like a normal rattletrap house!”
For their first State function, a diplomatic reception on the afternoon of February 9, Mrs. Kennedy made three requests to liven up the State Rooms: no receiving lines, more “natural” flower arrangements, and fires in all the fireplaces.
For two days, black smoke poured from the chimneys as we checked out one fireplace after another, to test their first actual use in eight years. (Mrs. Eisenhower had installed gold-paper fans as fireplace screens, and never had fires lit in any of the rooms.) It took two days to get them all working properly. Or so we thought.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Parish and I prowled the State rooms, switching lamps, placing ashtrays, looking for likely flower bowls.
“She wants to put pictures of the children and pets around on the tables here to make it cozy,” said Mrs. Parish, and laughed, as we went through the dull, imposing Green Room. We went searching—even to the National Botanical Gardens—for flowers that were not too “stilted.”
Finally, the florist set out vases of tulips and wildflowers, the engineers lit the fires, and the diplomatic guests assembled in the Blue Room for cocktails and conversation.
All the ushers were dressed in formal day wear: club coat, striped trousers, gray cravats. I was determined to be excused from sight, because I had dislocated my shoulder sledding with my daughters. Just in case, though, I dressed in my “formals,” and tied a black silk Navy regulation scarf around my neck for a sling. I was manning the Usher’s office when a frantic call came from Bruce, a doorman on the first floor.
“Mr. West, come quick—the East Room….”
I sailed down the hall to find the four East Room fireplaces belching smoke.
“Close all the doors to the room!” I ordered the doormen. “Open the windows, and bring up two big fans from the electrician’s shop. Bruce, get a bucket and shovel to carry out the logs.”
I stood at the fireplace, arm in black sling, directing the frantic traffic, and praying that the President and his guests would stay in the Blue Room and not call the fire department, when the door opened. Mrs. Kennedy and General Clifton, the President’s military aide, stepped into the East Room. I braced myself as they walked over to the fireplace.
“Oh, Mr. West,” Jacqueline Kennedy purred, “you look so glamorous—just like Zachary Taylor!” and making no mention of the commotion or smoke, she went back to her reception.
The next day I made a special trip into the Red Room to take a close look at the stern, military portrait of the twelfth President. I wondered how many fires he had put out. (Actually, I rather hoped Mrs. Kennedy meant John Tyler, the tenth President, who had posed for his portrait wearing a black scarf around his neck, and was, it seemed to me, a good bit better-looking than Zachary Taylor.)
Instead of having a regular 9:00 a.m. staff conference at her bedside, as Mamie Eisenhower did, Mrs. Kennedy might pop up anytime with a new plan for a room arrangement, a surprise dinner, a request for a stage or a stepstool. Our daily conferences took place in my office, in a storeroom, on the back stairs, on the south lawn, in a boat. She and I sat on the floor with drawings spread out all around us, we sprawled on the marble stairs to discuss the ceilings above, or we poked around in a dusty warehouse for some lost White House possession.
She learned quickly to put everything in writing, and kept on her desk a yellow legal-size pad with my name on it. Any time of day or night, when she thought of something to tell me, she’d jot it down. Anything that happened to pop into her mind, from picture frames for Caroline’s drawings or sleeping arrangements for Kings and Queens, would find its way to me, on her notepad. Her incredible attention to detail, in every subject she put her mind to, made the difference for me in managing an institution (for by now, the White House had indeed become so) without the morning staff meetings to which I had been so accustomed.
For Mrs. Kennedy herself never kept regular hours. Despite the discipline that imposed order on everything around her, she usually did what she pleased, whenever she wanted to. The only truly inviolate time of her day was the children’s hour, in the evening, when she read to or played with John and Caroline.
She had breakfast served on a tray, in bed, whenever she woke up. Sometimes at 8:00, sometimes, after a long evening of partying, at noon.
The President was usually up at 8:00, however, and Miss Shaw brought the children in to visit with him while he ate breakfast.
Caroline walked him over to his west wing office every morning, then walked back to the kitchen, where she picked up her little brown-paper-bag lunch, and headed for the play school that Mrs. Kennedy had
designed and installed in the third-floor solarium.
After greeting her children, Mrs. Kennedy dressed in pants and a sweater or shirt (I can’t remember her ever wearing a dress in the White House unless she had company) and took a brisk hour’s walk, alone, around the sixteen acres of White House grounds.
Before she developed her system of memos, she’d stop by my office on her way out, to discuss her plans for the day. After the memos started appearing, our meetings, though unscheduled, were actually more frequent. I learned to carry my yellow legal pad (with her name on it) around under my arm whenever I left my office. No telling where I might run into her, for a full-scale executive conference.
Following her walk, she’d return to the West Hall, where she worked at her desk. That ornate French Empire desk with big brass appointments was her most prized possession. She worried more about scratches-in-transit, or its improper care, than about any other piece of furniture or art in the White House or in her own house. The desk had belonged to her late father, stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier, whom she had adored and of whom she spoke quite frequently.
If she had no appointments or visitors, she joined the children in the “high-chair room,” where they had lunch, then she ordered a grilled cheese sandwich, served to her in bed, before her nap.
2
AFTER LUNCH, THE KENNEDY children were bedded down, the maids and houseman scuttled away, and silence reigned upstairs at the White House. For the President of the United States, after a dip in the pool, came home from the office.
Just after they first moved in, Mrs. Kennedy had walked with me down the ground-floor corridor, out the west door, and along the colonnade by the Rose Garden, to the President’s oval office in the west wing. A brisk January breeze whipped at us as we opened the door to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s heated swimming pool.
“Do you think we could have this colonnade enclosed in glass, like the east entrance is, so that the President can get back from the swimming pool without walking in the cold air?” she asked. “He doesn’t like to dress after a swim.”
