Upstairs at the White House

by J. B. West

  Many of us noted how cool and aloof Mrs. Kennedy appeared in public. Yet we also knew that she tried very hard to please the President, to amuse him, to bring him into her world of the arts, and at the same time to step gingerly around the edges of his world of politics, which she never really enjoyed.

  After their triumphant trips abroad, I think President Kennedy realized what a political asset his publicity-shy wife actually could be. And I felt that she was slowly beginning to enjoy the adulation. After all, when the crowds all over the world cried “Jack-ie, Jack-ie, Jack-ie,” she realized that the applause was indeed for herself and not simply for the political stereotype of the devoted woman behind the great man.

  Jacqueline Kennedy and her husband of nearly ten years had not yet become as truly close as they might have been, but I think they were getting there. They were not knit-from-the-same-cloth and mirror-close like the Trumans; they were not openly sweethearts, like the Eisenhowers; but neither was their relationship formalized and “official,” like the Roosevelts’.

  I think Mrs. Kennedy was trying to grope through the maze of differences between them—differences in interests, background, and personality.

  5

  “I WANT TO MAKE this a grand house,” Mrs. Kennedy had told me at the beginning, and she started then to make it so. A few days later the familiar two buzzes sounded on my telephone.

  “Mr. West, could you come up here a moment?” Mrs. Kennedy called.

  Notebook in hand, I was at her bedside in a moment’s time; she was in the pink-canopied Queen’s bed, propped up for all the world like Mamie Eisenhower. She held out an old, battered copy of a magazine on antiques, which featured a photograph by Hans Huth, depicting a pier table which had been used by President Monroe in the White House.

  “Do you know anything about this table?” she asked.

  “I’m sure I can find it,” I answered, for the White House keeps an annual inventory of all its possessions, both those in the mansion and those in the warehouse. Sure enough, in the Fort Washington warehouse, we found the Monroe pier table, dusty and rickety, with the gilt peeling off. I sent a White House truck to bring it to the mansion, and stored it in the carpenter’s shop until Mrs. Kennedy got a chance to see it.

  When she did, she was delighted. “We must have it restored,” she exclaimed. Then, “May I go with you to the warehouse?”

  I was startled—not being accustomed to First Ladies stumbling about in our warehouse. Neither Mrs. Roosevelt, Mrs. Eisenhower, nor Mrs. Truman had ever ventured there.

  “You can see a list of everything in this inventory,” I countered, handing her the huge bound book.

  “Oh, Mr. West, please let me see your warehouse,” she begged. Laughing, I agreed, and off we went to search for treasures.

  The Fort Washington warehouse, located on the Maryland side of the Potomac, had been filling up with furniture since the Roosevelt administration. We scrupulously followed the law, which stated that anything donated to the White House immediately became government property, and could not be returned or resold. The same law ordered an annual inventory of all White House property, to be kept by the National Park Service. Prior to this 1929 Act of Congress, the Presidents could either give away their White House gifts, take them home with them, or sell them at public auction. (Presidents James Buchanan and Chester A. Arthur had staged notorious public auctions of White House furnishings, and many of James Monroe’s French acquisitions disappeared during those sales.)

  When I first took Mrs. Kennedy to the warehouse, she found it filled with broken-down, no-longer-usable furniture. There were few discoveries like the Monroe pier table.

  What she did find was china—and she was delighted. Following the 1929 law, every broken piece of china or silver had been stored in a special cupboard in the White House butler’s pantry until inventory time at the end of the year. When they were duly recorded as broken, we ceremoniously carted them off to the carpenter’s room, where we smashed the broken or chipped pieces with a sledgehammer. We then sent a butler to toss the pieces off Hains Point, into the Potomac River.

  Only after enough plates were broken and dumped in the river were we able to order new Presidential china. We couldn’t replace the broken pieces, because the manufacturer always destroyed the mold. So when the White House no longer had enough dishes to make a complete “set” for the State Dining Room, we retired the remaining pieces to the Fort Washington warehouse.

  As the Kennedys had no State china of their own choice, Mrs. Kennedy was happy to discover some remaining pieces of the Polk service, the Harrison service, and even some Lincoln pieces, during her warehouse tour.

  “Oh, Mr. West, we can use these in our upstairs dining room,” she whispered excitedly, wiping the dust off the Lincoln plates with her hand.

  Our lack of success in finding historic furnishings in the warehouse, however, only made Mrs. Kennedy determined to bring in outside help to carry out the project. From the very beginning, she assembled advisors, named a Fine Arts Committee,* and appointed as its chairman the distinguished American furnishings authority, Henry Francis du Pont. The Committee’s purpose was to locate authentic furnishings reflecting the history of the Presidency of the United States, furnishings that were both historically accurate and of museum quality. Though the fourteen members of the Committee didn’t have regular meetings, or decide as a group what should or shouldn’t be accepted, each person was simply expected to go around the country, search out antiques, and persuade people to donate them to the White House.

  By the time Mrs. Kennedy announced to her Fine Arts Committee’s first formal meeting that, “My main project here will be to make this a truly historic house,” she knew that our budget would barely cover the cost of paint and window shades, that there was no appropriation or hope of an appropriation for the kind of a grand-scale restoration (“Not redecoration!”) Mrs. Kennedy had in mind. She knew her only hope of achieving it was from private sources.

  Originally Mrs. Kennedy hoped to find furniture that had actually been used in the White House or by the Presidents at some time or other. Members of the Committee soon learned, however, that either such furnishings didn’t exist or were jealously guarded by museums. Moreover, they found that what was in private collections cost plenty, especially if the White House was known to be interested.

  The Fine Arts Committee brought in the money and the antiques, and she quickly named two experts to head actual restoration projects. Mr. du Pont was to be the one authority on historic furnishings. M. Stephane Boudin, of the Jansen decorating firm in Paris, was to be the decorator. He was selected because Mrs. Kennedy wanted the restored White House to recall the time of President Monroe, when it was furnished in the then fashionable French style. Du Pont and Boudin, both in their sixties, brought strong opinions to the project. Each naturally thought his was to be the final word.

  From the first day the two men met, it was apparent they’d never see eye to eye on anything. Mr. du Pont, a dignified Eastern millionaire, was interested only in authenticity, and didn’t care about arrangement or proportion or compatibility. M. Boudin, a bubbly, dramatic little Frenchman, cared only about pleasing the eye.

  Mrs. Kennedy and I gave them a tour of the White House early in 1961.

  Mr. du Pont, who was slightly deaf, spoke rapidly, walked slowly, and mumbled. M. Boudin was also hard of hearing, spoke halting English, and bounced energetically around the room. They tried desperately to be polite to each other. There were so many “beg pardons” and “so sorrys” and “I’m afraid I don’ts” and “but don’t you means …,” Mrs. Kennedy and I both had to interpret. We wove in and out of the State rooms, dumbfounded by their total lack of communication.

  “This is not going to work!” Mrs. Kennedy whispered to me.

  “We’ll just have to see to it that they aren’t here at the same time again,” I ventured. She broke into laughter.

  “Absolutely!” she said, still convulsed. “Must keep the
m apart!”

  Mrs. Kennedy was in command at every step of the restoration, entering every decision, judging like a Solomon every conflict between Boudin and du Pont. In the Green Room, for example, du Pont submitted his choice of green for the walls, and Boudin submitted his choice of green.

  Mrs. Kennedy sent me a memo:

  Mr. West,

  “Could you send Mr. du Pont Boudin’s 3 samples for green room 1) big ocean on green design 2) smaller green-on-green piece 3) tiny bit of moiré. Also return his own darker green stripe material, on white board. Please enclose this humble letter soliciting his approval. If we don’t get it he will have the shock of me doing it anyway!

  Mrs. Kennedy selected design 3, the moiré, for the Green Room walls. Despite the selection of his favorite green silk for the walls, however, Boudin was never happy with the Green Room. “It is full of legs!” he shrieked, indicating du Pont’s choice of delicate chairs and tables in the American Federal style of the late eighteenth century.

  Mr. du Pont, on the other hand, was never satisfied with the Blue Room, with its white walls by Boudin and the traditional blue only in accent.

  “It’s too French,” he mumbled.

  President Kennedy, also, was unhappy with the Blue Room. He was not at all sure that the change to white walls would meet with the approval of the American people.

  “He’s scared to make the change,” Mrs. Kennedy whispered. “Let’s cross our fingers!”

  But she assured the President that the white walls were more historically accurate, and he allowed the change. Before it was opened to the public, however, President Kennedy went through the Blue Room on his own. I waited outside the door.

  When he came out, he had no compliments for the room.

  “Before you open it up, have the floors darkened and get a great big blue rug on the floor,” the President ordered.

  I sent Mrs. Kennedy a note with her husband’s instructions.

  “Fine—Darken floors,” she scribbled back. “I’ll talk to Pres. about rug.”

  In the end, she talked him into keeping the present rug, a valuable antique Savonnerie donated by Mrs. Albert Lasker, which had a gold-and-pink scalloped design on a light blue field.

  Just before we opened the Blue Room to the press, Mrs. Kennedy stopped by the Usher’s office, Caroline swinging on her hand.

  “Mr. West, could you please get Mr. du Pont and David Finley (Chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts) up here and brief them enthusiastically on the Blue Room—and have them here when it’s opened to the public? I want to be sure they praise it for the press.”

  They both agreed to come early on the day of the unveiling.

  When they arrived, I took them on a preview tour, explaining in detail each of the changes, pointing out what great pains were taken to avoid a “clash” between the Red Room and Green Room, by using a soft white rather than a bold blue.

  At the end of fifteen minutes, Mrs. Kennedy stepped in, on cue.

  “How do you like it?” she asked, smiling expectantly.

  “It’s great—a great improvement!” Mr. du Pont beamed.

  Mrs. Kennedy winked at me. The master would perform well for the press.

  As each room took shape, the President’s wife maintained a very delicate sense of timing, knowing that it would not be politically or aesthetically proper to make over the White House overnight—even when we had found the money to do more. Just after we completed the Blue Room, she wrote a note asking me to warn Mr. du Pont “not to say anything about plans for the Gold and China Rooms—as I feel we have done enough this year.”

  All during the restoration, when decorators, committee members, or anyone else was there, Mrs. Kennedy insisted that I accompany her at all times, as mine was the responsibility for executing (and budgeting) all changes.

  The tours with Boudin were always a show: Mrs. Kennedy and the irrepressible Frenchman chattering away in French, I following along with a notebook for her occasional translations; Boudin standing on tiptoe to indicate the height a picture should hang, then trying the picture first on one wall, then another, then in another room, then in another, until the perfect spot was found. Two carpenters stood by on these expeditions, to hang pictures and move furniture. Then Mrs. Kennedy would be apt to call the next day, and ask if it could please be moved back to the first location.

  Round and round the rooms we went, trying art in every possible combination. With the acquisitions from a Special Committee for White House paintings,* we soon had 150 historic paintings to hang, including five life portraits of early Presidents. And she was finally able to persuade the National Gallery of Art to return to the White House two Cézanne landscapes—her favorite paintings in the house.

  Boudin and Mrs. Kennedy preferred to hang pictures in multiple groupings on each wall, rather than the one-picture-to-a-wall style of recent years. When General Eisenhower came back to the Kennedy White House for luncheon with the Prime Minister of Japan, he noted the picture arrangement with great delight.

  “I wanted to do that here,” he told me, “but the Commission of Fine Arts wouldn’t let me.”

  Mrs. Kennedy and Boudin conferred on every detail in the house, from the wardrobe doors in her boudoir (they cost $800 and were painted with realistic trompe l’oeil representations of great moments in her life: the cover of her husband’s prize-winning book Profiles in Courage, a photo of Caroline, a model of a yacht), to the chandeliers in the East Room, to the ashtrays in the upstairs halls. The Frenchman missed nothing. “The tablecloth on the round table in the Blue Room must go,” he ordered, indicating the gold fringed cloth selected by Sister Parish. “It looks like a fat Spanish dancer.”

  “I’ve learned more about architecture from Boudin than from all the books I could ever read,” Mrs. Kennedy told me. “He has a superb sense of perspective.”

  And Boudin wrote me hundreds of letters discussing all those little details—letters in French all signed, “Croyez, cher Monsieur West, a l’assurance de mes sentiments bein dévoués,” or even more affectionate terms.

  “You are carrying on one of the great French correspondences of the century, Mr. West!” Mrs. Kennedy wrote, after translating one of his letters. “Do you sign your letters to Boudin, ‘please believe dear sir in the assurances of my most respectful sentiments’?” As his letters grew more flowery, Mrs. Kennedy was even more amused. “I think you two are having a great affair!” she teased.

  Every lampshade, every vase, every andiron came under her scrutiny and that of Boudin. Even the chandeliers moved from room to room in their march toward perfection. And the contributions poured in.

  Nobody had expected the donations to come in such quantity. The White House was barraged with everybody’s old quilts, spittoons, and paintings. Some were unthinkable, some were real prizes. Most of the acquisitions were authentic pieces from the period of a particular Presidency, or from a President’s private home. Mrs. Kennedy was overjoyed to recover from generous donors the few pieces that actually had been used in the mansion, such as President Monroe’s Bellangé chairs. Some treasures were too rare. The antique rugs, for example, did not hold up under the heavy traffic. We had to order exact copies rewoven, and what was left of the originals was banished to the warehouse, to be brought back for smaller parties.

  When the “accepted” antiques moved, one by one, out of the Map Room to their place upstairs in the White House, the “rejected” reproductions they replaced started piling up next door in the spacious ground-floor room which had first been the kitchen, then the broadcast room.

  I had to call in the Park Service.

  “We need another warehouse badly,” I said. “This stuff is all White House furniture for storage, and we’ve run out of space.”

  “Too bad we can’t sell it,” came the reply. “We might be able to finance your whole project that way.”

  But they quickly found space, in a government warehouse near National Airport, for the department-store furniture
chosen by a committee and disliked by three First Ladies. In a matter of months, both warehouses bulged at the seams with the massive Victorian mirrors and heavy Grand Rapids copies used during Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower years.

  Jacqueline Kennedy seemed to possess endless ingenuity when it came to persuading various persons and groups to make particular contributions that she wanted for the restoration. When the Colonial Dames wished to make a gift, the President’s wife confided to me that a “marvelous idea” would be for them to donate the chandeliers and lanterns, for which we had already paid $5,000 and installed in the ground floor, “saving our precious money to pay for all the little things—chintz, lampshades, carpets, etc., that we will never find donors for.”

  She took the restoration upstairs as well, to every room in the White House. But she never forgot her need to make every dollar count. When she began to decorate the north guest room so that it would reflect the elegance of the rest of the house, she wrote me:

  Could you let me know how much chintz (50 inches wide) we would need for the double north guest room for curtains, bedspreads, and maybe a couple of chairs? The price is $13.50 a yard, hand-blocked in England. Maybe you know some charming way of wooing the wholesale dealer so we can get it with a decorator’s discount—so, you can figure out how much it might cost—and then, I will tell you where it (the money) comes from etc.

  On another occasion, we were trying to negotiate purchase of an Oriental rug for the President’s Private Dining Room on the second floor. I advised Mrs. Kennedy that I could scrape up the money—more than $10,000—but that I thought “Rug dealers and antique dealers are all alike—no good.” She replied in a memo: “I so like the rug, but we are short of dollars and I am ENRAGED at everyone trying to gyp the White House. Tell him if he gives it (to the White House) he can get a tax donation and photo in our book—if not—goodbye!”