The phrase, which in Dr. Auchincloss’s opinion, encapsulated the code of a lady or a gentleman, is today carved in stone in the chapel of the Groton School, of which Dr. Auchincloss was a trustee. The words have gazed down upon a full generation of Groton boys, including a good many Auchinclosses. “Obedience to the unenforceable”—a principle first uttered in an address significantly titled, “Law and Manners” by Lord Moulton, a British jurist and parliamentarian, Minister of Munitions at the outbreak of the First World War—meant, as adapted by the Auchincloss family, that a man or woman’s first duty was to obey that which he cannot be forced to obey. Such matters as a person’s morals, or his human obligations, in other words, cannot ever be legislated by others. A government cannot regulate decency of thought and purpose; the right action cannot be found by consulting a rule book. Obedience to the unenforceable, Dr. Auchincloss reminded the children, is the great unwritten law of any worthwhile society, or Society, and each individual is the enforcer, and the only enforcer, of that unwritten law upon himself. “Obedience to the unenforceable” is, one might argue, a slightly more noble principle than that of noblesse oblige, and the Auchinclosses have, as a family, done their best to abide by it.
“Obedience to the unenforceable” has been the theme of life at Hammersmith Farm, where good behavior is expected to be automatic, and where one’s duties are expected to be assumed without question or complaint. Today the amenities of Hammersmith Farm are in the hands of soft-spoken, soft-slippered servants, but it was not always thus. When Janet and Hughdie Auchincloss were married, it was 1942, wartime, and among the other difficulties to be assumed by the new bride—such as helping her two young daughters make the transition to a new home and stepfather who already had three children of his own—was the problem of Hammersmith Farm itself. Janet Auchincloss’s mother-in-law had, as part of her staff, employed fourteen full-time gardeners to keep the Hammersmith landscape tidy; she had belonged to an era of Newport Society when gardens were placed a goodly hiking distance from the house, and they were part of a daily ritual: one strolled to the garden after lunch and, when there, sat in the shade of vast pergolas to be served tea brought on a wagon by the “second man.” In wartime Newport it was impossible to find a first man, much less a second and the fourteen gardeners were a quaint and distant memory.
Young Mrs. Auchincloss put her little girls to work—pruning rosebushes and fruit trees, clipping hedges, and cutting grass. It was very nearly a hopeless task (there were five hothouses of growing things), but the children tackled it with spirit. It would have been easier to give up the big place, but Hughdie Auchincloss was sentimentally attached to it, and still is. He was born there and says, without a trace of gloom, that he intends to die there.
Gradually, under Janet Auchincloss’s supervision, the scale of the gardening operation was reduced. The huge old gardens were photographed for posterity, then plowed under. A smaller garden was built next to the house, considerably shortening the old garden trip. But there were other inconveniences. Wartime restrictions meant that the house could have only one telephone. The children took turns doing telephone duty, which meant staying within earshot of the ring. Cooks and maids were hard to find, and the children learned the techniques and disciplines of cooking and housework.
Sometimes guests seemed to forget how much work the old place was. There was one—an old friend—who always insisted on bringing his own linen sheets, pillowcases, and blankets when he visited. The sheets were so deeply hemmed that when folded down across the blanket, they extended fully halfway down the bed and, to satisfy these whims of his, a guest bedroom had to be dismantled and re-made on his arrival. Janet Auchincloss took on the chore herself. She has always been fond of dogs—she presently keeps two poodles and two pugs—but one of her poodles had a curious habit. Whenever he disliked a person, he registered the fact by wetting, rather pointedly, on some article belonging to that person. One evening, the special-sheets friend had come to Hammersmith Farm for the night and, while Janet Auchincloss was making up the bed with his linen, the dog suddenly leaped on the bed. The rest may be imagined. As much to save her dog’s reputation as her own as a hostess, Mrs. Auchincloss rose—like an Auchincloss—to the occasion. She seized a bath towel, dried the damaged pillowcase as much as possible, reversed it, and prayed that her guest would not turn it over before retiring. Apparently, he didn’t. When he left, he had a special word of praise for “your beautifully behaved dogs.”
To teach her children obedience to the unenforceable, Janet Auchincloss had her own methods. When her daughter Lee was about ten, the child was caught telling a fib. Her mother thereupon sat her down and began telling her the classic tale of George Washington and the cherry tree. When she got to the point of the story where George’s father asks him who cut down the tree, Mrs. Auchincloss paused and said, “Now, Lee, when his father asked him that, what do you suppose little George Washington answered?” Without a moment’s hesitation, Lee replied, “He said, ‘I don’t have any idea who cut it down, of course!’” “Why, Lee,” said her mother, “I’m surprised at you. That wasn’t the truth. No, he said, ‘Father, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little hatchet.’” “Well,” said Lee, “I think that was an awfully foolish thing for him to say when his father was so mad at him.”
Each of the two Bouvier girls had her own personality and her own style, and, though close as sisters, they were not a bit alike. Jacqueline was the quieter of the two, the more reserved and the more determined. She would spend hours over her sketch pad and in scrapbooks at Hammersmith Farm are some of the drawings she made as a child of the others in the family—drawings with such titles as “Mummy,” “Uncle Hugh,” “Yusha,” “Lee,” and “Me.” As a girl, Jacqueline Bouvier also seemed to be genuinely ashamed of the fact that she was bright. With boys, particularly, she went out of her way to make them think that they were smarter than she, and her mother would overhear her saying—to a young man who had flunked his math exam—“Oh, I’m terrible at math, too!” even though she was excellent at it. It was something her mother—a great advocate of “Be yourself”—never quite understood. “She was so afraid of being thought a bluestocking,” her mother says now.
Lee was the more volatile, a creature of sudden whims and enthusiasms. As a girl, she considered herself a champion of social justice, and her mother was always finding her on the telephone to city officials, or writing letters to Mayor LaGuardia to tell him what was wrong with New York and how to correct it. Once her older sister Jackie walked into a room to find Lee telephoning orphanages. She had become interested in orphans that morning, and was trying to find a group she could take with her to the theatre.
Though both girls were voted, by such authorities as Cholly Knickerbocker, “Number One Debutante” of their respective coming-out years, it was Lee Bouvier, not Jackie, who was considered the beauty in the family; Jackie, despite her best efforts to establish a contrary reputation, was known as the brainy, creative one. Then Jacqueline Bouvier married John F. Kennedy, and the Auchincloss family history entered on a new chapter. “This is the most beautiful spot on the Atlantic seaboard,” the President used to say as he stood on the terrace of Hammersmith Farm. With a wink at his mother-in-law, he would say, “Mrs. Auchincloss, don’t you think this is the most beautiful spot on the Atlantic seaboard?” Since she has had to deal with some of the housewifely problems of the place, she insists she has merely “put up” with it. Still, those were exciting days with the President spending holidays there, entertaining such guests as Prime Minister Nehru. The Auchinclosses’ guest book of that period reads like an international Who’s Who. To be sure, there were always crowds of tourists at the foot of the drive, and boats in the bay coming in close for a look, and the retinue of staff and Secret Service men who attended the President to be housed and fed. “Still,” says Hughdie Auchincloss, “I think we got the best of the deal. We got wonderful telephone service. All our calls, you see, went through the White House swit
chboard.” Friends, calling the Auchinclosses from down the street had to call via Washington, but it was fast. Mail delivery was speedier, too.
In the summer of 1963 Janet Auchincloss, Jr., whom many consider the most beautiful of Mrs. Auchincloss’s three daughters, made her debut at Hammersmith Farm. The long drive was lighted by flares and white Chinese lanterns, and in the big “deck room”—the main entertaining room of the house—the chandeliers were festooned with flowers and velvet ribbons. Outside, in the tents set up on the lawn facing the bay, everything was Venetian red, blue, and gold, with the center tent poles garlanded with swags of flowers and sparkly lights. Meyer Davis and his orchestra played from behind a thirty-foot red-and-black Venetian gondola filled with baskets of flowers, and the band and its leader were dressed as gondoliers. There were over a thousand guests, including seven foreign ambassadors, two United States Senators, a retired Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, along with the Angier Biddle Dukes, the David E. K. Bruces, the Harvey Firestones, the Winthrop Aldriches, the Sheldon Whitehouses, and virtually everybody who was anybody at all in Eastern Society including, of course, dozens of Auchinclosses. It was the most festive and lavish debutante ball of that or any other Newport season anyone could remember. The President and Mrs. Kennedy did not attend, but they sent Janet the bouquet of flowers she carried, and announced that they would entertain for her at the White House during the Christmas season—a Christmas that did not come for President Kennedy.
Hughdie Auchincloss was lunching at the Metropolitan Club in Washington when the news of the event in Dallas was brought to him. He hurried downstairs to have it confirmed on television, then sped home and gathered his children around him. Later in the day, he and his wife went to the White House where they met Jacqueline Kennedy when she arrived. Still later, when the President’s body was brought to the White House, there was a short family service. At Mrs. Kennedy’s request, the Auchinclosses spent the night with her.
When John Kennedy was President, with Hughdie Auchincloss’s stepdaughter as his wife, the Auchinclosses were swept into a kind of international celebrity. All named Auchincloss in America found themselves in this curious position. They accepted it with good grace, even enjoyed it. They put aside the traditionally Republican Auchincloss political stance, and spoke out for the President and his party.* Now, in Mrs. Kennedy’s much publicized widowhood, her mother and stepfather have been flung into a share of the spotlight that surrounds the most famous woman in the world, and so have all the other Auchinclosses. Mrs. Kennedy’s position in the Auchincloss clan is now an odd one. Just as she seems somewhat out of place among the Kennedys, so does she seem out of keeping with the Auchincloss style and manner. She lacks the Kennedys’ Irish exuberance and competitiveness; she also blends uneasily with Auchinclosses who have, by tradition, been Scottishly conservative, understated, and aloof. What, for instance, would Aunt Ellie have thought of her in her miniskirt—Aunt Ellie, who disapproved of men and women swimming together in the same pool. It is clear that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy is, after all, her father’s daughter. Her sensitivity as well as her certain sentimentality, her sense of drama and her sense of fashion, her poise which often conceals her Gallic temper, seem to have come from the opposite side of the English Channel.
Auchinclosses have never been in the business of producing giant public personalities. Like the occasional Vanderbilt, Roosevelt, Rockefeller, Adams, or Saltonstall who has chosen a career in government or politics, the Auchinclosses have produced one such family member—James Coats Auchincloss, Republican Congressman from New Jersey for many years. He seems decidedly a maverick. To prove, however, that Jim’s political adventures were not entirely frivolous, Auchinclosses remind themselves that for twenty-five years Jim was a member of the New York Stock Exchange, and a member of its Board of Governors for eighteen. By nature reticent when outside the realm of “people we know,” the Auchinclosses now find Mrs. Kennedy’s face on the cover of every magazine.
On the ferry-crossing from Jamestown to Newport, Hammersmith Farm, smiling down on the bay, is one of the tourist sights. The little windmill guest house that Mrs. Auchincloss is building at the water’s edge is announced as “where Jackie stays,” though this is not really the case. Rubberneckers park outside the entrance to Hammersmith Farm with cameras, and some drive boldly up the drive itself, hoping for a glimpse of their beloved. Needless to say, this is a nuisance to Hammersmith Farm’s owners, nor are others in the family pleased with these developments. It is not that they are jealous of “the fuss,” as one cousin puts it, made over Hughdie and Janet. It is just that they are afraid the family is becoming famous for the wrong things. Auchinclosses were Auchinclosses, after all, long before Kennedys were Kennedys.
Life at Hammersmith, meanwhile, continues to be decorous and seemly. In the mornings, which Hughdie Auchincloss spends at his desk, slippered servants move efficiently through the sunny, airy rooms, speaking in whispers. Before lunch, Hughdie and his wife meet for a Daiquiri in the deck room. Then lunch is announced. After lunch, Hughdie may drive around Hammersmith in his blue Bentley, stopping to speak with his head gardener or his superintendent. Or he may sit for an hour or so at the water’s edge, fishing for mackerel. If there is a professional football game scheduled, he will head back for the deck room and the television set. Upstairs, his wife works at her desk. Both Auchinclosses nap before dressing for dinner, and at these times the house grows very still.
The house, too, now wears something of the air of a memorial. Framed, in the entrance hall, is the Presidential flag which flew from the lawn when the President visited, and photographs of him are everywhere—there he is with his wife, there with his children, there with Yusha Auchincloss’s twin sons. Upstairs, in the study off the room he used, is a desk with a bronze plaque listing the various bills he signed into law there. Everyone in the family speaks of him respectfully as “The President,” only occasionally slipping and referring to him as “Jack.” On the third floor, the children’s floor, the rooms of Yusha, Nina, Jackie, Lee, Janet, and Jamey are often empty now. The long hallway is lined with photographs of departed Auchinclosses. One is struck with a sad sense that the greatest days of the great house may now be past, or that its history must now enter another new phase.
Janet Auchincloss, Sr.—a handsome, vivid, slender and auburn-haired woman with a buoyant step and a quick smile who looks far too youthful to be a grandmother—may sense this too. In 1965, she embarked upon a new project. The old windmill, which once lifted water for the house, was standing idle, and she had an idea: why not move it down to the edge of the bay and remodel it? She and her daughter Jackie spent weeks hiking around the acreage at Hammersmith in search of the perfect spot and, when they thought they had one, the two women had themselves raised on a fork-lift tractor so they could inspect the view, as it would be, from the top. Working with walkie-talkies between the main house and a prospective site, she and Jackie tried to place the windmill where it would do the most for the house’s view. It was a familiar sight, that summer, Mrs. Kennedy and her mother—one woman, leaning from an upper window of the main house, gesturing and shouting directions, and the other, skirts blowing, perched high on the platform of a fork-lift, half a mile away. At last they settled on a site. A workman, helping to prepare to move the building, was using an acetylene torch. A gust of wind blew his flame under a shingle. The windmill caught fire instantly and burned to the ground.
But Mrs. Auchincloss is a woman of determination. Undaunted by the catastrophe, she decided to build a new windmill which became, in the process, quite a bit more than the old one was to be. There are four floors, with an elevator between—a large room for entertaining on the ground floor, a living-dining room on the next, a bedroom on the next and, on the top, a glass-walled studio room that takes in the entire bay and a generous portion of the Atlantic Ocean. Two kitchenettes and a sundeck are staggered between the floors. From now on, according to Mrs. Auchincloss’s plan, she and her husband
will retreat for the summers into this diminutive, elegant, fairy-tale castle. The children and grandchildren may use the big house as they wish.
There are no outward signs that being the mother of the most publicized woman in the world has been a strain, but certainly it has been. Janet Auchincloss is often recognized and approached by strangers who, as often as not, are well-meaning, and who ask the question, “Pardon me, but aren’t you Jackie Kennedy’s mother?” Mrs. Auchincloss visibly stiffens before murmuring a polite, and poised, affirmative, and moving on. The publicity and the recognition that went with being connected to the White House, which the Auchinclosses once accepted, is now merely something to be endured.
There is a further matter that privately worries the family. “When,” asks one member, “will the Kennedy publicity begin to deteriorate and run downhill?” When, in other words, will it take on a yellow-journalistic cast of the “intimate-secrets-of-John-F.-Kennedy” variety? Alas, it has had a way of happening, following a decent interval, after the deaths of many other famous men, and a number of the family are now grimly steeling themselves for this kind of lurid and leering press.
The Auchinclosses’ distinguished brother-in-law, Wilmarth Lewis, feels that in most eventualities, Auchinclosses will emerge triumphant. Having married one, he has particular admiration for the Auchincloss women and their particular sense of balance and lightness. They have acquired this sense, he feels, partly through family tradition and inheritance, and partly through their education. This, of course, has been outwardly superficial—with the mandatory year in Europe—and consistently upper class. Women, by tradition, have gone to Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, just as Auchincloss boys have traditionally gone to Groton, and, says Mr. Lewis, “Porter certainly isn’t the worst school in the world, but it’s hardly the best, either. And yet it has somehow been able to teach these girls to go to the heart of complicated problems—and to rise to occasions.” It teaches them, he feels, a sense of themselves, a sense of duty, of obligation, of responsibility. It teaches them that there is more to “being a lady” than manners, or Manner. It teaches them to tell what is important from what is not, what needs doing from what doesn’t. It supplies them with a certain toughness of fiber. It is this upper-class toughness that is so often mistaken for simple coldness, even arrogance.
The Right People Page 34
