Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  When Jackie and Bev began their senior years at Miss Porter’s and Harvard, respectively, they regarded themselves as a couple. For some girls, Miss Porter’s functioned, as it long had, as a finishing school. Upon graduation they considered themselves finished—that is, ready for a proper husband. Other seniors preferred to continue their schooling, whether at a junior college, an art school, or a full-fledged four-year college. In Jackie’s day, Miss Porter’s placed new emphasis on college preparation. Still, for those who chose college, as for those who did not, the nearly universal objective was marriage. Few girls saw college as the prelude to a serious career of one’s own. Seniors like Jackie who, though they had yet to be introduced to society, had already had established boyfriends appeared to be on a fast track to married life. For them, college could be a good place to wait until the boys were ready to become husbands. As Jackie solemnly advised a friend, the reason so many boys resisted marrying immediately was that they needed time to establish themselves in business. Besides, she stressed, marriages were so much more likely to last when the boys had had a chance to “sow their wild oats first.” For her part, Jackie was keen to attend Sarah Lawrence, mainly, it appears, because of the school’s proximity to Manhattan and its nightlife. Black Jack insisted that she select the rather more isolated and inconvenient Vassar. Though after a preliminary visit Jackie despairingly described Vassar as a huge lonely place, in the end Black Jack gave her no choice but to capitulate.

  Meanwhile, addressing Bev as “darling” and “dearest,” she recorded her ever-shifting feelings for him in blue ink on pale blue monogrammed stationery. Since she rarely saw Bev now that they were both at school, there was a sense in which the relationship existed more on paper than in reality, more in her head than in the flesh. She spent many hours alone, reading about romantic love, contemplating what it means to be in love. Keenly, she dwelled on the pleasures to come when she and Bev could be together. Yet when she was actually with him, more often than not he was a disappointment to her and she pulled back. In the beginning, Jackie had admitted to being ashamed of liking him as much as she did. Now it was Bev’s turn to be embarrassed.

  Jackie had not seen him for a good many weeks when, on a Saturday afternoon in October, he materialized at Farmington in the role of a caller. In accord with tradition, Bev arrived at two P.M. and departed after tea at the headmaster’s residence. At some point in between, the twenty-two-year-old made a blundering attempt to kiss Jackie, who refused him. Writing afterward, she sought to assuage his hurt. “I do love you—and can love you without kissing you every time I see you and I hope you understand that.” As Christmas drew near, her fantasy of Bev seemed to recover from the ambivalence that a dash of reality, in the form of actually seeing him, had provoked. Suddenly, she could hardly wait to be with Bev in New York during the holiday break. Yet when at length she did meet him there, the experience proved as awkward and unhappy as before. At Rockefeller Center, Bev again tried to kiss her, and again she pulled away. He charged Jackie with not loving him.

  “I do think I’m in love with you when I’m with you,” she wrote initially. “But it’s awfully hard for me to stay in love with someone when I only see them every three months and when the only contact I have with them is through letters.” Unfortunately for Bev, there was worse in store. The more opportunity she had to reflect, the less willing she was to try to talk herself into believing that she loved him. At the outset of their correspondence, she had aimed to fashion a voice that was “devastatingly witty.” A year and a half later, her words of January 20, 1946, were simply devastating. “I’ve always thought of being in love as being willing to do anything for the other person—starve to buy them bread and not mind living in Siberia with them—and I’ve always thought that every minute away from them would be hell—so looking at it that [way] I guess I’m not in love with you.”

  Behind his back, Jackie was even harsher. Bemoaning to another girl that Bev would never be much in the world, she predicted he would be content to be a party boy for the rest of his life. Despite Jackie’s complete disillusionment, she and her first real boyfriend continued to correspond. He still visited her at Farmington, and in anticipation she merrily urged him to smuggle in cigarettes, chocolate, and even a hip flask, the latter expressly to shock the housemother charged with keeping order in the dormitory. Bev’s passion for Jackie showed no sign of abating. On her side, however, fire had turned to ice. For Jackie, as for other Farmington girls, everything ultimately was about marriage and the future. Bev seemed incapable of a future she might actually want to share. Pointedly, Jackie had once asked him if he could think of anything worse than living in a small town like Farmington all one’s life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake. She made it clear that she had higher ideas for herself than such a hidebound existence, yet she remained fuzzy about specifics. At seventeen, she was able to conceive of the future largely in negatives. Called on for the purposes of her class yearbook entry to state her life’s ambition, Jackie flung back: “Not to be a housewife.”

  In Newport that summer, Jackie officially entered the marriage market. Positioned alongside Janet and Hughdie, who were also celebrating the christening of their second child together, Jackie “met” three hundred of the couple’s friends at a tea dance at Hammersmith Farm. No matter that Janet’s newborn son, as well as a daughter born two years before, bore a completely different relationship to the household than Jackie did. The optics of Jackie’s debut seemed to confer upon her the Auchincloss imprimatur. Daughters of divorced parents often had two separate debut parties. For example, Jackie’s friend Helen Bowdoin, known as “Bow,” was formally presented by her very rich father at his home in Oyster Bay, Long Island, before being feted in Newport by her mother and stepfather. Both events were listed in the same notice in The New York Times. By contrast, on the occasion of Jackie’s debut, it was as if her real father did not exist. He was not even mentioned in the Times announcement.

  Black Jack’s exclusion from anything to do with his daughter’s social emergence was a triumph for Janet. Despite her status as the chatelaine of two estates, she remained imaginatively invested in the futile, unending war with her failed, frenzied ex-husband. As far as Janet was concerned, in the financially desperate pre-Auchincloss years when the girls lived with her and spent weekends with their father it had been easy for him to arrange to be the parent they always had fun with. In those days, Jackie had spoken of wanting to run away and move in with her father, and she had often gone so far as to tell Janet that she hated her. Long afterward, Janet, forgetting apparently that she had been a drinker, a yeller, a carper, a spanker, and a slapper, persisted in brooding about the injustice of Black Jack’s favored status. At the time of Jackie’s debut, when he reproached Janet for having presented their daughter under the Auchincloss banner in Newport, Janet retorted that he was free to give his own party for Jackie in New York. With an additional twist of the knife, she asked whether that was not the custom among divorced parents. What could Black Jack say? Obviously, financing such an event was beyond him.

  In the fall semester of 1947, the photograph of Black Jack Bouvier taken in the 1920s went up in a college dormitory room, which was soon deluged with engraved invitations addressed to his eighteen-year-old daughter. Rarely spending seven consecutive days at “that goddamn Vassar,” as Jackie referred to her school, she was observed at nearly every major event of New York’s debutante season. She appeared among weeping willow branches and strings of clematis at the Tuxedo Autumn Ball. She posed at a table decorated with pink carnations and pompon chrysanthemums at the Grosvenor Ball. She danced before a background of artfully arranged tropical tree ferns at the first Junior Assembly. Genteel New York, as she experienced it that year, was a whirligig of large, lavish parties, intimate dinners beforehand, midnight champagne suppers, and special breakfasts for those revelers who stayed out all night. Despite the appearance of sybaritism, the purpose of these rituals was somethin
g other than pleasure. Tacitly understood by all, the objective of a debutante year was twofold: first, to show the suitable marriageable girls to the suitable marriageable boys, and vice versa (when Jackie was not in Manhattan for the weekend, there was further opportunity to consult the menu of possible husbands during football outings at Harvard and Yale), and second, to provide the debs with a preview of their future lives as wealthy, leisured married women who would be expected to pour their energies into volunteer work. Most of the classic cotillions therefore were fund-raisers. Exchanging the strapless gowns she wore at night for boxy sober suits that made her look like the young society matron she was expected soon to become, Jackie served on a number of junior committees. In November she was appointed to lead a committee tasked with organizing a night at the opera to benefit a free milk fund for ill and indigent children.

  Every year, Igor Cassini, who wrote a gossip column for the Hearst newspapers under the pen name Cholly Knickerbocker, designated a leading debutante. Typically, Cassini focused on one of the showier, better-looking society girls who had made their debuts in New York that season. This time, however, the arbiter did something different. He named Jackie Queen Deb because he had perceived what certain of her rivals also had seen. She was shy and reserved, at times to the point of standoffishness, yet she had a knack of compelling attention, of getting herself noticed.

  For rich American girls, as well as for those merely pretending to be rich, a European grand tour had long been part of the momentum toward marriage. They went to view the art and antiquity, to see and appreciate everything, and thereby, in theory at least, to become more entertaining companions for their future husbands. Bow, Jackie’s Newport friend, was set to travel to Europe that summer of 1948, accompanied by a younger sister and another girl. At length, it was arranged that Queen Deb would go with them. A chaperone was hired; hotels, cars, and local tour guides were reserved; and nearly every hour of the seven-week trip to England, France, Italy, and Switzerland was blocked out and accounted for in advance. The goal was for the quartet to be able to explore the continent without ever having to emerge from a protective bubble. Still, so soon after 1945 there could be no shielding the young travelers from sights and sensations well outside their accustomed sphere of life. England, where the wreckage of war remained everywhere evident, made the strongest impression on them. The American girls, with their wide-brimmed straw hats and elbow-length white gloves, happened to be traveling at a moment of acute international tension, when the Soviet decision to sever Western road and rail access to Berlin threatened to spark a third world war.

  At a garden party at Buckingham Palace (to which Bow’s stepfather, Edward H. Foley Jr., undersecretary of the Treasury in the Truman administration, had secured an invitation for them), Jackie and the others went down the receiving line twice in order to shake the hand of Winston Churchill, like de Gaulle one of Jackie’s particular heroes. Though widely regarded as the savior of his country, Churchill had been hurled from power in 1945. At the time Jackie saw him, in 1948, Churchill, ignoring demands that he retire as head of the Conservative Party, was maneuvering to become prime minister again. He hoped to “round out” his career by settling the unfinished business left at the end of the war when the last of the Big Three meetings, the Potsdam Conference, had broken off without resolving the matter of the ongoing Soviet presence in Eastern and Central Europe.

  Jackie came home at the end of August and spent the last days of summer at Hammersmith Farm. She was nineteen and her year was over. Ostensibly, as Number One Deb she had been more successful than most of her peers. Yet in the one way that really mattered, the deb experience had backfired for her. At length, having seen all the suitable bachelors, Jackie balked. “Not because of them,” she later said, “but because of their life.” The distinction was crucial. Previously, she had cast off Bev Corbin because of his individual limitations, as she perceived them. Now she was inclined to rule out the entire group of young men that had just been confidently presented to her as the cream of the haut bourgeois crop. Most were in business, finance, or law. It was by no means the idea of marriage she had rebelled against, just marriage to any of them. It certainly was not their money she objected to, just how they and their families chose to live with all that wealth. Having previewed what it would be like to be the committee-minded wife of one of these vanilla fellows, all with the right pedigrees and jobs, she realized it was not for her. There was a bland predictability to what they offered, and she was eager for an alternative. As to what that other option might be, she had yet to form a definite conclusion. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” Jackie said years afterward of the quandary that beset her when she was nineteen. “I was still floundering.” In conventional terms, her grand tour also had failed to work out quite as it was supposed to. Abroad, she had had her first hurried but tantalizing glimpses of some unfamiliar vistas. What she sought now was the chance for a more leisurely look.

  She found it in the form of a notice on a bulletin board at Vassar, where she had begun her sophomore year. Smith, another of the elite Seven Sisters schools, offered a junior year of study in Europe. In the absence of such a program at Vassar, Jackie sought permission to join the Smith group. Her partner in the endeavor was another Miss Porter’s graduate who had gone on to Vassar, Ellen Gates. Puffin, as everyone called her, had been one of the Farmington girls who had thought Black Jack Bouvier a cartoonish dirty old man. At college, Puffin had sustained a friendship with Jackie based in part on the fact that both were exceedingly restless in Poughkeepsie, the Hudson River town where the campus was set. The friends also shared an interest in art. Unlike Jackie, however, Puffin had a steady boyfriend. Russell D’Oench Jr., who had attended the same prep school as Jackie’s old Newport beaux, was then working in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. When he learned that Puffin intended to go to Paris for a year, he proposed that she marry him instead. In keeping with the perception of college as a convenient place to park oneself for a few years, it was routine for girls of their caste to drop out before completing a degree. Faced with the choice of Paris or a husband, Puffin chose the latter. Previously in letters to Bev, Jackie had flashed disdain for the insular, unadventurous life. Now again, she voiced her contempt in a poem addressed to Puffin. In the past, she had targeted cake-baking Farmington housewives. This time, she aimed her shafts at Puffin’s future mode of life. The mocking text read in part: “Instead of boating on the Seine, alas, Puffin’s floating down the drain in Pittsfield, Mass.”

  And it was not just Puffin. Other girls Jackie knew were beginning to marry precisely the sort of young men she was so eager to elude. Clearly, the rites and rituals had not failed to work for everyone. It was only natural that this year a good number of the invitations accumulating in Jackie’s dormitory room were to engagement parties and weddings. Notable among the impending marriages was that of her friend Bow, with whom she had traveled to Europe the year before. In June 1949, Jackie served as Bow’s bridesmaid. As it turned out, she would not be available to do the same for Puffin. In August, Puffin was awaiting her September nuptials when Jackie sailed for France.

  The Smith group went first to Grenoble for an intensive six-week language course. In October they moved on to Paris to study French civilization and history at the Sorbonne. Rather than live in a dormitory, Jackie preferred to board in a household where only French would be spoken. During the war, she had followed press accounts of the French Resistance. Now she landed in the apartment of a woman who, along with her late husband, had participated in the struggle against the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Eventually, both the Count and Countess de Renty had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp, where he perished. Four years after the war, the countess survived financially by taking in boarders. Fuel was so expensive that her rooms were often almost unbearably cold. Swathed in sweaters, scarves, earmuffs, and woolen stockings, Jackie, writing in graph-paper notebooks with mittened hands, did much of her schoolwork in bed. At sixteen, sh
e had monitored the trial of Marshal Pétain and its aftermath. At twenty, she found herself in an environment where some of the very questions the Pétain affair had raised, about France’s anguished recent past, but also about its postwar future, were being played out daily. She loved experiencing Paris as she could never have done when she visited under more guarded and gilded circumstances. She enjoyed spending part of the day as a university student and then, as she wrote home, “like the maid on her day out, putting on a fur coat … and being swanky at the Ritz.” She prized the sense she had in France that in her dealings with others, men included, she need not conceal that she had a mind. Prior to her year in Europe, Jackie had lamented the stultifying sameness of the young men she knew and of the futures they seemed to offer. Paris suggested a bouillabaisse of other options. She dated authors, titled aristocrats, junior diplomats, political aspirants. The significance of these men in Jackie’s story is not that she actually considered marrying any of them. It is that by their very existence, they confirmed that there were positive alternatives to the life she had seen looming ahead of her in Newport and New York, a life she remained determined to avoid.