Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  Still, that life continued to beckon when she returned to Newport late in the summer of 1950. There were new engagement announcements, new wedding invitations, and requests that she serve as a bridesmaid. Puffin, who had chosen not to accompany Jackie to Paris, had just had her first child. By the standards of her group, Jackie was simply not where she ought to have been at the age of twenty-one. By this point, many of the most sought-after men of her year had already been taken. To make matters worse, another massive wave of debutantes—younger, fresher, less familiar to the eye—was about to break in New York. Highlighting the pressure of fleeting time in Jackie’s case was that her sister Lee had already begun her deb year. The Bouvier girls had long been rivals, with Lee almost always cast as the lesser light. Nineteen fifty, however, was very much Lee’s period overall. Presented by her mother and stepfather at Merrywood, the family’s ivied Georgian-style winter home in Virginia, Lee made a second formal bow to society at the Junior Assembly in New York. Like her sister before her, she was crowned Queen Deb, but Lee differed from Jackie in being smaller, more fine-boned, and more exquisitely featured. At the time, she also tended to be the more stylishly dressed. Regarded as the prettier, sexier, and more accessible of the Bouvier girls, Lee was hugely popular with the young society men of whom Jackie claimed to want no part.

  Loath to return to Vassar, Jackie transferred to George Washington University, where she majored in French while living at Merrywood. She had been in no hurry to come back from Europe, and now she yearned for the more flavorful life she had had there. In October she entered Vogue magazine’s annual Prix de Paris contest for female college seniors. The top prize was a yearlong junior editorship: six months at the New York office and, crucially from her point of view, six in Paris. Her submission materials included an arch account of herself (“As to physical appearance, I am tall, 5'7", with brown hair, a square face and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose”) and an essay on the three figures of history she would like to have known: Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Sergei Diaghilev. Jackie beat out more than a thousand girls from more than two hundred colleges, and was asked to report for her first day of work in the fall. In the meantime, Hughdie, under pressure from Jackie and Lee, had agreed to send the sisters to Europe for the summer, in honor of their graduation from George Washington and Miss Porter’s, respectively.

  Before Jackie sailed in June, she accepted an invitation to dine at the home of friends in Georgetown. Charles Bartlett, a thirty-year-old correspondent for The Chattanooga Times, had first met Jackie some years before in East Hampton, Long Island, where the Bouviers summered, and he had dated her briefly in the interim. Now he and his wife, Martha, who had married the previous December and were expecting their first child, sought to play matchmaker. The purpose of the dinner party was to introduce Jackie to a thirty-four-year-old congressman from Massachusetts named John F. Kennedy. As it happened, she had previously met her voluble, boyishly attractive, dryly humorous dinner partner, who had long, skinny arms and legs, long, pale lashes over ice-blue eyes, and a mop of reddish hair, and looked substantially younger than his age: When she was still at Vassar, Jack Kennedy, as he was known, had flirted with Queen Deb on a train between Washington and New York. At the time his efforts had come to naught, and so it was again in 1951 when at evening’s end he followed Jackie outside. “Shall we go someplace and have a drink?” Kennedy’s murmured invitation fell flat. While Jackie was at dinner, a male friend of hers had spotted her battered convertible parked in front of the Bartlett residence and had concealed himself in the backseat to surprise her. Having found him there, Jackie declined the drinks offer and drove off with her friend. Kennedy, an incorrigible skirt chaser, had made the effort expected of him by his hosts, but he was not so smitten that he attempted to call Jackie afterward. In any case, for all of Charles and Martha’s enthusiasm for the match, it hardly seemed to matter that Kennedy did not follow up. Jackie was soon off to Europe, and on her return was due to be away from Washington for at least a year.

  At length, only the first part of her plan came to fruition, however. On the day Jackie started at Vogue headquarters in New York, the magazine’s managing editor, Carol Phillips, sensed the twenty-two-year-old’s ambivalence. After twelve months, Jackie would be perilously near an age beyond which young women of her background became increasingly less marriageable. Was Jackie really willing to take that risk? The Vogue editor perceived something in her that suggested she was not. Skidding between kindness and condescension, Phillips advised the younger woman to go back to Washington immediately, saying, “That’s where all the boys are.” The encounter seemed to unnerve Jackie. Instead of spending the anticipated year at Vogue, she did not last beyond that first day.

  Living again with her mother and stepfather at Merrywood, Jackie began to attend Washington parties and dances frequented by the sort of young men she had previously ruled out. She was also soon looking for a job in the capital. A position at the CIA was in play for a time, but before long another possibility materialized. On her behalf, Hughdie approached a journalist friend, Arthur Krock of The New York Times, who had a history of placing “little girls,” as he called them, at the Times-Herald, a conservative, colorful, and often controversial Washington paper that had been among the national publications to tout Jackie as Queen Deb. Its editor, Frank Waldrop, had made journalistic history when his paper was first in the nation to report the attack on Pearl Harbor. The Times-Herald looked to inexperienced girls like Jackie, many of them finishing-school graduates, as a source of fresh, unconventional points of view, not to mention cheap labor. Initially, Waldrop used certain of these girls as gofers in his office, both to assess what they were capable of and to give them a chance to see if the rowdy atmosphere at the Times-Herald suited them. If the new hires survived, he sent them on to other jobs at the paper. When Jackie came to see him shortly before Christmas, he demanded to know whether she intended merely to “hang around” until she got married. In this respect, he exhibited the same skepticism about her that the Vogue editor had shown. Eager to be hired, Jackie assured him she wanted a career in journalism. Waldrop told her to go home for the holidays and report to work after the first of the year. In parting, he warned her not to come to him in six months with the news that she was engaged.

  Hardly had Jackie had that conversation when she met John G. W. Husted Jr. at a seasonal party for which he had driven down from New York. The twenty-four-year-old stockbroker, who had powerful shoulders, a high, slightly protruding forehead, and bright, clear, expectant eyes, was unmistakably of the milieu she had been in flight from since she was nineteen. He had been to prep school and to Yale, he worked at a prominent Wall Street firm, he belonged to exclusive clubs, his family was listed in the Social Register and had homes in Bedford Hills and Nantucket. Nevertheless, at this point John Husted appealed to the romantic element in Jackie. For him, their initial encounter was a coup de foudre. When he first saw her, Jackie had recently cut off her shoulder-length hair in favor of a feather cut that gave her a distinctly gamine look. Taken by what he perceived to be her sensitivity and vulnerability, he compared her to a deer that has just come out of the woods and beheld its first human being. The suddenness of Husted’s feelings for her, and the swiftness with which he acted on them, harmonized with her bookish notions of romantic love. In the days that followed, he called her often, and soon she was traveling to New York to see him. On a snowy December day on Madison Avenue, she who tended to be so cautious and so fastidious acted impulsively, agreeing to marry this young man she had not even known the month before. Later, she wrote Bev Corbin suggesting that, given the speed with which she had become engaged, this time it really must be love.

  “What I hope for you,” she grandly told her spurned former boyfriend, “is for the same thing to happen as quickly and as surely as it did with me. It will when you least expect it.” No sooner
had Jackie assured Bev of all this than she was overcome by doubt. A meeting with her intended’s mother proved to be a debacle. A former Farmington girl herself, Helen Armstrong Husted had had a debutante’s pattern career. She had been presented to society twenty-eight years previously, had married a banker shortly after that, and had long been active in volunteer work. Everything about her background was intensely familiar, but for Jackie that was very much the problem. The sweet, shy, elfin child John Husted had fallen in love with seems to have been scarcely in evidence the day he brought her home to David’s Brook in Bedford Hills. Alarmingly, Jackie became snippy when Mrs. Husted produced some family picture albums documenting a life the young woman was expected soon to become part of—indeed, to carry on in a new generation. Rudely, she refused her hostess’s offer of a childhood image of John, commenting that if she wanted a photograph of him, she was capable of taking one herself. As if tone-deaf to the implications of that dispiriting exchange, John went on to make a huge mistake: He presented Jackie with a sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring that had previously belonged to his mother. Jackie wore that ornament for several weeks thereafter, and it is tempting to imagine it blazing away on her finger as she read a new novel that, to her amazement, seemed to clarify her situation uncannily.

  The book was Sybil, and its author was thirty-four-year-old Louis Auchincloss, whose father was Hughdie’s first cousin and whose grandfather had built Hammersmith Farm. The novel’s heroine is a young New York woman who becomes a most reluctant participant in the marital sweepstakes that are of such compelling interest to others in her opulent milieu. For all of Sybil Rodman’s gestures toward escape, in the end she is drawn ineluctably into precisely the kind of hemmed-in existence she had hoped to avoid. For all of her apparent “spunk” and individuality, at last she proves deficient in the qualities of courage and determination that would make it possible to break free. This protagonist does not triumph so much as resign herself to the inevitable. The book’s icily ironic final vignette portrays poor Sybil, her capitulation to her husband’s family complete, being toasted by her exultant mother-in-law and other members of “the assembled tribe.”

  “Oh, you’ve written my life,” Jackie told beak-nosed “cousin” Louis when she encountered him at an Auchincloss family dinner in Washington not long after she had read his novel. He knew what it felt like to want to free oneself from a certain society, to create a new and different kind of life. Tracked to become a lawyer like his father, he had long aspired to be a writer. It was not that he wished altogether to remove himself from the luxe Wasp world of his New York upbringing, but rather to paint that world with ironic detachment in novels and short stories. His loving but overbearing parents had pressured him to publish previous fiction under a nom de plume for fear that his books might damage his legal career. Sybil was the first work to appear under his own name. When he and Jackie talked that evening, he was still in crisis over how he intended to live the rest of his life.

  But it was Jackie’s future they spoke of when, after a meal that had included a champagne toast on the joyous occasion of her engagement, they sat together in a corner apart from the others. Officially set to marry in June, Jackie pictured her life as the wife of such a man as she had finally chosen. Louis’s new book had helped her see it all so clearly, and like the character in the novel, she seemed grimly resigned to the inevitable. “That’s it. That’s my future,” Jackie declared. “I’ll be a Sybil Husted.”

  Two

  Everything had changed in the weeks since Jackie had had her interview with Frank Waldrop. As she had assured him of her commitment to the work, it was a matter of no small embarrassment now to have to disclose her wedding plans. Still, the only polite thing was to have that awkward conversation in person. So in January 1952, she visited his office for what she assumed would be the last time. After she told him her story, Waldrop, a West Point graduate who retained a certain military demeanor all his life, asked how long she had known John Husted. To Jackie’s astonishment, her answer, that she had only just met him during Christmas, seemed to settle the matter. Waldrop actually appeared relieved. “Hell, there’s nothing to that,” he said. “Get to work.” Falling into the frenetic pace of an institution known for putting out ten editions a day, she started immediately as Waldrop’s secretary-receptionist. The editor jestingly described the position as consisting largely of saying over and over again, “Thank you very much for calling,” and of drafting a polite letter whenever he thundered, “Tell him to go to hell!”

  Now that Jackie was working, she wrote affectionately to John Husted during the week and visited him in Manhattan on weekends. Before long, however, she began to spend whole weeks in Washington, requiring her fiancé to travel to her. Clearly, it was not the job that was suddenly monopolizing Jackie’s time. Nor was it Waldrop himself who appeared to be the agent of her newfound fascination with the newspaper business. Rather it was a wild-eyed, luridly tattooed forty-year-old ex-Marine and former crack features reporter at the Times-Herald, with a well-earned reputation in Washington as a lady-killer. In his prime, John White had been an outspoken freethinker, left-winger, and labor-booster at an ultraconservative paper; an almost fantastically prolific journalist, who simultaneously authored five different columns under as many pseudonyms, among them a regular feature on men’s attire supposedly written by a fashion-obsessed Frenchmen utterly unlike his sartorially challenged, perpetually unkempt creator. White was also a self-described book and movie nut, whose combative conversational style echoed the staccato rhythms of the screwball film comedies he adored. In the manner of certain real-life gangsters who modeled their clothes and gestures on Hollywood films, White was more than a little in love with an image of himself, and of his newspaper friends, cast in the mold of the Ben Hecht–Charles MacArthur stage and cinema classic The Front Page. As is the case with many eccentrics who pride themselves on their naturalness, there was much about him that was studied and self-conscious, at times cloyingly so.

  These days White worked at the State Department, but it was no secret that he still sighed for the Times-Herald, where he had had some of the best fun of his life. His heyday had been 1941–1942, when he fell in love with Waldrop’s new secretary-receptionist, the sunny, relentlessly exuberant and extroverted Kathleen Kennedy, favorite daughter of Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy and favorite sister of Jack Kennedy. She was known as Kick to everyone except John White. Nothing if not contrary, White dismissed her nickname, a reference to her irrepressible nature, as demeaning and inappropriate. Like her colleague and close friend, the lusciously beautiful Inga Arvad, Kathleen owed her job at the paper to Arthur Krock, who had recommended both women to Waldrop. White viewed her as exceptionally promising material that cried out to be shaped and sculpted only by the most expert hands, and early on he set himself up as her mentor. Whether or not he really had anything to do with it, she quickly catapulted to a reportorial post. In the course of their sweet and sour romance, Kathleen, a devout Catholic, steadfastly refused to sleep with him. Eventually, he concluded that to seduce her would be truly to violate her, so deeply ingrained were her religious principles, and he loved her too much to risk that. So he gave up trying, and the pair settled into a tensely chaste relationship, while he trawled for sexual satisfaction elsewhere.

  Kathleen went on to marry the Marquess of Hartington, heir to a dukedom, whom she had met when her father was U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James’s before the war. After Billy, as her young husband was known, was killed in action in Belgium, she embarked on a romance with the dissolute and exceedingly rich 8th Earl Fitzwilliam. Through it all, John White never wavered in regarding Kathleen as the love of his life. When, accompanied by Fitzwilliam, she died in a plane crash in 1948, a part of White seemed to die as well. Assigned to prepare an obituary, he experienced writer’s block, apparently for the first time in his career. At length, he bled the necessary words, which read in part: “It is a strange, hard thing to sit at this desk, to tap a
t this typewriter (your old desk, your old typewriter), to tap out the cold and final word—good-by. Good-by, little Kathleen.” Though his copy was typeset, it was scratched prior to the evening edition on the grounds that it was overly intimate and emotional.

  In 1952, John White was unabashedly trying to recapture something of an earlier, better time when, in his own phrase, he “came at” the twenty-two-year-old Jackie Bouvier, upon learning of her arrival at the Times-Herald from a mutual friend in Newport. He had left the paper after Kathleen’s death, but he remained close to Frank Waldrop. So there was nothing unusual about his visiting the editor’s office, though on this occasion it was really the new secretary-receptionist, the girl sitting in Kathleen’s old seat, he wanted to see. The meeting was a critical event in Jackie’s life. In the weeks that followed, she became a regular at “the cave,” as White called his grungy living quarters in the basement of his sister Patsy Field’s house in Georgetown. He often brought girls there, but his relationship with Jackie was uncharacteristically platonic. His interest lay more in the areas of guiding her professionally and influencing her intellectually, as he perceived himself to have done with another exceptionally promising protégée a decade before. He saw Jackie as a study in contrasts: the “winsome” face and “fadeaway” voice, but also the big, boyish hands that she self-consciously concealed beneath wrist-length white gloves. Casting her in the conventional role of “kooky” girl reporter, he encouraged her to have fun and take chances. He taught her that it was all right to make mistakes and laugh at herself. He nurtured her as a writer; he peddled her projects; he nudged her to tell Waldrop she was ready for a better assignment. When she took over the one column that no one else at the paper seemed to want, White puffed her work as Inquiring Photographer as the best escapist fare in town.