The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Whereas Jacqueline Kennedy, at least since her marriage, has always seemed to know what she wants most out of life—to be a wife and mother—her little sister has had no such conviction. On the contrary, ever since her debutante days, Lee has lived the life of a woman in search of identity . . . She is a woman who is trying to wear many hats, some of which are considerably more becoming than others.

  Her cousin John Davis believed, “If her sister had not been Jacqueline Kennedy, Lee would most certainly have attained a distinction unrelated to any other person’s renown.” But for Lee, has it been a search for identity, or a longing to be recognized for her gifts and talents, for her style and beauty, for her intelligence, social acumen, and poise?

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  Jacks and Pekes in Paradise

  My heroes were Byron, Mowgli, Robin Hood, Little Lord Fauntleroy’s grandfather, and Scarlett O’Hara.

  —JACKIE

  Living in a fairy tale can be hell—don’t people know that?

  —LEE

  To be with him when we were children meant joy, excitement and love,” Lee wrote about her father, Black Jack Bouvier III, a stockbroker with a seat on Wall Street, known for his dark good looks, elegant style, and roguish behavior. Lee still refers to him as “dashing.” In her ravishing coffee-table book titled Happy Times, published in 2000, Lee wrote, “JBV, my father, was special. The Black Prince, or the Black Orchid as he was also known, had enormous style and charm . . . He brought gaiety to everything we did together.”

  An investment banker and a ladies’ man, Jack Bouvier bore so close a resemblance to Clark Gable that he was sometimes besieged by autograph seekers. Gore Vidal described him as “a charming alcoholic gentleman with whom Cole Porter had had a ‘flirtation,’ whatever that might mean, since according to legend, Black Jack was as notorious and as busy a womanizer as an alcoholic can be.”

  Although his womanizing, heavy drinking, and diminishing fortune ended up derailing his marriage to Jackie and Lee’s mother, Janet, he doted on his two daughters, showing them off at the exclusive Maidstone Club in the Hamptons, making sure his beautiful little girls were well dressed and well noticed, and encouraging them to work hard and “be the best.” Despite the divorce, he would remain an important figure throughout their lives.

  Lee’s earliest memories are radiant with pleasure: unaware of the tensions in their parents’ marriage, she and Jackie spent their summers at the Bouvier family estate on Further Lane in East Hampton. Lasata was owned by Jack Bouvier’s father, “Major” John V. Bouvier Jr., and it boasted a tennis court, orchards, a stable and riding ring—even an Italianate fountain brimming with goldfish—on its fifteen beautifully landscaped acres. On idyllic summer days, “Grampy Jack” Bouvier would take his granddaughters for rides in his maroon Stutz, and the family would attend the local horse shows, where Janet and her firstborn daughter, Jacqueline, would often compete, but it was Lasata’s proximity to the sea that Lee treasured most.

  Her father “taught me to trust the sea and to share his love for it,” Lee remembers. “I can still hear him calling out to us, ‘Come on! Swim out to the last barrel! Now get under those waves so you won’t get somersaulted and torn to pieces! Here comes a beauty—ride this one in! Hold my hand, hang on to my shoulders. Let’s go!’ Being with my father during those early summers, having him to ourselves for days on end, was a joy.”

  The beautiful Bouvier girls—Jacqueline Lee and Caroline Lee—were bred to dazzle. Jackie was born on July 28, 1929, at Southampton Hospital on Long Island. Lee arrived there three and a half years later on March 3, 1933. In contrast to her dark-haired, athletic sister, Lee was light-haired, chubby, mischievous, and loved to be the center of attention. She also had a strong adventurous streak. Years later, she recalled that, feeling miserable one day in the family’s New York apartment,

  I took my mother’s high heels and my dog, a Bouvier des Flandres, and walked across the Triborough Bridge, saying I’m going to escape, I’m going to get out of here! I realized I couldn’t go much further, and I didn’t know where I was going in any case. And so I turned back, and, of course, when I got home, as usual, I was punished.

  Caroline Lee Bouvier would always be known as Lee, her mother’s maiden name. The Bouviers were living in an eleven-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue, leased to them rent-free by Janet’s father, who had made a fortune in real estate, because Jack Bouvier was experiencing financial insecurities and could not be counted upon to maintain the family as they were accustomed to being maintained. It added to the tensions in that household, as Janet’s father later felt that Bouvier had only married his daughter to shore up his financial status, which had been left shaky by the Wall Street crash of 1929—the year of Jackie’s birth.

  Differences between the two girls would shape the women to come: Jackie had a first-class brain, intellectual curiosity, a fascination with history, and an inherent shyness. In the first half of her life, she would mostly follow in the path that Janet had laid out for her two daughters: observe decorum, dress beautifully but conservatively, and marry a rich husband (or two). Jackie would become the ultimate symbol of prefeminist, demure womanhood, and would be greatly admired for that. Lee would rebel, having several affairs and trying time and again to forge a career and an identity for herself apart from her sister’s. Whereas Jackie would become universally admired—practically deified, especially just following the assassination of John F. Kennedy—Lee would often be swatted down, the object of criticism and sometimes ridicule, having to be rescued on more than one occasion by her far more successful sister. Yet Lee continued, always, on her path of adventurous self-discovery, sans her mother’s high heels.

  From an early age, Jackie won annual prizes on her beloved horse, Danseuse, encouraged by Janet, an avid and prizewinning equestrienne. But Lee—usually so adventurous—was frightened of horses after an early mishap. “I was thrown one day, three times in a row; chipped my front tooth, broke some ribs, had a hoofprint on my stomach,” she recalled. “And every time, my father made me get back on.”

  As young girls, they called each other “Jacks” and “Pekes.” Lee adored her older sister, but it was often difficult living up to her already long list of accomplishments, beginning with winning equestrienne prizes when Lee was still a toddler, earning top grades at the Chapin School for girls on East End Avenue in Manhattan, and again at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, and being named Debutante of the Year years before Lee attended a single debutante ball. Sisters are usually competitive—it just goes with the territory—but it was hard living up to Jackie’s spectacular successes. Lee realized early on that her adored father “favored Jackie . . . That was very clear to me, but I didn’t resent it, because I understood he had reason to . . . she was not only named after him—or at least as close as you could get a girl’s name to a boy’s—but she actually looked almost exactly like him, which was a source of great pride to my father.”

  Early on, they carved out their separate realms: Jackie, like her mother, loved riding and competing. Lee adored swimming in the ocean. Truman Capote, with whom she would have a long but ultimately disastrous friendship, nicknamed her “Ondine” in tribute to her mermaid soul. Jackie also loved books, and at nap time when she was supposed to be sleeping, she would creep over to the windowsill and curl up with a book. Afterward, she would dust off the soles of her feet so the family’s nurse wouldn’t know that she had been out of bed. She recalled:

  I read a lot when I was little, much of which was too old for me. There were Chekhov and Shaw in the room where I had to take naps and I never slept but sat on the windowsill reading . . . My heroes were Byron, Mowgli, Robin Hood, Little Lord Fauntleroy’s grandfather, and Scarlett O’Hara.

  Jackie’s love of books and delight in writing poetry also endeared her to her literary grandfather, Grampy Jack Bouvier, who was a classical scholar proud of his erudition. He disdained his son for his complete lack of interest in language and literature, so Grampy
’s fondness for Jackie made Black Jack Bouvier all the prouder of her. In a way, Jackie and Lee were raised by snobs—their paternal grandfather did not wear his learning lightly, and Janet Lee Bouvier was always highly conscious of her social standing, elaborating her family’s dubious connection to the Southern aristocratic lineage of Robert E. Lee. Their father was refreshingly free of these judgmental traits, adding to his attraction for both girls. When he was around, he doted on the girls, and they loved being with him.

  Jackie also later wrote that as a child, she “hated dolls, loved horses and dogs, and had skinned knees and braces on my teeth for what must have seemed an interminable length of time to my family.” John Davis observed that “despite her outer conformity . . . from an early age Jackie displayed an originality, a perspicacity, that set her apart from her other cousins . . . She often said things that were wise beyond her years.”

  Both women would ultimately be admired for their style, but many considered Lee the beauty of the family, outshining her older sister. (Oscar Wilde defined “taste” as the love of beauty, and Lee had that quality to an immense degree.) What developed was a relationship between the two sisters that was extremely close yet threaded with rivalry, jealousy, and competition. Yet it was probably the most important relationship of their lives. “I think you always have some sibling feelings,” Lee once wrote about her sister, “but I felt more devotion than anything else. As a small child I think I was probably as annoying as any younger sister. I was knocked out by a croquet mallet [by Jackie] for two days—that sort of thing. So we had plenty of those sibling rows and fights.” Lee apparently took a bit of revenge against her older sister, recalling that “although we occasionally fought fiercely, that came to an end when I finally triumphed by pushing her down the stairs. From that moment on, she realized I could stand up to her, and the childhood fights were over.”

  If Jackie was her father’s favorite, Lee, by some accounts, was her mother’s. A longtime Kennedy friend who knew the sisters when they were in their late teens admitted that she “found that household to be really unhealthy. Their mother clearly favored Lee.” And if Jack Bouvier was especially close to Jackie, “he wasn’t around very much, or for very long, so that didn’t equal out, really.”

  Like many parents of that era, Janet pigeonholed her children, labeling Jackie as “the intellectual one” and Lee as the one who “will have twelve children and live in a rose-covered cottage.” Of course, in Lee’s case, “this certainly did not turn out to be true,” as she later observed, but it raises the question of how little their mother knew or understood her daughters. She was especially hard on Jackie. Petite, feminine Lee more closely resembled her mother. Janet, always the impeccably turned-out (if muted) fashion plate, was highly critical of Jackie’s appearance. As Barbara Leaming described in Mrs. Kennedy:

  She pointed with disgust to Jackie’s big, masculine hands and feet, her broad shoulders and wide hips. Her favorite target was her daughter’s kinky hair, which was highlighted by a low hairline, also inherited from [her father]. No matter what Jackie did with her hair, Janet’s criticism of its texture and unruliness persisted. With reference to both her hair and her clothes, Janet accused her of sloppiness and compared her unfavorably with Lee.

  Part of Janet’s displeasure was that as her marriage unraveled, she increasingly disliked Jackie’s physical resemblance to her father, just as she resented Jackie and Lee’s affection for Black Jack Bouvier. Their cousin Mimi Cecil remembered that when she and her siblings would see him at the beach, they would “just run into his arms. You couldn’t help it with Uncle Jack. He was wonderful to his daughters in giving them treats that they didn’t get at home with their mother . . .”

  Among the treats Jack Bouvier provided were “daring excursions to casinos, racetracks, and boxing matches,” warning them that “all men are rats” and that they should “play hard to get and never be easy.” Lee especially loved her father’s sense of style, later describing his beautiful suits with jaunty boutonnieres.

  Janet, by contrast, was the disciplinarian of the house. She was high-strung and quick to anger. She always made sure her girls were perfectly turned out, sharply criticizing them for any sloppiness in their appearance. Jackie’s childhood friend Solange Herter described Janet as “overbearingly proper and not very warm.”

  Nonetheless, theirs was often an enchanted childhood. Years later, Jackie recalled an early memory that she treasured throughout her life:

  I’ll never forget the night my mother and father both came into my bedroom all dressed up to go out. I can still smell the scent my mother wore and feel the softness of her fur coat as she leaned over to kiss me good night. In such an excited voice she said, “Darling, your father and I are going dancing tonight at the Central Park Casino to hear Eddy Duchin.” I don’t know why the moment has stayed with me all these years. Perhaps because it was one of the few times I remember seeing my parents together. It was so romantic. So hopeful.

  There were other lovely memories as well. The girls were encouraged to create holiday gifts—usually drawings and poems. Lee remembers how much her mother loved the annual Christmas plays the girls put on for their parents, and sometimes Janet would weep with maternal joy.

  Janet and Black Jack Bouvier divorced in 1940 after messy public accusations of infidelity that became tabloid fodder (much to the family’s humiliation, the New York Daily Mirror ran the story “Mrs. Bouvier Sheds ‘Love Commuter’” with photos of Bouvier’s lovers), which cast a pall over the two girls, as if divorce itself were not shameful enough in the l940s. So early on, the sisters were not strangers to the scent of scandal.

  After her parents’ divorce—rare in high society in l940s America and rarer still (and looked down upon) in Catholic families—Jackie became even more introspective. A family friend at the time, Aileen Bowdoin Train, recalled that Jackie “was much more private than any other person I’ve ever known. She was always standing back watching the scene, and, sort of, recording it in her mind. Looking at people, seeing how they acted toward one another, she was a born observer.” She might have felt culpable, as children of divorce often do, especially as there had been a tug-of-war between Janet and Jack for their elder daughter’s affection.

  Jackie found solace in her books and in riding Danseuse, which her Bouvier grandfather boarded for her in Central Park now that divorced Janet had decamped with her girls to 1 Gracie Square. Jackie would later confide in the pianist Peter Duchin, son of the bandleader Eddy Duchin, that she never felt completely at home in the haute society she had been born into:

  You know, Peter, we both live and do very well in this world of Wasps and old money and society. It’s all supposed to be so safe and continuous. But you and I are not really of it. Maybe because I’m Catholic and because my parents were divorced when I was young—a terribly radical thing at the time—I’ve always felt an outsider in that world.

  Lee reacted by becoming nearly anorexic, shedding her baby fat and causing her mother concern. Years later, Lee recalled how the excoriating insults traded between her parents affected her. “I was like a tuning fork, then and now,” she explained. “My sister wasn’t, so much. She could send bad news to the basement and lock it up. She was like a sphinx in that way.”

  Perhaps as a result of their parents’ bitter divorce, the two sisters became even closer. “I looked up to her, counted on her and admired her,” Lee later wrote. When Jackie left home to attend school at Miss Porter’s, Lee felt bereft.

  Janet’s divorce and remarriage to the unprepossessing but extremely wealthy investment banker Hugh D. Auchincloss was exactly what she had been trained to do by her wealthy, social-climbing father, Major James Thomas Aloysius Lee (who conceived the apocryphal connection to General Robert E. Lee): Janet had married brilliantly. Whereas Jack Bouvier’s fortune had declined after a series of bad investments and through his father’s failed stewardship of the Bouvier riches, Hugh D. Auchincloss—called “Uncle Hughdie” by Ja
ckie and Lee—was of older, richer, and more established stock. Bouvier was the Catholic great-grandson of a French carpenter who had worked for Napoleon’s brother. But the Auchinclosses—Scottish Presbyterians—were old money, nourished by Standard Oil, going back generations. Some in the Auchincloss clan looked down on the Bouviers as arrivistes.

  Suddenly thrust into a family of three stepsiblings (Hugh, known as “Yusha,” Thomas, and Nina), with two more children to come from that union (Janet and James), Jackie and Lee were no longer the center of Janet’s fierce attention. Gore Vidal described his former stepfather as “a magnum of chloroform,” but “Hughdie” proved to be a devoted, steady husband and father. Lee in particular was enchanted by Hammersmith Farm: “To arrive there, as a child of 8, was just a fairy tale,” she reminisced. “It was good for my imagination. It was such a wonderful place.” She was delighted when her stepfather named two Guernsey calves Jacqueline and Caroline after his new stepdaughters.

  Nonetheless, the two girls were aware that they were the poor relations in the family, as their stepsister, Nina, and stepbrothers, Yusha and Tommy, each had their own trust fund, whereas Jackie and Lee had only a small allowance from their father, who was on a financial downward spiral. “They were like little orphans,” said the writer and socialite Helen Chavchavadze, who had been in the same class as Lee at Miss Porter’s. “Jackie and Lee were very fused, the way sisters are when they haven’t had much security.”