The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  There was much to love about Merrywood, but it wasn’t always easy being there. John F. Kennedy once chastised Gore Vidal for his uncharacteristically cheerful description of the Auchincloss family, which he wrote about for Look magazine: “What’s this golden season shit you’re telling, Gore? It was The Little Foxes.” In fact, in Vidal’s memoir Palimpsest, he reveals his intense dislike of his stepfather. He and Jackie both found their patrician, avuncular, well-meaning stepfather a thrilling bore, though Jackie remained fond of him. Not Gore—“My lifelong passion for bores began with Hughdie,” he wrote in Palimpsest.

  As described in Sally Bedell Smith’s Grace and Power: The Private World of the Kennedy White House, however, Auchincloss was actually

  a serious bibliophile, a nineteenth-century club man who took refuge in reading. It was in his library at Merrywood that Jackie steeped herself in stories of America’s founders, especially George Washington, whose “human qualities” she came to appreciate, according to her stepbrother Hugh D. (Yusha) Auchincloss III.

  But there was the inescapable fact of the two girls’ divided loyalties. “I dreaded Christmas,” Lee wrote years later, “because it was always kind of bittersweet. We spent it at Merrywood, but then we had to rush to New York to see our father, and he was spending Christmas alone. Except for us, he was really kind of abandoned.”

  Unlike Janet, Bouvier never remarried.

  The usual warfare flourished between the divorced parents, as the girls relished their time with their black sheep father, who was now cast out of paradise and living in a small, sunless four-room apartment at 125 East 74th Street, a far cry from the lavish Park Avenue duplex that had been lent to them by Janet’s father. When they visited, Bouvier would serve his girls lunch on a folding card table in front of the fireplace, as the apartment’s dining room was turned into a tiny bedroom for his daughters to use. (To this day, Lee sometimes serves intimate dinners in the same fashion, on an exquisitely set folding table in front of the fireplace.)

  When Jack’s father sold the East Hampton estate, where the Bouvier girls had spent early carefree summers riding, learning to play tennis, eating triple-decker ice cream cones, and swimming at the Maidstone Club and in the Atlantic Ocean, Bouvier was reduced to summering in a small rented cottage blocks from the beach. But the girls didn’t mind so much—they were still delighted to spend time with their father.

  Jackie was the first to attend Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut, followed by Lee three years later. Both entered as sophomores, with Lee arriving a year after Jackie graduated. “We were like ellipses, separated by three years,” is how Lee characterized it.

  Neither girl really wanted to attend the all-girls preparatory high school, but Jackie made a cold peace with being there. Her grades were good, and she was a natural athlete and horsewoman. Always bookish, she became an editor of the school newspaper, Salmagundy, for which she wrote and drew a comic series called Frenzied Freda. Physically, Jackie was still in chrysalis—not yet a hit with the young men she met at mixers, as she was reserved, and usually taller than the boys her age. She was slim, flat-chested, large-boned. Her main interest was her horse, and she couldn’t wait to visit the stable where Danseuse was boarded.

  Years later, Lee confessed how much she hated being at Miss Porter’s: “I always hated school, but I really hated Miss Porter’s. Very rah rah rah and their teams must win! I was terrible at sports, and I was always the last to be chosen for a team, which was so embarrassing and made me feel pathetic.”

  Despite Jackie’s reputation as a shy bookworm, however, “it may surprise you [that] my sister was something of a rebel, early on,” Lee recalled. Surprising, too, that the future First Lady was a bit of a ringleader and a tomboy at Chapin. “She was full of the devil,” recalled a former classmate. Jackie’s lifelong friend Nancy Tuckerman described her at Chapin’s as “naughty as everything; she would disrupt whatever she could.” On “dreaded” bird walks, Jackie would yell and scare the birds out of the trees; she would drink from public water fountains (a big no-no); she would mock classmates and teachers alike. “I think she had the best sense of humor and of the ridiculous throughout her life,” Tuckerman said, but she could be manipulative and bossy. Jackie once told her friend, who would later become her personal secretary in the White House and whom she called “Tucky,” to walk under a horse “for good luck.” It was a dangerous stunt, but Nancy, naïve about horses, did it. Jackie was good at getting people to do her bidding, and she often “sent Lee off to do her dirty work,” Tuckerman recalled.

  Another classmate, Sally Smith Cross, remembered Jackie as a pretty girl with “thick brown braids bouncing as she ran to the center of ‘The Roof’ for a game of corner kickball. I can also see her being chastised and sent to Miss [Ethel Gray] Stringfellow’s office for having challenged the inexperienced teacher of Modern Dance . . . she was a very able student and also a ringleader, whose stuffed zebra, Flapjack, became our class mascot.” There was something impishly perverse about her; Lee recalled that during the Second World War, Jackie persuaded her Swiss governess to teach her German, which upset Janet.

  With Jackie away at school, eleven-year-old Lee was lonely. Decades later, she recalled how she was once left alone with the servants “at this enormous house of my mother and stepfather in McLean, Virginia,” while they were on a deep-sea fishing trip in Chile. She decided that the thing to do was to adopt an orphan to take Jackie’s place.

  All I did was play in the woods with my dogs day after day. And so I and a very fat cook called Nellie, who was my only friend, decided I couldn’t stand it any longer. I looked up in a Yellow Classified Pages “orphanages,” took my pathetic allowance, called a taxi.

  Lee marched into the nearest Catholic orphanage and announced to the Mother Superior, “I’ve come to adopt an orphan, and I have a lovely place where she would be terribly happy—horses and dogs and walks, and she would really love it!”

  The “absolutely stunned” Mother Superior told her she was just too young to adopt anyone. Lee returned home, disappointed. When Janet and Hughdie returned a week later, Lee recalled, “I just got such hell for this—‘how you could upset me, how you could torture me the way you have? We were so worried about you!’

  “I couldn’t figure out quite why that was, as they were in Chile on a motorboat.”

  At Miss Porter’s, if Jackie was tomboyish and self-possessed, Lee appeared frailer and more feminine, not interested in horses or athletics. But she often found herself—not Jackie—the center of attention from the boys in their Eton jackets brought in for socials from prep schools like Buckley and St. Bernard’s.

  While each was at Miss Porter’s in her turn, they would visit their aunt Annie Burr Lewis, Hugh Auchincloss’s sister, who would serve them tea in the afternoons. Her husband, Wilmarth Sheldon “Lefty” Lewis (a nickname straight out of Damon Runyon, oddly), was a bibliophile and an authority on Horace Walpole, the English art historian and man of letters. Lewis was famous for editing twenty-six of fifty volumes of Walpole’s correspondence (“Could you imagine, twenty-six volumes!” Lee commented). Even then, Aunt Annie noticed how different the girls were: Lee preferred her tea without milk, while Jackie put the milk in first; Lee turned down her aunt’s chocolate cake, but Jackie—for a skinny girl—really enjoyed her aunt’s rich chocolate layer cake and scones and sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Jackie fell in love with her aunt and uncle’s library—he had a great collection of antiquarian books—which were of little interest to Lee at the time.

  Lee, curiously, was fascinated by Catholicism and its iconography—she filled her bedroom with various crosses and Russian icons, which probably reflected her nascent interest in décor, objets d’art, and Russian culture rather than Catholicism. Perhaps she was also inspired by the ceremonies of the Catholic Church; she would be drawn to and flourish in dramatics at Miss Porter’s. If Jackie preferred being left alone with a book, Lee bloomed in the spotlight. She enjoyed, as she still
does, being fussed over. “Flattery—my great flaw!” she recently admitted.

  At Miss Porter’s, people thought Lee the prettier of the two sisters; she had a more feminine, curvier body, which she made more svelte by dieting. Lee didn’t enjoy food the way Jackie did, but she did take Jackie’s adolescent advice to smoke cigarettes to keep the weight off. As teenagers, both girls smoked (Jackie would be a heavy smoker her entire life, though she was never photographed with a cigarette). Concerned at how thin Lee had become, Janet threatened to send her to a weight-gain camp, and only got her daughter to eat by promising to let her redecorate her room.

  Lee believed in frivolity: “Showing off was part of my character,” she said. Whereas Jackie won praise for excelling in French and history and English, Lee shined outside of the classroom. If Jackie “wanted to learn all the arts,” Lee remembered, she herself wanted to learn the art of being popular. “I behaved as though the whole world should know me,” Lee recalled. In contrast, Jackie “would have liked to act on the spur of the moment, but she didn’t know how. The desires of youth, for my sister, were held in check by a certain faintheartedness.”

  Despite their closeness, a certain jockeying for attention continued between the two girls. Jackie excelled in Farmington, but at her first coming-out party, at the Newport Clambake Club in August of 1947, Lee found a way to steal Jackie’s thunder by showing up in a frothy pink strapless dress sprinkled with rhinestones that set tongues wagging. Jackie had worn a chic white off-the-shoulder tulle gown, but Lee’s dress—which she had designed herself, working with a local seamstress—got all the attention. Janet was furious, but Jackie didn’t seem to mind, and in fact appropriated that dress for her debutante ball, where she was named Debutante of the Year by the influential gossip columnist and social arbiter Igor Cassini, who wrote under the nom de plume Cholly Knickerbocker. He was the brother of the fashion designer Oleg Cassini, who would later play an important role in Jackie’s life. Thus began a pattern of Jackie sometimes appropriating Lee’s sense of style and earning praise for it.

  It’s a good thing that both sisters triumphed at their coming-out parties, because, as Gore Vidal later noted, “There was never much money for either girl.”

  Certainly, Hughdie’s fortune—when he had it—was insufficient to launch two ambitious girls in society. As Vidal wrote, “Janet (just described by Newsweek as ‘an icy social climber, trying to disguise her Irish [sic] roots’) had no money until she reconciled, late in life, with her father, who had objected—I wonder why—to her marriage with Jack Bouvier. So Jackie, constantly presented as a wealthy debutante of the highest society was, like me, a poor connection of the Auchinclosses.”

  Jackie’s Bouvier cousins were surprised to see how much she dazzled at debutante balls and soirees, given how shy and difficult to talk to she had been as a girl. At a dinner dance given at the Newport Clambake Club the summer of 1947, hosted by the Auchinclosses and the Grosvenors (parents of Jackie’s friend Rose Grosvenor), her cousins were astonished by how the formerly withdrawn Jackie captivated the guests.

  At eighteen and fifteen years of age, each sister was developing her own style of dress—Jackie was more like Janet in her preference for casual, conservative, extremely well-made clothes. Janet dressed in simple but exquisitely tailored suits, or skirts and twin-sets worn with a strand of pearls, but all in beige and browns, so that one wag described her as looking like a mushroom. “She was never seen without her perfect white kid gloves,” her youngest child, Jamie Auchincloss, recalled. Lee, now slimmer and sleeker than her older sister, had far more flair. She loved color and a more dramatic style.

  A childhood friend of Jackie’s, Sylvia Whitehouse Blake, noticed that “Jackie didn’t care a whit for fashion in those days. She and I ran around in shorts and sneakers all summer. The only time we dressed up was during Tennis Week, Newport’s social highlight. But even then we weren’t exactly your typical Vogue fashion plates.” Nonetheless, another one of Jackie’s friends was struck by her unadorned beauty: “First of all, her beauty was incredible. She didn’t wear any makeup—she didn’t have to! I mean, to me she was breathtaking!” Jackie would later describe her beauty routine when she was a college student at Vassar:

  Wash your face with hot water and a rough wash cloth and really rub, with upward strokes on the cheeks and forehead . . . Rinse with cold water: the shock will stimulate circulation and leave it tingling. With the same upward motions massage in a rich cream before retiring. Do this for about two minutes and wipe off what is left so that you won’t find it on your pillow the next morning.

  She used Dorothy Gray’s Special Dry Skin mixture, later switching to the expensive high-end brand Erno Laszlo. Years later, after ascending to the White House, she would add a peroxide rinse for her teeth to remove the nicotine stains resulting from her two-pack-a-day smoking habit.

  Lee, remembered Sylvia Whitehouse Blake, “was shorter than Jackie but more rounded, with a classically attractive, heart-shaped face and tiny, delicate features. She never left the house unless dressed for Ascot.”

  Jackie saw how boys flocked to Lee. While Jackie kept her nose buried in a book when she wasn’t riding Danseuse, now boarded at Miss Porter’s, Lee triumphed in the school play, the George S. Kaufman–Moss Hart madcap comedy You Can’t Take It with You. It seemed as if Lee was the one destined for fame—she loved the limelight—and although each girl in her turn was named Debutante of the Year by Cholly Knickerbocker, Life magazine devoted a whole page to Lee’s coming out, eclipsing Jackie’s.

  One of several things they had in common, though, was their soft, whispery way of speaking. Lee’s voice was slightly huskier; Jackie’s had the breathy little-girl quality of Marilyn Monroe’s, which belied her sharp intelligence. Their own mother sometimes couldn’t tell them apart over the telephone. They also shared a kind of halting style of speech, as if their words were divided into lines of verse. One of Lee’s phone messages sounded like:

  Sam . . . this is Lee Rad-zi-vill . . . Would you call me . . .

  please? I forgot to tell you . . .

  about Truman . . .

  and my fur coat.

  Thank you . . . Lee

  Despite their differences, the two sisters were often thick as thieves growing up. As teenagers, they would make the rounds of their favorite restaurants in New York when they visited their father in Manhattan. Years later, they were once asked to leave Elaine’s, the popular Upper East Side restaurant, after sitting and talking and smoking for hours in one of the front banquettes, where everyone could see them, ordering nothing but ice water.

  Jack Bouvier felt he was losing his daughters the closer they became to the Auchinclosses. The estrangement was also painful for Jackie and especially for Lee, who felt torn between the wealth, security, and status their stepfather afforded them and their love for their cast-off father, now living in reduced circumstances. He tried to maintain his role of affectionate and generous father—it was Jack Bouvier who paid for Jackie’s Vassar education, and he was pleased that Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, New York, was closer to Manhattan than it was to McLean, Virginia. She could visit her father on weekends, and he could more easily visit. On his visits to the Seven Sisters college, Jackie “would have the glory of showing him off in the main dining room, enjoying the way the girls would gawk at him as if he were a movie star,” as her cousin Davis recalled.

  Jackie made frequent visits to her father’s New York apartment to take advantage of dates and social events in the city, which sometimes made Bouvier feel as if she were just visiting for convenience’s sake. He groused to his sisters that his daughter only wrote or phoned “when she needed her allowance” of fifty dollars a month, and that Jackie would turn up a half hour before a social engagement and rush off on the train early the next morning. He never withheld Jackie’s or Lee’s allowance—and he paid for both their college educations and gave them generous checks on special occasions—but he was hurt by what he perceived as their negle
ct of him. But no matter what Bouvier managed to do for his beloved daughters, Janet Auchincloss—with her second husband’s wealth—could outdo him. Davis remembered:

  When Janet would schedule dental appointments for Jacqueline in Washington (which Jack would subsequently be asked to pay for), Jack would immediately interpret the action as a way of getting Jackie to come to Virginia, and he would angrily counterattack by insisting she have her teeth fixed in Manhattan: he would not pay for any more treatments in Washington, D.C. And so it would go in countless other matters.

  Though he also complained that Lee only called him from Miss Porter’s when she was in need of funds, he did in fact spend more time with her, especially when Jackie left for France in her junior year. Lee spent two summer weeks with him in East Hampton, in his small, rented cottage, which she enjoyed nonetheless because it meant time spent with her father. And in the fall, Bouvier traveled to Farmington to see his younger daughter perform in You Can’t Take It with You. He was so delighted by Lee’s performance that he returned to New York full of grandiose plans for her future as an actress.

  3

  Americans in Paris

  We are not the Brontë sisters.

  —LEE

  I flatter myself on being able at times to walk out of the house looking like a poor man’s Paris copy . . .

  —JACKIE

  What could be more wonderful than to be affluent, pretty young girls in Paris in 1951, in immaculate, wrist-length white gloves? Rather surprisingly, after months of coaxing, Janet agreed to let eighteen-year-old Lee travel to Europe in the summer of l951 with twenty-two-year-old Jackie.

  Three years earlier, Jackie had spent her junior year abroad in Paris, which she once referred to as “the happiest year of [my] life.” While abroad, she’d studied French at the University of Grenoble and French literature and history at the Sorbonne. “I have an absolute mania now about learning to speak French perfectly,” she wrote to her mother. “We never speak a word of English in this apartment and I don’t see many Americans.” She also noted that in the cafés that year, all the American girls in Paris were drinking Picon-citrons, and many of her college compatriots were still wearing the girlish, ankle-length white socks of the era—but not Jackie.