The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  The sisters left for Europe well prepared for their adventure: armed with a portfolio of papers “tucked into our dainty purses,” as Lee described it, including vaccination certificates; traveler’s checks; a letter of credit; letters to American Express in London, Paris, Madrid, Nice, Rome, and Lucerne; a letter to Chase Bank, Paris; international driving licenses; an AAA membership card; a card “for legal representation in case of accident”; and seven extra passport pictures. On June 7, 1951, at 9:45 a.m., “after pleading and pestering and praying for a year,” passport No. 218793 (Jacqueline Lee Bouvier) and No. 545527 (Caroline Lee Bouvier) embarked to Europe.

  It was a splendid adventure.

  Luckily for posterity, the two young women kept a playful scrapbook and journal of their travels, written by Lee and illustrated with insouciant drawings and poems by Jackie, and later published in 2005 as One Special Summer. They created it to present to their mother as a thank-you gesture for letting them go on this trip. Their adventures, poems, and reassuring letters to Janet (“We DO sew on all our buttons and wear gloves and never go out in big cities except in what we would wear to church in Newport on Sundays”) are sprinkled with tourist snapshots, showing the girls in St. Mark’s Square dressed—horrors!—in slacks and sandals (Jackie) and short shorts and ankle straps (Lee).

  “Look at us,” Lee later remarked, poring over those snapshots. “How did those countries let us in? We look like two criminals arriving off the boat.”

  Among their adventures in Europe: the sisters sneak into first-class dinner dances aboard the ship; Jackie takes art lessons from a rather lecherous teacher in Venice; Lee suffers a wardrobe malfunction at a gala reception (her underwear slips down while she’s chatting with an ambassador); Lee takes singing lessons from Signora Gilda Dalla Rizza, “Queen of all the sopranos in Italy.”

  Known as Puccini’s favorite soprano for her creation of the role of Magda in La rondine in 1917, Signora Dalla Rizza had retired from the stage in 1939 and taught at Conservatorio Benedetto Marcello in Venice. However, she did give private lessons, and one of them was with Lee Bouvier, who was more impressed by Signora Dalla Rizza’s enormous bosom than by her vocal technique.

  “We went to her house on the Grand Canal,” Lee wrote in One Special Summer, “and were ushered into this salon where we sat shaking, while the house shuddered and thundered with her singing scales in another room” in her trademark guttural and nasal style. “On the piano was a picture of Toscanini with a long dedication to her—also, one from Puccini—she was the first to sing ‘Madama Butterfly’ . . . and portraits on the walls of her in different costumes.” When the diva finally entered, she couldn’t speak any English and very little French, and as neither Lee nor Jackie knew any Italian, Jackie went to work thumbing through her Italian grammar book in an attempt to communicate.

  Lee was asked to sing a few arias, but Lee was too terrified to even open her mouth. Jackie, on the sofa behind the signora, attempted to stifle a fit of hysterical laughter. Lee was then asked to simply sing a scale, which Lee was still too frightened to manage—her voice cracked halfway through. Jackie continued to giggle, and suggested that Lee sing something from a popular musical comedy of the day, Call Me Madam (which was Irving Berlin’s last successful musical, written in 1950 as a send-up of Perle Mesta, the famous Washington hostess whom President Truman had appointed as ambassador to Luxembourg).

  Instead—out of desperation—Lee launched into “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a novelty song popularized by Debbie Reynolds in a movie called Two Weeks with Love. (The song would later be reprised at the end of the decade in a Three Stooges picture, Have Rocket, Will Travel. Thomas Pynchon once called it “the nadir of all American expression.”)

  Lee had hoped that its refrain—“Aba daba daba daba daba daba dab, said the chimpie to the monk”—might sound vaguely Italian to the diva, and if she sang it fast, “it might even sound like coloratura. I ended with a screech, like a cat being run over.” The diva was not amused, and the two young women left Venice in a hurry.

  Years later, Lee said that yes, she’d grown up wanting to paint and to act and to write, but she had really wanted to sing. “There’s something celestial about a beautiful voice,” she believed. Her sister liked to make fun of Lee’s singing lessons, putting her hands over her ears when Lee practiced her scales.

  Not surprisingly—given their good looks, good manners, and irrepressible youth—the Bouvier girls were a tremendous social success in Europe. The bon vivant Reinaldo Herrera—husband of the couturier Carolina Herrera and scion of a wealthy Venezuelan family—first met Lee at a dinner party Vincent Astor hosted in the l950s. Looking back on the trajectory of the sisters’ lives, he recently commented, “These two girls, with all the innocence of America and the generosity of America, go over [to Europe] and they’re amazed that they’re a success! And they’re amazed that all these people in Paris and everywhere kept being their friends, until the bitter end.” One of his acquaintances, he recalled, “was in love with both of them. Until the day he died, he talked with awe about the Bouvier girls.”

  Their most impressive encounter was meeting one of Lee’s heroes, the Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson. Lee had begun a correspondence with Berenson when she was just fifteen. She later said that the only way she got through Miss Porter’s was her love of her art history class, taught by her favorite teacher, Sarah McLennan (“I lived for her class and was transported by the subject”). Lee wrote to Berenson about her European tour and was thrilled to be invited to meet him.

  A slight figure at eighty-six, with an immaculately trimmed white beard, Berenson did not disappoint. He walked toward them out of the woods of his beautiful estate, the Villa I Tatti, outside of Settignano near Florence, like a figure out of Dante. Upon meeting the two enchanted girls, he immediately began talking to them about love. “Never follow your senses,” he advised. “Marry someone who will constantly stimulate you, and you, him.”

  But Lee’s first question to their eminent host and sage had nothing to do with romance or art. Instead, she blurted out, “Why did Mummy divorce Daddy?”

  At seventeen, she was still looking for answers to the upheavals of her early life. If Berenson had an answer, he didn’t say. Instead, the art historian served them tea, and proceeded to define all experience as either “life enhancing” or “life diminishing,” warning them not to “waste your life with diminishing people who aren’t stimulating, and if you find it’s often you are with unstimulating people, it must be because you yourself are not stimulating.” Lee never forgot that—even today, when attending a cocktail party or reception, she always seeks out the most interesting person in the room.

  Berenson also spoke of “a house of life. Art is not real life, but an ideal life,” he told the two impressionable young women, and for Lee, those were the words she carried away with her. “That is how I have tried to live,” she said years later. “I hear his words in my head to this day.”

  While the two proper girls sipped their tea in Berenson’s beautiful Italian garden, his collection of fragile seventeenth-century teacups reminded Lee of one of her childhood fantasies: “My sister was the White Queen” she later recalled, “and I was her handmaiden, her lady-in-waiting, bringing her tea in tiny cups.”

  “Come back soon, darlings, and see me soon” were Berenson’s parting words to the starstruck debutantes. A final piece of advice Berenson gave the two girls, however, had nothing to do with art history: “American girls should marry American boys. They wear better.” But he also said, “The only way to exist happily is to love your work.”

  Gore Vidal later noted that “Italy had been sealed off not only by war but by Fascism.” Among the few Westerners who knew Italy well at that time were “mad Ezra Pound, gentle Max Beerbohm,” and Bernard Berenson.

  Jackie, like Lee, was deeply impressed by their afternoon with Berenson; she had discovered a mentor that day whose words and sensitivity marked her, even though it was Lee, of
course, who had begun the correspondence and secured the invitation to visit him. Lee’s fascination with art history, and especially Italian Renaissance and, later, nineteenth-century Russian art, predated Jackie’s. This was a pattern that would follow the two women throughout their lives: Jackie often took her aesthetic interests and style, in décor and in couture, from her younger sister, and earned international acclaim for her discernment, while Lee increasingly resented it.

  There was an unfortunate coda to their special summer, which happened during their last week abroad, following the enchanted visit to I Tatti. They were staying at Marlia, a villa on a vast, parklike estate that had once belonged to Napoleon’s sister, the Duchess of Lucca, Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi. The current chatelaines were the Count and Countess Pecci-Blunt, and the Bouvier girls were made welcome by letters of introduction from Hugh Auchincloss. The countess, Anna Pecci-Blunt, was known for her brilliance and social prominence. It was there that the two well-brought-up young women made a faux pas heard round the world, like something out of Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence: they left the villa without bidding their hostess good-bye.

  They had an early-morning flight back to America, and the girls felt it would be inconsiderate to wake the countess. “We were just being polite,” Lee later recalled, but when the countess awoke and found them gone, she considered their exit the height of rudeness. The word quickly went out that those American girls had no manners! A fellow guest at Marlia observed, “It marked them for several years to come.”

  “We were accomplices,” Lee recalled about their special summer, “but only for a short time.” On returning home, Janet Auchincloss was delighted with the booklet of poems and drawings that Jackie and Lee had put together for their mother. Jackie’s illustrations are funny and pleasing (“You can see how much Jackie was influenced by [Saul] Steinberg,” Lee observed). Her poems, too, are witty and charming, including one that uses as a refrain images of Lee being corralled by a series of doting swains that suggest that Jackie really was looking out for her younger sister: “Yes, she’s taking the air / with Monsieur Moliere” and “Oh she’s behind the trees / With the Duc de Guise”:

  I did minuets

  I drank champagne

  looking for Lee

  always in vain

  Mais vous n’avez pas vu ma petite soeur?

  Elle est si jeune—j’ai un peu peur.

  “That book was so much fun,” Lee said, looking back. “Filled with enthusiasm, but it was such an organized trip. We had to call our mother all the time.”

  As for the two sisters, they would not travel together again for another twelve years, and by then Lee would be accompanying the First Lady of the United States of America.

  Years later, the young woman who became Lee’s daughter-in-law, Carole DiFalco Radziwill, reflected on the difficulties Lee had being the younger sister of the White Queen.

  “I think it was hard to be overshadowed by her sister,” she said, “when you feel like you have something to say and you just know no one is ever going to be interested, whereas your sister is beloved on the world stage. Most siblings have stuff between them, but how about, ‘The world likes you best’? You can’t fight that.”

  Which is exactly what Lee—and Jackie—set out to do.

  4

  London Calling

  If you went on a date with Marilyn Monroe, what would you talk about?

  —JACKIE, AS THE “INQUIRING CAMERAGIRL”

  A daughter in my mother’s house, or a mistress in my own?

  —LEE

  Back home in the States, Jackie took a job in January of 1952 as an “Inquiring Cameragirl” for the Washington Times-Herald for twenty-five dollars a week. Again, her well-connected stepfather asked Arthur Krock, then the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, to help land her a position, which he did, as a receptionist to the editor of the Washington Times-Herald, Frank Waldrop. But Jackie had far loftier ambitions than being a receptionist; she really wanted to write.

  Waldrop recalled Jackie telling him, “I want to be in the newspaper business.”

  “Are you serious?” he asked. “Do you want to make a career, or just hang around until you get married? Because I don’t have time to fool around with this.”

  “No,” she answered. “I really want to write. I’m serious about making a career of writing.”

  If he wasn’t impressed by her ability to read and speak French, her tony education, her beautiful manners and obvious intelligence, Waldrop was impressed with her directness. He recalled:

  She was a bright young woman. She could see around corners. She had gone to Krock. She wasn’t wasting time. She was just getting right into things. She had sense enough to do that.

  Jackie saw the job of writing the Inquiring Cameragirl column as a way into journalism. It involved asking questions and taking photographs of various Washingtonians from all walks of life—construction workers, hospital staff, hotel clerks, truck drivers—and young politicians. In developing the photographs, Jackie discovered an interest in photography, and in approaching strangers with her camera and her provocative questions, she found a way to overcome her innate shyness.

  Her questions ranged from playful to penetrating, reflecting the concerns of the day, including the evolving awareness of how women’s traditional roles were being challenged in contemporary culture. For example:

  Do you think bikini bathing suits are immoral?

  Do you consider yourself normal?

  You look important. Are you?

  What prominent person’s death affected you most?

  Do the rich enjoy life more than the poor?

  Do you think a wife should let her husband think he’s smarter than she is?

  What do you think women desire most?

  When did you discover that women are not the weaker sex?

  She once asked a circus clown if he “was really hiding a broken heart,” and attendees at an American Psychological Association convention, “How do you think you’re maladjusted?”

  Increasingly, her questions showed a deepening interest in politics, and she wanted to know what it was like to cover the White House press conferences. Her Inquiring Cameragirl questions reflected this new interest: “Which first lady would you have liked to have been?” she asked, and “Would you support a woman for president of the United States?” “Should a candidate’s wife campaign with her husband?” “Do a candidate’s looks influence your vote?” She even cheekily asked, “Do you think Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs will become a nationwide fashion?” (They didn’t.)

  Jackie managed to sneak into the Republican headquarters on election night after Eisenhower and Nixon’s victory, and soon after interviewed Pat Nixon. She devoted her column to the l953 Eisenhower inauguration, interviewing two of Mamie Eisenhower’s nieces, Ellen and Mamie Moore. She illustrated it with a fetching cartoon she drew of one of the girls, Mamie, alongside the new president. When the story and sketch ran in the Times-Herald, the girls’ mother was angry, urging Waldrop to “do something to make that brash cameragirl, whoever she is, know her place.” But Arthur Krock at the New York Times loved it and brought it to the attention of Bess Armstrong, who covered First Ladies for the Times, and who suggested that Jackie write and illustrate a children’s book about the history of the White House.

  Jackie loved the idea, but didn’t follow through. She also became interested in the Octagon House, which had been the temporary home for James Madison and his wife, Dolley, after the White House was seriously damaged by fire during the War of 1812. She was well ahead of her time in seeing that the relatively new format of historical documentaries could go beyond print journalism, and she wrote a script for a television documentary on the subject, portraying it as Dolley Madison’s haunted house:

  . . . Little boys and girls dared each other to run up the steps, then ran back to the sidewalk squealing with delight and horror . . . There are days when you can smell lilacs . . . They say [on] those days th
at Dolley Madison is “around . . .”

  Jackie managed to find a television station interested in her script, but the station went out of business before her project could be realized.

  Jackie loved being independent and self-supporting, though “she was always a little short of money,” recalled Waldrop. “She always had to be careful how she spent . . . She would always be looked after by her stepfather, but he had his own children. She certainly wasn’t going to get anything substantial from her father [Bouvier]. She worked, and she earned a living.”

  Jackie wasn’t quick to rush into a marriage, relishing her escape from Janet’s eagle eye and sometimes stifling social milieu. By the time she was nineteen, Jackie knew that she “didn’t want to marry any of the young men I grew up with—not because of them but because of their life . . .” Nonetheless, Jackie became engaged to a New York stockbroker named John G. W. Husted Jr., a friend of Hugh Auchincloss, who had already brought her so many important connections in her young life. The Times-Herald announced their engagement on January 21, 1952, the wedding to take place six months hence.

  Perhaps Jackie wasn’t as independent as she felt herself to be, accepting a proposal from a Wall Street broker close to and approved by her family. And in a pattern that both sisters would follow, square-jawed investment banker Husted bore a passing resemblance to Black Jack Bouvier.

  * * *

  LEE HAD PERSUADED her parents to send her to Rome the summer after her first trip abroad, where she continued her singing lessons. On her return, she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence after just three terms. The journalist Barbara Walters, who had been a student at Sarah Lawrence at the same time as Lee, remembered her as