The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  When the tiny infant finally arrived in London in the arms of her nurse, Lee and Stas met them at Heathrow, and with great satisfaction brought Tina home to 4 Buckingham Place. Finally holding her newborn, Lee reportedly said, “This is really the most wonderful Christmas present I have ever had.”

  The Kennedys were disappointed when Lee and Stas had to miss his inauguration as the thirty-fifth president on January 20, 1961. Mother and infant were still too weak to fly to Washington. Jack called London twice during the festivities to see how they were faring. He especially missed having Stas there, who had such a calming effect on the young president. Jackie, too, was left weakened by the birth of her son, John Kennedy Jr., born November 25, 1960, and had to take frequent rests between inaugural activities.

  At home in London, Lee’s recovery from depression was slow and fitful. Angry at Stas for wanting a second child so soon after Anthony’s birth, and blaming her husband for her breakdown and for Tina’s frailty, she resolved to bar her bedroom door against her husband. From then on, Stas would find sexual fulfillment outside of their marriage, as would Lee. It was hardest on Stas, who genuinely loved Lee, but as an old-world European aristocrat, he considered such an arrangement the norm. He accepted it, but the glorious days of their marriage were over.

  * * *

  AFTER NOT SEEING Jackie for the four months since the election, Lee was well enough to fly to Washington, where she was thrilled to see her sister, who met her at Washington’s National Airport. Both arrived looking fit and tanned—Lee from a vacation in Jamaica and Jackie from having spent over a week in Palm Beach, Florida.

  Jackie had flown back on a commercial airline, along with two Secret Service agents, taking up five seats in first class, and had passed the time by reading a biography of the French mistress of Philippe d’Orléans, Madame de Genlis—one of both sisters’ enduring interests.

  Despite some renewed feelings of competition, Jackie’s two and a half years in the White House brought the sisters closer together. Somewhat overwhelmed by her new status and responsibilities, Jackie relied on Lee, knowing she could relax with her sister and exchange confidences. They became the whispering sisters once again, speaking often in transatlantic calls and exchanging flurries of letters. Lee and Stas made frequent visits to the White House, where Lee would occupy the Queen’s Bedroom with Stas staying in the Lincoln Bedroom.

  Lee loved her visits to the White House, and her role in advising Jackie in matters of couture. At Jackie’s request, she often arrived with photographs of Paris showrooms and ateliers. Lee and Stas’s visits were a welcome respite for Jackie, who complained to Gore Vidal that as First Lady, she was “never alone. You sit in a room and try to write a letter and someone comes in.” She made it her priority to hold cultural gatherings with writers she admired, such as Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, but what she really needed was “to spend an evening with just a few people. I’m terrible at crowds, and everyone gets so precious in the White House, they’d all clam up.” Lee gave her that necessary feeling of normalcy and intimacy that the demands of being First Lady seemed to prohibit.

  When the Radziwills were in town, they were the center of a social whirl—a White House reception for Latin American diplomats, a performance of the Comédie-Française, a party thrown by the French ambassador. They also traveled to one of Jackie’s favorite spots, an estate the Kennedys owned in Middleburg, Virginia—horse country—where Jackie often rode and Jack played golf and shot skeet. Jackie loved having Lee and Stas with her. They traveled to New York City for a four-day trip where they dined with Lee’s former boss at Harper’s Bazaar, Diana Vreeland. Driven around in a black limousine bearing the plate “JK102,” Lee and Jackie scoured antique shops and art galleries. They attended a performance of the New York City Ballet, escorted by Adlai Stevenson, then Kennedy’s ambassador to the United Nations. They stayed at the Kennedys’ duplex apartment on the top two floors of the Carlyle Hotel, decorated with Louis Quinze furniture and paintings ranging from African-American artist Romare Bearden to the American-born Impressionist painter Mary Cassatt. (The owner of the Carlyle made sure to find out what book the president was currently reading and would have his staff run out and purchase the book, leaving it opened to the page the president was currently on. There could have been no more attentive staff than that!)

  On one such visit to New York, Jackie and Lee summoned the fashion designer Oleg Cassini to this elegant setting, asking him to bring his latest creations. The sisters admired the dresses, which Cassini draped over the Louis Quinze furniture. For Jackie—who made the trip with ten suitcases of clothes—it was a welcome hiatus from the pressures of her life as First Lady. For Lee, it was a chance to share the glamour and privilege that the role of First Lady afforded them both.

  On March 15, 1961, Jackie organized her first dinner dance at the White House, which she made in honor of Lee and Stas. Jackie’s first social secretary, Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, who had known Jackie since Miss Porter’s and Vassar and who helped organize the gala, recalled that there were certain requirements for the guest list. Beauty was one of them.

  “The guests all had to be beautiful,” Baldrige later recalled. “[Jackie] said it was for Jack’s sake, but it was for her sake as well.” Lee was the same way: they often commented on how attractive—or unattractive—a person was. It always mattered to them. Jackie would often seat the “single beauties” next to her husband, in part to please him, but possibly to choose his paramours, as Jackie was by now aware of his proclivities. One of those beauties, the socialite turned writer Helen Chavchavadze, believed that “Jackie was in charge of choosing his playmates. It was very French.”

  It was the first of only five dinner dances in the Kennedys’ thousand days in the White House, and it was a tremendous success, lasting till three in the morning. Both sisters dazzled, Jackie in a white sheath gown and Lee nearly upstaging her in red brocade (as she sometimes had during their debutante days). The seventy guests included the Aga Khan, the Carlyle Hotel muralist and children’s book author Ludwig Bemelmans, and—on John Kennedy’s arms—the comely Pinchot sisters, Tony (who was married to Ben Bradlee, then editor of Newsweek and later executive editor of the Washington Post) and Mary Meyer (who would later become one of Kennedy’s paramours and would be murdered under mysterious circumstances). Jack had made unsuccessful passes at Tony, but as she later said, “I think it surprised him I would not succumb. If I hadn’t been married maybe I would have.” Because they were Jackie’s social equals—and both were married—they were not the women Jackie had in mind for her husband’s dalliances.

  Festivities began in the East Room for cocktails. The State Dining Room was set up with nine round tables sumptuously adorned with yellow linen and baskets of spring flowers. Champagne flowed, and the menu consisted of mostly French cuisine—saumon mousseline normande, poulet à l’estragon, mushrooms aux fines herbes, casserole marie-blanche. Dancing to Lester Lanin’s orchestra in the Blue Room rounded out the evening. The entire gala had a slightly naughty air because, in part, it took place during Lent, and theirs was certainly one of the few Catholic households observing Lent with champagne, feasting, and dance.

  It was a glorious and gracious way for the Kennedys to thank Stas for helping the president with the Polish-American vote, and it was Jackie’s way of including Lee in her sudden, unexpected social prominence and astonishing level of privilege. It ushered in a period of shared pleasure, grand adventures, moral support, and intimacy between the two sisters, not felt since their delightful tour of Europe ten years earlier.

  “I have boxes of letters from Jackie,” Lee said. “Most are from ’60 on—I have her life then, imploring me to come over, what pleased Jack or didn’t please him, what would make him happy, and a lot about our children and trying to keep them together and seeing each other every summer. Those letters showed great anxiety to keep us together and the children together as often as possible. We did spend those first three Christ
mases in the ’60s in Palm Beach together with our children and a large part of every summer as well.”

  London in winter was rainy and often dreary, so Lee especially looked forward to spending Christmases with Jackie and their children at Jayne and Charlie Wrightsman’s oceanfront estate in Palm Beach, a kind of winter White House not far from a vacation home owned by the Kennedy family.

  Jayne Wrightsman was the second wife of Charles Wrightsman, the president of Standard Oil from 1932 to 1953. Besides their Palm Beach estate, the Wrightsmans lived at 820 Fifth Avenue. Jayne would become known as a legendary art collector, completely self-trained after buying an art history book that inspired her. She was especially interested in French furniture—a passion she shared with both Jackie and Lee—so her Palm Beach home combined the airy and damp-friendly feel of a beach house with museum-quality French furniture, a collection that eventually made its way to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Their Palm Beach vacations were idyllic. Anthony would join his cousin Caroline, just two years older, to loll and frolic on the beach, trailed by their younger siblings, frail little Tina and “John-John,” just three months apart. It was heavenly for the children to re-create the blissful fun that Jackie and Lee had found as children, playing in the surf, coming home with sand in their bathing suits, feeling the daytime sun on their faces and the cool evening breezes off the ocean. Jackie and Lee would find themselves lost in long conversations as they watched over their brood. On Christmas Eve, the children would dress as Joseph, Mary, and the Wise Men for an annual Christmas play.

  “It was wonderful to be together again,” Lee recalled, while Stas and Jack Kennedy played backgammon or golfed, or the two families took advantage of good weather to sail on the Kennedy yacht, named the Honey Fitz after Jack’s grandfather. They’d all learned to ignore the Secret Service agents who trailed the Honey Fitz in a raft of smaller boats.

  * * *

  JACKIE HAD PROMISED Kennedy that as First Lady she would only wear American couture, so Cassini technically fit the bill, albeit with a strong European flair that pleased Mrs. Kennedy. And she already had a history with the Cassinis: Oleg’s brother, Igor, wrote the pseudonymous Cholly Knickerbocker column that had named Jackie Debutante of the Year in 1947. (He gave Lee the same honor three years later.) Oleg Cassini took an active role in shaping Jackie’s public image, advising her to adopt the persona of a movie star, telling her that “she needed a story, a scenario, as First Lady.”

  Cassini was also impressed by Lee’s chic fashion sense and sangfroid: “She wore an elegant mask,” he recalled. “I could imagine both her and her sister at the Court of Louis XV. Destiny had separated them. It was Jackie who became the historic figure, and Lee the society woman, but their roles could have been reversed.”

  At first, Lee relished her association with the newly minted glamour of the Kennedy White House, happy to play lady-in-waiting. Not having to please an electorate, Lee was more daring, and more European, in her taste, wearing the French designer André Courrèges and smuggling Givenchy dresses into the White House. As early as 1960, Lee landed on the International Best-Dressed List for the first time, and stayed there for many years. Oleg Cassini aside, Jackie called Lee daily—sometimes hourly—for fashion advice when Lee was in London.

  “Lee was the first to be dressed in a Paris couture house, and not Jackie,” André Leon Talley explained. “It was Lee who took Jackie to have those clothes made at Givenchy. Once Lee became Princess Radziwill, she had a way of life that was very, very different from her sister’s. You would never be able to find a picture of the First Lady curled up in a caftan, or find her in a bikini.”

  “Lee has an extraordinary amount of original style,” agreed the designer Ralph Rucci, who became close to Lee in 2000. “I think her sister, the First Lady, had a great deal of influence, but with less courage to develop her own style. Lee has always been an original. Mrs. Vreeland said that Jacqueline Kennedy released style in this nation. Well, she had a great deal of assistance, and she had the best tutors. But Lee is the original.”

  Talley noted that Lee forged an original style that was part French, but really very classically American. “There’s a lot of French influence on Lee’s style,” he said. “She loves Paris, but she is, for me, a true American in her sense of style. I mean, she’s as American as a sweater—the most perfect, expensive cashmere twinset, but she’s not as American as apple pie, certainly not frozen apple pie! She’s truly a Bouvier, and the Bouvier style had a very important impact on the image of American women. It made a big, big, big mark.”

  * * *

  IN MAY OF 1961, Jack Kennedy headed for Vienna for the summit with the combative Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev. There was much riding on this meeting during the Cold War years, and it would prove a testing of the young president’s mettle. But before he headed to Vienna, the first stop on the president’s inaugural European trip was Paris, where he would introduce Jackie to an adoring French public.

  Right before Air Force One left from Idlewild Airport in New York, a disheveled figure with a German-Jewish accent climbed aboard for a private consultation with the president. He then left the plane, but soon after, he and his wife boarded an Air France jet chartered for them, and they flew to Paris. Once there, they were driven to the Hôtel Napoléon, where they checked in.

  Dr. Max Jacobson had arrived in Paris.

  During the 1960 campaign, the president’s Yale friend Charles “Chuck” Spalding had introduced Kennedy to the notorious doctor through Stas Radziwill.

  “I picked up Jacobson from Radziwill,” Spalding later told the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh. “I’d see Stash [sic] jumping around town and went to see Max. I guess it was speed, or whatever he gave us.” Soon after, Spalding paid a visit to the Kennedys. “I was hopping around,” he recalled. “They said, ‘Jesus! Where do you get all this energy?’ After seeing Max, you could jump over a fence.”

  Jacobson, known as “Dr. Feelgood” and “Miracle Max,” administered shots of a concoction he made up in his lab, which turned his fingernails black. He called his elixir “miracle tissue regenerator”; it was a bouillabaisse of “amphetamines, animal hormones, bone marrow, enzymes, human placenta, painkillers, steroids, and multi-vitamins.” His practice hovered at the edge of respectability, but his injections, not surprisingly, gave his patients jolts of energy and clarity. The downside was that the amphetamine-laced tonics could lead to addiction, grandiosity, and even psychosis, but in the 1960s, this was still unknown territory. That such a fringe doctor would be ministering to the president was suspect, and dangerous, and thus he was often consulted surreptitiously. Kennedy suffered with chronic back pain as a result of an old war injury, as well as the exhaustion of campaigning and governing, so the injections gave him blissful—if short-lived—bouts of being energized and pain-free. When Bobby Kennedy suggested that one of his aides have the injections analyzed, Kennedy famously told him, “I don’t care if it’s horse piss. It works.”

  “Miracle Max” visited the White House more than thirty times to administer his magical injections, as well as making visits to Palm Beach and Hyannis Port, to inject not only Kennedy but Jackie as well. He’d often leave his drugs and hypodermic needles behind for self-injection. He would never send the Kennedys a bill for his services, feeling too indebted to the US for its intervention in World War II, when Jacobson and his family escaped the Nazis and were given sanctuary.

  Jacobson’s other patients included an astonishing roll call of celebrities, from government to Hollywood to the arts: Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Leonard Bernstein, Humphrey Bogart, Yul Brynner, Maria Callas, Truman Capote, Oleg Cassini, Montgomery Clift, Rosemary Clooney, Marlene Dietrich, Eddie Fisher, Judy Garland, Alan Jay Lerner, Mickey Mantle, Marilyn Monroe, Zero Mostel, Elvis Presley, Anthony Quinn, Paul Robeson, Nelson Rockefeller, Elizabeth Taylor, Billy Wilder, and Tennessee Williams. Also caught in the net was Life photographer Mark Shaw, who was a favorite
of the Kennedys. Of these, Zero Mostel died of amphetamine-related heart failure; Truman Capote, Montgomery Clift, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Elizabeth Taylor all had struggles with prescription drug abuse. Mark Shaw died at the age of forty-seven of acute intravenous amphetamine poisoning. Lee recalled seeing the elegant British actress Margaret Leighton (who appeared in the film adaptation of Gore Vidal’s play The Best Man) pounding on Dr. Jacobson’s door in New York, desperate for a fix.

  But the biggest victim of his elixirs, perhaps, was Dr. Jacobson himself. Increasingly dependent upon his own miracle shots, he ended up working around the clock, seeing up to thirty patients a day. In 1968 he attracted the attention of federal authorities for amphetamine misuse and lost his license to practice medicine seven years later. He died in 1979, at the age of seventy-nine, which meant that he lived a lot longer than many of his clients.

  Curiously enough, Lee managed to escape the pull of Dr. Jacobson’s miracle elixir. “He was an awful man,” she said years later. “And physically dirty.” She was not going to be injected by a man with blackened fingernails. To her credit, if not her foresight, Lee wouldn’t let him near her.

  * * *

  BESIDES DR. JACOBSON, Lee also accompanied the Kennedys to Paris.

  Lee, relegated to riding with the entourage, followed the president and First Lady’s limousine as the motorcade traveled from Orly Airport into the city. An estimated five hundred thousand Parisians thronged the streets to greet the glamorous president and his beautiful wife. Lee heard their chants of “Viva Zhack-ee” and “Kenne-dee” fill the air. Later, in exchanges with French journalists, Jackie spoke French for forty minutes, further delighting the Parisians.