The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  In a meeting with General Charles de Gaulle of France, Kennedy made inroads against de Gaulle’s anti-American stance, impressing the aging politician and former leader of the Free French. But if he was impressed by the young American president’s intelligence and geopolitical savvy, he was even more enchanted by Jackie, delighted to speak French with her over luncheon at the Élysée Palace, home of the French president.

  Arthur Schlesinger recalled that visit in his 1965 history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House:

  Jacqueline sat by the General and engaged him in animated conversation in French, about French history—Louis XVI, and the Duc d’Angoulême, and the dynastic complexities of the later Bourbons—until de Gaulle leaned across the table and told JFK that his wife knew more French history than most French women.

  Schlesinger was one of the first historians to recognize her keen intelligence, giving full credit to Jackie’s valuable contributions to the nation as First Lady.

  Later, according to Gore Vidal, Jackie wrote a thank-you letter to de Gaulle and was pleased when he promptly answered her, “while Jack’s letter to the general had gone unanswered.”

  Jackie was given a royal tour of Paris in a brilliant return to the city she loved but had not seen since her summer tour with Lee. What made it even more wonderful was that her docent was the writer and freedom fighter André Malraux, then de Gaulle’s minister of culture, a figure she’d admired since being introduced to his work while a student at Vassar. She had read Malraux’s most famous novel, La Condition Humaine, winner of the 1933 Prix Goncourt, and it was he whom she had most wanted to meet. Indeed, Tish Baldrige, who accompanied Jackie along with her personal secretary, an attractive young woman named Pamela Turnure, thought that Jackie had “an intellectual crush” on the French writer, as the two hit it off immediately. Jackie even flirted a little: when Malraux asked her what she did before marrying Jack Kennedy, she answered rather coyly, “J’ai été pucelle”—“I was a little virgin.” (If true, it discourages belief in the gossip that she’d lost her virginity in a Parisian elevator on her first trip to France.) This was the beginning of a friendship between Jackie and Malraux that would last until his death in 1976.

  Schlesinger would write that Jackie was “deeply moved” at Malraux’s attendance at the state events welcoming the Kennedys because his two sons, Pierre-Gauthier and Vincent, had been killed in an automobile accident just a few days earlier. She had written a note to Malraux, allowing him to stay home and grieve (“Monsieur Malraux must not feel obligated to keep his promise”), but he graciously attended the state dinner at the Élysée Palace, looking “white and taut,” in Schlesinger’s description.

  The next day, Malraux escorted Jackie, with Lee beside her, to the Jeu de Paume to view the great collection of French Impressionist art. Jackie especially responded to seeing her favorite painting, Manet’s Olympia, reminiscent as it was of David’s famous reclining portrait of the French saloniste Madame Récamier. They next toured Malmaison, the home of Empress Josephine, whose French Empire style had always impressed Jackie. She learned that the influential decorator and art restorer Stéphane Boudin had done some of the restoration work, and she made note of that.

  For Lee, it must have felt like a repetition of their earlier meeting with the art critic Bernard Berenson, as Malraux focused his attention on Jackie while Lee trailed behind as part of Jackie’s entourage. Not only that, Lee had conflicting feelings about the idolatry being heaped upon her sister by the French press, particularly when they praised the First Lady’s style, couture, and knowledge of French painting, which had always been Lee’s special passions. The historic role that Jackie was now being asked to play seemed to seal Lee’s fate as Jackie’s sister-in-waiting.

  During the official visit, Jackie managed to make a brief escape from the watchful eyes of Tish Baldrige and her thick black notebooks that held the First Lady’s social obligations. She slipped out of the Queen’s Chamber at the opulently appointed Quai d’Orsay while her husband napped, and pressed one of the Secret Service agents into driving her around Paris, to take in the city she had fallen in love with as a college student. For forty-five minutes, she was free of the trappings of the presidency, happily touring the Parisian sights at dusk.

  One hundred fifty invited guests took part in the final state dinner, held in a dazzling, candlelit Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Jackie wore a stunning Givenchy gown with diamond clips in her hair. Bouvier cousin John Davis wrote in The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family that

  invitations to Versailles that evening were so highly coveted that scores of Americans and Parisians whose sense of self-importance had led them to assume they should have been invited, were forced to leave Paris rather than face the shame of having been excluded.

  Schlesinger watched Jackie’s triumph from afar, noting later:

  The Parisians cheered the President, but it was now apparent that as much as they liked him, it was his wife whom they adored. Her softly glowing beauty, her mastery of the language, her passion for the arts, her perfection of style—all were conquering the skeptical city. This was a good deal more than the instinctive French response to a charming woman. It had the air of a startled rediscovery of America as a new society, young and cosmopolitan and sophisticated . . .

  On the last day of his visit, Kennedy wittily remarked to the Paris Press Club at the Palais de Chaillot that he was “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.” As Davis has pointed out, not only did the French show their appreciation of the First Lady, Kennedy himself saw her with renewed respect, recognizing what an asset she was to his presidency: “In marrying her he had acquired what the Kennedys generally lacked: elegance, cosmopolitan appeal, and a link with the nation’s past.”

  Not surprisingly, Lee was feeling overwhelmed, overlooked, and underappreciated, so she was happy to encounter a cousin, Michel Bouvier, in a reception line at the Élysée Palace. At last, here was someone who knew her, and who provided a few moments of normalcy to the whirlwind state visit in which Jackie was hailed as an American queen. She had seen little of Michel since those halcyon days at Lasata, and she was thrilled when his wife, Kathleen, complimented her on her taffeta gown. Kathleen recalled Lee looking “young and happy and beautiful and terribly successful.”

  Malraux’s tragedy wasn’t the only one that marred the triumph of the Kennedys’ visit. Jackie’s popularity stirred an enthusiasm among the French to claim kinship with the graceful and sophisticated First Lady. A pretty young woman of nineteen named Danielle Bouvier, eldest daughter of a family of subsistence farmers who worked a two-acre plot in the small village of La Mirandole, was convinced that she was related to the First Lady. An American journalist had “discovered” her and her family and, soon after Kennedy’s election, sought to authenticate the connection. Danielle had never traveled far from her home, but she was fascinated by all things American, and was “especially fond of rock and roll, chewing gum, and blue jeans,” as Davis wrote. Egged on by the American journalist, Danielle started to dress like Jackie and adopted her bouffant hairdo, to much teasing from the townspeople.

  “If Jacqueline would only invite me to see her in America,” she pined, “my whole life would change.” The family wrote to the First Lady, and when they learned about her impending state visit, they made up their minds to travel to Paris to meet her.

  Jackie, for her part, had no way of knowing who among the many claimants were actually related to her, so Tish Baldrige and Pam Turnure decided to simply ignore the many requests from French Bouviers for an audience with the First Lady. But, miraculously, two French journalists turned up and told the Bouviers of Mirandole Farm that they had arranged an official visit with the Bouviers of Hammersmith Farm to meet the First Lady and her sister. It was decided that Danielle would be the one to travel to Paris, accompanied by her father. She was, of course, ecstatic. She hurriedly packed her finest dress of white silk in her only suitc
ase and left with the two journalists. She stopped in the village to buy a gift for her “American cousin”—a mechanical nightingale in a cage.

  The day before the Kennedys were due to arrive at Orly, Danielle, her father, and the two journalists set out on their journey to Paris. Two hours and a hundred kilometers into their trip, while making a dangerous curve, their car hit a tree and Danielle was killed in the accident. Everyone else in the car survived. Pulled from the wreckage was a broken birdcage with the toy nightingale. On the gift box the young woman had written, “For my dear cousin Jacqueline from her cousin Danielle.” A French archivist later proved that “the Bouviers of Mirandole Farm bore no blood relationship to the First Lady of the United States.”

  The Kennedys and their entourage—excluding Lee, who had returned to her home in London—hastened to a cold and grim Vienna for a cold and grim summit with Khrushchev, to discuss, among other topics, nuclear disarmament.

  Dressed in an elegant and seductive mermaid dress designed by Cassini, Jackie was ogled by the stocky, pugilistic Russian premier at an official dinner at the Schönbrunn Palace. Unlike her meetings with de Gaulle and Malraux, Jackie and Khrushchev had little to say to each other. She tried to talk about Ukrainian history, but he countered by extolling Ukraine under Communism. “Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics,” she replied, eliciting a big laugh from the premier. Searching for another topic of conversation, she remarked that one of the dogs that the Soviets had sent up into space had recently had a litter of puppies. “Why don’t you send me one?” she asked. Again Khrushchev laughed. But two months later, the Russian ambassador, Mikhail Menshikov, arrived at the White House “bearing a terrified small dog,” as Schlesinger wrote.

  Puzzled, Kennedy asked, “How did this dog get here?”

  “I’m afraid I asked Khrushchev for it in Vienna,” Jackie admitted. “I was just running out of things to say.”

  The Kennedys ended their state trip in London, where Kennedy met with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in June of 1961. While there, they were able to attend the christening of Lee’s daughter, Tina, at Westminster Cathedral, which had been postponed until the president and First Lady’s arrival. The private event was turned into a media circus, with press and photographers crowding around because of Kennedy’s presence, but Lee was used to that by now.

  The Kennedys stayed with Lee and Stas at 4 Buckingham Place, along with Dr. Jacobson, who lingered to administer his elixir to Jack and Jackie. Lee was unhappy about his visit, but as long as he entered through the garden and avoided meeting her, she allowed him in.

  It was not a typical party for the Radziwills. What with Jacobson stealthily entering through the garden, the CIA’s London station chief coming in through another entrance, and the men huddled together wringing their hands about how poorly the summit with Khrushchev had gone, there was little gaiety. For the first time in his young presidency, Kennedy had felt the full weight of his office, learning that seventy million Americans could be killed in a nuclear war with the Russians. He told his friend and supporter Joe Alsop, the Washington Post columnist, that he “will never back down, never, never, never” in his dealings with the Russian premier.

  Gloom hung over the London town house, alleviated somewhat when the president and First Lady, accompanied by Stas and Lee, were guests of Queen Elizabeth at a dinner at Buckingham Palace. It caused a bit of fussing in the English press, because Stas and Lee were officially invited as Prince and Princess Radziwill, a title Stas had been forced to abandon when he expatriated. Stas had often been referred to in the press as Prince Radziwill and Lee as Princess Radziwill, but after Kennedy’s election, which elevated the prince’s profile, there were now public grumblings when their titles were used. It was a point of contention for both of them. For Stas, whose aristocratic family went back several generations in Poland, using the title reflected his pride in his ancestry. It had been difficult for him to give up this connection to his past, though he often pretended that it didn’t matter so very much. But when a stolen silver place setting bearing the Radziwill family crest was presented to the exiled prince by Kennedy’s old friend Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, Stas openly wept.

  For Lee, the title reminded her that she had achieved a kind of nobility, like America’s de facto queen. After Jackie’s spectacular success in Paris she was now being celebrated in the realms that Lee had conquered first: European high society and haute couture. Time magazine dubbed Jackie “First Lady of Fashion.” Clint Hill, the Secret Service agent assigned to guard the First Lady, felt that she had “become more popular than Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Grace Kelly all put together.” Her popularity and style seemed to reach the farthest corners of the globe: Noël Coward noticed on a trip to the Fiji Islands in 1962 that the Fijians “all wear skirts regardless of gender. And as they all go in for ‘Jackie’ hair-dos, this is apt to cause confusion.”

  Lee looked on, wondering how her sister had managed to completely eclipse her in so short a time. As First Lady, Jackie had now trumped Lee in the admiring eyes of the world. From then on, Lee would always be referred to as Jackie’s younger sister. Davis explained:

  Her sister’s accession to the White House promised to magnify a problem Lee had to cope with for some time, the problem simply of being Jackie’s sister. Although she was abundantly gifted herself and was quite capable of shining on her own, she had often been obscured by the shadow of her sister’s prominence, and now that shadow threatened to eclipse her identity . . . If Lee felt any sibling resentment of her sister’s success, however, she was brave and intelligent enough not to show it.

  But she would long remember Prince Philip’s remark to her during the private dinner given by the queen: “You’re just like me—you have to walk three steps behind.”

  * * *

  KENNEDY LEFT FOR Washington right after the royal dinner at Buckingham Palace, but Jackie stayed on in London to be with her sister. They shopped, dined out with Lee’s friends, and when they left a private tour of an antique show at Grosvenor House, they found themselves surrounded by a gaggle of screaming teenage fans.

  The next morning, the two sisters left for a two-day trip to Greece, guests of the Greek prime minister, Constantine Karamanlis. But after the opulence of the Élysée Palace, Versailles, the Schönbrunn Palace, and Buckingham Palace, Karamanlis realized that his small Athens apartment wouldn’t do, so he enlisted shipping tycoon Markos Nomikos to lend them his sumptuous villa at Kavouri and the use of his 125-foot yacht, the Northwind, to cruise the Greek islands.

  Tish Baldrige accompanied them, and though she was just thirty-four, she played the role of Jackie’s taskmistress, chaperone, and chief organizer. The job of getting the villa ready for its exalted guests fell to her, as did coming up with their Greek itinerary and keeping the sisters on track. Organizing Jackie was a challenge, as Jackie wanted to do what she pleased, when it pleased her.

  The sisters blossomed in the sun-washed seascapes of Greece, sunbathing and swimming and sightseeing among ancient ruined temples. At first they adhered to Baldrige’s schedule, but behind her back they conspired to rebel against her and go their own way. Greece itself seemed to liberate them. Lee later described it as “a beautiful part of the world, covered with almond and lemon trees, set in a satin sea, with a magnificent coastline . . . silent with heat.” Finally, the sisters had a taste of real freedom. Being in Greece felt luxurious, elemental, and it harkened back to their sweet early memories of sun and sea at Lasata. They wandered into a pear orchard where a Greek farmer, not knowing who they were, gifted them with fresh warm pears fattened in the sun. Jackie described Greece, rather prophetically, as “a miracle . . . My dream is to have a house here to spend vacations with my children.”

  The sisters drew closer as they relished their two days of pleasure, and they reverted to their former wisecracking, mischief-making ways as Jacks and Pekes.

  Baldrige was annoyed. “There was whispering behind my back and cons
piratorial giggling,” she later complained. She was so exasperated that she turned to Kennedy for help, which only earned her the sobriquet of “chief tattler.” Jackie had always had a rebellious streak, mostly hidden beneath her shyness and her demeanor of a good, properly brought up girl. Lee—who also nurtured rebellion in her heart—encouraged and abetted Jackie in undermining Tish Baldrige’s strict schedule. Baldrige put it down to “a momentary lapse of selfishness going back to her school days”—they had been students together at Miss Porter’s—“of doing what she wanted, being independent, and stamping her foot.”

  As she had in Paris, one night Jackie slipped free of her minders, this time to go nightclubbing. At one such venue, she and Lee danced the kalamatianos, the exuberant ancient Greek folk dance in which all the dancers hold hands in a circle while the two lead dancers hold each end of a handkerchief.

  Back in the States, the press was taking note, giving Jackie a hard time with headlines designed to embarrass the new administration. The Washington Star announced, “First Lady Dances Till 1,” and Time magazine described her as speeding through the Greek countryside “in a Mercedes with young Crown Prince Constantine at the wheel.” There was even public clucking about Jackie being photographed in a bathing suit.

  Kennedy ordered Jackie back to the White House. He was suffering with excruciating back pain, and he needed her near him, not to mention wanting to quell the unflattering reports. Jackie spoke to her husband every night, commiserating with his back pain, but she refused to cut her holiday short. Her two-day vacation turned into eight. When she finally returned, a “tanned and radiant” Jackie was met by Kennedy’s limousine, the president slouched in the back seat, in too much pain to stand. Newsweek reported on her homecoming:

  [Jackie] flew into the arms of her husband, waiting for her in his car with his crutches at his side. As photographers clicked away and a crowd of 200 cheered, the First Couple kissed and chatted excitedly until, a trifle embarrassed, the President commanded his driver: “Come on, let’s go.”