by Sam Kashner
Mailer’s second impression, based on her performance as White House docent and decorator-in-chief, was that she resembled “a cat, narrow and wild, and her fur was being rubbed every which way.” He goes on to blast the tour as pummeling us with facts but giving us “no sense of the past” (“We do not create a better nation by teaching schoolchildren the catalogues of the White House”). He admits to feeling compassion for how hard she tried, how eager she was to please, but goes on to say, “At times, in her eyes, there was a blank, full look which one could recognize,” hyperbolically comparing it to the deadened look of a nineteen-year-old woman of his acquaintance who had slashed her wrists. From this extreme comparison, Mailer goes on to say that “it is to be hoped that Jackie Kennedy will come alive . . . I liked her, I like her still, but she was phony—it was the crudest thing one could say, she was a royal phony.”
Perhaps Mailer was put off by her upper-class, boarding school, East Coast accent (“lit-ter-a-ture”) and her proper attire and demeanor. In part it was a class bias, with Mailer fulfilling his usual role of being the proverbial bull in a nineteenth-century china shop. In part, it was the default criticism often levied by alpha males against pedestal-topping, unattainable women. But there is a kernel of genuine insight as well, when he writes:
There was something very difficult and very dangerous she was trying from deep within herself to do, dangerous not to her safety but to her soul. She was trying, I suppose, to be a proper First Lady and it was her mistake.
There was no sign of the rebellious ringleader of her days at Miss Porter’s, her sometimes sly, mocking wit, her deep engagement with language, literature, and poetry. Mailer had seen that Jackie was trapped in the proper role of First Lady. “Afterward,” he wrote about the White House tour, “one could ask what it was one wanted of her, and the answer was that she show herself to us as she is.” This was something that Jackie, in 1962, simply could not do.
Despite Mailer’s often sour complaints, Jackie’s White House tour was widely popular and won an Emmy. It was broadcast on Valentine’s Day to 46.5 million viewers, over CBS and NBC, and rebroadcast the following Sunday on ABC, when 10 million people watched the black-and-white hour-long program. Enchanted by her poise, her knowledge, her sweet decorum, America fell in love with Jackie all over again.
6
The Traveling Sisters
In 1963 Barbara Walters described Lee as Jackie’s “glamorous sister and closest friend.” Among other benefits, Lee gave Jackie an excuse to take extended stays away from the White House, on family vacations to Palm Beach, London, and the Amalfi Coast. In March of 1962, the White House sent both sisters on a three-week goodwill tour of India and Pakistan, which recaptured the sense of adventure they’d shared on their summer trip to Europe eleven years earlier and their splendid holiday in Greece the previous year. The trip had been suggested and arranged by John Kenneth Galbraith, then Kennedy’s ambassador to India and a favorite of Jackie’s.
The two sisters began their state visit in Rome, where Jackie had a private audience with Pope John XXIII on March 11, 1962. She was there to intercede on Lee’s behalf, asking for an annulment of Lee’s marriage to Michael Canfield, as their divorce had not been recognized by the Catholic Church. It was something that Stas, a devout Catholic, had especially wanted, so he and Lee could be married in the eyes of the Church three years after their civil ceremony. Lee had petitioned the Vatican in July of 1961, but the pope had refused to intervene. It took pressure from the Kennedys before he reluctantly agreed to hear Lee’s petition, and Jackie met with the pope for a half hour, where the two conversed in French. The next day, the sisters left Rome for India.
However much she loved light, Lee was almost blinded when she stepped off the plane in New Delhi on March 13, 1962, where a crowd of three thousand awaited them. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s prime minister, greeted them warmly, and they were encircled by women in brilliantly hued saris—“a sea of pink, fuchsia, turquoise against the most beautiful blue sky” was how Lee later described her first glimpse of India. Lee was impressed by Nehru, whom she described as “the most fascinating, gentle, and sensual man I ever met.” Over a hundred thousand people lined the road cheering as Jackie’s motorcade made its way slowly into New Delhi, shouting “Jackie, Jackie, welcome, Mrs. Kennedy!”—an echo of the Paris trip—as Lee sat silently beside her.
Throughout their visit, the two sisters were met by worshipping crowds who called Jackie “Ameriki Rani”—“American Queen”—looking upon Princess Lee Radziwill as her lady-in-waiting. Crowds surged around them, causing near riots in Agra, where Jackie was photographed in front of the Taj Mahal wearing a turquoise dress, which, as Galbraith later wrote in his Ambassador’s Journal: A Personal Account of the Kennedy Years, “could be picked out at any range up to five miles.” (Galbraith also wrote that the press paid “far too much attention to the subject of clothes . . . designer, dress, handbag, and so forth.” Not surprising, as the two sisters between them had brought sixty-four pieces of luggage.)
At the Maharaja and Maharani of Jaipur’s Amber Palace, thousands of children danced and sang to welcome the First Lady. They drove to Amber, a twelfth-century city in the Rajput hills, where they climbed atop one of the liveried royal elephants, among hundreds of photographers.
Jackie and Lee, perhaps realizing that their usual muted beiges would not stand out in India, wore pinks and lavenders throughout their trip, mostly designed by Oleg Cassini, Lee mixing it up with some peach and lemon yellow. In Karachi, Pakistan, they rode a ceremonial camel, where they were perched sidesaddle in sleeveless summer dresses and high heels. At first Jackie was reluctant to climb onto the camel’s back, so Lee mounted first and took a seat in front, holding the reins until Jackie ordered, “Hand me the reins, Lee,” and she did.
The sisters embraced the local customs. Jackie “threw holi chalk powder, ate wild boar and candies wrapped in pounded silver, watched endless folk dancing and singing.” She even made the attempt to stand on her head as Nehru demonstrated yoga postures. They made the grand tour of India’s most stunning sights: in Agra, the Taj Mahal flooded with moonlight; in Lahore, the Shalimar Gardens; the historic Khyber Pass bordering Afghanistan, through which Genghis Khan once rode. In Lahore, more than a thousand men marched in their honor, each one holding aloft a burning torch. They took a train ride across the Ganges Plain in a luxurious imperial train that had once belonged to the last viceroy of India. They cruised the Ganges, the sacred river of India, in a barge covered with marigolds. They were met by massive crowds everywhere they went, and were showered with gifts—flowers, saris, books, jewel-encrusted daggers, and carpets too big for them to carry. “At the end of each day, we would collapse with exhaustion and laughter, shaking our heads at the incredible events,” Lee would write some fifty-three years later, sitting in her New York apartment graced by artifacts from that long-ago trip.
At a party given for Jackie by the Maharaja of Jaipur at the Amber Palace, Jackie and Lee had the heady pleasure of teaching their royal hosts how to do the Twist. “Do you know the Twist?” Jackie had asked her hosts, and when they said no, the two sisters enthusiastically demonstrated the dance. East meets West.
The very European maharaja and his wife were already good friends of Lee’s, yet the focus of attention was always on Jackie, who was aware of how Lee was being overlooked throughout their trip. She tried to “compensate for Lee’s so obviously inferior position, being relegated to the back of motorcades, overlooked, and sometimes even left behind,” as one Kennedy biographer noted. Jackie was becoming “the most photographed woman in the world,” the society photographer Cecil Beaton wrote in his diaries. “She is still the most photogenic person in the world, infinitely more so than her infinitely more beautiful sister, Lee Radziwill.” At one point, Jackie was so besieged by autograph seekers that Lee stepped in and signed autographs for her sister, as their plump, rounded handwriting was so much alike.
Nehru was particularly re
sponsive to women, and particularly the Bouvier sisters. Where he had been bored and taciturn in talks with Kennedy earlier that year, he had come to life seated between Jackie and Lee at a state dinner in his honor at the White House. Now in India, at the end of their tour, Nehru and Jackie sat together at the American embassy’s garden. Nehru in his white jacket sporting a red rose and Jackie in a red-and-white dress sat on the steps and talked and laughed together, obviously enjoying each other’s company. Galbraith believed it enhanced India and America’s international relationship, because Nehru was India, and Jackie was America.
At the end of the trip, Jackie confessed to Lee that she much preferred India to Pakistan, which they subsequently visited. Pakistan was “a man’s country” in which the women were still in purdah, whereas there were many prominent women in India to whom the men were “agreeable and responsive.”
On their wildly successful ambassadorial trip, Jackie had relied on Lee for companionship and refuge. Barbara Walters, who was assigned to accompany the tour as a writer-reporter for the Today show, later wrote that Lee was “at her best” as Jackie’s companion, “conducting herself with dignity, warmth, and—for the most part—good judgment whenever she travels with the First Lady and shares with her the world spotlight.” And Galbraith, who knew both women well, was impressed at how Lee comported herself through the visit. “Lee was wonderful, Lee was very good. She was the ideal sister.” Jackie thought so, too. She later said to Joan Braden, who had been Jackie’s ghostwriter during the presidential campaign and who accompanied Jackie and Lee on the trip, “I was so proud of her.”
Although the outpouring of adulation for Jackie took its toll on Lee, it didn’t stop her from inviting Jackie on a lavish family vacation just three months later, in June of 1962, at a cliff-top villa in Conca dei Marini, Italy, near Amalfi in the Bay of Salerno.
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THE NINE-HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD VILLA, called El Episcopio, was perched 1200 feet above the Bay of Salerno and was reached by climbing three hundred rocky steps from a private beach below. Lee especially loved the Amalfi Coast, another world of sea and light. In addition to Stas and their two children, and Jackie and four-year-old Caroline, Lee invited several friends, including Gianni and Marella Agnelli, to join them.
Lee had gone to great lengths to prepare a fabulous vacation for her sister and niece, as a way of reciprocating the imperial hospitality Jackie had afforded Lee and Stas at the White House over the past two years. She wanted everything to be perfect, which put her nerves on edge to the point that she suddenly fired her cook forty-eight hours before her guests were to arrive, sending out for a French chef to step in at the last minute. She organized local security to supplement that provided by Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who arrived with the First Lady.
It was perfect. When Jackie and Caroline arrived in Ravello, they were met by the mayor, dancing children, and a live band in the brightly festooned piazza. The only drawback was a paparazzi riot that thronged the town to photograph the First Lady. But once the guests made their way through the villa’s stone arches and wrought iron gate, their two-week vacation was sublime. Taking in the sweeping view of the aquamarine sea and the scent of blossoming lemon and orange trees, Jackie turned to her sister and said, “Oh, Lee, it’s just magnificent.”
In the evenings, looking down from the villa’s terrace, they could see the fishing boats and moored yachts strung with white lights glinting in the Bay of Salerno. Besides the pleasures of the villa, the private beach, the excellent local food, the sun and the sea, they sailed on the Agnellis’ eighty-two-foot, two-masted yawl (the Agneta) and spent a night on the fashionable Isle of Capri as guests of Italy’s leading fashion designer, Princess Irene Galitzine (creator of high-end lounging pajamas favored by the newly dubbed “jet set”). They were serenaded by three singers at Galitzine’s villa, then departed to Capri’s most fashionable nightclub, where they danced till the early hours. Returning to Conca dei Marini at dawn, the boating party boisterously sang “Volare.”
The Agneta turned out to be a refuge from their refuge, as it allowed them to escape what Jackie termed “the locusts”—the constant flashbulbs of photographers vying for pictures of the First Lady.
Cropped photographs showing Jackie striding alongside Gianni Agnelli gave rise to rumors of a liaison between them—just as there had been rumors of an affair between Lee and Gianni. But the constant presence of Gianni’s wife, Marella, and Secret Service agent Clint Hill casts doubt on that rumor. Another photograph of Gianni about to apply suntan lotion to a black-bathing-suit-clad Jackie further fueled the rumors, but a countess who knew Gianni well felt that Gianni would not have wanted the complications of such an affair. And Jackie was writing ten-page letters to Jack describing her sun-swept days: “I miss you very much, which is nice though it is also a bit sad—because it is always best to leave someone when you are happy & this was such a lovely summer . . . but then I think of how lucky I am to miss you . . .” She waited up till 3 a.m. for his phone calls, including two incoming calls that were from an imposter.
They took a day trip down the coast to the ancient city of Paestum, originally named Poseidonia after Poseidon, the Greek god of the sea, and known for its well-preserved Greco-Roman temples. Without a port for the Agneta, the party was rowed ashore in a rather rough sea, then rowed back among a gaggle of photographers who had found them out.
After two glorious weeks, Jackie opted to stay on an additional week. These had been halcyon days for both sisters and their children, and Lee would devote pages to their Ravello adventure in her first book, Happy Times, describing their stay as
carefree, with no set hours for lunch or dinner except that they were very late. Only a vague rhythm existed, of waking to hear fishermen below calling to one another, the hum of the motorboat in the distance, then the shutters opening over an endless stretch of sea.
Just before Jackie departed, she was made an honorary citizen of Ravello, and the Conca dei Marini beach where they swam every day was renamed the Jacqueline Kennedy Beach—an honor not extended to Lee.
* * *
FOUR MONTHS AFTER Jackie and Lee’s excellent adventure, the agonizing thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis gripped the Western world. The crisis began on October 16, 1962, when a photographic mission revealed that the Soviets had begun installing ballistic missiles in Cuba. It quickly escalated into a confrontation between the two nuclear nations, bringing the world to the brink of mutual annihilation. Jackie—and, soon after, Lee—would be among the first to know that something was terribly wrong.
In an interview with Arthur Schlesinger for the Kennedy archives, Jackie recalled that she was with her children at Glen Ora, sunbathing, when “this call came through from Jack and he said, ‘I’m coming back to Washington this afternoon. Why don’t you come back there?’” She remembered that “there was just something funny in his voice . . . it was so unlike him.”
She quickly woke her children from their naps and returned to Washington, later saying, “When you’re married to someone and they ask something—that’s the whole point of being married—you just must sense trouble in their voice and mustn’t ask why.” For the next thirteen days, the world held its breath. “It seemed there was no waking or sleeping,” Jackie remembered.
Kennedy responded by placing a naval blockade around Cuba and insisting that the missiles be removed. Many members of the cabinet, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and White House personnel made arrangements for their wives and children to leave town, but Jackie pleaded with her husband, “Don’t send me away to Camp David. Please don’t send me anywhere. If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you . . . even if there’s not room in the bomb shelter in the White House.” She told Kennedy that she just wanted “to be on the lawn when it happens . . . I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you—and the children do too—[rather] than live without you.”
Kennedy promised not to send them away.
; Jackie also recalled one late night during the crisis when she tiptoed into Kennedy’s bedroom, dressed in her nightgown. “I thought he was talking on the phone . . . and suddenly, I saw him waving me away—‘Get out, get out!’” National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy was in deep consultation with the president. Bundy “threw both hands over his eyes,” Jackie recalled. “Poor Puritan Bundy, to see a woman running in her nightgown!”
She also recalled never feeling closer to Kennedy than during the days and nights of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads:
. . . that’s the time I’ve been closest to him, and I never left the house or saw the children, and when he came home, if it was for sleep or for a nap, I would sleep with him. And I’d walk by his office all the time and sometimes he would take me out—it was funny—for a walk around the lawn. He didn’t often do that. We just sort of walked quietly, then go back in. It was just this vigil.
Lee and Stas were staying with Jackie during what Lee later described as “the most memorable, extraordinary time of the White House years that I knew.”
There was one moment nearing the end when we—that’s Jackie, the president, and myself—were in their private rooms upstairs, and the phone rang and it was McGeorge Bundy saying that there was extreme trouble ahead . . . the President put down the phone and said, “In three minutes we’ll know if we’re at all-out war or not.” . . . You pictured missiles rising all over the world, submarines submerged . . .
She remembered that the phone rang after an agonizing few minutes. “The President had an extraordinarily tense expression on his face and hung up and said, ‘The Russian ships turned back.’”
