These Few Precious Days

by Christopher Andersen

  Once the four-day visit was over, Jackie headed off for what wound up being a three-month vacation. No longer willing to spent her holiday cheek by jowl with the rest of the clan, she convinced her husband to rent a seven-bedroom house outside the Kennedy compound from the popular tenor Morton Downey, who also happened to be an old friend of the Kennedy family. The Downey house was located on Squaw Island, less than a mile from the rest of the Kennedys, and Jackie made it clear that she intended to divide her time between there and Glen Ora.

  In the meantime, Jack was left to his own devices back in Washington. “Frankly,” Baldrige said, “we all felt rather sorry for the President because there were these long stretches when Jackie was never there.” Smathers saw things a little differently. “There were times when he wanted Jackie around, when he missed her and the kids,” he said, “But then he knew that being at the White House could put her in one of those black moods of hers. So naturally, after a while he started looking forward to her being out of town so he’d be free to do what he wanted.”

  Helen Chavchavadze, Diana de Vegh, and especially Mary Meyer took up the slack that summer. None were as bold as the guileless intern Mimi, who made no attempt to conceal her sleepovers with the president; each morning when she awoke in JFK’s bed, she was politely greeted by JFK’s trusted valet, George Thomas (“Too discreet and loyal,” she recalled, “to ever hint that he disapproved of my presence”).

  As with the other women in what one Secret Service agent called JFK’s “private stock,” there was nothing remotely romantic about the way Jack treated Mimi. “I don’t remember him ever kissing me—not hello, not goodbye, not even during sex,” Mimi later wrote. Nor would she ever call him anything but “Mr. President.” But Mimi also insisted what they had was “sexual, intimate, passionate.”

  With the exception of Marilyn, it appears none of Jack’s other lovers considered themselves to be in serious competition with Jackie. “I never knew if Jackie knew,” Helen Chavchavadze conceded, “but I felt uncomfortable about her.” Mimi did not share Chavchavadze’s sense of apprehension concerning Jackie, but she was impressed with “the great care the President took to shield his wife from his infidelities. I believe he placed her on a pedestal as the perfect partner … And he planted that pedestal in a private space where all his ‘other women,’ including me, would never be permitted to enter.”

  “I just hate to be a thing,” Marilyn told writer Richard Meryman for a Life magazine cover story that hit newsstands on August 3, 1962. The next evening, after quarreling with Bobby, she called Peter Lawford from her home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. Marilyn’s psychiatrist had just left after giving her a sedative, she was drinking, and she had also taken sleeping pills. “Say goodbye to Pat,” she slurred to Lawford, “say goodbye to the President, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’ve been a good guy.” On Sunday morning, August 5, Marilyn’s lifeless, nude body was found sprawled on her bed. The official cause of death was acute barbiturate poisoning—a “probable suicide,” ruled Los Angeles County coroner Thomas Noguchi.

  The American public reacted to Marilyn’s sudden death with shock and disbelief. Yet no one made a connection between the doomed sex goddess and the handsome president. “The President and Marilyn Monroe? Lovers? Are you kidding me?” Tish Baldrige asked incredulously. “You might just as well have said little green men from Mars had just landed on the White House lawn. That would have been far more plausible to most Americans.”

  Jack, who was spending that weekend with Jackie and the kids on Cape Cod, made no public comment about Marilyn’s death. Behind the scenes, however, JFK’s reaction to the news confirmed Jackie’s worst suspicions. Peter Lawford and Bobby were burning up the lines to Hyannis Port. Among other things, there was genuine concern that evidence at Marilyn’s house—not to mention those tapes the FBI now allegedly had in their possession—might tie her to the Kennedys.

  Damage control was something with which Jackie had become all too familiar. “The possibility that she might be humiliated or embarrassed really got to her,” Smathers said. “She didn’t like it, not one damn bit.” While Jack returned to the White House to carry on business as usual, an irate and frustrated Jackie fled with Caroline and twelve Secret Service agents to Ravello, the picturesque village on Italy’s Amalfi Coast where the Radziwills rented a clifftop villa with a breathtaking view of the Bay of Salerno. Abruptly leaving the country was Jackie’s “way of telling him,” Smathers said, “that he’d gone too far this time.”

  The paparazzi shadowed her every move, clicking away as Jackie shopped, water-skied, dined, swam, sunbathed, visited local nightclubs, and simply strolled Ravello’s narrow streets. Unfazed, she took Caroline to an ice cream party with local children at the home of an American friend. Later that day, Jackie scrawled a ten-page letter to “Dearest, Dearest Jack” in which she lamented being apart: “I miss you very much … I know I exaggerate everything but I feel sorry for everyone else …” In the end, she told her husband that thinking of him was “the only thing I have to give & I hope it matters to you.”

  But in Washington, Jack was fuming over gossip that his wife had decided to extend her Italian escapade from two weeks to four because of another Radziwill house guest, the suave and very rich Gianni Agnelli. The president was able to keep his temper in check until wire services ran photos of Gianni and Jackie swimming together off Agnelli’s eighty-two-foot sloop the Agneta. In a cable fired off to his wife, Jack demanded A LITTLE MORE CAROLINE AND LESS AGNELLI. The next morning, papers around the world were filled with photos of the first lady and the Italian auto magnate scuba-diving together.

  La Bella Jackie, as she was now being called in the local press, won even more Italian hearts after a devastating quake struck Naples, some twenty miles away. “The past two weeks have reaffirmed my admiration and affection for the people of this part of the world,” she said in a statement. “That they, who give so much in heart and spirit, should suffer loss of life and home is truly a calamity.”

  The first lady’s heartfelt remarks proved her worth as a goodwill ambassador once again, but that didn’t prevent Jack from placing several transatlantic calls pleading with Jackie to stay away from Agnelli and return home. “He could be very jealous when it came to Jackie,” Salinger said, “and it wasn’t just because he was worried it might look bad. He was always imagining she might be up to something, and you’d have to reassure him.”

  Oleg Cassini confirmed that JFK was very possessive when it came to his wife, even more so after they entered the White House. “But if she had slept with somebody other than him,” said Cassini, whose own reputation as a Don Juan made him suspect to JFK at the beginning, “it would have been disaster for her.” The designer felt that, beyond being perpetually “irritated” over her husband’s infidelities, Jackie had no interest in getting even.

  Once again, Jack was able to separate the other women in his life from the unique relationship he had with his wife. “Believe it or not,” Betty Spalding said, “Jack was jealous of Jackie seeing any other man, even a pal like Bill Walton, because he was convinced she was doing the same thing he was doing.”

  It wasn’t all work and no play for Jack that summer, either. He did manage a long weekend sailing off the coast of Maine and a trip to Los Angeles, where he was mobbed by squealing, swimsuit-clad women as he tried to take an impromptu dip in the Pacific.

  At the end of August, the first lady and Caroline finally joined JFK and John in Newport. For the next six weeks, Jackie and the children stayed at Hammersmith Farm while Jack spent much of his time conferring with advisers about Soviet intentions in Berlin and Cuba.

  EVEN BEFORE SHE LEFT RAVELLO, Jackie was drawing up guest lists for the small weekend dinner parties she hoped would entertain Jack in Newport. For the president, nothing could top what they had planned for September 15: watching the eighteenth America’s Cup final between the American sloop Weatherly and Australia’s first-ever contender, the Gr
etel, in Narragansett Bay.

  On the eve of the race, the Kennedys—he in black tie and nursing his customary Cuban panatela, she bare-shouldered in another provocative sheath by Cassini—seemed right at home presiding over the official America’s Cup reception at the Breakers, once the palatial summer “cottage” of the Vanderbilts. For much of the evening the president and first lady were locked in intimate conversation; sitting at a long banquet table, she leaned close in and whispered bits of gossip, and he reacted with amazed looks and the occasional burst of laughter. “Of course everybody was staring at them,” Salinger recalled, “wondering what they were saying to each other. They looked like a happy young married couple out on a date, having the time of their lives.”

  Yet when he stood to speak that night, Jack waxed poetic about his connection to the sea—words that decades later would be quoted at the funeral of his own son. “We have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears,” he told the well-heeled crowd. “We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it, we are going back from whence we came.”

  THE NEXT DAY JACK AND Jackie sidled up to each other again, this time watching the Weatherly defeat the Gretel, from the deck of the destroyer Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. At times, Jackie sat at her husband’s feet while he watched the race through binoculars. “It was just like the dinner at the Breakers,” Salinger said. “They were exchanging intimacies, and everyone else was trying to read their lips.”

  On September 23, Jackie made a quick solo stop in New York to attend the nationally televised opening of Philharmonic Hall, the first of several concrete-and-glass buildings that were to make up the new arts complex called Lincoln Center. After conducting the world premiere of a new work by Aaron Copland, the Kennedys’ old friend Leonard Bernstein committed a social gaffe for which he was excoriated in the press: he kissed Jackie on the cheek. What bothered Jack, apparently, wasn’t that Bernstein kissed his wife. It was the fact that Bernstein was “dripping wet” while doing it. “That sweaty, awful conductor kissing this gorgeous creature, coast to coast on television, was just not permissible … Horrible.”

  Jackie merely laughed it off. “Oh, Lenny, really,” she later told him. “People treat me like some porcelain doll, and I’m around horses all day that sweat buckets. And that’s hardly the most disgusting thing I see them do.”

  The Kennedys began to wind down their ten-day September vacation by hosting a lunch for Ayub Khan. Eager to show the Pakistani president how thrilled she was with Sardar, the horse he had given her, Jackie insisted they ride together at Glen Ora. The following evening, the Kennedys attended a special performance of Irving Berlin’s new Kennedy-inspired musical, Mr. President, at Washington’s National Theatre. While Berlin’s show turned out to be a dud, the extravagant midnight dinner dance for six hundred thrown at the British Embassy afterward was—thanks to the presence of Jack and Jackie—one of the year’s social highlights.

  As expected, necks craned as the president and first lady, this time wearing a shimmering pink silk gown that had been given to her by King Saud of Saudi Arabia, made their entrance. Surprisingly upbeat given the theatrical fiasco they had just endured (“An old-fashioned dud” was the verdict of the New York Journal-American), Jackie and Jack mingled, laughed, and danced until 2:30 a.m.—only leaving when JFK literally took Jackie’s arm and pulled her toward the exit. Everyone marveled at the first couple’s stamina—unaware that they were both being bolstered by regular amphetamine and steroid shots, courtesy of Max Jacobson.

  “They weren’t faking it,” said Jacques Lowe, who never failed to be amazed by the way the Kennedys “brought the world to a complete standstill” whenever they walked into a room. “They enjoyed being in each other’s company. Jackie wanted her privacy and she wasn’t always around, but she more than made up for that when she was. Alone, they were incredible, but together—and I know it sounds corny to say it—they were magic.”

  The next day, JFK summoned Dr. Max for another series of shots, this time to give him the energy to deal with the looming prospect of race riots in the South. Just days after the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, twenty-eight-year-old James Meredith had been barred from registering as the first black student at the all-white University of Mississippi by that state’s governor, Ross Barnett.

  Forced to confront the volatile issue of race relations head-on, Kennedy canceled plans to join Jackie and the children at Hammersmith Farm and hunkered down with his top domestic advisers. After a series of conflicting reports from the field and bizarre phone conversations between Jack and a vacillating Barnett (“You knew the man was an inferior person to begin with,” Jackie sniped), the president addressed the nation. He pledged that Meredith would register safely the next day. He then sat down at a table that had been owned by Ulysses S. Grant and signed an executive order sending federal troops to desegregate Ole Miss. They did—but not before rioters armed with rocks, bottles, and guns killed two people and injured two hundred.

  Twice during the crisis—at midnight and then at 5 a.m.—Jack woke Jackie in Newport to vent his frustrations. “Oh, my God!” he told her over the phone. “You wouldn’t believe this.” Jackie was impressed by her husband’s self-control as he worked through the night to get Army troops to the Ole Miss campus. “There was never rage there,” she recalled. “It was just so hopeless. I guess that was one of the worst nights of his whole life.”

  Yet Jackie was moved that the president took time out from conferring with his team of domestic advisers to reach out to his wife. “You know, I was so touched that he called me,” she said, “and just wanted to talk.”

  JFK may have been motivated, to some degree, by guilt. Around this time, Mimi Beardsley informed Dave Powers that she might be pregnant—no surprise, really, since JFK never used condoms and Mimi knew nothing about birth control. Abortions were illegal at the time, but Powers told the coed to stay calm. Within an hour, he put her in touch with a woman in Newark, New Jersey, who, in turn, gave her the number of a doctor willing to do the job. The need for Powers to distance himself and the president from the whole procedure was obvious. “Even the docile White House press corps,” she later wrote, “couldn’t have averted their eyes from that story.” As it turned out, Mimi wasn’t pregnant, and no mention was made of the episode again. But, she would admit decades later, “I shudder to think what other cleanup jobs Dave Powers was asked to do for his boss.”

  On October 9, Jackie packed up the kids and returned to Washington. The next night, she and Jack hosted an intimate dinner party that included Federal Aviation Administration chief Najeeb Halaby, noted San Francisco architect John Warnecke, Bill Walton, and Walton’s supposed date for the evening—Mary Meyer. Although JFK and Meyer had been alone at the White House several times, this was the first time she and Jackie actually sat across from each other at the dinner table. To make matters even more awkward, JFK had to be helicoptered to Baltimore to give a speech; he could only stay with his guests for drinks in the Yellow Oval Room and then return after dinner for coffee.

  That evening, according to the other guests, there were no stolen moments or knowing looks from Mary or Jack. Jackie, who spent part of the evening deep in conversation with Warnecke about efforts to save Washington’s historic Lafayette Square, held down the fort until the presidential helicopter returned shortly after nine. “Lovely and gracious but totally inscrutable—that’s how they handled things,” said Baldrige. “If Jackie knew someone was sleeping with her husband, she’d never let on—and certainly not to the person in question. That just wasn’t her style.”

  Cassini, one of the relative chosen few frequently invited to the first couple’s intimate White House dinners, chalked it all up to Jackie’s “natural dignity. She was a woman of great pride. If she and Jack had had a fight ten minutes before, she would never have shown it.”

  “They both considered 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue sacrosanct,” Baldrige agreed. “She wore a mask.�
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  I want to be with you, and I want to die with you—and the children do too—rather than live without you.

  —JACKIE TO JACK, AS THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS UNFOLDED

  They did have a sex life. She talked about that intimately with me. She loved him dearly, and I felt they were getting much closer together.

  —JIM REED, LONGTIME KENNEDY FRIEND

  8

  “But What About All the Children?”

  OCTOBER 20, 1962

  A SATURDAY

  Jackie stretched out languidly in the warm sun of an Indian summer, glad to be back at her beloved Glen Ora. In keeping with her usual routine, she had arrived with the children the previous day, hoping for another much-needed break from the pressures of Washington. She was surprised when Provi said the president, who had been speaking in Chicago, was on the phone.

  “I’m coming back to Washington this afternoon,” he said. “Why don’t you and the children join me there?”

  When she asked him why, Jack paused for a moment. “Well, never mind,” he said. “Why don’t you just come back to Washington?”

  “There was something funny in his voice,” she recalled. “I could tell something was wrong … That’s the whole point of being married—you just must sense trouble in their voice and mustn’t ask why.”