Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  That same week, Jackie and George Smathers were dancing together at a White House gathering. “I know you and Jack get so tired of this sort of stuffy function,” Smathers recalls her saying to him. “I know that you’d much rather be sailing with Jack down the Potomac on The Honey Fitz with some pretty girls, like Marilyn [presumably Monroe].” When Smathers protested, Jackie said, “Oh, please, George. Don’t give me that. I’ve watched you guys too long. I know what’s going on, and I’m not fooled by any of it. When are you two going to grow up?”

  George Smathers didn’t have an answer to her question.

  “That’s what I thought,” Jackie said as she broke free of his hold.

  Jackie, Ethel, and Joan each felt the sting of a cheating husband, and their shared experiences caused them to unite in a special sisterhood. Shortly after the incident in the Lincoln Room, Jackie hosted one of her small dinner parties at the White House. The sisters-in-law sat with their husbands, Jack, Bobby, and Ted, and a few other friends. After dinner in the White House dining room, beautifully refurbished in an American Federal motif, they adjourned to the Treaty Room for cigars, coffee, and liquor. Once used as a cabinet room by President Andrew Johnson, it had been transformed by Jackie into the Treaty Room, with Grant furniture and framed facsimiles of all the treaties that had been signed in it through the years. (Always with an eye toward history, she would ask Jack, when the time came, to sign the U.S.–Soviet Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in this room, which he did.) There was no personal covenant in the Treaty Room this evening, however, as a brief and heated exchange occurred between Ted and Joan. According to a witness who worked as a social secretary to Ethel at the time, all were eating their soufflé au chocolat when Ted and Joan began discussing a young secretary who worked for Ted. Joan hinted that she felt Ted was becoming “just a little too close” to the woman.

  “This is not the place to discuss it,” Ted said angrily. Joan opened her mouth to protest, but Ted silenced her with a stern look. After an uncomfortable moment, he popped open a bottle of 1959 Dom Perignon, poured the bubbly into a glass, and handed it to Joan.

  “She feels better after she’s had a little drink,” he told the others with a chuckle.

  “Don’t we all,” Ethel said, wryly.

  Humiliated, Joan put the drink down and ran from the room. Jackie, who was drinking a daiquiri, handed it to Jack without a word, got up, and followed Joan. After a beat, Ethel rose and followed her sisters-in-law.

  The Bouviers

  Why would an intelligent, beautiful, and graceful woman such as America’s youngest First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, put up with such flagrant infidelity from her husband? The answer is as complex as the woman herself. Part of solving the puzzle is in understanding the qualities and feelings Jackie developed through her relationships with her parents.

  While there were a number of superficial similarities between the backgrounds of Ethel Skakel and Jacqueline Bouvier, there were also important distinctions. Though both women came from wealth, the manners by which they were raised couldn’t have been more different. Ethel was raised in a home full of pistol-shooting, car-wrecking juvenile delinquents, and she enjoyed every second of it. That kind of lifestyle would have appalled Jackie, who had enjoyed a genteel, elegant upbringing.

  John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier, Jackie’s father, was a personable and self-confident man, a world-class rogue who had always exuded a sensual charisma. Devilishly handsome, with dark, slicked-back hair and a Clark Gable mustache, Black Jack earned his nickname because of his potent sex appeal and his legendary womanizing, not to mention his year-round suntan. Although his father, known as The Major, was a much-admired lawyer, and Jack himself had a seat on the stock exchange, he was not an erudite, serious person. A man who insisted on living his life recklessly, he gambled compulsively, drank to excess, squandered his money, and borrowed from nearly everyone he knew in order to maintain his lavish lifestyle. His charm was so great, though, that both men and women tended to forgive him his excesses—as well as his debts.

  Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, was a sometimes confounding woman whose love for money and status practically ruled her life. Janet had created a fanciful story about her family tree, saying she was of French aristocratic background, and then handed the myth down to Jackie. For Jackie, just as it was for her mother, even in the early days image was everything. Janet had even managed to put together a phony genealogy to prove her heritage to skeptics. She was actually just following the lead of her father, James T. Lee, who had claimed he was the son of a high-ranking Confederate officer in the Civil War, and also that he was born in New York City. Neither assertion was true.

  Janet passed down to both her daughters the imperative to improve their social standings and acquire wealth. Her own father had risen from the slums of Manhattan’s Lower East Side and made a fortune in real estate development. Merely having money, however, wasn’t enough for Janet; she yearned to be a part of high society. So she overlooked Black Jack’s shady reputation and accepted an offer of marriage from him, mostly because of the reputation of his father and the prestige he held in social circles. Marrying into the Bouvier family was likely to improve her station in life. Ironically, while she married him because of his family’s pedigree, he married her for her family’s money: Sometimes he had his own, sometimes he did not, so it was a good idea for him to marry into wealth. Janet didn’t let on to Black Jack that her family’s wealth was also overstated. Still, she and her new husband managed to settle in the wealthy resort town of Southampton, on the eastern end of Long Island, New York.

  John and Janet would have two daughters: Jacqueline, born on July 29, 1929, just months before the stock market crash decimated the fortunes of so many Wall Street financiers; and Caroline Lee (known as Lee), born three and a half years later.

  From all accounts, Jackie was a headstrong, precocious child. Her mother imparted her own love of riding to Jackie, and both mother and daughter rode in horse shows together. Jackie started competing at five years of age and was as competitive as any Kennedy when it came to winning blue ribbons.

  Even as a child, Jackie learned out of necessity not to reveal her feelings. In September 1936, Janet insisted on a six-month separation from Black Jack that later resulted in divorce. In those days divorce was not the common occurrence it is today, and Janet made it appear even more lurid by leaking a story to the newspapers that she was divorcing her husband because of adultery; she even identified his mistresses by name. Jackie, who quickly became the object of much schoolgirl gossip, immersed herself in her studies and spent more time than usual on her riding lessons, as though nothing unusual was happening.

  In 1940, when Jackie was eleven, her parents divorced. Janet soon bettered her social position by marrying an even wealthier man, Hugh Dudley “Hughdie” Auchincloss, an investment banking attorney whose fortune was seemingly secure. Auchincloss had three children from his previous marriages and would have two more with Janet.

  In her new life with her stepfather, Jackie would experience a lifestyle even more lavish than the one to which she had grown accustomed, and she would take full advantage of the resources her privileged world afforded her. Attending the best schools available, she excelled in her studies. Because she was able to travel, she mastered four languages and acquired a vast knowledge of foreign cultures. Surrounded by the finest things in life, she developed impeccable taste and an appreciation for art, music, literature, and architecture.

  The Auchinclosses divided their time between two estates. The first was Hammersmith Farm, overlooking Narragansett Bay in Newport, Rhode Island. This was a sprawling, twenty-eight-room mansion with thirteen fireplaces and a working farm that supplied the Newport naval base with eggs and milk. Because so many of the local farmhands had gone to war, all of the children were put to work; Jackie was responsible for feeding two thousand chickens each day. The other Auchincloss home was Merrywood, located on forty-six acres and fronting the Potomac River in Vir
ginia. The property included an indoor badminton court, stables, an Olympic-size pool, and a kitchen with enough facilities to serve three hundred people. Yet the opulence was all a charade. Just as Black Jack could never hang on to his money and was always in debt, Auchincloss had similar financial problems due to bad investments and poor management. Whether the family had enough money to support its lifestyle was always a big concern, and Jackie learned to live with it. If she was going to marry for wealth, she would be sure that the gentleman she was marrying truly was wealthy and not just acting wealthy.

  Although there was a rancorous tug-of-war between Jackie’s mother and father for the beautiful, dark-eyed child’s affections, Jackie and her natural father shared an almost obsessive love for one another. When she went to Vassar College (making the Dean’s List in her first year), she kept photos of her father in her room and spoke of him constantly, For his part, Black Jack’s New York apartment was filled with many stunning pictures and expensive oil paintings, some of Lee, but many more of Jackie. John Davis recalls, “Jackie so loved being with her father, it was as if she just bathed in his compliments of her. Janet would notice this, and it would drive her completely up the wall. She was very jealous of the way Jackie idolized her father.”

  The love Jackie had for her father, along with the social ambition inspired by her mother and the penchant she had for the finer things in life, all came together to form the model of what she wanted in a mate. Unlike her mother, Jackie would not marry only to improve her status, though that was a consideration. Instead, she would wait until she met a man with whom she could actually fall in love and who also happened to embody the qualities she was looking for: a wealthy person who would match her in intelligence and ambition, yet someone who also had the swagger and panache of her adored father. She had dated a number of men and was even briefly engaged to one—John Husted, a handsome investment banker—before settling on a young senator from Massachusetts, John F Kennedy. The two met in May 1951 at a party hosted by newsman and Kennedy family friend Charles Bartlett and his wife, Martha. Although Jackie was still in college, she had enough poise to interest Jack, twelve years older and a man who reminded her very much of her own father. “Jackie, who was a college senior at the time, couldn’t have been attracted to a man unless he was dangerous, like her father,” Lem Billings once observed. “It was Freudian. Jack knew about her attraction to Black Jack and even discussed it with her. She didn’t deny it.” They were immediately drawn to one another, and thus the storybook tale began.

  Jack conducted an unromantic courtship: He was undemonstrative in public, did not send flowers, gifts, or love letters, and, like his brothers, barely made it clear that he was interested. Notorious for not carrying money with him, he expected whomever he was with to pick up the tab for taxis and meals. So when they dated, this chore fell to Jackie, Still, she knew a good thing when she saw it, and she saw it in Jack: She was swept away by him.

  The package that Jackie presented to her beau was certainly an appealing one to the politically ambitious John Kennedy and his family. Joseph Kennedy’s lifelong obsession was to have a son in the White House, After his first son, Joseph Jr., was killed in an air mishap during World War II, the elder Kennedy put all his attentions into the next in line, Jack, whom he began grooming for the Presidency. When thirty-five-year-old Jack won a congressional seat in November 1952 by defeating three-term Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge, he was encouraged by his father to change his playboy image and find a wife, a partner for public relations purposes as well as for mating, a potential First Lady.

  There were many women in Jack’s life, some of them famous actresses such as Lee Remick, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Sophia Loren, and some of them not as well known, like Ruta Lee; but they were always sexy, young, and ready to follow him anywhere. Entire books have been written about his life and times before he knew Jackie.

  Because Jackie had the sophistication and class that wives of heads of state were supposed to project, along with beauty and glamour equal to the movie stars to whom father and son had always been attracted, she soon became a front-runner in the marital race. Also in her favor was the fact that she had a “proper” upbringing and her reputation was untarnished, which was expected of political wives at the time; for the most part, Jack’s other girlfriends were anything but demure. Jack had also said in one interview that what he was looking for in a spouse was someone “intelligent but not too brainy.” As insulting as that comment may have been, Jackie, a woman of her times, understood it. “No man wants a woman who’s smarter than he is,” she said, so typically 1950s in her attitude about male-female relationships.

  “She was also funny. People always tend to forget her wicked sense of humor,” said Sancy Newman, a neighbor of the Kennedys in Hyannis Port who knew Jack and all of the Kennedys as children. “She was completely different from anyone he had ever dated, not your average pretty girl. She had great wit and could give it right back to him just as quickly as he could throw it at her.”

  Stephen Smith, Jean’s husband and Jackie’s future brother-in-law, once recalled, “Jack always said how smart Jackie was, and she really was. What they had going between them was this sense of humor. And she could cut him down, and did—no question about it. When she felt strongly about something, she let him know it and let everyone else know it, too.”

  “She’s the one,” Joseph told his son. “I have a good feeling about this girl, Jacqueline. Trust me. She’s the one.”

  While Jack and Jackie were dating, John Davis met with his cousin for lunch at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Jackie was working at the time for the Times-Herald newspaper as “The Inquiring Photographer,” a job that found her snapping pictures of people after asking them questions about current events. She would then combine photos and text for a column.

  He recalls, “Jackie thought that Jack was rather vain. She talked about how he had to have his hair done all the time, how he had to always look just right. I laughed to myself because, certainly, she was very much the same way. She said that he would sulk for hours if he was at a party and hadn’t been recognized. Again, I laughed to myself. That, too, was very much like Jackie. Then she said to me, ‘Really, John, I think the Kennedys are terribly, terribly bourgeois.’ I laughed to myself, again… for obvious reasons.”

  Jackie began devoting time and energy to Jack’s work by helping him edit and write senatorial position papers on Southeast Asia, and even translating several books for him, including the work of French writer Paul Mus, who was an expert on France’s involvement in Vietnam. (Fluent in French, Jackie had attended the Sorbonne after her two years at Vassar.)

  “Whenever he came across something in French, the senator would think, ‘My wife could translate the research material,’ ” recalls Kennedy friend and speechwriter Ted Sorenson. “I don’t think she herself regarded herself as a political savant or counselor. She had judgments of political figures as people, as individuals, but usually not related to their political positions—except that she loved Jack and people who liked him, and who he liked, she liked. People who were mean to him, she didn’t like. There was something there between them, and it was good.”

  Others perceived Jack and Jackie differently, “I could see Jack behaving very badly with Jackie very early on, at the beginning of their engagement,” recalls Betty Beale, who was a columnist for the Washington Evening Star. “I talked to Jackie on the phone shortly after they announced the engagement so that I could write about it. She told me in an offhand way that he was going to Eden Roc [with his friend Torby McDonald and father, Joseph] for a vacation on the French Riviera without her. The men had chartered a boat, and off they went for a wild time. You’d think that an engaged man would be lusting after his fiancée and want to be with her. She didn’t express any concern or annoyance about him going, however, she just told me matter-of-factly, ‘Jack is going away. He’s gone every year, and he’s going back.’ She minimized its significance.”

 
; Jackie’s First Meeting with Ethel

  By the time Jackie Kennedy got into the White House in January 1961, she and Ethel Kennedy had known each other for about six years “for better or worse,” as Jackie once referred to their often contentious relationship. Sweetness and light weren’t always possible in a family like the Kennedys, whose members had widely differing temperaments, and probably no two of them were more at odds over the years than Jackie and Ethel. Once she became First Lady, Jackie was the embodiment of everything Ethel wanted to be: a powerful, intelligent, and attractive woman who commanded the world’s attention and respect just for being herself. Ethel felt that, if her life worked out as she planned, Bobby would one day be President and she would have the status she so craved. Meanwhile, she just had to tolerate the fact that Jackie had it and she didn’t—at least for the time being.

  From the first time they met, though, Jackie presented herself as a princess, even on Ethel’s own, royal, home turf.

  In March 1953, when Ethel Kennedy settled into her new Georgetown home, she longed to meet Bobby’s new friends in government. She hoped to demonstrate her ability as a hostess to the Kennedy family, especially after Jean had told her, “You can’t be in this family unless you know how to entertain.” Ethel had certainly come from a clan who knew how to throw a good party, and she was anxious to show Bobby’s side of the family that she was worthy of her distinction as the only Kennedy wife so far (other than the matriarch, Rose). So she decided to host a get-together at her home in honor of St. Patrick’s Day—an affair of about thirty people, mostly family but with some important business associates of Bobby’s as well. When Bobby’s brother Jack heard about Ethel’s plans, he called to ask if she could invite his new girlfriend, Jacqueline Bouvier. Ethel readily agreed. She liked the senator a great deal and would do anything to please him.