Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Jackie stared at her brother-in-law for a moment, her lips pressed together, a hard look in her eyes. She started to speak but checked herself. Instead, she walked away, shaking her head in disgust.

  Ten minutes later, a campaign worker came over to Joan and paid her a compliment about her hairstyle. “Why, thank you,” Joan said, her smile bright. “I just thought I’d try something a little different, you know?”

  “You wanna see different?” Ted asked, cutting in. He had walked away, but suddenly he was back. “You oughta see her hair when she wakes up in the morning,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s not so pretty.”

  As the staffer walked off, muttering to herself, the expression on Joan’s face was of complete bewilderment. Quick tears came to her eyes; she blinked rapidly.

  Ethel Kennedy happened to have overheard the exchange. She grabbed Ted by the arm. “What’s the matter with you?” she demanded. “This is your wife. How dare you insult her here, of all places? Now leave her alone, you big brute.” Then Ethel grabbed Joan’s hand. “Come on,” she said to her stunned sister-in-law, “I have someone I want you to meet.” The two women headed for the other side of the room, leaving Ted staring into his empty dessert bowl. As they left, Joan, with an aching expression on her face, looked over her shoulder at her embarrassed husband. For just a moment, it was evident that there was a richness of understanding between Ethel and Joan.

  Jackie’s Documentary: A Tour of the White House

  It was February 14, 1962, when the public got its longest and closest look at Jackie Kennedy in a remarkable hour-long documentary, A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. During the program, television cameras followed the First Lady and news correspondent Charles Collingwood from room to room as she answered questions about the recent renovations she and her committee had made to the presidential quarters. In truth, Jackie’s television special was as much a political exercise as it was an opportunity to show off her work, for as First Lady she represented her husband in everything she did.

  Politics being the essence of the Kennedy men’s world, much was expected of the Kennedy women whenever campaign time rolled around, and they did their part, usually with great success. TV appearances, though, were a bit more challenging.

  In 1958 during Jack’s senatorial campaign, a television special was broadcast to Massachusetts viewers titled At Home with the Kennedys, featuring Rose, Jackie, Eunice, and Jean, who had her baby, one-year-old Steve Jr., on her lap. Sitting up as straight as rods, their hands clasped in their laps, they looked like robots. “You have the Sacred Heart way of sitting,” explained Joan, who, though she wasn’t present for this television appearance, was well aware of the importance of posture in the Kennedy family. “Rose showed us all how to sit on stage, poised. You don’t have your legs crossed. They’re together, maybe crossed at the ankle. From the beginning, she was after me about my poor posture. I was five feet eight when I was twelve, one of those tall girls who are always scrunched over. And she would say, ‘Stand up straight. You have a beautiful figure. Stand up and show it.’ ”

  During the television special Rose, in a sensible dress suit with pearls, wondered aloud at her son Jack’s good fortune in finding a wife so fond of campaigning. Jackie, the rhythm of her speech robotic and her demeanor stiff, replied, “I’ve always enjoyed campaigning so much, Mrs. Kennedy.” She pronounced each syllable slowly, deliberately, and unnaturally, in an odd, upper-class tone. “Since September 15, Jack and I have been traveling through the state trying to meet as many people as we can. Your son Teddy, who as you know is a campaign manager, set up the schedule for us last summer. We visited 184 communities.”

  “Well, congratulations, Jackie,” Rose said, as if giving her a royal blessing, “and congratulations to Jack for having found a wife who is so enjoying the campaign.”

  This television show—which also featured home movies narrated by Eunice and Jackie—is actually credited with being helpful to Jack’s victory. Apparently, the public was fascinated by the Kennedys whatever way it could get them.

  Joan, praised for her blonde beauty, did not giver herself credit for the attributes she had, so her lack of confidence was easily noticeable on camera whenever she had to give a televised speech, usually at a press conference.

  Ethel carried her “rah-rah” spirit into the political arena, but politics exhausted her and television was her greatest enemy. She too appeared wooden and unnatural whenever she was interviewed, and, worse, she never really looked as attractive on television as she did in life. Her features were somehow hardened by the camera’s lens, and she knew it.

  “I am just not that ugly,” she once said after seeing herself being interviewed on a late-night talk show. “I refuse to accept it.”

  The nation got a real surprise when A Tour of the White House was broadcast in February 1962. One of the reasons this special was groundbreaking is that cameras had never before been allowed in the upstairs residence of the White House. The most startling revelation to the forty-six million viewers, however, was not Jackie’s work on the White House but Jackie herself. She seemed knowledgeable enough about the furniture and heirlooms she had used to decorate the rooms, including the Reception Room, State Dining Room, Red Room, Blue Room, and Lincoln Room. She rattled off the names of donors, as well as the history of wallpaper, silverware, china, sofas, desks, lamps, clocks, and portraits. But her delivery was stiff, and she seemed a bit dazed. She appeared to be reading cue cards or, at the very least, to have memorized large blocks of information. She projected an impression almost of slow-wittedness.

  It was as if everything Jackie had to say had been so carefully scrutinized in advance and memorized before each take, that there was no possibility she would be able to come up with a single anecdote on her own, nor would she take the chance of doing so. (Later, it was learned that she had made a number of errors and had recorded corrections to be dubbed over the mistakes.)

  Jackie Kennedy, who was thirty-three at the time, had so much class, sophistication, and self-confidence; yet throughout the program she seemed self-conscious, as if terrified of making a mistake. Her lack of stage presence was startling, considering her position in the country. Even her walk seemed awkward and unsteady. Her nervousness did have its endearing moments, though. “If you knew her, you would know that she was the last person in the world you would ever have expected to be seen giving a televised tour,” says Jim Ketchum. “It was just not in her, or her manner. It must have taken great courage.”

  It should also be noted that television coverage of public figures was unsophisticated at that time and that events such as Jackie’s tour were relatively new. Viewers were not expecting technical wizardry, nor that their public figures be polished and smooth. Today, Jackie would have had to take courses in media training just to live up to the standards of “sound bite” television. It’s interesting that people have always said the reason Jackie never gave interviews in her later years was that she was hoping to maintain a sense of mystery about her life. But according to those who knew her best, the actual reason was that she knew she was terrible on television. She made a wooden interview subject, and that she had so little charisma when in front of a camera was her real secret.

  Also, she never felt that she was articulate, even decades later. When her friend Aileen Mehle (the gossip columnist “Suzy”) asked Jackie for an interview, instead of just begging off without explanation, Jackie said, “I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I’d feel like such a jackass, like such a fool. My answers are always so asinine.”

  During her White House tour, though at times she seemed almost unearthly, she really was fascinating to watch. People today watch A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy with as much fascination as did viewers in the sixties.

  The Voice

  Jackie and Jack hosted a small dinner party at the White House on the night Jackie’s television special aired. Their guests were reporter Ben Bradlee, who at that time worked for
Newsweek, and his lovely wife, Tony; Max Freedman, American correspondent for the Manchester Guardian; and New York socialite “Fifi” Fell, a friend of Jackie’s. It was nanny Maud Shaw’s day off, so Jackie had her hands full with the children as well as with dinner preparations. And to make a woman’s life even more complex, a king had visited earlier that day.

  King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia had come by the White House bearing gifts, including some for little John that confounded his mother: a small jacket that would have sold for about five dollars at any Sears, as well as a few other children’s clothes that the King had turned inside out, apparently to prove they had never before been worn. Jack and Jackie, in turn, gave the King a relief map of the United States. As soon as the King took off for Saudi Arabia, the dinner guests arrived.

  After a meal of fettuccini rené (fettuccini alfredo, to which was added chicken stock and sour cream), the party moved to a small sitting area off the Lincoln Room to watch Jackie’s show.

  They watched the program—which was broadcast on all three networks—in absolute silence, and Ben Bradlee later said they were “impressed with Jackie’s knowledge and poise.” Oddly, Bradlee’s wife, Tony, felt that Jack was actually jealous of the attention Jackie was getting, as all eyes were on her during the “performance.” Also, Jack had referred to her as “Jackie” during a brief spot he had on the show, and he now wondered aloud if perhaps he should have called her “Jacqueline,” as he usually did in public.

  After the show had aired, the phone rang constantly, with friends and family wanting to lodge their opinions. Jackie wasn’t interested in their comments, however, perhaps feeling some would be critical. When Eunice telephoned, Jackie vigorously shook her head, indicating that she did not want to speak to her. In front of guests, the moment hung awkwardly and uncomfortably.

  Jack winked at his guests and told his sister, “Look, poor Jackie went to bed. She’s crying her eyes out. So call back tomorrow.” Then he quickly hung up.

  Later, and privately, everyone present would agree that the show was “unusual” and that the voice that had come out of Jackie that night on the air was a revelation. She sounded as if she had just learned the English language phonetically. Her voice was so soft and breathy during the filming that producer Perry Wolff, standing less than four feet away, could not hear a word she was saying.

  “When she was placed in a formal situation as the center of attention, her voice, and the way she acted, was a retreat from herself,” former senator John Glenn observed, “more formal as, perhaps, a defense mechanism. She was careful what she did, careful about every word she said. But in private she sounded different—relaxed, easy.”

  It would seem that Jackie, ever conscious of trying to be all things to all people—the perfect mother, the perfect wife, the perfect First Lady, and the all-round perfect woman—chose to mimic a voice that in that day was considered demure and feminine. Hairdresser Mickey Song, who had styled Jackie’s hair before she became First Lady, recalls, “When I first met her she had a normal voice. I remember seeing her later on TV when she did the tour and thinking, ‘I don’t remember her sounding like that.’ ”

  “She was such an innocent girl when she first came to the White House in 1961,” recalls Robin Duke, wife of the President’s chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke. “She didn’t know how to talk on television. She was so inexperienced that she put on that wispy little baby voice, which none of us had ever heard her use before.”

  Jim Ketchum observes, “I think she was a bit self-conscious of herself and, yes, put the voice on. When talking to her day to day, you weren’t aware of her sounding like that. It was a mode she shifted into when the little red light started flashing on the camera. It was a very different sound from what I heard day in and day out at the White House.”

  Ethel, never one to pull a punch, summed it up best when, while viewing the special with Bobby and friends, she said, “Oh my God, where’d that voice come from?” Ethel was accustomed to Jackie’s “other voice,” the one she used privately. It was a deeper, more expressive tone, one that Jackie would use when she was angry at Jack or at one of her staff members—or angry at Ethel.

  The day after the broadcast, according to a Kennedy intimate, Ethel telephoned Jackie to render her review. “Look, if you want my opinion, Jackie,” she said—even though Jackie did not ask for it—“I think you should act more normally when you do those kinds of things in the future.”

  In her defense, Jackie said that she was acting normally.

  “Oh, hogwash,” Ethel countered. “I know you, Jackie. And you’re not that way at all.”

  Sister-in-law Joan also telephoned Jackie, but to praise her. “I couldn’t have done it,” she said later. “I couldn’t have gone up there in front of the nation and talked so knowledgeably about all of those old antiques. Jackie has such class, and ease.”

  Jackie appreciated Joan’s support, and she probably would have accepted her criticism as well, knowing that it wasn’t malicious in intent. However, she was so stung by Ethel’s comments that Kennedy insiders were surprised at her reaction, especially since she was not ordinarily sensitive about her voice. Jim Ketchum remembers an employee at the White House who did an impression of Jackie that, had she been a sensitive person, would have hurt her feelings. “But she would gather us all together and make this woman do the impression at the drop of a hat,” he says. “ ‘No one is leaving this room until you do it,’ she’d say, and she loved it. ‘Do it again!’ she’d say, laughing. ‘One day I’m going to make you do this at a private party with Jack and the others. Jack would adore it.’ ”

  For whatever reason, and true to her contradictory nature, Jackie did not like Ethel critiquing her performance and acted distantly toward her for the next few weeks. Rather than bring her hurt to the surface, perhaps she was just allowing Ethel to wonder what she was thinking.

  “Lots of luck in that regard,” Ethel said to reporter Laura Bergquist Knebel, who was writing a cover story on Jackie for Look magazine. “The wheels go ’round constantly in her head. You can’t pigeonhole her. You have a hard time getting to the bottom of that barrel.”

  Then, as if to take the sting from her observation because she was, after all, talking to a journalist, Ethel quickly added, “Which is great for Jack, who’s so inquisitive.”

  The public didn’t seem to mind Jackie’s girlish delivery in the least. If anything, her appearance on the television special added to the nation’s fascination. “I remember watching and listening to Mrs. Kennedy more than thinking about the White House,” Barbara Bush would recall.

  College girls across the land began imitating her breathless voice, which was described by one student as sounding “expensive.” Plastic surgeons reported clients asking for nose “bobs,” to look just like Jackie. She was a movie star without ever having made a movie, and the public was more captivated by her than ever.

  Despite the fact that it was poorly directed and edited in an amateurish manner, the documentary went on to win an Emmy and a Peabody Award. “Television at its best,” wrote a critic for the Washington Post. White House historian Carl Anthony says: “Jackie Kennedy’s interest in the restoration of the White House was the first truly public project of a First Lady to be permanently linked in the public’s mind with the role of the First Lady.”

  Jackie’s popularity reached beyond the White House walls: Her clothes, hair, and makeup were having a visible impact on 1960s culture. “Everyone copied her and mimicked her,” Letitia Baldrige said. “So she had an enormous influence on the American public.”

  “Secrets Always Come Out”

  On March 14, 1962, reporters jammed into Joan Kennedy’s small living room at 3 Charles River Square (which she and Ted had moved into in 1961) to hear her husband, Ted, make the formal announcement of his candidacy for the Senate. As the press noisily converged upon the Kennedys, their two-year-old daughter, Kara, began to wail uncontrollably in the nursery off the main hallway, and Joan
appeared distracted by Kara’s cries. A nurse shut the door quickly to muffle the baby’s crying, but Joan still appeared uneasy.

  Ted’s political career, like those of his brothers, was really the brainchild of the Kennedy patriarch, Joseph. Ted never wanted to be a senator. Knowing that he would always be in competition with his brothers for familial as well as public acceptance in the political arena, he had told Joan that he wanted to get as far away from the confines of the Kennedy dynasty as possible—to the West Coast, in fact.

  “His main reason was that in a new state, among new people, he would have to succeed or fail on his own,” Joan recalls.

  In the early sixties, however, when the young couple went to the West Coast to start looking for a home, Joseph made it clear that not only were they expected to stay in Massachusetts, but that Ted would run for the Senate the following year and take Jack’s seat. Joseph always believed that the family had a proprietary claim to that seat. “I paid for it,” he said. “It belongs to the family.”

  Even Jack was against Ted’s candidacy, fearing that charges of nepotism would damage his Presidency. He suggested to his father that Ted be allowed to live outside the public eye, that he should be the one brother with a normal family life—an idea that suited Joan just fine.

  Joan almost got her wish when it was determined that Ted could not be appointed to Jack’s vacant seat because he would not have reached the age of thirty—the minimum age for a senator, as dictated by the Constitution—until February 22, 1962. Someone would have to fill the chair for a year until a new election could be held in 1962 to complete the final two years of Jack’s unexpired term. Governor Foster Furcolo was persuaded by the White House to name Benjamin Smith, a former house mate of Jack’s at Harvard and a close family friend, who agreed to vacate the seat after the term so that a Kennedy could possibly move into it.