Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Jackie enlisted the same writer who had helped assemble Martha Graham’s book to work with Jamison on putting together her story. Kaplan recalled an adventure with Jackie in which they went to watch a rehearsal of the Ailey company. At the studio there was no stage separating the audience from the dancers: the dancers were right in front of them, performing breathtaking movements, nearly nude. The book also has some touching moments, as in the description of a time when Jamison traveled to the Vienna State Opera for an engagement. She was surprised to be greeted backstage by a group of little girl ballerinas all wearing pink tights and pink shoes, who curtsied to her and said, “Grüss Gott.” She then realized that this was the etiquette of the institution. “I was the star dancer from America and I was treated as such.”

  Judith Jamison understood that she was working with the same powerful woman who had told Mason in no uncertain terms what he had to do with his book. Jamison’s mother was the same way: “I just come from a legacy of very strong women so Jacqueline Onassis can join the ranks there.” Jamison danced with Alvin Ailey, and Ailey had studied with Martha Graham. He had what Jamison called “blood memories” of spirituals, gospel music, ragtime, and folk songs from growing up in Texas, all of which inspired his dancing and choreography. Jamison was also aware of the scandal created by Gelsey Kirkland’s book, and she decided to take the opposite approach. She held her cards close to her chest, and although the book is called an autobiography, it leaves out the details of romances and personal life. Jamison’s book reveals little and says of her meeting Gelsey Kirkland with Mikhail Baryshnikov in Europe only that “she was having trouble in those days.” Jamison says that a dancer is at her most moving when she makes herself vulnerable onstage, but she refused to make herself vulnerable in her book in the same way that Graham and Kirkland had.

  The critics responded unfavorably. Some of them even pointed, without naming names, to Jackie’s role in the book, calling it “carelessly edited and produced.” It sounded as if Jamison had chatted at random to a tape recorder. The book had no index, no list of its striking photographs, and an entire page had been devoted to a bibliography of only four books. Another critic pointed out that the book did not mention that Ailey and other dancers, such as Nureyev, had died of AIDS. Thus, although Jamison’s book exposed the prejudice African Americans experienced in the dance world, it reinforced the stigma felt by gay men who were dying in a health crisis that disproportionately affected the dance world.

  The Visitors in the Room Froze,

  but Mrs. Kennedy Rose

  Jackie’s love of dance went back a long way in her life. Even her girlhood horse, which she took with her to Farmington, was named Danseuse, though she shortened that to Donny, just as Jacqueline in her family had been shortened to the more prosaic Jackie. With Jackie, though, even if there was an informal and prosaic name on the surface, there was always a formal and controlled embrace of a poetic ideal underneath. When Robert Kennedy began, as senator from New York, to strengthen his ties with Harlem in the 1960s, Jackie, too, became a patron of a tuition-free school in Harlem called the Children’s Storefront. An episode one observer remembered of her behavior there speaks to the kind of ballet-like performance she could summon up: “Her physical manners were … polished. She always jumped to her feet when she was introduced to someone. Once she was visiting the Children’s Storefront school in Harlem. As she sat in the office of Ned O’Gorman, the founder, a drunken homeless man wandered in. The visitors in the room froze, but Mrs. Kennedy rose. ‘How lovely to meet you,’ she said as one friend held her back.”

  On a small scale, Jackie’s gesture was similar to her movement and carriage at the funeral in November 1963. Hers was the application of principles from the dance world to the manners and courtesies of everyday life. Whether arriving at the door for a society event to benefit the ABT or shaking the hand of a homeless man in Harlem, she aimed with her movement to bring a dancer’s sense of occasion to the most mundane and ordinary of everyday ceremonies.

  Gelsey Kirkland remembered that as a young girl, what had impressed her about George Balanchine’s ballet classes was the way he kept alive an Old World sense of courtliness and ritual. “The rules of classroom decorum implied an aristocratic tradition that went back to the court dances of the Renaissance,” Kirkland wrote. “At the end of class, we always observed the quaint ritual known as the reverence. Each dancer bowed or curtsied for the teacher.” It was to return to that world of ritual and courtly romance where she felt most at home that Jackie sponsored books on the best-known of Europe’s royal dynasties, the Bourbons and the Romanovs, as well as the lesser-known but no less elaborate rituals of Mughal India and pharaonic Egypt. In the world of ballet and in these historic courtly societies, grace and carriage was all.

  CHAPTER 9

  Circus queen.

  JACKIE’S GIRLHOOD PREDICTION OF HER OWN FUTURE POSITION

  Among the many roles Jackie inhabited in her lifetime—reader, writer, and editor; wife, mother, and myth—probably the one most often publicly associated with her is queen. She was the most unforgettably regal of twentieth-century first ladies. Her only real rival, Eleanor Roosevelt, chose an identity nearer to the mother superior of an order of powerful nuns than to the royal persona Jackie slipped into so easily. Roosevelt told Marietta Tree privately that she distrusted JFK’s “meretricious charm” and disliked the “court” the Kennedys created at the White House, but the rest of America loved it. Nor could anyone question that Jackie’s planning of the 1963 funeral and her own performance at it were the closest things Americans had ever witnessed to a royal ritual. The universal feeling was that she had single-handedly saved both the nation and the world from prolonged despondency as a result.

  What’s more surprising is that Jackie should have been preparing for this role long before she married Jack Kennedy. After he died, she commissioned more than a dozen books on kings, queens, and royal courts; on royal patronage of the arts and on the prostitutes or courtesans who attended royal men; on vilified royal ladies blamed for spending too much money and their husbands, who were put to death when they were still young. A review of the royalism of her early life is an important introduction to the books she was publishing at the end of her life. Together they show us a dimension of her personality that seems to have been present from her earliest years and persisted well into her middle age.

  “Little Edie” Beale, Jackie’s cousin of Grey Gardens fame, thought Jackie in childhood was an odd combination of “tomboy and dream princess.” She remembered that when Jackie was a girl, she played with a cardboard crown and wanted to run away from home in order to become “queen of the circus.” A more reliable source, Mrs. Thayer, noted in her authorized biography that Jackie had written a send-up of various family members when she was young and imagined a comic future as circus queen for herself. Jackie’s stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss, recalled from traveling in Europe with her that she was particularly interested in the kings and queens of England. He also witnessed firsthand how Jackie could sometimes behave in a queenly way. He remembered her criticisms, which “could strike with severity and then serenely turn sympathetic. She would stamp her foot, clap her hands, point her finger, and then hug.” Even the loyal Nancy Tuckerman recalled these brief flare-ups as “you know, hands-on-hips” sorts of thing. Not everyone was willing to put up with what they thought of as a regal act that was out of place in a domestic or a democratic setting. When as a young bride-to-be Jackie told the Kennedy family that the proper pronunciation of “Jacqueline” was the French one, Ethel Kennedy raised a laugh by saying in a stage whisper, “Hmmm, rhymes with ‘queen.’ ”

  Jackie wasn’t going to be deterred from being who she was by Ethel. Even before Jack was elected president, Jackie wrote to Diana Vreeland to consult her on what she might wear for the inaugural balls. Had her husband, then still only a candidate, seen this letter, it would have gotten her into trouble, and she knew it. Jackie was well aware that she was going
to be attacked as a “let-them-eat-cake fiend” for liking Parisian clothes. Marie Antoinette, the last French queen before the French Revolution, was reputed to have suggested that the hungry crowd rioting for bread in Paris should eat cake instead. The queen’s reported comment on the riots was a myth meant to stir up displeasure with the monarchy. Marie Antoinette was one of the royal ladies with whom Jackie identified, because she knew well how people were willing to connect being beautifully dressed with self-indulgence and supposed blindness to the needs of others. Nevertheless, she pressed on. Jackie told Vreeland that she wanted the inaugural gown to be very simple, possibly in white, “as it is the most ceremonial color,” and added that “I suppose it’s undemocratic to wear a tiara—but something on the head.” She closed with her usual stroke of self-deprecating humor: if Jack was not elected, she would wear the dress to watch the balls on TV. Come hell or high water, however, she wanted to wear diamonds in her hair.

  (photo credit 9.1)

  The fashion choice was indeed regal, so it is no wonder that Jackie as first lady sometimes gave the impression of being in competition with the queen of England. When she and JFK made a state visit to Britain early in his presidency, they posed next to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip for a formal photograph. Jackie made the queen look as if she’d chosen her frock out of the Missouri closet of Bess Truman. Her own dress looked space age, as if she were ready to meet George Jetson and his boy, Elroy. Perhaps the queen recognized what Jackie was up to and wanted to put her in her place. The palace had politely inquired whom the Kennedys might like to meet when they came to the state dinner. The queen resented the American request that Jackie’s sister, Lee Radziwill, then living in London, be invited to the party, because there was a ban on receiving divorcées at the palace. Jackie had also suggested inviting several of the queen’s racier relations, including her sister, Margaret, and Princess Marina, who had moved among Hollywood actors before the war. After the state dinner was held, Jackie confessed that she’d been beaten: “The Queen had her revenge. No Margaret, no Marina, no one except every Commonwealth minister of agriculture they could find.”

  Jackie did have some queenly habits, however, which other practiced observers noticed and admired. Philip Mansel and Lady Antonia Fraser are two English historians of court life who between them have written more than two dozen volumes on European kings and queens. Connoisseurs of courtesy, both were surprised when they met Jackie to discover what notable manners she had. When the British government invited Jackie and her children to inaugurate the memorial to her husband at Runnymede in 1965, the Frasers, who had known Jackie since she was first married, invited her to their house on Campden Hill Square, just down the road from Notting Hill. Fraser remembered, “We had an old Scottish cook. She wasn’t our cook, but she happened to be having a holiday here from Scotland. She was really old, and as she was here, she said she’d cook dinner for Mrs. Kennedy. It was rather a thrill for us. She also looked after the children’s tea. After dinner, Jackie said, ‘Can I see the lady who cooked the dinner?’ She went into the kitchen, found Mrs. Hepburn, and said ‘Did you cook that dinner? Did you make those sandwiches the children had?’ I couldn’t get over this. She went into great detail. That is what we think royalty do, but on the whole, they don’t. But she did. She made one old Scottish lady intensely happy.”

  This has to be balanced with another repeated observation of Jackie: she could have an imperious manner. She gave tongue-lashings even to those she considered friends and allies. Her correspondence with Roger Stevens, who was chairing the committee that built the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, shows her giving commands as if he were a mere pawn. She told Stevens that after the center was built, its director “must be acceptable to me.” If the center was not what she thought JFK would have liked, “I will ask Congress to change its name—which they will do”—a reminder of her nearly sacred status in the post-assassination and pre-Onassis era. She also told him she had to have a representative on the board of the center: “I must have one—or I wish to pull out of the whole thing right now.”

  Jackie was equally curt with William Manchester, who had written a fawning pro-JFK biography and whom she and Robert Kennedy had selected to write the one authorized account of the assassination. After Manchester had finished, she got wind of a prepublication deal whereby the author would be paid several hundred thousand dollars by Look magazine to run excerpts from the book. She changed her mind and tried to forbid him from publishing, even though he’d resigned from his full-time job and given several years of his life to the project. She refused to face the fact that she and Bobby had commissioned him to write the book in the first place. News leaked out that she was trying to suppress his account and destroy the author: it was the first time in the post-assassination period that her reputation was tarnished. After some revisions and excisions, and the author’s commitment to donate the bulk of the money promised him to the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the book was published as The Death of a President, in 1967.

  Even ex-Kennedy loyalists, longtime supporters of the Kennedy Library, and staunch defenders of JFK against revisionist historical attacks on him could come in for Jackie’s wrath. Theodore Sorensen served Kennedy both in the Senate and in the White House as a speechwriter and a close adviser. Sorensen wrote in his book Counselor, published in 2008, that Jackie was deeply involved in protecting her husband’s reputation, mainly through the supervision of the library built in his name and academic programs named for him at Harvard. He thought she was “misguided” in her fury at one head of the John F. Kennedy School of Government’s Institute of Politics at Harvard for directing programs that were not in the original spirit of the family gift to the university. Sorensen noted that Jackie could write well herself, but he ultimately “found that the writer of such moving, sensitive, and beautiful letters could also be volatile on rare occasions, turning those eloquent words and powerful feelings against even close friends if they seemed to err.” He gave as an example his plan to bring out a collection of JFK’s speeches. Jackie thought he wanted to take credit for the speeches himself, as well as to profit from the sale of the book, something that always made her angry, even though she was rich herself. He was “crushed” to receive her letter condemning the proposed book. He was able to get another member of the Kennedy family to intercede for him with Jackie and explain it to her better, “but I have never forgotten the impact of that one brief but ferocious rebuke.”

  These stories continue into the Doubleday period. One fellow editor, Tom Cahill, was surprised to find how protective she was of her relationship with Bill Moyers. When he had followed up a suggestion of hers that he contact Moyers about reviewing a manuscript he was considering, she telephoned him and to his surprise asked him, “How dare you use my name?” A stream of vituperation followed, and although she didn’t quite say, “You little nobody,” he recalled that that was the drift of what she said to him on the phone. When he asked her to wait and reminded her that it had been her suggestion that he contact Moyers in the first place, she said quietly, “In that case, I apologize,” and hung up the phone. But they didn’t speak for a long time afterward.

  Her relationship with Bill Moyers was also the center of a dispute Herman Gollob recollected at Doubleday. Jackie’s assistant Judy Sandman had expressed an interest in meeting Moyers, so when Gollob was taking Moyers out for lunch, he invited Sandman to join them. But Jackie regarded Moyers as her author, and soon afterward she met with Gollob in his office to tell him she didn’t appreciate having her assistant invited out with her authors behind her back. Gollob defended the lunch, but he was a little taken aback at Jackie’s possessiveness of Moyers and her resentment of Sandman, who served her loyally.

  Which was the real Jackie, good queen or bad queen? Or perhaps the better question is, what was going through Jackie’s mind as she gave these different performances? The fact that she did eight books on the Bourbon court at Versailles and the N
apoleonic court that succeeded it, as well as books on courtly life in India, in ancient Egypt, and in Russia under the Romanovs, gives ample room to explore what interested her in the worlds of European and oriental monarchies. Her own life intersected with these books in four different contexts—France, India, Egypt, and Russia—which together tell a story about her that she was never willing to tell in her own lifetime.

  What a Cruel Fate! She Must Have Been

  an Extraordinary Woman

  In her correspondence with Oleg Cassini about the clothes he was designing for her to wear in the White House, Jackie said that she had in mind three royal women whose fates she wanted either to avoid or to emulate: Marie Antoinette, Josephine Bonaparte, and the Princesse de Réthy. Early on in JFK’s presidency, she already thought the press reports about her clothes were getting “vulgarly out of hand,” and she had no wish to be “the Marie Antoinette or the Josephine of the 1960s.” She understood that this would have a negative impact on JFK’s administration. Her problem was partly Cassini himself. He and his brother, a gossip columnist, were from a White Russian family, descended from nobles prominent in pre-Soviet diplomacy, so they were socially okay, but both of them were also self-promoters. Before the Kennedy presidency was long under way, Cassini was using the fact that he was designing for Jackie to sell his collection, and thus there was more publicity than she liked. She tried to get him to desist by reminding him that he was “a gentleman”—a hint that he was not—and by saying that she wanted prior approval before he released anything to the press. She used this tactic again in her editorial years when she told Howard Kaplan, one of her writers, that “a gentleman never tells whom he’s sleeping with.” She wasn’t sleeping with Kaplan, but she didn’t want him talking to the press, or to his friends even, about what it was like to work with her as an editor.