Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Jackie’s remark to Cassini underscored that she knew Queen Marie Antoinette had not been the wicked queen her detractors made her out to be. They said that she spent extravagantly on clothes; that she had lovers, both male and female; that she meddled in the king’s political business. None of this was true. It was part of the sexism of the era, when a woman could be made the scapegoat for the French monarchy’s problems. When the French monarchy fell in the 1790s, Marie Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, were both guillotined by the revolutionary regime. They were convicted of plotting against the revolution, and they symbolized an old order—hierarchical, historical, and Catholic—that the revolutionaries wanted to bury for good.

  Jackie wanted the French royal family back, or at least that was the impression she gave through her books. She and her friend Jane Hitchcock loved talking about the Bourbon court of the eighteenth century in the period that led up to the revolution. Looking back over those long-ago discussions with Jackie, Hitchcock remembered laughingly, “We were obsessed!” Hitchcock’s novel Social Crimes, written after Jackie died but with references Hitchcock has frankly acknowledged as her tribute to Jackie, is filled with detailed historical knowledge of Versailles, the French court, and the manufacture of Sèvres porcelain. Jackie owned a number of rare bibelots from this court. After she died, her children sold some of them at Sotheby’s in 1996, including a small ornamented box that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette.

  Jackie’s book with Olivier Bernier, Secrets of Marie Antoinette (1985), described the queen’s difficulties as a young Austrian woman trying to become accustomed to the French court and to persuade her husband, who was uninterested in sex, to help her produce the children and heirs that it was her duty to provide. Jackie also asked Bernier to write biographies of the king who had plucked Madame de Pompadour from obscurity and given her the latitude to cultivate the French court’s reputation for cultural excellence, Louis the Beloved: The Life of Louis XV (1984) as well as of that king’s great-grandfather, the so-called Sun King, who built Versailles, Louis XIV: A Royal Life (1987). The center of Bernier’s world was the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he gave lectures on the French court and where Jackie’s friends the Wrightsmans exhibited their Bourbon furniture. Jane Hitchcock’s Social Crimes points out that for anybody to be anybody in New York in the first decade of the twenty-first century, they had to be on the board or in some other way connected to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. An astute observer of the New York social world, Hitchcock also wrote that bustling New York was more like the French court than most people realized, with ambitious people trying to climb up and others being sent to the provinces in exile. It was almost as if the museum, across the street from Jackie’s apartment, had become a kind of American Versailles, the repository of everything associated with taste, social power, and prestige. Jackie’s publication of books on Versailles, her long-term association with the Met, and even her geographical proximity to it were her ways of asserting continued interest in being part of the social hierarchy long after JFK and Aristotle Onassis had died. She appeared to sit effortlessly and unconcernedly atop the New York social heap, but she actually possessed a position she did not intend to relinquish, and the books helped her defend it. Only a few, but the few who counted, knew that she had edited them, as her name is usually omitted even from their acknowledgments pages, so she could assert her status without seeming to say a word.

  After the French Revolution sent Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI to early deaths in 1793, a series of unworkable experiments in government led to a young army officer’s staging a coup d’état and taking power for himself. Napoleon Bonaparte eventually resurrected the French court, with himself at the center. In the 1790s Napoleon had met and married Josephine de Beauharnais, a widow whose husband had been executed in the bloodiest phase of the revolution. She was a stylish society figure with more than one lover. He crowned her empress in 1804, but divorced her in 1810 in hopes that another woman could produce a male heir. Still friendly with Napoleon, she lived in retirement at the Château de Malmaison outside Paris until her death in 1814.

  Jackie sometimes playfully imagined herself in the guise of Josephine. On the state visit to Paris in 1961, Jackie, accompanied by André Malraux, had gone out of her way to attract attention not only with her clothes but with saucy references to French art and Napoleonic history. After a visit to the Jeu de Paume, a small museum in the Tuileries that in the 1960s held the Impressionists and other nineteenth-century French paintings, reporters asked her what she had liked best. She picked one of the sexiest canvases on display, Édouard Manet’s Olympia, considered shocking on its first exhibition for its nude depiction of what appeared to be a rich courtesan. Critics identified the black cat at the end of the naked lady’s bed as a cultural symbol of the sitter’s profession. Jackie didn’t mind being connected with Olympia. She later commissioned work from Jacqueline Duhême, an illustrator for a French magazine, who had depicted her and Malraux in cartoon fashion standing in front of the painting. Jackie even had in her own collection some erotica by the French painter Marcel Vertès, known as the illustrator of Colette, someone Jackie identified as one of her favorite writers. Vertès’s image is also of a black cat next to a naked lady. Caroline Kennedy disposed of Le Chat Noir at a Sotheby’s sale in 2005, but perhaps her mother enjoyed faintly subversive images of women’s sexuality.

  After visiting the Jeu de Paume with Malraux, Jackie specifically asked to be taken to see Malmaison. Standing in front of Josephine’s portrait and recalling her story, Jackie commented, “What a cruel fate! She must have been an extraordinary woman.” Malraux caught Jackie’s flirtatious tone and replied in the same vein, “A real bitch!” Later, when Malraux came to visit in Washington, Jackie and Cassini decided that her dress for the reception at the French embassy should be something Josephine might have worn, in the Empire style. More than twenty years later, Jackie still liked to imagine herself in Napoleon’s world. She asked Olivier Bernier to edit and abridge a collection of letters from a courtier in Napoleon’s circle who knew Josephine well, which Doubleday published as At the Court of Napoleon: Memoirs of the Duchesse d’Abrantès (1989). Although Diana Vreeland died in the summer of 1989, Bernier’s book coincided with an exhibition at the Costume Institute that December on the age of Napoleon. Jackie was not one to dwell on historical fantasy without figuring out ways to sell her books.

  The third royal woman whom Jackie singled out as one of her models—certainly in jest, but the joke is revealing—was actually Belgian. Jackie told Cassini at the beginning of their collaboration that she would like him to design some daytime clothes for her as “if Jack were President of FRANCE—très Princesse de Réthy mais jeune,” something a younger Princesse de Réthy might wear. The Princesse de Réthy was a controversial Belgian lady born in 1916 (she died in 2002). The Belgian king had married her after his first wife, Queen Astrid, died in an automobile accident and he was a state prisoner of the Nazis in 1940. Together they decided that she should not hold the title of queen of the Belgians, but this did not prevent her from being unpopular. Astrid had been beloved by many Belgians, and the king had married his second wife at a time when he was suspected of having collaborated with the Nazis. What the Princesse de Réthy had in common with Marie Antoinette and Josephine was a certain stylish sophistication, which forever inspired distrust of her among the Belgian people, even though this distrust was probably undeserved.

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  Before the 1980s, the view of academics was that the eighteenth-century French court had been a top-heavy extravagance waiting to be swept away. Most university historians viewed themselves as amis du peuple, antiroyalist advocates for the poor. Most of them thought that the revolution of 1789 had been long overdue. A majority of French intellectuals of the post–World War II generation, Malraux among them, were either Marxists or believers in the necessity of
a more thoroughly egalitarian reconstruction of the social order. Malraux in his own day had fought shoulder to shoulder with Republicans and Communists in the Spanish Civil War. Jackie’s books universally went the other way. They pointed out some of the failings of the French court, but they were pro-monarchy and enthusiastic about the life of art and music, decoration and dance, architecture and literature that thrived at Versailles. In short, her books might have seemed like bits of fluff she did with an amateur historian from the Met, but they were in fact royalist tracts that celebrated the achievements and romanticized the lives of French kings and queens. It takes a woman with some courage, and a sense of humor, to wear a Josephine-inspired dress to dine with André Malraux.

  Passage to India

  Another of Jackie’s star turns as first lady was her 1962 visit to India, where she was greeted by Indian newspapers as “Amriki Rani,” American queen. She went accompanied by Lee, while JFK stayed at home. Although the trip has been described as a way of persuading the Indians of the desirability of alignment with the West during that cold war era, when Americans were anxious to combat the Soviets, it also had a different purpose. It was about fun. The American ambassador to India at the time, John Kenneth Galbraith, a Harvard economist and an intimate of both Jackie’s and JFK’s, said long afterward that it was “a fraud” to think that such state visits accomplished anything serious. They were meant for the pleasure of the visitors. Visiting the maharajah of Jaipur, nicknamed Bubbles because of all the champagne poured at his birth, and an attractive figure in the jet-setting scene of the 1960s, was just as important for Jackie and Lee as fighting the cold war.

  India had not been among Jackie’s earliest interests, nor was Hindi among her languages, but in the years that followed she not only began to collect Indian art, advised by Galbraith, but also visited India several times. She even sent her son, John, there to travel and attend the University of Delhi for six months in the early 1980s.

  Naturally, as Jackie and Lee were good-looking young women in their thirties, a good deal of romantic teasing was involved. The code name Washington officials assigned to Jackie caused Galbraith some embarrassment in the run-up to the trip, as cables kept being received in India announcing the arrival of Girlfriend. He also had a difference of opinion with the president when it was proposed that Jackie should visit a famous temple with erotic statuary at Konarak, which he anticipated the press would misinterpret. He advised against her going there. JFK cabled back, “Why? Don’t you think she’s old enough?” When Jackie and Lee arrived in India, the two women were scheduled to stay in the guest quarters of the American embassy, but the Indian head of state, Jawaharlal Nehru, insisted that these were not good enough and they should stay with him. Galbraith remembered being surprised by this move and described it later as “not a simple act of grace. Meeting her at the plane and seeing her later, he was enormously attracted and wanted to see more of her, which as the visit passed he did.” Lee Radziwill remembered Nehru as among the most sensuous men she had ever met. A picture of Jackie together with Nehru on the trip suggests that the sexiest thing about him was that he made her laugh.

  This spirit of sensuality, openly expressed, lives on in a book Jackie edited called A Second Paradise: Indian Courtly Life, 1590–1947, published in 1985. The publication coincided with a special exhibition on Indian art at the Met and with a show, The Costumes of Royal India, at the Costume Institute. Jackie thanked Diana Vreeland for her “original inspiration” in an editor’s note to the book. The book described the many courts that flourished throughout India between the sixteenth century, when the Mughals conquered India, and the twentieth century, when British control of India’s government ended. The book has color illustrations on virtually every page and must have been not only expensive but also unusual to produce in those days, when book design was not Doubleday’s priority. Galbraith had introduced Jackie to his Harvard colleague Stuart Cary Welch, who curated the Met’s show on Indian art, and she wanted him to write the text for her book, too, but he did not have the time. Instead, Jackie’s friend the novelist Gita Mehta introduced her to her brother Naveen Patnaik, who agreed to write it. Brother and sister were from a prominent Indian family, and Naveen Patnaik was a social butterfly on the New York party scene. Vreeland sent Jackie to stay with Patnaik in New Delhi when she was doing research for the book in the 1980s. Patnaik told Vanity Fair’s regular contributor Dominick Dunne that when Jackie arrived to visit him in Delhi, he was shocked that “she literally had two pairs of slacks, dark glasses, and one gold jacket for evenings, which she wore to even the grandest palaces.” Her wardrobe may have been inadequate, but Gita Mehta remembered her brother receiving “pages of research material annotated” in Jackie’s own hand. “I know as a writer that to have that kind of attention by a commissioning editor is quite rare,” she said.

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  The book is more eyebrow-raising still, not only for the way its description of Indian courts directly recalls Jackie’s specific contributions to the Kennedy White House but also for its frank embrace of female sexuality. Here are two excerpts from the book’s jacket copy, which Jackie may well have written herself. In Indian court life, “with the ruler as patron, there flourished great schools of music, poetry, cuisine, philosophy, and painting, taking court life to a peak of subtlety and splendor.” The book promises to go “behind the harem wall to reveal the lives of royal women, the training of a courtesan, the preparation of a princess for the bridal chamber, the use of intoxicants to enhance the madness of passion. It describes the ancient ceremonies that raised a king to divinity and reveals the pageantry of court life through its spectacular celebrations.” It is almost as if regality entailed both high culture and carnality. Patnaik’s book suggested that you couldn’t have a court without classical music and courtesans.

  Jackie told Publishers Weekly that she was particularly proud of A Second Paradise, and she “caressed [it] lovingly” while she talked to the magazine’s interviewer. Patnaik’s text discusses how concubines would plot to enslave a maharajah by using aphrodisiacs and by studying “erotic spells” from the Kama Sutra, the biblical text of Hindu lovemaking. Patnaik also distinguishes between a lowly concubine and an upscale courtesan: “The beautiful courtesan was a woman a man could not possess as he did his wives and concubines, and the courtesans of Lucknow added that element of adventure to a man’s life lacking in his crowded harem.” Many of the illustrations for the book come from the collection of Stuart Cary Welch. Welch’s wife, Edith, wrote the glossary for the book and helpfully explained of a picture of scantily clad Nautch girls, “They’re like the Folies Bergères,” where Parisian women danced nearly naked in the 1890s. Of another image of an all-female orgy, Edith Welch commented, without disapproval, “Look at all these ladies carrying on.”

  The Welches and Jackie went to India together several times, Jackie profiting from the learned commentary of a couple who were both exceptionally knowledgeable about Indian art and culture. “We weren’t social,” said Edith Welch. “We all three sat around and read our books.” One of Stuart Cary Welch’s younger colleagues, Navina Haykel, now a curator at the Met, remembered that “he talked to me frequently about her. He found her to be a person of some substance. She was not his creature. He couldn’t easily move her. He quite admired that about her.” Welch opened a generation’s eyes to Indian art and was used to being surrounded by adoring students, but Jackie refused to be his acolyte. Like a courtesan of Lucknow, she would not allow herself to be possessed.

  Jackie had to do a lot of legwork for the book to acquire the rights to reprint images belonging to different people. She approached Mark Zebrowski, one of Welch’s students, then living in London, for permission to use several images that belonged to him. One image alone required four letters to Zebrowski in Jackie’s own hand. He ultimately sent Jackie his own book on Deccani painting, for which she wrote him a long thank-you note. She recalled a visit with John to visit the nizam of Hyde
rabad, one of the hereditary rulers of India, who had been dispossessed after the newly independent Indian state was proclaimed in 1947. She struck a wistful note in this letter and pointed to a last important feature of what inspired and interested her in the former courts of India. Their rulers had become so refined, so devoted to rituals of lovemaking and art patronage, that they did not have the wherewithal to survive. They became decadent. That was what she loved the most.

  Jackie remembered having spent a memorable evening with the surviving nizam and his friends, when there were aged musicians playing on a moonlit night. Her noble hosts talked of how their culture was disappearing and how young people appreciated neither the traditional music nor the traditional manners. “This over civilised, rarified world—you could feel it—but you knew it was too rarified to survive. You felt so fortunate to be able to sense for those hours what it had been,” she wrote. When she had read his book, she told Zebrowski, “I understood it, what it had been at its zenith. That evening was profoundly sad. My son John told me the next day that the sons of the house had taken him to their rooms, because they couldn’t stand the classical music—and had offered him a tall glass filled with whisky and had put a pornographic cassette in the Betamax and the Rolling Stones on the tape deck. They wore tight Italian pants and open shirts, and all the while, their fathers, on the terrace in beautiful shantung, were speaking of how sad the sons made them.” She identified with the Indian noblemen who rued the passing of something wonderful, something cultivated, something great; but there is also a sense of mischief behind her description of the boys taking John upstairs in their tight pants and putting a skin flick on the video player. To appreciate and poke fun at the same time—that is Jackie speaking in her characteristic register. She concluded by saying, “Often in art I think I love the periods when you know it cannot last, when it has become over civilised.” What couldn’t last was her adolescent son’s youth, for he, too, was soon to leave home for good. What she could do to make some of that world endure was to put it between two hard covers.