by Tina Cassidy
“Did you understand all the words?” Janet asked.
“Yes—except what’s a midwife?”
“Didn’t you mind all those long names?”
“No, why should I mind?”12
By age eight, Jackie was writing sophisticated poetry, such as this one on Christmas:
Reindeer hooves will soon be drumming/On the roof tops loud and clear …13
By eleven, she had read Gone with the Wind three times.14 Her grandfather encouraged her to write—as he often wrote to her—and once, when she was twelve, she asked him to edit a poem.
“My dear Jacqueline,” he wrote in response, “Holy Writ informs us that it was a futile labor to paint the lily white, and it is equally fatuous for me to attempt the perfecting of the perfect, in any suggested emendations to your delightful lines.”15
But Jackie was not encouraged only by her grandfather. Her father also pushed her to excel in school.
“I do so, Jackie, want you to be a standout at school. In fact, I’ve such high ambitions for you,” Black Jack wrote to her at Miss Porter’s. “I know you’ve got it in you to be a leader. But what’s more, I know you’ve ‘got what it takes’ to make your schoolmates like and admire you … Just make it come out and show them.”
Jackie’s mother also saw the girl’s academic potential and labeled her daughters accordingly. “Jacqueline is the intellectual one, and Lee will have twelve children and live in a rose-covered cottage,” Lee remembered her mother saying.16
Jackie’s love of words and art blossomed, and fed her academics at Miss Porter’s, a venerable training ground for women in a man’s world. There, her favorite classes were art history, literature, and English. Her average grade was an A-, but the headmaster always told her parents she could do better. She was still mischievous, dumping a pie in a teacher’s lap on a dare, stealing cookies from the kitchen for herself and her roommate, Nancy “Tuck” Tuckerman, who would play an important role later in Jackie’s life, as her White House social secretary.
On weekends, Jackie would sometimes visit her nearby uncle Wilmarth “Lefty” Lewis (her stepfather’s brother-in-law),17 an impossibly intellectual literary scholar whose specialties were the romantic poet William Blake and the father of gothic fiction Horace Walpole. She’d browse his rare book library and often received an art book for Christmas from him.18
But while she thirsted for information, she often tried to hide her intelligence, especially around men. Once, at a Yale football game, when it was fourth down and five yards to go, she turned to her friend Jonathan Isham and said, “Oh, why are they kicking the ball?”
“Come on, Jackie, none of that,” he said, believing she probably knew more about football than he did.19
Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s presidential historian who spent a significant amount of time with her at Hyannis Port, watched her intently read books such as Remembrance of Things Past. “I realized that, underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence, she concealed a tremendous awareness, an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment.”20
In her Farmington graduation yearbook, Jackie defined her “ambition” as “never to be a housewife.” Although she likely meant the remark as a rebellion from the presumption of a stultifying bourgeois life—her family had enough money to ensure she would probably never be doing her own vacuuming or cooking—the sentiment was the opposite of what most young women then aspired to.
As Jackie prepared to graduate from Miss Porter’s, all around her she saw what Betty Friedan would later confirm in The Feminine Mystique: a postwar plunge in women going to college. In fact, the proportion of women attending college in comparison with men dropped from 47 percent in 1920 to 35 percent in 1958. The women who applied to universities seemed to be there until they found husbands, as Jackie’s sister, Lee, did with her first marriage to Michael Canfield. Some women even thought getting too much of an education would be a hindrance to marriage. Colleges built dormitories for married students, with the wives working toward a “Ph.T.”—putting husband through.21
Jackie still considered secondary education an important goal. She scored in the ninetieth percentile on the college entrance exams and was off to Vassar, the all-girls college in New York’s Hudson Valley, right after her debutante party at Hammersmith Farm, with no fewer than three hundred guests. Cholly Knickerbocker, the famous Hearst columnist and brother of fashion designer Oleg Cassini, summed her up in a headline: QUEEN DEBUTANTE OF THE YEAR 1947.
After her first year at Vassar, Jackie traveled to Europe with three friends and a teacher on the Queen Mary and attended a royal garden party at Buckingham Palace, where they shook hands with Winston Churchill. They then toured chateau country in France, and made their way through Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome. She was enthralled.22
Jackie enjoyed what she was learning at Vassar, later saying that “all my greatest interests—in literature and art, Shakespeare and poetry—were formed because I was fortunate enough to find superb teachers in these fields.”23 But Poughkeepsie was a sharp contrast with Europe. She grew restless and applied for a junior-year-abroad program in France, where she lived with a family in Grenoble before heading to the Sorbonne. (Her friend Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, three years ahead of her at Miss Porter’s, was working at the French embassy at that time.) There, Jackie took a photography course, and soaked up the language. She loved France. But she also missed her homes, which to her had their own souls, memories, secrets, and stories. They were places that embodied and nurtured her life.
“I always love it so at Merrywood—so peaceful—with the river and the dogs—and listening to the Victrola,” she wrote to her stepbrother Yusha from the Sorbonne. “I will never know which I love best—Hammersmith with its green fields and summer winds—or Merrywood in the snow—with the river and those great steep hills. I love them both—whichever I’m at—just as passionately as I loved the one I left behind.”24
When the school year was over, she stretched her European travels through the summer and then, not wanting to return to campus in New York, enrolled at George Washington University, close to Merrywood.
“Most of my friends had left Vassar to get married,” Jackie later explained. “And I wanted to be closer to my family, who were living in Washington.”25
One day, at Merrywood, Janet was flipping through the pages of Vogue and came across a writing contest—the Prix de Paris. She tore out the notice and sent it to Jackie, urging her, between her studies at GWU, to enter. “It’s something you’d do well and find amusing,” Janet said encouragingly.26
After surviving an initial round of Vogue judging, Jackie sat down and typed, with only a few grammatical errors, twenty pages of finalist material, including a plan for an entire issue built around the theme “nostalgia,” which described clothes that she would soon be famous for wearing. In response to the call for five hundred words on “People I Wish I Had Known,” including favorite people in “art, literature or other milieus, no longer living,” she named the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the British author and playwright Oscar Wilde, and the Russian ballet dancer Sergei Diaghilev, whose famed Ballets Russes George Balanchine had choreographed in the 1920s.27
“If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space, it is their theories of art that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and paintings and ballets composed to. And they would each make good stepping stones if we thought we could climb any higher,” she wrote.
She also told the magazine that it should not abandon its mix of drawings, models, and celebrities to show off clothes, because without such visual variety “Vogue would be a bore if it offered nothing but poker faced mannequins posturing through its pages. It would have the commercial deadliness of some wholesale buyers [sic] magazine. It is fun to come across Marlene Dietrich brooding in a great cape or Mrs. R. Fulton Cutting II sitting in a pink cloud of William Winkler nylon tulle,” she said.28
For her self-portrait part of the entry, she wrote that she has:
… a square face and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose. I do not have a sensational figure but can look slim if I pick the right clothes. I flatter myself on being able at times to walk out of the house looking like a poor man’s Paris copy, but often my mother will run up to inform me that my left stocking seam is crooked or the right-hand topcoat button is about to fall off. This, I realize, is the Unforgiveable Sin. I lived in New York City until I was 13 and spent summers in the country. I hated dolls, loved horses and dogs and had skinned knees and braces on my teeth for what must have seemed an interminable length of time to my family.
I read a lot when I was little, much of which was too old for me. There were Chekov [sic] and Shaw in the room where I had to take naps and I never slept but sat on the window sill still reading, then scrubbed the soles of my feet so the nurse would not see I had been out of bed. My heroes were Byron, Mowgli, Robin Hood, Little Lord Fauntleroy’s grandfather, and Scarlett O’Hara.
On men’s fashion, she wrote that Vogue should direct their coverage toward educating women on the subject, because they did the buying. She said the articles should explain what is a “sack back” jacket, show various collar types, how to “convert” men to wear French cuffs, and why a guy should have a pair of suspenders with every set of pants “so he won’t have to switch them when he is in a hurry.” “Tell women that well-dressed men are bound by convention and good taste to a limited field,” she wrote, “but that within this field a great deal can be done to obtain color, variety and elegance.”29
Another feature she wrote as part of the contest entry proposed pictures of perfume bottles shot next to close-ups of famous noses. As an alternative, she suggested bottles set next to open books, accompanied by quotes from Milton, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare such as:
A violet in the youth of primy nature
Forward, not permanent sweet, not lasting
The Perfume and suppliance of a minute.
—Shakespeare, Hamlet
She showed her own literary flair in another part of her Vogue submission, a fictional short story—ominously about a wake, the death of her grandfather, during which a friend of the deceased places violets on the coffin. When the visitor leaves, a relative huffs that the violets do not belong there, and moves them to the floor. Jackie wrote:
I picked up the violets and put them to my face. They smelled cool and raindrops were still on them … I knelt on the bench beside the coffin and put the violets down inside, beneath my grandfather’s elbow, where the people who came too close the coffin would not see them.30
The Prix de Paris’s winner would be entitled to a year working as a junior editor—six months in the Paris office and six months in the New York office. Jackie won first prize out of 1,280 entrants from 225 colleges. Winning meant she would report to Vogue in September 1951, after graduation from George Washington with a degree in French literature.
First, however, she would spend the summer traveling in Europe with Lee, who had just completed high school. The sisters boarded the Queen Elizabeth, and immediately began documenting their trip with a scrapbook of their mischievous adventure. They called it One Special Summer, wrote it in longhand, and embellished it with drawings—Jackie had a talent there, too—as well as snapshots and flowery handwriting. The scrapbook, rediscovered many years later in an attic by Lee when she was sorting through memorabilia for a book she was writing, was eventually published in 1974, “without a word or pen-stroke changed,” according to the dust jacket.
“We split the fun,” Lee wrote in the forward. “Jackie did the drawings, the poetry and the parts on Rome and Spain. I described most of our adventures—on the Queen Elizabeth, in London, Paris, Venice, Rome and Florence.”
Jackie’s poems, like the one below from the scrapbook, had become wittier with time, and her French was excellent.
I danced a gavotte
I ate an éclair
I looked for Lee
But she wasn’t there
“Mais vous navez pas vu ma petite soeur?
Elle est si jeune—j’ai un peu peur”*
Yes she’s taking the air
With Monsieur Moliere
I did minuets
I drank champagne
Looking for Lee
Always in vain
“Mais vous navez pas vu ma petite soeur?
Elle est si jeune—j’ai un peu peur”
Oh she’s behind the trees
With the Duc de Guise31
Aside from the wonderful memories—and charming book—the trip had a profound impact on Jackie in ways that she may not fully have understood until almost a quarter century later. Late in their trip, in Venice, the sisters dropped in on Bernard Berenson, a legendary art historian who had grown up in Boston, attended Harvard, and written volumes of criticism. He had served as an adviser to Isabella Stewart Gardner, helping her buy European art that hangs on the walls of her villa-museum in Boston today.
The meeting with Berenson was an occasion at least three years in the making. At fifteen, Lee had written to him from Miss Porter’s, where she had become immersed in Italian Renaissance art history. When he replied to her note, she was determined to meet him. As he lounged, wearing a three-piece suit and tie, in a well-stuffed upholstered chaise, propped up by a velvet pillow with a madonna-and-child oil painting hanging on the wall behind him in his sitting room, Berenson told the sisters: “Never follow your sense—marry someone who will constantly stimulate you—and you him.” Indeed, what the white-bearded man with hands like “silky polished marble” and a brown hat said to them on their grand tour seemed profound, telling them there are two kinds of people—those who are “life diminishing” and those who are “life enhancing.”
And then he told them, “The only way to exist happily is to love your work.”
Lee was moved by the meeting. “He has loved and loves beautiful women and beautiful things and above all his work,” she wrote in the scrapbook, “which is the one thing that makes life worthwhile and complete … We left almost feeling depressed as our visit had seemed so incomplete. We had hardly said a word and every word of his was so great and so true that if we only could have listened longer—then gone away and contemplated all of it, and choose the path from there. He set a spark burning. It was the difference between living and existing that he had spoken of and both of us had simply been existing in our own selfish ways for far too long. Maybe that was why it was so upsetting but more because you longed to reap out of life what he had but knew you never could.”32
Later in life, Jackie would remember Berenson as one of the two most impressive men she had ever met.33 (The other was Charles de Gaulle.)
After feeding pigeons in Saint Mark’s Square and getting a taste for the good life’s long lunches at outdoor cafés, her first days on the job at Vogue in New York were not what Jackie expected. Her special desk was next to editor Bettina Ballard. She was dark haired and stern looking, like a mother bird perched in her big pale-green office at the end of a long hallway on the nineteenth floor of New York’s Graybar Building. Jackie watched various editors pay homage to Ballard, and propose ideas for photo shoots or a story.34
“Bettina, dahling, thees is you!” one affected male editor said, dramatically draping some sage-green velvet over Ballard’s desk.35 Jackie quit. Neither Shakespeare nor an eligible bachelor was in sight. In fact, in her Vogue entry, she had written that after she had spent a summer in Paris the first time, she realized she “should not be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide.”
She disguised the reasons for her resignation in a letter to Vogue, blaming it on her mother “feeling terrifically strongly about keeping me ‘in the home’ [in Virginia] … But I would rather work at what interests me than have a home base and so we have reached a compr
omise. I will stay here next fall—and learn to type I guess—and then in January if I still want to work for Vogue I can move to New York.”36
Jackie settled into Washington looking for another job. “Real journalism” seemed a better fit than fashion editing especially for someone who would later publicly admit to having dreamed of writing the great American novel.37 And she knew it would be good training. For help, she called her stepfather, Hughdie, who, in turn, called his friend Arthur Krock, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times. Krock, who was also rumored to help Joe Kennedy “fix” stories in the press and get paid for that work,38 picked up the phone and dialed Frank Waldrop, the editor of the Washington Times-Herald, which was then the most popular paper in the capital.
“Are you still hiring little girls?” Krock asked.
Although journalism was then a man’s world, there were certain types of low-wage jobs—like covering society teas and reporting on fashion—that women of Jackie’s pedigree were hired to do, often still being financially supported by their parents. The Times-Herald in particular had a reputation for hiring attractive young women.39
Waldrop wanted to hear more of what Krock had to say.
“Well, I have a wonder for you. She’s round-eyed, clever and wants to go into journalism. Will you see her?” Krock asked.40
They agreed to have her come in for an interview, meeting first with city editor, Sid Epstein.
“I want to be a reporter,” she told Epstein.41
“We only hire experienced people,” he said.
“I’m also a photographer and used a Leica at the Sorbonne.”
Epstein laughed at the combination of her sophistication and naïveté.
“Kid, we don’t have anything that fancy.”
But Epstein looked at this beautiful young woman and told her the paper could use a new “inquiring photographer,” a person to snap headshots and invent questions posed to a handful of people on the street. The position was about to be vacated by a stringer leaving for law school.
