The scenario was alarmingly similar to her circumstance four years earlier when she suffered internal bleeding and delivered a stillborn baby one month premature. Then, as now, she was alone for the ordeal. In 1956 she had returned exhausted to Newport from the Democratic convention, and Jack had gone on a Mediterranean cruise with his brother Teddy and some friends, including several women.
This time Walton managed to contact Kennedy by calling the airport in West Palm Beach, and JFK immediately flew back to Washington. After midnight on November 25, John F. Kennedy Jr. was born by cesarean section—an occasion marred only by an Associated Press photographer who snapped three flash pictures as Jackie left the recovery room. “Oh no, not that!” Jackie exclaimed. Secret Service agents seized the film and destroyed it.
The arrival of their second child gave Jack Kennedy a son and namesake, and put Jackie’s role as a mother in the forefront. The presence of an infant and a precocious three-year-old daughter would add a lively dimension to White House life not seen since the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, who had six children ranging from Alice the debutante to Quentin the toddler. But the Kennedy offspring would pose new challenges for parents seeking to balance a “normal” childhood with the growing demands of the press and public for information about their favorite new celebrities. Shortly before the election, in a TV interview with Sander Vanocur of NBC, Jackie had talked of her need to be with her children in the White House. “If you bungle raising your children,” she said, “I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”
THREE
During her extended recuperation from childbirth, Jackie Kennedy methodically prepared herself for life in the White House. For two weeks she worked first from her bed at Georgetown University Hospital, and then from her bedroom at Joe and Rose’s home in Palm Beach, where she stayed until two days before the inauguration. While Baldrige and other staff members dealt with logistics, Jackie steeped herself in the history of the White House and its interiors.
At 55,000 square feet, the President’s House, as Jackie liked to call it, is imposing but not palatial. (By comparison, the Seattle home built by multibillionaire Bill Gates in the 1990s measures 65,000 square feet.) Completed in 1802 during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, the White House had been burned by the British army during the War of 1812 and rebuilt by President James Monroe in 1817. It was Monroe who set the decorative standard for the modern White House by purchasing fine French Empire furniture.
Jackie consulted forty books from the Library of Congress along with assorted periodicals—including the January 1946 issue of Gazette des Beaux Arts, which described the pieces Monroe had ordered from Paris. After examining fabric swatches, blueprints, and photographs of White House rooms, she scribbled memos and letters on yellow legal pads to her interior designer, Mrs. Henry Parish II, known to all as “Sister.” Jackie’s collaborator on the Kennedy homes in Georgetown and Hyannis Port, Parish would be responsible for the first stage of work, a quick refurbishment of the private apartments on the second floor, using $50,000 designated by Congress. Parish was “a woman of quality and taste,” said Tish Baldrige, “from the same social group,” with “a tremendous sense of what was proper and refined.”
The day she came home from the hospital, Jackie took a tour of the White House that showed how badly the place needed a major restoration. Room after room was filled with second-rate reproductions; curtains were “seasick green”; the ambiance was as cold as a hotel. Jackie was struck, she later said, that the Executive Mansion looked “so sad.” She phoned Sister Parish immediately with her report. “Jackie did not have two big eyes,” recalled Parish. “She had a dozen. Every room was observed, down to the last detail.”
Although the White House lacked an overall decorative vision, a number of twentieth-century presidents and first ladies had made important improvements: Teddy Roosevelt added the West Wing and redesigned the ground floor; Calvin Coolidge’s wife, Grace, created the “period room” concept with Federal-style furniture in the Green Room; Herbert Hoover’s wife, Lou, added more original pieces; and the Trumans gutted the building in order to shore up its deteriorating structure.
But following that extensive refurbishment, Congress had refused to provide funds for antique furnishings, and neither Bess Truman nor Mamie Eisenhower showed much interest in sophisticated decor. Only a generous gift in 1960 from a group of interior designers—a collection of museum-caliber Federal-period furniture for the Diplomatic Reception Room—offered a hopeful precedent for Jackie’s plan to enhance the historic integrity of the White House.
Jackie had grown up in an atmosphere of understated elegance in her family homes, Merrywood in suburban McLean, Virginia, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport. Gore Vidal, Jackie’s relative by marriage, once described Merrywood as “a bit Henry Jamesian . . . deliberate quietude removed from 20th Century tensions.” Jackie, he said, “tried to recreate Merrywood’s heavenly ambiance.” Good taste was in Jackie’s bloodstream, along with a basic knowledge of historic periods in the decorative arts.
“Our background was influential in terms of knowing how things should be done,” said Lee. Janet Auchincloss presided over her households with a disciplined formality. She was strict, proper, and old fashioned. “Every library . . . had chintz,” Lee recalled, “very nice, but bland.” Jackie incorporated her mother’s sense of the appropriate with a more expansive imagination and a more relaxed style. Jackie was determined to bring history to life in the White House, but she also resolved to inject liveliness and informality. “I felt like a moth banging on the windowpane,” Jackie said. “The windows . . . hadn’t been opened for years.” It was this balance of the casual and the grand that would redefine the look and feel of her new home.
Jackie was equally preoccupied with her personal image. After studying sketches and pages ripped from fashion magazines, she corresponded with fashion designer Oleg Cassini. Only days after her son’s birth, Cassini met with her for nearly four hours in her hospital room. During the campaign, Jackie had been sharply criticized for her fondness for extravagant French clothes. Women’s Wear Daily, which made a fetish of following her fashions, declared the Kennedys were running “on the Paris Couture fashion ticket.” Jackie responded by showing reporters her maternity wardrobe from “a Fifth Avenue store” and issuing a stinging rebuttal: “A newspaper reported . . . that I spend $30,000 a year [the equivalent of $182,000 today] buying Paris clothes and that women hate me for it. I couldn’t spend that much unless I wore sable underwear.” Afterwards, she painted a watercolor of protesters marching with signs: “Put Jackie and Joan back in American clothes.” But she understood that the way she dressed had political ramifications: The ladies’ garment workers union was a key Democratic supporter that lobbied JFK for her to wear American-made clothing.
To head off further speculation by the fashion press that Jackie said had “gotten so vulgarly out of hand,” she designated forty-seven-year-old Cassini as the designer of her official wardrobe. He would not be her exclusive supplier, although that was left unstated. In the authorized biography of her White House years, Jackie explained that she had wanted “a single person, an American and a man whom she had known for some years” so that “all information about her costumes could be controlled by a single source.” Not only could she converse with Cassini in French, his first language, he was steeped in the history, literature, and art of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. When she asked for a dress in “Veronese green” or “Nattier blue,” he would instantly understand.
With his pencil mustache, pomade-glazed hair, deep tan, and courtly manner, Cassini was perfect for his role as official couturier—a first in White House history. He was the scion of a noble Russian family; when he was born in Paris, the doctor arrived in a top hat, white tie and tails, white gloves, and spats. Cassini’s grandfather had served as Russian ambassador to the United States during Teddy Roosevelt’s presidency, and Cassini’s parents traveled in aristocratic Euro
pean circles.
Cassini got his start in fashion through his mother, who built a successful dress-designing business that foundered during the Depression, prompting the family to emigrate to the United States. He became an American citizen and renounced his title of “Count Cassini.” (He had taken the more illustrious family name of his mother; his father was Count Loiewski.) Cassini’s career as a fashion designer took off in Hollywood when he began creating costumes for film stars such as Gene Tierney, whom he married, and Grace Kelly, to whom he was fleetingly engaged.
The Washington Post called Cassini a “wise-cracking ladies’ man” when his new position was announced. During World War II his cavalry unit (which included multimillionaires Jock Whitney and Paul Mellon as well as Hollywood producer Darryl Zanuck) had what he called a “fantasy life” at officer candidate school in Fort Riley, Kansas, playing polo, foxhunting, and drinking cocktails with Gloria Vanderbilt and Claudette Colbert. In Palm Beach and Manhattan, Cassini became friendly with Joe Kennedy, whose table at La Caravelle Cassini would obligingly fill with models and society girls. The Ambassador not only blessed his friend’s appointment by Jackie; he told Cassini, “Don’t bother them at all about the money, just send me an accounting at the end of the year. I’ll take care of it.”
Jackie had strong views about fashion that complemented Cassini’s approach, which was marked, she later noted, by “sophisticated simplicity” and the restrained use of “unusual materials.” Since he was a family friend, Jackie could count on him to accept and incorporate her ideas. He in turn could feel comfortable applying his Hollywood approach, creating “fashion scripts” to evoke “a dramatic version of a look” so Jackie “would always be the same and there would be a discipline to the look.”
Jackie had been intrigued by fashion since her adolescence, when she sketched ideas for dresses on the back of her exam papers. For nearly a decade she had been collaborating with her mother’s dressmaker, Mini Rhea, to create her own clothing designs. During her senior year in college she had won the prestigious Prix de Paris at Vogue magazine on the strength of sophisticated essays that extolled the virtues of “excellent cut and unobtrusive color” in a suit, and the appeal of an orange skirt for evening that would “look delicious in front of the fire.”
At a time when women wore big skirts, pinched waists, and puffy sleeves, Jackie favored the clean lines and slender silhouette of Givenchy and his mentor, Balenciaga. “Just remember I like terribly simple, covered up clothes,” she wrote to Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, after the Democratic convention. Jackie’s understated style was typical of upper-class fashion avatars such as socialite Babe Paley.
Yet Jackie brought her own youthful dash. The New York Times called Jackie “a pace setter who has worn sausage skin pants, streaked hair, chemise dresses and sleeveless tunics long before these became popular currency.” Like Vreeland, Jackie embraced a sense of whimsy. In one of her Vogue essays she had described “a great dip brimmed black hat that makes you look like the femme fatale one takes to hear tangos at teatime,” and she had imagined how even a humble turtleneck sweater could be enlivened by “gauntlet gloves and a beret and a walk with a swagger like D’Artagnan’s.”
During their hospital room conference Jackie and Cassini discussed for the first time using her official wardrobe to create the image of “an American Versailles” in the White House that would emphasize youth and elegance. But Jackie also intended, she told Cassini, to “continue to dress the way I like.” In a letter to the designer summarizing her goals, she asked for designs “that I would wear if Jack were President of France—très Princesse de Rethy mais jeune”—a reference to the forty-three-year-old wife of King Leopold III of Belgium, who was admired for her refined style. Jackie wanted Cassini’s assurance that her dresses would remain exclusive, so that she wouldn’t see any “fat little women hopping around in the same dress.” Above all, she asked that he keep the lid on publicity. “I refuse to have Jack’s administration plagued by fashion stories of a sensational nature,” she wrote, “& to be the Marie Antoinette or Josephine of the 1960s.”
“Whenever I was upset by something in the papers,” Jackie once recalled, “[Jack] always told me to be more tolerant, like a horse flicking away flies in the summer.” But Jackie’s dislike of the press would never subside; journalists covering her would always be adversaries who approached their work as a zero-sum game. “Mors tua vita mea est,” she said to Cassini, explaining her view of their attitude: “Your death is my life.” To some extent her animus was inbred. When the Kennedys invited journalists to Jack and Jackie’s wedding in 1953, Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, told Rose Kennedy that publicity would be “demeaning and vulgar.”
Over the years Jackie had periodically spoken to reporters out of political necessity. Her remarks were by turns bland (“Women are very idealistic and they respond to an idealistic person like my husband”), artful (“I’d love to get to know exactly what to say in situations, like Noël Coward”), and irreverent. “I don’t think Jack has changed much, I really don’t,” she said during the campaign. “He still thinks nothing of answering his door at home when he’s wearing his shorts.” During her campaign appearances she remained “skittish and edgy,” observed Look magazine reporter Laura Bergquist, who once spotted her “curled up on the campaign plane, reading the Beatnik best-seller, Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums.” Before an appearance by JFK on Face the Nation, Jackie left notes on the reporters’ desks saying, “Don’t ask Jack mean questions.” When Peter Lisagor of the Chicago Daily News did anyway, she sat in the studio “looking daggers” at him and afterwards said his questions were “absolutely horrible.”
Those who had known Jackie a decade earlier might have been surprised by her hostility toward the press. After her graduation from college, she had worked for fifteen months as “The Inquiring Camera Girl” on the Washington Times-Herald. Armed with a bulky Graflex, she roamed the city, asking questions that were frequently droll, sometimes disconcerting, and invariably probing. “You could make the column about anything you wanted to,” she said, “so I’d find a bunch of rough, salty characters and ask them about a prizefighter just so I could capture the way they talked.”
She asked pretty young women if they would rather be “an old man’s darling or a young man’s slave,” and at an elementary school in Virginia she inquired, “What makes little boys so bad?” She touched on issues of love and marriage: “Are wives a luxury or necessity?” “What didn’t you give up after you got married?”
Since her girlhood, Jackie had loved writing; she had descriptive flair and a good ear for language. In her Vogue application she called Cecil Beaton’s sets for the plays of Oscar Wilde “the candybox spillings of pinks and mauves.” She told the Vogue judges that she had grown up with “vague little dreams of locking myself up somewhere and turning out children’s books and New Yorker short stories.”
Still, journalism was a raffish profession for a well-bred girl. Jackie found amusement in rewrite men and other newsroom characters, and savored that “there was no routine, no two days were ever the same.” But Jackie didn’t identify with the newspaper world, viewing herself more as a provocateur than a journalist. Mini Rhea said that Jackie regarded her job as a “field course in psychology,” using her inquiries “to learn how people thought and reacted and what mistakes they had made in life and what they would do over.”
As a reporter, Jackie had freely asked questions that she would never consent to answering herself. She used the excuse of her pregnancy to curtail much of her contact with journalists during the campaign. But she made an important foray into image-making that showed her skill as a “hidden hand.” Within two days of Kennedy’s election, Jackie began collaborating with Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer, a contributor to the Washington Post popularly known as Molly Thayer, on an authorized account of the new first lady’s first thirty-one years. Molly Thayer was no ordinary journalist; she was a clos
e friend of Janet Auchincloss and had known Jackie since her childhood in Long Island and Newport. “Molly was like her aunt,” said Baldrige. “She adored Jackie. Molly was an obedient servant. She was poor and hungry and needed the money.”
Jackie and Thayer agreed that Thayer would publish a three-part series in Ladies’ Home Journal, later to appear as a short book. Jackie gave Thayer exclusive access to scrapbooks, photographs from her personal collection, and family letters. “Jackie did a lot of the writing in bed, and then Molly would take it over and rewrite it,” said Mary Bass of Ladies’ Home Journal. Thayer sent the completed manuscript to Florida to be edited by Jack as well as Jackie. The first installment arrived on the newsstands on inauguration day, and the series was a “complete sellout.” The biography, said Tish Baldrige, was “exactly how Jackie wanted the world to see her.”
It was an enviably rosy picture, complete with glowing tributes to her mother and father, gently glossing over their bitter divorce when Jackie was ten, after years of rancor over her father’s womanizing, drinking, and profligacy. Nor did Jackie mention the heartbreak of her wedding day: after Janet excluded her former husband from the rehearsal dinner, Jack Bouvier drank himself into a stupor and could not escort his daughter down the aisle. A single sentence marked Bouvier’s death at age sixty-seven, avoiding any mention of the cancer, alcoholism, reclusiveness, and financial reversals that darkened the end of his life.
Jackie also paid homage to the Kennedy family. Bobby was “the best legal mind” and “the one I would put my hand in the fire for,” Eunice “the most civic-minded,” Pat “the smartest,” Jean “the most domestic” and the “closest” to Jackie, Teddy “the best natural politician,” Rose “the most devout,” and Joe, the one Jackie said she adored.
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