The bumps in Jack and Jackie’s marriage were invisible as well. Jackie called her husband “a rock . . . I lean on him in everything. . . . He’s never irritable or sulky. He would do anything I wanted or give me anything I wanted.” Jack was said to be charmed by her “many-faceted character” and to admire “her self-sufficiency in maintaining an inner life of her own” that kept her “content, though not happy” when he was away. Yet there was one crack in the facade, tucked into page 95 of the book’s 127 pages, that went unremarked on at the time.
It was an account of the evening in June 1951 when Jack and Jackie were introduced at dinner by their mutual friends Charley and Martha Bartlett. Jack Kennedy would take two years to propose after a sporadic courtship. But that first night, as Jackie described it to Molly Thayer, she “looked into Jack’s laughingly aroused, intelligently inquisitive face and knew instantly that he would have a profound, perhaps disturbing influence on her life.” Jackie was “frightened” and “envisioned heartbreak, but just as swiftly determined such heartbreak would be worth the pain.” Readers had no way of knowing that Jackie herself had written that touching and prophetic description as she was about to become the thirty-first first lady—words that illuminated the real nature of the Kennedy marriage.
FOUR
Jackie’s arrival in Palm Beach on December 9 with baby John shifted the locus of activity away from Washington for more than a month. Jack still came and went, but he conducted many of his important deliberations in the fifteen-foot-square library of muted and perfectly proper chintz in Joe Kennedy’s oceanside villa, La Guerida. The house, “long, white, vaguely Spanish and not unhandsome,” as John Kenneth Galbraith described it, had been designed in 1923 by the resort’s signature architect, Addison Mizner, in a style dismissed at the time as “Bastard-Spanish-Moorish-Romanesque-Renaissance-Bull Market-Damn-The-Expense.” When Joe Kennedy bought it in 1933 at the bottom of the Depression, he added a wing created by the other premier designer, Maurice Fatio.
The property was hidden behind a high wall along North Ocean Boulevard. By Palm Beach standards, the house was not large, with only six bedrooms. It faced a wide lawn planted with palm trees down to the seawall. Off to the side were a swimming pool and tennis court, as well as Joe Kennedy’s “bullpen,” a wooden enclosure with benches where he sunbathed in the nude—slathered in cocoa butter, wearing a broad-brimmed hat—and conducted business on the phone, an instrument that he used “like a Stradivarius,” said the singer Morton Downey. Jack and Jackie’s bedroom occupied a corner of the ground floor, with French doors opening onto a balcony overlooking the tennis court. After his election, JFK declined to move upstairs to a bedroom with an ocean view; he liked the room he had occupied since 1933 because he could get in and out quickly.
On the rear patio Lem Billings stretched his large frame in a chaise, sunbathing for hours each day and “relishing the mob scenes”—the constant parade of dignitaries, prospective appointees, staff, friends, and family. Billings’s appearance was unobtrusive: square jawed and blue-eyed behind thick glasses in clear plastic frames (the same kind worn by McGeorge Bundy, Kennedy’s new national security adviser, with whom he was frequently confused). But Billings had a loud raspy laugh—braying as he exhaled, honking as he inhaled—that was frequent, infectious, and so unusual that the TV talk show host Jack Paar claimed he could always hear his friend Lem “among hundreds of others in the studio audience.” The Billings voice was similarly distinctive—deep, gravelly, and nasal.
Long before Zelig was invented by Woody Allen, Billings was ducking in and out of the picture, “a mystifying relic of JFK’s youth,” said Arthur Schlesinger. One moment he sat on an airplane with JFK sharing a sandwich and a bottle of milk en route to the Orange Bowl. Another time he might be spotted at mass on Sunday with the President-elect.
After the election, Fletcher Knebel was disconcerted to find Billings at the Kennedy home in Georgetown when he stopped by to retrieve Jackie’s answers to a series of written questions about Jack for a profile in Look. With Jack in Florida, Billings was keeping Jackie company for several days. “I thought, ‘Jesus, this is strange,’” Knebel recalled. “‘This is not the middle-class way of living that I know. The guy goes off to Palm Beach with his cronies, leaving his pregnant wife at home with one of his good friends.’”
For nearly three decades, Billings had been an integral part of Jack Kennedy’s life. He reminded Charley Bartlett of a “stable pony, relaxing, undemanding, peppy, and very vibrant.” Jack and Lem met at Choate just after Billings’s father, a physician, had died unexpectedly of a strep infection. Lem’s mother was from a distinguished Pittsburgh family and had graduated from Farmington. The Billingses had lost most of their money in the Depression, forcing Lem onto the scholarship rolls. An Episcopalian descended from Mayflower Puritans and French aristocrats, Lem didn’t switch from Republican to Democrat until Kennedy ran for president.
Lem and Jack had older brothers who were star athletes and students at Choate, creating an instant bond that fed their irreverence and incessant teasing. “Jack had the self-assurance of a sharp lyrical tongue,” observed David Michaelis, who wrote about Billings and Kennedy in a book on famous friendships. “Lem had a Chaplinesque sense of situation.” They had countless nicknames for each other, from “Leem” and “Moynie” to “Kenadosus” and “Rat-Face.” Mostly the two were Billy and Johnny. Billings and Kennedy were also united in their dislike of Choate, which inspired them to form a subversive club called the “Muckers” that nearly got them both expelled. A poignant measure of Billings’s adoration of JFK was his decision to repeat his senior year simply to be with his friend; Billings even pretended that he had been born the same year as JFK. Jack and Lem enrolled together at Princeton, although JFK had to withdraw because of illness and switched to Harvard the following fall.
After Billings’s first visit to Palm Beach at Christmas in 1933 he became an honorary Kennedy brother. “Lem and his battered suitcase arrived that day and never really left,” said Teddy Kennedy. Billings’s full-time mission was to create laughter in his adopted family with amusing songs, wry observations, and tall tales filled with vivid details. “Lem had the ability to make you feel funny and clever,” said Kennedy sister Eunice Shriver, who considered him her “best friend.”
Joe Kennedy often subsidized Billings’s expenses, including a European tour with Jack in 1937 when Lem was a walking Baedeker, tutoring JFK in the fine points of culture gleaned from studying art history at Princeton. After college Billings received an MBA from Harvard and pursued a fitful career in advertising, where his claim to fame was inventing “Fizzies,” a carbonated beverage in tablet form that briefly became a national craze. Finally in 1960 he moved into the Kennedy office on Park Avenue and became an unofficial retainer, advising family members on real estate, art, and antiques. Whenever Jack called, Billings was at his doorstep with that battered bag, sometimes for weeks at a time. In the White House, Billings came and went as he pleased; he was so familiar to the Secret Service that he didn’t even have an official pass.
Billings probably knew more about Jack Kennedy’s relationship with Jackie than anyone else in the inner circle. Before Jack and Jackie were married, he cautioned her about her prospective husband’s numerous romantic liaisons over the years, and how difficult it would be for him to settle down with one woman. Instead of being put off, she later told him, “I thought it was a challenge.” After the wedding, “Lem was a bridge between them,” said journalist Peter Kaplan, a younger friend of Billings. “She liked him but she didn’t like him. He appreciated things. He had an aesthetic sense that she wanted Jack to have. But she got fed up with his ubiquitousness, and she made fun of him, although he did help her in various ways.”
Because of Billings’s giggling mannerisms and resolute bachelorhood, Jack’s friends wondered about his sexual orientation. “I didn’t see anything overtly gay about him; I think he was neutral,” said Red Fay. Ben Bradlee regarded Billi
ngs as “idolatrous. The rest of Jack’s friends felt great affection for Jack, but idolatry is not that male an attribute.” The Kennedys tended to be homophobic, but in Billings’s case, family members averted their eyes from any homoerotic hints in his personality.
Kennedy dutifully offered Billings three jobs in his administration: director of the Peace Corps, head of a proposed United States Travel Service, and ambassador to Denmark, all of which Billings turned down. “Can you imagine,” Billings said, “my best friend becomes President of the United States and I spend his presidency in Denmark?” Instead, Billings preferred the singular role of “First Friend.”
The Jack Kennedy who greeted visitors in Palm Beach was the picture of health, tanned and fit, an image crucial to his political success. During the transition, Today’s Health, the magazine of the American Medical Association, issued an upbeat report on Kennedy’s “superb physical condition” based on the opinion of his doctors, as related by Bobby Kennedy. The article acknowledged, almost in passing, the litany of health problems Kennedy had suffered since childhood, starting with the scarlet fever at age two-and-a-half that had separated him from his family for three months. In addition to standard ailments such as measles, mumps, and chicken pox, the magazine mentioned attacks of jaundice, malaria, and sciatica. According to the article, Kennedy had prevailed over these diseases with his “barb-wire toughness” and for more than a year he had been “singularly free of health problems.”
The report was guilty of serious omissions, including his problems with colitis, cystitis, neuritis, gastroenteritis, hepatitis, and post-gonococcal and nonspecific urethritis, a venereal disease. Nor were there references to his periodic confinements at the Mayo and Lahey clinics for mysterious pains and fevers during his adolescence, or the nine times he was hospitalized—a total of more than six weeks—for a variety of gastrointestinal and urinary tract infections in his first term as a senator. Similarly ignored was the osteoporosis that severely weakened his lumbar spine—worsened by injuries on the Harvard football field and in the navy—and that led to three difficult operations. The second and third of these procedures, in 1954 and 1955, had kept Kennedy out of the Senate for nine months as he recuperated in Florida.
The most troubling evasion was Kennedy’s affliction with Addison’s disease, diagnosed when he collapsed during a trip to England in 1947. Addison’s is a disorder in which the adrenal glands fail to produce two crucial hormones: cortisol, which regulates the immune system; and aldosterone, which maintains blood pressure. Many of Kennedy’s symptoms over the years, including weight loss, fatigue, and a yellowing of the skin (which once moved columnist Joe Alsop to say JFK looked “rather like a bad portrait by Van Gogh”), were typical signs of a gradual adrenal gland degeneration. His critical illness in England—nausea, severe pain, weakness, fever, and vomiting—resembled a classic “Addisonian crisis.”
Joe Kennedy had wept on hearing his son’s diagnosis, because, as he told his friend Arthur Krock of the New York Times, he thought Jack was “doomed to die.” Addison’s meant Jack was highly vulnerable to infection as well as a potential breakdown of his circulatory system. But while Kennedy couldn’t be cured, he could be treated with cortisone, which he took in varying forms—pellets inserted under his skin, injections, and pills—for the rest of his life. (Joe Kennedy even had supplies of the medicine placed in safe-deposit boxes around the world in case of emergency.) The medication eliminated the symptoms but had side effects including insomnia, restlessness, facial puffiness, and, depending on his hormone levels, heightened or diminished sexual desire. Equally dangerous was the fact that any severe stress, such as his back surgery, could trigger a potentially fatal Addisonian crisis. By the age of forty, Kennedy had been given last rites four times.
Today’s Health dismissed accusations from Lyndon Johnson and his supporters before the Democratic convention that Kennedy had Addison’s. (India Edwards, a former Democratic national committeewoman, had said Kennedy was so ill he “looked like a spavined hunchback.”) Instead, the doctors alluded only to a past “adrenal insufficiency” that required medicine “by mouth” to deal with “any possible aftermath.” Kennedy never admitted the truth about his disease, fearing it would harm his political prospects. (When Press Secretary Pierre Salinger asked about it, Kennedy said, “I don’t have Addison’s disease” and “I don’t take cortisone.”) But his personality and his relationships were affected by his poor health, brushes with death, and the throb of constant pain in his back as well as the “hard knot” in what Billings called JFK’s “nervous stomach.”
The only advantage to Kennedy’s numerous confinements was that they fostered his interest in history and biography; family friend Kay Halle recalled seeing The World Crisis by Winston Churchill on JFK’s hospital bed when he was fifteen years old. Otherwise, Kennedy’s physical burdens tended to “set him somewhat apart from [his] extroverted and gregarious family,” wrote Schlesinger, and invested him with a “peculiar intensity.” He learned early to conceal his discomfort, rarely complaining, even to those closest to him. His friends and family saw what Bobby Kennedy described as “the face . . . a little whiter . . . lines . . . a little deeper . . . words a little sharper” as Jack had to reach for crutches or a cane. But in public, the President-elect managed to appear robust.
JFK’s resilience took on almost mythic qualities that affected the way his intimates viewed him and the way he behaved. “I’ve always said he’s a child of fate,” Joe Kennedy wrote to Jackie. “If he fell in a puddle of mud in a white suit, he’d come up ready for a Newport ball.” That kind of confidence helped fuel Kennedy’s strength as a leader, but it also contributed to recklessness in his personal life—the sense that he could abide by his own rules and not suffer any consequences.
Jackie Kennedy had lived under the roof of her in-laws for extended periods, especially when she was caring for Jack during his illnesses. Now, in Palm Beach, she had to conserve her strength in an atmosphere that afforded little privacy. “It was so crowded,” she recalled, “that I could be in the bathroom, in the tub, and then find that Pierre Salinger was holding a press conference in my bedroom!”
She had arrived in a state of exhaustion after her tour of twenty rooms at the White House with Mamie Eisenhower. Jackie promptly collapsed, stayed in bed for five days, and then largely kept to herself, walking on the beach and catching some sun when she took a break from her children and her paperwork. During Ken Galbraith’s visit, he noticed how quickly Jackie disappeared because “she was not feeling well.” Occasionally she ventured out to watch Jack play golf, but she avoided fancy gatherings at the Bath and Tennis or the Everglades, the exclusive clubs where the Kennedys were members. Jackie once told French ambassador Hervé Alphand that she preferred Hyannis Port, “a sort of family home . . . similar to Colombey-les-deux Eglises [the bucolic village where French president Charles de Gaulle had a home] rather than Palm Beach . . . which I detest.”
From the early days of her marriage, Jackie had declined to meld into the overpowering Kennedy clan, where “hey kiddo” was a standard greeting. The Kennedys had initially seen her “as a threat,” according to Billings, who also viewed her as “a serious rival for [JFK’s] time and affection.” Kennedy had married late, at age thirty-six, and his family worried that “he’d be drawn away from them” by Jackie. The Kennedy sisters—whose long legs and great manes of hair reminded journalist Stewart Alsop of an “unbroken Shetland pony look”—“called her ‘the Deb,’ made fun of her babylike voice,” said Billings, and tried to pull her into their high-intensity sports competitions. But Jackie resisted, figuring “why worry if you’re not as good at tennis as Eunice or Ethel when men are attracted by the feminine way you play tennis?”
Jackie and the sisters eventually accommodated each other, but she felt the greatest kinship with her twenty-four-year-old sister-in-law Joan, who struggled to become a Kennedy. Joan was musically talented and beautiful, with a curvy figure and a cascade of
blonde hair, but she could never shake her insecurity. “If only she had realized her own strengths instead of looking at herself in comparison with the Kennedys,” Jackie lamented years later. Jackie revealed the depth of her affection for Joan as well as Teddy in a page-long unofficial “last will & testament” that she scribbled on a piece of hotel stationery during a vacation in Jamaica ten days after Jack announced his campaign for the presidency. On it she stipulated that if she and JFK were killed, Caroline should be raised by “Edward M. Kennedy and his wife Joan . . . as one of their own children.”
Jackie’s trickiest family relationship was with Rose Kennedy, the dainty (five foot three) matriarch who wore the latest Paris designs and took pride in her trim figure at age seventy. Their temperaments and habits were often at odds, although their respective marriages had discomfiting parallels. Bright and inquisitive, Rose had been thwarted in her ambition to attend Wellesley, forced instead by her father into strict convent schools run by Sacred Heart nuns where she wore a veil and disciplined herself with silent retreats of prayer and reflection. Decades later Rose called her missed educational opportunity her “greatest regret. . . . It is something I have felt a little sad about all my life.”
Rose had raised her nine children like a team, organizing their lives with brisk efficiency, her office filled with card files containing vital information for each child. She was “great on self improvement,” according to JFK. But by late middle age Rose had endured the profound sorrow of losing three of her first four offspring—two dead and one incapacitated. She had also withstood decades of her husband’s philandering, including his flagrant two-year affair with Gloria Swanson. Rose’s own father had been a womanizer, and she remained proudly stoic, never complaining, never confronting. To protect herself, Rose withdrew into her own interests, traveled extensively, and kept an emotional distance, even from her children. Jack, like his siblings, treated Rose respectfully, although he did complain to Bill Walton, “She was never there when we really needed her. . . . My mother never really held me and hugged me.”
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