Jayne Larkin was a delicate brown-eyed beauty nicknamed “Little Egypt” as a teenager for “her dark hair in a pageboy, and her sophisticated use of makeup and eyeliner,” according to New York writer Francesca Stanfill. A midwesterner from modest circumstances who had worked as a shopgirl in Beverly Hills, Jayne had flair—an example was the “y” she added to her first name in high school—that attracted the attention of wealthy oilman Charles Wrightsman, described by Thomas Hoving, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as “the most immaculate man I ever met. . . . He moved with a languorous grace as if participating in a minuet.” A polo-playing ladies’ man twice Jayne’s age, Charlie had been educated at Exeter, Stanford, and Columbia. Although twenty-five-year-old Jayne lacked his pedigree, her ambition was obvious, and her attentiveness impressive.
After their marriage in 1944, Charlie and Jayne set out to conquer society as collectors of fine French furniture and objects, as well as old master paintings. With a net worth of at least $100 million, Charlie had plenty to spend. He drove Jayne relentlessly to learn about art and decor, and to master the French language. She read books and quizzed experts such as famed art critic Bernard Berenson. An exacting martinet, Charlie shocked antique dealers when he would bark, “Jayne, come over here and take some notes!” The photographer Cecil Beaton once observed that “her face twitches with anxiety when Charles is on a bait. . . . One wonders if it is worthwhile suffering for so much of her life.”
Jayne’s most important tutor was Stéphane Boudin, a Parisian interior designer with a prestigious clientele including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Gianni Agnelli, Pamela Churchill Harriman, and Lady Baillie, the glamorous Anglo-American owner of Leeds Castle. Boudin headed Jansen on the rue Royale, an antiques dealer as well as atelier that employed 650 craftsmen and designers. With Boudin’s guidance, the Wrightsmans amassed a dazzling collection of eighteenth-century pieces, many created for French kings, that they would eventually donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Jayne consulted Boudin down to the slightest detail,” said Boudin’s New York partner, Paul Manno.
Jayne first met Jackie through Joe and Rose Kennedy, who lived north of the twenty-eight-room Wrightsman estate in Palm Beach. The Wrightsmans entertained the Kennedys in Florida as well as in the south of France, where they traveled every summer on a luxurious yacht. Typical fare at a Wrightsman dinner party would be a pound of caviar, cold pompano salad, and quail on toast. “Jaynie” once helped the Kennedys find an artist to paint Kathleen’s portrait, and when Joe was about to buy the Caroline for Jack’s campaign in 1958, Charlie offered him advice on airplanes.
In 1959, Charlie Wrightsman, a committed Republican, asked Boudin if he would work with Jackie on her Georgetown house. Charlie advised that it could be useful to meet her because “who knows—she may some day be First Lady.” During his visit that May, Boudin sold Jack and Jackie two antique rugs that they paid off at $100 a month. “I’m still in a glow over the day with him,” Jackie reported to Jayne, pronouncing Boudin “an enchanting, brilliant man.”
With Sister Parish, the ultimate in WASP chic, as her decorator of record, and American aristocrat Harry du Pont as her official consultant, Jackie seemed to have her team in place. But Jackie wanted Boudin’s imprimatur as well. Having worked on the great houses of Europe, among them Buckingham Palace and Josephine Bonaparte’s Malmaison, he was accustomed to grand historical settings. He could do “what no American decorator can do,” Jackie later said, because he was “trained as an interior architect” with an “eye for placement and proportion” that she needed. As early as February 3—three weeks before the formation of the Fine Arts Committee—Boudin arrived at the White House for a secret four-day visit with Jackie. He suggested changes from top to bottom “to represent the United States in a bit more elegant and refined way.”
After word of the visit leaked into the press two months later, Boudin emphasized that he was there only for “friendship,” not professional reasons. Given Boudin’s national origin, any overt role in the White House refurbishment would be politically awkward, so Jackie decided to keep his involvement from the public even as she considered him her “primary visionary.” Chattering and sharing jokes in French, Jackie got along famously with seventy-two-year-old Boudin, who was diminutive, effervescent, and impish. On his visits to the United States, Boudin would bring his mistress; he was married to “a wife in name only,” explained Manno.
Jayne Wrightsman’s biggest gift to the White House was underwriting Boudin’s design for the sumptuous Blue Room, a paragon of French-inspired taste. But she was also Jackie’s co-conspirator in an elaborate minuet with Boudin, du Pont, and Parish, serving as liaison with Boudin and traveling frequently to Paris to scout for choice pieces for what she called “La Maison Blanche.” Both Jayne and Jackie were skilled at presenting Boudin’s ideas as their own, to avoid offending Parish and du Pont. (When Boudin had the brown stone mantels in the East Room painted with a faux finish of white marble, du Pont praised Jackie for her “stroke of genius.”)
Even so, Parish threatened to quit several times when she sensed that Jackie was favoring Boudin’s suggestions over hers. Parish’s continuing role was vital, not least because she enlisted her friends—the John Loebs and Charles Engelhards—as large donors. At one point, Jayne had to write a ten-page letter from the Hotel Ritz in Paris imploring her to stay on. At another touchy moment, Jackie advised Janet Felton Cooper, “say this tactfully to Sister. I don’t want to hurt her feelings.”
Du Pont was irked by Boudin’s preference for dramatic presentation over strict historical fidelity. “I shudder to think what Mr. Boudin would do with American furniture,” du Pont once wrote. During his White House visits, du Pont would spend hours arranging furniture and artwork; he took placement so seriously that at Winterthur he pounded brass tacks into the floors—each stamped with a catalogue number—and instructed staff not to move pieces even an inch from the tacks without his permission. Boudin would arrive “fresh and vigorous” the next day to undo du Pont’s scheme, and Jackie often rearranged items as well. “Mr. du Pont was rigid,” recalled Joe Alsop’s wife, Susan Mary, “but Jackie’s charm made everything work.”
Both Jayne and Jackie soothed du Pont with flattery: “You are a wonder man!” wrote Jayne, while Jackie praised “each ‘little touch of Harry in the afternoon.’” “Mrs. Kennedy juggled everybody,” recalled Jim Ketchum. “She felt certain people were able to handle certain points on the compass, and if she felt instincts and tastes would clash, she kept them in separate rooms.” “As the elder statesman,” du Pont “was always philosophical and appeared not to be unduly disturbed,” noted his daughter Ruth Lord.
Jack Kennedy kept aloof from the internecine struggles, but he took a keen interest in the progress of the restoration. He had not been raised to appreciate the decorative arts, nor the visual and performing arts for that matter. The Kennedys had large houses with furnishings “that could survive the marauding swarms of children who wrought havoc there,” recalled Oleg Cassini. Joe Kennedy bought antiques occasionally through Marie Bruce, a British friend, but only when she could find a bargain. “They didn’t even own any paintings anywhere until very late,” said Walton. The only counterbalance to the family’s philistinism had been Lem Billings, whose passion for art and antiques had begun with his Princeton thesis on Tintoretto, a precociously sophisticated study.
When Jack married Jackie, “he really had no idea about how you should decorate a room, or what was the difference between a pretty house and an ugly house,” said David Gore. At first, JFK resisted Jackie’s insistence on “fancy stuff,” but according to Gore, “gradually he came to appreciate good taste” and to admire Jackie’s “instinct for excellence.” It was Jack who selected their Georgetown house because “he liked the door knocker,” said Jackie. During one of Jackie’s series of redecorations there, JFK surveyed the muted shades on the walls, sofas, and curtains and asked, “Do you think we’re prisoners of
beige?”
JFK grew to admire the impressionists, especially “paintings of water and sky.” At Jackie’s urging, he even took up painting for a brief spell during their first year of marriage. Wearing surgical scrubs bought by Jackie, he set up his easel and “did a lot of terrible paintings, but he was enjoying himself,” said Walton, who served as his teacher. JFK quit after admitting “he had no gift,” but Jackie hung one colorful canvas—a Riviera scene he did from memory—in their Hyannis Port living room.
He remained eager to learn, and “he was really very visual minded,” said Mary Lasker, the philanthropist and renowned collector. Kay Halle recalled her astonishment during one of her Georgetown dinner parties when Kennedy crawled under an Adam table and announced, “You can tell by the boards what its age is, whether it’s a reproduction or whether it’s of the period.” Halle was impressed that the “one thing that really caught him” was her highest-quality piece.
Jack Kennedy’s love of history converged nicely with the artistic appreciation nurtured by his wife. The White House restoration also proved a political boon, as the public and the press reacted with enthusiasm. “Furniture classes sprung up all over town as young women studied the difference between Sheraton and Queen Anne, and between Lowestoft china and Chinese export,” wrote Nancy Dickerson. JFK took to stopping by the White House Curator’s Office on the ground floor to see the latest acquisitions. When two dust-covered side chairs originally made for President Monroe arrived, Kennedy was so delighted that he asked that they be wrapped and tied with bows so that he could present them to Jackie himself.
Almost from the beginning, Kennedy had his own project to complement Jackie’s work in the White House: influencing the design of the city of Washington. Kennedy had acquired an interest in public architecture, and he knew Washington intimately after living there on and off for nearly two decades. As a result, “John F. Kennedy’s feeling for Washington was probably deeper than any president since Jefferson,” wrote Bill Walton. “He deplored its ugly areas and schemed, as president, to help make the capital a far more beautiful city than he had found it.”
In the earliest days of his administration, JFK called Walton “every morning for something.” One day he asked Walton over to talk about the Eisenhower administration’s plan to raze historic buildings near the White House in order to build much-needed modern offices. The first target was the Executive Office Building (officially known as the State, War and Navy Building), a massive six-story granite pile of pediments and columns topped by an ornate mansard roof sprouting chimneys, medallions, and dormers. It was a nineteenth-century extravagance, but Kennedy thought it deserved to survive.
Together Walton and Kennedy gazed out at Lafayette Square, where a number of buildings were also endangered by the bulldozers—homes that had been occupied by such famous nineteenth-century figures as Stephen Decatur and Dolley Madison. Walton convinced Kennedy that the structures had to be saved and offered his help. (Walton’s wasn’t an original idea; a Citizens Committee to Save Lafayette Square had formed in 1960.) To give Walton official status, Kennedy appointed him to the Commission of Fine Arts, which was charged with preserving the cultural and architectural heritage of the capital. But ever mindful of practical concerns, Kennedy warned Walton, “I want you to remember one thing: Don’t ever get me out on a limb that I can’t support what you’re doing . . . I have a limited amount of political capital to spend, and I can’t spend it all on your projects.”
TEN
The thing that broke me up was this snowman . . . He was wearing a big floppy Panama hat, like Frank Lloyd Wright A.D. 1920 or somebody . . . It seems to me there is an awful lot of formality around this new house of mine. Maybe you have noticed a certain look in my eye . . . like I have an independent streak. Well I do . . . I intend to have a fine time for myself.
—BY CAROLINE KENNEDY AS TOLD TO THOMAS WOLFE,
FEBRUARY 5, 1961, WASHINGTON POST
The make-believe description of three-year-old Caroline’s arrival at the White House after nearly two months in Florida offered an early glimpse of the satirical talents of Tom Wolfe before he began exposing the foibles of American society in his journalism and novels. Unlike the sober reports of his competitors, Wolfe captured the mischievous spirit that the Kennedy children unleashed in the Executive Mansion.
Jackie had prepared well for the arrival of her children, having recruited and trained her staff and put everyone on notice about the way she planned to operate in private and public. Jackie structured her life to allow her to spend as much time with Caroline and John as she wished.
The Kennedys enjoyed the luxury of an English nanny named Maud Shaw, who had been with the family since Caroline was eleven days old. Shaw lived in a spartan room between the two children’s bedrooms on the second floor. “She won’t need much,” Jackie cracked to J. B. West, the chief usher. “Just find a wicker wastebasket for her banana peels and a little table for her false teeth at night.” Red-haired and droll, Shaw oversaw daily logistics, reinforced Jackie’s emphasis on good manners, and, according to Jackie’s secretary Mary Gallagher, was the principal disciplinarian who “with words alone . . . could master the situation.” With her starched white uniform, Shaw was “a little puffed up with herself,” recalled Anne Truitt, whose daughter Mary was a playmate of Caroline’s, “but she was a very competent nanny.”
Jackie’s involvement with her children was striking for a woman of her class, where formality and emotional distance were the rule. (Significantly, she was “Mommy,” not “Mummy.”) “She usually had her youngsters in tow,” recalled James Ketchum of the Curator’s Office. “Mrs. Kennedy had the kids more than Miss Shaw, which was a great shock to me. I assumed she turned them over to Miss Shaw as her responsibility.” In Georgetown, Jackie had participated in a playgroup that several mothers took turns hosting at their homes. “She was a remarkable mother, the way she spoke and engaged the children,” said Sue Wilson, who had also known Jackie at Vassar.
Jackie declined to “talk down” to children. As a surprise for Jack, she taught Caroline at age three to memorize Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig” and “Second Fig,” two short poems with more sophisticated language than standard nursery rhymes. Yet Jackie also had what Ketchum called “a tremendous sense of play.” “Let’s go kiss the wind,” Jackie would exclaim to Caroline. Watching her with Caroline and John on the South Lawn, J. B. West observed that she was “so happy, so abandoned, so like a little girl who had never grown up.” Jackie valued the imagination of children—“a quality,” she noted, “that seems to flicker out in so many adults.”
In her quest to shield Caroline from prying eyes, Jackie asked the playgroup mothers—who included Jane Saltonstall, daughter-in-law of the Republican senator from Massachusetts, and Cathy Mellon Warner, daughter of Paul Mellon and wife of lawyer John Warner, the future Republican senator from Virginia—to move their gatherings to the White House. “Jackie thought it would be more natural for Caroline,” said Sue Wilson, “to demystify the place, to make it less cold and formidable, to have kids scampering in the long hallways.”
The mothers were wary at first, fearful that publicity would violate their privacy. But JFK promised that the names of the seven children would be tightly guarded, so Pat Hass organized the group as a cooperative, with the parents paying all expenses for equipment and staff. For the first four months, Anne Mayfield, a graduate of Bank Street College of Education, supervised the group informally. The following fall she was joined by Jaclin Marlin, who had a master’s from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Marlin and Mayfield ran the White House nursery school—expanded to fourteen children—for two mornings a week during its first full year. Jackie designed a playground on the South Lawn and a schoolroom in a third-floor solarium—a sun-filled space above the Truman Balcony with a panoramic view of the capital.
JFK routinely saw his children at breakfast and before their bedtime, spending as much time with them “as the ave
rage medium- to high-income man,” observed Time’s Hugh Sidey. But unlike most organization men, he lived “above the store,” which afforded glimpses of Caroline and John at lunchtime and when he took breaks in his schedule to sit on a bench next to the playground. Compared to the previous five years, when he had been either on the road campaigning or in the Senate chamber many evenings, the White House, for all its abnormality, forced him into more normal family rhythms.
JFK lacked the exuberance of Teddy Roosevelt, known for wild pillow fights with his sons Archie and Quentin. Still, “Jack Kennedy with children was pure fun,” said Anne Truitt, recalling his three-clap summons into the Oval Office. He was the patriarch of his generation who took an active interest in the children of his siblings. In Hyannis Port, with the family golf cart loaded with nieces and nephews, he would zoom to the local candy store, looking like Toad in The Wind in the Willows. While riding on the Caroline, Walt Rostow watched Kennedy settle a rambunctious swarm of children one by one—“a man who all his life was at home with women and kids and human situations.”
Like Jackie, JFK spoke to young people in a straightforward fashion; when arts adviser August Heckscher brought his teenage son to the Oval Office, Kennedy let the boy sit in on the meeting, listening to sensitive discussions. Charles Heckscher was struck, he amusingly wrote afterwards, that Kennedy addressed him “with an air of businesslike equality.”
Kennedy also knew that his children showed the human side of his presidency and welcomed “photo ops” with them for publications such as Look and Life—publicity that Jackie tried to restrict. Some of the most enduring images of the Kennedy years—“John John” peeking out from underneath his father’s Oval Office desk, Caroline eating chocolates in Evelyn Lincoln’s office—were organized by their father while Jackie was out of town. “I always heard back from the First Lady,” wrote Tish Baldrige, recalling Jackie’s annoyance.
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