Surrounded by luxury and wealth, but lacking fortunes of their own, both Lee and Jackie became preoccupied by the need for financial stability. “They were like little orphans,” said Helen Chavchavadze. “Jackie and Lee were very fused, the way sisters are when they haven’t had much security.” They also shared a mocking humor. Their mother had a soft, husky voice, and each of the girls spoke in such a similarly whispery fashion that Janet “could never tell us apart on the phone,” said Lee. Neither sister was loquacious like Janet, whose “galloping tongue” prompted their ridicule. Rather, Jackie and Lee had what Cy Sulzberger, who spent time with the sisters on a European holiday, described as “the odd habit of halting consistently” while talking, “a kind of pause rather than a stutter.”
Lee followed Jackie to Farmington, and after graduation Jackie took her on a European trip that they turned into a whimsical book written by Lee and illustrated by Jackie. Their observations were laced with self-deprecation (“My voice cracked like a sick rabbit”) and a sense of the world’s absurdity (“We jitterbugged to ‘Wave the Green for Old Tulane’ underneath the Flemish primitives”) that carried into adulthood.
Lacking Jackie’s intellectual drive, Lee dropped out of Sarah Lawrence after only three terms and went to work as an assistant to Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar. By the age of twenty she was married to twenty-seven-year-old Michael Canfield, the dazzlingly handsome adopted son of New York book publisher Cass Canfield. (Michael was rumored to be the bastard child of the Duke of Kent.) Canfield was a heavy drinker, and after the couple moved to London, the marriage foundered.
One evening in 1957 at the American Embassy, where Canfield worked, his fellow attaché James Symington, the well-connected son of Democratic senator Stuart Symington of Missouri, gave a party attended by three couples: Michael and Lee, Stas Radziwill and his wife Grace, and the Earl of Dudley and his wife Laura. Within two years, the three couples had reconfigured like partners in a grand gavotte: Stas married Lee, Eric Dudley married Grace Radziwill, and Michael Canfield married Laura Dudley. “I often thought to myself, ‘What was I serving that night?’” recalled Symington.
Stas had an outsized personality, by turns genial and intense. His aristocratic confidence often made him dismissive, but he was bighearted and full of fun, an extravagant and gracious host. He was difficult to miss in London, tearing around in his Cadillac, living unapologetically beyond his means.
During the presidential campaign, Stas had helped by addressing Polish-American groups in their native language, nearly fainting from anxiety before each speech. Jack and Jackie enjoyed entertaining Stas at the White House, where he played backgammon with JFK and filled him in on British gossip. Jackie had great affection for her brother-in-law, whose quirks she understood better than Lee. “In a way, Jackie was a confidante to Stas,” recalled Marella Agnelli.
Jackie pulled Lee even closer during the White House years—“the one person with whom she could relax and pour out her feelings,” wrote Mary Gallagher. Letters flew back and forth, they talked frequently by transatlantic phone, Lee came for extended stays, and the sisters took vacations abroad. “Lee wanted to be at the White House all the time,” said Tish Baldrige. “Jackie was kind and good to her, making time for Lee to get her into the loop, but Lee also meant escape for Jackie from her official life.” The two sisters often lapsed into their schoolgirl roles, whispering together, sharing jokes, “banging around their mother to each other,” said Baldrige, who took offense that Janet would be maligned unfairly.
“There was drama in Jackie and Lee,” said Oatsie Leiter, who had observed them growing up in Newport. “The way they moved and spoke and greeted people.” But friends could see pronounced differences in style and temperament. Jackie was warmer than Lee, and more off the cuff; Lee tended to be insecure and guarded. Lee also had more refined taste than Jackie, and cared even more about fashion. At Jackie’s request, Lee combed the Paris couture showrooms for fashion ideas, and inspected antiques suggested by Boudin. When Lee arrived at the White House, she usually had a sheaf of black-and-white photographs for Jackie to review as she played the willing lady-in-waiting at the Kennedy court.
After being apart for more than four months, Jackie and Lee embraced when they were reunited at Washington’s National Airport in early March 1961. Both women looked tanned and healthy, Lee from a vacation in Jamaica, and Jackie from more than a week at the Wrightsman home in Palm Beach. Accompanied by two Secret Service agents, Jackie had flown commercial, occupying five seats at the front of the plane, where she sketched dress designs, read Madame de Genlis (a biography of the French mistress of Philippe d’Orléans), and stunned a stewardess by recounting her honeymoon trip to Acapulco and San Francisco.
Jackie and Lee arrived at the White House shortly after the departure of Lem Billings, who had been keeping JFK company during Jackie’s absence—the First Friend’s second week-long visit in two months. Lee occupied the Queen’s Bedroom and Stas the Lincoln Bedroom. To the delight of the press, the Kennedys and Radziwills popped up repeatedly—at a White House reception for Latin American diplomats; at a performance of the Comédie Franaise followed by a party given by the French ambassador; in Middleburg, where they played golf and shot skeet; and in Manhattan, where Jackie and the Radziwills rode in a black limousine with the license plate “JK 102,” dined at Jayne Wrightsman’s and Diana Vreeland’s, and attended the New York City Ballet with Adlai Stevenson.
Jackie brought ten suitcases to New York and spent four days with Lee touring antique shops and galleries, as well as selecting clothes presented by Oleg Cassini in the privacy of the Kennedy apartment, a duplex on the top two floors of the Carlyle Hotel. Jack and Jackie’s Manhattan aerie was decorated with Louis Quinze furniture and paintings by artists ranging from Romare Bearden to Mary Cassatt. It was said that the owner of the Carlyle would purchase whatever book the President was reading and leave it opened to the correct page for Kennedy’s arrival.
The capstone of the Radziwill visit was the White House dinner dance on Wednesday, March 15. These parties were “very precious” to Jackie, said Tish Baldrige. “The guests all had to be beautiful. She said it was for Jack’s sake, but it was for her sake as well.” Jackie always made a point to include single beauties from New York and Washington such as Mary Meyer, Helen Chavchavadze, Robyn Butler, Fifi Fell, and Mary Gimbel, often seating them next to her husband. “Jackie was in charge,” said Helen Chavchavadze, “choosing his playmates. It was very French.”
Besides friends, family, administration insiders, and favored journalists (“no New York Times, no Luce—very hurt feelings,” noted Stewart Alsop), the list of seventy invitees that spring included such exotic personalities as the Aga Khan and Ludwig Bemelmans. “From that moment the city’s official society tote boards began to be changed,” wrote Hugh Sidey. “. . . There were no obligatory guests. These were the people the Kennedys wanted around for a long gay evening.”
Guests mingled first in the East Room for cocktails and hors d’oeuvres before drifting into the Red Room and State Dining Room, where nine round tables for eight were covered in yellow linen with white, embroidered organdy top cloths, and decorated with low vermeil baskets of spring flowers. After a dinner of saumon moussline normande, poulet à l’estragon, grilled tomatoes, mushroom aux fines herbes, and casserole marie-blanche, everyone danced in the Blue Room to Lester Lanin’s orchestra until 3 a.m.—an astonishing hour for midweek.
Lee wore a red brocade gown, and Jackie looked ravishing in a “dramatic white sheath.” Jackie danced just once with the President, who typically felt uncomfortable on the dance floor. Instead, Kennedy “moved from one group to another, a glass of champagne in his hand,” wrote Arthur Schlesinger. “Never had girls seemed so pretty, tunes so melodious, an evening so blithe and unconstrained.” Stewart Alsop observed that with “champagne flowing out of every available crevice,” the evening had a “slight speakeasy quality since the whole thing was supposed to be kept qui
et because of Lent.”
One scene offered a revealing glimpse into the politics of the Kennedy White House. Lyndon Johnson had Bobby Kennedy cornered in the Blue Room, pressing him about a judicial candidate that Bobby was resisting. Stewart Alsop witnessed the “full Johnson treatment, right down to the knee rub and the lapel pull,” which Bobby countered with his “wolfish grin” and “cutting wisecracks,” leaving a humiliated Johnson to retreat “in confusion—first time I’ve ever seen it happen.” The Vice President, noted Alsop, “seemed a bit sad.”
Even more revealing, although only in retrospect many years later, was the choice of Jack Kennedy’s two dinner partners, which made “the Beautiful People from New York seethe with disbelief,” according to Ben Bradlee. Sitting on either side of the President were the famous Pinchot sisters, Tony Bradlee and her sister Mary Meyer, two of Washington’s most alluring women. Tony already knew that Jack Kennedy was attracted to her, because he had made several unsuccessful passes. “Jack was always so complimentary to me, putting his hands around my waist,” she recalled, “I thought, ‘Hmmmm he likes me.’ I think it surprised him I would not succumb. If I hadn’t been married maybe I would have.” (At the time, Tony told neither her husband nor her sister about JFK’s advances.) Kennedy was equally drawn to Mary, but it would be some months before he would instigate their clandestine affair. On that evening in March, when “the sense of possibility had its gayest image,” Kennedy was in a lighthearted mood as he chatted during dinner. Afterwards he linked arms with Mary and Tony, and when they entered the Blue Room he exclaimed, “Well, girls, what did you think of that?”
THIRTEEN
The “girls” Kennedy entertained in the State Dining Room were the least of his dalliances in the spring of 1961. His complicated amorous life included Judith Campbell, Helen Chavchavadze, and further out on the periphery, Marilyn Monroe, with whom he had been linked since they were seen during the Democratic convention dining at Puccini’s, an Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills. JFK also had a lover on the White House staff whose identity was revealed to Hugh Sidey only months after Kennedy’s inauguration.
Sidey was working late in the Time bureau when he was interrupted by a colleague named Billy Brammer, a colorful thirty-one-year-old Texan who had written an astute political novel called The Gay Place inspired by Lyndon Johnson. As Sidey recalled it, “Billy said, ‘Hugh, this is the darnedest thing,’” and recounted that a young woman he was dating, a “beautiful girl” named Diana de Vegh, was also having an affair with Jack Kennedy. “Billy said he asked her why she did it. ‘Nothing will come of it,’ she said. ‘But he has a hold on me.’” The attraction, she confessed, was “power.”
Several months later, Brammer disclosed more details in a letter to a friend back in Texas: “Jack Kennedy is down in the back, and this has apparently limited his roundering,” Brammer wrote, “for he does not often call to bug his teenaged mistress to whom I am secretly engaged. Very late on a recent evening a voice that was unmistakably our Leader’s reached me on the phone, inquiring of ‘Diaawhnah.’ (I started to say she’d gone to ‘Cuber’ for a week and a hawrf.) I informed him that she was in the bawrth, tidying herself, and he rang off rather abruptly.”
JFK’s involvement with de Vegh, a twenty-two-year-old Radcliffe graduate, was known among West Wing aides as well as members of the press. “You heard there was a special relationship with her,” said Barbara Gamarekian. “She was very classy.” De Vegh had arrived in Washington before the inauguration, working first in a job Kennedy arranged on Capitol Hill and then as a member of the National Security Council staff. She was a striking brunette (like Jackie, Helen, Judith, and Pam), and an upper-class New Yorker descended from John Jay (as was Joe Alsop’s wife, Susan Mary) and related to Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw (in a strange coincidence, also an ancestor of Mary Meyer and Tony Bradlee).
She and Kennedy had met during his 1958 Senate campaign at a political dinner in Boston when she was a twenty-year-old college junior and he was forty-one. “There was an empty place next to me,” she recalled, “and he came and sat down and . . . asked . . . who was I and what was I doing . . . I was just thrilled.” When Kennedy visited Boston, he would send Dave Powers or his longtime driver Muggsy O’Leary to collect her at her Radcliffe dorm. The Kennedy aides were matter-of-fact, inquiring only if she had an interest in politics. Mac Bundy, then dean of the Harvard faculty, heard about de Vegh and became alarmed, not only because Kennedy was on Harvard’s Board of Overseers, but because de Vegh’s father sat on visiting committees at Harvard for rare books and economics. “Bundy said to Kennedy, ‘You have to stop it,’” said Marcus Raskin, one of Bundy’s assistants in the White House. Kennedy ended the dorm pickups, but continued to see her.
Over a ten-month period, de Vegh and JFK got together a half dozen times in a platonic relationship as he sought her views on his performance as a politician. “We would have dinner,” she recalled. “He was looking for a mirror, someone who would keep reflecting back that he was fascinating and amazing. . . . Eventually it became a love affair.” After de Vegh graduated, Kennedy’s placement of her on Bundy’s staff was “a way to get even,” said Raskin. “She was put to work for me. . . . Bundy said to me, ‘Well, I have a present for you.’ I knew something was going on.” Her work involved doing research and writing reports about the Trust Territories—a genuine if marginal job.
Once she was installed in the Executive Office Building, Kennedy invited her to the private quarters when Jackie was away. They would usually dine with Powers or O’Donnell, and afterwards JFK and de Vegh would retire to the Lincoln Bedroom—a place sacred to Jackie for “the kind of peace . . . you feel when going into a church,” its high carved bed “like a cathedral,” where she’d find herself “sort of . . . talking” with the great Republican president.
During his time with de Vegh, Kennedy gave away little, never talking about his parents, siblings, or his immediate family. Their conversation focused on the events of the day, and he joked about other politicians. “I never did experience John Kennedy in a moment of reflection or pain or sadness,” she recalled. To make herself more interesting, she purposely took views contrary to his, which amused him. By keeping the tone superficial, Kennedy was a man “of his time,” de Vegh said. “He was limited . . . He was caught in privilege.”
For Kennedy, de Vegh’s appeal was that she was impressionable, pretty, and adoring. She had a good brain and brought him information that diverted him. He displayed no guilt, nor did she. De Vegh settled for an emotionally barren and lopsided arrangement mainly because she was programmed by her background to cater to a handsome, powerful, charismatic, and important man. Their common ground was a fascination with Jack Kennedy.
De Vegh’s niche was by no means unique. Kennedy had a need for the company of attractive and wellborn women half his age. “There were a couple of the girls who worked on the White House staff who had also worked on the campaign and who had a pretty close relationship with the President,” said Barbara Gamarekian. “The thing that amazed me so was that these . . . girls were great friends . . . and gathered in corners and whispered and giggled, and there seemed to be no jealousy between them, and this was all one great big happy party, and they didn’t seem to resent any interest that the President or any other men might have in any of the girls. It was a marvelous example of sharing, which I found very difficult to understand as a woman!”
The most conspicuous among these female staff members were Priscilla Wear, known as “Fiddle,” who worked for Evelyn Lincoln, and her close friend Jill Cowan (“Faddle”), an assistant in Salinger’s office. Both women were twenty years old and had left college to work in the Kennedy campaign, winding up with the staff who assembled at the family compound on election day. “The President said to Fiddle and Faddle on the night of the election, ‘If I win I’m going to give you jobs in the White House,’” recalled Phyllis Mills Wyeth, who shared a house with the two women in Georgetown. “Fiddle wa
s so lovely. He said, ‘I want you in my front office.’ He lived up to the promise.”
The presence of Fiddle and Faddle in the White House prompted speculation at least in part because, as Gamarekian observed, “these girls would go on presidential trips but not do the work. There was not animosity but a great deal of curiosity.” Both young women, for example, were seen in the Oval Office “doing his hair”—massaging gel into Kennedy’s scalp. The first time Bundy and White House aide Myer Feldman witnessed this unusual pampering, they were taken aback. “I said I didn’t think this kind of thing was sufficiently dignified for the Oval Office,” recalled Bundy. Kennedy stared at their balding pates and cracked, “Well, I’m not sure you two plan your hair very well.”
Wear and Cowan were “long-legged, tawny coltish kinds,” said Gamarekian. “They were kind of the same, like Pamela, like Jackie. They all had the veneer of good breeding, a little money, the right schools and the attitude of the world is your oyster.” Wear had gone to Farmington, and Cowan was related to Alfred Bloomingdale of the department store family. They had a “joking, warm, easygoing relationship” with Kennedy, said Wendy Taylor, who worked as a White House intern and knew Wear from Farmington.
Cowan answered phones and clipped the wire copy for Salinger, while Wear helped Lincoln with typing and perfected JFK’s signature on photographs sent to well-wishers. But mostly they were known for joining Kennedy and Powers for the midday or early evening swim. “They would go off to the pool and come back with wet hair,” said Gamarekian.
There has been no firsthand evidence that Kennedy’s co-ed pool encounters with women on the White House staff (including, from time to time, Pamela Turnure) were anything more than what Gamarekian called “swimming and cavorting.” “We swam in borrowed bathing suits, and Dave Powers was sitting there near the side of the pool,” said Taylor, who took the plunge with two other interns after repeated invitations from Powers. “The President came in wearing his bathing suit. We didn’t know he was coming. He came walking in with a big grin. He was amused by these young things, and he swam around with us, chatting to us about our jobs. He or Dave asked that they bring in a tray with glasses of wine. We were sipping wine while swimming, and all the while Powers was on the sidelines. . . . I remember thinking President Kennedy was tall, with a dramatic scar on his back.”
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