One Thursday evening that winter the Kennedys threw a small dinner in honor of the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky. The guest list, drawn from London, Paris, New York, and Chicago, included Leonard Bernstein, Lee Radziwill, Vladimir Nabokov and his cousin Nicholas, and Helen Chavchavadze, who was seated near the maestro. Amid all the “Russian kissing,” Bernstein heard JFK saying, “How about me?,” a plea the conductor found “endearing and so instantly unpresidential . . . at the same time never losing dignity.” The guests were disappointed when Stravinsky had to leave early, “weary” from a day of rehearsals, the White House explained to the press. In fact, Stravinsky had gotten so drunk that his assistant Robert Craft had to carry him out.
Jackie had Lee as company for long stretches of January and February. To all appearances, the sisters had never been closer. Lee and Stas had been spending more time apart, and their marriage was shaky, aggravated by the difficult birth and five-month-long hospitalization of their daughter,Christina, just a year after the arrival of their son, Anthony. There were submerged tensions with Jackie as well. After lunch with Lee in New York on Friday, February 9, Truman Capote reported to Cecil Beaton, “My God, how jealous she is of Jackie. I never knew . . . Her marriage is all but finito.”
That evening, Lee and Stas were together in Washington at another festive White House dinner dance, this time for Steve and Jean Smith, who were moving to New York. With Joe Kennedy’s incapacity, it fell to the son-in-law with the business acumen to oversee the vast Kennedy family fortune. Their send-off, JFK told Ben Bradlee, was the best yet of the three private dances. Because the Kennedys were obliged to invite nearly a hundred guests to dinner, the Bradlees, Bill Walton, Mary Meyer, and other regulars dined at private homes before joining the dance at 10 p.m. “We were so out,” Bradlee recalled, “that we were in. . . . The Kennedys couldn’t afford to snub anyone . . . except their really good friends.”
Once again, the twist held center stage in the East Room, as Oleg Cassini performed a solo, and Jackie and Lee instructed both Bob McNamara and Averell Harriman, “much to the distress of John Kennedy, who tried to stop us,” McNamara recalled. During another twist demonstration, Washington Post publisher Phil Graham left the dance floor with a six-inch rip in his trousers.
Jackie, wearing a white satin sheath, danced nearly every dance and stayed until 4 a.m. Shortly before midnight, JFK found time to tip Bradlee that Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the U-2 spy plane shot down by the Soviets in May 1960, was being exchanged for a Soviet spy held by the Americans. Newsweek’s deadline had passed, so Bradlee, with dance music playing in the background, dictated the story to its sister publication, the Washington Post. Kennedy slipped away from the party at 2 a.m. to check with Berlin to make sure Powers was safe, then rejoined the festivities and didn’t leave until 4:30 a.m., after the band stopped playing. “By that time,” Bradlee recalled, “Tony and I both agreed that he seemed a bit high—one of the very rare occasions we’d seen him in that condition.”
Rehashing the evening’s events on the phone the next day, Kennedy brought up Bradlee’s sister-in-law. “Mary would be rough to live with,” JFK said, “not for the first time.” Bradlee agreed, “not for the first time.” “Mary was not easy because she had so much attention, effortlessly like a tide,” said Cicely Angleton. “The husband would be left out in the cold. That is what Kennedy meant.” Unknown to Bradlee, JFK’s offhand remark concealed his latest clandestine entanglement.
Less than three weeks earlier, while Jackie and the children were in Glen Ora with Lee and her son Tony, Mary and Jack had begun their affair at the White House on a wintry Monday evening. Although she was as free a spirit as her friend Helen Chavchavadze, Meyer became more deeply enmeshed with Kennedy from the outset. Unlike Chavchavadze, who kept her liaison secret, Meyer confided in Anne Truitt a couple of months after the affair began—and later that year to Anne’s husband, James. “She told me she had fallen in love with Jack Kennedy and was sleeping with him,” Anne recalled. “I was surprised but not too. Mary did what she pleased. She was having a lovely time.” Anne was a safe confidante, too polite and “incurious” to probe, and disinclined to pass judgment.
Bill Walton was Meyer’s frequent escort when the Kennedys called, and he served as Helen Chavchavadze’s designated date as well. Despite Walton’s sophistication, Kennedy kept him in the dark about the nature of his relationships with Meyer and Chavchavadze. “Bill was a friend of the marriage,” said Chavchavadze. “For Jack he was a cover. Jack always arranged for Bill to bring me to White House dinner parties. Bill was very romantic about the marriage, perhaps too romantic.”
Meyer had other lovers during her involvement with Kennedy. “She and Jack understood each other. Mary didn’t want to marry anyone,” said Anne Truitt. “In that sense the relationship was superficial. Jack and his wife were joined together, in the same business. Mary also liked her privacy. They were two very sophisticated people who formed a friendship with no intention of it being forever. It was for mutual friendship and pleasure and enlightenment. It was a matter of lifting each other.”
Truitt characterized the affair as an “amitié amoreuse,” a romantic friendship. “He saw that she was trustworthy,” Truitt said. “He could talk to her with pleasure, without having to watch his words. Mary brought him a whiff of the outdoors, the quick interchange of lightheartedness. He needed entertainment of various sorts. Mary was very entertaining.”
Mary and Jack betrayed nothing in the company of others—including Tony and Ben, who had no idea. “I think the real key to Jack was his love of risk,” Bradlee said. “How could he be fucking her and inviting her to dinner with Jackie?” Kennedy once told Charley Bartlett that he thought Mary was a “great woman,” Bartlett recalled. “Normally he didn’t talk to me about girls, so that comment gave me a few suspicions.” Characteristically, Bartlett kept his hunch to himself. In the East Wing, “we knew Mary was a pal,” said Tish Baldrige, “and she was invited to dinner often. Jackie was accepting, didn’t complain. She was as cool as a cucumber always.”
On Valentine’s Day, America fell more in love with Jackie Kennedy than ever, as both CBS and NBC broadcast her White House tour to an estimated 46.5 million people in prime time—about 75 percent of the viewing audience. (ABC would show the program the following Sunday afternoon, adding 10 million more viewers.) Jackie wore a red dress, but neither that nor the beautiful hues on upholstery and curtains could be seen by viewers since the show was shot in black and white. For a solid hour (the networks ran no commercials) the American audience heard a history of the White House as Jackie and Collingwood chatted while strolling from room to room.
She filled her narrative with piquant anecdotes and characterizations as well as factual details. Charles Dickens called the White House an “English clubhouse,” and when funds ran low it was known as the “public shabby house.” In the Green Room, Jackie noted that Thomas Jefferson gave dinner parties where he introduced such exotic foods as “macaroni, waffles, and ice cream.” She conscientiously explained the periods represented by each room, pointing out the Egyptian touches that Napoleon brought to the Empire style, wryly recalling President Grant’s “ancient Greek and Mississippi riverboat” version of the East Room, and pausing in the State Dining Room to marvel at the “architectural unity” of the 1902 era.
The presentation was thoroughly beguiling, from Jackie’s bowlegged walk down a corridor toward the camera to her soft, low voice with its hint of breathiness. Her accent was distinctly upper-class New York—“mahvelous” and “rawther” and “hahbor”—yet her style was unaffected. As she spoke of her favorite acquisitions, she enthusiastically arched her eyebrows, and her eyes sparkled with a suppressed merriment. She cleverly mentioned by name such prominent donors as the Walter Annenbergs, Henry Fords, and Marshall Fields.
That evening, Jack and Jackie had the Bradlees for dinner with Max Freedman and Fifi Fell. Afterwards they watched the program in the Lincoln sitti
ng room, as Bradlee recalled, “impressed with Jackie’s knowledge and poise.” Even after redoing his part, Kennedy was unhappy with the way he came across. (Tony told her husband later that she sensed JFK might have been jealous of his wife.) Among those calling with congratulations was Charley Bartlett, who said the program had moved him to tears, prompting JFK to crack that he had cried too—“over my performance.” Moments later when Eunice called and asked to talk to Jackie, the First Lady “shook her head,” Bradlee recorded in his diary. Inexplicably tearful, Jackie went off to bed.
In a page-one review the next morning, Jack Gould, the respected television critic of the New York Times, raved about the program, praising Jackie’s evident “verve and pleasure” and declaring her an “art critic of subtlety and standard.” In the three days following the broadcast, the White House was swamped with 6,300 pieces of fan mail for the First Lady. But several months later, Norman Mailer scorched Jackie in Esquire with what Newsweek called a “scathing neurotic attack.” Mailer, who had tried early to ingratiate himself with the Kennedys, had turned on them when they excluded him from White House gatherings. Her “odd public voice” reminded him of a “weather girl,” and she moved “like a wooden horse,” a “starlet who is utterly without talent.” Jackie, in Mailer’s view, was “a royal phony.”
Jackie’s critics frequently assumed that her breathy voice—“so gentle,” said Hervé Alphand, “as if she were continually astonished”—was a manufactured mannerism, but friends like Jessie Wood, who had known her since adolescence, insisted it was genuine. Her voice became a liability because it led people to underestimate her intelligence. Cy Sulzberger’s wife, Marina, found herself expecting platitudes, and was pleasantly surprised to hear “really intelligent things. . . . One sits there open mouthed and . . . completely entranced.” To women such as Vassar acquaintance Sue Wilson, “it was a voice that kept you a little away from her. It wasn’t a voice that said ‘kick off your shoes and join me and relax.’” Yet George Plimpton felt Jackie’s whispery quality “was part of her intimacy. From the time she was a girl she talked that way to me.” Those who found her quiet tone inviting often detected the accompanying glint in her eye that carried a hint of mischief.
The White House restoration was only partly finished in February 1962. Jackie was working on new decorative schemes for the Blue and Green Rooms with Boudin and Jayne Wrightsman, which increased the strain with curator Lorraine Pearce, whose loyalty remained with Harry du Pont. Despite feeling that Pearce was “too full of herself,” Jackie assigned her to write the first White House guidebook. Jackie considered the guidebook “desperately important,” not least because she needed its revenue to help pay for White House furnishings.
“She wanted a story,” said Jim Ketchum, “concentrating on the people in the White House and the objects in their time.” Jackie spent many hours on the guidebook, working on the layout with staff from National Geographic, who donated their time, and editing the text prepared by Pearce. Jackie felt satisfied with Pearce’s work, but in mid-February she asked Arthur Schlesinger to add “some stirring phrases” and “beautiful words.”
By then Schlesinger had become a versatile intellectual factotum for both the President and First Lady. He had solidified Kennedy’s loyalty after the Bay of Pigs by flying to Florida to mollify angry Cuban exile leaders. From time to time Kennedy heeded Schlesinger’s periodic memos on foreign and domestic policy, most notably when he took into account his aide’s admonition against playing “chicken” with the Soviets over Berlin. Yet Kennedy ignored much of Schlesinger’s political advice—to push a recalcitrant Congress forcefully for a liberal agenda, for example, and not to appoint Republican John McCone as head of the CIA.
Schlesinger freely exchanged information with favored journalists such as Ben Bradlee, who “relied on him a lot” for historical perspective. “He was pulling strings all the time,” said Jean Friendly, who had known Schlesinger since the late forties.
In addition to his role in the Hickory Hill seminars, Schlesinger proposed August Heckscher, a New York cultural critic, to serve as the first White House consultant on the arts, an appointment that Kenny O’Donnell viewed with undisguised hostility. As a part-time film reviewer for Show magazine, Schlesinger would also alert the Kennedys to new releases for the White House theater—Jackie seemed to like his selections more than Jack. The President found L’Avventura so slow paced that he asked to skip to the final reel, and he walked out of Last Year at Marienbad after twenty minutes. Jackie loved “the puzzle aspect” of Marienbad, said Schlesinger. “She felt it was a mysterious, stylized movie.” She even asked Cassini to design an evening dress similar to the “chanelish chiffons” in the film.
For Jackie, Schlesinger’s most important role was as unofficial consultant on the restoration project. “I am sorry to impose on you,” she wrote to ask his assistance on the guidebook. “But you are the only person who can do it—and the only one who is always kind enough to help me with whatever project I need help with.” Once he had burnished Pearce’s text, Jackie pressed him to rewrite the introduction. Jackie considered Pearce’s version too long and pedantic: “ghastly,” she told Schlesinger, “uncoordinated and conceited.”
JFK suggested that Jackie write a short introduction herself. In a lengthy memo to Schlesinger, she outlined her objectives for the book: to give visitors “something to take away,” to describe the meaning of the White House in American history, and to explain the effort to furnish the mansion in a historic way “without making one sound conceited.” She also needed a “marvelous closing sentence worthy of Euripedes.”
Schlesinger complied with four elegant paragraphs, touching on the “imperishable memories” evoked by the White House, and the recent restoration work to “bring back old and beautiful things” that would remind us of our nation’s “rich and stirring past.” It was only when Jackie tried to prod Schlesinger into writing a White House guide to the presidents that he drew the line. She envisioned pithy profiles that were “lively, even controversial.” Significantly, she gave Schlesinger a book about Versailles to help inspire him. “If you can do all this I will carve your name on the Blue Room mantelpiece,” she wrote.
Schlesinger gently reminded Jackie that he had “certain jobs to do for her husband that had priority,” and he promised to find another historian for the task. While she didn’t take offense, the project would languish for more than a year until Schlesinger’s choice, Harvard historian Frank Freidel, took on the job.
Jackie and Lee’s goodwill trip to India and Pakistan had been postponed three times since it was first planned for the end of November. The final delay, announced less than a week before their scheduled arrival in New Delhi on March 4, was blamed on Jackie’s “low-grade sinus infection” which had been causing her “intermittent low fever.” Only the day before the announcement, Jackie and Lee had given a lively water-skiing demonstration for friends aboard the Honey Fitz in Palm Beach, and several days later Jackie was back in Glen Ora, riding with the Orange County Hunt. Time speculated that the postponement had more to do with “John Kennedy’s pique at an intransigent Nehru,” who had recently invaded the tiny Portuguese territory of Goa.
It turned out that Jackie’s second thoughts were the real reason. At a dinner party the night after her televised White House tour, Jackie had been in high spirits, dancing the twist with Joe and Susan Mary Alsop, diplomat Chip Bohlen and his wife, Avis, the Ros Gilpatrics, and Joan Braden, the wife of former CIA official turned newspaper publisher Tom Braden. “Jackie now hates the idea of going to India, but JFK insists that, having made the commitment, she must go for state reasons,” Stew Alsop revealed to a friend. “She kept insisting that she needed Joan along as a companion and general cheerer-upper.”
Jackie was hardly an intimate friend of Joan Braden, a diminutive and feisty mother of seven who switched from Republican to Democrat because of JFK. Joan had worked in a variety of government posts, and during the campaign she
had ghosted a homespun weekly column for Jackie called “Campaign Wife.” In addition, Joan had served as an informal press secretary, fending off requests from reporters as well as overeager campaign aides. “She has a remarkable talent for being a close personal friend of the great,” Stew Alsop observed, “a unique combination of charm and brass.”
Jackie called her “that little freckle-faced girl” and wondered why Jack and Bobby were “forever asking her opinion.” Joan and Tom Braden had what would later be called an “open marriage,” in which they gave each other “total freedom—just enough rope,” as Joan put it, to have extramarital affairs. Joan’s most noted liaison was with Nelson Rockefeller, the Republican governor of New York who was a leading candidate to oppose JFK in 1964. (In later years her lover would be Robert McNamara.) Still, Jackie felt comfortable with Joan, so Jack announced that Pierre Salinger would “fix it up” for a magazine exclusive on the First Lady’s trip. Stew Alsop arranged Joan’s “inside story” for the Saturday Evening Post, to be written in a “gay chatty style.”
On her way to the subcontinent, Jackie spent several days in Rome, where she was greeted with shouts of “Che bella!” (How beautiful!). She was scheduled to have a private audience with Pope John XXIII, which had been secretly sought to help Lee secure an annulment of her first marriage to Michael Canfield. As Roman Catholics, Lee and Stas had been compelled to marry in a civil service—five months before Tony was born. Now, despite the cracks in their relationship, Stas still wanted a religious service, which an annulment would permit.
Jackie saw the pope alone, and they talked in French for an unusually long time—more than a half hour, compared to the usual fifteen to twenty minutes. Afterwards, Jackie consulted with Cardinal Cicognani, the pontifical secretary of state, who had originally discussed the annulment during a White House visit the previous November. The Kennedys had deep connections at the Vatican: one of Joe Kennedy’s oldest friends was Enrico Pietro Galeazzi, a top papal aide and chief architect of the Holy See, and for her motherhood and good works Rose Kennedy had been named a “Papal Countess” by Pope Pius XII.
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