First Ladies (6 page)

Next Jackie formed the White House Historical Association to raise funds for the overall renovation. When a knowledgeable friend predicted she would need a minimum of two million dollars, JFK was ready to abandon the project all over again. He could almost hear the uproar the figure would cause. But Jackie rescued the situation by coming up with the idea for a full-color guidebook, describing the White House through its architecture, furnishings, and history. The book has since become a small publishing industry unto itself. Over eight million copies have been sold, making it the equivalent of an oil well or a gold mine in the basement, pumping funds into ongoing acquisitions of art and antiques, rugs and curtains.

Jackie’s French taste coincided in a remarkable, almost spooky way with that of previous upper-class First Lady, Elizabeth Monroe. In fact, she made the Monroe White House the focus of her renovation. Jackie loved France so much, she inserted a French decorator, Stephane Boudin, into the process, making him more or less coequal
with the man who thought he was in charge, Henry Francis du Pont, of the famed Winterthur Museum. Du Pont was the acknowledged greatest living expert on American antiques. Boudin knew nothing about them and cared even less. How could they be any good? They weren’t French. The result was some spectacular behind-the-scenes fireworks.

Not only was Boudin arrogant but he was rude—and he listened to nobody. He stunned du Pont and his staff by painting the Blue Room white and the Green Room chartreuse. Jackie backed him, ignoring frantic protests from du Pont and a pointed comment from her husband that he preferred the traditional colors. Redecorating the White House was not a joint venture, as far as Jackie was concerned. It was her thing, and she brooked no interference and very little criticism from anyone, including the President.

Any staffer who talked loosely to the press about the project got into deep trouble, if Jackie did not like the resulting story Maxine Cheshire of
The Washington Post
wrote a seven-part series that was anything but complimentary, pointing out that several of the newly acquired—and in some cases very costly—antiques were fakes. An outraged Jackie forced Jack to call the publisher of the paper to protest and ruthlessly banned those who had talked to Cheshire from further association with the White House.

Friends and staff alike were amazed by both the energy and the willpower Jackie displayed in her drive for a perfect White House. No detail escaped her often furious attention. She fired off enraged memos to staffers about antique dealers who tried to overcharge them. She badgered old friends in Newport who were reluctant to part with favorite antiques. Only once did anyone recall her being recalcitrant about any aspect of the operation: that was when her passion for privacy clashed with her passion for artistic perfection. The National Geographic editors, who were to produce the White House guide, wanted to include a picture of John Jr.’s second-floor bedroom. Jackie refused, and the picture was removed from the layout.

The climax of Jackie’s efforts was her 1962 Valentine’s Day television tour of the completed public rooms, which attracted forty-eight
million viewers and catapulted 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into Washington’s number-one tourist attraction. It also zoomed Jackie herself into supercelebrity Historically speaking, she was not a new kind of First Lady, although the media never stopped babbling such clichés. There had been younger—and even prettier—First Ladies. But the public memory is not the same as historical memory. For people used to Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, and Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie was new in capital letters.

While she was refurbishing the White House, Jackie launched a crusade to make the place a showcase for the best in American culture. She invited the cream of American writers, dancers, actors, musicians to entertain and be entertained. Pablo Casals, the world’s greatest cellist and number-one prima donna, was charmed into performing. (It was not, as we shall see, his first visit to the White House.) Jerome Robbins contributed a ballet. Frederic March read excerpts from Ernest Hemingway. Again, the press, with no historical memory worth mentioning, marveled, as if no First Lady had ever done anything like this before.

They were really comparing Jackie’s taste with her immediate predecessors’. It was, of course, much more sophisticated. Jackie had been raised to admire and enjoy the best in art and culture, and she wanted more Americans to share her pleasure. She wanted to change the prevailing notion that we were a nation of corporate clunkheads who seldom read anything more challenging than a stock market ticker or hung anything on our walls besides family pictures. If she had planned a way to rocket herself into hyperpopularity, she could not have chosen better tactics. Granted, her main appeal was to the American intelligentsia. But by 1962, a new generation of college-educated reporters and editors were part of that influential group, and they rushed to embrace Jackie and her crusade.

Almost as important was Jackie’s success abroad, which seemed to ratify the American intelligentsia’s approval. People still talk about her sensational reception in Paris, where her beauty and chic and French heritage and command of the language reduced the entire nation, including their austere maximum leader, General Charles de
Gaulle, to the Gallic equivalent of Jell-O. (Creme caramel?) Less well known is the way she also enchanted the English, who have a tradition of looking down their noses at American Presidents and their wives. “Jacqueline Kennedy,” intoned the
Evening Standard
, “has given the American people… one thing they had always lacked—majesty.”

Even more astonishing, though not as well remembered, was Jackie’s goodwill trip to India. One New Delhi newspaper called her “Durga, Goddess of Power.” Screaming millions lined the streets to cheer her. Plain folk walked ninety miles from their modest farms to the cities to get a glimpse of the “Queen of America.”

This tidal wave of approval enabled Jackie to escape the consequences of some very undemocratic behavior behind the scenes—and occasionally out front. One of her best-kept secrets was how much money she spent on clothes and other private expenses—$121,000 in 1962 alone. She was totally reckless in the expenditures she ran up renovating the White House’s private quarters on the second floor. Working with Sister Parish, one of the nation’s highest-priced decorators, she ordered the same room repainted two or three times when the results did not suit her. There was nothing new about Jackie’s fondness for endless redecorating. She had done the same thing in every house she and Jack had owned. Once, returning from a trip to their pre-presidential Georgetown mansion, he had cried: “Dammit, Jackie, why can’t I come home and find the same house I left?”

Clothes were a major item. Mary Gallagher, her secretary, said one of Jackie’s closets “was like… a little private shoe store.” Dresses and accessories filled the storage closets on the third floor of the White House. Jackie kept friends busy scouting Europe for the latest and best from Paris and Rome. She even sent Oleg Cassini to Paris to check out his competition. He bought her two dresses from Balenciaga, which she hated. “You picked the two worst,” she told him, which was quite possibly true.

Soon Cassini—and Jackie—were prepared to try out some decidedly unstuffy outfits. The first was a one-shouldered evening gown that Jackie loved. She told Cassini the President would not tolerate it: “It’s too advanced.” Cassini tackled the problem by invading the Oval
Office and giving a lecture on the role of queens as style setters. JFK approved the dress—and later allowed Jackie to appear with both shoulders bare in a pink and white lace dress that she wore to the Elysée Palace when they visited Paris.

Washington Post
Executive Editor Ben Bradlee once described the President as “boiling” over his wife’s dress and decorating bills. But JFK soon realized he was in a losing war. Jackie used wit as well as willpower to joust with her putative lord and master over who had control of the money. One day she sent a framed painting which consisted of daubs and streaks in a half dozen colors to the Oval Office with a note saying it was the best work of a brilliant new modern painter and she wanted to buy it for a mere nine thousand dollars. JFK exploded—until Jackie informed him it was one of John Jr.’s first experiments in finger painting.

As readers may have gathered from her remark about fat little ladies, Jackie more than equaled Elizabeth Monroe in her dislike for the hoi polloi of American politics. She specialized in what she called the “PBO”—the polite brush-off—for numerous semiofficial visitors to the White House. “I can’t stand those silly women,” she said, refusing to attend a Congressional Wives Prayer Breakfast. As for the Girl Scouts, the March of Dimes, the American Heart Association—the myriad organizations a First Lady is expected to greet when they convene in or near Washington—Jackie had a standard, all-inclusive phrase: “Give them to Lady Bird.” Always agreeable and a hardworking political partner in a way Jackie could scarcely envision, Lady Bird Johnson, the vice president’s wife, filled in for the First Lady again and again and again.

Jackie once boasted to Mary Gallagher that “they” had told her ninety-nine things she had to do as First Lady and she had not done one of them. She even boycotted a Distinguished Ladies Reception held in her honor. “Jackie! You can’t do this!” her husband roared. In the end the fuming President went in her place and made polite excuses for her. Jackie justified many of these withdrawals by saying she was too busy restoring the White House or wanted more time with her children. But a lot of her PBOs were rooted in a visceral repugnance for
average Americans and their inclination to treat her as public property. She escaped with only a few public bruises thanks to the overwhelming success of her ability to project a personality that combined mystery and allure and sincerity while saying hardly a political word.

Not that Jackie lacked good political instincts. In Vienna, when she lunched with Nina Khrushchev at the Palais Pallavicini while her husband, Nikita, the Soviet leader, was talking tough to a flabbergasted President at the Soviet embassy, a crowd gathered outside the palais and began chanting “Jac-kie! Jac-kie.” Gradually, Mrs. Khrushchev and her party grew visibly uncomfortable. No one was yelling Nina’s name. The uproar also made conversation almost impossible. Finally, Jackie strolled to an open window and waved to the crowd, then persuaded Mrs. Khrushchev to join her. Soon the crowd was chanting “Jac-kie! Ni-na!” and the crisis had passed.

Jackie Kennedy’s children often took precedence over her duties as First Lady. Here she introduces Caroline and John to horseback riding at their Virginia retreat, Glen Ora.
(Kennedy Library)

Behind the facade of public success were glimpses of personal unhappiness. Jackie was essentially estranged from the rest of the Kennedy family, except for JFK’s father, Joe. Most of the others regarded her as a political liability and fiercely resented the publicity she got. JFK’s mother, Rose, especially disapproved of Jackie’s free-spending ways and wrote numerous letters to the President’s aides and even to White House staffers, such as Head Usher J. B. West, criticizing Jackie for everything from misuse of Air Force One to sloppy housekeeping.

There were also signs of estrangement from her husband—or deep discontent with life in the White House, or both. We will probably never learn how much Jackie knew about the other women Jack Kennedy enjoyed in the White House and outside it. Some of them included her close friends, such as the painter Mary Pinchot Meyer. But it would be hard to believe she did not pick up the ugly rumors that swirled through Washington. There were flashes of cynicism, even bitterness in some of her remarks. Once she was said to have introduced her press secretary, Pamela Turnure, to a visitor as “the woman my husband is supposedly sleeping with.”

Unquestionably significant is how often Jackie escaped the White House, in small and large ways. One friend was invited to tea and arrived to find Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, serving. Jackie had gone for a walk. Then there were the three-and four-day weekends she spent at Glen Ora, the getaway house in Virginia, and more weekends in New York and Palm Beach and Hyannis Port. More publicly noticeable were the long vacations she took without her husband—a 1962 trip to Italy, which included jet set-style partying aboard Italian billionaire Gianni Agnelli’s yacht, and her summer of 1963 cruise with Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis aboard his ultimate yacht,
Christina
. JFK strongly disapproved of both these expeditions, which had lurid over-and undertones of scandal. But he was hardly in a position to do more than feebly protest and insist on Jackie taking her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her husband and some family friends along as window dressing.

There was, I strongly suspect, a hidden drama being played out here, one that future biographers will explore at greater depth. Jackie
was challenging Jack’s attempts to control her—perhaps warning him that two could play the extramarital sex game. Yet she simultaneously wrote him ten-page letters from the
Christina
, opening with “Dearest dearest Jack.” This might not have meant quite as much as it would from an ordinary woman. As we shall soon see in another upper-class presidential marriage, endearing expressions in the mail can go hand in hand with profound alienation.