Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (46 page)

“They really don’t like us at all, you know,” Ethel said as she continued railing against the Johnsons, even bringing up the old story about the time LBJ took Bobby deer-hunting, hoping to make a fool of him because he realized that Bobby would never be able to handle a rifle. “I think we should be careful about how they exploit us for their own gain.”

“Well, I couldn’t care less about any of this,” Jackie said finally, hoping to end the discussion. After a few moments of silence, Jackie dug into her purse for a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep drag, making its tip turn red. She exhaled with a loud sigh. Then, with a sad smile, she shook her head and said, “What an awful world this is, isn’t it? An awful, awful world when you can’t even accept another person’s kindness without endless debate about the motivation behind it. It’s all so dreary.”

Ethel shrugged her shoulders, as if to say, “So, what else is new?”

Bobby, who detested LBJ and had never tried to hide his feelings in the past, stared straight ahead as if he had not heard a word the two women had said.

* * *

Jackie had already set her boundaries with Johnson, any- way. She knew he would be able to use her only so much, because she wouldn’t allow him to push it. “I will tell you one thing,” she said at the time. “They will never drag me out as a little old widow like they did Mrs. Wilson when President Wilson died. I will never be used that way. I don’t want to go out on a Kennedy driveway to a Kennedy airport to visit a Kennedy school. I’m not going around accepting plaques. I don’t want medals for Jack.”

It would take some time for Johnson to understand that Jackie had set limitations. Two days after her luncheon with Ethel and Bobby, Jackie was at her home in Georgetown, trying to sleep. It was 11:30
P
.
M
. when she was jolted by the sound of the ringing telephone. Again it was the President of the United States, the biggest pest in her life these days, wanting to know when she would come by and visit him. He said he would finally be able to relax and start taking naps during the afternoon “on the day you come down here and see me.” To Jackie, his constant pestering had become ex- hausting.

“Oh, Mr. President,” Jackie said, wearily. “I can’t come down there. I was going to tell you. I’ve really gotten hold of myself. You know I’ll do anything for you,” she said. “I’ll talk to you on the phone. I’m just scared I’ll start to cry again.”

“Oh, you never cried,” LBJ said.

He must have quickly realized the callousness of his statement. At the church during the service for Jack, Jackie had cried uncontrollably, and anyone near her—as he was— knew it. Clint Hill handed her a handkerchief and tried to comfort her, but to no avail. The wracking sobs and uncon-

trollable spasms would not stop. Caroline, at her side, had reached out, grabbed her mother’s hand, and held it tightly. Jackie had managed to compose herself before going for Communion, but it had not been easy.

LBJ nervously corrected his statement. “Honey, I never saw anyone as brave as you.”

“But, I mean . . .” Jackie seemed at a loss for words. “It’s . . . you know . . .”

“. . . or as great,” LBJ continued. “I just can’t,” Jackie insisted.

“You know how great we think you are?” LBJ said, push- ing.

“Well, you know,” Jackie said, sounding as if she was at the end of her rope. “I’ll talk to you. I’ll do anything I can for you. But don’t make me come down there yet.”

“Well, I got to see you before long,” Johnson said. “Anytime you say, Mr. President,” Jackie responded, her

tone one of resignation, as if she understood that it didn’t matter what she said, he wasn’t listening.

Then, they signed off. It was the last time LBJ ever asked Jackie to visit the White House.*

*In fact, it would be eight years before Jackie would return to her former home, in 1971 when President Nixon and his wife, Pat, invited her and her children for dinner to view her and Jack’s offi- cial portraits.

Joan’s Bottled-Up Anxiety

E
thel Kennedy had predicted that the home originally chosen by Joan when she and her family moved to Wash- ington would prove to be too small. Perhaps she felt vindi- cated when she learned that after less than a year, in January 1964, Joan and Ted decided they needed more space, and moved into another home in Georgetown. The red-brick, vine-covered home with white-trimmed win- dows, selected by Joan, was a real find, boasting a large drawing room, library, and dining room. This five-bedroom, five-bathroom home was truly a palace, possibly fit more for a queen than for a senator’s wife. The house was such a large, formidable structure that taxicab drivers often mis- took it for a hospital. Because it was a completely unchar- acteristic environment for the rather simple tastes of Joan, some in the Kennedys’ circle began to wonder about the reasons behind the purchase.

“We knew there was a problem afoot when she moved into that house,” said one of Joan’s friends, today the wife of a senator but at the time married to a newspaper reporter. “She was overcompensating for something that was missing in her life, or at least that’s how most people saw it. We knew that her drinking was getting worse. You couldn’t keep that kind of thing a secret in Washington. Whenever Joan would go to lunch and have one too many cocktails, people talked.”

Whether or not Joan was “compensating” for some lack in her life, she was now truly living the full Kennedy expe-

Joan’s Bottled-Up Anxiety
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rience: She had a governess for the children, a cook for the family, and a social secretary (Theresa Dubbs, an attractive blonde who had worked for the Kennedy presidential cam- paign in 1960) to tend to her own needs. She had money at her disposal and, even though she was usually frugal, she was living a life that was not exactly the norm for most women in America.

Joan’s days were increasingly busy with social activities, charity work, and luncheons with the wives of other sena- tors. For instance, Joan and Marvella Bayh, wife of Indiana Senator Birch Bayh, both became members of “the Senate Ladies,” an informal organization formed in the early 1900s to aid the Red Cross during the First World War. The Vice President’s wife was always the leader of the group, which met on Tuesdays. The women spent hours after lunch sewing and rolling bandages, which were then sent on to Bethesda Naval Hospital.

As long as Joan was consumed with and preoccupied by her duties as a senator’s wife, she seemed in good spirits. Many of her days and nights were busy, which was the way she liked it; when alone, however, she would inevitably sink into a dark depression. She loved her two children and en- joyed caring for them, but Ted was seldom around. He was either off to Vietnam, looking into the plight of war refugees, or when in town, at his office until the wee hours of the morning working on duties having to do with the Sen- ate committees (the Labor, Veteran’s Affairs, Aging, and Ju- diciary subcommittees) on which he had been placed. Even when her husband was home, though, Joan knew that she did not have his undivided attention. She could not adjust to having a philandering husband, and it still tormented her that she wasn’t “good enough” for Ted.

Making matters worse for Joan, most of the senators’ wives, the women with whom Joan would spend the bulk of her days, were from another generation, being as much as thirty years older than her. Rather than think of her as a peer, a “girlfriend,” they were maternal toward Joan and treated her like a daughter. They spoke of their grandchildren, while Joan was still raising her children. Because there wasn’t much common ground upon which to establish solid friend- ships with these women, Joan felt alone and isolated. Jackie could not be depended upon at this time; she had her own or- deal. Ethel could never be depended on, and she had never gotten close to her other sisters-in-law on the Kennedy side of the family.

After Teddy Jr. and Kara went off to bed, Joan would find herself alone, night after lonely night, with nothing to do but pace the floors of her large home. When Ted would come home and crawl into bed with her, they still had what she thought was passion in their lovemaking, “which kept her on a hook,” said one friend of hers. “I don’t know if, for Ted, it was passion or just great sex. But most nights, she was alone.”

“I’m going stir-crazy,” Joan recalls having complained to Ted. “I can only listen to Bach so many hours.” On evenings when she wasn’t expected at a political function, she had no one to chat with on the telephone or to visit, and so she drank.

Unfortunately, Joan Kennedy’s frustrated nights alone, with only her supply of liquor as her companion, had be- come a matter of routine. In the process, the youngest sena- tor’s wife would follow a genetic leaning and emotional pattern set by her own mother, Ginny, and one that, in time, would nearly destroy her life: alcoholism.

Jackie’s Saddest Days

A
t the same time that Ted and Joan moved into their new rented home, Jackie purchased a fourteen-room, brick town house close to them, at 3017 N Street in Georgetown, just down the street from the temporary home offered her by the Harrimans. Jackie’s new three-story, mottled-brick house featured a spacious drawing room with a fireplace and French doors leading out to a flagstone patio. To the right of a center hall was a dining room, and behind it, the kitchen, laundry room, and servants’ quarters. A large mas- ter bedroom was on the second floor, along with a study, a large dressing room, and a small office. On the third floor were four large bedrooms and a small workroom. All floors were accessible by an elevator at the front of the house.

While Joan never had any company at her home, Jackie had more than she could handle at hers—and not anyone she had invited, either. Unfortunately, her new home had be- come a tourist mecca. Fans would line the street in front of it, hoping for a glimpse of the former First Lady, and would shout out “Jack-eee, Jack-eee.” Some of the braver ones would actually attempt to peer into her windows or knock on her door to ask for an autographed picture before being told to leave by Secret Service agents. “I’m a freak now,” Jackie complained to Secretary of Defense Robert McNa- mara one day when he came calling. “They’re like locusts,” she said of the fans. “They’re everywhere. It’s getting worse. Every day, it’s getting worse.”

Night after lonely night, she would sort through Jack’s books, papers, and personal mementos, many of which she planned to send on the road in a traveling exhibit of JFK memorabilia. There was the tiny ancient statue of Herakles and the Skin of a Lion, which Jack had bought for himself while in Rome the June before his death; a book of poetry he had borrowed from Eunice and enjoyed too much to return; a handful of family snapshots that he carried with him everywhere he went—it all now had special and heart- wrenching meaning.

Like Joan, Jackie found solace only by artificial means, by taking sedatives and antidepressants such as Amytal to get through the days and sleeping pills for the nights. She drank heavily, with vodka now her liquor of choice. Later, she would say that she played the events of the assassination over and over in her mind, wondering what she could have done differently, how she could have saved Jack’s life. She developed a pattern of awakening in the middle of the night, her body torn by dry sobs and shudders. During the day she would be completely fatigued, an exhausting kind of sad- ness hanging over her.

One afternoon, according to Jackie’s Secret Service agents, Jackie and Joan met in Washington for one of their intimate lunches, which in the past had usually centered on Jackie counseling Joan about Ted’s philandering. This time, there was no consolation coming from Jackie. The tables were turned.

“Jackie, you have to pull yourself together,” Joan said, concerned by the former First Lady’s haggard appearance. Her hair had been combed, but defied order. She wore little makeup. Her clothes weren’t “Jackie Kennedy crisp.” “We all love you,” Joan said. “We’re so worried.”

Jackie just shook her head, dismally. “I’m fine,” she said. “Just fine.”

Then, as she picked listlessly at her food, Jackie began once again to tell the story of what happened in Dallas, run- ning a checklist of each awful occurrence. She said that the previous night she had suddenly awakened screaming after a nightmare. “I’ve heard that gun go off ten thousand times,” she said. “I picture my own head splattering. I’d give my own life gladly, if I could just get back Jack.” Joan looked horrified.