Next morning even the serious journals featured, among others, the photographs of her late husband meeting the woman that she now knew had been his mistress for years.
The ravishing blonde was also pictured with her first and second husbands and her last costar. Most of the stories referred to the re
markable coincidence of Monroe committing suicide on the first anniversary of Jack’s death.
The next day the children returned from Europe in time for their birthdays.
As they were going to spend Thanksgiving with Janet at Merrywood, they had their parties early. Luckily both of these celebrations took place at home.
In front of her children’s friends, assembled nannies and mothers, Jackie once again entered dream mode.
She laughed, ate crustless cucumber sandwiches, and birthday cake. She joined in with laughter at the clown booked for her son and the magician she had hired for her daughter.
It was during one of the latter’s tricks that she stepped outside the drawing room to take a call from President Johnson.
Sadly he explained that he had been able to do nothing about the note. “I assume you are coming down to your mother’s for Thanksgiving? Could the attorney general visit you there?”
“More bad news?”
“Why don’t you just enjoy the rest of Caroline’s party,” said Lyndon, and was gone before she could follow up with supplementary questions.
The most powerful man in the land knew she would be horrified by the picture that he held in his hands.
He felt it essential that she should be surrounded by loved ones when she saw it.
When he arrived at Merrywood, Nicholas Katzenbach, the attorney general, quietly suggested to Janet that it would be a good idea for her to be present at his meeting with Jackie. In the cathedral quiet of Hugh Auchincloss’s library he slowly withdrew the picture from the heavy white paper envelope with its presidential seal and placed it on the low glass coffee table. Jackie bent forward, painstakingly absorbing its content. Involuntarily she fell forward, emitting an anguished whimper followed by the entire contents of her stomach.
The two of them. In the Lincoln bedroom in the White House.
For days she had been unable to escape her self-made images of
the pair. She imagined them chatting longingly and lovingly on the phone, dancing alone together, kissing and reading and walking, arms around each other, along a beach with a West Coast sunset gilding Marilyn’s perfect limbs. Hurtful, romantic images of the kind that she had always wanted for herself.
But she was totally unprepared for this.
Two hours later she emerged from her room and asked to be left alone with her children. She gave them their baths and read them to sleep. For the first time the dream mode failed and she sobbed into their soapy curls.
Finally, at midnight she allowed her mother into her room and was told that the White House had rung to inform her that Consuelo James had sold the photo to one of the supermarket gossip magazines.
A
few days later the photograph was published.
In the interim Jackie had been unable to go out.
If it were just hurt and embarrassment she was feeling, she would have defied the photographers and journalists lying in wait for her on the street downstairs. After all, these emotions were not new to her. She had been dodging them ever since she was a girl.
The photograph revealed the extent of his ardor. Not content with maintaining M.M. as his mistress for year after year, his heedless irresponsibility meant that he had not only played while out of town but he had taken crazy risks at home. Defiling their inner sanctum seemed to mean nothing to him. He had wanted her enough not to care.
It wasn’t just pain she felt; it had become clear that her belief in her “specialness” to him was delusional.
There was no real Jack and Jackie. It was a fraud. Even when he became president he could not be loyal to her. How he must have been laughing behind her back, his intellectual wife with such useless radar, his empathetic partner who found such reassurance in her own imagination that he didn’t even have to lie to her.
These thoughts shattered her confidence, not just in everything she had achieved but in what she believed she now stood for. Her life as a role model for the nation had rested on the shakiest of foundations. How on earth could she continue?
Because her self-esteem had been burned off, first by her parents, then by her unfaithful spouse, when Jack had first won the presidency she shied away from her role as First Lady.
She made it clear to White House staff that she was not going to change.
“I want to be called Mrs. Kennedy, not First Lady,” she told them.
She also stated that she intended to continue to concentrate on her children and her hobbies.
Although she had given press conferences while her husband was running for office, once installed at the White House she stopped.
“The press always covers my official engagements and is kept abreast of my projects and I prefer not to answer personal questions, so that leaves little for a press conference,” she explained.
She felt such a fool. She hadn’t raised the subject of Jack’s behavior once they were in the White House. In the past she had always found talks about his “girling” so painful, leaving a pall of misery over them both for days, so she assumed, now that he was never alone, that his Casanova ways had stopped. He still flirted outrageously in front of her and she guessed that from time to time he still managed to go “off piste,” but she was comforted by many things in their new situation that she thought would keep him mostly on the straight and narrow.
For one thing he was keenly aware of the continual scrutiny he was under from both the Secret Service and the police. She was sure that he would never put at risk the high office that both he and his family had fought for so hard.
Even if he could square things with their loyal security guards, he knew he could not rely on all sections of the press.
It was true that American newspapers were deferential and not
intrusive into their leaders’ private lives. As far as Jackie could tell, as long as their elected representatives did not misbehave financially they were content to leave their other off-duty activities unreported. This meant that other than having their hand in the till, politicians could put other parts of their anatomy wherever they liked. Elements of the foreign press were far less supine, but Jackie had no idea that as soon as he was elected JFK had given orders that they were to be kept as far away from him as possible.
Jackie also reckoned that Jack would be worried about giving anyone the opportunity to blackmail him. Having sexual secrets that could be unearthed by the enemy in the middle of a ferocious Cold War was so risky.
She convinced herself that he would not want the people that he had handpicked to work with him, in particular the men that he respected, to know that sexually he was out of control. In front of them she imagined he would want his private life to mirror the same lofty ideals that he pursued while in the greatest office of state.
So she made the decision that apart from the dullest of jobs, which she continued to parcel out to her mother-in-law or to the vice-president’s wife, she would attempt to embrace more First Lady duties. She put her heart into not just refurbishing the residence for her family’s comfort, but restoring it, inviting world-class artists and musicians to entertain there, making the White House not just a powerful destination but a glamorous one.
Everything that she had been and everything that she had done, both with him and for him throughout his presidency, was predicated on what she thought of as his “new loyalty.”
How was she to know that he didn’t care if his praetorian guard of speechwriters, economists, and other experts found out that beneath the elegant charm of the youngest president of the United States, there was just a greedy sexual predator? She added up how many people in the White House would have known of Marilyn’s visit. Anyone who entered would have had to leave their name with the men on sentry duty, then been signed in. As she slowly ticked off the names, his secretary, the sergeants on the desk, the private
quarters house keeper who changed the sheets, the list was endless, Jackie arrived at the shocking realization that having those around him in the know about his relationship with the Hollywood sex bomb was obviously something he positively relished. It gave him a buzz, a sexual frisson.
Throughout the thirty-four presidencies before Jack, the way in which the White House was used—whether it had been welcoming or forbidding—had been an accurate litmus test of the personality of the incumbent, and occasionally, of his wife. Part of his legacy would forever be tainted by his cheating.
She wanted to vent her anger to him, so decided on a visit to Arlington but this time without the cameras.
Late at night, when members of the public were not allowed in, lit only by flashlights, two Secret Service men led her to his grave.
There she hurled invective at him, but fearing her protectors might still be in earshot, she could only hiss the words under her breath.
She told him that from now on she would do only what suited her and she would do just the minimum to make her children think they had lost a decent father.
“But I am not going to peddle anything else good about you.
“You bastard. You liar.
“You betrayed me and I didn’t deserve it, I loved you.
“I just wish that I had never met you.
“The sordid secrets you have left have destroyed my life.
“Did you never think of anyone but yourself?…Me…The children…?
“I owe you nothing. Nothing!”
Somehow the whole episode did little to extinguish her sorrow. Who could be angry with an eternal flame?
To the outside world she forced herself to appear indifferent, making flippant jokes about the dead movie star, but privately she felt her paranoia growing. She found it hard to accept that her husband had cared for, possibly loved, another woman. Emotionally, as well as physically, she had not been enough for him.
It offered small comfort when she realized that neither had the blond goddess. Just two weeks after the Marilyn story subsided, another one emerged.
First there was the president and the prostitute. The woman, a high-class hooker, had been so bowled over by doing business with the leader of the free world she ended up charging him nothing, so he went back for more, twice.
Then some two weeks later it was the president and the princess. An elfin brunette, she had lost everything when her small country had been snaffled by the Chinese. One person, her ex-butler, discovered the joys of capitalism by fleeing to the U.S. and selling the letters he had found in the royal bedroom.
Then there were the memoirs of a policewoman. She had met the president while on duty, guarding him on a trip back to his original homeland, Ireland. Every facet of the lovemaking with the most successful member of the Fitzgerald clan was laid bare in public.
She was followed by a stunningly curvaceous Italian who pretended to be a writer and politician but was famed for giving the best parties in Rome.
Jackie continued her self-imposed purdah but forced herself to ridicule these stories when she spoke to friends and family. But when a pretty maternity nurse, hired to help with night-time feeds for the premature baby John, stepped forward, it all became too much. How could she have been so stupid?
Virtually every month she had been married to him, he had been with someone else.
And everyone around her must have known. How could she keep socializing with them? How could she ever keep facing the people she saw at parties every night who had probably been scheming behind her back for years? If only she knew who they were.
However she tried to hide it there was tension in the house.
She made sure the newspapers arrived after the children had gone to school. Caroline could read, but even little John wondered why his daddy was still on the front page so often. Remembering just
how distressed she felt when she had been the same age as Caroline and her parents went through their very public split, she arranged for the nanny to take them to and from school in the car, hoping that the little girl would not see the headlines on the newsstands.
Slowly she started to become what she had tried to avoid: bitter.
She couldn’t face asking anyone but her sister for the truth. She had a horrible suspicion that Lee might have been closer than she should have been to her brother-in-law.
When Lee visited from London she felt she had to know.
She started by asking if Lee knew about Jack’s conquests.
“I knew as little as you,” was the cool reply. “I often suspected something was going on. I mean, it wasn’t something strong, just a feeling.
“Whenever Jack came to Europe he was friendly and came to dinner, but he always had to leave early. I can remember teasing him once and asking if he had a girlfriend tucked up at the embassy, but you know him…he told me nothing. I just figured there was a crisis going on that I was too feebleminded to know about.”
Jackie thought her sibling was being too casual and lighthearted and remembered that Lee herself had played around when married to her first husband.
Maybe her sister didn’t think it mattered, or did she really know something?
It was infuriating.
“Why on earth didn’t you say something, warn me?” Jackie asked.
Sardonically, Lee remarked: “Even you must have suspected that some out-of-town branches of the family were very keen to lay on parties for big brother. I have no proof, but don’t you remember how exhausted he was after seeing his relatives in Florida or California?
“Let’s face it, what was he doing out there that was such hard work?
“Still, he was consistent.” Lee got up to refill her glass of white wine and passed her sister yet another cigarette. “He was always the
same from the moment you started seeing him. Extremely charming, the sort of man who never let a decent-looking woman walk by without giving her the hard stare.”
Jackie started to reproach herself for not having done anything about it. Lee was right, he was far too interested in other women. He was also careless and believed he was bound by no rules. He often cut phone calls short when she came into the room but not so quickly that she could accuse him of anything. If she did ask who he was talking to, his usual response was that he was talking politics.
Suddenly the comment about her Californian in-laws caught her off guard. Something was trying to force its way into her memory.
With exquisite pain it came back to her, the misery just after he died when she couldn’t find so many of his things, not just his clothes but his diaries, his medicines, his address books and notebooks, all his pieces of paper. She should have guessed then. His family knew he had secrets. Loads of them. So without so much as a by-your-leave they had judiciously ransacked their home the minute he was dead.
She was furious now that she understood how ruthlessly they had taken advantage of her grief to step in and save him from himself one last time. Any incriminating evidence had to be removed before the new incumbent moved in.
She remembered an upset Nurse Shaw when two of their smoothest operators, young men obviously working for the attorney general, Bobby, had ushered her away from some of the rooms in their private quarters. How gullible Jackie had been in later accepting their apologetic excuses. Even the White House logbook had not been left behind.
“Oh, come on, Jackie, don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Lee. “Your husband had just been shot. And when he was alive, you were always having babies.”
“Or losing them.” Jackie’s eyes filled with tears as she remembered Arabella and Patrick.
“Let’s face it. Guys like Jack ran around because they could. They had the money, the looks, and no one ever said not to. In fact, judging by his father, the reverse. The world’s a great big bowl of sexual adventure for them.”
Emboldened, Lee said: “Also, you could’ve left him. You had the power, you had the children.”
“And have them grow up like we did?” said Jackie. “Sent round like parcels from one parent to the other, from one city to another, never fitting in? Never knowing which parent you were going to upset next? I just couldn’t do it to them. It was okay for you, you were Mummy’s favorite. You were the pretty one. You got married first, even though you were younger. You did everything first, I seem to remember.”
Jackie started to wonder, Was she so mad because she thought that her own sister had slept with him?
“Yup, and I split up first and it was the best thing I ever did. So don’t give me the whole divorce and guilt bit. You still wanted to be his wife even when his adultery was staring you in the face You wanted the excitement of being with—what did
Life
magazine call him—‘Washington’s most eligible bachelor.’”
She was now putting on a fake accent and speaking with the Boston inflection that all the Kennedys used.