These Few Precious Days (16 page)

Authors: Christopher Andersen

Realizing how tired and sick his wife really was, JFK went off for a dinner with new cabinet members, leaving staff with instructions to serve Jackie her dinner on a tray in bed. At 9 p.m., it was time to get dressed for the first ball. “I can’t do it,” she told Providencia “Provi” Paredes, her longtime personal maid. “I can’t get out of bed. I just can’t move.”

“I was
frantic
,” remembered Jackie, who immediately called Dr. Travell. Within minutes the president’s personal physician was at Jackie’s bedside. “She had two pills,” Jackie said, “a green one and an orange one. She told me to take the orange one.” The orange one, Travell told her as she swallowed the pill, just happened to be Max Jacobson’s favorite drug: Dexedrine. “Thank God,” said Jackie, who jumped out of bed and was dressed in half the time she usually took. “It really did the trick.” She never found out what the green pill was, although Jackie conceded that she would always wonder.

It was the president’s turn to gaze adoringly when Jackie appeared wearing a white silk crepe gown with a bodice embroidered in silver thread, all beneath a floor-length cape with a high mandarin collar. Diamond pendant earrings on loan from Tiffany and white opera gloves completed the look. Jack escorted her down to the Red Room, where a small group of friends were waiting. “Darling,” Jack said as he lifted his champagne glass, “you’ve never looked lovelier.”

That evening, Jackie was radiant. At each of the first three inaugural balls they were scheduled to attend, a gasp went up from the crowd as the dazzling Jackie and Jack, in white tie and tails, made their entrance accompanied by “Hail to the Chief.”

But as they headed to the fourth ball, said Jackie, “it was like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight, because that pill wore off and I just couldn’t get out of the car. I just crumpled. All of my strength was finally gone.”

She urged him to go on without her, but that was hardly necessary. Daily doses of cortisone were giving Jack the stamina of a twenty-year-old athlete. He quickly met up with Red Fay and Fay’s date for the evening, Angie Dickinson. It was not JFK’s first encounter with the striking, blond, twenty-eight-year-old actress; they had reportedly gone skinny-dipping in Peter Lawford’s pool the night Jack secured his party’s nomination. “He was the killer type,” Dickinson said of their relationship, “the kind your mother hoped you wouldn’t marry.” As for the sex: “It was,” Angie allegedly said, “the most exciting seven minutes of my life.”

This time things were different. When Fay asked if the equally stunning Kim Novak could tag along, Jack suddenly grew circumspect. “I can just see the papers tomorrow,” he said. “The new President concludes his first day speeding into the night with Kim Novak and Angie Dickinson while his wife recuperates from the birth of their first son.”

Instead, the president went on to the next balls alone before winding up at 2 a.m. dropping in on a small party at the Georgetown home of an old friend, columnist Joe Alsop. Two hours later, when he finally arrived back at the White House, Jack was still so excited that he went straight to the Queens’ Bedroom and woke Jackie up. After they shared a few details of the evening’s festivities, she went back to sleep while he went across the hall and crawled into Abraham Lincoln’s huge, elaborately carved rosewood bed.

Far from being angry with her husband for partying without her until dawn, Jackie felt guilty “for not participating in those first shining hours with Jack. But at least I thought I had given him our John, the son he had longed for so much.”

It was only a few hours before Jackie joined her husband in the Lincoln Bedroom. “It’s the sunniest room,” she remembered of that first morning. “I mean, you feel like two children again. Think of yourself in Lincoln’s bed!”

After Jack headed off for the Oval Office (“with that wonderful spring in his step,” Jackie recalled), she found herself back in the Queens’ Bedroom with leg cramps so debilitating she couldn’t walk. Dr. Travell was in the process of treating Jackie’s problem (“She had my leg up in the air trying to get some kink out of it”) when “who burst in the door but Jack and President Truman. Poor President Truman just turned scarlet. I don’t think he’d ever seen a woman but his wife in bed in a nightgown before.” That night and for several nights after, Jackie and Jack ate supper on trays in the small Lincoln Sitting Room. “You know,” she later said wistfully, “I loved those days.”

Lincoln’s rooms were, in fact, Jackie’s refuge, her “secret place.” Those times when she felt overwhelmed—and there were many—Jackie would “go and sit in the Lincoln Bedroom. It gave me great comfort. When you see that great bed, it’s like a cathedral. To touch something I knew he had touched was a real link with him. I used to sit in the Lincoln Bedroom and I could really feel his strength. I’d sort of be talking with him. Jefferson is the president with whom I have the most affinity. But Lincoln is the one I love.”

Once the inauguration hoopla was over, Jackie really only needed a few days to regain her strength. While Jack worked in the West Wing, the first lady perched on the edge of her antique slant-front desk and had candidates for household jobs brought to see her, three at a time. They were astonished to see that at home the glamorous Jackie Kennedy wore riding boots, a plain white shirt, jodhpurs, and no makeup—and that she smoked.

As it turned out, Jackie always wore pants if she wasn’t expecting visitors and went barefoot whenever she could. “Jackie laughed at the way people expected her to be dressed up like a cover for
Vogue
every minute of the day,” Tish Baldrige said. “She’d walk in a room with that wild dark mane of hers, toss off her shoes, and sit cross-legged on the floor. And everyone standing there would look at each other thinking ‘Now what do we do?’ ”

“I love it when they get that panicky look in their eyes,” Jackie confided to Baldrige. “Sometimes I feel like telling them, ‘No, I don’t wear a pillbox hat to bed—but I do wear one when I bathe!’ ”

Even judged against her fellow first ladies, Jackie was a mind-spinning tangle of contradictions. No more qualified an authority than White House Chief Usher J. B. West believed hers was “the most complex personality” of all the modern first ladies. “In public she was elegant, aloof, dignified, and regal,” said West, who served every president from FDR to Richard Nixon. “In private, she was casual, impish, and irreverent.” Jackie also had “a will of iron,” West said, “and more determination than anyone I have ever met. Yet she was so soft-spoken, so deft and subtle, that she could impose that will upon people without their ever knowing it.”

Mommy and Daddy were waiting at the airport to meet them when Caroline and her brother finally arrived from Palm Beach. Caroline sat between her parents for the ride back to her new home; in this pre-car-seat era, Jackie held John fast in her arms.

As the limousine pulled up to the White House gates, Jackie told Caroline that this was to be her new home. “Wow,” she said, gazing out over the snow-covered grounds. “It’s very big.” At the edge of the driveway stood “Frosty,” a regulation snowman with buttons for eyes and a carrot nose—all topped off with a big white panama hat. As soon as the rear doors of the president’s car swung open, Caroline clambered out and raced toward the snowman. Jack and Jackie watched approvingly as their little girl, fresh from several weeks in the Florida sunshine, playfully poked Frosty in the stomach.

No one was happier than the president to have his children back. Since the inauguration, he had been pestering Jackie to have them both flown up from Palm Beach. Jackie kept reminding him that intense paint fumes made the children’s end of the family residence uninhabitable, but Jack insisted. “You’ve got to bring them back soon,” he told her. “I really miss them.”

Jackie had other reasons for postponing the children’s arrival. “As odd as it sounds, those first few days were the first time since Jack started running for president that they could be alone,” Lowe said. “Jackie wanted to savor those moments, because I don’t think she believed they would last very long.”

There was also no way of telling how long the Kennedys’ honeymoon with the press would last. “We were all flying pretty high,” Salinger admitted. “There was this euphoric feeling about what we were going to do for the country—I mean, we were all very young. Older hands knew the higher the expectations the greater the fall.”

JACK’S PRESIDENCY WAS NOT YET
one hundred days old when the honeymoon came to an abrupt halt. On April 17, JFK suffered not only his first major foreign policy defeat but the first significant failure of his political career when twelve hundred Cuban exiles launched an abortive invasion of Cuba. Jack authorized CIA support for the military action but at the last minute canceled promised U.S. air strikes in support of the attack. The chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned JFK’s decision to call off air support, which doomed the Bay of Pigs invasion from the start, as “absolutely reprehensible, almost criminal.”

Publicly, the American president remained the very picture of strength and confidence. But privately, the Bay of Pigs fiasco left him deeply shaken. For only the second time, Jackie saw her husband weep. At 8 a.m. the morning after the attack, Jack walked into Jackie’s bedroom and, she recalled, “he started to cry. Just sobbed and put his arms around me. It was so sad. He cared so much . . . all those poor men who you’d sent off with all their hopes high and promises that we’d back them and there they were, shot down like dogs.”

JFK was so despondent that the attorney general, his younger brother Bobby, paid a special visit to Jackie in the East Wing. “Please stay very close to Jack,” he asked her. “I mean, just be around all afternoon.” Jackie said Bobby wanted her “not to go anywhere, just be there to comfort him because he was so sad.”

Even as her husband grappled with crises that would bring the world to the brink of nuclear war, Jackie set out to transform the White House from a “soulless office building” into a majestic showplace for the nation, to celebrate the arts, and to create an aura of high style and sophistication so extraordinary it would make the French “ashamed of Versailles.”

Yet nothing she could do, Jackie later said, would ever be as important as the contribution she made as Jack’s wife and partner. Inside the White House, she later observed, “you were hermetically sealed. . . . And I decided the best thing I could do was to always make it a climate of affection and comfort for him when he was done for the day.” At least that way, she added, “we could sort of live our strange little life in there.”

Jack could have had a worthwhile life without me. But mine would have been a wasteland, and I would have known it every step of the way.