These Few Precious Days (5 page)

Jack, still clad only in his robe, joined the first lady for lunch served on trays—always a grilled cheese sandwich for Jackie and usually a medium-rare hamburger for her husband, although at times the weight-conscious Jack opted for a glass of the diet drink Metrecal. Jackie was equally mindful of her weight. If she gained as little as one pound, she fasted for a day and stepped up her exercise regimen—walking ten times around the South Lawn, or bouncing on a canvas trampoline she ostensibly installed for the children. “It’s not only terrific exercise,” she told Pierre Salinger, “but a marvelous way to reduce stress.”

Jack’s vanity extended beyond his waistline and his wardrobe. Periodically, he would use part of his nap time to have Jackie massage a special tonic from a New York firm called Frances Fox into his hair. Later in the day, he would have someone—sometimes Jackie but just as often one of the attractive young female aides assigned to the West Wing—add a few drops of another Frances Fox concoction and then put the finishing touches on his famously tousled coif. Whoever was assigned this task knew that it must be done with a brush, never a comb. “My God, Jack, everyone keeps talking about copying my hairstyle,” said Jackie, whose own bedtime routine involved sprinkling cologne on a brush and then stroking her hair one hundred times. “If they only knew the real expert about hair is you!”

(According to Jackie’s half brother Jamie Auchincloss, what made JFK’s hair so striking was its “odd color—or rather
colors
. Once I counted fifteen distinctly different colors in his hair, ranging from silver to orange.” Although JFK’s secret hair treatments may have also been at least partly responsible, Auchincloss learned that this was one of the peculiar symptoms of Jack’s Addison’s disease, a degeneration of the adrenal glands that destroys the immune system. Another symptom of Addison’s: the deceptively healthy-looking orange glow that was often mistaken for a Palm Beach tan.)

When they were finished, Jackie, who joked that “the only song Jack really likes is ‘Hail to the Chief,’ ” walked over to the stereo system between their two rooms and piled the turntable high with his favorite albums. Soon music—jazz, show tunes, songs by Peggy Lee, Frank Sinatra, and even Elvis—was drifting through the eerily empty corridors. It was then that they each retired to their separate rooms.

Or not. George Thomas had been instructed to always wake the president precisely at 3:30 p.m., but there were many times when JFK’s bed was empty. On those occasions, he quietly slipped into Jackie’s bedroom and whispered into the president’s ear so as not to wake the first lady, who was sleeping soundly beside him.

“They had a very close, very romantic relationship,” Jackie’s stepbrother Hugh “Yusha” Auchincloss observed. “Technically they had separate bedrooms, but they slept together. There was a lot of laughter. They enjoyed each other. They had
fun
.”

Indeed, one lunchtime Jackie got so wrapped up in her paperwork that she forgot her husband was waiting for her. At Jack’s behest, Thomas tracked her down. “Miz Kennedy,” the valet said, “the President says if you don’t hurry, he’ll fall asleep.” Jackie put down her pen, jumped up from her desk, and headed straight for her bedroom.

The entire concept of taking a nap in the middle of the day struck Jackie as peculiar at first. “Jack never took a nap before,” she said, “but in the White House I think he made up his mind he would because it was good for his health.” Jack insisted that he was merely following the example of his idol, Winston Churchill. “It gave him so much more staying power, so much more stamina,” Jack explained. “I need every ounce of strength to do this job.”

Jack’s habit of changing in and out of clothes several times a day also struck his wife as “extremely odd. I used to think,” she later confided, “for a forty-five-minute nap, would you bother to take off all your clothes? It would take me forty-five minutes to just snuggle down and start to doze off.” Again, Jack said it was necessary to copy Sir Winston’s approach exactly. “If I’m going to do this,” the president told Pierre Salinger when his press secretary asked why he felt it necessary for so many changes of wardrobe, “then I’m going to do it right. Otherwise, what’s the point? Lying down and getting up in wrinkled clothes?”

Knowing how much he liked to sleep with fresh air blowing through the room, Jackie often closed the curtains and then threw open the large windows herself. Jackie did not share Jack’s talent for napping (“I just can’t shut my mind off like that”), so she often tiptoed into her room, read one of her magazines, then came back to wake him before Thomas “officially sounded the alarm.”

Jack took his third shower of the day after his afternoon nap, put on a fresh suit, and returned to work. More than any other president, Jack had crammed the Oval Office with photographs and cherished mementos. His first week in office, JFK personally carried photos of Jackie and the children as well as a favorite watercolor painting over from the family quarters in the East Wing. As might have been expected, the room took on a seafaring motif as Jack decorated it with naval paintings and seascapes, ship models, pieces of scrimshaw, semaphore flags, and a plaque with an old fisherman’s prayer: “O God, Thy sea is great and my boat is so small.”

From the windows of the Oval Office, Jack could watch Jackie and the children in the play area she had specially designed for them. There was the small trampoline concealed by evergreens, a rabbit hutch, a leather swing, a barrel tunnel, and a tree house with a slide. When they first moved into the White House, Jackie often had to keep Caroline from trying to push her infant brother down the tree house slide, “carriage and all.”

Soon Jackie returned to her mounting pile of correspondence, returning to the High Chair Room at 5:30 to sit with the children as they ate dinner. Caroline would later remember how her mother always made a point of asking them what they had learned in school that day.

“Caroline is already reading at three,” Jackie boasted to family friend Chuck Spalding, “and over dinner she bubbles with excitement about what happened that day in her little class in the solarium.” Able to properly pronounce the tongue-twisting names of such world leaders as Konrad Adenauer, Nikita Khrushchev, and Jawaharlal Nehru, Caroline had no use for baby talk. When Pierre Salinger pointed out a “moo cow” standing in a field, Caroline replied, “No, that’s a Hereford.” (Nor did she brook any misbehavior on the part of her little brother. When John spit out food or banged his spoon on the table, Caroline’s reaction was swift. Rolling her eyes and shaking her head, she sighed, “There he goes again.”)

Jack was seldom privy to his children’s dinnertime chitchat. Out of the office by 5:30, he repeated his morning ritual—into the pool with Powers, O’Donnell, or whoever else happened to be around for a half-hour dip, then back upstairs to shave, shower, and change into yet another suit—his third full wardrobe change of the day. (Jack was dumbfounded when, during a visit to the White House, his longtime journalist-friend Ben Bradlee informed him that he and a lot of other men saw nothing wrong with wearing the same shirt two days in a row.)

There were times when some pressing matter kept Jack working in his office until 8 p.m. or later, but his day usually ended around six. It was then that Jackie, who always changed into a dress for dinner, met her husband for daiquiris in the Yellow Oval Room. In the absence of any formal functions requiring their presence downstairs, they usually dined alone or with close friends like Bradlee and his wife Tony, Kentucky senator John Sherman Cooper and his wife Lorraine, or the couple who actually introduced them, Charles and Martha Bartlett. At the time, Charles Bartlett was the Washington correspondent for the
Chattanooga Times
and Ben Bradlee wrote for
Newsweek
.

The next two hours or more were devoted to drinks and banter and, occasionally, board games. “We played Chinese checkers, Monopoly, bridge,” recalled Charlie Bartlett. “Somebody said Jack played Monopoly like the property was real, and they were right. He loved winning, and he hated to lose even more. Jackie was the same way—very competitive, a born game-player. There was always a great deal of laughter, and everybody had a great time.”

By way of after-dinner entertainment, they also screened new movies in the White House theater. Even though he regarded Jack as “the most urbane man I have ever met,” Bradlee had to confess that the president’s taste in movies was markedly middlebrow. “My mommy always watched cowboy movies with my daddy,” Caroline later told her teachers, “because my daddy liked cowboy movies. My mommy doesn’t like cowboy movies
at all,
but she watched them because she loves my daddy.” She didn’t have to watch for long; too restless to sit through an entire feature film, Jack usually excused himself after the first twenty minutes or so.

TO BE SURE, IT WAS
Jackie—not the president—who spearheaded a cultural renaissance in the nation’s capital by using the White House to showcase the arts. She invited stars of the Royal Ballet and the Metropolitan Opera, as well as Shakespearean actors and the world’s greatest classical musicians, to perform for visiting heads of state in the East Room.

According to key Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorensen, JFK had “no interest in opera, dozed off at symphony concerts, and was bored by ballet.” (Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” was one of JFK’s favorite records, and the president asked that it be played repeatedly at private White House functions.)

Still, Jack was immensely proud of his wife’s efforts and usually did his best to mask his distaste for what he privately derided as “longhair crap.” He certainly didn’t fool Caroline, who shared her mother’s love of ballet even as a child. “Daddy claps,” she said at the time, “but I don’t think he really likes it. He makes faces when he thinks no one is looking.”

In fact, the high-spirited Kennedy kids were themselves often part of an evening’s entertainment. Several dinner guests arrived just as Caroline raced past them stark naked, with Maud Shaw in hot pursuit. Caroline “practically knocked us over,” one guest recalled. “Then she looked up with these huge eyes, looked back at the nanny, and shot off down the hall.” Caroline’s antics certainly kept Secret Service agents on their toes; members of the Kiddie Detail spent hours in hot pursuit of the first daughter as she ran from pillar to pillar firing off her cap pistol, or zipped down marble hallways on roller skates.

Jack delighted in their shenanigans, and made a point of spending time with Caroline and John just before bedtime. “No matter who we were having dinner with,” Jackie later recalled. “No matter how important they were, Jack would turn to me and say, ‘Go get the children!’ And of course I’d have to bring them out in their underwear or their pajamas. . . . You know, the children were never bratty, but he liked to have them underfoot.”

So did Jackie. While the president was more inclined to roughhouse—even at the risk of reinjuring his back—Jackie smothered them with hugs, kisses, and motherly concern no matter who was watching.

Yet for all the warmth they openly displayed as young parents, the president and first lady were often strangely formal around each other—even in front of staff members who saw them every day. In part, this was due to Jack’s antipathy toward couples that were overly affectionate in public, and his deep-seated aversion to touching and being touched in a nonsexual way—an idiosyncrasy rooted in his childhood.

“He never would hold hands in public,” Jackie conceded, “or put his arm around me—that was naturally just distasteful to him.” Even when campaign aides asked Jack and Jackie to put their arms around each other for the cameras, JFK refused. “He wouldn’t be fake in any way,” Jackie said. “People just don’t understand him.”

Long before Jack and Jackie were a couple, Jack’s friend and Senate colleague George Smathers of Florida noted that JFK “absolutely
hated
to be touched. If you put your hand on his shoulder, he would literally pull away. He just wasn’t brought up in a family where there was a lot of hugging and that sort of thing. It just made him terribly uncomfortable. It wasn’t like he could help himself. Jackie eventually broke through the wall, but it took her a long, long time.”

Like Jack, Jackie grew up watching her parents treat each other with icy indifference. And, along with most members of her generation and her class, she viewed egregious displays of affection in public places as gauche.

“Jackie was a very self-contained person, especially in the White House,” said Kennedy family photographer and close friend Jacques Lowe. “She very much lived her own life, as much as she was allowed to. Jack certainly wasn’t jumping into bed with her every night. But when they were both there, they made time for each other.”

White House social secretary Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, who had known Jackie since when they were both students at Miss Porter’s School for Girls, in Farmington, Connecticut, insisted their day-to-day relationship was poignant. “Maybe they weren’t always madly ‘at’ one another,” Baldrige said, “but there were plenty of tender moments when I would catch him putting his arm around her waist, or she’d lean her head on his shoulder . . .”