Because of the difference in their ages, the sisters would both be separately educated at the elite and strict Miss Chapin’s School for Girls on the Upper East Side—the same school Janet had attended—whose academic motto was Fortiter et Recte (Bravely and Rightly). At Chapin’s, the girls kept a regimented schedule and were expected to excel in their studies. Miss Chapin, who taught poetry, Latin, and history, would accept nothing less from them; she was extremely active in the school’s day-to-day regimen and was steadfastly determined that each and every student well represent her school. It was tough and challenging for Jackie and Lee, but it taught them order, discipline, and tenacity. They worked hard to keep their grades up. Though Jackie sailed right on through with ease, Lee had a lot of trouble. “I will never forget,” she said. “I was terrible at sports and I was always the last to be chosen for a team which was so embarrassing and made me feel pathetic.” (Today Lee has a habit of accentuating words for the sake of drama; to hear her tell it, “I’ve always been quite dramatic.”)
Though exceedingly close, there was also a distinct whiff of competition between the girls, which, as it would happen, would be a lifelong issue for them. An early hint could be detected during that same summer of ’41. Jackie was scheduled to give a piano recital at school, playing “The Blue Danube” for an assembly. She had a difficult time with the composition and really wasn’t good at all as she pecked away at the keys. Still, she practiced every day on the piano at home. One day, she came to Janet in tears and told her that Lee had added her name to the list of those who would be performing at the recital. Janet didn’t take it seriously, noting that Lee couldn’t even play the piano! When Janet asked Lee about it, she just shrugged and looked up at the ceiling as if she didn’t have much to say.
The next day, Jackie played her song at the assembly, and failed miserably. Then, sure enough, the teacher announced, “And now little Lee will play the same song.” Lee then proudly sat in front of the piano and played “The Blue Danube” perfectly and to great applause. Jackie was mortified and, later, ran crying to Janet, who was not in attendance. It turned out that Lee had been privately practicing the whole time at school. Janet was astonished, and not happy about it. Though she would inadvertently foster a sense of competition between the girls just by virtue of preferring one over the other depending on the circumstance, she felt strongly that they should stick together. “You two are all you have,” she would often tell them. “I will not have you arguing. I will not have you fighting. You will get along because once I’m gone, you will only have each other.” The two girls would smile and hug each other, taking comfort in the security of their sisterhood. It wouldn’t be long, though, before Lee would start to feel that she was once again in Jackie’s shadow and seek to balance the scales.
It’s worth noting, though, that their sisterly competition seemed to be completely one-sided. Jackie never thought to compete with Lee. In fact, she’d actually lost count of the number of times she told Lee that there was no need for such rivalry and that they should both shine at their own interests. “I think the way Lee took that advice, though, was as if Jacqueline had implied that they shouldn’t compete because she [Lee] could never win,” Janet would later say. “Jacqueline was in her own little world, though. She excelled at everything, she just had an easy ride, to tell you the truth. She was blissfully unaware that other people had it harder. But how much can a child be expected to recognize of the world around her?”
To hear Lee tell it years later, she would have done pretty much anything to distinguish herself from Jackie, especially when she got to Miss Porter’s boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut (grades nine to twelve). Again, Jackie had sailed through with good grades while Lee struggled. “I always hated school, but I really hated Miss Porter’s,” she would say. “It was very rah-rah-rah and their teams must win.” She was constantly unfavorably compared by teachers to her sister. “All I ever heard was how Jackie had been a better student than I,” she later recalled. “It does tend to wear one down.”
“With the passing of not a lot of years, Lee began to develop a real complex about Jackie,” their cousin John Davis once observed. “Jackie, even as a teenager, dominated over Lee. People paid more attention to Jackie than they did Lee. Even her father and her grandfather. Her father was in love with Jackie. It was so patently obvious that there was a strong bond between those two. She was older and more on his level intellectually. I know that Lee always felt that her mother, too, loved Jackie more than she loved her. Lee was always just the little girl on the sidelines, and I believe she suffered because of it.”
“Lee had a real quality, but she always felt Jackie got the recognition,” added Rue Hill Hubert, who knew Lee as a youngster. “Jackie was much more obvious, and Lee a more subtle person. Lee certainly looked up to Jackie for a lot. But it’s what she felt deep down inside. She always felt Jackie had something she didn’t have, something that she so desperately wanted. It would be true all of her life.”
Jill Fuller Fox, who was a year ahead of Lee at Miss Porter’s, recalled, “The thing that all of us at school were aware of then was Lee’s extreme envy of Jackie, her feeling of being so much the paler of the two. The problem of being Jackie’s kid sister emanated from within Lee. I remember one time she said to me, ‘How would you like to have a sister like that?’ It was something she and I empathized about because I have an older sister who was also a great belle, but it was more painful for Lee because she and Jackie were so close.”
Another classmate, Lisa Artamonoff Ritchie, added, “I remember Jackie would come occasionally to school from Vassar to visit Lee, and there would be such light flashing out from her. She was so dazzling. Next to her, Lee looked so washed out. Somehow, at fifteen, she seemed as if she were thirty. There was no sense of youngness or freshness about her. There was a fatigue about her that was not so much jadedness as a kind of apathy. Lee was lovely, gracious, intelligent and she was not dull, but she was just in a veil. She didn’t have any verve.”
Janet couldn’t help but worry about Lee’s feelings of inadequacy when it came to Jackie. She joked now and then about the competition she so clearly saw going on between the girls and tried to make light of it. In her heart, though, she didn’t approve of it. Ironically, she made things so much worse by being so unrelentingly critical of Lee and praising of Jackie. She always thought Jackie was the smarter of the two and would probably have a career, and that Lee would just have to settle for a husband and a lot of children. Janet didn’t see a problem with her estimation of Lee, either. She was blunt, always had been, and thought it best that Lee be equipped with an accurate appraisal of her potential from her own mother. There was nothing wrong with being a homemaker anyway, Janet would argue. Not every woman could hope for more. However, Lee didn’t at all see things that way and she fought her mother every step along the way. “Oh, that’s just Mummy being Mummy,” Jackie would say. For Lee, though, the constant badgering only served to underscore her ever-growing insecurity complex. She just wished Janet would ease up on her, but the possibility of that happening didn’t seem to be in the offing.
“If she was okay before she went home for a break from Miss Porter’s,” said one of her classmates, “she was ten times worse when she got back. Her mother would wear her down. You’d see it on Lee’s pretty little face when she got back to school—she was just worn down to the nub by her mother.
“So many times I would be in the girls’ company when they would break out into an argument about some petty thing only to be chastised by Janet, who would say, ‘You do not fight with each other. I won’t allow it!’ Then she would go off with Jackie, the two hand in hand, leaving poor Lee behind with a sad face. She wanted them to be close as sisters, but it was hard when she so clearly preferred one over the other.”
A Sad Kind of Love
Most people didn’t understand what was going on between Lee Bouvier and Michael Canfield. Though they officially announced their engagement
at the end of 1952, they sure didn’t seem well suited. The first sign of incompatibility could be detected when the two were in London together before Lee had even started her job at Harper’s. There just wasn’t a spark between them. They acted like siblings, definitely not a couple with passionate intentions.
Michael’s stepbrother, Blair Fuller, recalled, “Michael and I were roommates all through Harvard. I can tell you that he was impotent at a young age. I know because he told me. However, Lee was patient about this, and she did not give up on him.” In fact, Michael wrote a letter to Blair’s sister Jill Fuller Fox in which he stated, according to her, “Lee had been rather pursuing him, and they didn’t know each other that well. I don’t think she meant anything to him.”
“He confided in me over beers that he probably would not be able to make love to her,” said Terrance Landow, who worked with Canfield at Hamish Hamilton. “I asked him why he wanted to be with her, then. He said, ‘First of all, she has enormous intelligence. She’s also beautiful, tough, and strong. She seems to need me as much as I need her. Maybe I will grow to want to be with her in that way. We’ll see, I guess.’ He told me that he’d explained to Lee that he wanted to wait for marriage before being intimate.”
“The story handed down in the family was that, while in the service, Michael had somehow been disfigured on his backside with an exploding grenade,” said Jamie Auchincloss. “I can’t say this was true. I can only say that this was what we had heard in the family.”
“He and Lee got along great, though,” continued Terrance Landow. “They seemed like they were the best of friends, if nothing else. They laughed a lot, getting a real kick out of each other. You have to understand that people back then, at least at that level of society, seldom married for sexual attraction, anyway.”
Jill Fuller Fox also recalled a telling conversation she and her brother, Blair, had with Michael. “As we walked through the woods at Crowfield [a village in Suffolk, England], he told us that Lee had proposed to him,” she said. “The last we heard about Lee from Michael was that she was pursuing him, and what was he to do about it? So we just laughed and said, ‘Oh, well.’ But then Michael said, ‘I’m going to accept.’ Blair and I almost fell sideways off the path. I said to him, ‘But, Michael, you can’t do that! You don’t love her.’ And Michael replied, ‘Oh, but the dear girl, she loves me so!’”
Some people in Michael Canfield’s life speculated that there were mercenary intentions behind his interest in Lee Bouvier. They figured he assumed Lee had family wealth, and he wanted in on it. In fact, the family of her stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, was extremely wealthy. However, Janet had made it clear that none of the Auchincloss money was ever going to trickle down to Lee or Jackie. Since Hugh had his own children from two previous marriages plus two with Janet, Lee and Jackie could expect nothing from him. The girls always knew that the only money they might one day stake claim to was whatever “Grampy Lee” (Janet’s father, Jim T. Lee) left them in his will. Maybe when Janet passed away, there would be some money for them there, too, but hopefully that was years off. A primary reason Janet didn’t want her daughters to have any illusions about wealth was because she wanted them to consider a potential suitor’s bank account before marrying. She didn’t want them to be under the impression that it didn’t matter because it most certainly did.
When Michael told Lee that he had a trust fund to augment his publishing business income, she was happy about it. However, she didn’t seem to care as much as one might think she would given the way she was being raised. While she didn’t want to be without security, she also didn’t place nearly as much of a premium on marrying well as her mother.
Another valid question was why Lee, a gorgeous young woman of a socially upstanding family, would want to spend her life with a man who seemed not to be attracted to her, especially given what other men viewed as her appeal. Chauncey Parker III, who was the son of Hugh’s business partner, Chauncey II, and who knew Lee from the time she was eleven, said of her, “She had a douceur about her. Douceur is a French word that implies more than gentleness, something stronger than just sweetness. She had a sense of wonderment, a lilt in her voice, and a wonderful smile. She was someone you really just wanted to take in your arms and hug. She had a delicious aura.”
Maybe because of her low self-esteem, Lee felt she couldn’t do any better than Michael. Then, of course, her competition with Jackie probably came into play; royalty always did make for a good catch, after all. Chauncey Parker recalled, “I have long thought another reason Lee wanted to marry Mike—besides the fact that she was determined to get as far away from her mother as possible—was that she was absolutely hell-bent-for-leather determined to beat Jackie to the altar. At least beat her at that!”
It’s also worth noting that Lee and Michael shared the same forlorn temperament. Though Michael was witty, charming, and good-looking, like Lee he had a deep pathos about him. Always sad and melancholy, he seemed to suffer from what would today be considered depression. Maybe it was understandable. After all, he never knew where he fit in: was he a vaunted royal from an exclusive bloodline or just an American from a successful publishing family? This confusion and uncertainty about identity ate away at him and was, no doubt, one of the reasons he drank so heavily. Like a moth to a flame, Lee seemed drawn to him and his downhearted persona. “She told me that she loved his sensitivity,” said one close friend of hers at that time. “She knew that he didn’t want to sleep with her. Of course she knew! But she felt that sexual attraction between them would grow in time.”
Maybe Michael said it best about his relationship with Lee at the couple’s engagement party, which was at the home of Pat and Jerry Hill, parents of Lee’s roommate at the time, Rue Hill. In front of several guests, he pulled Lee into his arms and, with no small measure of vulnerability, observed, “A guy like me doesn’t get a girl like you, Lee. It just doesn’t happen.” Lee was visibly overcome; any witness could see her heart go out to him. “Yes, Michael, it does happen,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “It really does.”
They had a beautiful yet, at the same time, sad kind of love, one most people didn’t think had a chance. While a great many observers had a great many opinions about it, probably none were as vocal or as vociferous as Janet. She put her foot down; there would be no wedding to Michael Canfield, not as far as she was concerned, anyway. She ticked off her reasons to Lee one night over dinner with the family: “He’s not in love with you. You’re not in love with him. He drinks too much. He’s homosexual. He’s broke.” Janet said she was endeavoring to shield the family from gossip and innuendo, but, more important, she said, she was also trying to look after Lee. “Say what you will about my mother,” said her son, Jamie, “she was tough, yes, but also fiercely protective of my sisters. Maybe it could also be said that she didn’t know when to let go or to back off, but that was just who she was as a parent.”
The discussion quickly turned into an argument, with Lee raging on that Janet was meddlesome and critical. “Enough, Lee!” Janet said, raising her voice. “I have made my decision. This is not up for debate.” One witness to the disagreement recalled, “Lee was so upset, she refused to even look at her mother. The next thing we knew, Janet was saying, ‘Eyes on me, Lee! Eyes on me!’ It was quite the spectacle. Those two could be very dramatic.”
Why, Janet wondered, did it always have to be such a battle of wills between her and Lee? It certainly wasn’t that way with Jackie. In fact, when Janet had concerns about the suitability of a man named John Husted for Jackie, the two had been able to work through them as mother and daughter. Janet not only managed to get rid of the guy, she got Jackie to agree with her about it!
John Husted
As much as she craved an exciting life for herself that included a career of some sort, by the time she was twenty-two Jacqueline Bouvier also felt a strong pull toward domestication. As was the custom for young women at that time, Jackie, like Lee, wanted to get out from under he
r mother’s domination, too. While her relationship with Janet was nowhere near as contentious as Lee’s, she still felt that Janet was overbearing and overprotective. Therefore, getting married and becoming her own woman appealed to her. She knew that whomever she chose would have to meet with Janet’s high standards, though, and many of the men she’d dated recently didn’t even come close. However, through connections made by Hugh Auchincloss in New York high society, Janet was introduced, in 1951, to a man she thought would be just perfect for Jackie. He was a stockbroker named John G. W. Husted Jr., whose family, much to Janet’s pleasure, was listed in the Social Register. His father was a friend of Hugh’s, a partner in Brown Shipley, which was the British arm of Brown Brothers Harriman on Wall Street. Janet knew his mother and liked her.
Born John Grinnel Wetmore Husted Jr. in 1926 in Hartford, this tall and urbane stockbroker spent much of his youth in England, where he attended the preparatory Summer Fields School in Oxford. An eventual Yale graduate, he also served in World War II. “On our first date we went to the Dancing Class in Washington, which was a proper, social thing to do in those days,” he recalled of himself and Jackie. “I was immediately attracted to her, and we began seeing each other every weekend.”
Any relationship with John would have to wait, however, until after Jackie returned from a much-anticipated European vacation with Lee in June of 1951, which Janet paid for—London, Paris, Venice, Rome, and Florence. “We were so young,” Jackie recalled. “It was the first time we felt really close, carefree together, high on the sheer joy of getting away from our mother; the deadly dinner parties of political bores, the Sunday lunches for the same people that lasted hours, Lee and I not allowed to say a word. My dream was France, but Lee’s was really Italy, as art was all she cared about through school.” The sisters were probably closer during this trip than they’d ever been, loving Europe together, enjoying its many exotic sights, and learning all about art history there. It was a happy time, a period that they would both remember with great fondness. When they returned in September, they gave Janet a homemade scrapbook they called “Our Special Summer.” It was composed of anecdotes from the trip along with photos they’d taken, captions and memories designed to thank Janet for allowing them to go on a vacation they’d never forget. (Years later, this book would be packaged and released by a major publisher.)
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 3