Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Back in the States, Lee began attending school at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, while Jackie tried to figure out what she might do now that she’d graduated. In Janet’s mind, the decision was an easy one; Jackie should just settle down with John Husted. However, Jackie was a little lukewarm on the idea. She kept saying she wanted to live happily ever after with someone, but she just wasn’t sure John was the one.

  The idea of “happily ever after” was just a tad naïve for Janet’s taste. The subject came up during a “Mother-Daughter Tea,” a tradition of the Bouvier women for many years. Whenever possible—and when the girls were in boarding school it was a little more difficult—Janet made sure to take her daughters to high tea at one of the better hotels in New York, usually the Plaza. This special occasion became known among the three as a Mother-Daughter Tea. They would dress to the nines, and spend the entire day together, shopping before tea and then afterward, and maybe even see a Broadway show that night. All three looked forward to this time together; they really enjoyed being in one another’s company. Mostly, it was typical mother-daughter conversation—boyfriends, clothes, school. Janet would always reiterate her wish that the two girls remain close, that they not compete with each other—usually this dictate was directed to Lee, of course—that they not fight. As they got older, the subject matter became more about the men in Jackie’s and Lee’s lives. Sometimes, the occasion was to discuss a pivotal decision one of the girls had to make. Other times, it was just an opportunity for Janet to impart some motherly advice or wisdom, as it was on this day. “Do you know what the secret to happily-ever-after is?” Janet asked Jackie and Lee during their teatime, according to what she later confided in her socialite friend, Oatsie Charles. “Money and power,” she said, answering her own question. Janet was raised to believe that the two often went hand in hand, money acting as a means to power if only just for its ability to finance a life well lived. Years later, when recounting this particular anecdote, Janet would say of her daughters, “They looked at me as if I was the devil, especially poor Lee. God love her, she was such a little romantic.” Janet said she saw Jackie’s wheels turn as if she truly got it. However, Lee was taken aback. “She almost choked on her finger sandwich,” Janet said, laughing. “Fine. If it made her think, good. She should’ve been thinking.”

  John Husted was a nice-enough gentleman, but it was clear that there was no real attraction for Jackie. However, Janet had heard that he was successful and believed him to have money; she was certain Jackie would learn to love him in time. Jackie had already experienced real passion with a man, though, a year earlier when she was in France. She had a one-night stand with John P. Marquand Jr.—everyone called him Jack—son of the famous writer John P. Marquand Sr. The two had quick sex in an elevator. It wasn’t exactly romantic, but it was exciting. It took her months to get over it, though, not sure how she should feel about it, whether or not it had compromised her morality since she’d been a virgin. In the end, she decided it had been good experience and that she wanted to feel that way again one day, only with the added element of true love. She also decided not to tell anyone about it, not even her sister, Lee.

  During the girls’ most recent trip to Europe, though, Jackie had wanted to see Marquand again. She then confided in Lee about him and the sexual interlude they’d had, swearing her to secrecy. Lee promised to keep her confidence. Much to Jackie’s dismay, though, Lee then turned right around and told Janet all about it by transcontinental phone call. Why? Because Lee had information Janet didn’t have, and she decided to use it to curry favor. It worked. On that day, anyway, Lee was definitely Janet’s favorite. Though Lee apologized, Jackie was heartbroken. “But we had a deal!” she reportedly exclaimed. “We had a deal!” It would take her some time to get over the betrayal, though in a strange way she seemed to understand it. She would never have done the same thing to her sister, but she certainly knew what it was like to want to win points with “Mummy.”

  After Janet made some quick calls to her high-society friends in Paris, she learned that John Marquand’s finances were in disarray; he was pretty much broke. When the girls got home, Janet made it clear that she was deeply disappointed in Jackie for having kept the relationship with Marquand a secret from her. The fact that she’d been intimate with him was more than Janet could bear; she couldn’t even discuss that part of the story, preferring to act as if it had never happened. She made it clear, though, that Jackie was never to see Marquand again. When Jackie tried to protest that she was old enough to make decisions about who to date, Janet smacked her across the face—twice. That was the last time mother and daughter ever talked about John Marquand. Instead, Janet now preferred John Husted for Jackie.

  Meanwhile, at this same time, Jackie landed a job at the Washington Times-Herald, taking over a column that had originally been called “The Inquiring Photographer.” Jackie was hired to pen what was a daily question-and-answer “think piece” in which readers were able to state their opinions on current events and then have those remarks be published, accompanied by their photographs. Jackie would write the column and also take the respondents’ pictures. Though she wasn’t a professional photographer, she did have an eye for composition and design and, in just a few days, learned to use the professional cameras provided her by the newspaper. Soon, the column was renamed “The Inquiring Camera Girl,” and Jackie was earning a little over forty bucks a week composing it. Therefore for the next year and a half, she would be asking innocuous questions of strangers about life and love such as: “Is your marriage a fifty-fifty partnership?” “Do the rich enjoy life more than the poor?” and “What do you think women desire most?” John Husted, who sometimes helped Jackie with her work, would call it “an insipid little job, but kind of fun.”

  One snowy evening in December of ’51, John Husted asked Jackie to meet him at the Polo Bar in the Westbury Hotel. He took a leap of faith and said that if she was interested in marrying him she should show up at a certain time. That night, he then waited for her, fretting she would not appear. At the last second, she showed up. She wasn’t exactly swept away by his proposal. “You can do a lot worse, Jackie,” Janet told her later that evening as they talked things over. The problem with John, as Jackie saw it, was that he was just so dull and pedantic. Janet was persuasive, though; Jackie eventually agreed to marry John, and told him so the next day. Now, in Janet’s mind, everything seemed to be working out—Jackie not only had the career she had wanted for herself, but more important, she also had the kind of spouse Janet wanted for her. The wedding was set for June of 1952.

  Unfortunately, things took a bad turn just before the engagement party in mid-February ’51 at Janet and Hugh’s Merrywood estate in McLean, Virginia. At Janet’s behest, Hugh had begun to dig a little deeper in the Manhattan business world about John’s financial situation. Through these inquiries, he came to understand that Husted and his family were not at all well off. While they had some money, it wasn’t much. Janet was upset and felt that Husted had been purposely covering up the truth just to snare Jackie. She therefore decided to learn more about whatever was going on with him at, of all places, the couple’s engagement party.

  At the party, Janet asked the right questions of the right people and learned that John only made $17,000 a year (about $160,000 in today’s money). This was a surprise. She had it in her head he was worth a lot more, even given Hugh’s recent inquiries. Once Janet knew the truth, she turned on John with a vengeance, no longer gracious to him, his friends, or his family members. She just wasn’t one to hide her feelings, no matter how hard she tried. During the party, John presented Jackie with a sapphire-and-diamond ring in front of all of the guests. As Jackie accepted it, Janet turned to Hugh’s son Yusha and, with a real edge to her voice, said, “She must have fallen off her horse and hit her head.”

  At one point during the festivities, Janet and Helen Husted, John’s aunt, had a difference of opinion over the simple placement of a large flo
ral arrangement. Helen relocated it in order to make way for a platter of food. However, Janet didn’t want it moved. This insignificant moment led to harsh words. Jackie was mortified. A rising panic took hold of her when she realized that people were whispering all around her about the outburst, calling it “undignified.” She pulled Janet into another room and demanded to know, “Why are you trying to ruin this day?” Janet angrily shot back, “Because he’s not for you, not unless you never want to be able to afford to travel again! I’m trying to protect you, can’t you see that?”

  Janet then told Jackie what she had learned about John’s finances, and she also noted that Jackie’s father had earned almost three times as much when Janet married him—“And that was more than twenty years ago!” Now Jackie was the one surprised. “How did I not know this?” she asked. “You tell me,” Janet countered.

  A couple weeks later, members of the Auchincloss and Bouvier families—Janet, Hugh, Jackie, Lee, Janet Jr., and Jamie and a few others—were having dinner at Merrywood when, according to one relative present, the subject of John Husted came up. As the uniformed waitstaff solemnly served beef Wellington, Jackie said she was worried about hurting John’s feelings by ending it with him. “Why care about him when, in a week, he won’t be in our lives?” Janet asked. “We won’t even remember his name,” she added.

  After dinner, Janet tried to talk to Jackie about John, but Jackie seemed more invested in a stack of fashion magazines she had brought down from her bedroom. “Eyes on me,” Janet reminded her daughter. “Eyes on me!” Jackie looked up, annoyed. She then said that if she was going to end it with John, she wanted to do it with kindness and consideration. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings. “But it’s not your job to take care of his feelings,” Janet said. “That’s what his family is for.”

  Janet said that she had invited John Husted to Merrywood in a few days’ time and that she would then find out all there was to know about his suitability for marriage. While Jackie begged Janet not to embarrass her, Janet felt that any awkwardness would be the least of Jackie’s problems if she married someone who couldn’t afford to give her a good life. Then, staring at her daughter with a stern expression, she told her that this was not the time for sentiment. She, as the mother, knew what was best. By this time, Jackie couldn’t take another second of Janet. “I know, Mummy,” she exclaimed petulantly as she rose and stormed from the room. Hugh, who was sitting at the head of the table, just smiled and shook his head. He was used to such scenes and almost always stayed out of the line of fire.

  Shortly after that conversation, John Husted spent the weekend at Merrywood as planned. With Jackie not present, Janet asked him directly how much money he earned. He told her the truth—$17,000 annually—which, of course, she already knew. “My prospects for making more money were reasonable but not assured,” he would later recall, “and I had no great family fortune, at least not the kind she wanted for Jackie. Consequently, Janet did not approve.”

  After talking to John, Janet told Jackie what she had learned. Mother and daughter knew what had to be done. Later, when Jackie took him to the airport for his return flight, she simply slipped the engagement ring off her finger and dropped it into his jacket pocket. “She was ice cold,” John would remember. “Like we never knew each other. I understood that the end had come. I never heard from her again. Not ever.”

  In the weeks to come, Jackie would experience pangs of guilt about the way it had ended with John. She’d even gone to church to pray for guidance. Had she done the right thing? Yes, Janet reassured her, she had, and, in fact, she would one day thank her for her counsel. She was looking out for her by protecting her and their family from a marriage to the wrong kind of man. Janet had even put a correction in the local newspaper announcing that the engagement was off “by mutual consent.” As far as she was concerned, that was the end of it. When she found out that Husted was still sending letters to Jackie asking what had happened, she took it upon herself to answer one of them herself. She told him the time had come for him to move forward with his life without Jackie, and to do so immediately.

  It’s worth noting that Janet’s prediction that the family wouldn’t remember John Husted’s name seemed to come to pass when the first in-depth biography of Jackie was published in 1961. It was an authorized book written by a good friend of Janet’s, Mary Van Rensselaer. In it, John Husted isn’t even mentioned, totally written out of history.

  Lee and Michael Marry

  Less than two years after Janet put the kibosh on Jackie’s romance with John Husted, she had to contend with Lee’s affection for someone she viewed as being just as unsuitable, Michael Canfield. She had to wonder why she and Lee couldn’t just sit down as mother and daughter and work out the problem of Canfield in the same way she and Jackie had dealt with Husted. “I am not the enemy,” she kept telling Lee. “I am on your side.”

  To Janet, this was the part of raising daughters that mattered most—the part where she was able to weigh in on their choice of mates and how they would then fit into high society. Her prior responsibilities as a mother were pretty much limited to hearing their stories about life at boarding school, making certain they had time for a Mother-Daughter Tea when they were home, and then keeping them entertained during the summer months by sending them off and paying for trips abroad. It wasn’t as if Janet—and, later, her daughters—was a hands-on mother all year round. When her girls were old enough to make decisions about marriage, that’s when the experienced mother’s opinion and guidance really mattered. For years, Janet had looked forward to this time. For her, it wasn’t supposed to be a battle but, rather, the natural course of things. It was also her responsibility. Or, as she liked to say, “This is what a mother is for! Otherwise why even have a mother?”

  “I think that Jackie was always grateful to her [Janet] because she felt that she had intentionally enlarged her world—our world—for our sake as much if not more than for her own sake,” Lee would have to admit. “I think she was always far more grateful than I was for that kind of guidance. She appreciated it so much.”

  Lee didn’t see things quite the same way, though. She didn’t want her world “enlarged” as much as she just wanted to make her own choices in it. There would definitely be no talking Lee out of a marriage to Michael, especially if the reasons against it all felt to her like criticisms of her and her judgment. Whereas Jackie tried to agree with Janet when it came to matters of the heart and would almost always bend to her will, Lee vehemently disagreed. She was headstrong and determined to live her own life her own way. If this meant Janet loved Jackie more because Jackie would acquiesce to her—and Lee certainly thought this was the case—then so be it. Lee was satisfied just knowing she was her own woman, and that would never change.

  Janet fully understood that a primary reason Lee wanted to marry at just nineteen was to escape her influence. She was self-aware enough to know that, yes, she could be imperious and that this trait was sometimes difficult for her daughters to accept. After all, she’d been through the exact same thing with her own father, Jim T. Lee, who never approved of anything she ever did. In fact, one of the reasons she married Jack Bouvier at Lee’s age was to escape her father’s dominance over her and, at the same time, to defy him. Though the notion of being in love wasn’t foremost on her mind when it came to her daughters’ selection of spouses, if Janet thought Lee actually felt that way about Michael, she might have been a little more accepting. She realized, though, that Lee just wanted to make her own statement of independence, and that Michael represented a means to that end.

  Janet was willing to give Michael a chance, though. She decided to take him to lunch in New York at Le Pavillon, one of her favorite French restaurants, “just the two of us, my treat,” she told him, this according to what Tom Guinzburg once recalled; he was a publicist at Viking Press (where Jackie would one day work) and a close friend of Michael’s. Of course, Lee didn’t want this tête-à-tête to take place without her, bu
t Michael felt sure he could handle Janet, and asked Lee to allow him to do so. “Michael was an innocent,” said Guinzburg. “He didn’t know what he was in for.” First, Janet plied her future son-in-law with liquor to see just how much he would imbibe and, unfortunately, she found that it was quite a lot. He definitely didn’t pass that particular test. When she wanted to know about his relationship history, he told her about this girl and that one, but he wasn’t convincing about any of them. Then he said something like, “There are a lot of things I am confused about, but not the way I feel about your daughter.” His comment did nothing to make Janet feel any better. In fact, all she took from it was his admission that he was “confused” about “a lot of things.”

  In the end, Michael did warm Janet up a little, though. Something about him always managed to bring out the maternal instincts in a woman, and Janet wavered a little after their luncheon. If anything, she began to think that maybe the reason he and Lee shouldn’t marry was because he was too weak-willed to take on such a strong-minded woman. She felt that any man Lee married would have to be tough on her in order to get her to comport herself in a more disciplined way, and she didn’t believe that was Michael. Therefore, she left the luncheon thinking the poor guy might be in way over his head.

  Also at this time, Janet was frustrated when she learned that Lee had decided to quit her job as Diana Vreeland’s assistant. Janet thought this decision only served to underscore her daughter’s maddeningly indecisive nature. She had truly believed Lee had finally found a good place for herself at Harper’s. However, true to her mercurial nature, Lee was ready to move on after just four months. Of course, Janet had to mention to Lee that Jackie was quite happy at her job as “The Inquiring Camera Girl” at the Washington Times-Herald, and she, once again, wondered why Lee couldn’t be more like her sister. Why did Lee have to be so, as Janet put it, “wishy-washy”?