Some people thought Lee was just so happy with Michael that she no longer needed a job to feel fulfilled. A lifelong challenge for her, though, would be to avoid looking to outside influences for inner happiness. “She did sort of glom on to Michael,” Jill Fox recalled, “and, yes, it did seem to make her happier. I thought that being in love with Michael had brought about a great change in her, though. She was giggly, outgoing, and rambunctious, so different than the person I had last seen at Farmington that it was breathtaking.”
“They were such a gorgeous couple, I thought, my goodness wouldn’t it be fun to leave Seventh Avenue and all this stuff behind?” recalled her colleague at Harper’s, Laura Pyzel Clark. “I wouldn’t stay at Harper’s for five minutes if I was getting married to someone like Michael Canfield. I thought he was the most attractive man I had ever met.”
So what was Janet to do about Michael Canfield, especially given that Lee was so determined to be with him? She gave it a lot of thought. She knew that when she was Lee’s age, she, too, was defiant and determined to be her own woman, to make her own decisions, no matter what. There was a lot to be said for such independence, and Janet recognized it and respected it in Lee, even if it did vex her. “In the end, she remembered how important it was that she disobey her father by marrying Jack Bouvier, Lee’s dad,” said Janet’s former assistant, Adora Rule. “Years later, she told me, ‘Defying my father was truly a defining moment for me. It gave me a self-confidence I’d never known before. I felt that if I could take on my father, mean old bastard that he was, I could take on the world. So, I made the decision to let Lee have the same kind of victory.”
Janet said she decided that Lee’s marrying Michael might actually serve a good purpose and that, perhaps, it was to make her feel empowered enough to come to her own important decision and then, “for once in her darn life,” maybe stick to it! The idea that she was marrying before Jackie also appealed to Janet; she thought perhaps it might be good for Lee to have that achievement for herself, to have finally done something before her sister. “I decided maybe it wasn’t so bad,” Janet would recall.
“Did you tell her you had changed your mind about Michael Canfield?” Adora asked.
“No,” Janet said. “That would have completely ruined it.”
Janet actually wanted Lee to be under the false impression that, in choosing Michael, she was defying her mother and making a decision to live life on her own terms. “It seems a little twisted, but if you knew Janet, you understood that, despite all of this manipulation, she was really trying to do something good for Lee,” said Adora Rule, “trying to give her a sense of independence and self-confidence. She figured the marriage wouldn’t last anyway, she said, so there may as well be some good attached to it.”
Janet sat down with Lee at a special Mother-Daughter Tea (without Jackie) and told her that she could marry Michael if she insisted upon it, that it was her mistake to make. However, she also said she couldn’t give the union her blessing. Therefore, it would be Lee’s move. She waited for Lee’s reaction. It could have gone in one of two ways: Lee could have said, “No, Mummy, I won’t marry him,” or “I’m marrying him, anyway.” If it had been the former, Janet would have been disappointed. Of course, it was the latter—chip off the ol’ block that Lee was.
The marriage of Lee Bouvier to Michael Canfield took place at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown on April 18, 1953. Lee looked stunning in a high-necked, short-sleeved and bouffant ivory-toned wedding dress. She wore an Irish lace, floor-length bridal veil handed down to her by her maternal grandmother, and then by her own mother. Model thin with angular features that were somehow softer than Jackie’s or Janet’s, she was gorgeous. Jackie was her maid of honor, of course.
Jackie didn’t share her mother’s disapproval of Michael. While she wasn’t certain he was the perfect mate for her sister, she was determined not to second-guess Lee’s decision. “He’s lovely” is how she described him to Lee’s friend from Harper’s, Deena Atkins-Manzel, who was also at the wedding. “I hope Lee will be very happy. She’s my sister,” Jackie said. “What happens to her happens to me. If she’s happy, I’m happy.” When Lee tossed her bouquet, she directed it at her sister, who eagerly nabbed it.
Despite the fact that she had pretty much orchestrated and manipulated the entire thing, Janet was out of sorts at the wedding reception, held at Merrywood. Had she made the right decision to let this marriage go forward? Now that it was all over, she had mixed emotions. “I think maybe I should have stepped in and stopped this,” Janet told Deena Atkins-Manzel at the reception.
“But could you have stopped it?” Deena asked.
Janet looked at her as if she was out of her mind. “What do you think?” she asked.
“But they’re so in love,” Deena said, dreamily.
Janet shook her head. “You think that’s love?” she asked, staring at Michael and Lee. The newlyweds were sitting on settee in a corner, each one looking blankly in an opposite direction and seeming a little lost. “That’s not love,” Janet said, squinting at them. “I don’t know what that is, but it’s not love.”
“Black Jack”
Flashback to 1927.
There he stood in the main dining room of the popular East Hampton Maidstone Club in New York, about six feet tall, lean and trim, and with a deep, summer tan. He wore a white shirt, a crimson silk tie, and a dark blue suit made of the finest imported raw silk, flawlessly cut and unerringly tailored. At thirty-six, John Bouvier III—known as “Jack” or “Black Jack,” because of his swarthy, dark good looks—had a classically handsome face with expressive dark eyes, a high forehead, chiseled cheekbones, and a pencil-thin mustache. He was so vital and arresting, Janet Lee, nineteen, couldn’t stop looking at him.
Though Janet Lee wasn’t necessarily a pretty girl in the accepted sense, she was thin and slender of frame and did possess a certain grace. She had an elongated face, a strong jawline, and a long, straight nose. Her dark eyes were her best feature. She sometimes wore her short auburn hair parted on one side. What she may have lacked in looks, she more than made up for with her outgoing personality. She was funny, smart, and a good conversationalist, but it would be overstating it to say she was warm. She had a patrician way, speaking in a soft pitch and slowly in an inordinately polite manner, as did many young women of her background and time. She could appear aloof, sometimes disconnected and chilly. Still, she had a great many friends, was social and well liked.
Upon this fateful meeting, Jack and Janet stared at each other, their eyes locked in an intense gaze that neither was able to break. Janet would later admit that, to her, it felt like love at first sight. Fate had cast its die; these two would become inextricably tied to each other.
James T. Lee had certainly set the bar high as far as a suitor was concerned for his daughter Janet. An enterprising businessman, he would make a million dollars in real-estate development in Manhattan, losing that fortune in the panic of 1907 but then earning it back and much more. He was not only smart, he took chances. “Better a bad decision today than a good one three weeks late,” he liked to say. He was as headstrong as he was rich, though. When his daughter told him—after a quick courtship—that she wanted to marry Jack Bouvier, he said, “Absolutely not,” and that was the end of it for him.
One might have thought Jim would have been impressed with Jack Bouvier. The Bouviers—of French ancestry—were of “old money” and had lived in great splendor in a number of Fifth Avenue residences before settling into a magnificent twenty-four-room apartment at 765 Park Avenue. The family also owned two impressive estates in East Hampton. “Black Jack” was earning almost $100,000 a year, which in today’s currency would be almost $1.5 million. Supposedly he also had almost a million dollars in savings—almost $15 million in today’s world. On the surface, Jack looked pretty good. Dig a little deeper, though, and problems became evident, and Jim knew it. Typical of Jack’s laissez-faire attitude about business, he was in tremendous d
ebt. “He put on a good show” is how his nephew John Davis put it in a 1999 interview, “but he was heavily leveraged, and Jim knew it. His family had bailed him out many times. Despite appearances, he was always on the brink of financial ruin.”
That Jack Bouvier dressed as he did, so elegantly and without so much as a loose thread anywhere, and that his manner was so courtly and sophisticated didn’t fool Jim at all. It just made him more suspicious. “Not only does he not have solid money,” Jim told his attorney, Lyndon Davis, this according to Davis’s son, Barry. “He doesn’t have power. That’s what worries me most. You need not only money in this life, but power. This man has neither.”
Janet’s immediate acceptance of Jack’s proposal of marriage caused another deep rift in a family that was already troubled. Janet’s mother, Margaret, felt that Jim was being unreasonable, withholding his approval simply because he didn’t believe Jack to be “good enough” for Janet. Moreover, Margaret held fast to the notion that Janet and her sisters, Marion and Winifred, should not only marry well but, hopefully, be happy, too. Her own marriage was in a shambles, and had been for years; she and Jim practically never even spoke to each other. Embittered by her own marital experience, she famously told Janet, “The only thing I know about relationships is that they don’t work.” Margaret also knew that Janet just wanted to get out of the house, that she was tired of being under the thumb of her domineering father. She wanted the same for her.
In the end, Janet openly defied her father and married Jack on July 7, 1928, in the small, quaint St. Philomena’s Church in East Hampton.
For a while, the Bouviers lived a fun, extravagant lifestyle, spending much of it at Lasata, their summer home, where Janet was able to improve her horseback-riding skills while also lording over a house full of obedient servants. Meanwhile, in Manhattan, her social status soared as a result of her well-connected marriage. A big problem was clear, though, almost from the outset: Jack couldn’t stop cheating on Janet, and there was nothing she could do about it. “It hurts being cast aside,” she would say years later about this time in her life. She realized early on that he wasn’t going to change. Complicating things was that, regardless of how much he cheated on her, when she was with Jack in bed there were always fireworks. Their intimacy remained strong and powerful, and Janet was hooked by it. She wasn’t willing to let it go.
At twenty-one, Janet would become a young mother with the birth of Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, on July 28, 1929, her name Jackie honoring both her father and grandfather. Three and a half years later, on March 3, 1933, she gave birth again, to Caroline Lee Bouvier—Lee, of course. It was interesting that both Bouvier daughters carried Janet’s maiden name, Lee, as their middle name. Clearly, Janet wanted to make sure their identities were as linked to her family’s name as to their father’s.
In years to come, Janet and Jack would separate and reconcile so many times, people in their lives had lost track. Every time Janet decided to leave him, Jack would come by and sweep her off her feet. There would then be the unfolding of another sexual marathon, soon to be followed by another reunion and then breakup. This was unusual. In these circles, at that time, sexual compatibility was generally not something people in high society cared about one way or the other. For Janet and Jack, though, it was definitely something that kept them bound.
Despite their problems, Jack didn’t want to separate from Janet, either. He loved his daughters so much he couldn’t bear the idea of being away from them. “Jackie meant everything to Jack,” said Kathleen Bouvier, his niece, “and, to a certain extent, Lee did, too. He devoted himself to making sure every day was special for them, whether it was gifting them with a new dog—and there were plenty in the household already—or taking them to the park, just spending time with them, there was no limit to what he would do for them. Janet was more of a disciplinarian than Jack so, naturally, they gravitated toward him. Janet felt he spoiled the girls. Maybe so, but it was out of love.”
“The fights with Jack Bouvier were nonstop,” said Danine Barber, whose mother, Theresa Gambit, had been one of the governesses hired by Janet for her daughters. Danine Barber recalled to her daughter a time when little Jackie was in the parlor playing with her stuffed animals while her parents argued in front of her about an affair he was apparently having. Her resentment spilling over into rage, Janet gave Jack an angry shove. As he fell backward, his head hit a doorknob. He began to bleed. Jackie began to cry. Janet scooped her up and got her out of the room. “When her mother—Margaret—came to visit, Janet cried, resting her head in her mother’s lap,” said Danine Barber. “‘Men are complicated,’ she told her daughter, ‘but it’s your children that matter,’ she said, ‘and you must never allow them to witness another fight between you and Jack. You must promise me.’ Janet did make that promise. There was nothing she cared about more than those girls. They both meant the world to her.”
At the beginning of ’36, Janet finally had enough; she wanted out of her marriage. Surprisingly, her father, Jim, did not support her in her decision, though, telling her that if she went through with a divorce she would be on her own.
Jim’s reaction was consistent with the mind-set of many people of their time; after all, less than two percent of women in this country were divorcées. Plus, it was against their Catholic religion. Also, there had never been a divorce in the family. Moreover, it was a decision Janet had come to without her father’s counsel—therefore, as far as he was concerned, it was a bad one. To make matters worse for her, he reminded her that she had no money of her own. He had not set up trust funds for any of his three daughters and had no intention of ever doing so, either. He believed that Janet and her siblings should inherit his survival instincts, definitely not his money. “No free rides here” is how he liked to put it.
“Would it kill you this one time to be on my side?” Janet asked, according to her later recollection. Jim had no response. “Fine,” she said, gathering her things. “At least now I know where I stand with you.” She would not cry, though. She would later recall “that’s the one thing I would not do.” Instead, she straightened her shoulders and reportedly told her father, “Maybe one day you’ll climb down off your pulpit and understand what I’ve been going through.”
What would it take for Janet to stick to her convictions and end her marriage? It would take courage, she knew that much. Maybe she actually had inherited something from Jim, that being his survival instinct. Because her parents had tolerated their own unhappiness for years didn’t mean, in her mind, that she should have to do the same. She couldn’t help but be angry at Margaret for staying with Jim for so long, thereby setting a bad example for her daughters. While she loved her mother, she also viewed her as weak. In Margaret’s view, her mother was weak, too, as evidenced by the way she allowed herself to be treated in the household. Poor Maria Merritt, Margaret’s mother, was allowed to live with the Lee family, but because of her Irish brogue not allowed to speak in front of company. When people came by, she would dart in and out of her room, a strange, shadowy figure. The Lees said she was the family maid; it had been that way for as long as Janet could remember. How could Margaret tolerate this indignity of her own mother? Obviously, it was because both women were weak, at least in Janet’s opinion. She hated weakness in people—especially in herself. “Weakness isn’t something you’re born with,” Janet would observe in years to come. “You learn it. And I learned it from my mother. And she learned it from hers.”
The question of religion was a significant one for Janet. Though she was a devout Catholic who attended church every Sunday, she would never be the kind of woman who would be vocal in her beliefs; in other words, she would never proselytize. However, she did value her faith. When she went to see a priest about a possible divorce, he was adamant that it would not be accepted by the Church, that she would be excommunicated if she divorced Jack Bouvier. Of course, this made her decision all the more difficult. It would not, however, change her mind.
T
he separation between Janet and Jack finally became official in late ’36 with Jack agreeing to pay Janet about a thousand dollars a month—roughly $17,000 a month, today—as well as take care of his daughters’ medical and dental bills and education. Janet would continue to live with Jackie and Lee in a Park Avenue duplex.
Now that he was separated from Janet, of course Jack felt at liberty to date other women. However, Janet, unrealistically enough, still expected faithfulness from him—at least, she said, until after a final divorce decree. True to form, he would lie about his dalliances, she would find out about them anyway, and the subsequent fight would occur, all of it in front of her girls. The two would then tumble into bed again together, despite their legal separation. “The one thing I learned from my relationship with Jack,” Janet would later tell her friend Oatsie Charles, “is knowing when someone is being dishonest with me. I can smell dishonesty a mile away, and I owe all of that to Jack Bouvier.”
To Oatsie, Janet would many years later recall an incident that happened one evening in early 1938 as she and Jack were on their way home from a production of The Greatest Show on Earth at the Playhouse Theatre. At the time, Janet was thirty; Jack was forty-six. On the night in question, it was pouring rain, the weather almost freezing cold. The Bouviers had been arguing for hours about a woman Janet knew he’d been dating. Jack told the driver to pull over to the side of the road, and then he ordered him out of the vehicle despite the stormy weather just so that he and Janet could argue in private. “You have to choose,” Janet told Jack as the two sat in the car. “It’s me. Or her.”
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 5