When the convention was over, LBJ used Air Force One to literally block Jackie’s plane from departing for Newport—refusing to move until she came out onto the tarmac and posed with him for a picture. Johnson knew that she was now focused on getting Bobby elected to the Senate, but wouldn’t she make this one gesture that would mean so much to the Democrats in this election year?
“She said, gently but firmly, no,” Jamie Auchincloss recalled. “My sister could not be budged once her mind was made up, and the one thing she hated above all else was being exploited—even by the president.” Especially not this president, whose crass behavior—among other things, LBJ liked to confer with aides, both male and female, while sitting on the toilet—often made her cringe.
Jackie was “appalled by Johnson’s earthiness,” observed historian William Manchester. What LBJ had to say about her good friend Adlai Stevenson (“You know, he squats to piss”) simply “horrified” Jackie. She confided to Manchester that the remark left her “stunned” and speechless.
Getting Bobby elected to the Senate was an obvious next step toward putting the Kennedys back in the White House in 1968, and Jackie was willing to do all she could to help make that happen. When she wasn’t getting her new home ready or squeezing in a few moments with the children, Jackie was courting influential New York opinion makers on Bobby’s behalf.
“He must win,” she told Dorothy Schiff, powerful publisher of the New York Post, over tea in her Carlyle suite. “People say he’s ruthless and cold . . . but, being younger than his two brothers and so much smaller . . . he hasn’t got the graciousness they had. He is really very shy, but he has the kindest heart in the world.” Not surprisingly, RFK would win the Post’s coveted endorsement—in large part, Schiff later conceded, because of Jackie’s impassioned plea on his behalf.
Bobby wasn’t above using John, either. When JFK’s only son showed up at the World’s Fair in Flushing Meadow, Queens, that September, he created a minor sensation—largely because the Kennedy campaign had tipped off the press in advance. Perched on the back of one of his four Secret Service agents, John cheerfully answered questions lobbed to him by reporters.
“Where’s Caroline?” one asked.
“She’s in school,” answered John, “but I’m too young.”
At Walt Disney’s futuristic Magic Skyway exhibit, John was presented a toy car. “Hi, everybody!” he shouted to the assembled crowd as he grabbed the toy and plopped down on the ground. “I’m going to play car!”
The Tyrannosaurus rex exhibit at Sinclair Oil’s Dinoland, however, turned out to have a sobering effect on Jackie’s boy. “The lights and the dinosaurs,” an uncharacteristically somber John told the pack of reporters, made him feel “a little bit scared.”
“Jackie and John had enormous, really universal appeal,” David Halberstam said. “Dallas was still so fresh, so raw. Just looking at Jack Kennedy’s young family—especially John-John—it was hard not to feel a tug of emotion.” They “made it impossible to forget that Bobby was carrying the torch for Camelot and the New Frontier, not LBJ.”
That November, Bobby clobbered his opponent at the polls, racking up a 700,000-vote margin of victory. Ironically, Jackie’s was not among them. She refused to cast her vote for anyone in the 1964 election—not for Bobby, and certainly not for LBJ. “This is very emotional, but I’d never voted until I was married to Jack,” she later explained. The 1964 vote “would have been his—he would have been alive for that vote. And I thought, I’m not going to vote for anyone because this vote would have been his.”
Jackie understood full well how Lyndon would react. “I know,” she conceded, “that LBJ was hurt.” But not Bobby, who publicly acknowledged that he, too, refused to cast a vote for the Texan who had replaced his brother in the White House.
It would be another two weeks before Jackie finally checked out of the Carlyle and took up residence in her new home. The apartment at 1040 Fifth was the axis on which John’s world would spin for the next thirty years, and would, for the most part, remain frozen in time.
“It was Jackie’s haven, her refuge,” Tish Baldrige said. “And a magical place for any child to call home.” Anyone stepping into this magical place for the first time was instantly drawn to the apartment’s paramount feature: its jaw-dropping panoramic view of Central Park in the foreground, with the Hudson River and New Jersey stretching to the horizon. Just across the street and to the left was the limestone-sheathed, neoclassical Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later, John would be able to look down on a reminder of his father: the glass-enclosed Temple of Dendur, which Jackie picked out when Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser offered to honor JFK by giving the United States one of his country’s ancient ruins.
Jackie, who had a talent for illustration that dated back to her days at Miss Porter’s School, spent hours at the window trying to capture the view on canvas. Occasionally, she invited John and Caroline to set up their own child-size easels and join her.
They also enjoyed peeping at neighbors and the pedestrians below through a high-powered telescope set up on a tripod. Her friend and frequent escort Charles Addams, the celebrated cartoonist, explained that Jackie liked “prying into other people’s lives for a change.” Like any other boy his age, John was keen on looking but had a difficult time at first mastering the lens. Once he did, “there was no stopping him.” While Mommy focused on people, John tended to zero in on ships plying the Hudson, or the dogs, horses, and pigeons that also populated the park—not to mention the moon and the stars. “John shared his mother’s love of adventure and her tremendous curiosity,” Plimpton said. “The whole business of peering through a telescope as if you were a captain on the high seas or an astronomer—it was just incredibly exciting.”
To ease the children’s transition into their new life, Jackie flooded the apartment with furniture, decorative objects, and mementos that had been part of the family’s time in the White House. As John and his sister stepped directly out of the elevator and into the apartment’s long, mirrored entrance hall, they instantly recognized the marble torso of a Roman god displayed on a table between two yellow porcelain vases. “Look, look, it’s Daddy’s man,” John shouted. The torso had been part of JFK’s antiquities collection. Several other pieces from the collection, including the two-thousand-year-old bust of a young boy and a small rendering of Hercules circa 500 B.C., sat atop an elaborately detailed nineteenth-century French chest.
Exploring their new home for the first time, Caroline and John clicked off each familiar item they spied—starting with John Singer Sargent’s Venetian Girl displayed on an easel in the living room. Nearby was Study of a Snow Owl by Peter Paillon, and Sargent’s striking Head of an Arab. The dining room scarcely resembled a dining room at all. With its crimson damask wallpaper, bookcases, comfy overstuffed couches, marble fireplace, and black baby-grand piano, it contrasted sharply with the stark formality of the other rooms. On one wall was a world map covered with colored pins, each denoting a spot JFK had visited as president. From now on, John would take first-time visitors straight to the map and proclaim, “See those pins? My daddy went to all those places!”
As in nearly every other house in America with small children, John’s finger paintings and Caroline’s watercolors were proudly displayed along with family photos on a bulletin board in the kitchen. Down the hall, in the direction of John’s room, were several framed four-by-six-foot collages made up of family snapshots. John’s friend Robert Littell described each as a “joyful pastiche—pictures of poignant moments and happy days.” By design, none of the photos in the collages, which she would replicate and hang in the family’s other homes, predated November 22, 1963.
In fact, images of Jack were made conspicuous by their absence. In the entire apartment there was only one silver-framed head shot of JFK to be found, and it sat with other family photos on the dresser in her chartreuse-and-white corner bedroom. “She was trying to move on,” Billy Baldwin said, “and she didn’t want Caroline and es
pecially John to have their whole lives dominated by the ghost of their father.”
The welcoming, almost-but-not-quite casual environment Jackie tried to create for guests belied her attention to detail and an obsessive need for order. The closets in her bedroom were nothing short of immaculate, the contents arranged according to Jackie’s exacting standards. Hundreds of pairs of shoes were organized by color and style. Evening dresses were lined up by length, day suits and evening suits were separated, and all clothes were arranged according to the spectrum, starting with primary colors and then shades of color. Hanging in their own section were forty pairs of identical white slacks.
Housewarming gifts from political leaders, celebrities, and social movers-and-shakers were soon landing on her doorstep—a Louis XV bed from Bunny Mellon, the forty-nine collected works of Winston Churchill from his son Randolph. President Johnson dropped in to pay his respects, as did ballet great Rudolf Nureyev, Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, her old friend Leonard Bernstein, and King Hassan of Morocco.
For Jackie, most days were spent in an unmarked office at 200 Park Avenue, one of several Manhattan buildings owned by her father-in-law, Joe Kennedy, and for years the headquarters of his financial empire. There, with the help of Tuckerman and Pamela Turnure, the Jackie Kennedy look-alike who was both Jack’s lover and the first lady’s press secretary, she went about the business of sorting through letters of condolence that were still pouring in from all over the world.
Yet for the first time in months, Jackie was no longer crying herself to sleep. She could get through an entire day without mentioning Jack’s name, now concentrating on beginning the next chapter of her life as the world’s most famous single mother.
An early challenge was to convince the other mothers not to shy away from asking Caroline and John to parties and playdates. When Caroline asked why all the other girls in her class at Sacred Heart were being asked to birthday parties and she wasn’t, Jackie picked up the phone and called one of the other mothers directly. “Of course we’d love to invite Caroline,” the woman sputtered, “but we all felt it might be presumptuous to ask.”
“Oh,” Jackie replied, “but she’s just a little girl. Please invite Caroline to everything. She’s dying to come!” Caroline quickly became the most sought-after children’s birthday party guest in New York.
Unfortunately, John was missing out on all the fun—and let everybody know it. “How come Caroline gets to go birthday parties and I don’t?” he demanded whenever she headed out the door wearing a party dress and clutching an elaborately wrapped gift. “I want to go, too!”
A solution came in the improbable form of Morocco’s King Hassan II and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed. During their White House years, the Kennedys had grown especially fond of the dashing monarch and his young family. Now Jackie seized the opportunity to throw a birthday party at her apartment for the crown prince, who was turning four.
No one was more excited than John, who joined his sister at the table alongside the crown prince. “Oh, John just loved it,” Jackie later said. “He was so tired of hearing Caroline chatter on about all the wonderful parties she’d been to.”
Not so thrilled was the birthday boy himself. When seventeen-year-old Jamie Auchincloss arrived to lend his sister a hand, the crown prince “was sitting at the table and looking terrified.” Four bodyguards were lurking in the background, and hovering over the festivities was a royal nanny who, Jamie recalled, “looked even more intimidating than the bodyguards.”
Everyone jumped when Jackie suddenly burst out of the kitchen carrying a huge birthday cake and singing a comically off-key rendition of “Happy Birthday” at the top of her lungs. When Jackie embellished the lyrics—“Happy Birthday, Dear Mohammed, Crown Prince, Li-on of Juu-dah”—everyone laughed. Everyone but the birthday boy and his entourage.
Matters only got worse when the little prince tried and failed to blow out his candles. The nanny and the bodyguards quickly joined in, huffing and puffing furiously, only to see the flames flicker back to life.
JFK’s mischief-loving widow had put trick candles in the cake, convinced that it would liven up the festivities. What she hadn’t considered was the fact that Prince Mohammed was considered infallible in his part of the world. Unaccustomed to things not going his way, the little boy burst into tears—and his nanny angrily confronted Jackie.
“Look what you have done!” she shouted in Jackie’s face. “How terrible! I suppose you think you are funny?”
It was something the nanny “shouldn’t have done,” Jamie recalled. “Jackie was not accustomed to being talked to that way—especially by a servant.” Jamie held his breath as his sister fixed the woman with a withering stare.
“It’s too bad if he didn’t understand the joke,” Jackie said. “But this is my house and in it I will do as I damn well please.”
Perhaps with the exception of her Moroccan guests, everyone in the room “felt like applauding,” Jamie said. “I was very proud of her.” So was John, who laughed so long and hard at the prince trying to blow out his candles that he fell off his chair.
John’s zany antics were more than a match for his mother’s, and during those first few weeks at 1040 Fifth she could count on him to keep her spirits high while Caroline was at school. John still spent most of his day with Nanny Shaw or roughhousing with Secret Service agents, who—whether Jackie approved or not—still helped fill the void left by his father. But when they were together—hanging out at the circus or digging into butterscotch sundaes at their favorite spot, Serendipity off Third Avenue—it had to have been clear to John that his mother was happier than she had been in months.
“The spark had returned to her eyes,” said her friend Kitty Carlisle Hart, who not long before sat in stunned silence as Jackie obsessively recounted every moment of Jack’s murder in horrific detail. Only a year earlier, Hart had lost her husband, the legendary playwright Moss Hart, and the two women bonded over concerns that their children might be emotionally scarred by the loss of their father at such a young age. Now Kitty Hart, who had previously doubted that Jackie was capable of letting go of the past, was struck by her friend’s upbeat demeanor. “She was finally giving herself permission to rejoin the land of the living.” Pierre Salinger agreed. “The black cloud had lifted, so they could start to get on with their lives.”
But the black cloud soon returned, and John and Caroline were the first to notice. Mommy had stopped smiling and laughing, and her eyes were once again red from weeping. Caroline quickly figured out the reason: Everywhere there were black-bordered photographs of her father—on the sides of buses, in store windows, on newsstands, and on television. Mommy was crying herself to sleep again.
The approaching first anniversary of JFK’s assassination hit his widow hard. “She knew it was coming, of course, and assumed she could just soldier through it,” said Baldrige. “She hadn’t counted on not being able to look anywhere without seeing his picture, or seeing the assassination recounted again and again on television. The nation was living it all over again, and that meant she had to as well. It was agony for her.”
Jackie had planned to cancel her newspaper delivery for the week leading up to the first anniversary of Dallas, but forgot. So when she looked at the front page of the New York Times as she did every morning, there was another painful reminder—a banner headline trumpeting the release of the Warren Report.
She went about her business, but soon realized there was no escaping the painful reminders of what had happened just twelve months earlier in Dallas. As Jackie walked down Fifth Avenue toward Kenneth’s Salon, every single store window she passed displayed a picture of her martyred husband. Once she got to the salon and closed the door behind her, she walked up to the receptionist’s desk and broke down. “For the next several minutes, she just stood there, weeping,” another customer said. “It broke your heart to see it.”
Settling into a salon chair, Jackie managed to regain her composure and instinctive
ly reached for a magazine. Jack stared back at her from the black-bordered cover of Life’s special memorial issue. “I can’t stand it,” she told her hairdresser, Rosemary Sorrentino. “Why do they remember the assassination? Why can’t they celebrate his birthday?”
On November 22, 1964, Jackie took John and Caroline to the Seventy-ninth Street playground in Central Park. While the usual contingent of Secret Service agents looked after them, Jackie wandered down one of the park’s winding paths until she found a secluded bench. She spent the next several hours sitting in that same spot, she later said, “crying my eyes out.”
The first-anniversary hysteria proved so devastating for Jackie, in fact, that she admitted to Ros Gilpatric that she had considered suicide. “I have enough pills to do it,” Jackie told him.
Gilpatric did not take the threat seriously. She would never take her own life, he said, “because of the children.” But he was still worried about her mental state. “Everyone who loved her,” he said, “was very much concerned.”
“People tell me that time will heal,” she told Dorothy Schiff. “How much time?” Schiff was shocked by the change in her friend. “She is odd and different,” Schiff said of Jackie, “very much less the queen than she was.”
That fall, several of Jackie’s friends were taking turns inviting her to small dinner parties at their Park Avenue penthouses and Upper East Side brownstones. These were “always groups of four or six—never more than that,” said George Plimpton, one of her frequent escorts. But in late November, all that changed. “Nancy Tuckerman would call and say Jackie was in her room, too ill to keep our dinner date,” said Gilpatric. “All of the terrible memories had flooded back.” To the dismay of her friends, Jackie “was back at square one—shattered, inconsolable.”
Three days after the world marked the anniversary of his father’s murder, John blew out the four candles on his birthday cake. “See, Mommy,” he said, making a sly allusion to Prince Mohammed’s futile attempt to extinguish the fake candles on his cake. “I can do it!”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 9