In the coming months and years, Jackie made sure that John maintained a long-distance relationship with the woman who had been a mother figure to him. At first, Jackie wrote notes to Miss Shaw as if John were the author, painstakingly printing each word in her version of a child’s awkward scrawl. Later, Jackie made certain that John jotted off a note to his former nanny at least once a month, updating her on what was going on in his life.
For the time being, however, the children were told only that Nanny Shaw was postponing her return to the States, and that she would be back in New York to care for them in a matter of weeks. Jackie shrewdly made sure that other familiar faces—her maid, Provi Paredes, as well as members of the Kiddie Detail, the cook, and the family’s longtime driver, to name a few—filled at least some of the void left by Shaw’s absence. “Caroline cried a little when she heard Mrs. Shaw wasn’t coming back,” said Plimpton, who had developed a special fondness for Caroline. “John was too young for any of it to mean much to him. He just kept dashing about and getting into tons of mischief—a typical four-year-old boy.”
Jackie also did whatever she could to take up any slack in the aftermath of Shaw’s firing. She left no doubt as to what role she intended to play in her own children’s lives. “They are the center of my universe,” Jackie said, “and I hope I am the center of theirs. I intend to always be there for them.”
As soon as they returned to New York, Jackie resumed her morning routine of walking Caroline the six blocks up Fifth Avenue to Sacred Heart, then returning to the apartment to meet up with John and walk him four blocks to St. David’s on East Eighty-ninth Street. When she could, Jackie also made the effort to meet John at his school and walk him home. “Caroline is an old hand at school,” Jackie explained to her friend Charles Addams. “But it’s all terribly new for John. I think he feels reassured when he sees me there waiting for him.”
Evenings, however, were reserved for Mommy. That spring, Jackie became a glittering fixture on Manhattan’s social scene. No longer sobbing night after night in her room, JFK’s widow now seemed to be everywhere—at concerts, plays, fashion shows, museum openings, and benefits. Night after night, John and Caroline peeked in to see what Mommy was wearing before she headed off into the night. When Addams, one of her frequent escorts during this period, told Jackie she looked like a queen in her white evening gown and diamonds, Caroline and John laughed. “I’ve seen a queen,” said Caroline, recalling their recent encounter with Queen Elizabeth, “and my mommy looks better. Lots.”
Jackie’s frenetic social schedule now meant that she was in the papers more than at any time since she left the White House, and the public’s thirst for gossip about her and the children remained unslakable. John was once again the target of photographers who lurked in the shadows outside his apartment building, hoping to snap a shot of the little boy as he and his mother departed for school.
Jackie’s first instinct was to come down hard on her staff, threatening to fire anyone who divulged even the most innocuous-seeming detail of her life to the outside world. “That went double for the kids,” said Addams, who noted that Jackie became “blind with rage” anytime there was a story about John or Caroline in the press.
When the family cook let slip to a reporter she knew that Jackie had lost twenty-five pounds, she was fired the next day. Jackie learned that the cook’s successor planned to write a cookbook, and she met the same fate. Caroline’s piano teacher made a passing comment to someone who turned out to be a reporter that she was working for the Kennedys, and was gone in a matter of hours.
This purging of anyone suspected of disloyalty did not stop there. Limousine drivers—all instructed not to speak to either John or Caroline—were replaced on a weekly basis so that none of them would become too familiar with the family’s coming and goings. For entirely different reasons, Jackie was also replacing Secret Service agents more frequently; she still harbored the fear that John in particular would become too attached to them as father figures—a role that Jackie strongly felt only Uncle Bobby was qualified to fill.
“I’ve never known anyone who cut people off with such ease,” Jamie Auchincloss said of his sister. “The phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ was invented for Jackie.” Jackie’s abiding distrust of those who worked for her had the unintended result of chipping away at her children’s sense of security. “The way her mother dispensed with people,” he went on, the children “must have found it all bewildering—and more than a little scary.”
Yet Jackie’s growing paranoia hadn’t extinguished her sense of fun and whimsy—particularly when it came to the children. That summer, she enlisted George Plimpton to help her put together a special “treasure hunt” for John and Caroline at Hammersmith Farm. Once the children found the wooden treasure chest Jackie had filled with fake doubloons and trinkets, a Coast Guard longboat carrying angry, eye-patch-wearing “pirates”—Plimpton and a few locals—showed up to reclaim it. Taken by surprise, the other forty children who had been invited to the party—including several Kennedy cousins—ran screaming for their nannies. John, however, advanced toward the scary-looking buccaneers. “John was so not afraid,” Plimpton recalled, “that he asked for the rubber sword I had tucked in my belt and began waving it above his head.”
Jackie, watching the whole chaotic scene unfold, was “apoplectic” with laughter. “Jackie had such a great sense of mischief,” Plimpton said, “and I think she thought it was absolutely hilarious that John, the youngest child there, was completely unfazed while the older children were absolutely terrified.”
At one point, however, John did become upset—when, after capturing one of the pirates, the older children made the man walk the plank. When he realized the buccaneer was John Walsh, one of the substitute dads in his life, John burst into tears. “You can’t die!” he sobbed. “You can’t die!”
Just a few weeks after the infamous treasure hunt, John and Caroline joined the rest of the Kennedy clan at a party in Boston marking Richard Cardinal Cushing’s seventieth birthday. A family friend and confidant to the family for years, Cardinal Cushing had officiated at every significant event in the lives of the Kennedys—including Jack and Jackie’s marriage, the burial of Patrick, the christening of both John and Caroline, and of course, Jack’s state funeral. As a young man, JFK admitted to being intimidated by the prelate’s gruff demeanor and reverberating growl—but not John. “You,” the boy proclaimed to the cardinal, “sound like a bear.”
Caroline and John joined their Kennedy cousins again that Halloween, when everybody went trick-or-treating in Hyannis Port. This time, Caroline was dressed as a Dutch girl in wooden shoes and pigtails. Jackie shredded John’s pants, found an old pair of men’s shoes with holes in the bottom, and smudged some fireplace ash on the boy’s cheeks so he could go door-to-door pretending to be a dirty-faced hobo.
Behind the scenes, John’s mother was battling what she viewed as attempts by others to cash in on her private anguish. In addition to Maud Shaw, Jackie came down hard on Paul “Red” Fay when she learned he had written an account of his twenty-five-year friendship with Jack, titled The Pleasure of His Company. She demanded—and got—final approval.
Jackie directed the full force of her wrath at professional journalists like Jim Bishop, author of the hugely successful The Day Lincoln Was Shot. Jackie tried to get Random House to pull the plug on Bishop’s JFK book, The Day Kennedy Was Shot, and when that failed she approached historian William Manchester to write the full, authorized account of the assassination. In the end, Bishop’s book would become a major critical and commercial success, and Jackie would become embroiled in a protracted war with Manchester over the content of his magnum opus, Death of a President.
For now, Jackie coped with stress the best she knew how—by jumping astride a horse and tearing through the countryside. She traded in her weekend rental on Long Island for a farmhouse in Bernardsville, New Jersey, and joined the exclusive Essex Hunt Club. Already an accomplished rider,
Caroline was soon sailing over fences and water hazards along with her equestrienne mom. Jackie strapped a helmet on John as well, and put him through his paces with Leprechaun, the pony given to the Kennedys after JFK’s triumphant visit to Ireland in the summer of 1963. Despite Jackie’s best efforts and John’s own fearless nature, his allergy to horses remained a serious impediment to John’s chances of ever becoming a first-class horseman.
The children were scarcely wanting for excitement. That winter and into the spring of 1965, there were trips to Antigua—where John splashed around in the crystalline waters of the Caribbean while his sister learned to snorkel—as well as skiing holidays in Sun Valley, Stowe, and Gstaad. On the way back from Switzerland, Jackie and the children stopped in Rome for a private audience with Pope Paul VI, then jetted off to the Argentine pampas so John could meet some real caballeros working on the ranch of longtime Kennedy family acquaintance Miguel Carcona.
John and Caroline stayed behind that May 1966 when their mother traveled to Spain to catch Seville’s famous feria. Still, they had no trouble charting her progress; newspapers and magazines were flooded with photographs of the “Radiant Conquistador”—looking regal in a high comb and white lace mantilla as she rode through Seville in an open carriage, sidestepping through the city streets on a white stallion, gazing down from her seat at the bullfights as three famous matadors dedicated their first kill to her while Princess Grace of Monaco sulked nearby.
Back home at 1040 Fifth, Provi showed John the latest copy of Life with Mommy on the cover. The photo of Jackie astride a stallion, in full Andalusian riding regalia—broad-brimmed hat, ruffled shirt, scarlet jacket, and chaps—made it clear to her countrymen that JFK’s young widow had moved on with her life. While Caroline wondered aloud who owned the horse her mother was riding on, John was struck by how much she looked like the cowboys he had seen in South America. “Wow!” he told one member of the Secret Service Kiddie Detail. “Mommy looks just like a groucho!”
As soon as she got back to the United States, Jackie—named the world’s most admired woman for the sixth year in a row—wasted no time making good on promises she had made to the children. On Memorial Day weekend 1966 she teamed up with Caroline to compete in a horse show in New Vernon, New Jersey, and wound up with a trophy for second place.
The next day in Hyannis Port, on what would have been Jack’s forty-ninth birthday, Jackie fulfilled a promise to John that the president had made shortly before his death. She gave John a reconditioned Piper Cub observation plane. “Jack always said he was going to give John a real plane when he grew up,” Jackie told JFK’s friend Chuck Spalding. “Well, it’s a little early, but now he has it—a real airplane.” The World War II–vintage aircraft had no propeller and no engine, but that did not prevent John from climbing into the cockpit and taking off on a thrilling, make-believe aerial dogfight in the skies over Cape Cod.
Less than a month after returning from Spain, Jackie took off again—this time bringing along John and Caroline for a vacation in Hawaii with ex-Kennedy brother-in-law Peter Lawford and his children. The trip merely exacerbated tensions between Jackie and the other Kennedy women, who now referred to her contemptuously as “the Widder.”
Choosing to remain behind at the Lawfords’ Santa Monica, California, beach house, Pat Kennedy Lawford only learned that Jackie was going on the Hawaiian trip with her ex-husband when she read about it in the newspapers. Pat, who had officially divorced Peter just three months earlier, wasted no time ringing up his manager, Milt Ebbins.
According to Ebbins, the former Mrs. Peter Lawford was “so angry that she just kind of growled. She was livid.”
Then Pat called Peter directly. “I won’t put up with this!” she shrieked into the phone, pointing out to her ex-husband that their honeymoon had taken place in Hawaii. “How dare you go away with this woman!”
For the next seven weeks, Jackie and the children stayed in an oceanfront house near the base of Diamond Head, which they rented for three thousand dollars a month. Peter and the Lawford cousins were encamped down the beach at the Kahala Hilton.
It turned out that Pat Kennedy Lawford’s suspicions—fanned by Eunice and Ethel, who now left the room anytime Jackie walked in—were warranted. Jackie and Peter had more in common than the fact that they both spoke impeccable French. Like Jackie, Lawford was an aristocrat, and often felt overwhelmed by the noisy, boisterous Kennedy clan. They also had their individual crosses to bear when it came to their Kennedy marriages. Jackie suffered though Jack’s countless infidelities, while Peter confided to a friend that Pat crossed herself whenever they were about to make love.
Lawford had also suffered other indignities because of his status as “Brother-in-Lawford” to the Kennedys. After JFK decided to stay at Bing Crosby’s estate instead of Frank Sinatra’s when he visited Palm Springs, California, Ol’ Blue Eyes blamed the perceived snub on Lawford. Shunned from that point on by one of the most powerful and feared men in the entertainment industry, Lawford would never quite regain his footing in Hollywood.
Now Jackie and the debonair British actor walked hand in hand on the beach, laughed over daiquiris at the Hilton piano bar, and exchanged knowing glances when they weren’t in a quiet corner murmuring to each other in French. Things had gotten familiar enough for Peter to start lighting two cigarettes in his mouth and then handing one to Jackie à la Paul Henreid and Bette Davis in the film Now, Voyager.
Lawford would later admit that he and Jackie had had a brief fling during the Hawaiian trip.
Oblivious to the intrigue that invariably swirled around his bewitchingly glamorous mother, John was having the time of his life—thanks in large part to three local boys he and Caroline met at the beach. The Miske brothers—eleven-year-old Tommy, thirteen-year-old Michael, and fourteen-year-old Gary—were dubious at first. But soon John was dashing into the surf at Wailea Beach (“John had no fear of the ocean,” Gary Miske said), sliding down mud-covered hills in Nuuanu, and clambering over boulders at Sacred Falls. “You would think that we would get annoyed with a little five-year-old tagging along,” said Tommy, who remembered that he and his brothers cracked up every time John pretended to be a sea captain squinting through a pretend spyglass. “But we found him to be a fun and adventuresome little kid.”
John’s fearless streak almost proved to be his undoing. Toward the end of their Hawaiian sojourn, one of Jackie’s post-Dallas escorts, noted San Francisco architect John Warnecke, invited the children along on an overnight camping trip to the big island of Hawaii. The highlight of the evening was to be a luau, and John couldn’t resist peering down into the smoldering pit where traditional dishes like Kalua pig and lomi lomi salmon were slowly cooking on hot embers.
Suddenly, Caroline let out a scream as John tumbled into the pit. The Miske brothers came running, and Secret Service agent Jack Walsh sprang into action. By the time Walsh managed to yank John to safety, Jackie’s little boy had suffered severe burns to his hands, arms, and buttocks. He was rushed to the local hospital, given a battery of tests, then treated, bandaged, and released after a few hours.
To everyone’s surprise, the normally vocal John remained calm and quiet throughout the whole ordeal. “That brave little kid,” Tommy Miske said, “never once complained.” At least John returned to New York with an unconventional souvenir—a white glove doctors in Hawaii gave him to protect the second-degree burns on his right hand—and a dramatic tale to share with his friends at St. David’s.
That July, John was dolled up in a ruffled shirt, periwinkle blue shorts, and blue velvet sash for his role as a pageboy at the Newport wedding of his aunt Janet, Jackie’s half sister. While he fidgeted and glowered through most of the ceremony (at one point John had to be restrained by Secret Service agents when another boy made fun of his getup), Caroline solemnly fulfilled her duties as a flower girl.
Incredibly, it had been only thirteen years since thousands of people clogged the streets of Newport to catch a glimpse of Senato
r Jack Kennedy and his stunning young bride as they emerged from St. Mary’s Church. The crowds and the photographers had descended on Newport again, but this time to see the thirty-seven-year-old widow of the martyred president. The bride, elbowed aside by reporters and onlookers in their zeal to catch a glimpse of Jackie, turned to Lee Radziwill and wept.
After the service, Jackie and the children managed to wade through the sea of humanity to a waiting limousine—only to have paparazzi cram so tightly against the car doors that at first they couldn’t be opened. Once inside the vehicle, a terrified Caroline started crying. John, however, pressed his face against the window and glowered at the photographers.
Later during the reception at Hammersmith Farm, John was able to let off steam with his equally scrappy cousins, darting in between tables and nearly knocking over an ice sculpture. His plan to surprise Jackie by letting two of Hugh Auchincloss’s prize ponies into the crowded reception tent was foiled at the last minute by the father of the bride.
This playful streak notwithstanding, John was already impressing everyone with his even-tempered demeanor. “There was no one sweeter than John,” St. David’s assistant headmaster, Peter Clifton, remarked years later. “He had no guile in him. He’s still like that. I have to give Jackie a lot of credit for that.”
Even when John took a swing at another boy, it was invariably because he was being teased. “Some of the other children were jealous of all the attention that John got,” the mother of another student said. “It wasn’t John’s fault, of course. He never struck any of the other parents as anything but a very polite, well-behaved little boy. He was not spoiled—not at all. I couldn’t say that about some of the others.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 11