First Ladies

by Margaret Truman

MYSTERY

  THERE IS ONLY ONE FIRST LADY WHO HAS SUCCESSFULLY NEGOTIATED the perilous passage between democracy and upper-class style. We all know her name: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Entering the White House under the flag of the Democratic Party, the supposed voice of the poor and downtrodden, Jackie established a reign of genteel taste which managed to mesmerize Americans without alienating them.

  At first, Jackie viewed the First Lady’s job with dread. Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas was amazed to discover that this “polished American aristocrat” hated crowds, abhorred the political handshake, and avoided official White House functions as often as possible. Jackie said she felt like a moth on a windowpane; she hated her title—she claimed it made her sound like a saddle horse. She shuddered at becoming public property and feared for her children’s equilibrium.

  How did Jackie transform these liabilities into immense popularity? The onrush of the television era played a part—complemented by Jackie’s beauty. But there is much more to it than the ubiquitous camera eye. The shyness Jackie projected was part of an aura of mystery, of elusiveness, that her father, John Bouvier, a profound student of women, had taught her to create. It was a public personality, one of many roles she played in the White House. “Jackie wore so many masks, she was impossible to decipher,” said a former schoolmate, the journalist Charlotte Curtis. “With her elevation to First Lady she became even more elusive, more secretive, more dramatic.”

  Among her few close friends Jackie was never shy; on the contrary, she had always been talkative, witty, and, with men, more than a little flirtatious. She did wicked impersonations of everyone from the Queen of England to her own husband, whose Massachusetts accent and chopping hand motions she parodied perfectly. Given the chance, she could also be more than a little sarcastic. In an interview with Nan Robertson of The New York Times early in the 1960 campaign, Jackie mocked Pat Nixon’s “Republican cloth coat”—a phrase Richard Nixon had enshrined in his famous 1952 speech, defending himself and his wife against accusations that they lived lavishly off a secret slush fund. Jackie noted that Pat bought her clothes at Elizabeth Arden, where you could not get a cloth coat for under $250. She also assailed John Fairchild, owner and publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, for saying she spent $45,000 a year on clothes. “I couldn’t do that without wearing sable underwear!” she said.

  When Jack Kennedy saw this remark on the front page of The New York Times, he reportedly exclaimed: “That’s the last thing Jackie’s going to say in this campaign.” His reaction underscores the curious, not to say precarious relationship between Jackie and her husband. New York and Washington had abounded with rumors that before Jack Kennedy ran for President, she had seriously considered divorcing him for his compulsive womanizing. Nancy Dickerson, a TV reporter who knew her well, noted that in her pre-White House days, wifely devotion was not one of Jackie’s outstanding traits—and you could hardly blame her.

  In short, this was not a political partnership at work, in spite of some campaign rhetoric from both Jack and Jackie that strove to give that impression. The Kennedys, male chauvinists all, made no attempt to tout Jackie’s intelligence, mostly because they did not believe it existed. In their eyes, she was, like all the other women in their lives, strictly for relaxation. Bobby Kennedy, utterly unaware of his condescension, told one reporter Jackie never bothered her husband with questions like “What’s new in Laos?” JFK said the same thing in a slightly more flattering way: “I don’t have to fight the day’s political battles over again at night.”

  Note the assumptions underlying those two statements. RFK obviously thought Jackie lacked the brainpower to be interested in Laos. His brother the President seems to have assumed that if he discussed politics with his uncomprehending wife, the result would be warfare.

  None of the New Frontiersmen had the slightest inkling that Jackie would size up the situation and cope with it her way. First, she chose an old friend, Oleg Cassini, to advise her on her White House wardrobe. From the start, she and the Paris-born designer seemed to have an almost mystic communion. The first sketch he showed her, while she was still in the hospital in December 1960, recovering from the birth of her son, John, was a white full-length evening dress for the inaugural ball. The fabric was an opulent Swiss double satin. The lines were unusually modest; overall the dress was a unique combination of the simple and the regal. “Absolutely right!” Jackie said.

  Next Cassini showed her a fawn-beige wool coat, with a small sable collar and muff and a matching pillbox hat. Cassini urged her to wear this outfit to the inauguration. “All the other women will be wearing [full-length] furs. This coat will set you apart, emphasize your youth. It will set the tone for the whole administration.”

  “I’m convinced,” Jackie said. “You’re the one.”

  From that moment Cassini became her official designer. He was a wise choice. The inaugural outfit created a fashion revolution—the “Jackie look.” Within days of the ceremony, pillbox hats filled the shelves of the nation’s stores and knockoffs of the coat sprouted on a thousand racks. One magazine assured its readers they could get “the look” for $68.68. None of this bothered Jackie in the least. She had worn it first.

  Jackie’s conversations and correspondence with Cassini reveal how quickly she grasped the essence of the challenge she faced. She told him she wanted to avoid any taint of sensationalism in her clothes. She had no intention of becoming another Marie Antoinette. At the same time she did not want to look stuffy—“there is a dignity to the office [of First Lady] which suddenly hits you.” Trying to sum up the style she was aiming for, she told Cassini she required dresses “I would wear if Jack were President of FRANCE.” She also insisted on exclusivity. She wanted only original creations—there was no way she would tolerate “any fat little woman hopping around in the same dress.”

  With her fashion persona under decisive control, Jackie found a cause in the White House itself—redecorating it, not only to suit her own good taste but to make it a museum, even a historical pageant of American taste. The mansion was far from that estate in 1961. Soon after she moved in, Jackie remarked that the place looked as if it had been decorated by B. Altman, New York’s prim and proper department store. She told Oleg Cassini most of the rooms reminded her of another now defunct prototype of conventional taste—a Statler Hotel.

  As I mentioned in the opening chapter, Jack Kennedy disapproved of overhauling the White House almost as violently as he disliked Jackie’s campaign remarks about sable underwear. Later Jackie would acidly recall she had been “warned, begged and practically threatened” not to go anywhere near the project. JFK asked an old Truman hand, my father’s White House counsel, Clark Clifford, to talk her out of it. Clark arrived with terrifying tales of the flak my father had encountered when he decided to add what is now known as the “Truman Balcony” to the South Portico. Jackie’s ears had already been filled with horror stories of other Presidents, going all the way back to Martin Van Buren, who had wound up losing votes and even elections for trying to refurbish the White House. Along with political sharpshooters in Congress who were always ready to scream about presidential extravagance (perfect camouflage for their own perks and privileges), there were numerous architects and other self-appointed watchdogs ready to pounce on any supposed desecration of a national shrine.

  In his memoirs, Clark Clifford maintains he thought Jackie’s idea was wonderful from the start—which strikes me as just a bit dubious when the man who called him into the fray, the President, was furiously trying to talk Jackie out of it. Whether Clark became an instant convert or an eventual one, he soon found himself working as Jackie’s right-hand man. Not only was he a good choice because of his insider’s knowledge of Washington’s pitfalls but he also brought with him memories of our experience in Dad’s second term, when the White House was gutted and rebuilt just in time to save the Trumans from being buried in its rubble.

  In 1948 we discovered the mansion, after decades of hal
fhearted, often half-baked repairs, was close to literal collapse. Among other things, a leg of the piano in my sitting room broke through the ceiling above the Family Dining Room, and the architects informed Dad that the ceiling of the State Dining Room was staying up only from force of habit. We had to move to nearby Blair House, the historic town house normally used for VIP guests, for almost three years, while the entire building was reconstructed using twentieth-century steel and concrete.

  The cost of that operation ignited Congress’s traditional parsimony toward the White House, and the lawmakers declined to put up any serious money to decorate the place. Dad left Washington grumbling that the exterior had been improved but the interior looked worse than ever. Like the historian that he was in his spare time, Dad had wanted to do exactly what Jackie did—make the inside of the house as historic as the outside. Unfortunately he was distracted by a few pressing problems such as Senator Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts and a war in Korea.

  This harking back to the Truman White House gave Jackie the key idea that enabled her to overhaul the mansion with an amazing minimum of fuss. Instead of using the scare word redecorate, which was certain to arouse penny-pinching congressmen and other assorted busybodies, Jackie chose the golden word restoration to describe her efforts. The term cast an aura of irreproachable disinterested authenticity on the project, rendering it almost immune to criticism. No matter that it was a misnomer which could not be applied in any literal sense. There was no previous perfect White House in the past which diligence and research could restore. For most of its long career, the place had been an unnerving mixture of the elegant and the shabby. No President ever had the time—or could persuade Congress to cough up the money—to create the kind of splendor that its spacious public rooms and lofty corridors demanded.

  Jackie hurled herself into her task with a passion that swept away obstacles and enlisted enthusiasts everywhere. With Clark Clifford’s help, she formed the Fine Arts Committee for the White House, to seek out furniture, paintings, and other historic objects. She did not a little of the seeking herself. Clad in jodhpurs and riding boots, she plunged into the cavernous Fort Washington warehouse on the Maryland side of the Potomac, where White House castoffs were stored, rummaging through hundreds of dust-covered crates to rescue long-discarded chairs and tables and lamps for restoration. She also pursued historic paintings, rugs, and furniture with pleading phone calls to their startled owners, frequently persuading them to surrender valuable family heirlooms on the spot.

  Next Jackie formed the White House Historical Association to raise funds for the overall renovation. When a knowledgeable friend predicted she would need a minimum of two million dollars, JFK was ready to abandon the project all over again. He could almost hear the uproar the figure would cause. But Jackie rescued the situation by coming up with the idea for a full-color guidebook, describing the White House through its architecture, furnishings, and history. The book has since become a small publishing industry unto itself. Over eight million copies have been sold, making it the equivalent of an oil well or a gold mine in the basement, pumping funds into ongoing acquisitions of art and antiques, rugs and curtains.

  Jackie’s French taste coincided in a remarkable, almost spooky way with that of previous upper-class First Lady, Elizabeth Monroe. In fact, she made the Monroe White House the focus of her renovation. Jackie loved France so much, she inserted a French decorator, Stephane Boudin, into the process, making him more or less coequal with the man who thought he was in charge, Henry Francis du Pont, of the famed Winterthur Museum. Du Pont was the acknowledged greatest living expert on American antiques. Boudin knew nothing about them and cared even less. How could they be any good? They weren’t French. The result was some spectacular behind-the-scenes fireworks.

  Not only was Boudin arrogant but he was rude—and he listened to nobody. He stunned du Pont and his staff by painting the Blue Room white and the Green Room chartreuse. Jackie backed him, ignoring frantic protests from du Pont and a pointed comment from her husband that he preferred the traditional colors. Redecorating the White House was not a joint venture, as far as Jackie was concerned. It was her thing, and she brooked no interference and very little criticism from anyone, including the President.

  Any staffer who talked loosely to the press about the project got into deep trouble, if Jackie did not like the resulting story Maxine Cheshire of The Washington Post wrote a seven-part series that was anything but complimentary, pointing out that several of the newly acquired—and in some cases very costly—antiques were fakes. An outraged Jackie forced Jack to call the publisher of the paper to protest and ruthlessly banned those who had talked to Cheshire from further association with the White House.

  Friends and staff alike were amazed by both the energy and the willpower Jackie displayed in her drive for a perfect White House. No detail escaped her often furious attention. She fired off enraged memos to staffers about antique dealers who tried to overcharge them. She badgered old friends in Newport who were reluctant to part with favorite antiques. Only once did anyone recall her being recalcitrant about any aspect of the operation: that was when her passion for privacy clashed with her passion for artistic perfection. The National Geographic editors, who were to produce the White House guide, wanted to include a picture of John Jr.’s second-floor bedroom. Jackie refused, and the picture was removed from the layout.

  The climax of Jackie’s efforts was her 1962 Valentine’s Day television tour of the completed public rooms, which attracted forty-eight million viewers and catapulted 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue into Washington’s number-one tourist attraction. It also zoomed Jackie herself into supercelebrity Historically speaking, she was not a new kind of First Lady, although the media never stopped babbling such clichés. There had been younger—and even prettier—First Ladies. But the public memory is not the same as historical memory. For people used to Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, and Mamie Eisenhower, Jackie was new in capital letters.

  While she was refurbishing the White House, Jackie launched a crusade to make the place a showcase for the best in American culture. She invited the cream of American writers, dancers, actors, musicians to entertain and be entertained. Pablo Casals, the world’s greatest cellist and number-one prima donna, was charmed into performing. (It was not, as we shall see, his first visit to the White House.) Jerome Robbins contributed a ballet. Frederic March read excerpts from Ernest Hemingway. Again, the press, with no historical memory worth mentioning, marveled, as if no First Lady had ever done anything like this before.

  They were really comparing Jackie’s taste with her immediate predecessors’. It was, of course, much more sophisticated. Jackie had been raised to admire and enjoy the best in art and culture, and she wanted more Americans to share her pleasure. She wanted to change the prevailing notion that we were a nation of corporate clunkheads who seldom read anything more challenging than a stock market ticker or hung anything on our walls besides family pictures. If she had planned a way to rocket herself into hyperpopularity, she could not have chosen better tactics. Granted, her main appeal was to the American intelligentsia. But by 1962, a new generation of college-educated reporters and editors were part of that influential group, and they rushed to embrace Jackie and her crusade.

  Almost as important was Jackie’s success abroad, which seemed to ratify the American intelligentsia’s approval. People still talk about her sensational reception in Paris, where her beauty and chic and French heritage and command of the language reduced the entire nation, including their austere maximum leader, General Charles de Gaulle, to the Gallic equivalent of Jell-O. (Creme caramel?) Less well known is the way she also enchanted the English, who have a tradition of looking down their noses at American Presidents and their wives. “Jacqueline Kennedy,” intoned the Evening Standard, “has given the American people… one thing they had always lacked—majesty.”

  Even more astonishing, though not as well remembered, was Jackie’s goodwill trip to India. O
ne New Delhi newspaper called her “Durga, Goddess of Power.” Screaming millions lined the streets to cheer her. Plain folk walked ninety miles from their modest farms to the cities to get a glimpse of the “Queen of America.”

  This tidal wave of approval enabled Jackie to escape the consequences of some very undemocratic behavior behind the scenes—and occasionally out front. One of her best-kept secrets was how much money she spent on clothes and other private expenses—$121,000 in 1962 alone. She was totally reckless in the expenditures she ran up renovating the White House’s private quarters on the second floor. Working with Sister Parish, one of the nation’s highest-priced decorators, she ordered the same room repainted two or three times when the results did not suit her. There was nothing new about Jackie’s fondness for endless redecorating. She had done the same thing in every house she and Jack had owned. Once, returning from a trip to their pre-presidential Georgetown mansion, he had cried: “Dammit, Jackie, why can’t I come home and find the same house I left?”

  Clothes were a major item. Mary Gallagher, her secretary, said one of Jackie’s closets “was like… a little private shoe store.” Dresses and accessories filled the storage closets on the third floor of the White House. Jackie kept friends busy scouting Europe for the latest and best from Paris and Rome. She even sent Oleg Cassini to Paris to check out his competition. He bought her two dresses from Balenciaga, which she hated. “You picked the two worst,” she told him, which was quite possibly true.

  Soon Cassini—and Jackie—were prepared to try out some decidedly unstuffy outfits. The first was a one-shouldered evening gown that Jackie loved. She told Cassini the President would not tolerate it: “It’s too advanced.” Cassini tackled the problem by invading the Oval Office and giving a lecture on the role of queens as style setters. JFK approved the dress—and later allowed Jackie to appear with both shoulders bare in a pink and white lace dress that she wore to the Elysée Palace when they visited Paris.