Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  Nonetheless, by April 1954 the pain had become well-nigh intolerable and he entered the Lahey Clinic for additional consultations. By degrees, he lost the capacity to pick up a piece of paper that had fallen to the floor; to put on his own socks in the morning; to go up and down stairs normally. Navigating the marble floors between his Senate office and the Senate chamber; standing, as was required, to address the chamber—these and other routine tasks associated with his work were transformed into monumental undertakings. When, more and more, he found it necessary to use crutches, he scrambled to conceal them before anyone came into his office. From the time he first ran for Congress using the campaign slogan “The New Generation Offers a Leader,” he had been keen to associate himself in voters’ minds with the dash and vigor of youth. Now Evelyn Lincoln, his secretary, perceived that the incessant struggle to mask his condition made him snappish in private, so much so that at one point she considered quitting her job. When he returned to Dent Place at night, more often than not he was so drained, both physically and mentally, that all he wanted to do was go right to sleep.

  Prior to the marriage, Lem Billings also had spoken to Jackie about Jack’s sexual habits. Nevertheless, according to Lem, until she was actually wedded to the man, she simply failed to comprehend “the depth of Jack’s need for other women.” Another old friend of Jack’s, Jane Suydam, judged that in spite of anything Jackie had heard or seen in advance, “I don’t think she anticipated a difficult marriage. We all thought we would change the man.” Jackie, Suydam assessed, had entered married life with “eyes filled with dreams.” In Lem’s view, Jackie proved to have been unprepared for “the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.” Not even the wrenching back pain he was experiencing impeded his activities in this respect. On the contrary, the complicated stagecraft that was often necessary in these situations seems to have offered a welcome distraction. In addition to the women he compulsively targeted at Washington parties and otherwise pursued in the company of one of the married senators in his and Jackie’s set, George Smathers of Florida, there were also the long-range fantasies that absorbed him more and more. Three months into the Kennedys’ residence at Dent Place, he managed to track down the address of the statuesque Swedish girl whom he had met in Antibes on the eve of his wedding and had not seen or been in touch with since. “I expect to be in France in September,” he wrote to Gunilla von Post on March 2. “Will you be there?”

  That spring the women’s magazine McCall’s pitched a story to Senator Kennedy’s office about young Mrs. Kennedy’s adjustment to her new life in political Washington. “The Senator’s Wife Goes Back to School” was to focus on Jackie’s decision to sign up to study political history at Georgetown University’s Foreign Service School. But hardly had the photo shoot begun in early May when it became evident that the senator intended for the piece to be as much about him as about his wife. During the course of five days, in locations ranging from Dent Place to the nearby cobblestoned streets of Georgetown to JFK’s Senate office, McCall’s generated nearly a thousand negatives. Almost a year had passed since Jackie had posed for a comparable set of pictures at the time of her first visit to Hyannis Port as a bride-to-be. Whatever her unease had been when a private family event was transformed into a photo opportunity, the excitement and elation of the twenty-three-year-old woman portrayed in the Life photographs had no doubt been genuine. Whatever the calculatedness and cynicism involved in Joe Kennedy’s decision to ask in the Life team, the images of a radiant young woman who adores the man who has finally asked her to share his life accorded with reality as Jackie Bouvier surely saw it in the spring of 1953. The McCall’s shoot would prove to be another matter entirely.

  Her husband by this time was very nearly at the point of having to use crutches constantly. Yet she is pictured cheering on a robust Jack Kennedy as he tosses around a football with his equally athletic brother Bobby. She had discovered that an evening out in Washington could be a mortifying ordeal when he routinely stole away with other women. Yet she is shown, dressed in a strapless evening gown, beaming at her no-less-adoring husband, also formally attired, at the outset of precisely such an evening. She had learned to resent the various men—Torby, Red, Lem, and others—who were forever interposing themselves between Jack and her so that she and her husband were, in her plaintive phrase, almost “never alone.” Yet she is seen clowning merrily with Lem, as though nothing could delight her more than to have Jack’s sycophants always about. She had found that Jack could scarcely be less interested in the academic studies she had undertaken to make herself a more engaging and useful companion. Yet she gamely appears in various shots on the Georgetown University campus. What makes these photographs so different from those generated by Life magazine the previous year is nothing in the pictures themselves. Rather, it is the freight of disillusioning knowledge on her part that makes her complicit in fashioning a public image so at odds with the facts. Last time she believed much of the hype. This time she countenances it. The boyishly coiffed twenty-four-year-old woman in the McCall’s photographs is already amply acquainted with the stern, often squalid reality concealed behind this pictorial Potemkin village of happy young married life in Georgetown.

  A salient feature of that reality was her husband’s abiding restiveness. The month after McCall’s rather charmingly photographed Jack and Jackie at his Senate desk serenely laboring together on his official correspondence, he sat in that same office drafting a letter of a decidedly more personal nature. “It now appears as though I shall be coming to Europe at the end of August,” he wrote to Gunilla on June 28. “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks—with you as a crew. What do you think?”

  Four

  For the rest of his life, Elmer Bartels would puzzle over Jackie Kennedy’s behavior when he encountered her again in New York in October 1954. It was not the first time he had found her actions to be, in his phrase, “kind of strange.” He had had a similar response to her at Hammersmith Farm the previous year when he was one of the approximately fourteen hundred guests at the Kennedy wedding. He noticed that every now and again the bride would disappear “behind the drapes” whenever she spotted someone on the reception line whom she presumably did not like or wish to see. But then, as the physician in charge of supervising Jack Kennedy’s treatment for Addison’s disease, Bartels had long perfected a disappearing act of his own. No one but Joe Kennedy and members of Jack’s intimate circle knew that Jack had Addison’s disease. No one but they were aware that the various bouts of illness described to the public as recurrences of malaria contracted in the South Pacific during the Second World War had in fact been Addisonian crises. No one had any idea about Jack’s arrangement with Bartels, who was religiously available to him twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Bartels attributed his willingness to give his patients so much of his time and spirit to the fact that when he was a boy in Ohio, the doctors had not been as attentive to his long-ailing mother as they might have been. Lest word of Kennedy’s condition seep out, the senator always telephoned personally when he needed to see his endocrinologist. Nevertheless, on Kennedy’s wedding day, there was Bartels—thin, balding, homely, and homespun—hiding in plain sight among the horde of reporters on whose presence Joe Kennedy had insisted despite the vehement objections of both Jackie and her mother.

  Bartels, a staunch Republican who made a point of never discussing politics with the senator, prided himself on having managed to get Kennedy’s Addison’s disease under reasonably “good control.” He sniffed at the catastrophic predictions made at the London Clinic before Kennedy initially came to see him in Boston. He was adamant that so long as Kennedy was fastidious about taking his medicine, avoided trauma and stress, and remembered that he would always be unusually sensitive to infection, there was every reason to believe he could enjoy a normal life span. He emphasized that when, as in Japan i
n 1951, Kennedy suffered a new, potentially fatal Addisonian crisis, it had been because the patient, who tended to be lax about such matters, had simply neglected or forgotten his medicine. The physician had a highly developed sense of duty and was inclined to blame himself severely when, despite his best efforts, patients acted recklessly.

  A year after attending the Kennedy wedding, Elmer Bartels went to New York determined to prevent the senator from making a calamitous mistake. As late as August, Kennedy had been blithely telling Gunilla von Post that he planned to come to Europe in the fall. By September, however, Kennedy’s health had gotten the better of him and he sent Gunilla a telegram claiming that, having been hospitalized on account of an injured leg, he was going to have to postpone the trip after all. In truth, unable any longer to endure his back pain, he entered the Hospital for Special Surgery on October 11, 1954, using the cover story that he needed to address an old war injury. In fact, he was there to undergo the double spinal fusion recommended by the doctors in New York for the unstable back with which Bartels believed him to have been born. Bartels had previously attempted to talk him out of the procedure on the grounds that with Addison’s in the mix, the surgery, which seemed misguided in any case, might have fatal consequences. When the Boston physician appeared in Kennedy’s hospital room, time had very nearly run out. If Bartels was to talk Kennedy out of his purpose, it must be now or never.

  But Jack Kennedy had another visitor as well. “The Senator’s Wife Goes Back to School” had been published in the October issue of McCall’s magazine, and Jackie had since been in touch with the photographer to acquire prints of some of the pictures. The magazine had already sent her a selection during the summer, but there had been a certain amount of confusion about the Kennedys’ address. Since the Georgetown short-let had ended in June, the couple had been leading what Jackie ruefully described as a “nomadic” existence shuttling between their parents’ homes and various hotels. The original package from McCall’s therefore was presumed to have been lost in the mail. Now the replacement set had arrived and she fluttered about her husband’s bedside, intent on sharing the numerous prints with him before the doctor had one last chance to make his case. For three-quarters of an hour, Bartels was left to stew in his own juices while Jackie laboriously commented in a babylike voice on each of the photographs in the pile.

  Though it hardly seems possible, there was an even greater incongruity between those pictures and her day-to-day reality than had existed just five months previously. Since the couple left Dent Place, they had lacked even the illusion of having a home of their own. More than anything now she wanted roots, stability, “a normal life with my husband coming home from work every day at five.” To judge by her remarks, the unadventurous life she had once regarded as a trap was beginning to look pretty good. Did the July 21, 1954, society wedding of John Husted to another Farmington girl, Ann Brittain, have anything to do with this change of heart? No doubt because prior to his hospitalization Jack had so often been away on political business, she dreamed of a time when he would at least “spend weekends with me and the children I hoped we would have.” But here too she had been thwarted. Jackie suffered a miscarriage that fall. Whether or not it had anything to do with the loss of the couple’s first child, these also had been the weeks when Jack finally had had to decide whether to risk everything in one desperate throw by consenting to a spinal fusion. Vehemently opposed, Bartels and his orthopedic colleagues at the Lahey Clinic militated for a more conservative course of treatment involving physiotherapy and exercise. Having lost one son already, Joe Kennedy also insisted that the danger was excessive. At a certain point, however, for all of Jack’s stoicism, pain trumped every other consideration. Finally, at Hyannis Port, Jackie heard him tell his father: “I don’t care. I can’t go on like this.”

  The prints she maddeningly insisted on reviewing one by one when she came to see him that day at the Hospital for Special Surgery depicted two handsome young people beginning their life together. Now, a year into the marriage, the twenty-five-year-old woman who, to the physician’s exasperation, persisted in babbling on about seeming trivia was faced with the very real possibility of imminent widowhood. Almost certainly she knew what Bartels had traveled from Boston to say. Surely Jack did. But at this particular moment, powerless though she might be to influence her husband on important matters, or even to get him to answer straightforward questions, the stage was hers for as long as she chose to command it.

  When Bartels finally had his interview, he failed to convince Kennedy to cancel the operation. Doctor and patient had entirely different casts of mind. Bartels was cautious and conservative. Kennedy was a risk taker. Bartels was a plainspoken man who eschewed drama. Kennedy was byzantine and self-dramatizing. Though Bartels had assured him early on that it was possible for an Addison’s patient to have a normal life expectancy, Kennedy had persisted in saying privately that he would not live past middle age. From boyhood, he had drawn a strange kind of sustenance from the proximity of death. Some observers believed that his brushes with mortality had in some curious way “liberated” him, forcing him to go after what he wanted in life earlier and harder than might otherwise have been the case. A sense of his own ending was the inner demon that drove him. Thus the dizzying velocity Jackie later sought to evoke in speaking of her early married life. As far as her husband was concerned, he had had to fight every inch of his road through life to this point, and the spinal fusion was just another of the obstacles he needed to surmount. In spite of anything his father, his endocrinologist, or anyone else said to dissuade him, Kennedy acted as if the operation were bound to be successful. As he awaited surgery, he made extensive plans for his political moves afterward.

  At Hyannis Port in the weeks leading up to her husband’s hospitalization, Jackie had been drafted to take notes when his great friend from prewar London days, David Ormsby-Gore, helped him begin to formulate certain of the policies and beliefs that would at length carry him to the White House and guide his actions as president. These unusually intense, fast-paced conversations continued in New York that October when the tall, gaunt thirty-six-year-old Ormsby-Gore, who had come to the United States the previous month as part of the British delegation to the United Nations General Assembly, visited the hospital room of the man he regarded as his “American cousin.” Jack in turn characterized David to Jackie as, in her phrase, “the brightest man he’d ever met.” And from the first, she too was powerfully drawn to David, who was to play an important role in her own life as well.

  A decade later, when Jackie was a young widow, she judged that after Bobby Kennedy and herself, David had been the person who had been “the most wounded” by Jack’s death. Whether or not that assessment was fair or correct, it suggests the depth of her emotional bond to David in 1964. “If I could think of anyone now who could save the Western world,” she told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in the aftermath of the assassination, “it would be David.” Extravagant words, perhaps, but such was the significance she attached to the work that began when Ormsby-Gore visited Hyannis Port prior to her husband’s back operation. Already, in 1954, David embodied certain of the strands she loved best in Jack—his bookishness, his conversational flair, his familial and philosophical ties to the British aristocracy, and not least the tragic-romantic backstory of which she had had her first tantalizing glimpses when she heard John White speak of his lost love Kathleen. For Jackie, the arrival of David added many crucial colorful bits of glass to the mosaic of her husband’s early life.

  David Ormsby-Gore, great-grandson of the Victorian colossus Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, had been a member of the set of young noblemen to which Kick Kennedy had gained entrée before her brother Jack, then a student at Harvard, joined her in London in 1938. He was the first cousin of Billy Hartington, the heir to the Devonshire dukedom with whom Kick fell in love and later married. David had been brought up virtually as a brother to Billy, as well as to Billy’s younger brother, Andrew Cavendish. When J
ack Kennedy arrived in London on the eve of the war, the young American was initiated into the second son’s club, comprised of those like David and Andrew who were thought to have drawn the “short straw in life.” As it happened, by virtue of their older brothers’ early deaths, all three second sons were propelled to the position of “prime runner” in their families. Andrew became the 11th Duke of Devonshire, Jack his father’s anointed to be America’s first Irish-Catholic president, and David (whose elder brother, Gerard, was killed in an automobile accident in 1935) the heir to a peerage, as well as the eighth generation of Ormsby-Gores from father to son to sit in the House of Commons.

  After the war, Kennedy’s friendship with Ormsby-Gore deepened when David and his wife, Sissie, endeavored to look after Billy’s young widow, who had chosen to remain in England. Jack, too, when he visited London in this period was treated by the Ormsby-Gores and other members of the set as if he were “another cousin”—no minor matter in that inbred aristocratic world. Jack and David had long reveled in each other’s company, talking endlessly about jazz, reading, politics, history, and other shared interests, but a family connection intensified the bond and encouraged it to develop. When the friends met again in the autumn of 1954, David had much to tell about the strategic thinking on international affairs that had been taking place within Churchill’s postwar administration.