Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  Finally, on August 26, a day after the baby had been buried, Jackie heard her husband’s voice on the telephone from Genoa. Directly—at the urging of George Smathers, who counseled him that to do otherwise would be disastrous for his presidential hopes—Jack returned to the United States. When he flew in to Newport on the twenty-eighth, an Auchincloss family member was waiting for him with a car. Even after Jack had been told about his daughter, he had been disinclined to return much before he was due to begin campaigning nationally for Stevenson in September, with an itinerary that promised to keep him busy until election day. Now, suddenly, he seemed frantic to reach the hospital. “I’ll pay for any tickets,” he said, pressing the driver to run stop signs and yellow lights en route. When at last he beheld Jackie at Newport Hospital, a week had passed since the convention, where it had been made manifest that the White House was suddenly achingly within their grasp. But a tremendous amount had changed in those few days. There could be no mistaking that he had come home to a wife who was angry, grieving, dispirited, confused about what came next. After two failed pregnancies, Jackie worried that she might never be able to have a child of her own, and after all those months of lovingly outfitting a nursery, she questioned whether she could bear to see Hickory Hill again, let alone live there in the future. To be sure, at this point she was as powerless to influence her husband’s behavior as she had been when she spoke to George Smathers of the impending yachting holiday as though every fiber of her being were not ardently opposed to it. Yet for all that Chicago had done for Jack, she needed only to decide to walk away from the smoldering ruins of her marriage to destroy him politically.

  Five

  “Let’s face it. There are rumors going around in Washington about the senator and his wife, that they’re not getting along, and that they’ve been separated. What about that?”

  The woman asking the question was the Look magazine journalist Laura Bergquist. At work on a piece about the Kennedys, she was visiting the University of South Carolina campus, where the senator was about to deliver the commencement address. It was May 31, 1957; Dwight Eisenhower had begun his second term as president; and in the wake of the defeat of the Stevenson-Kefauver ticket, Jack Kennedy had decided to go after his party’s 1960 presidential nomination. Following Kennedy’s incandescent appearances in Chicago, so many speaking invitations had come in to his office as to fill the briefcase Ted Sorensen had presented him with after the ill-fated yachting holiday. In the intervening months, even when his campaign duties were done, he had been constantly in transit, coming home rarely, as Jackie later said, and then mostly to sleep. All the while, the political badinage at certain Washington dinner parties had begun to include talk about the senator and his wife. Newspaper coverage disclosing the family’s inability to reach Jack on the Mediterranean while Jackie lay in Newport Hospital; the sudden, surprising sale of Hickory Hill to Bobby Kennedy; Jackie’s having spent the better part of November 1956 abroad with her sister; the knowledge in Washington that she and her goatish husband were so often apart; and even a published story to the effect that in the aftermath of the stillbirth Joe Kennedy had paid Jackie a million dollars to remain in the marriage—all this had been responsible for the rumors that Bergquist had decided to raise with the Kennedy camp.

  Though Sorensen, the upright, socially awkward twenty-nine-year-old senatorial aide to whom Bergquist had posed the question, did not in any obvious way resemble Kennedy, he was nevertheless oddly, even disturbingly, similar to his employer. Chuck Spalding judged that in the course of their professional association, Sorensen, whether unconsciously or by design, had by slow degrees “modeled himself, his gestures, his language, his thoughts” on Kennedy. Laura Bergquist perceived that Sorensen, whom she had known well prior to his association with Kennedy, had “picked up a lot of Kennedy’s attitudes and mannerisms along the way.” Given Sorensen’s adoration of Kennedy, she described the process overall as an act of “passionate self-effacement.” Joe Alsop, similarly, spoke of the aide’s “self-abnegation.” Of course, Sorensen needed to sound like the senator when writing for him. But before long, things had gone substantially beyond that. There came a point when, should the need present itself, Sorensen had no difficulty impersonating Kennedy on the office telephone. At such times, it was almost as if an alien spore had taken over Sorensen’s body. But it was also the case that Sorensen had managed somehow to insinuate himself in Kennedy’s head. The aide was proud of his ability, when conversing with Kennedy, to complete his boss’s sentences and anticipate his questions.

  Jackie found the dynamic creepy. Not without a palpable twinge of discomfort, she later insisted that she could remember when Sorensen began to ape her husband. She was sure the younger man had been blushing at the time. She perceived that he had “such a crush” on Jack and that that adulation was perilously rooted in feelings of “resentment” and “inferiority” on Sorensen’s part. “I think he wanted to be easy all the ways Jack was easy.” But then, her husband no doubt would have given much to possess Sorensen’s easy way with a pen. McGeorge Bundy, later a national security adviser in the Kennedy administration, also picked up on the element of danger in, as he characterized it, “a relationship that was so close and so entangled and so full of worry to both” men. Indeed, that May of 1957, the relationship had been on the verge of imploding. Kennedy had just won the Pulitzer Prize for Profiles in Courage, and Sorensen had been making noises about town that in fact he had written a good deal of the book for the senator. Word of another man’s considerable involvement in the preparation of a work for which Kennedy alone had won the Pulitzer seeped into the public discourse in the form of charges by the culture critic Gilbert Seldes, who wrote on May 15 in The Village Voice about the senator’s having had a collaborator; and later and far more explosively by the political columnist Drew Pearson, who spoke on national television of Kennedy’s having used the services of a ghostwriter. It is easy to see why in the wake of the literary award Sorensen would resent his position vis-à-vis Kennedy. Kennedy’s abiding upset, as Bundy perceived it, about the need to employ a writer is also understandable. Finally, that month, Sorensen accepted a payment, which he regarded at the time as “more than fair,” in exchange for his written agreement to back off from seeking public recognition of the extent of his role in Kennedy’s writing life.

  So in the end, contrary to rumor, it had not been Jackie who had had to be paid off lest she behave in such a way as to damage her husband politically. The real recipient of the hush money had been Sorensen, whom she would long persist in calling “sneaky.” At a moment when Jackie was widely believed to be at odds with her husband, she cast herself, neither for the first time nor the last, as Jack’s one-woman Praetorian Guard. Rather than futilely wax indignant about Jack’s repeated betrayals of her, she found it much more satisfying to focus on what others had done to him. “Jack forgave so quickly,” she later recalled, “but I never forgave Ted Sorensen. I watched him like a hawk for a year or so.” Strange to say, the garrulous ghostwriter, whom her husband had meanwhile contrived to clutch with hoops of steel, also saw himself as Kennedy’s impassioned defender. Sorensen responded to the question about marital rumors, as Bergquist remembered, “rather heatedly.” “Well, that’s not true,” said Sorensen, who when speaking of his boss had a tendency to sound, at least to Bergquist’s ear, a bit self-righteous. “As a matter of fact, I can tell you this in confidence. Jackie is pregnant and that’s why she’s not traveling with him.” At the time Sorensen made that statement, Jackie was three months pregnant and had no plans to trumpet the news that she was expecting. If anything went wrong, the prospect of its being rehearsed in the press, as the stillbirth had been, horrified her. Additionally, Jackie had been eager to minimize any worries or pressures on herself for the duration of the pregnancy. So the gossip about her marriage, the gathering storm about the authorship of Profiles in Courage, and finally a series of newspaper items about the pregnancy, notably one by the Broadway column
ist Dorothy Kilgallen, were especially unwelcome.

  On August 3, 1957, Jackie, accompanied by her husband, rushed to Lenox Hill Hospital on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, but sadly by the time they got there, it was already too late. Moments before they entered the hospital, Black Jack Bouvier had died of cancer of the liver, aged sixty-six. While the Canfields, who had been in Italy at the time, traveled to the States, Jackie, now six months pregnant, oversaw the arrangements for the funeral service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue and the burial in East Hampton, Long Island. Confronted with the signature sunlamp tan from which the appellation “Black Jack” derived, the undertaker, assuming he was only doing what the family would want, painted the corpse over with flesh-toned makeup. Upon seeing the professional’s handiwork, a dismayed Bouvier nephew—who as chance would have it possessed some competence in the mortician’s art—set about to restore Black Jack to his customary swarthiness. There was a modest turnout at the funeral Mass, where the entire rear pew consisted of women in inky-black veils, who, though largely unknown to the family, were said to be some of Black Jack’s lovers. Prior to the closing of the casket, “the most beautiful daughter a man ever had” undid a bracelet from her wrist and tenderly deposited the trinket, which Black Jack had given her as a graduation gift when she was a girl, in his hand.

  Three months later, Jackie gave birth at New York’s Lying-in Hospital on November 27, 1957. This time, her husband could hardly have been nicer or more attentive. It was Jack who wheeled in the newborn when Jackie first saw their daughter. “I don’t think he really knew what loving someone was like until he had Caroline,” remembered Betty Coxe Spalding. “He was adorable with her from the beginning.” Jack was unreserved in his love for the child, intent, he later told his friend Debo Devonshire, on being physically affectionate, as Rose Kennedy had never been when he was a boy. As a parent, Jackie proved to be the more physically reserved of the couple. Nonetheless, a shared passion for their daughter, and subsequently for John Junior, would do much to help sustain the marriage in some exceptionally difficult times. The birth of Caroline was also politically useful. Senator and Mrs. Kennedy posed on the cover of the April 21, 1958, issue of Life magazine, with Jack holding the infant in his lap. The image satisfyingly, if belatedly, filled out the trajectory that had begun with the engagement pictures in Life and had been followed by the photographs in McCall’s of the happy young marrieds at their rented Georgetown residence. By the time this new cover image appeared on newsstands, the Kennedys at last owned a home of their own, a three-story redbrick edifice on N Street in Georgetown, where more often than not Jackie remained with their daughter, while the senator traveled in anticipation of 1960.

  It was during this signal period, from 1958 to 1960, that Jackie embarked on the next major phase of her Washington education. The first had taken place on Dumbarton Avenue, under the somewhat erratic but nonetheless highly effective tutelage of John White. This time her classroom moved across the street, where Joe Alsop, having recently returned from a year in Paris, proved eager to take her on. Hoping to serve Jack’s interests by becoming the wife she believed he wanted and needed right then, Jackie in turn proved an apt pupil. Afterward, she remembered Alsop’s tutorials with affection and appreciation. To look at, the curmudgeonly stager and the chirpy young Washington wife made a curious couple. Both used cigarettes, his ripped in two and screwed, at times a bit frenziedly, into a yellowing holder, as theatrical properties. Both spoke in an excruciatingly affected way, Joe’s strangulated accent and intonation causing him to evoke, as someone once said, Charles Laughton essaying the role of Oscar Wilde; Jackie’s mannered, whispery voice suggesting a repressed version of Marilyn Monroe. And, not least, Joe and Jackie were both perilously thin-skinned public people whose gifts of ridicule and raillery at once shielded and subverted them.

  As Alsop surveyed a guest over his trademark massive circular dark horn-rimmed spectacles, he liked to cup his sagging, spotted face with his hands, giving him the appearance of someone suffering with a toothache in both jaws. At the outset, he saw Jackie as a “starter” who despite anything she had done or endured to date was suddenly at the very beginning of the particular race she had been designated to run in life. He judged that of all the starters he had seen and worked with in the course of his career, there had never previously been another who merited, in his phrase, “a higher handicap.” Despite her immense potential, however, he also perceived that she possessed nowhere nearly enough self-confidence. That was where Joe came in. Joe, the cousin of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. Joe, the political and social arbiter. Joe, the aesthete and intellectual snob. Joe, who had briefly removed himself to Paris because he feared that his best years professionally might already be past. Joe, who saw a Kennedy candidacy as a chance not just for the country’s renewal, but, equally if not more importantly, for his own.

  He was the person to go to for the facts and statistics regarding the deficiencies of Eisenhower’s defense posture, but he was also the man who could tell you, with equal ardor, which restaurant was to be avoided because the owners did not systematically rotate the wine bottles in their racks. During Churchill’s postwar administration Alsop had been the first newsman in Washington to learn that the prime minister had secretly suffered a stroke, but he could also be depended on to know all the choicest details about the European grande dame whose ornate dress had been intercepted by the customs authorities because of the danger of fowl pest being carried in its pheasant feathers. Such was the mentor who set about to help prepare Jackie Kennedy for what he was to call her “high role” in history. Now he spoke to her of power and politics, now of food and furniture. He gave her carefully chosen books, and regaled her with gossipy accounts of previous Washington wives who had experienced challenges similar to hers. Seeking to toughen Jackie against the myriad petty vexations of political life, he offered perspective when she was distressed; and, though known when upset to chew on his knuckles until they bled, he encouraged her to view her own challenges dispassionately. By turns, he sat with her, telephoned her, wrote to her, walked with her, and sailed with her.

  Jackie had other counselors as well. A former Los Angeles shopgirl, Jayne Wrightsman was the the second wife of the Oklahoma oil tycoon Charles Wrightsman, whose social ambitions were said to be “as sizable as his fortune.” Spurned by the old guard in Palm Beach in the 1940s, the couple set about to win social acceptance by reinventing themselves as free-spending connoisseurs of art and antiques, with an emphasis on eighteenth-century France. Mrs. Wrightsman, in particular, pored over art history books; conferred with curators, dealers, and other experts; and taught herself to distinguish between, in Alsop’s words, “objects that are merely good of their kind, and objects of truly great quality.” She imbibed the principle that the highest test of a collector is not whether the collection includes only things of the best quality, but rather whether the owner has composed the collection “as a true, independent work of art.” And that, Alsop proclaimed of her Fifth Avenue apartment, where the decor fairly screamed magnificence and museum-quality, she had assuredly accomplished.

  Alsop was no less in awe of Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, Jackie’s other, even more significant adviser in matters of style and fashion. The Listerine mouthwash heiress, whose second husband, Paul Mellon, was the heir to a great banking fortune, subscribed to an aesthetic, if not to a form of snobbery, that could hardly have been more different from the Wrightsmans’ approach. Jayne Wrightsman’s personal narrative highlighted the infinite labor devoted to perfecting her taste and amassing her collections. Bunny Mellon, though equally painstaking and attentive to minutiae (such as the weeds she contrived to grow to precisely the right height between carefully irregular patio stonework), preferred to be admired for her ease and artlessness. She exemplified the idea that naturalness is perhaps the greatest affectation. Jayne Wrightsman’s homes were all about show and splendor. Bunny Mellon lived by the dictum “Nothing should be noticed.” O
stentation was anathema to her. Her raincoat was sable-lined, the fur being for her pleasure alone, not for display. Master gardener; art and rare-book collector; creator of beautiful, resolutely comfortable and serene homes in Upperville, Virginia, and other settings; devotee of the couturiers Cristóbal Balenciaga and Hubert de Givenchy, Bunny Mellon did not hesitate to pour vast sums of money into her projects—she simply thought it vulgar if the effort and expenditure were apparent. She also religiously shunned publicity as degrading to one’s personal dignity, a notion that, however appealing to Jackie personally, was fundamentally at odds with the whole Kennedy ethos, indeed, with some of the practical advice Alsop was to offer her in this period.

  As Jackie shed the last lingering vestiges of the “sloppy kid” that Bill Walton fondly remembered her as having been during her John White phase, the question presented itself: Would the rarefied tastes and attitudes, the particular styles of dress and decor, that she had been cultivating help or hinder politically? There was no sense, as she made it clear to Alsop, in which she wanted to be perceived as acting “at cross purposes” with Jack. However it might sometimes appear, she really did mean to be a political plus. According to Walton, who, as an artist, was also known to advise Jackie on visual matters, she wanted so to please Jack: “She got elegant for him.” But how would this increasingly chic young woman be received by the American people? What would voters make of her bouffant hairstyle, couturier costumes, and penchant for all things French? How would the country react to the sprightly remarks that always played so well in the deep-red-lacquered dining room at Joe Alsop’s? Jackie’s comments in this vein often had a lurking sting. What, someone wanted to know, did the French motto “Honi soit qui mal y pense” (Evil to him who evil thinks) inscribed in gold on her belt mean? “Love me, love my dog,” she helpfully explained. Told of the religious prejudice that threatened to torpedo her husband’s presidential hopes, she returned: “I think it’s so unfair of people to be against Jack because he’s a Catholic. He’s such a poor Catholic. Now, if it were Bobby, I could understand it.” Asked where she thought the upcoming Democratic national convention ought to be conducted, she deadpanned: “Acapulco.” The matter of Jackie’s political viability was fervently discussed within the Kennedy camp, and for all of her snark and sophistication, these conversations were capable of cutting her to the quick. When, in conference with his political team Dave Powers and Kenny O’Donnell, the senator wondered aloud if America was “ready” for Jackie, indeed, if it might be best to run her through subliminally in a quick-flash television spot so no one would notice her, she ran out of the room in tears.