Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story

by Barbara Leaming

  At the same time, she arrived back in the United States with new personal confidence and new clout. Confidence, because of the completely unexpected reception she had had abroad. Clout, because the trip had transformed her into a figure of international appeal. In the months that followed, she used the spotlight to help her husband’s beleaguered presidency. She who had attracted the first negative press coverage of the administration reinvented herself as among its greatest public relations assets. She presided over exquisite state dinners and hosted high-profile arts events. Not so long before, candidate Kennedy had wondered aloud whether it might be best to run her through subliminally in a quick-flash TV spot. Now she starred in an immensely successful program aired on all three networks, A Television Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, which showcased the work she had undertaken in collaboration with the French decorator Stéphane Boudin. Far from the iconoclast many people had feared early on, Jackie proved to be a champion of historical restoration and preservation. Far from striking America as too fey and too fancy, she delighted viewers with a full-out performance of the role she had been groomed to play at Miss Porter’s: the cultivated wife who uses her painstakingly acquired knowledge and graces in the service of her husband.

  In the present case, at least, the husband returned the favor by continuing to betray her with other women, often frolicking with them (JFK had a fondness for threesomes) in Jackie’s own bed in the White House family quarters while she was at Glen Ora, the couple’s rented country house in Virginia. He even embarked on an affair with a recent Miss Porter’s graduate, Mimi Beardsley, whom he had met when the teenager came to the White House to interview Letitia Baldrige about Jackie for her proud alma mater’s student newspaper. “It’s not that he cheated on her,” observed Larry Newman, one of the Secret Service agents assigned to guard Jackie, “but that everybody knew about it, and then she’s got to appear with him.” Nor did the president necessarily confine his sexual indiscretions to the times when his wife was away. In addition to the state dinners, Jackie arranged a number of dinner dances, which, according to Special Assistant Arthur Schlesinger Jr., she conceived “as a means of restoring a larger social gaiety to her husband’s life. When several months of unrelenting pressure had gone by, she would feel that the time had come for another dancing party.… The President seemed renewed by them and walked with a springier step the next day.” No doubt he did. At one such gala, on February 9, 1962, which was attended by Kennedy friends, administration members, foreign diplomats, and other Washington notables, Jackie danced the twist with defense secretary Robert McNamara in one of the crowded state rooms, while JFK enjoyed a tryst with another of his numerous mistresses, Mary Meyer, in his daughter’s schoolroom upstairs.

  The contrast between refinement and dissipation that was among this administration’s salient characteristics began to play out in public with the juxtaposition of two lavishly publicized but otherwise distinctly different events in May of 1962. The first, held at the White House on the eleventh, was the Kennedys’ dinner in honor of French Minister of State for Cultural Affairs Andre Malraux, who had been kind to Jackie at the time of the state visit to Paris. Jackie had long labored over the guest list, which, at the suggestion of France’s ambassador in Washington, Hervé Alphand, included some of America’s most esteemed artists. There were the playwright Tennessee Williams, the critic Edmund Wilson, the novelist Saul Bellow, the director Elia Kazan, the painter Mark Rothko, the dancer and choreographer George Balanchine, and the conductor Leonard Bernstein, among many others. The evening culminated the first lady’s efforts over many months to establish “Kennedy Washington,” as her mentor Alsop liked to call it, as the world capital of culture and taste.

  Less edifying, perhaps, but in its way equally typical of the Kennedy years, was a Democratic fund-raiser in the form of a forty-fifth birthday tribute to JFK, which was held a week later in New York. Instead of Jackie, who chose not to attend, the star of the occasion was Marilyn Monroe. The actress sang “Happy Birthday” in a manner that Jackie’s old nemesis, Dorothy Kilgallen, described to newspaper readers as “making love to the President in direct view of 40 million Americans” watching on TV. Marilyn had in fact been one of Kennedy’s sexual partners, and his hubristic decision to allow her on that public stage seemed to dare journalists to investigate his philandering in a way that they simply had not before. Realizing the damage he had caused himself, he put out word to various press people that there was no truth to claims that he had slept with Marilyn. Unfortunately, however, the actress had shared his bed that very night at the Carlyle Hotel in New York, and she followed up with a series of frenzied calls to the White House in hopes of being invited to visit him in Washington. “He liked her,” remembered George Smathers, “but she liked him more.” And with Kennedy, of course, that “more” always presented a problem. Marilyn, having transformed herself into one of the countless women in his life who “won’t leave me alone!”, thereupon became persona non grata. Determined to stop her from phoning, the president dispatched Bill Thompson, one of his procurers, to Los Angeles to control her. In the meantime, Kennedy refused Marilyn’s calls. Finally, “she quit bothering him,” reflected Senator Smathers, “because he quit talking to her.”

  What did not quit, however, was the speculation in certain quarters about presidential promiscuity. In the past, both JFK and his father had been known to dismiss suggestions that his unfaithfulness to Jackie might damage him politically. Despite the swirl of rumors about the marriage that had materialized after Jackie’s stillbirth in 1956, as well at other points, nothing substantive had yet to appear in print. Now the iconic image of Marilyn Monroe singing to JFK had put a familiar face on everything that people had heard or imagined. Suggestive of the sense of foreboding that pervaded Washington in the months that followed were the remarks about JFK that the French ambassador confided to his diary at the time: “He loves pleasure and women too much. His desires are difficult to satisfy without making one fear a scandal and its use by his political adversaries. This may happen because he doesn’t take sufficient precautions in this puritan society.” In a similar vein, there was mounting anxiety among the Kennedyites that Republicans would make JFK’s womanizing an issue in the 1964 presidential campaign.

  Rather than ask the president to restrain himself, however, his consultants cast a worried eye on Jackie. After a great deal of entertaining and additional foreign travel in her capacity as first lady (including two Latin American trips with the president, as well as a solo mission to India and Pakistan), she was planning to spend a few weeks in Italy with Caroline. In the present climate, his political experts worried that such a trip, undertaken for no reason other than Jackie’s personal pleasure, would be read as evidence of unrest in the marriage. The White House sought to avert any such perception by announcing that her Italian sojourn had been scheduled to take place in a period when JFK, set to speak in various parts of the nation, would not be able to spend weekends with her at Cape Cod. The implication was that the first lady hoped to assuage her loneliness abroad.

  In accord with White House instructions that she keep her stay in Ravello “low-key,” Jackie made it clear to the limited staff accompanying her to the chic Italian resort that every possible propriety must be religiously observed. “She was very concerned about who she was and how she acted and how the people around her acted,” recalled Mary Taylor, whom the U.S. embassy in Rome had assigned to be the first lady’s assistant during her stay in Italy. “She wanted everyone to comport themselves in a good manner.” Despite Jackie’s best efforts, however, it soon became apparent that the advisers’ anxiety had been far from unfounded. After the first lady, the Radziwills, and other friends were the guests of Gianni and Marella Agnelli on the couple’s two-masted racing yacht, photographs appeared in the press that made it seem as if Jackie had been alone on the boat with Agnelli, with only a lone guitarist to serenade them. In fact, Agnelli’s wife as well as various guests, not
to mention Jackie’s Secret Service protectors, had been there at all times, but the carefully framed and cropped photographs suggested to the world that Jackie and her host were having an affair. On the contrary, the Agnelli cruise had never been anything less than “a proper trip,” attested Secret Service agent Larry Newman. “It was just beautiful people enjoying themselves.” Newman, when he guarded President Kennedy, had been present on numerous occasions when JFK cavorted with other women. The agent found Jackie to be another story entirely: “I never saw anything of untoward desire or activity on her part toward another man.” Nor, in his view, was she inclined to attempt to spite her faithless husband by misbehaving with Agnelli in Italy, as some would later represent her as having done. “She was above all that,” Newman declared. “She didn’t burn that kind of fire.”

  Neither JFK nor his team believed that Jackie was really misbehaving with Agnelli. They were, however, concerned about the potential political consequences of the pictures. Nor, importantly, can the press have believed any of it. Besides broaching the idea that all was not well in the Kennedy marriage, the contrived images appealed to popular sentiment that while it was acceptable for the first lady to use her rarefied tastes and graces in the service of her husband, it was another matter to play on her own, however blamelessly, among the international super-rich. Ironically, at one point during the ensuing media tempest, JFK had been a guest at the Santa Monica residence of his brother-in-law the actor Peter Lawford, where, as was their custom, the president and Dave Powers diverted themselves with various women provided by their host. Meanwhile, it was Jackie whom a group known as the Concerned Citizens of America was threatening to picket when she returned to the White House. “Would you not better have served the nation and the President by remaining at home by his side?” Jackie’s critics asked her in an open letter. “We have honored you greatly with the position of First Lady of our land. We ask only that you not violate the dignity of that title.”

  Jackie came home on August 31 to a husband who was indeed preoccupied with a series of surreptitiously taken photographs, though not the ones she had been hearing about. And, much as President Kennedy might have wished otherwise, there could be no doubting or denying the reality these new pictures disclosed. As it happened, hours before Jackie had been reunited with him, JFK had received hard evidence, in the form of photographic intelligence, showing that the Soviets were constructing missile sites in Cuba. Three months previously, as Kennedy frolicked with Marilyn Monroe in New York, the Kremlin had been quietly launching a plan to force JFK to agree to major concessions in Germany. That day, Khrushchev had spoken to Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko and others of his idea of installing Soviet missiles in Cuba. As soon as Khrushchev had the missiles in place, he planned to appear in New York, probably in the latter part of November, and demand that Kennedy agree to pull Western troops out of Berlin, as well as abandon any idea of a reunified Germany. On the basis of Kennedy’s weak performance in Vienna, where the American leader had been “savaged” by his Soviet counterpart, Khrushchev calculated that rather than risk all-annihilating war, Kennedy would quickly cave. JFK as yet knew none of this at the end of August, only that the missile sites were being built, and that he would soon have to make a decision about how, if at all, to react to the information.

  Jackie would later speak of the autumn crisis, when a single miscalculation, either in Washington or Moscow, threatened to set nuclear weapons flying, as the period in the entire marriage when she had been the closest to her husband. “Please don’t send me anywhere,” she begged him. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you. Even if there’s not room in the bomb shelter in the White House, please then I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do too—[rather] than live without you.” At length, by a combination of adroit negotiation, deft timing, and sheer nerve, JFK successfully resolved what came to be known as the Cuban missile crisis. In the end, it was Khrushchev who backed down, when he consented to remove the missiles from Cuba.

  There followed a strange interlude in Kennedy Washington, when, amid the resounding chorus of praise for the president’s strategic victory over Khrushchev, there was also, for the first time, significant open dissension among certain members of JFK’s intimate circle about the sex parties, the mistresses, the prostitutes, the procurers, and the drugs that were regular features of his private life. “They had turned that place into a brothel, hadn’t they?” said Betty Coxe Spalding of the debauched atmosphere that President Kennedy, Dave Powers, and their group had established at the White House. Spalding was one of those who finally decided that she could no longer countenance Jack’s womanizing. “I didn’t approve of the way he behaved,” she recalled. “It was sick.” Sissie Ormsby-Gore, who had herself known Jack since before the war when they were members of the same elite London set, also made it known now that she was “disgusted” by his betrayals of Jackie, to whom Sissie had become close during David’s tenure in Washington. Presently, Sissie was one of the very few people to whom Jackie initially confided, not long after the missile crisis, that she was pregnant. Jackie’s pregnancies had always been troubled, and now, as before, she was concerned from the outset that the baby might not survive. The first lady thereupon quietly withdrew from the active public role she had undertaken at a moment when her husband had needed her help.

  For all of Jackie’s precautions, however, the baby was born prematurely, with the same lung deficiency that had afflicted John Junior, except that in the present case the condition was much worse. At Children’s Hospital in Boston, to which the four-pound, ten-and-a-half-ounce newborn, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, had been moved, specialists, hoping to keep his lungs open, planned to try a pressure chamber typically employed in open-heart surgery. That night, JFK insisted on sleeping at the hospital, where the child visibly struggled to breathe. The president, wearing a white surgical cap and gown, held tiny Patrick’s fingers for hours. He was still touching them when, shortly after four A.M. on August 9, 1963, the baby died. Directly, JFK went to Jackie at Otis Air Force Base Hospital, where, as she later described the scene, he knelt by her bed and sobbed. Afterward, Jackie told Betty Spalding that she had “never seen anything like that in him.” He had reacted so heartlessly to the stillbirth of a daughter, seven years before. His response this time was entirely different, and Jackie, by her own account, was “stunned” and not a little hopeful that the ordeal might yet change him as a person.

  At the same time, the child’s death sent Jackie into a deep depression, news of which prompted an invitation, conveyed by her sister Lee, to cruise the Aegean as a guest on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. Previous European yachting holidays having been a big problem for this family on at least two occasions, the president initially did not like the idea of the new trip. For one thing, Onassis’s history of legal skirmishes with the U.S. Maritime Commission and the Justice Department made it unseemly to accept the magnate’s hospitality. More generally, his substantial business dealings with the U.S.government through Victory Carriers, a New York–based shipping company in which he held a large stake, posed conflict-of-interest problems. To make matters worse, there had been speculation in the press that Onassis was having an affair with Jackie’s sister. The columnist Drew Pearson went so far as to suggest that Onassis was maneuvering to become the American president’s brother-in-law, with all of the advantages that the familial status would provide. Under the circumstances, it seemed wisest to decline the invitation.

  Still, Jackie wanted to go, and at length JFK conceded, as he said, that the cruise would probably be “good for her.” Jackie insisted that there could be no question of accepting her host’s offer to deflect some of the potential criticism by absenting himself from the yacht for the duration of her stay. So, in light of the misleading photographs that had been published at the time of her cruise with the Agnellis, JFK, at his wife’s behest, drafted Undersecretary of Commerce Franklin Roosevelt Jr. to accompany h
er on the Christina in the role of a chaperon. The anticipated presence neither of Roosevelt nor of Stas Radziwill, who would be accompanying his wife, mollified those administration figures, Attorney General Robert Kennedy not least among them, who regarded the cruise as an ethical and electoral nightmare. As though there were any need to do so, Kenny O’Donnell warned the president that he had “an election year coming up.” In a similar vein, the American ambassador in Greece, Henry Labouisse, urged the president to keep Jackie off of Onassis’s yacht—not because her presence on the Christina would be wrong in itself, but rather because it was bound to leave “a poor impression.”