The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  Jackie’s letters home fired Lee’s imagination. In August of 1949, she wrote to her younger sister:

  I just can’t tell you what it is like to come down from the mountains of Grenoble to this flat, blazing plain where seven-eighths of all you see is hot blue sky . . .

  Last Sunday we all went to Sassenage, a village on the plain near Grenoble. We visited the grottoes and waded in underground rivers—and explored the town and sang songs and danced in a lovely little restaurant under rustling trees by a brook with a waterfall . . . We missed the last tram and had to walk back to Grenoble (all the way back)—about five miles!

  Lee longed to go abroad as Jackie had done. Now a freshman at Sarah Lawrence, she was bored by Bronxville, except for her lively social life. What reading she did was not on the curriculum: “It was Fitzgerald’s novels—The Beautiful and Damned, Tender Is the Night—those Riviera novels with their doomed characters,” she recalled. “When my sister spent her year abroad, and wrote back these exciting, almost fevered letters, I just couldn’t wait to go! I thought I was going to live at Versailles! It was that kind of thing. Of course, the reality [was] much different. But it was still a swoon-worthy notion.”

  Janet “was extremely apprehensive about letting her daughters go alone on such a venture,” Lee later wrote, “in spite of the fact that Jackie had already lived in Paris for a year. But then Jackie had been well chaperoned and supposedly studying hard under rigid conditions. This trip would be just us and the Hillman Minx,” the car they used to tootle around in Europe, from Cannes to Cap d’Antibes.

  The trip was offered as Lee’s belated high school graduation present, but it was offered to Jackie partly out of guilt: Jackie had won Vogue’s sixteenth annual Prix de Paris award, which was to send her to France for six months to work in the Paris office, then to the States to work for Vogue for six months in New York. Her prizewinning essay—actually the answers to six questions posed by Vogue editors—are remarkably assured and thoughtful, reflecting her deep engagement with the arts and a serious intellect, seldom displayed among the usual crop of debutantes in 1950s-era America.

  When asked to name “People I Wish I Had Known” from the arts, literature, or “other milieus,” Jackie chose Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Serge Diaghilev. She wrote:

  It is because I love the works of these three men that I wish I had known them. If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space, it is their theories of art that I would apply to my period, their poems that would have music and ballets composed to.

  She cited lines from Baudelaire’s sonnet “Correspondances,” praising the poet’s synesthesia: “[Perfumes] green as prairies, sweet as the music of oboes, and others, corrupted, rich and triumphant.” She appreciated the sensual imagery in Wilde’s poetry as well, quoting “the musk and gold heat that emanates from a vase of flowers” in “The Music Room.” But more tellingly, given the role she would play in a then unimagined future, she praises Diaghilev, the Russian impresario of dance, for his ability to bring together Rimsky-Korsakov’s music, Bakst’s and Benois’s theatrical sets, Fokine’s choreography, and Nijinsky’s brilliant dancing:

  Serge Diaghilev dealt not with the interaction of the senses but with an interaction of the arts, an interaction of the cultures of East and West. Though not an artist himself he possessed what is rarer than artistic genius in any one field, the sensitivity to take the best of each man and incorporate it into a masterpiece all the more precious because it lives only in the minds of those who have seen it and disintegrates as soon as he is gone . . . [He is] an alchemist unique in art history.

  She herself would become adept at “an interaction of the arts” in her future role as First Lady, a role for which she had prepared herself in her wide exposure to the performing arts.

  In her six-part essay, Jackie also proved herself adept in describing a typical college girl’s beauty routine, inventing an advertising campaign for perfume, and advising Vogue to educate women about men’s fashion. “You can never slip into too dismal an abyss of untidiness if once every seven days you will pull yourself up short and cope with ragged ends,” she cautioned in answer to the command “Make out a plan of beauty care suitable for a college girl.”

  After displaying her erudition and artistic sensibility in the first part of the essay, her “beauty plan” shows her to be a more typical, down-to-earth American girl, advising her classmates that they can

  avoid smudged nails daubed on the New York Central from a bottle of polish that has spilled in your pocketbook, strange unwanted waves in your hair because you have washed it at midnight and gone to bed too tired to wait for it to dry, stubbly legs with razor cuts, and a legion of other horrors . . .

  She also gives a telling description of herself, chafing a bit at her mother’s eagle-eyed attention to always looking one’s best:

  I am tall, 5'7", with brown hair, a square face, and eyes so unfortunately far apart that it takes three weeks to have a pair of glasses made with a bridge wide enough to fit over my nose. I do not have a sensational figure but can look slim if I pick the right clothes. I flatter myself on being able at times to walk out of the house looking like a poor man’s Paris copy, but often my mother will run up to inform me that my left stocking seam is crooked or the right-hand top coat button is about to fall off. This, I realize, is the Unforgiveable Sin.

  In an answer to the question of how she might display a perfume in a Vogue advertisement, Jackie again displays her sophistication and artistic sensibility. She asks, “Why not quote some of the poetry [perfume] has inspired?” Making an analogy between perfume and fine wine, she expressed her own poetic capacity and an already refined sensibility when she wrote:

  Both are liquids that act upon the closely related senses of taste and smell to produce an intoxicating effect. Wine has an even stronger appeal in literature . . . why not pilfer some of its drawing power . . . ? . . . The layout . . . would show some strewn flower petals, a thin-stemmed crystal wineglass with the blurred suggestion of a women (a long neck, an earring—her hand), pouring perfume out of a Diorama bottle into the glass.

  Her six-part essay—and an original short story that inspired one of the judges to comment, “She is already a writer . . .”—won her the coveted prize.

  Jackie had begun a love affair with all things French, even before living in Paris. The summer before junior year, she had been given the present of a European tour with two friends. Visiting museums and practicing her French had been thrilling, a preparation for her junior year abroad.

  Jackie had majored in French in college, but since Vassar did not offer any opportunities to study abroad, she applied and was accepted in Smith College’s Junior Year in Paris program.

  Jack Bouvier was delighted at Jackie’s upcoming trip to Europe, although he would miss her visits to see him in Manhattan. But at least Jackie would get a break from having to choose between spending holidays and weekends in Merrywood or with her father on East 74th Street.

  Before sailing, Jackie and thirty-four other Paris-bound French majors had attended a luncheon in their honor with gossip columnist Hedda Hopper and had been toasted by the French consul in New York. On board the De Grasse, which departed from New York Harbor on August 23, 1949, the group was asked to sing Edith Piaf’s popular “La vie en rose.” Jackie was singled out to sing one of the verses on the final night of their ocean crossing. She did so—she knew all the French verses. As Alice Kaplan has noted in Dreaming in French, France would become the place where Jackie “could become [her]self, or protect [her]self from what [she] didn’t want to become . . .”—i.e., a prim product of Janet’s all-too-proper upbringing. Kaplan writes that Jackie was one

  whose fate now depended on her own wits . . . since her father had lost his fortune and she could not rely on an inheritance from her stepfather. The Vassar girl and toast of high society had a sense of her worth but little security. She was
on a quest in Paris . . .

  Jackie’s infatuation with France derived, in part, from the fiction that her father’s family of Bouviers had been French aristocrats. Not true—the Bouviers had been Provençal shopkeepers in France, and Jackie’s great-grandparents Michel Bouvier and Louise Vernou had met as French immigrants in Philadelphia. Indeed, the very name “Bouvier” derived from the word “boeuf” (beef) and signified cattle herders. Jackie and Lee’s ancestors on her father’s side were, in essence, French cowboys, though from the French Revolution to the Bouviers’ emigration to America, they became shopkeepers. Her great-grandfather became a highly successful cabinetmaker in Philadelphia, improving his social status through marriage and becoming a wealthy land speculator. But the Bouviers exalting their past was no more of a fabrication than Janet Lee Auchincloss’s clinging to the idea that she descended from Southern aristocracy and not immigrant Irish stock—like that other wealthy and influential family, the Kennedys.

  Her French heritage captivated Jackie in ways that did not shape her sister. She preferred to pronounce her name in a French manner—“Jack-leen”—and frequently used French words and expressions, such as naming her horse Danseuse. But it was Auchincloss’s wealth and prominence, not Bouvier’s, that showered Jackie with invitations to socially prominent families in Paris during her year abroad.

  Smith’s program was intellectually rigorous in preparation for a career in teaching French, and everyone was expected to speak only French for the duration. Their itinerary began in the provinces, in Grenoble, where the students studied French grammar before heading to Paris.

  When Jackie moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne that October, she lived at 76 Avenue Mozart in the 16th arrondissement with a French family: the comtesse de Renty and her two daughters, Claude and Ghislaine, and Ghislaine’s four-year-old son, Christian. Janet had made the connection to the de Rentys through a Franco-American family she’d met in Newport. Jackie got the largest bedroom, though she shared the apartment with two other study-abroad students, including a friend of Jackie’s from New York, Susan Coward. There was ample space—“four bedrooms, two parlors, a dining room, and a kitchen with the traditional wrought iron ‘cage’ beneath the window for keeping food fresh . . . a back staircase for the servants, exiting onto the inner courtyard” in Alice Kaplan’s description—but there was only one toilet and one bathtub for the apartment’s seven inhabitants. That meant only one bath a week for the three boarders, unless they were willing to visit the public baths.

  Four years after the Liberation, the memory and the effects of war were still palpable. Sugar and coffee were rationed, and coal was scarce, so the apartment was frigid in winter, and Jackie wrote that she was “swaddled in sweaters and woolen stockings, doing homework in graph-paper cahiers.” For the countess, depredations of the war were still etched in memory. She and her husband had been part of a nationalist wing of the French Resistance known as the Alliance, founded by a former member of the Vichy government. Its recruits were mostly from the upper classes. Little experienced in espionage, they were arrested and deported more often than other Resistance fighters. The de Rentys were deported a week before the liberation of Paris on August 22, 1944, and the count was sent to Dora, a German slave-labor camp, where he was put to work digging the construction site for Wernher von Braun’s underground missile factory. He only lasted four months. The countess survived him at Ravensbrück, one of the women’s camps, and when she returned to Paris, now a widow, she needed to rent out rooms to survive. Nonetheless, according to her daughter Claude, the comtesse de Renty enjoyed the role of housing young American students and introducing them to the best of French culture that had survived the war, inviting Jackie to accompany her to the Sèvres porcelain museum and to the Louvre. “Jackie knew what had happened to my parents,” recalled Claude, “but did not ask any questions. At that time, nobody talked about it.” As Kaplan observed, Jackie was secretive: “Perhaps that secrecy, born of her own private sorrows, blended well with a family that had so much to forget.”

  Jackie’s quest to discover herself and mature beyond Janet’s reach was tested by an experience in February of 1950, six months after she arrived in France. A friend and classmate, Martha Rusk, invited Jackie to accompany her on a trip to Austria and Germany just before New Year’s, and was surprised when Jackie accepted, mostly because it involved traveling third class by rail. That didn’t faze Jackie—it was all part of the great adventure of exploring Europe, and being on her own. As she later wrote in a letter home:

  It’s so much more fun traveling second and third class and sitting up all night in trains, as you really get to know people and hear their stories. When I traveled before it was all too luxurious and we didn’t see anything.

  They spent a few days in Vienna before heading to Munich, where much of the city, like Vienna, was in bombed-out ruins. In Munich, they were only a ten-minute trolley ride away from Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp, where medical experiments were carried out among prisoners. More than 41,000 people had been murdered there, either worked to death or destroyed by disease and malnutrition; others were gassed or cremated in ovens. When the American GIs arrived, they found 5,400 corpses within the camp. Over 15,000 had been buried by the Nazis in a mass grave.

  By the time Jackie and Martha visited the camp, Dachau had been dedicated and sanitized, preserved as a memorial site. The two young Americans wandered through a series of empty, whitewashed rooms, in eerie silence. They were accompanied by a young GI they’d met on the trolley, who was equally stunned by what he saw and learned there. Back in Munich, Jackie and Martha tried to forget their Dachau visit by spending New Year’s Eve at a nightclub with several friends.

  Though Jackie might have tried to hide her sense of horror, and never wrote directly about it, she talked about the experience with her stepbrother Yusha Auchincloss. Yusha later wrote that she had been “deeply affected by what she saw there and never forgot it.”

  She was appalled and outraged at what the Nazis did, but she did not condemn the Germans as a race. She was a very emotional person, but she would try to repress emotions, and after seeing the camp, she managed still to never speak of all the Germans in a derogatory way. She always saw the Nazis as distinct from the German people . . . [but] she never forgot what she saw.

  If anything, the trip and what she learned there deepened a gravitas that she already possessed; it was one of the key features of her personality she did not share with Lee. Her sojourn in France had matured her and had gone far in showing her who she really was. She later wrote that her travels taught her not to be ashamed of her thirst for knowledge, which she had previously sought to hide. Now Jackie was ready to resume her life in America, but with an enduring love for Europe.

  After returning to the States, instead of completing her studies at Vassar, Jackie spent her senior year as a student at George Washington University, in DC, now majoring in French literature and taking classes in creative writing and journalism. One of her writing professors at GWU, Muriel McClanahan, recalled her as “beautiful, and she could write like a million. She didn’t need to take my class.”

  She lived with her mother and stepfather at Merrywood while finishing her undergraduate degree—which might have been part of the deal she’d made with Janet to allow her to take her junior year abroad. One of her classmates at GWU was the avant-garde musician and composer David Amram, who remembered being struck by Jackie’s “dignity” and “bearing.” He recalled playing music for her at a mutual friend’s house, music from the Khyber Pass on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which Jackie very much enjoyed. “She always had that ‘world view,’” Amram recalled.

  Her next trip to Europe, taken with Lee, would be very different in style and mood.

  * * *

  STUDY ABROAD HAD been a life-enhancing sojourn for Janet’s dark-haired daughter, but to allow her to return for six months as the recipient of Vogue’s Prix de Paris?

  Janet or
dered Jackie to turn down the prize.

  Perhaps Janet sensed that her daughter’s love affair with all things French revealed a preference for her father and his French ancestry, as opposed to her own Irish heritage. But it’s more likely that Janet wanted to ensure that Jackie would marry and not waste her time pursuing a career in journalism—in Paris! Both girls were being groomed to make good matches, in an era where a good marriage and a respectable husband were the summit of what most women—even privileged girls—could expect. At the time, the average age of a married or engaged woman was twenty, and Jackie was twenty-two, with no real prospects. (It was feminine, flirty Lee who had all the beaux!)

  At the urging of both Janet and Jack Bouvier, afraid that they would lose their elder daughter to the sophistications of Paris, Jackie turned down the Prix de Paris. She wrote to the judges that she had already spent her junior year in Paris and that her mother felt “terrifically strongly about ‘keeping me in the home.’”

  So Lee and Jackie’s summer sojourn was meant to be, for Jackie at least, a kind of consolation prize. Perhaps Janet would have changed her mind about allowing either daughter to go, had she heard that Jackie had lost her virginity on her first trip to France. An unsubstantiated rumor suggested that this took place in a pension lift on Paris’s Left Bank, to John Marquand Jr., an early contributor to the Paris Review.

  * * *

  LEE WAS THRILLED at the prospect of traveling to Europe with her big sister. She later wrote, “I couldn’t imagine anything that could be more fun than a trip with Jackie, since we were both absolutely psychic about laughter and had the same sense of the ridiculous.” She “longed to see everything [Jackie] had been writing me about” in her letters home during her earlier year abroad. With Jackie as Lee’s chaperone, and armed with their stepfather’s letters of introduction to ambassadors and doyennes throughout Europe, the two young women made their way into the greater world.