The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  After the European trip, Jackie recognized her influence and power, and found subtle ways to use it, furthering her long-held ambition to celebrate the arts in the White House. The words she had written in her prizewinning essay for Vogue twenty years earlier—“If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space . . .”—were coming true. She now had the power and ability to be a kind of high arts impresario, in part due to her taste, her erudition, but also her beauty. Especially in midcentury America, before the second wave of feminism took root and flourished, beauty—and the devotion it often inspired—exerted its own kind of power. Columnist Stewart Alsop, Joe’s brother, noted, “All the men are in love with Jackie.”

  As Jackie began to recognize her own allure and purpose, Lee was losing her sense of herself, overwhelmed by the attention paid to her sister. While Jackie scaled the heights of world approval, Lee watched and waited.

  * * *

  IT SOON BECAME clear to Lee that her sister’s fame would bring them both a fishbowl existence. In the White House, Kennedy had asked Jackie to never speak in public, and never write letters to anyone outside the family. “I write the most beautiful letters to these dreadful journalists, and I show them to Jack, and he says, ‘Oh, that’s really great. Now, go tear it up,’” she ruefully confided in Gore Vidal. Her enforced reticence, however, simply added to her Garbo-like air of mystery. For both Jackie and Lee, the White House years were a golden time, but one lived like a mechanical nightingale in a gilded cage.

  Nonetheless, Jackie felt that those years brought her family closer together. “She had dreaded coming to the White House,” Schlesinger observed, “fearing the end of family and privacy. But life for herself and her husband and children was never more intense and more complete. It turned out to be the time of the greatest happiness.” And Jackie wanted to be sure Lee shared in that. It was in her power to offer Lee the grand hospitality of the White House, receiving her and Stas like visiting dignitaries, but she was powerless to affect how her sister would react to Jackie’s paramount place in the cultural life of America.

  * * *

  IN NOVEMBER OF 1961, the Kennedys gave another black-tie dinner dance in honor of Lee, and for the powerful Italian industrialist Giovanni (known as Gianni) Agnelli and his wife, Marella. Agnelli was the extremely wealthy head of the Italian car company Fiat. Lee had been a guest on their yacht many times and would host them in the twelve-room, cliff-side villa they rented in Amalfi in the summer of that year. (Lee, in fact, was rumored to have had an affair with Gianni, a handsome rogue said to have bedded the wives of many men.) Jackie and Jack had first met the Agnellis during trips to the South of France and at the Wrightsmans’ home in Palm Beach. And there was another connection: Franklin Roosevelt Jr., under secretary of commerce in Kennedy’s administration, had represented Fiat in America.

  Whereas the first dinner dance for Lee and Stas had been elegant and grand, this dinner party was far more raucous. One reason was the popularity of the Twist, the gyrating dance introduced by Chubby Checker. (In order to dance the Twist, you were supposed to imagine putting out a cigarette with your toe while drying your backside with a towel.) Oleg Cassini brought it into the White House from the Peppermint Lounge, and Jackie and Lee were both crazy about it. However, it was considered so suggestive by much of America that Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s press secretary, denied it had ever been danced at the White House. That night champagne glasses overflowed, and guests danced the Twist and partied till 4 a.m. Lyndon Johnson reportedly fell on top of another guest and slid to the floor. Franklin Roosevelt Jr., fooled by the Continental mustache, mistakenly toasted Oleg Cassini, thinking he was Stas Radziwill. This faux pas delighted Kennedy, who doubled over in laughter.

  As the evening wore down, a drunken Gore Vidal sidled over to Jackie and steadied himself by resting his arm against her back. Bobby Kennedy—who never liked Vidal—rushed in and pulled Vidal’s arm away from Jackie. Vidal followed Bobby out of the Blue Room, snarling, “Never do that again,” adding, “I’ve always thought you were a god-damned impertinent son of a bitch.” Vidal then insulted Kennedy’s good friend Lem Billings, who was also drunk, and when he spied Jack Kennedy, Vidal barked, “I’d like to wring your brother’s neck.” Jack asked Schlesinger if he could get Vidal out of the White House before more mayhem ensued.

  Schlesinger enlisted George Plimpton, the cofounder of the Paris Review, to help him escort Vidal out of the White House and to the Hotel Jefferson. They watched him “lurch into the lobby” of his hotel, and then the two men returned to the White House gala.

  After the White House dinner debacle, Jackie resolved never to have Gore Vidal in the White House again, but the entire incident would have serious repercussions for Lee fifteen years later.

  * * *

  DESPITE PROLIFERATING RUMORS of Jack Kennedy’s affairs and dalliances with other women, Jackie remained a loyal and loving wife. It was fairly expected that men of wealth and influence had mistresses and lovers outside of marriage, and wives were expected to put up with it, to some degree. It was a behavior that Black Jack Bouvier had indulged in, though when it became the subject of public scandal, Janet divorced him. That seems to have been the trade-off for a certain class of American men. Wives were supported magisterially, given social status, and their children were protected, and alpha males kept their dalliances secret.

  It was a philosophy that both Jackie and Lee knew and accepted, as daughters and wives. In their teen years, the sisters—and especially Jackie—had been fascinated by famous French courtesans such as Louise de la Vallière and the Marquise de Montespan, both mistresses, at different times, of Louis XIV. They also admired the nineteenth-century Parisian socialite Madame Récamier, famously the subject of Jacques-Louis David’s graceful neoclassical portrait of the young beauty reclining on a divan. Instead of playing with dolls, the two sisters collected information and images of celebrated Parisian courtesans.

  On one occasion, Jackie was showing a Paris Match journalist the private office used by Evelyn Lincoln, President Kennedy’s longtime secretary. One of the staff members, the twenty-year-old Priscilla Wear, nicknamed “Fiddle,” was also present. She was a coltish, pretty young woman who, like her friend and fellow staffer Jill Cowan, nicknamed “Faddle,” was wellborn—and could type! Their presence in the White House seemed to be limited to answering the phones and signing Kennedy’s autograph on pictures sent to fans. In making introductions, Jackie glanced at Priscilla and turned to the French reporter, whispering, “C’est la femme qui couche avec mon mari.” Very sophisticated, very upper class, very French.

  Jackie knew the bargain she had entered into, yet she loved her husband and felt she could bring a certain style and class to the People’s House. She took her duties as First Lady quite seriously. As Oleg Cassini observed, “Jackie wanted to do Versailles in America.” Schlesinger saw the tremendous advantage that Jackie brought to the White House. “There was nobody to touch Jackie using style as a political tool,” he observed.

  The things people had once held against her—the unconventional beauty, the un-American elegance, the taste for French clothes and French food—were suddenly no longer liabilities but assets . . . she represented all at once not a negation of her country but a possible fulfillment of it, a suggestion that America was not to be trapped forever in the bourgeois ideal, [but could achieve] a dream of civilization and beauty.

  Jackie had been a student of the role of First Lady since her early days at the Washington Times-Herald. Now, as the nation’s First Lady, she was able to use her love of history, her intelligence, her good eye for décor and objets d’art to undertake a much-needed restoration of the People’s House.

  Discovering on her arrival that the White House no longer reflected its own unique American history, having been redecorated and reimagined by the stream of presidents and their First Ladies before her, she raised the funds to restore the White Ho
use to its full glory, and spearheaded the effort to locate the actual furnishings, paintings, sculptures, and objects that had once graced the White House rooms. And when the originals could not be found, she located identical items from each period of history, based on photographic and written records. Mary Todd Lincoln, destitute after the assassination of President Lincoln, had sold the White House furniture to raise funds for her to live on. Chester A. Arthur sold wagons full of historic furnishings, and Dwight and Mamie Eisenhower redecorated the White House to give it a more contemporary look (Jackie later described the effect as looking like the lobby of a Sheraton hotel). Theodore Roosevelt filled the State Dining Room with a moose head and other trophies from his hunting expeditions. (Woodrow Wilson hated them so much that he sat with his back to the taxidermied trophies whenever he dined there.)

  Jackie formed the Fine Arts Committee, inviting historians, museum curators, decorators, and socialites to help her to restore the White House so that it truly and accurately reflected the nation’s heritage. Charles Montgomery, director of the Winterthur Museum, and collector Henry du Pont chaired a committee to locate authentic antiques from the early 1800s, as so much had been lost in the devastating fire during the War of 1812.

  One of the interior decorators invited to join the committee was Dorothy May Kinnicutt, known as Sister Parish (a childhood nickname and her married surname), whose colorful name often gave rise to misinterpretation, as when the New York Times announced, “Kennedys Pick Nun to Decorate the White House.”

  Sister Parish was an old-money WASP whose paternal grandfather had been the novelist Edith Wharton’s friend and personal physician. Her clients were mostly of her class, including, besides the Kennedys, Brooke Astor, William and Babe Paley, Betsey and Jock Whitney, and Sarah, the Duchess of York. Jackie first met Sister Parish socially and then invited her to decorate the Georgetown house she lived in with Jack Kennedy when he was still the junior senator from Massachusetts. After Kennedy’s election to the presidency in 1960, she asked Parish to redecorate a country house they leased in Virginia, called Glen Ora, before taking up residence in the White House. (Jackie lavished $10,000 on redecorating the country house, infuriating Kennedy, especially as the house was leased and had to be returned to its former style when they left.)

  A budget of $50,000 was raised for the entire redecoration project (roughly $350,000 in today’s dollars). Jackie wrote to Sister Parish:

  I want our private quarters to be heaven for us naturally, but use as much of [the Eisenhowers’] stuff as possible & buy as little new—as I want to spend lots of my budget below in the public rooms—which people will see & will do you & I proud!

  Despite her noble intentions, Jackie ended up spending the entire budget in the first two weeks on the family’s private quarters on the second floor, adding a kitchen and a dining room. Luckily, her Fine Arts Committee was adept at convincing collectors to donate many of the period pieces and furniture that, quite often, had once belonged to the White House.

  In choosing to work with Sister Parish, Jackie showed her taste for unfussy, inviting, and refreshing décor. The look became known as “American country style,” and it was hugely influential, reflected in today’s collections by Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart. As journalist Steven M. L. Aronson wrote in Architectural Digest in 1999:

  A Sister Parish room overflowed, to be sure—but buoyantly. It was romantic and whimsical but not sentimental; and, always, it was light—the rug might be Aubusson, the mirror Chippendale and the chandelier Waterford, but she undercut these “brand names” with all manner of charming distractions. Her living rooms lived . . .

  Jackie also sought advice from Jayne Wrightsman, who had been an early mentor when Jackie first arrived in Washington. Jayne and her friend the wealthy socialite and collector Bunny Mellon were helpful in Jackie’s transformation of the White House, though Jackie had to rein in their penchant for French décor. Jackie felt it incumbent to state that the Fine Arts Committee she assembled would make sure that she would not fill the White House “with French furniture, or hang modern pictures all over it and paint it whatever color we like. I don’t ‘do up’ old houses. These things aren’t just furniture. They’re history.”

  Nonetheless, when Sister Parish suddenly quit over a disagreement with the First Lady, Jackie was quick to hire French decorator Stéphane Boudin to finish the job. She had been impressed by Boudin’s restoration of Empress Josephine’s château in Paris on her official trip, and so she found a way to bring in the French influence that most pleased her sensibilities. He would end up designing the Red Room and the Blue Room of the White House, much to Sister Parish’s and Henry du Pont’s disapproval.

  John Walker, then director of the National Gallery of Art, wryly commented:

  . . . because the thought of a Frenchman doing over the White House might possibly cause some question among 100 percent Americans . . . his visits were not publicized. It is not true, as Washington gossip related, that he was carried into the White House wrapped in a rug.

  Though Jackie had ample guidance from Jayne Wrightsman, the Fine Arts Committee, Sister Parish, and Stéphane Boudin, it was clear that she—like her sister—had a genius for décor. Even the White House upholsterer, Larry Arata, noted that Jackie had “exquisite taste. She seemed to know a lot about everything whether it was materials, paintings, or anything pertaining to art.” In her taste for airy, light-filled, gracefully proportioned rooms, Jackie had much in common with Lee, though Lee went about it in a more baroque, eclectic way, using the theatrical set designer Mongiardino to achieve a similar, but much richer, effect. When it came to redecorating the White House, Jackie let history be her guide, and her goal was absolute authenticity down to the smallest detail. If Lee was after drama, Jackie was after historical accuracy.

  All of that is apparent throughout her celebrated and unprecedented White House tour, recorded by CBS on January 15, 1962, in which Jackie presented her transformation of the White House to an avid and appreciative public. The program was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, who would go on to direct Patton, starring George C. Scott, and Papillon, with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The television commentator Charles Collingwood was an able guide throughout the hour-long broadcast. Jackie—in low-heeled shoes and a red sheath with a hemline falling just below the knees—led him through the various rooms of the White House and commented both knowledgeably and charmingly on the changes and acquisitions in each room.

  Pamela Turnure, Jackie’s press secretary, was on hand to adjust the microphone that had been concealed beneath Jackie’s dress at the small of her back, because CBS “couldn’t have a technician fiddling with the First Lady’s person,” as Collingwood later observed.

  Time magazine described the broadcast in admiring tones, expressing, perhaps, a bit of surprise at Jacqueline Kennedy’s erudition. Her poise and attractiveness were already well-known, but few had suspected her intelligence and how effortlessly she seemed to have mastered the names of painters, furniture makers, major donors, and the hundreds of historical minutiae that had gone into the extensive redecoration.

  In “an expert performance,” Time reported, and “without notes or prompting,” Jackie “showed a connoisseur’s knowledge of every antique and objet d’art that came into view . . . She easily rattled off the names of bygone artists and cabinetmakers, displayed an impressive knowledge of intimate White House history.” If she was nervous, it didn’t show up on camera, but she did smoke between takes, missing the ashtray and dropping ashes on an expensively restored settee. But on camera, she smiled winningly throughout the entire room-by-room tour.

  Jackie described how the Green Room “used to be the dining room, and here Jefferson gave his famous dinners and introduced such exotic foods as macaroni, waffles, and ice cream to the United States.” She spent extra time showing off Lincoln’s bedroom, which had been lovingly restored to its former state, with the addition of a sample of the historic wallpaper from the Peters
en House, the rooming house across the street from Ford’s Theatre, where Lincoln was rushed after being shot by John Wilkes Booth, and where he died.

  What made an equally strong impression on the public, besides the scope and beauty of the restoration and Jackie’s unerring knowledge of White House history and décor, was the whispery, childlike voice in which her accomplishments and knowledge were conveyed.

  She sounded like Marilyn Monroe. She sounded like a woman who had been reared in the 1930s and ’40s who was taught to hide her intelligence and not appear threatening to men. She sounded like a woman uncomfortable with the sudden glare of the spotlight. She sounded like a woman trying to overcome an inherent shyness. As Janet had noted early on, “There’s a certain stiffness about Jackie, even shyness . . . It’s not that she’s frightened of people, but she’s not outgoing.” Nonetheless, Jackie appeared slightly flirtatious, even girlish, despite her proper equestrienne’s posture and careful enunciation of the facts she possessed. It produced an odd, slightly dizzying disconnect: historical erudition, insight, and even wit related in the voice of a shy, careful, beautiful, girlish woman.

  Norman Mailer would notice it, and he wrote about it in the July 1962 issue of Esquire, in an article titled “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy,” one of three essays comprising “The American Woman: A New Point of View.” (The other two women were Mary McCarthy, profiled by Brock Brower, and singer Brenda Lee, by Sarel Eimerl.) Mailer describes his impressions of Jackie on two different occasions. The first was meeting her at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis, among a gathering of “journalists, cameramen, magazine writers, politicians, delegations, friends and neighboring gentry, government intellectuals, family, a prince, some Massachusetts state troopers, and rednecked hard-nosed tourists patrolling outside the fence for a glimpse . . .” Also present were Lee and Stas; Arthur Schlesinger and his wife, Marian; and Pierre Salinger. Jackie among the vast Kennedy entourage struck Mailer as simply, in his condescending description, “a college girl who was nice. Nice and clean and very merry.”