In marrying Rose Fitzgerald, the beloved oldest daughter of John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the mayor of Boston, Joseph found the ideal wife. A devout Catholic, Rose was silent, devoted to the family name, and fiercely loyal. Just as Joseph would set the stage for his sons’ future behavior, it was Rose who would act as an example of how Jackie, Ethel, and Joan were supposed to behave.
As soon as he and Rose were married, Joseph started seeing other women, and in spite of his own Catholic background, he flaunted his affairs in front of his entire family. Rose immediately started having babies—almost one after the other. A stoic woman, she believed in strict discipline for her children and ran her household as if it were an army barracks. She would have only limited contact with her children, however. Each time a new child was born, Rose would hire another nanny.
Rose, who went to church every morning and allowed sexual relations with her husband only for childbearing purposes, at first tried to curb Joseph’s unfaithfulness. Early in their marriage, she became dismayed by her husband’s philandering and returned to the open arms of her parents (leaving her three children with their nannies). Eventually, though, she went back to Joseph and learned to ignore as best she could his indiscretions.
As Mrs. Joseph Patrick Kennedy, Rose had problems other than her husband’s unfaithfulness, such as the deaths of two of her children and the mental retardation of another. Twenty-nine-year-old Joseph Patrick Jr. died when his plane exploded during war maneuvers in 1944. Twenty-eight-year-old Kathleen (nicknamed “Kick”), widow of the Marquis of Hartington who, after her husband was killed in action and over her mother’s heated objections, began an affair with the Protestant and already-married British Earl Peter Fitzwilliam, died with him in yet another plane mishap in 1948.
Rose and Joseph’s oldest daughter, Rose Marie, known as “Rosemary,” had been born retarded, perhaps as a result of a lack of oxygen. For years, Rose denied anything was wrong. When she finally had her daughter tested, she learned that Rosemary had the mental capacity of a seven- to nine-year-old. In 1949, after doctors performed a lobotomy on her, Rosemary was institutionalized. At the time of this writing, she is eighty-one years old.
Joseph’s womanizing gradually became more brazen. In 1928 he began an almost public affair with screen actress Gloria Swanson. Rose knew what was going on between them, yet she chose to convey to the world that she believed the beautiful actress was an important business associate of her loving and entrepreneurial husband. Later, Gloria would say that Rose was either “a fool or a saint.”
Rose’s modus operandi throughout her marriage was simple: If one doesn’t see it, one doesn’t have to deal with it. Her way of coping with a humiliating situation was to pretend that it was not occurring, or to blame the press for writing about it.
“[I] began to accept the idea that gossip and slander and denunciation and even vilification are part of the price one pays for being in public life,” she said in her memoir, A Time to Remember, which was actually written by Robert Coughlin with her approval. “But neither Ethel nor Jackie nor Joan had been brought up in a political atmosphere. I made sure to warn them in advance what they were in for: that they might be hearing and reading all sorts of scandalous gossip and accusations about members of our family, about their husbands, and for that matter about themselves, and eventually even about their children; that they should understand this and be prepared from the very beginning, otherwise, they might be very unhappy.”
It is said that the Kennedy sons admired the way their mother turned a blind eye to her husband’s infidelities. The sons viewed their mother’s determination to keep her marriage together as a confirmation of her great strength and resolve, and also as her way of respecting her husband’s desire to do just as he pleased.
Jack’s Affair with Marilyn
Jackie Kennedy may not have felt threatened by most of the women with whom her husband became involved, but Marilyn Monroe was another matter. In terms of her private life, at least based on the best evidence we have, nothing bothered Jackie more than her husband’s assignations with Marilyn.
Even today, no one seems sure when Jack’s affair with Marilyn began. Some have said that he had been introduced to her by his sister Pat and her husband, Peter Lawford, in 1955, and the affair commenced immediately. Others insist the two met a year earlier.
At the time, Marilyn Monroe was a personality as famous and, in her own way, as prominent as John F. Kennedy. In the show business world there was as much public interest and scrutiny about the life of the blonde movie star as there was in the political arena about the Kennedys. As a result there was a very real possibility that the affair could become public knowledge and that the scandal could destroy the careers of everyone involved. “Yes, there was concern,” says Peter Summers, one of Kennedy’s political advisers with the job of handling relations with the TV networks during the 1960 campaign. “And Marilyn was spoken to very frankly about it. The President was spoken to very frankly about it.”
“There were actually some good times with Marilyn,” recalls George Smathers. “Jack, Marilyn, I, and other friends would all get aboard the Honey Fitz and go sailing down the Potomac, and then turn around and come back. That would get you back at around eleven-thirty at night, just in time to get Jack to bed. This kind of thing went on frequently. Marilyn felt a part of the family, I think.”
In the summer of 1961, Marilyn apparently thought it would be interesting to wangle a formal White House invitation. Jackie was in the midst of planning a state dinner to be held in honor of Pakistan’s President Mohammed Ayub Khan at George Washington’s Virginia estate, Mount Vernon, just outside of the capital. Marilyn called Jack to tell him she wanted to attend, but he did not return her telephone call. Bobby, who didn’t really know Marilyn at this particular time, intercepted a message from her. When he mentioned it to Ethel, Ethel alerted Jackie. Jackie pondered the notion of inviting Marilyn, wondering aloud if perhaps Jack “should be forced to face his little mistakes.” In the end, however, it was decided not to extend an invitation to the actress.
Jackie had an eye toward history that seemed to overshadow any personal matters. According to those who knew her best, she was concerned—for her husband, her children, and herself—that Jack’s relationship with Marilyn might be a political liability. “What would happen if news of the affair leaked out before the presidential election in 1964?” asked George Smathers rhetorically. “Sure, she was bothered by the prospect.” Apparently, Jackie actually felt great pity for Marilyn and thought her husband was acting irresponsibly by engaging in an affair with a woman who clearly could not control herself. “She’s a suicide waiting to happen,” Jackie said of Marilyn.
One woman who worked for Jackie throughout her time at the White House and for many years afterward (and who does not wish to be identified) overheard a conversation between Jack and Jackie regarding Marilyn Monroe. She recalls, “I was walking through the East Wing, and the two of them were having a discussion. I overheard just a piece of it, but enough to let me know there was trouble.”
She reports that Jackie said to Jack, “I want you to stop it. I don’t like it one bit, Jack. This one is different. This one worries me. She’s trouble.” She adds that Jackie used graphic language, which she never used unless she was upset. “She wanted Jack to knock it off with Marilyn,” says the source, “leave her alone, have some pity on her.”
Jack denied being anything more than Marilyn’s friend. “Sure,” he told his wife. “If you want me to stop being friends with her, that’s no problem.”
In the era of the late 1950s and 1960s the public was completely unaware of what was going on with the President and the movie star. Today, Jack would never get away with such an affair, nor with his other womanizing. The impeachment of President Bill Clinton and the publicity surrounding his personal affairs illustrates that it’s a different America today, and the media is different as well. These days, the public consequences of illicit behavior
in the White House can be grave. As Jack’s own son, the late John Kennedy, Jr., said in 1998, “Hellish torment awaits those who mix an undisciplined libido with a political career.”
Recalls Helen Thomas, “In the sixties, it was a different time, and you had certain unspoken agreements. It wasn’t like today…. The media is different, more invasive now. JFK and Marilyn would be in all the papers today, on all the tabloid shows. The affair would be huge news. But back then, we were more polite.”
Michael Selsman, Marilyn’s press agent at the time through the Arthur Jacobs Agency, recalls a time when members of the press had a covenant not only with the White House but with publicists and one another to protect the highest office in the land. Selsman says, “Reporters knew where to draw the line, and it was a matter of doing business. What I would do, as a publicist, was trade ‘exclusives’ about my other clients in order to keep the Marilyn-JFK stories quiet and everyone in the press happy. No one in the media ever caused a problem. You really didn’t attack a sitting president back then with his personal life, only his politics.”
“We were respectful of the First Lady,” concludes James Bacon, a veteran reporter working in Hollywood at the time and a good friend of the Kennedys and Monroe. “You wouldn’t have written about such a thing just out of respect for Jackie, never mind what he was doing.”
Jackie’s Expensive Diversion
“Okay, now how many more pieces are we looking at?” Jackie Kennedy asked a young White House curator, Jim Ketchum. America’s glamorous First Lady was sitting cross-legged on top of a two-drawer file cabinet, a clipboard in one hand, a pen in the other. In tight blue jeans and a white sweatshirt, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail with a white bow, she was the picture of wholesome perfection—including the giant ink blotch on her left cheek. She and Ketchum were in the Broadcast Room of the White House, which was used for storage those days. They were keeping track of some invaluable antiques being returned to the White House after an exhibition in New Jersey.
“There’s a lot left, Mrs. Kennedy,” Ketchum answered, as he too checked the inventory sheet. “Looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”
“Really?” Jackie said, looking up from her list, a surprised expression on her face. “Well, I have things to do. I have a state dinner to plan. Come with me. We don’t have all day.”
“She then jumped down off the cabinet, walked out to the truck, and for the next hour, helped six rather amazed movers carry valuable pieces of furniture into the White House storage area,” recalls Ketchum, a smile on his face at the memory even now, so many decades later. “Later one of the guys asked me, ‘Who was that lady?’ When I said, ‘The First Lady,’ his jaw slackened. I don’t think we who were involved in White House restoration ever saw her as the symbol of pristine elegance that the rest of the country saw,” he concluded. “To us, she was Mrs. Kennedy, the go-getter. Jackie, the kid.”
Ketchum recalls, “That wasn’t the only time she ever went out there and unloaded a truck with the boys. It was a regular routine for Jackie, who was the most energetic and smartest person I have ever worked for. And holding it all together was a wild sense of humor which played a vital role, I think, in her surviving some of the slings and arrows that she had to suffer during the White House years. I remember that she had dictated a letter saying that she wanted to help the tourists understand the significance of some of the pieces in the state rooms. So to achieve that, she said in her memo, she wanted to place ‘tastefully designed vitrines’ in the East Wing, which would hold pamphlets and that sort of thing. Her handwriting was sometimes hard to read, and the architect wrote her back saying that he was confused. Did she really want him to come up with ‘tastefully designed latrines’ for the East Wing? Jackie couldn’t stop laughing when she got that letter. She showed it to everyone she came in contact with for days.
“She loved her work,” Ketchum adds, “and didn’t take herself that seriously, and loved it if you didn’t take yourself that seriously, either. Whatever was going on in her personal life—and I have no idea what that was because she never, ever presented it to me—she lived her own life in the White House, and in a fulfilling way.”
She realized early on that she owed it to herself to not compromise her goals, and to tend her own needs as well as those of her children. So, even though in the public consciousness she and Jack were inseparable, she actually built a life for herself separate and apart from her husband’s. Bobby Kennedy, who always seemed to have a bit of a crush on his sister-in-law, recognized as much when, in 1961, he said to writer Laura Bergquist Knebel, “Jackie has always kept her own identity. That’s important in a woman. She’s poetic, whimsical, provocative, independent, and yet very feminine. What husband wants to come home at night and talk to another version of himself? Jack knows she’ll never greet him with ‘What’s new in Laos?’ ”
Larry Newman, who joined the Secret Service in 1960 and in the fall of 1961 was promoted to presidential detail, was assigned to Jackie along with Clint Hill. Because the essence of his job had to do with observing Jackie’s activities, he can say with authority, “The way she was validated my wanting to protect her…. There was a sadness there… but she made it work somehow. She definitely channeled her energy and any frustration she had into special projects.”
“She survived because of the interests she had,” observed Dorothy Tubridy, a Kennedy family friend from Ireland, “in ballet and art and those kinds of things that the Kennedy sisters weren’t particularly interested in. She had her own life, she made her own interests, and she created this atmosphere about herself. I think it helped.”
One of the accomplishments for which Jackie Kennedy will always be highly regarded was her restoration and refurbishing of the White House. The well-traveled Jackie had always considered European culture the most artistic in terms of style and aesthetics, but as First Lady she refocused her devotion for “the finer things” in her native land. In the process of refurbishing the White House, she would learn a great deal about American history and art, and she passed that knowledge on to millions of citizens. Comments Jackie made to her sister-in-law Joan during a luncheon in Washington, when Joan complained about Ted’s philandering, would seem to indicate that Jackie had other motives for her work at the White House. She told Joan that she would “find something for you to do at the White House. That’ll keep you busy. You won’t give Teddy a second thought.”
“I think Jackie wanted to make her mark, keep herself busy,” said Mary Barelli Gallagher, who was Jackie’s personal secretary. “Any woman in her circumstances would understand. I think she needed an outlet for whatever that natural female instinct is to put her stamp on things.”
As has been widely reported, Jackie’s first reaction, when Mamie Eisenhower took her on a tour, to the presidential quarters had been one of utter disbelief. She could not understand why the most important family in the country should have to reside in such a cold and dreary place.
With her newfound position, Jackie had the power to make changes happen, and happen quickly. There were 132 rooms in the White House at this time, and during Jack and Jackie’s stay there, their second-floor living quarters consisted of a living room, kitchen, dining area, and five bedrooms. The Secret Service was not permitted in the family’s quarters so as not to intrude upon their privacy, and also so that the living area would not look like an official governmental office but like a home.
First, Jackie persuaded Congress to designate the White House a national museum, thus guaranteeing the necessary funding to do whatever she wanted to do with it and also to ensure that her work there would be preserved for future generations. Of course, her purpose would prove to be twofold: She would not only be able to indulge her expensive tastes in antiques and other furnishings, she would also be doing something historically relevant for the White House. By refurbishing the presidential quarters, she would be redesigning her own personal space in a tasteful, elegant way that she and her family co
uld enjoy for years to come.
With typical determination and zeal, Jackie thrust herself full-speed into the project. She used her time while she was recovering from John’s birth to study the history of the White House and its decor. Then she set her plan into action. “Everything in the White House must have a reason for being there,” Jackie declared. “It would be sacrilege merely to redecorate—a word I hate. It must be restored. And that has nothing to do with decoration. That is a question of scholarship.”
Since some of the rooms cost as much as $250,000 to restore, Jackie had to rely on the generosity of the multimillionaire members of her restoration committee to underwrite the costs. She became an expert at charming the heads of corporations into donating things she wanted for the White House: carpets, fabrics, chairs. While the donor got the honor of supplying a small piece of history to the Kennedy White House, Jackie got those antique wing chairs she wanted so badly.
Using her charm, Jackie managed to coax some of her many socialite friends into donating valuable art to the White House collection. She secured over 160 new paintings to adorn the White House walls.
Along with soliciting treasures from outside sources, Jackie also thoroughly explored the White House basement and storage facilities. Her treasure hunts uncovered Lincoln’s china, a Bellange pier table, and President Monroe’s gold and silver flatware. So focused was she on her work that she once completely ignored Martin Luther King, Jr., in an elevator because she had just learned of the existence of a certain antique chair in the White House basement.
While it may seem to minimize the importance of Jackie’s work, the fact—at least according to those who knew her best—is that shopping and buying had always been a great ego fortifier for Jackie Kennedy. Even Jackie herself said, “I think that shopping to give yourself a lift is a valuable form of do-it-yourself therapy.”
Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot Page 12