Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  At the end of several hours, when asked to sign a copy of Maverick in Mauve, he asked with sparkle, “Shall I sign Louis Auchincloss? Or Florence Adele Sloane?” It was not far off the camp sense of humor Jackie herself used when she asked Loring to remove Barbara Mandrell’s Thanksgiving photo. Some part of her personality thrived on her connection to these two men, both of whom enjoyed writing about the American upper classes.

  Secrets of the Bedroom

  Didi d’Anglejan was born Mary-Sargent Ladd, into a prominent Boston family that included the descendants of the painter John Singer Sargent. Growing up, she moved in the same debutante circles that Jackie did and went to Foxcroft, where she and the rest of the girls were taught to make their beds with military precision as the hunting horns blew outside their windows. Diana Vreeland was a friend of her grandmother. She remembered Vreeland sitting her down in front of a mirror when she was very young, evaluating her critically, and telling her to hold up her chin, “like Alice in Wonderland.” In the 1950s she had success as a fashion model. She was photographed by the great photographers of that era, including Horst, Richard Avedon, and Lord Snowdon.

  In 1960 she married Jean Claude Abreu. They lived in Paris, where he was the publisher of the art magazine L’Oeil, and in Switzerland. One of the surrealist painters who did portraits of society women in that era, Jean-Claude Fourneau, painted Didi Abreu’s picture in a library with a parquet floor and an odd surrealist object in the middle distance. She kept up her contacts with American magazines after she stopped modeling, writing articles on interiors and artists for both Vogue and House & Garden. After the marriage to Abreu ended, she married a French baron, Bernard d’Anglejan-Chatillon, but she visited New York regularly, sometimes lunching with Jackie, whom she had known for decades. Jackie knew of the articles Didi had been writing on interiors and told her, “You must do a book.” This was the genesis of The Frenchwoman’s Bedroom, a big four-color book with sumptuous photographs of rooms decorated mainly for titled ladies, which Doubleday published in 1991. It was the boudoir equivalent of a Tiffany place-setting book.

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  Didi d’Anglejan said that she did not know Jackie well when they were growing up, but they saw one another in Newport and she had been invited to Jackie’s wedding to JFK. When she was young, the Irish—“this is going to sound snobbish”—were always maids in her parents’ house, so she was surprised to find all these Irish Kennedys so confident at Jackie’s wedding. JFK, “of course,” had great charm. This feeling of social miscegenation hung over both of Jackie’s marriages. D’Anglejan had spent several weekends with Onassis and recalled that his accent was so thick she could barely understand him. She didn’t think he had any charm whatsoever, and she believed that he had married Jackie to prevent the U.S. government from proceeding against his business interests. She thought that Jackie was mostly unhappy in love until she met “her Belgian,” Tempelsman, with whom she was very happy indeed.

  Her book with Jackie had its origins in a kidney ailment she had had as a child, which had confined her to her bed for long periods of time. In those immediate post–World War II years, she wrote in the preface to her book, “I dreamed of a lost and glamorous past, of coronation bed heads and baldachins, of chintz galore, of French Provincial and of the sunlight slanting through the painted shutters.” She didn’t realize that this dream would come true and that one day she would sleep in just such French bedrooms herself.

  The feeling of exile from lost and fallen grandeur was certainly a theme of Jackie’s other books. The Frenchwoman’s Bedroom includes a long essay on the historical uses of women’s bedrooms and their change over time, which would also have appealed to Jackie’s historical sense and her continuing interest in the lives of historical women. There are hints of sensuality and eroticism in The Frenchwoman’s Bedroom that echo Naveen Patnaik’s book on the courtly life in India. “The bedrooms included in the present book,” wrote d’Anglejan, “are eclectic, dramatic and sensual, from the historical to the trendy. But they all have one thing in common: they intimately reflect the secrets of the women who live in them.”

  Although Jackie told few of her secrets to d’Anglejan, their book together hints at one significant subterranean theme in Jackie’s personality. The only thing Jackie ever really revealed to d’Anglejan—and probably to her because it was a feeling they shared—was insecurity about her expatriate identity. Jackie was as interested as d’Anglejan in French history and decoration, but she was always insistent on her equal interest in American history. D’Anglejan thought this went back to Jackie’s time in the White House, when she had been accused, according to Auchincloss, of being “too damned French” at the very moment she wanted to make her mark on American history and culture. D’Anglejan thought Jackie “protested too much” about her interest in American history.

  She and Jackie talked of doing another book together before Jackie died. D’Anglejan had seen an article in House & Garden on the painter known as Balthus, who produced canvases that were controversial because of their explicit treatment of troubling and eerie girlhood sexuality. He painted many young women with cats, and these works are thematically allied to Manet’s Olympia and to Vertès’s similar image that had been in Jackie’s own collection. The article discussed Balthus and featured the interior of the Swiss chalet where he lived and worked. This gave d’Anglejan the idea to approach Balthus, whom she knew, and pitch the idea of a book about how the interiors depicted in his paintings were closely linked to the interiors of the studios and houses where he had worked. She thought her essay could be accompanied by pictures taken by a French photographer famous for his interiors, Jacques Dirand. Balthus gave her the green light, and Jackie loved the idea too. However, before she could finish the book, Balthus died, and his son protested that he wanted to do a book of his own. Doubleday’s lawyers had to get involved, and the project was dropped. Balthus was a painter of international renown, and there’s no reason to see any autobiographical interest in either d’Anglejan’s or Jackie’s fascination with his work. Their willingness to pore over his images and to treat them at book length, however, indicates how Jackie’s visual interests encompassed the dark, the weird, and the perverse as well as the beautiful.

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  In the end d’Anglejan had to give up her writing career. She edited a Christmas issue of Vogue in the late 1980s at about the same time Anna Wintour became the editor in chief, but Wintour didn’t like her work and replaced her with André Leon Talley. With Jackie, however, d’Anglejan’s relations were always smooth. They agreed when the first design for The Frenchwoman’s Bedroom came in that the designer would have to be replaced by an excellent Japanese couple, whom Jackie found herself. When d’Anglejan submitted her text to Jackie, she discovered how Jackie worked as an editor: “She encouraged, she didn’t criticize.” After Jackie’s death, d’Anglejan turned her efforts to organizing and fundraising for a museum of Franco-American friendship in Picardie, at a château called Blérancourt. If Jackie’s spirit lives on in the books she edited and among authors with whom she liked to work, then a distinctive Jackie ghost also survives in this French castle, looked after in part by a Foxcroft baroness.

  The cultural critic Christopher Hitchens has written of the way Americans often think about elegant living with a mixture of envy and disapproval: “The association between luxury and decadence, and the punishment of these by disaster, is an almost automatic one in our culture. Marie Antoinette maintains a sumptuous court while all the while the fires of resentment are being stoked to a white heat. A band plays on the Titanic as the gowns and white ties perform their elegant combinations. The nobles of St. Petersburg look down from their brilliantly lit windows and fail to see the snarling hatred that is gathering in the darkness.”

  Jackie understood that this ambivalence in American attitudes extended to their view of high culture, meaning art and literature, classical ballet and classical music, which many of her c
ontemporaries would have regarded as the exclusive preserve of those with the bank accounts and expensive educations. She also knew that her own life could all too easily be written into Hitchens’s framework: Kennedy white ties punished by an early death in Dallas; life on a yacht punished by a lymphoma that came far before a woman’s usual time to die. She refused to be so straight-faced and straitlaced about it all. Loring remembered her characteristic attempts to make him laugh just at a moment in a crowded room when laughter would have been most out of place. Her books show her enjoying all the sumptuousness that she could surround herself with in the present and not worrying about the moral disapproval that might follow when she was gone. Even in the 1960s, soon after JFK had died, she had demonstrated a remarkable ability to send up the political idealism that she had learned to share with JFK, along with her own liking for comfort and opulence. For instance, when Dorothy Schiff called on Jackie in her suite in the Carlyle in October 1964, Jackie told her that there had been a lot of requests from magazines but she had barely looked at them. They all wanted her to write about “gracious living or fashion.” Then she cried out, “I am interested in the same things Jack was interested in,” before she added, “and those things too, of course.” The sotto voce self-deprecation is Jackie being endearingly honest.

  That she was interested in the same things her first husband had been interested in, that she continued to identify herself with the political themes and personnel of his administration, are shown by a very different group of her books. These books make it clear that however much she might be criticized for it, even by friends like Schlesinger and Galbraith, she insisted that Camelot “shall not be forgot.” Despite the image we have of her, with her gentle whisper, she could be surprisingly tough about ensuring that her version of history lasted.

  CHAPTER 11

  Oh, they found Guenevere with her bold cavalier …

  LYRICS FROM THE 1960S MUSICAL CAMELOT

  It’s hard to know precisely what Jackie had in mind when she told the journalist Theodore White on a rainy night in Hyannis, only a week after her husband was murdered, that the idea of Camelot was the best way to remember her husband’s presidency after he was gone. Many historians have leapt to the conclusion that Camelot was an overly glorified vision of JFK’s presidency, not only because of his serial and compulsive adultery, but also because he actually accomplished so little during his administration of less than three years. They think of Jackie’s Camelot idea as at best the understandable idealization of a grieving widow, at worst a public relations spin that covered up much that was wrong with Kennedy’s administration.

  The much less well known version of how she wanted to remember JFK appeared in her publishing career, when she quietly brought out a series of books either that were written by persons whom she knew from the White House or that recaptured themes of JFK’s administration. The matter of Jackie and Camelot was not merely a simple conversation between her and Theodore White late in 1963. It was an ongoing concern.

  Jackie confessed in the period immediately following JFK’s death that he hadn’t liked her to be involved in politics, but after he died she was more forward than she had ever been in the White House about making sure that her view of the Kennedy presidency would be remembered by historians. Jackie might have been a retiring and apparently passive widow on the surface, but underneath she had an iron fist in her white glove and shrewd instincts about when to bring it down hard on the table. Her books show her to be a much more active and knowledgeable figure than she has been supposed to be.

  Building a Library

  Two important associations with books and libraries formed an important prelude to her life as an editor. She had begun to assemble a library for the White House when she was there, and after JFK died, her chief public activity consisted of assembling the materials necessary to construct his presidential library in Boston. In one of the revealing letters Jackie wrote to Harold Macmillan just after JFK died, she showed how she was ceasing to be a dutiful wife and assuming the role of powerful defender of her husband’s legacy. The best way she could remember her love was through history, she thought. She said it was inevitable that inferior presidents and prime ministers would destroy what had been created, but she and Macmillan could still say to one another, “Do you remember those days—how perfect they were? … I always keep thinking of Camelot—which is overly sentimental—but I know I am right. For one brief shining moment there was Camelot—and it will never be that way again—And you and Jack were the ones who made it so.”

  Earlier in the same letter she had conceded that JFK, like many men of his time, did not think she had any role to play in politics. “I have been an observer (not a participant as he did not wish his wife to be that way),” she wrote, “of the political and international scene.” With this letter, however, written to one of her husband’s most prominent international counterparts, the retired leader of America’s most important ally, she showed that she wasn’t going to be confined to observing anymore. She would be doing, and making, and building, and forgetting whatever constricted view JFK might have had about women in politics.

  The outpouring of feeling following JFK’s assassination meant that Jackie and Robert Kennedy were able to collect considerable sums to build JFK’s presidential library. Any contribution of a thousand dollars or more got a personal response from Jackie, as the library was her great passion in the period immediately following the assassination. That a bookish woman should have cared about building a library is not so surprising, but her choice of architect and her involvement in allied programs that she was endowing at Harvard also reveal her unique and individual vision of Camelot.

  What she did not do is important. She did not choose an imitation Gothic structure appropriate to the era of Camelot, or a Georgian reproduction appropriate to Harvard’s main architectural style, for the institution that tourists would visit and historians would turn to for guidance on her husband’s archive. She insisted that some of the most prominent architects working in a modernist tradition—Philip Johnson, Louis Kahn, Mies van der Rohe—be invited to advise on the construction of the building. She went to a conference to see their presentations and hear their recommendations. She made trips around the country to visit the latest examples of the work of the most prominent members of this committee of advising architects. In the end she chose the relatively unknown Chinese-born I. M. Pei, who had been educated in the United States and become an American citizen. In a picture of her at the Hyannis conference at which the Kennedys took advice from the assembly of architects, she looks visibly moved by Pei’s remarks. Her choice of Pei literally made Pei’s career. It led to important commissions to extend the National Gallery in Washington and to build the glass pyramid that has become such a distinctive feature of the Louvre in Paris. She continued to support Pei long after the Kennedy Library was built, going to the party to dedicate the new National Gallery, traveling to Paris to see his redesign of the Louvre entrance, and going to China for the opening of his Fragrant Hill Hotel in 1982. So one of the lesser-known legacies of Camelot that has to be attributed to her are these striking buildings of glass and steel, both at home and abroad, which Pei might never have been invited to design if she had not first given him her seal of approval.

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  Jackie was not only a builder. She was also someone who read carefully through the memoirs and histories written by her former husband’s staff members as they came out in the 1960s. She made detailed criticisms and asked for changes. Ted Sorensen recalled her comments on his draft of the book that became Kennedy, published in 1965: “She wanted me to delete or at least modify virtually every favorable reference I had made to Johnson.” Where Sorensen’s manuscript said that “JFK ‘learned from Lyndon Johnson,’ she said emphatically, ‘I don’t think he learned anything about campaigning from Lyndon Johnson—because Lyndon’s style always embarrassed him, especially when he sent him around the world as Vice-President.’ Wh
ere my draft mentioned ‘a deep mutual respect’ between JFK and LBJ, she commented, ‘I think you overstate this a bit—from JFK’s side. But it doesn’t matter.’ Then she crossed out that last sentence. It mattered to her,” Sorensen concluded.

  When Pei’s library was finally ready to dedicate, in 1979, she stage-managed the dedication ceremony, saying that she would never invite former president Nixon. She had always thought that President Johnson was absurdly puffed up and proud of his presidential status, but his widow had to be included in the ceremony, Jackie felt. While she and Nancy Tuckerman were in Boston for the library dedication, they traveled quietly in an inconspicuous taxi. By contrast, when a motorcade with motorcycle outriders and a limousine forced their cab to the side of the highway, Jackie looked through the window and observed with her deadpan humor, “Oh look, Nancy, there goes Lady Bird.”

  Jackie also occasionally put in her oar at Harvard, where funds had been collected to name the school of government after JFK and found the Institute of Politics. The idea was to encourage young people to enter politics with the same kind of youthful idealism that had inspired JFK. When it came to her attention in the later 1960s that Harvard was using the money to bring in retired politicians and sponsor scholarship that she thought was obscure, she wrote a letter of protest, saying that Harvard was abusing the Kennedys’ generosity. The institute was becoming a place for retired has-beens, when she had hoped for excellence and originality. Her letter of protest was never sent. Sorensen thought that she was wrong and that Harvard was doing just as it should with the money. Nevertheless, her unsent letter shows the psychology of her continuing wish to establish her version of Camelot. The Harvard institutions, she said, had been created “by the love and grief and sacrifice and effort” of those who had believed most in JFK. Working on the Kennedy Library, she added, had “helped us to overcome grief,” but she wasn’t content to leave it at that. She wanted to remain actively involved with the foundations she had set in motion and to ensure that they were making themselves felt in the political world.