The Kennedy Men

by Laurence Leamer

  That August, Jack flew over to southern France for his last few days as a single man. One evening he was in Cap d’Antibes when a blue sedan stopped. “Jack! What are you doing here?” exclaimed Gavin Welby, a British acquaintance. “We’re going to have dinner at Le Chateau at Haut-de-Cagnes. Why don’t you join us?” As Welby spoke, he nodded toward the two stunning young Swedish women he had picked up in Cannes where they had been hitchhiking.

  Jack hadn’t said whether he could make it for dinner, but he managed to arrive at the romantic restaurant high above the valley before his host and his two other guests. A few minutes later the two young women walked into the famous restaurant wearing simple dresses that set off their fresh features, which glowed with youthful health. Gunilla Von Post and Anne Marie Linder were staying in a nearby villa. Gunilla came from a distinguished old Swedish family and would never have hitchhiked if the stipend from home had not been so late in arriving.

  For the two friends, summer had a meaning that an American or an Englishman could never understand. It was short-lived and intense; a sensuous, passionate time when the sun seemed to burn all the moroseness out of the dark Scandinavian soul. For the women, it was adventure lying in the hot sand, feeling the Mediterranean sun beating on them.

  Gunilla was small and delicate with refined features and deep, melancholy eyes that suggested a Garbo-like mystery. Jack liked wellborn ladies, and there was an exquisite juxtaposition between this seemingly carefree, hitchhiking Swede and her aristocratic background. Jack had traveled enough within the upper-class European world to be able to spot a poseur immediately. Gunilla was not one of those. She knew many of the same people Jack knew. In Great Britain she had even stayed with the Earl and Lady Home, whose son William Douglas, the playwright, had once been in love with Kathleen.

  That evening, as Jack sat next to Gunilla in the banquette, once gently touching her hair, he never once mentioned Inga. But he could hardly have failed to think, at least momentarily, of his Danish lover and of how close he had come to walking with her up that unknown pathway to a free and open life. And now, days before his wedding, he sat with another beautiful young Scandinavian woman, a woman without a past, a woman who with her laughter and smiles beckoned him up that dangerous pathway again.

  Jack was never one to talk much about his family and his past, but this evening he went on and on about his father and mother and brothers and sisters. Europeans are often appalled at the way some Americans tell the most intimate details of their life to strangers and mistake these revelations for friendship. Jack’s admissions, however, were a true sign of intimacy, a mark not only of how much he was thinking about his past as his wedding day closed in on him but of how affected he was by this young woman and by these days in southern France.

  After dinner, Jack led Gunilla to Jimmy’s Bar, a popular nightclub, where the couple danced and talked some more. Jack usually considered sentimentality a weak man’s emotion. Yet this evening he suggested that they drive to Hotel du Cap Eden Roc at Cap d’Antibes, where he had spent so much time as a boy and young man. The couple sat there looking out on the Mediterranean near the very spot where Joe Jr. and Jack had dared Teddy to jump off the cliff into the water. And there he kissed Gunilla and, as she remembers it, told her, “I fell in love with you tonight.”

  This was not some tired romantic verbiage that Jack used to impress a gullible young woman. Jack was not a man to say such a thing. He was, however, in a sweetly melancholic mood that was as rare for him as were these words. It was almost a decade and a half since he had trod on this grass and had swum in the ocean below with his brothers and sisters, two of whom were now gone and one of whom was locked away.

  Jack was a U.S. Senator able to lead the discourse on the most serious problems of the age, but in his personal life he rankled at taking on all the tedious responsibilities of adulthood. He had chosen the road he would travel, but on this sweetly scented evening he stopped and looked back in the other direction and for a moment wished he could have chosen the other path.

  “I’m going back to the United States next week to get married,” Jack said suddenly. He did not have to admit that. He could have played the evening out, taking his chances at bedding Gunilla before heading back to the States, but he felt more than that. “If I met you one week before,” Jack said starkly, “I would have canceled the whole thing.”

  Jack may have believed what he was saying. But he would never have thrown over his life and commitments so cavalierly. He was speaking, however, to something more than simply the beautiful young woman sitting next to him. Gunilla represented freedom and sensuality and an exotic European world within whose pleasures a man could disappear.

  In the early morning hours, Jack drove Gunilla back to her house. “May I come in for a nightcap?” Jack asked, as Gunilla recalls. “One for the road.” Gunilla knew what he was asking and part of her wanted to invite him in. She knew instinctively that if he spent the night with her, she would never see him again.

  “You take your own road,” she said. “And good luck, my dear.” And so Jack turned around and drove back up the road he had come.

  Jackie had set the wedding for September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Auchinclosses lived in the genteel world of the Protestant upper class. Joe was openly disdainful of this aging, pretentious enclave where the residents called their mansions “cottages” and looked down their lorgnettes at déclassé tourists.

  “Their wealth is from an era gone by,” Joe told Red Fay, in a voice brimming with irritation at what he considered an insipid, declining social set. “Most of them are just keeping up a front and owe everybody. If you pulled the carpets up most likely you’d find all the dirt for the summer brushed under there, because they don’t have enough in help to keep those big places running right.”

  Jackie’s mother expected that the wedding would be a sedate, exclusive ceremony far from the vulgar flash of cameras. Joe flew down to Newport to disabuse Mrs. Auchincloss of that illusion and to inform her that over one thousand guests would be invited, including most of the U.S. Senate. Gliding down the steps, his face was alight with benevolent charm, his hand in his pocket. As Jackie saw her future father-in-law there, she thought, “Oh Mummy, you don’t have a chance.”

  Jackie appreciated Joe’s stylish nature. She admired his Sulka lounging clothes and the light blue gabardine suit he wore when he rode off to Hialeah in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce. She saw too that his manners were as elegant as his clothes, a subtle rendering of social nuance. His charm was not a dandy’s plaything, but a device he used to extract what he wanted. “When he turned on his charm to gain what he wanted, it was great to watch,” she recalled.

  Thirty-six-year-old Jack was full of fitful anxiety over his approaching wedding day, concerned most notably over the political cost of his marriage. At a stag party at the Parker House in Boston for many of his cronies, he worried over the price he might pay for no longer being the golden bachelor.

  “I was seated next to him on his right, and he was kind of shy,” recalled John Droney, a veteran who had worked in his campaigns since 1946. “He asked if I thought he was doing the right thing and what will the women think. I said, ‘Oh, you are doing the right thing, because I have a little girl and you’ll get a lot of pleasure in this thing.’”

  By the time the wedding weekend arrived, Jack no longer was making such public musings. “Well, the first thing you have to do, Jack,” Red whispered, leaning toward his friend at the prewedding dinner at the Newport Clambake Club, “is you’ve got to make a toast to the bride, and you’ve got to throw that glass in the fireplace.”

  Jack looked at the superb crystal glass as if divining the future there. His future mother-in-law was a woman of shameless social ambition, narrow snobbishness, and silly garrulousness. Hughie, Jackie’s stepfather, was a man who mistook cheapness for frugality, humbug for humility. Jack sensed that once he scratched their gold veneer he would find little but chintz. Here was
an exquisite opportunity to stick it to the Auchinclosses while staying protected behind the shield of civility and a countenance aglow with innocence.

  “To my future bride, Jacqueline Bouvier,” Jack said as the guests joined him in the toast. “Everybody throw your glasses in the fireplace.”

  As the precious crystal shattered against the stone fireplace, Mrs. Auchincloss’s countenance took on an ashen gray pallor, but the lady was nothing if not game. She motioned to the waiters to bring new glasses; after setting the crystal down in front of the guests, they filled them anew.

  Jack rose again. “I realize this is not the custom, but the love that I have for Jacqueline Bouvier overcomes me,” he said as he proposed a second toast to his beautiful young bride. “And now, everybody throw your glasses in the fireplace.”

  The guests had become adept at this custom by now, and they hurled the crystal with abandon toward a fireplace alive with shards of glass. Mrs. Auchincloss ordered more glasses, but this time they were cheap water glasses. The evening moved on, since Jack was not about to toast his elegant Jacqueline with anything less than crystal.

  This was an evening more for jocular comments than sentimental musings, and when it came time for twenty-four-year-old Jackie to talk, she held up a postcard from Bermuda with a picture of a red hibiscus that Jack had sent her after his election. She read the words on the back—” Wish you were here. Jack”—and told the audience that during their courtship, this was the only correspondence that Jack had ever sent.

  The audience roared with laughter, but the reality was that Jack was less than deeply solicitous of his high-strung young bride. For all of his natural charm, he was full of the high selfishness of an ambitious politician, eager to use every public moment to advance himself. That included even his wedding.

  Jackie had wanted an intimate ceremony with guests who knew and cared for them, not the massive spectacle that the Kennedys had made of what after all was her wedding. There were 750 guests, most of whom she did not know. Worst of all, she abhorred the hordes of journalists, the photographers with the snouts of their cameras pointing at her, the reporters pressing forward in sweaty earnestness. At the church, she suffered a further humiliation when her father was too drunk to give her away.

  After the couple had said their wedding vows at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and stepped outside on the steps, a scene took place that was a harbinger of what much of their public life would be like. First stood rows of photographers, like a media Praetorian Guard, all pointing their cameras up the steps. And across the street, behind a police barricade, stood over three thousand onlookers, clapping, whistling, and shouting, pushing forward so fervently that they knocked over the barricades and surged forward, a human tide. Jack was amused at the circus, and he surely must have realized that by marrying, he had not lost his appeal that so transcended politics but perhaps had enhanced it.

  Jack was not a man for a lengthy honeymoon filled with little but hand-holding and vows of devotion. The newlyweds went to Acapulco, where Jack caught a swordfish. From Mexico, the couple spent some quiet days in Los Angeles and then traveled on to Pebble Beach to play golf with Red Fay before driving two hours north to San Francisco with Red and his wife, Anita.

  Jack seemed not to care that the Fays were not necessarily Jackie’s kind of people, and definitely not participants in her kind of honeymoon. As much as Fay enjoyed his best friend, even he saw that this was no longer “the kind of honeymoon any young bride anticipates.”

  Jack, however, had apparently had enough of romantic solitude and wanted his own life back. He even may have suggested that Jackie go home early, an idea that his bride declined. Nonetheless, Jackie was so smitten with her husband that she gladly accepted whatever else Jack wanted, even if it meant on the last day of their honeymoon going off with Anita while Jack and Red attended a San Francisco Forty-niners football game.

  Jackie read literature and poetry not as a pallid diversion but as life’s vision written big and clear, and she saw that men were great in their failings too. She saw her Jack as she might a hero in an epic poem, as a grand romantic figure living a transcendent life. Like Inga before her, she sensed that there were two directions that Jack could travel, toward personal fulfillment or up that difficult path toward a place in history. She saw where Jack was heading when in California he admitted to her that he wanted to be president. Afterward she wrote a poem to Jack containing the lines:

  He would find love

  He would never find peace

  For he must go seeking

  The Golden Fleece.

  16

  Aristocratic Instincts

  Jack’s bride was not simply the youngest and most beautiful of the Senate wives, but also one of the most dutiful. She turned her sloppily attired husband into a fashion plate and brought him lunch that he could digest on his nervous stomach. When the couple had a dinner party in their rented house in Georgetown, Jackie led Jack and his guests into the dining room for a meal full of dishes exotic to the American palate.

  Jack’s taste in food went to meat as long as it was steak not gussied up with silly sauces. Jackie, however, believed that style was not something that one wore only on festive occasions. For Jack, it was an exceedingly expensive lesson, and the food bills were the least of it.

  Jackie returned one day with a spectacular find in eighteenth-century French chairs for the living room. Jack could hardly contain his displeasure before his old friend David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech. “I don’t know why!” he fumed. “What’s the point of spending all this money? I mean a chair is a chair and it’s perfectly good the chair I’m sitting in—what’s the point of all this fancy stuff?” The point of all this fancy stuff, as Jack took a number of years to realize, was that it impressed the hoi polloi enormously and brought him a cachet for high style that until then he neither possessed nor valued.

  During the first winter of their marriage, Jackie worked on a private little tome for her half-sister, Janet Auchincloss, called A Book for Janet: In Case You Are Ever Thinking of Getting Married This Is a Story to Tell You What It’s Like. The book was a wistful romantic account full of gentle caricatures of the couple—for instance, Jackie looking to see whether a flag flew over the Senate chambers, signaling that her Jack was off doing the nation’s business. And there was a drawing of a slightly risqué Jack in bare hairy legs saying: “I demand my marital rights.” It was in some ways like a children’s book yet in its way was a sophisticated fantasy.

  Charley Bartlett observed a marriage so different from the one portrayed in Jackie’s book that he at times regretted that he had ever introduced the couple. Bartlett felt that this exquisite young woman who had talked so fervently of art and culture had become a dispirited wife who sought in things what she could not find in marriage. He noticed “a sad look in her eyes.” One day the same woman who was writing a fantasy about her marriage got into her car and drove over to the Walter Reed Antiques Shop on Georgia Avenue to sell many of her wedding gifts.

  Jackie grew gloomy and withdrawn, and around Jack that was simply unacceptable. “Jack went crazy when someone sulked,” said Lem Billings. “He couldn’t stand the tension, and he’d go absolutely crazy trying to contrive ways to restore a friendly atmosphere. Jackie saw this almost immediately and used her sulks masterfully.”

  Jack, who considered faithfulness a fool’s virtue, was continuing with his affairs. Like his father, Jack had learned to cloak his marital deceits in an elaborate garb of euphemism. He had an unlikely admirer of his adulterous trysts in his father-in-law, Jack Bouvier, who continued to cut his own wide swath through the female population. “Miss New Zealand isn’t too bad, and it might be fun to run into her again some time,” he wrote Jack, like a gourmet discussing meals he has eaten. “I would like to see that English nurse of yester-year, she of my twenty minute romance, which you and your gang so rudely but effectively interrupted. All this providing … I still have the ‘wherewithal.’”

&
nbsp; In the summer of 1954, while his bride of less than a year was in Europe, Jack traveled up to Northeast Harbor, Maine, for a house party. Jack’s host was an old friend, Langdon P. Marvin Jr., who Life magazine had dubbed “Harvard’s outstanding [1941] graduate,” endowed with “name, wealth and brains.” The godson of FDR, Marvin had played an important role in the war managing the air shipment of strategic imports. After the war, Marvin became an important public advocate of air transportation, but he enjoyed his pleasures as much as Jack. Marvin presumably knew that his dissembling this weekend was not just for Jackie but also for a public that would not look kindly on this most blessed of married men having a romp among the women whom Marvin had so graciously assembled.

  Jack was on crutches, and he should have been thinking of anything but embellishing his sexual reputation. This weekend was little more than a consolation prize. Since March he had been writing Gunilla seeking to set up a rendezvous with her in the summer. His letter that month was doubly circumspect. He subtly reminded Gunilla of their meeting as if she might have forgotten (“Do you remember our dinner and evening together this summer at Antibes and Cagnes?”). As his return address, he gave his aide Ted Reardon’s Georgetown home.

  When Gunilla responded positively to his entreaties, Jack aggressively raised the stakes. He told her that he was willing to come to Sweden to meet her in August, but that was not his preference. “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks—with you as crew,” Jack wrote her. Gunilla tentatively agreed to see him in Paris, but he kept pushing her to go off on a private cruise. He was so sick, however, that in September 1954 he had to cable her: LEG INJURED AND HOSPITALIZED TRIP POSTPONED WILL WRITE MANY REGRETS JOHN.