Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Both of Jackie’s predecessors had embraced the official activities of the First Lady: obligatory functions with congressional wives and members of ladies’ clubs. As a general’s wife, Mamie Eisenhower had been particularly comfortable with large-scale formal entertaining, and had filled her spare time with TV soap operas and card games with friends. Bess Truman had defined herself in deliberate contrast to the politically active and opinionated Eleanor Roosevelt, saying “a woman’s place in public is to sit beside her husband, be silent, and be sure her hat is on straight.” Yet Bess also went home to Independence, Missouri, for months at a time and famously gave no interviews to the press—not even in writing. She was prickly but gracious, and emphatically set in her ways.

  Bess Truman was the First Lady Jackie most admired, mainly because “she kept her family together in the White House regardless of the limelight that suddenly hits a President.” But Bess also set a precedent for Jackie to go her own way—an approach even Janet Auchincloss applauded, noting that “it is very silly to try to behave as you think people expect you to, because then you become simply a colorless creature.”

  In her first weeks in the White House, Jackie spent time “organizing things as well as Field Marshal Rommel ever did” so she would have the “unfettered” life she preferred. The key to her success was finding the right people to deal with her unwanted chores, giving good direction, and then providing “overall unified supervision.” The whole structure, Jackie told Bill Walton, showed her understanding of “the use of power that Joe Alsop used to lecture me about.”

  From the outset Jackie wanted to bring her oldest friend, Nancy Tuckerman, into the White House. Brunette and blue eyed but slightly mousy in both appearance and temperament, “Tucky” was to Jackie what Lem was to Jack: fiercely loyal and dazzled by Jackie’s “charismatic presence.” Like Jackie, Tuckerman was a product of Manhattan and Southampton society, where she learned to play “all the accepted games competently.” They had met at the Chapin School as nine-year-olds, when Jackie was known as much for her “distinctive looks and magnificent thick braids” as for her naughtiness.

  Jackie and Tucky parted company when Jackie moved to Washington after her mother’s remarriage, but the girls were reunited at Farmington, where they roomed together and formed what Tuckerman described as “a special bond of friendship.” “Nancy knew everything,” said Janet Felton Cooper, a friend of both women since childhood. “She knew all Jackie’s feelings. There wouldn’t have been anybody else but Nancy she would share that with.” Quiet and somewhat withdrawn, Tuckerman was attracted to Jackie’s “intelligence, wit, and sense of the ridiculous,” she recalled. “You never could be bored when you were with Jackie, because you never knew quite what to expect from her.”

  Jackie was the provocateur, and Nancy the appreciative audience. At Farmington they would sneak off with a radio and cigarettes in a buggy drawn by Jackie’s horse Donny. When Jackie decided to teach Nancy to ride—against school regulations—“she had me walk under Donny’s belly 20 times a day,” recalled Tuckerman, “to get over my fear of horses.” They remained close in college and through the round of debutante balls and house parties as well as Jackie’s marriage. When the Kennedy administration began, Tuckerman was working in New York as a travel agent. Jackie asked her to help with the White House restoration, but Tuckerman said she was happy where she was and couldn’t leave. Jackie considered Nancy’s response a temporary setback and continued to look for a suitable position.

  It fell to Tish Baldrige to take on the most important of the First Lady’s tasks. But Jackie also credited herself with having managed to “diabolically figure out” that Pam Turnure would be someone “who answers every question exactly as I would . . . so we don’t even communicate for weeks on end.” In drawing this velvet curtain across her life, Jackie gave explicit instructions to Turnure and never abandoned them during her tenure.

  She told Turnure she had been chosen “for the very reason that you haven’t had previous press experience” and for her “sense and good taste,” unlike the “tub-thumping . . . highpowered girl” recommended by Salinger. She wanted Turnure to be “a buffer”—not to publicize but to “shield our privacy.” Sensing that “you are rather like me,” Jackie expected Turnure to be “fairly anonymous” and avoid interviews as well as stray comments in her private life. The credo would be “minimum information given with maximum politeness.” Jackie left it to Turnure to explain away a promised press conference. “Just tell them it won’t be for awhile,” said Jackie, adding, “take lots of vitamins poor Pam.”

  In her new role, Jackie was able to impose her urbane sensibility on the national consciousness—serving as a model as well as a catalyst. As Diana Vreeland wrote, “Jackie Kennedy put a little style into the White House, and into being First Lady of the land, and suddenly ‘good taste’ became good taste. Before the Kennedys ‘good taste’ was never the point of modern America at all.”

  The White House restoration was the most obvious symbol of Jackie’s reinvented role—“the stage on which the drama of the Kennedy Administration was played.” Jackie had decided that the “President’s House” would focus on 1802, when the White House was completed during Jefferson’s presidency. She was enchanted by the Francophile third president because he “had such wonderful taste and selected perfectly beautiful furniture. But the sad thing was that the War of 1812 came along and then everything was burned.”

  Obtaining high-quality antiques, art, and accessories was paramount, and Jackie moved quickly to assemble a committee of wealthy collectors to help her—the Fine Arts Committee for the White House. Jackie’s most important decision was to appoint eighty-year-old Henry Francis du Pont as chairman of the group—the suggestion of Wilmarth Sheldon “Lefty” Lewis, a noted collector of rare books and manuscripts who was married to Uncle Hughdie’s sister Annie. The Lewises lived in Farmington and had been intellectual mentors to Jackie when she was at Miss Porter’s. Lewis was close to du Pont, and a trustee of Winterthur, the thousand-acre du Pont estate in Delaware whose mansion had been turned into a museum with more than 175 rooms of Americana—the finest collection in the nation. The involvement of a prestigious connoisseur such as du Pont conferred instant legitimacy on Jackie’s project.

  Du Pont was shy and slightly deaf, but he didn’t hesitate to “snap the whip,” said Janet Felton Cooper, who served as secretary to the Fine Arts Committee. Jackie’s aides had to meticulously plan his visits from the minute he arrived in what he called “my cozy little Rolls.” “He would leave and we would have our tongues hanging out,” said Cooper. Du Pont initially agreed with Jackie’s stylistic focus on the grounds that the decorative arts at the turn of the nineteenth century “reflect so eloquently the social, political and economic aspirations of the new, free country.” He also concurred with her notion of making the White House “a symbol of cultural as well as political leadership.” But after Life magazine weighed in with a critical editorial titled “Forward to 1802,” Jackie began to sense that her approach was too confining.

  Du Pont enlisted two scholars, Julian Boyd and Lyman Butterfield, to redefine the purpose of the restoration. They warned that a single style would be “monotonous” and recommended instead that the “present living character of the White House” would be better served by a selection of periods from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries. Jackie embraced the new direction, and her collaboration with du Pont began in earnest. His letters “would come flying in 4 or 5 a week” and he would awaken her with phone calls at 7:45 a.m., when she “would have to pretend to be alert.” Over nearly three years, they would exchange more than a hundred letters—always addressed to “Mrs. Kennedy” and “Mr. du Pont”—about questions of aesthetics and historical accuracy.

  Despite their fifty-year age difference and their strongly held views, Jackie and du Pont communicated comfortably. His tone was invariably tactful and courtly, while hers was more outspoken and occasionally fr
etful: “That hall was getting so on my nerves I put anything decent I could find in it. It looks like a rather shabby shoproom now—but at least not like a hotel lobby.”

  Their Fine Arts Committee for the White House was not the formal organization it appeared to be: “purely a creation of my friends,” Jackie said later, “and some people I did not know but whom I thought . . . would give donations!! We had about 2 meetings the whole time & I did all the work myself” one-on-one with each member. Jackie admitted she couldn’t stand “ladies committee meetings” because she was too “autocratic.”

  “Jackie had everyone’s number very well,” said Janet Cooper. “Her cause was so important to her, and she knew how to go after the very wealthy.” A New York doctor recounted how Jackie “talked with me for hours, showing me how sad and forlorn various White House rooms looked. She never once asked me to do anything about it, never asked me to give her anything. But when I left, I found myself promising her a mirror for which I had turned down a $20,000 offer.”

  Jackie would eventually pull in more than $1.5 million in three years (approximately $9 million at today’s values), and she also obtained gifts of specific furnishings and artwork, including priceless portraits of Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Jackson, as well as a Thomas Jefferson by Rembrandt Peale. The Peale was her favorite, because it embodied “everything Jefferson was . . . aristocrat, revolutionary statesman, artist, skeptic and idealist, compassionate but aloof . . . The spirit of the 18th century is in Jefferson’s face.”

  The Jefferson portrait meant even more because the donor was Rachel “Bunny” Mellon, one of Jackie’s two close friends who served on her Fine Arts Committee. Bunny and her billionaire husband, Paul Mellon—renowned art collector, philanthropist, and thoroughbred breeder—were the twentieth-century equivalent of Edith Wharton’s van der Luydens, who “stood above all of them” and “faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight”: shy and gentle, the ultimate in discernment, seldom seen on the party circuit. “The Mellons didn’t have to inhabit anyone else’s world,” said Oatsie Leiter, a prominent hostess in Washington and Newport. “Everyone had to come to them.” By 1961, Paul and Bunny Mellon owned seven properties—in Upperville, Virginia; New York City; Osterville on Cape Cod; Washington (two brick Georgian Revival homes side by side, one of which held only an art collection); Paris; and Antigua—employing more than 250 people, as well as a private jet decorated with works by Braque, Klee, and Dufy.

  Bunny and Jackie were bound by background and deep affinities. The daughter of Gerard Lambert of the pharmaceutical family (“the man who used to own Listerine,” Rose Kennedy once said after a golf game with him at Seminole), Bunny was an heiress who had lived at Carter Hall, an eighteenth-century columned mansion on a large plantation in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley—a house “where girls didn’t go to college.” She was educated at Foxcroft, a southern version of Farmington. She had a pretty, fine-featured face kept defiantly unadorned, and she wore classic clothes—as well as outfits for gardening—created by Jackie’s favorite designer, Hubert de Givenchy. “Bunny was kind of a star with absolutely faultless good taste,” said the Duchess of Devonshire. “She lived in her own realm of beauty and perfection.”

  In 1948, Bunny married Paul, whose father’s banking fortune had created the National Gallery of Art, after divorcing her first husband, Stacy Lloyd, a close friend of Paul. Paul’s first wife, Mary, had died of an asthma attack while hunting, and Bunny had been “bewildered” by her husband’s changed manner following his European service during World War II. “Having known each other so well for so long,” Paul Mellon recalled with typical restraint, “we decided to marry.” Observed Bunny, “We became partners to help one another, and we remained that.” Both Paul and Bunny stayed close to Stacy Lloyd, who ran an equestrian magazine, Chronicle of the Horse, that the Mellons launched.

  Paul Mellon was a gentleman farmer famous for his superb collections of English sporting art as well as French impressionism, which was Bunny’s particular interest, an outgrowth of her passion for gardens and landscapes. Bunny had near-professional expertise in horticulture—she helped Joe Alsop devise the multileveled green garden with eight varieties of boxwood behind his Georgetown home—and sophisticated knowledge of the “interior landscapes” of architecture. The spacious and perfectly proportioned library she built in the middle of a field on the four hundred–acre Mellon estate in Virginia contained one of the world’s best collections of botanical books and artwork. She spent her days studying her books, planting and pruning, and she filled her homes with beautiful flowers, starting with the small vase of buttercups and violets on her breakfast tray.

  Shortly after the birth of Caroline, when Jackie was twenty-eight and Bunny was forty-six, they were introduced over tea by their mutual friend Adele Douglas, the wife of Kingman Douglas, who owned an estate next to the Mellons. The sister of Fred Astaire, “Dellie” had started as a vaudeville dancer, married Lord Charles Cavendish, brother of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, and returned to the United States after Cavendish’s death during the war. “Marvelous woman, frightfully coarse,” said the 11th Duke of Devonshire, recalling Adele’s habit of “appalling language” that earned her the nickname “Lady Foulmouth.”

  “I loved your house, but I don’t like mine,” Jackie said to Bunny after their first meeting. Jackie worshipped Mellon’s balance of elegance and comfort, and unabashedly relied on her new friend as a tutor on interiors and gardens. Oak Spring, the cheerful Mellon “farmhouse” in Upperville, with its pale palette, “natural shabbiness,” and French accents, sparked Jackie’s imagination. “I even loved the stale candies in the antique jars,” she told Mellon. “It never bothered Mrs. Kennedy to show the leading lights that she didn’t know all the answers and to ask would they help her,” said James Roe Ketchum, who served as White House curator at the end of the Kennedy administration. “Bunny was pleased and flattered,” said Tish Baldrige, “to have this beautiful young woman hanging on her every word.”

  Bunny shared Jackie’s admiration for eighteenth-century France (she would be instrumental in restoring the king’s vegetable garden at Versailles) and her fluency in the language. “I’m not scholarly myself,” Bunny once remarked, “but I do like to talk to people with ideas.” They were temperamentally compatible as well—controlled, soft-spoken, and instinctively private. “What appealed to Jackie was the easy way Bunny handled everything, and her peace of mind,” said Lee Radziwill. Bunny appreciated that Jackie “was true to her self” and respected her “gift of insight into people and her dislike of false pretenses.”

  Less obvious was the model Bunny offered for a marriage with ample space for separate lives. In many ways the Mellons were a devoted couple who revered each other’s intelligence and aesthetic sense, but their relationship was complicated. Although Paul was naturally reticent, his hobbies, particularly foxhunting and thoroughbred racing, kept him engaged in the outside world. Bunny became more remote and solitary, even as she indulged in frequent travels, especially to Paris. “She has a moat and drawbridge around her,” said Baldrige. Both Paul and Bunny consulted Freudian psychoanalysts to help them deal with their emotional inhibitions.

  When he was in Washington, Paul also sought the companionship of Dorcas Hardin, a prominent socialite who owned a high-end dress shop. Dorcas was a beautifully feminine vision of “fluffs and frills and adorable hats”—although rather hard of hearing. “At dinner they would talk and laugh,” recalled Oliver Murray, the Mellons’ butler. “She was cheerful and fun. Bunny was not bubbly like Dorcas.” Washingtonians were aware of the relationship, as was Bunny, who was said to have told her husband once on his return from Washington, “You don’t need to shout anymore, Paul. You’re home now.”

  With the arrival of Jackie at the White House, Bunny had a new mission that kept her more frequently in Virginia and Washington. Her signature contributions were redesigns of the Rose Garden and East Garden, but she was generous in an ongoing way, constan
tly on call for advice. “What does Bunny use to replace ghastly brass doorknobs?” Jackie asked in one of her numerous memos.

  Bunny worked with Jackie on a new approach to floral design—loose arrangements of seasonal flowers such as anemones, tulips, freesia, and lilies of the valley in baskets and bowls that were inspired by Dutch still life paintings and informed by Bunny’s seventeenth-century horticultural manuals—and helped set up a flower workroom. At Bunny’s suggestion, the Eisenhower era’s “lugubrious Victorian palms” gave way to “topiary trees in Versailles tubs.” She often supplied blossoms for White House events from her own greenhouses, where she kept duplicates of the plantings she devised for the Rose Garden. The Mellons also had “six different sets of two hundred chairs,” recalled Janet Cooper, that they provided for White House events. Oak Spring’s carpentry and metal fabrication shops did work for the White House, and Bunny installed her favorite upholsterer on the Executive Mansion’s third floor, where he lived for a year, working on the restoration.

  Jackie’s other mentor was a less intimate but comparably influential friend. Jayne Larkin Wrightsman had the same compulsion for privacy as Bunny Mellon, but while Jayne was supremely refined, she was also thoroughly self-invented. If Bunny preferred expensive simplicity, Jayne represented the “Louis Louis” opulence of ormolu, parquetry, and gilded boiseries. Like her husband, Jackie put her friends in compartments. In this instance, she looked to Mellon on pure matters of taste and to Wrightsman for rigorous scholarship. With Jayne, who was a decade older than Jackie, “it was a cultural friendship,” said Marella Agnelli, wife of Fiat auto baron Gianni Agnelli, who knew Jackie and Jayne from the Riviera.