Grace and Power

by Sally Bedell Smith

  Jackie’s approach to gossip was more selective. With Pat Hass she would speculate about Washington insiders such as Frances Scott “Scottie” Lanahan, the daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had snubbed Jackie when she was a Senate wife. “Jackie would say disparaging things—so and so is not very sexy,” recalled Hass. “For that time she could be fairly raunchy. These were women who had kind of hurt her feelings.” Jackie was also intrigued by figures in fashion and the international jet set. “She liked to hear things, but not to the same extent as Jack,” said her sister, Lee. “It was always with humor.”

  Jackie arranged their White House social life in tiers from the least to the most formal. Like President Franklin Roosevelt, JFK craved variety. The Kennedys’ intimate dinners—with one to three other couples—were usually hatched late in the day after Jackie had assessed her husband’s frame of mind. “He was seldom sure in the morning what his mood would be in the evening,” she said. Jackie would signal Evelyn Lincoln to phone the invitations, sometimes as late as 6 p.m. The atmosphere at these get-togethers was so nonchalant that Bill Walton took to calling the White House “the pizza palace on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

  Still, they were invariably command performances, often requiring quick rearrangements of schedules by invited guests. Despite the impromptu nature of such evenings, Jack and Jackie paid close attention to the social mix, recognizing the fault lines within their circle of friends. For example, Bill Walton, Red Fay, and Ben Bradlee were never invited with Lem Billings. Charley Bartlett would not share a table with Ben Bradlee, nor would Walton socialize with Fay. “There was underground jealousy among these people,” said Laura Bergquist. “There was an orbit, like the sun with the planets, and the planets each had their own place.”

  Every ten days or so, Jackie would organize one of her elaborate dinner parties for eight or more guests that would include “stimulating people”—diplomats, artists, actors, writers, summoned from as far as California and Europe, the names often supplied by Arthur Schlesinger, Oleg Cassini, and other well-connected insiders. Jackie preferred such gatherings to the “social treadmill” of cocktail parties for which she had “no esteem.” The small dinner could be “awfully valuable,” in Jackie’s view, because “men can talk to each other afterwards. . . . The French know this. . . . If you put busy men in an attractive atmosphere where the surroundings are comfortable, the food is good, you relax, you unwind, there’s some stimulating conversation. You know, sometimes quite a lot can happen, contacts can be made. . . . It’s part of the art of living in Washington.”

  Jack Kennedy brought an “intense concentration” and a “gently teasing humor” to the dinner table, along with what Katharine Graham called his habit of “vacuum cleaning your brain.” Marian Schlesinger felt that exchanges with Kennedy had a “hit-and-run” quality: “You were intimate one minute, and then it was over.” Oleg Cassini thought of the Kennedy courtiers as “social samurai” participating in “the conversational equivalent of athletic competition.” Ben Bradlee observed that more often than not, “the conversation jumped around” in a “relaxed but scattered” fashion. Among some close friends, Kennedy lapsed into navy talk. “He used ‘prick’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘nuts’ and ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’ with an ease and comfort that belied his upbringing,” said Bradlee. “Somehow it never seemed offensive, or at least it never seemed offensive to me”—mainly because such language came just as easily to Bradlee. Yet Kennedy scarcely swore in the presence of Charley Bartlett or Jim Reed.

  As a hostess, Jackie reminded William Manchester of “an eclectic blend of traditionalism and ton” who evoked “memories of young Edwardian ladies briefing themselves before a party by writing conversation topics on the sticks of a fan.” Yet she created an illusion of utter spontaneity.

  Jackie discouraged “gen con”—general conversations focused on meaty issues of the day—and consciously sought to mute what Chuck Spalding called Jack’s “extremely sensitive and high-strung” nature by setting a casual tone. “She conceived it right to try and avoid serious conversation when [Jack] was supposed to be relaxing, and rather deliberately made fun of serious topics—would sometimes, I think, quite deliberately make a foolish remark about the political situation just to see him explode,” recalled David Gore. “It was this sort of light-hearted approach while he was away from work which I think she thought was very important for him, and I think it intrigued him and was very valuable to him.”

  From time to time Jackie invited Flo Smith to the White House “to talk about parties,” recalled Flo’s son Earl. Flo was a fount of arcana—“sybarites in ancient Egypt wore little gloves on their tongues between courses so that they could enjoy flavors to the fullest”—as well as ideas for entertaining that she eagerly shared. Among the suggestions Jackie took to heart: “Have pretty women, attractive men, guests who are en passant, the flavor of another language. This is the jet age, so have something new and changing.”

  “Old-fashioned Washington was put on the side,” said Elizabeth Burton, a member of the city’s old-line establishment. “With the Kennedys, the Europeans came to Washington. Who had known about Agnelli in Washington before the Kennedys?” Gilbert “Benno” Graziani, an Italian photographer for Paris-Match and unofficial “historian of le tout monde,” became a coveted White House guest who “wouldn’t think twice about flying from Paris for a party,” said Oleg Cassini. Another favorite was Arkady Gerney, a wealthy Swiss American who had attended Harvard with JFK and had known Jackie from Paris days. A longtime bachelor, “Arkady was very close to Jackie,” said Solange Herter. “He was concerned about things like what shoes Jackie wore so her feet wouldn’t look so big.” (Jackie had cause for concern: she wore a size 10A.)

  Still, the most popular extra man at the Kennedy court was Bill Walton, who took on a role akin to the nineteenth century’s Henry Adams. Walton wrote about Adams’s “niche” as “stable-companion to statesmen,” exchanging visits in the “tight little world” of Theodore Roosevelt’s White House and the homes of his friends on Lafayette Square across the street. “Adams managed to be on the edge of great events, to stay near the seat of power, and to know intimately most of the great political figures of his time,” wrote Walton, who could easily have been speaking about himself.

  While Walton had known JFK longer, he was just as close to Jackie, who had met him when she worked at the Times-Herald. Fresh out of college, she had seen Walton as the epitome of worldliness, but he was also infinitely sympathetic, shrewd about people, and affectionate. His eccentricity amused her. He wore work shirts and blue jeans (“a size too small,” she teased him in a telegram) long before such attire was fashionable. Walton’s mid-career shift into painting appealed to her aesthetic side and to her fascination with nonconformists.

  Most women, Jackie included, found Walton “charmingly ugly,” in the words of Senator Claiborne Pell’s wife, Nuala. Jackie once sent Walton a Valentine comparing him to the sexy Marlboro man: “against a million smiles on the faces of a million handsome models, this face would stand out.” Walton became a “walker” for Washington’s grandes dames. He played bridge with Katharine Graham and Stewart Alsop’s wife, Tish, and savored the bons mots of Alice Roosevelt Longworth in her “slightly crumbling mansion near Dupont Circle.” His confiding manner made him popular with men and women alike. “He was at once the most indiscreet and most discreet man alive,” said Nancy White. “You could absolutely trust him. He knew with whom to be indiscreet and whom to trust. He had a lot of secrets about everyone. He knew which things to reveal.”

  Many Washingtonians assumed that Walton was, as Ben Bradlee put it, “gay as a goose.” But other than platonic friendships with numerous women, there was no evidence for that assumption as there was with Joe Alsop. Walton had gone through a searing divorce that left him with a son and daughter to raise by himself. Whenever the subject of matrimony came up, he slipped into an impenetrable silence.

  It was no accident that Wa
lton had been included in the Kennedys’ first small dinner party, held two nights after the inauguration. It was a lively if haphazard evening. The furniture was draped with swatches left by Sister Parish, everyone feasted on ten pounds of fresh caviar (a gift from a Palm Beach acquaintance) in an “enormous gold bucket as big as a milk pail,” consumed Dom Pérignon champagne, ate a dinner of turtle soup, filet mignon, and profiteroles, and watched films of the inauguration in the White House movie theater.

  Walton shrewdly brought as his date Mary Russell, a fifty-something widow of a New York Herald Tribune reporter. The daughter of Russian aristocrats, Mary promised good value for Kennedy. She was knowledgeable about the Soviet Union and fluent in Russian, lively and attractive, one of the most popular women in Washington. The other guests were Joe Alsop and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Jrs.

  The presence of the Roosevelts that evening was particularly significant as a gesture of both gratitude and solace by the Kennedys. The third of FDR’s four surviving sons (another namesake boy had died at seven months), Franklin Roosevelt Jr. had known JFK since Harvard days, when he was a senior during Jack’s freshman year, and both were famous for being speed demons behind the wheel. They also had overlapped for four years as congressmen. Young Roosevelt had been the son who seemed destined for a successful political career after Groton, Harvard, University of Virginia Law School, and naval service during the war, when he participated in the invasion of North Africa. As a girl, Jackie had been smitten with Franklin, and was caught peeking from behind a curtain to watch him in his ensign’s uniform at Newport dances.

  FDR Jr. had his father’s strong good looks, radiant smile, and gregarious personality but sadly lacked his focus and grit. After three terms in Congress, he had lost to Averell Harriman—the candidate of the Tammany Hall machine—in his 1954 bid for the gubernatorial nomination in New York. “He didn’t do his homework,” recalled Sue, who was his second wife. “Franklin didn’t have much self-discipline. He was terribly bright and able, and he would start off like a house afire, then he would lose his confidence and start drinking and do things like not get up and go to work.” Like his siblings, Franklin also had a turbulent love life; the five Roosevelt children would log twenty marriages, and Franklin would account for five of them.

  As a scion of twentieth-century America’s great WASP political family, FDR Jr. intrigued Kennedy, who also recognized his strategic value. Jack Kennedy was an admirer of FDR’s political skills, which he had studied carefully. Yet undercurrents of tension existed between the Kennedys and Roosevelts stemming from FDR’s firing of Joe Kennedy as ambassador to Britain. FDR took a dim view of Joe Kennedy; four months after Joe had left public life, Roosevelt called him “a little pathetic” for worrying that his family would be “social outcasts,” and dismissed him as “thoroughly selfish.”

  Roosevelt’s widow shared FDR’s disdain, which spilled over into skepticism about Jack—a “cold and calculating person,” in her view, who succeeded only through “a kind of meretricious charm and money.” During JFK’s campaign for the presidency, Eleanor Roosevelt had been a persistent scold, accusing Joe of buying his son’s Democratic nomination. After her ardent support of Adlai Stevenson at the 1960 convention, Arthur Schlesinger urged her to make peace with Jack. Kennedy “did a lot to win her over, but she didn’t like him,” said Charley Bartlett. According to Walton, “Jack honestly didn’t like her particularly.”

  But Jack and Jackie got along well with FDR Jr., who was “huge fun,” recalled Bartlett. “He really had a sense of humor, he left himself wide open to be laughed at, and he was a very naughty boy.” Early in 1960, Franklin had broken with his mother to support Jack’s candidacy, and Joe Kennedy persuaded him to join the primary campaign in heavily Protestant West Virginia, where the Roosevelt name was revered. “In a certain sense he was almost God’s son coming down and saying it was all right to vote for this Catholic,” recalled Charles Peters, a Kennedy campaign aide. Under intense pressure from Bobby Kennedy, Roosevelt unfairly portrayed JFK opponent Hubert Humphrey as a draft dodger, which helped push the electorate to Kennedy.

  It was the turning point that helped seal Kennedy’s nomination—for which both Jack and Jackie would always feel indebted. Kennedy tried to return the favor by asking Robert McNamara to name Roosevelt secretary of the navy, a sentimental choice because FDR had held the same job. But McNamara rejected him as unqualified, mainly because of his drinking problem. It was clear that FDR Jr. was hurt deeply, although he said nothing at the time. “Jack Kennedy owed Franklin,” said Sue Roosevelt. “But he had to be careful not to put him anywhere where he could be embarrassing to the administration by making a mistake.” Eventually Kennedy appointed him under secretary of commerce, where “he couldn’t get into too much trouble,” said Sue Roosevelt.

  The signature events of Jackie’s social calendar—formal only in their requirement of black tie and gowns—were her elegant private dinner dances. The Kennedys “didn’t dare give one for themselves,” wrote Ben Bradlee. To make such frivolous occasions “more publicly acceptable,” the trick was finding “beards”—friends or relatives whom the Kennedys could “honor” with a party. The first of these honorees were Jackie’s sister, Lee, and her husband, Stanislas, popularly known as Prince and Princess Radziwill—a sixteenth-century Polish title that his British citizenship invalidated.

  Four years younger than Jackie, Lee was just twenty-seven as the Kennedy administration began. She had been married to forty-six-year-old Stas (pronounced “Stash”) for two years—a shotgun wedding that produced a son, followed a year later by a daughter born three months early. Stas had a bulky build, a black mustache, and tanned skin as smooth as polished stone. “Why he is nothing but a European version of your father!” exclaimed Janet Auchincloss when she first met Stas, which Lee said “made me love him all the more.” Lee was a more classic beauty than Jackie, with high cheekbones, delicate features, and eyes that Truman Capote described as “gold-brown like a glass of brandy . . . in front of firelight.” At five foot six, she was an inch shorter than her sister, but just as slender.

  Jackie and Lee (who called each other “Jacks” and “Pekes”) were typecast early by their parents: Jackie the intellectual, and Lee the one Janet said would “have twelve children and live in a rose-covered cottage.” Jackie was also “strong and athletic,” while Lee was, by her own admission, “soft and chubby.” Horses frightened Lee, but Jackie pleased their mother by equaling her talent as an equestrienne. In part because Jackie resembled her father (and carried a feminine form of his name), Black Jack Bouvier favored her as well. He relied on her cleverness as a way of ingratiating himself with his own father, Grampy Jack, a scholar of Greek and Latin who prided himself on his erudition and demeaned his son as an intellectual lightweight. Grampy Jack picked Jackie as his star, applauding her poems and literary interests.

  Both girls received plenty of encouragement from their parents—accolades for achievements, as well as exhortations to work hard, use their talents, and “be the best.” Their mother prodded them to create birthday and holiday gifts—either drawings or poems—and every Christmas Eve they performed a play in her honor “where she cried incessantly,” said Lee. Janet was taut and nervous, with a quick temper, and she often assumed the role of enforcer, sharply reprimanding her daughters for lapses in comportment and appearance—a crooked seam in a stocking or a dangling coat button. “She was overbearingly proper,” said Solange Herter, “and not very warm.” Still, Jackie “was always grateful to her,” in Lee’s view, and “felt she had intentionally enlarged our world. . . . She was always far more grateful than I was.”

  Jackie and Lee particularly adored their roguish father, a “life enhancer” who indulged them with treats and amused them with daring excursions to casinos, racetracks, and boxing matches. He warned them that “all men are rats,” urging them to “play hard to get” and “never be easy.” They thrilled to his dramatic impulses, although they lamented the nasa
l laugh that he passed on to both of them. His sense of style deeply impressed them—the crisp gabardine suits adorned with his Society of the Cincinnati boutonniere—not to mention his completely hairless chest. “To be with him when we were children meant joy, excitement and love,” Lee recalled.

  Jackie and Lee were caught in the crossfire of their parents’ acrimonious divorce, which embarrassingly played out in the pages of the New York Daily Mirror with photos of Black Jack’s girlfriends. Lee was hit especially hard by the withering remarks their mother and father made about each other; she became anorexic when barely a teenager. Jackie coped by developing what Lee called the ability “to press the button and tune out.”

  Jackie’s resilience was severely tested by her lonely and bitter father as his fortunes declined and his personal life fell apart. He was reduced to giving Jackie and Lee dinner on a card table in front of the fireplace in his one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, because his tiny dining room served as a bedroom for the girls. (He did manage to help cover their school and travel expenses, although Hughdie paid a significant share.) Insecure and sensitive to any slight, whether imaginary or real, Jack Bouvier repeatedly complained that both girls neglected him, but Jackie bore the brunt. “If I didn’t come in for as much praise as Jackie,” Lee recalled, “I also didn’t receive the same amount of criticism as she did.” In angry letters, her father accused Jackie of selfishness, arrogance, intolerance, and carelessness with money.