JFK and Mary Meyer

by Jesse Kornbluth

  When I caught my breath, I served up the moral: Slow and steady wins the race.

  Michael said: No, Mommy…fast and steady.

  AUGUST 14

  Corn Hill

  Dinner at a long table, with friends of the couple in the next cottage: writers, professors, two psychiatrists (it’s August!)— people who have achieved but wouldn’t be recognized in DC.

  Lobster. Corn. Beer.

  I felt an unaccustomed peace.

  SEPTEMBER 5

  Arrive at White House @7:30. In the pool @7:40.

  SEPTEMBER 9

  André Emmerich51 came to DC for Morris Louis’s52 funeral, visited Anne, offered her a NYC show next February. Just like that—her career takes off.

  Ken Noland. Anne Truitt. A NYC beachhead for the Washington Color School. Can they sweep Mary Meyer along with them?

  SEPTEMBER 12

  Jack, in Houston.

  “We choose to go to the moon!” Huge cheers. “Choose” was brilliant.

  SEPTEMBER 30

  This is terrible. Ross Barnett finally allows James Meredith to register at the University of Mississippi. Bobby orders 500 US marshals to protect him. Barnett’s “negotiating” is a lie—at an Ole Miss football game, he makes a defiant speech.

  Jack issues a proclamation outlawing obstruction. Mississippi withdraws the Highway Police, and—while Jack is speaking on TV—a riot begins.

  Textbooks say the South lost the Civil War. Untrue. And they’re winning now.

  OCTOBER 2

  The Oval Office.

  Jack looks exhausted. He’d been up until 6 a.m. the other night getting troops to protect Meredith. It was ridiculous: the Army helicopters didn’t take off for hours because they literally didn’t know where to go. Jack and Bobby had to tell them—like air traffic controllers.

  Jack: I couldn’t rely on the US Army to carry out an operation against a few hundred students and rednecks!

  Meanwhile, Gen. Walker was inciting a riot.53

  Bobby was so furious he had Walker arrested and taken to a psychiatric prison. Jack was just sad.

  - There goes the South, lost forever.

  - Why?

  He pushed a sheet of paper across the desk—polling data.

  Forty-two percent of Americans favor segregated schools.

  Seventy-seven percent believe whites can legally refuse to sell their homes to Negroes.

  - I’m shocked. I hadn’t realized equality was so…remote for Negroes.

  - Those poor bastards.

  OCTOBER 4

  Anne has made a new piece she calls “Mary’s Light.” Like her other sculptures, it’s stripped-down, geometric—it looks too “simple” to be important.

  It’s certainly important to me.

  OCTOBER 6

  Jack advised families to build bomb shelters in case of nuclear war with the Russians.

  Why?

  OCTOBER 11

  A small dinner at the White House last night, a day after Jackie returned from Newport: the Truitts, John Warnecke, the head of the Federal Aviation Administration.54 I came with Bill Walton.

  My first time in a small gathering with Jackie since the Advise and Consent lunch.

  Conversation at cocktails mostly about saving Lafayette Square: the challenge, the opposition, the compromise. I knew Jackie was involved—but not how deeply. Jack interjected several times to tell us what she had done and was doing. Jackie doesn’t blush. But if she did, she would have.

  Jack had to speak in Baltimore, so he left before dinner. The helicopter on the White House lawn—that’s when you really get his power.

  Jack and I were polite, cordial, like old friends. Jackie was welcoming and friendly. Formal, but that’s her way.

  A puzzling night for me. Jack must really believe he has successfully gaslighted Jackie. But having me there requires us to give performances. I thought: there should be cameras and lights and a script by an English writer that’s a comedy with plenty of dramatic tension: one verbal slip, one reckless glance, one lingering touch, and the charade crumbles into farce. Or worse.

  Again and again, I think the same thing about Jack: he will see me when he wants, not caring what Jackie knows, or doesn’t.

  Reckless. Possibly cruel. And also…exciting.

  OCTOBER 14

  Charleston. A party at a great old house.

  Robert P. has “something” to show me. He’s drunk, so I know I can handle him.

  He takes me to a white wood building behind the house. Robert explains this building is an “adjacency.” The kitchen is out here, so if there’s a fire, the house won’t burn. And the slaves lived here, at a distance that couldn’t be breached.

  A Negro woman in a white uniform walked out of the adjacency, carrying a cake to the house, and I felt ashamed—she’s free, but what has really changed?

  OCTOBER 22

  7 p.m., Jack went on TV to announce the Russians had installed missiles in Cuba and we would blockade Russian ships sailing toward Cuba unless Cuba and Russia removed the missiles.55

  7:30. Bill and I at WH for dinner in the family quarters. Others there: Jackie, Lee R., Oleg Cassini, Benno and Nicole Graziani.56

  Jack took me aside to say that if he gets word that Russia is launching a nuclear attack, Bill and I are to join Jackie and the children in the underground bomb shelter.57

  Not home until midnight.

  Uneasy sleep.

  OCTOBER 31

  Halloween.

  The boys said they didn’t need to do any shopping, and when they came downstairs, I understood why—they were beatniks, in jeans and wrinkled shirts, with their hair mussed.

  I went to a party in a Mona Lisa mask. There were three Jackies.

  NOVEMBER 8

  Dinner tonight at the White House. An impromptu “celebration” of victories: the resolution of the Cuban crisis and the election results the other day—Teddy was elected senator.

  Jackie invited Gardner and Jan Cowles, Cy and Marina Sulzberger, the Alsops, Arthur and Marian Schlesinger, S.N. Behrman and Isaiah Berlin. Lee was invited but canceled in the afternoon, so I got a call.58

  Jack talked politics and left early.

  NOVEMBER 9

  Two nights in a row at the White House.

  Sixty guests. A dinner dance, in honor of James Gavin, home from a stint as ambassador to France.

  A glittering guest list, but not a glittering night—am I getting bored with these formal evenings?

  DECEMBER 18

  I read that Bach began every composition with “JJ” (“Jesu juva”…“Jesus help me”)—what I said as I held my boy in the road. I haven’t said that since that day. I should start to say it again.

  I am much in need of prayer.59

  DECEMBER 20

  Elaine de Kooning has been chosen to paint Jack.60 She’ll have two weeks in Palm Beach, a couple of hours a day. The main reason she was chosen: not her famous name. Her speed. She’s fast. And Jack is too impatient to sit for long.

  To prep her, the White House asked if I’d talk to her. So, we had a call. I told her the headlines: He’s taller than you think. This will surprise you. The color of his eyes: not blue, not green. Something else. I can’t think of a name for the color. Call it vivid… something.

  DECEMBER 30

  Elaine de Kooning called: Nothing could have prepared her. The eyes—incredible. Arresting. And the movement! He’s never still. He reads. Takes phone calls. Makes notes. Just constant motion. And talking. Is he flirting? She can’t tell. If he is, she knows it’s a reflex—he doesn’t mean it. She’s making sketches, not painting much—she’s confused between the man she sees and the images in her head. All she’s sure is that the portrait will be big: four feet by eight feet.61

  When she hung up, I was so glad I don’t do portraits. But if I had the skill, I’d draw him in bed, after we make love, when all the tension is out of him.

  DECEMBER 31

  This afternoon, I read this year’s entri
es: Jack, Jack, Jack.

  Like a schoolgirl, with a crush on the football captain, and then he notices her, and she writes his name 100 times in her notebook…

  And then they do it, and she notices something is…off.

  She asks: Have you ever been in love?

  He replies: No, but I’ve been very interested.

  She says: Sex is only the beginning.

  He asks: There’s something better than sex?

  She says: After passion, there’s tenderness.

  He looks confused.

  She says: Call it…intimacy.

  She says: For me, orgasm is a glimpse of eternity.

  He doesn’t say what he believes, because he doesn’t know, but she knows it is this for him: Orgasm is thirty seconds of annihilation.

  These imaginary exchanges with Jack persist all day.

  New Year’s Eve dinner with the Truitts.

  The simplest possible menu: roast chicken.

  The greatest possible wine: Chambertin.

  My poem just poured out of me:

  When I hear Sinatra sing “All the Way”

  I see a girl in white

  on a rainy night

  in a guest room

  in a country house

  on Homecoming Weekend.

  What’s that about if not a longing to start over?

  22 Kenneth Noland (1924–2010) was a color field painter, best known for paintings of targets, chevrons, and stripes. In the late 1950s, he was Mary’s lover. “She wasn’t a professional painter,” he said, “but she was a good painter, and she had ambition.”

  23 Jules Olitski (1922–2007) used an industrial spray gun in the 1960s to apply paint to unprimed canvases, producing works of striking color and misty subtlety.

  24 The Kennedys had separate bedrooms in the White House and in their weekend and vacation houses. They are the last presidential couple to have separate bedrooms until Donald and Melania Trump.

  25 If the memories scattered in a dozen books are remotely accurate, Kennedy was a selfish lover, concerned only with his own pleasure. He had no interest in foreplay. He didn’t like to kiss. He often didn’t recall the name of the woman he was with; his fallbacks were “sweetie” and “kiddo.” There was no afterglow, no warm conversation. The encounter was rarely lengthy. Impossible to know if this is irony or sincerity: Angie Dickinson allegedly described Kennedy as “the greatest seven minutes of my life.”

  26 Dave Powers (1912–1998) met Kennedy in 1946, when Kennedy was a Democratic candidate for Congress in a working-class district of Boston. Powers, born in Charlestown, knew these voters; he was indispensable to Kennedy’s campaign and, later, as his sidekick and special assistant to the president, to his life. Among his duties: arranging Kennedy’s trysts. In Dallas, he was riding in the car directly behind the president’s limousine; after the assassination, he was the first curator of the Kennedy Library. Kennedy, he wrote, “was the greatest man I ever met, and the best friend I ever had.” In his one recorded statement about Mary, he spoke as if she and Jack were only friends: “Jack loved to talk to her, and he talked to her about just about anything.”

  27 Kennedy was a generous host, offering forbidden Cuban cigars to friends. If they believed he couldn’t get more, they were mistaken—British Ambassador David Ormsby Gore often filled his diplomatic bag with a fresh supply of Petit Upmanns.

  28 Stephen Smith (1927–1990) was a financial analyst and political strategist who married Jack’s sister Jean. After Kennedy’s father suffered a stroke in December 1961, Smith managed the family’s investments.

  29 Betty Spalding (1921–2001) was the wife of Charles Spalding, one of Kennedy’s closest friends. She met the Kennedys first, before World War II, on Cape Cod; she was a roommate of Jack’s sister Kick. In 1963, after seventeen years of marriage and six children, she and Spalding separated. The former debutante—she’d invited 2,000 “friends” to her coming-out party—became an instant feminist when her divorce lawyer told her the divorce wouldn’t have happened if she had treated her husband better. From her obituary: “She picketed the Bristol police station to protest the arrest of prostitutes but not their customers, and she was chairwoman of the state delegation to the 1977 National Women’s Conference in Houston and a charter member of the state’s Permanent Commission on the Status of Women. In 1986, when she was 65, she obtained an undergraduate degree from Yale University.”

  30 Fifty-six million Americans—three out of every four Americans watching TV that night—and viewers in fourteen foreign countries watched Jackie Kennedy’s White House tour. The Kennedys watched it on the single TV in the residence—a thirteen-inch black-and-white portable with rabbit ears that Jack had installed so he could watch football and Caroline could watch Lassie—with Tony and Ben Bradlee; Max Freedman, American correspondent of the Manchester Guardian; and Fifi Fell, a New York socialite. As soon as it ended, Jackie hurried off to bed, in tears—from stress, her guests said. The broadcast was highly praised; the Chicago Daily News called it “an example of television at its best.” But there was also criticism. The harshest came from Norman Mailer. The first sound of her voice, he wrote, “produced a small continuing shock…like a voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin…I had heard better voices selling gadgets to the grim in Macy’s at Christmastime…” But in the end he had compassion for Jackie: she tried hard, she was so eager to please.

  31 Helen Husted married David Chavchavadze, a writer and CIA officer, in 1952. They had two daughters and divorced in 1959. She had lived abroad, spoke German and Russian, and had interesting opinions about Russia and education. When she met Kennedy—at a dinner party Jackie hosted—she was in her late twenties, teaching part-time and about to graduate from Georgetown. Ben Bradlee’s description suggests that Chavchavadze was attractive to Kennedy in the way he would find Mary Meyer attractive: “just gorgeous: totally pretty, well educated, and interesting.” In the summer of 1960—a few weeks before his nomination, with his wife five months pregnant—Kennedy had a friend invite her to dinner. After dinner, Kennedy pursued her in his car. “He followed me home,” she told Sally Bedell Smith. “I had an affair with Jack, and it began then. I always felt ambivalent and wanted to end it…I was never someone who had extramarital affairs. It was not my style, but it was irresistible with Jack.” He generally saw her at the White House when Jackie was away, but he once boldly visited her at her home—during the day. Nine days before Kennedy’s death, she was, at Jackie’s invitation, at a small White House dinner. Clearly, Jackie knew nothing of the affair.

  32 “Not ready” wasn’t the reason Kennedy didn’t marry Gene Tierney. In 1946, when he met her on a movie set, he was taken by her blue-green eyes and prominent cheekbones—she was a more beautiful version of his future wife. In JFK: Reckless Youth, Nigel Hamilton notes: “Gene Tierney became so enamored of Jack, she later claimed, she even spurned the advances of Tyrone Power.” She recalled: “Jack told me how he was going to conquer the world. He was so sure of himself, but there was also this wonderful little boy quality about him…He took life as it came. He never worried about making an impression…Gifts and flowers were not his style. He gave you his time, his interest.” The romance ended when he told her that his political ambitions stopped him from marrying an actress. In 1948, she reconciled with Cassini.

  33 John Husted, Jr. (1926–1999) worked in the foreign department of Dominick & Dominick LLC in New York for thirty years. He married two years after Jackie broke off their engagement. After retirement, he moved to Nantucket. Small world department: he was Helen Chavchavadze’s first cousin.

  34 There may have been a reason for Kennedy’s inattention—Mary may have been the second woman he bedded that day. Christina Oxenberg, a writer and fashion designer, says he was also seeing her mother, Princess Elizabeth of Yugoslavia. From Oxenberg’s 2019 Internet post: “My mama & President John F. Kennedy h
ad a love affair in springtime 1962. It’s not a secret. Jackie was in London lunching with her sister Lee on March 27, 1962 and I was born nine months later to the day, do the math.”

  35 William Lamb (1779–1848) was educated at Eton and Cambridge. He became Lord Melbourne in 1805 and was elected to the House of Commons as a Whig at twenty-seven, where he firmly occupied the middle ground, opposed labor unions, and had no interest in helping the working class. As Queen Victoria’s prime minister early in her reign, he was her coach in political affairs. He was haunted by the fear of making a fool of himself in public and never fought with someone he thought could beat him. Because he religiously pursued compromise, he had no great achievements. His wife was Lady Caroline Ponsonby, thought by many to be “the most dynamic personality that had appeared in London society for a generation.” She had a notorious affair with Lord Byron and famously described him as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Melbourne’s personal life was also checkered. A historian has written: “Spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies were harmless, not so the whippings administered to orphan girls taken into his household as objects of charity.”

  36 Bradlee had one brief moment of independence. In August 1962, Look magazine published an article about the White House and the press: “Never have so few bawled out so many so often for so little.” The piece quoted Bradlee saying, “It’s almost impossible to write a story they like. Even if a story is quite favorable to their side, they’ll find one paragraph to quibble with.” Big mistake. Kennedy immediately froze Bradlee out. Bradlee was wounded, writing that he went “from regular contact—dinner at the White House once and sometimes twice a week, and telephone calls as needed in either direction—to no contact.” The chill lasted for six months.

  37 Madame de Staël (1766–1817) was a French historian and literary critic known for her witty conversation, flamboyant clothes, and massive intelligence. She published an immensely popular novel—Byron called her Europe’s greatest living writer, “with her pen behind her ears and her mouth full of ink”—and was said to be the greatest hostess of her time. Kennedy was surely the only politician who ever quoted her on Meet the Press.