Jack's Widow (4 page)

To illustrate these difficulties she couldn’t resist leaning out of the window.

Immediately a Secret Service man looked up from the garden.

Pretty soon, like naughty children, they couldn’t stop taking
turns to look out of several ground-floor windows to the resultant semisilent panic of various Secret Service agents.

Bad behavior or not, they got the giggles.

Amazed that she could still laugh, she wanted to do it all over again.

Something in her demeanor made Guy want to indulge her.

He expected her to be low but from the moment he arrived he thought the house seemed to be crushing her, that the somber shadows of the place appeared to add more misery to the mood of the former First Lady.

Innocents caught up in horror and outrage often took years to cleanse themselves of fear and shock. How could she forget the moments when she had held the innards of the man she had loved, had seen the instantaneous removal of all of his dignity, let alone his life?

Guy’s training had included a great deal of information about the psychological effect of such a bloody baptismal.

But the heavy drapes and the comings and goings of too many Secret Service staff, all knowing her family’s routine, their moments of anguish or joy, seemed to him to be an extra punishment.

As they talked, he realized that for her there were no-go areas in her own home. She didn’t stir toward the kitchen for their coffees or for her beloved Newport cigarettes. She relied on staff. He could see this irked her. He knew that in the White House, while she disliked being under a magnifying glass, there was enough space to be unaware of the minders.

He could see that she was a person who had used up all her strength and fire on the nation’s behalf. A woman who was now quite capable of being drowned in Secret Service guilt.

It wasn’t right.

It wasn’t fair.

“Jackie, I know it is easy for me to say but the last thing you should be worried about now are threats.

“Think of it this way, the worst that could possibly be done has been done.”

“No, you’re wrong,” she said harshly, her face creased into a rare tightness. “You are so wrong. So wrong,” she repeated.

“Please don’t believe in all the stories, like everyone else. Because I don’t go out everyone thinks I can’t cope with not being First Lady. Not having protocol and pomp and ‘Hail to the Chief.’ Of course I miss my husband, I’m sad that he could not fulfill his dreams, go on being in the White House, see the children grow up, but there are worse things: they could hurt my children.”

“Then you have three choices, stay here with the understanding that these guys are just trying to do their job. They know they mustn’t screw up again, but there just isn’t the room here for them to operate without your being aware of them breathing down your neck.

“Or move to a larger house, long drive, bigger grounds, less chance of any nutcase being able to join in with the tourists just a few feet away from your front door.

“Or go far away. You love Europe, you speak French and Spanish.”

There was a momentary lull while they both stopped to think.

“But then,” he continued, “Europe is a problem. The local police will want to help…and…different countries will have their agenda and maybe try and use you.” He raised his hands in despair.

“Not to say they couldn’t guard you well.”

There was a small silence in the room as they heard yet another tourist bus, with its attendant loudspeaker, drift slowly by.

“No, I don’t think I should leave America. There’s the children’s education and my mother, and the Kennedys.” She grimaced in a friendly way.

“Okay, then there is L.A. Big houses, big security are quite common there.”

“But”—she smiled—“who would I talk to?”

“Which leaves just one place.” He stopped as he stood in front of a piece of modern art that he didn’t recognize.

“New York,” they said in unison.

“Think of it, you have all the security you have here and more, but it is thirty flights down. You have a driver and a specially adjusted car, faster, yet heavier, safer. You and the children establish a routine, school runs and so on, and everyone guards that bit of your life with no problem. NYPD, and the FBI, everyone gets together. You are less observed. Your apartment block is your fortress. I know these Secret Service guys drive you crazy, and if it is any consolation we have irritated the hell out of them today, but to be honest if I was advising them I wouldn’t know what else I would suggest they do.”

They talked into the evening, discussing her alternatives. She gave him a kiss on the cheek before he left.

She spent time with her brother-in-law, too much time according to the gossips. She went to as many family Sunday lunches as she could face at Hickory Hill to dampen the stories and to give the children the chance of playing with their cousins.

But it made her feel more isolated than ever. When she married she had entered this gene pool, drunk from it, swum in it, but she could never understand the noisiness and the hearty drinking and eating that went with it. It was not her style.

Guy’s suggestion stayed with her when she went to Hickory Hill again the following Sunday and tried to relax in their company. Here everything in life was speedily reduced to a joke. The black humor was fast and ferocious.

It may have been their Irish roots; when things got so bad the only way they could face life was with a laugh and a song. She had certainly enjoyed some of this when Jack was doing the joking and the singing. But their sentimental reminiscences about him, already incorrectly retouched and retold, were too much for her.

Irish eyes may have been smiling but a thousand cuts were slashing at her heart.

To be herself, whoever that was nowadays, she would need to escape.

Within a few weeks she had settled for a home high above the reservoir in New York’s Central Park and this time she chose it, and every item in it, for herself.

O
ver the years she had come to accept that everything she wore became the subject of comment.

At the beginning she was irritated when stories about her appearance, especially the fortune she was spending on it, were used to score cheap political points. Once she was under real scrutiny in the White House, the fact that absolutely no one had ever suspected how she felt about her looks, that they had never even come close, gave her extraordinary satisfaction.

Because the truth was not pretty.

The myriad contents of the many paper bags from stores like Bonwit Teller, Bergdorf Goodman, Lord & Taylor, plus the monogrammed dress bags and hat boxes from designers such as Oleg Cassini, Halston, and Givenchy, signaled her ambivalence about her image.

This had begun long before she enlisted in a vote-hunting team.

What none of the Jackie watchers had ever realized was that even as a teenager she had given everything that she wore the level of attention that a warrior might use when selecting his armor. All of it—the gloves, the hats, the dresses, the coats, the suits, the neck
laces, earrings and brooches—had a role to play, a protective one. They were to be her mask, a fake front, a façade that she could hide behind. It all began where most of our fears are born, at home.

As they disagreed on everything else, her parents had very differing and outspoken views on their firstborn.

Her mother, knowing that her two Bouvier children, though raised in luxurious circumstances, would be poor, inheriting virtually nothing from their father and absolutely nothing from their wealthy stepfather, was desperate for her daughters to marry well, and so repeatedly told Jackie, “Work on your brains and charm, they will win you the right sort of husband.” Janet thought that others in the family were far more attractive, while her father insisted, “Jackie, you have the eyes and mouth of an angel, a slightly naughty one. They will drive men wild.”

If this wasn’t enough to cause their eldest to feel confusion about her appearance, their scandalous divorce made young Jackie a target for gossip that completely undermined her self-esteem.

From her earliest years she had been witness to her parents’ constant quarreling. For a while the fights were private, but once they slipped into the public eye—when Janet finally decided that she had had enough of her husband’s gambling, his lack of business prowess, and his many infidelities—Jackie was a marked girl.

Divorce at the time, especially among the members of the exclusive Social Register, was such a rare occurrence that after her parents had separated they felt they could not divorce without an attempt at a reunion. Unfortunately this lasted only six months. The marriage was over. Jackie was eight.

Her introduction to unwelcome press attention was a photograph of the entire family that accompanied not just the news of the divorce but an article that included details of the tanned, handsome “Black Jack” Bouvier’s adultery.

In 1940 a sex scandal marked Jackie out as in some way different. Jackie never totally recovered from the embarrassment of hearing classmates, frequently joined by their ill-bred parents, talking about her behind her back. Childhood celebrations such as birthday par
ties, which should have been fun, became a nightmare as they merely produced new people who would stare at her.

Soon it was generally accepted that she was a loner. She was polite, would always join her family for meals, but her chosen hobbies, reading and riding, were solitary ones. She didn’t engage in team sports so learning filled the empty hours. She became an A student.

Shielding herself became natural to her. She had friends, but she never got too close. How could she invite girls home when she didn’t have a normal family but a house filled with stepfathers, stepbrothers, stepsisters, and eventually half brothers and half sisters? Her confidants were her sister and her eldest half brother, known as Yusha.

She became a defensive young lady.

Her father rather admired her aloofness, but her mother didn’t understand her unwillingness to join in with her peers. Because she loved them both she could never bring herself to tell them that her behavior was their fault. She even felt guilty for being angry with them, especially her mother.

Once she was old enough to understand about sex and adultery these sensitivities heightened.

Her fascination with all things French fed her initial yearnings to be well dressed. She longed to clothe her tall, lean figure in elegant but chic simplicity but it was hard to achieve at a time when postwar fashion was teased into terminal cuteness.

By the time Jackie was deemed to be of “young lady” status World War II had just ended. She was locked away in Connecticut for half the year at a girls’ boarding school and the vogue was for tiny, blond movie stars with pert breasts like June Allyson. Fashion meant frocks with a fully packed bodice, cinched into a tiny waist atop a circular skirt with its accompanying flurry of swirling petticoats.

Nothing could be further from the simple silhouette that she sought.

She could have turned to her mother for advice, but as so often
happens, forced to be a spectator at the continuing fights between Jack Bouvier and his ex-wife, her sympathy flowed toward the absent parent.

In her late teens, though she was not interested in boys, her father’s regular admonitions to “be a mystery to men,” had been highly successful. She knew that she would be the subject of even more unwelcome snickering if she held herself apart from this new world of flirting and teasing.

As a fairly unsociable being, she didn’t know where to start. At the time it was accepted that teenagers met one another under parental supervision, but even when she had the opportunity she was still far too hesitant, concentrating more on avoiding doing anything spontaneous that might send out a signal for pity from her peers, or even worse, allow them to look down on her. Reticence held her back for months until success occurred, quite by accident.

As soon as Jackie could walk she was sat on a horse. From early childhood her weekends were spent riding. She was so keen that she persuaded her grandfather to pay for her favorite mount, Danseuse, to be stabled near her school during term time. Like her mother, she had been winning rosettes since she was tiny. Competing in equestrian events was second nature to her.

At sixteen she was entered in the local Connecticut gymkhana in the dressage event. She enjoyed the competition, which was based on guiding a horse through a series of complex movements by the subtle shift of her hands, legs, and weight.

After dismounting she was surprised to see that, for the first time, many of her classmates and girls in the senior grades were among the crowd.

As an outsider she had not realized that the more precocious of her fellow students had discovered that sporting events like this were the perfect occasion to meet boys from the local schools and colleges, as they were sanctioned by both parents and the headmistress.

As she moved through the crowd she was aware of attracting male attention in a way that had never happened to her before. She wore
the formal uniform of dressage. A severe habit of a tight jacket in black velvet, a pairing of fabric and color then regarded as highly sophisticated for such a young girl. Beneath was a white shirt in thin silk with a matching stock, the long slim scarf traditionally worn wrapped tight around her throat, knotted at the collarbone beneath it. The event over, with her jacket open, the scarf hung between her breasts. Taut jodhpurs with high riding boots and gloves completed the outfit. After the exertions of the ride her eyes shone and her skin glowed. She removed her riding hat and released her gleaming brown hair from its regulatory snood, letting it tumble in the breeze.

Jostling around her were the older boys, the ones who already had all the accoutrements of sophistication such as their own cars and wallets full of their fathers’ money. As she reacted to their jokes and impudent quips with a mixture of embarrassment and delight, she realized that it was not her brave horsemanship that had aroused the attention of her classmates’ idols.

She saw interest entwined with lust in their smiles, but no spite. They were not laughing at her, but with her. Curious to discover just what she had done to attract them she spent time dissecting her appearance.

She looked in the mirror and saw the strong image of a fit young woman barely bridled by her masculine, form-fitting clothes that accentuated her slim hips and long legs. This was nothing like the girl who usually spent her days in simple yet unobtrusive blouses, skirts, and cardigans.

Nor was it in any way similar to her peers, who attempted to look like their mothers in supposedly grown-up clothes and heavy peach-pink lipstick. This was the tailored style she had been looking for, one that relied on a good cut and a simple design that simply followed the lean lines of a disciplined body beneath it.

From then on her pursuit of equestrian excellence was as much about winning looks as silver cups.

She also scrutinized the pages of
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Seventeen
, and other fashion magazines to look for a way to make facets of
her riding “look” into everyday reality. Amid their glossy pages she found one star and one style that echoed her dreams.

Equally blessed with huge eyes, shiny hair, and a tall, boyish figure, Katharine Hepburn also had oodles of aristocratic style. In public and private life she was always attired in the classics: pearls, silk shirts, crisply tailored trousers, and restrained evening wear.

Failing to find some of these things in the stores, Jackie hunted for a dressmaker that would help her follow her role model. Subtle and understated, the outfits that emerged were serious and successful—like the blossoming woman inside them.

Her father had been right all along. Attracting men was not all about large bosoms and trying too hard. Beauty was empowering;
unapproachable
beauty even more so.

“If you are beautiful, and by the way you are going to be a knockout,” he told her when she was six, “you can do anything. Be anybody.”

He repeated it to her and her sister like a mantra.

“If you look great you can take chances. Be special, be different, even difficult. Every day, in so many ways, a beautiful woman can get exactly what she wants.”

At last the bits of her lonely life began to fit together. Being naturally mysterious seemed to encourage men.

Because her father had been so perceptive about this she was in awe of him. When she was away at school just the prospect of a visit from him would make her starve for days beforehand.

As she and her sister grew old enough, he took plea sure in pointing out beautiful women, not only commenting on how well they had adorned their natural beauty, but admiring the quality and provenance of the jewels or clothes they had selected. These were to be their role models, as were younger women married to older successful men. Her father thought May–December relationships were highly practical.

When the three of them were together he would give his daughters little tests to show them that a pretty face, good figure, and the
confidence to turn on the charm could improve life a hundred percent.

“See that table over there,” he would whisper, “it’s the best in the house. See if you can get the maître d’ to give it to us. He’s bound to. You girls are going to decorate the dining room for him.”

A New York dinner with Daddy was quite an ordeal. Hair, nails, teeth, and clothes had to be flawless. A patter of intelligent if coquettish conversation had to be forthcoming, including a repertoire of gentle jokes, so that he wouldn’t fly off the handle and castigate his daughters as dolts.

He never stopped grooming them. Like eager puppies, yearning for his approbation, they jumped through all his hoops. His idea of how a young woman should behave became second nature to them.

He was a good teacher. Before she was much beyond twenty, both men and women would go that extra mile to please the soft-spoken beauty. But when she entered the public arena with Jack she took it upon herself to be far more analytical about her image.

Despite, or perhaps
because of
, her marriage to the flirtatious senator, she still lacked confidence in her appearance. She could not stop from obsessing about what she saw as her problem areas: wide shoulders, wavy hair, big hands, and long feet. She attempted to eradicate these feelings of inadequacy by a lifetime of incessant dieting and spending a lot of money on her hair and her clothes.

Now that she was married to a millionaire, she owned dressing rooms full of French couture, furs, and jewels that were typical of their well-heeled set. But the Kennedy publicity machine and her own good sense made her pinpoint very early on that the media was changing politics. More people would see her, and her husband, in a newspaper or a magazine or through the growing power of television, than would ever go to an election rally or a debate.

She made a cool appraisal of her wardrobe. Anything overtly luxurious was dispatched to the bank vaults or to cold storage. From now on all her clothes would look so simple that any house wife in
the land would feel that she could comfortably wear them. In truth every garment still cost many hundreds of dollars as each one was handmade by the finest designers to fit and flatter her—but because they were uncluttered they seemed very affordable.

She wanted women to admire not envy her.

She found experts who advised her on camera-happy colors. It may not have been intellectually challenging, but if it was simply a matter of tacking down collars so that they would lie flat or sticking nonslip rubber soles on top of expensive leather ones to ensure that she wouldn’t trip, it was worth it.

Her appearance was so faultless that even her mother-in-law was impressed and passed on a tip from the British royals who had their dressmakers sew tiny weights into the hems of dresses and skirts so that they wouldn’t fly up.

What started as a way of looking approachable on camera became a way of life. Even the large sunglasses, worn to hide tiredness or unhappiness, became her signature.