These Few Precious Days (18 page)

Although Jack willingly deferred to Jackie on cultural matters (“Pablo Casals? I didn’t know what the hell he played—someone had to tell me”), he always rose to the occasion with toasts, speeches, and banter that sparkled as brightly as Jackie’s haute couture. At the historic April 1962 dinner honoring forty-nine Nobel laureates, Jack lauded the group as “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Jefferson aside, Jackie personally made sure that the guest lists for these affairs glistened with the most celebrated names in arts and letters. Attending a May 11, 1962, dinner for French minister of culture André Malraux were playwrights Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, actress Geraldine Page, director Elia Kazan, choreographer George Balanchine (who coaxed Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev into performing at the White House), Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, and artist Andrew Wyeth.

There was one group that Jackie tried but failed to get barred from all state dinners—the press. “Their notebooks bother me,” she sniffed in a memo to Tish Baldrige. “I think they should be made to wear big badges and be whisked out of there once we all sit down to dinner.”

The new, gilt-edged atmosphere in Washington was no less apparent to the rest of the world. “They certainly have acquired something we have lost,” British prime minister Harold Macmillan admitted, “a casual sort of grandeur about their evenings, pretty women, music, beautiful clothes, champagne.” Schlesinger went further, gushing that the Kennedys had ushered in a “new Augustan age of poetry and power.”

To be sure, not all visiting dignitaries were as refined in their tastes as Jackie Kennedy or André Malraux. In anticipation of Indonesian strongman Sukarno’s arrival, Jackie asked the State Department to dig up a copy of a book published about his art collection so she could place it on the coffee table in the West Hall.

“Mr. President,” she told Sukarno proudly as she reached over to pick up the book, “we have your art collection here.” Then, with Jack sitting on one side of him and Jackie on the other, Sukarno sat on the sofa and began leafing through the glossy, full-color volume. Each painting was of a young woman naked to the waist, with a hibiscus in her hair. “And this is my second wife,” Sukarno said as he leafed through the book. “And this is my . . .”

“They were like Vargas girls!” Jackie said, comparing Sukarno’s paintings to the Alberto Vargas nude pinups that appeared in American men’s magazines. “I caught Jack’s eye and I was
trying
not to laugh . . .”

The Kennedys took their show on the road that first spring of 1961, starting with a two-day visit to Canada in May that doubled as a warm-up for a major European tour the following month. That trip would take them to Paris, London, and, most important, a summit meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna.

“Jack already knew that Jackie would be a huge asset on the trip,” Salinger said, pointing out that in 1960, when French president Charles de Gaulle first met her at the French embassy in Washington, he remarked that “the only thing I want to bring back from America is Mrs. Kennedy.” The feeling was mutual; as a child, Jackie had named her pet poodle “Gaullie” because “he was straight and proud and had a prominent nose.”

Trouble was, the first lady was suffering from intense migraines and simply didn’t want to go. “Everyone forgets that she wasn’t feeling well that first year,” Baldrige said. Jackie was “making this tremendous effort to restore the White House, and she just didn’t have the energy to do much of anything else.”

Before the trip, Jack and Jackie spent a restful four days at the palatial Palm Beach estate that belonged to their friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. While the president played golf, his first lady slid deeper into depression. “The state visits were daunting for her,” Baldrige said. “She wasn’t trying to be difficult. She was simply tuckered out—and frightened, because at just thirty-one she knew so much was expected of her.”

Just as Jackie had intervened after his back operations years earlier, Jack took matters into his own hands. He summoned Max Jacobson to Palm Beach, where Secret Service agents picked him up at his hotel and took him to meet “Mr. and Mrs. Dunn”—the aliases chosen for Jack and Jackie.

Jack didn’t beat around the bush. He told Jacobson that he was worried about his wife—that she had almost died twice after the birth of their son and now suffered periodic bouts of depression and headaches. Would she, JFK wanted to know, be healthy enough to accompany him on his trips to Canada and Europe?

The only way he could find out was by examining Jackie. Escorted into her room by Provi, Jackie’s maid, Jacobson found the first lady propped up on the bed. “I feel terrible, Dr. Jacobson,” she said, “so tired—and this awful headache . . .”

“The least I can do for you,” Jacobson told her in this thick German accent, “is to stop your migraine.” After Dr. Feelgood injected her with his usual potent “cocktail” of speed mixed with vitamins, Jackie pepped up considerably. “Why, Dr. Jacobson, my headache is completely gone,” she said in amazement. “I feel so much better already.” The first lady did not bother to ask what was in the syringe Jacobson had just used to inject her. Thrilled at the immediate results, Jack rolled up his sleeve and asked Jacobson to do the same for him.

In Ottawa, Jackie, wearing a red wool suit designed by Oleg Cassini to mimic the uniforms of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, wowed the public and parliament leaders alike. For JFK, the trip proved disastrous for reasons that had nothing to do with international diplomacy. At a tree planting ceremony on the grounds of Government House, Jackie turned a few dainty spadefuls of earth while her Dexedrine-fueled husband proved his prowess by plunging his shovel into the ground like a ditch digger. Instantly, he felt a searing pain in his back—a pain that, sadly, wasn’t going to be going away anytime soon.

Once again, a frustrated and angry Jack was hobbling around the White House on crutches. Jacobson was called back to the White House and, after giving both the president and first lady their shots—a stronger dose than usual in JFK’s case—was informed that he and his black bag would be accompanying them to Europe at the end of May.

Now both riding high—literally—on Jacobson’s potent amphetamine “treatments,” the Kennedys were greeted by more than a million Parisians who lined the streets screaming “Jacqui! Jacqui!” as their motorcade sped by. The climax of the visit was a glittering state dinner at Versailles’s Hall of Mirrors, where Jackie, wearing a Givenchy gown of white silk embroidered with flowers and four diamond “flame” clips in her hair, continued to charm de Gaulle with her knowledge of French history and culture. When Jackie explained to her host that her grandparents were French, he replied, “So were mine!”

At one point during the visit, de Gaulle told Jack, “Mrs. Kennedy knows more French history than most Frenchwomen.” Jack was delighted. “My God,” he told Jackie, “that would be like me sitting next to Madame de Gaulle and her asking me all about Henry Clay!”

Jack was more than happy not to be the center of attention. “I do not think it entirely inappropriate for me to introduce myself,” he told his hosts. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”

Although Jack got an extra boost from Jacobson in Vienna (“The meeting may last for a long time. See to it that my back won’t give me any trouble when I have to get up or move around”), Khrushchev ridiculed Jack’s handling of the Bay of Pigs fiasco and made no attempt to conceal his lack of respect for the inexperienced American president. The summit with the pugnacious Soviet leader was the “worst thing in my life,” Jack privately told journalist James Reston. “He savaged me.” For the first time in his life, British prime minister Macmillan observed, JFK had “met a man wholly impervious to his charm.”

Jackie, on the other hand, bowled Khrushchev over. At the state banquet held in Vienna’s Schönbrunn Palace, Khrushchev insisted on sitting next to the U.S. first lady all evening. Wearing a seductive, skintight pink mermaid dress by Cassini, she tried to impress him with her knowledge of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Pushkin. Instead, he began preaching to her about how many more schoolteachers there were in the Ukraine than there had been under the czar. In response, Jackie proclaimed, “Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics.”

A ballet performance followed dinner at the Schönbrunn, and when the dancers came swooping toward the guests of honor, Jackie again whispered in the Russian leader’s ear. “They’re all paying most attention to
you,
Mr. Chairman,” she told him. “They’re all throwing their flowers at you.”

Khrushchev merely laughed. “No, no, it is your husband they are paying attention to,” he said. “You must never let him go on a state visit alone, he is such a wonderful-looking young man.”

Tish Baldrige, who stood on the sidelines clutching a large black binder bulging with schedules and other tour information, watched with no small degree of awe as Jackie worked her charms on one notoriously prickly head of state after another. “When Jackie could get Khrushchev’s ear, and he would lean close to her,” Tish said, “the President was proud and pleased. After all, he couldn’t get Khrushchev to lean close to
him
.”

Soon they were trading lines “like Abbott and Costello,” Jackie later said. At one point she bantered with Khrushchev about the three dogs the Soviets sent into orbit. “I knew all the names of those dogs—Strelka and Belka and Laika. So I said, ‘I see where one of your space dogs just had puppies. Why don’t you send me one?’ ” Khrushchev merely laughed, but “by God, two months later, two absolutely ashen-faced Russians come staggering into the Oval Room with the ambassador carrying this poor terrified puppy.” Its name, Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin told Jackie, was Pushinka.

“That trip completely changed the way he saw her,” Baldrige said of the president. “One minute she was a wife complaining about his cigar ashes being ground into the carpet. The next she was charming heads of state and entire nations, arising like the queen of the world.”

THE KENNEDYS STOPPED OVER IN
London on their way home, attending both the christening of Jackie’s niece Anna Christina Radziwill at Westminster Cathedral and a dinner hosted by Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at Buckingham Palace. Immediately after the palace dinner, Jack flew back to Washington without Jackie; the first lady had decided to remain behind and tour Greece with her sister and her husband as a guest of Greek prime minister Konstantinos Karamanlis.

This jaunt was fine with JFK, with one stipulation: under no circumstances, he warned Clint Hill, should Mrs. Kennedy be allowed to cross paths with Aristotle Onassis. The Greek ship owner, well on his way to becoming one of the world’s richest men, had been arrested by the FBI in 1953 and charged with the illegal operation of U.S. war surplus ships. Onassis posed for a mug shot, was fingerprinted and then thrown into a holding cell with male prostitutes, muggers, and a group of Puerto Rican nationalists who had just been accused of shooting up Congress. He eventually paid a fine (he preferred to call it a “ransom”) of $7 million. The FBI investigation into a broad range of Onassis’s shady business dealings was ongoing, and, simply put, JFK did not want the first lady anywhere near him.

Not that the president had anything against Greek tycoons in general. Since Prime Minister Karamanlis was far from wealthy, he turned over some of his official hosting duties to yet another Greek shipping magnate, Markos Nomikos. In addition to a lavish villa in the village of Kavouri, Nomikos offered Jackie and her party the use of his 130-foot yacht, the
Northwind
.

First port of call: the thyme-scented village of Epidaurus, where Jackie watched a special performance of Sophocles’s
Electra
in Greece’s perfectly preserved fifth-century B.C. amphitheater. After some expert water-skiing off the back of a small boat, it was on to the island of Delos—reputedly the birthplace of Apollo—before proceeding to the picturesque island of Hydra.