These Few Precious Days (32 page)

One of the first congratulatory notes Jackie read in Palm Beach was from Roswell Gilpatric, the patrician New York lawyer who now served as defense secretary Robert McNamara’s deputy. The first lady made no effort to conceal her affection for the fifty-seven-year-old, Yale-educated Gilpatric, and their flirtatious behavior over the past two years had not gone unnoticed by the president or by Madelin Gilpatric, the third of Ros’s five wives. “They were certainly very, very close,” said Madelin, who would file for divorce in 1970 over her husband’s unflagging devotion to Jackie. “Just say it was a particularly close, warm, long-lasting relationship.”

NOW THAT SHE WAS CLEARING
her calendar (“No more ladies’ lunches!”), Jackie looked forward to a few more days in Palm Beach before moving on to spend the summer in Hyannis. She went ahead with plans to be at the White House for the state visit of Luxembourg’s Grand Duchess Charlotte, in part because Caroline had been teaching her brother how to bow for their royal visitor.

To guarantee success, Maud Shaw promised both children cookies and ginger ale as a reward after they greeted the grand duchess. Unfortunately, just as Jackie was introducing her son to Grand Duchess Charlotte, John threw a major tantrum. He fell to the floor and remained there, motionless.

“John,” Jackie said, “get up this minute.”

The boy refused to budge.

Jackie turned to an aide. “Would you ask Miss Shaw to come in?” she sighed.

The chagrined nanny came to Jackie’s rescue, scooping John up and whisking him away. “Now what on earth did you do that for?” she asked John. “That’s not being my big boy, is it?”

“But Miss Shaw,” he tried to explain, “they didn’t give me my cookie.”

Caroline, in the meantime, rolled her eyes with mortification, then executed a perfect curtsy. Later, she enjoyed her reward in front of her brother. “You were very naughty, John,” Caroline said with a wag of her finger. “
That’s
why you don’t get a cookie.”

Nureyev and Fonteyn almost put JFK to sleep, but he was eager to see the dance recital Caroline’s White House kindergarten class staged that May. Caroline’s mom came up with the concept—a tribute to White House chef René Verdon—and even designed the costumes: paper toques blanches and leotards. Jack’s “Buttons” stepped boldly out front while a chorus line of youngsters danced holding serving trays from the pantry. For part of the show, Jackie rested her head on the president’s shoulder. When the curtain came down, he led the packed house in a standing ovation.

Jackie had plenty of time to devote to her children, but she stuck to her pledge to sharply curtail her schedule. The fact that she was not the only pregnant Kennedy further complicated matters for Tish Baldrige. When a thousand Sacred Heart alumnae showed up for a White House tour, Tish scrambled to find someone to greet them.

“I promised them a Kennedy wife,” she told JFK over the phone. Ethel was eight months pregnant (again) and felt too uncomfortable to leave Hickory Hill. When Jack suggested Joan, Tish reminded him that she, too, was pregnant—“two months along and suffering from morning sickness.”

With Ethel, Jackie, and Joan all pregnant at the same time, the president had no choice but to do the job himself. “I know you wanted to meet one of the Kennedy wives,” he explained, “but they’re all expecting babies, as you may know. . . . My sisters may all be expecting as well,” he cracked, “I don’t know. Don’t quote me on that.”

Around the same time, Alan Jay Lerner and singer Eddie Fisher (both fellow patients of Max Jacobson) teamed up to produce a forty-sixth birthday extravaganza for their friend the president. Like the previous year’s memorable Madison Square Garden party, this one at New York’s Waldorf-Astoria was a celebrity-packed Democratic Party fund-raiser. Unlike the previous year, Jackie was there.

A markedly more tame affair, the gala featured Ed Sullivan and famed trial lawyer Louis Nizer dancing in a chorus line, as well as appearances by boxing legend Sugar Ray Robinson,
The Music Man
star Robert Preston, and actor Tony Randall. With Marilyn Monroe’s forty-fifth-birthday rendition of “Happy Birthday” still fresh in the public’s mind, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when the unfailingly classy Audrey Hepburn serenaded the president. (It would be decades before it was revealed that Hepburn had also briefly been one of JFK’s lovers, before he married Jacqueline Bouvier.)

Before anyone had the chance to get too comfortable, Fisher’s then-girlfriend, Ann-Margret, took the stage. The redheaded bombshell had just bounced and slithered her way through the film version of her Broadway hit
Bye Bye Birdie,
and now that she was only a few feet away from JFK she was determined to out-Marilyn Marilyn. “Ann-Margret did this provocative dance right in front of Kennedy,” Fisher recalled. “People remember Marilyn’s incredibly suggestive song, but Ann-Margret just buried that. She was so bold.”

As for the first lady: “Jackie was sitting right next to the President, smiling,” Fisher said, “but I don’t think she meant it.” There was an important difference this time: Ann-Margret was not having an affair with JFK.

On his actual birthday, Jack proudly received the George Washington Medal as Father of the Year in the Oval Office. Coincidentally, May 29, 1963, was also Tish Baldrige’s last day on the job.

The social secretary’s decision to leave had been a long time coming, spurred on by Jackie’s refusal to cooperate. To be sure, Jackie did agree to attend a dinner for Indian president Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan the first week in June. But in the meantime, she skipped a number of commitments, including the annual congressional wives’ brunch in early May. Doctor’s orders, Jackie claimed, although the morning papers were filled with photos of her attending a ballet performance at New York’s Metropolitan Opera the night before.

It had all proven too much for the self-deprecating, outgoing, unpretentious Tish Baldrige, who had used up her own credibility with the Washington press corps to run interference for Jackie. She couldn’t always shield the first lady from her obligations, and that meant there were times when Tish told Jackie bluntly, “You just have to do this.” Even then, Jackie seldom cooperated. “I don’t
have
to do anything,” she often answered, storming off to complain to Jack.

Baldrige chalked up her boss’s recalcitrance to a “lapse of selfishness going back to her school days of doing what she wanted, being independent, and stamping her foot.” In the end a burnt-out Baldrige, who often had to scramble to find a last-minute replacement for Jackie, confessed that she was in “a most unfortunate position, being both someone who worked for her and an old friend.”

Jackie quickly replaced Tish with another old friend—arguably her closest—Nancy Tuckerman. The two women had known each other since they were nine-year-olds at New York’s Chapin School, and had been roommates at Miss Porter’s in Farmington. “Tucky” seemed to be everything Tish was not—shy, somewhat drab, and not in the least bit interested in forcing Jackie to do anything she didn’t want to.

At about the same time JFK was being pinned with his Father of the Year medal, Jackie threw a farewell party for Tish in the White House China Room, where the walls are lined with china services from previous administrations. The champagne flowed freely, and there were gifts—most notably a table Jackie had specially made that was inlaid with the autographs of White House senior staff and the first family, including a doodle from John. Then, while the Marine Band played, the staff sang “Arrivederci, Tish” to the tune of “Arrivederci Roma,” with lyrics Jackie had written for the occasion.

Baldrige was touched at the warm send-off, but also a little mystified by what she would take as a backhanded compliment from the president when he said goodbye to her in the Oval Office. “Tish,” JFK told her, “you are the most emotional woman I have ever known.”

A few hours later, the White House staff threw another surprise party—this one for the president’s birthday—held downstairs in the no-frills Navy Mess. JFK gamely opened one gag gift after another: a copy of “Debate Rules” from Richard Nixon, boxing gloves “to deal with Congress,” a Lilliputian rocking chair, and Jackie’s gift—a basket of dead grass from the “White House Historical Society, genuine antique grass from the antique Rose Garden.” The dead grass, poking fun at Jackie’s own ongoing crusade to fill the White House with antiques, drew the biggest laugh.

That night, Jackie went ahead with plans of her own for Jack’s birthday—a cruise down the Potomac toward Mount Vernon aboard the
Sequoia
. Jack let it be known that he preferred the
Honey Fitz,
but he was told “the boat’s got rotting stern timbers—like the rest of us, I guess.”

The invitation called for “yachting clothes” and instructed everyone to be on time for an 8:01 departure. It was a dismal, rainy evening, but the yacht embarked anyway with a full complement of guests: Lem Billings, the Bradlees, the Shrivers, the Smatherses, Bobby and Ethel, Teddy, the Bartletts, the Fays, actor David Niven and his wife Hjordis, Bill Walton, an old Boston pol named Clem Norton, Mary Meyer, and one or two others.

With thunder and lightning crashing all around, drinks were served on the covered fantail, followed by a dinner of roast filet of beef in the elegant, mahogany-paneled main cabin. As the 1955 Dom Perignon flowed, toasts were delivered and the laughter grew louder. Everyone was having too good a time to notice the storm raging outside.

ALTHOUGH BY NOW THE TWIST
was decidedly passé, it remained Jack’s favorite piece of dance music. On orders from their commander in chief, the three-piece Marine Band aboard the
Sequoia
played the tune over and over again until it was finally time for JFK to unwrap his presents.

Sitting in one of his padded rockers, Jack ripped through the presents as he always did, reacting to each with unalloyed glee. As he held each gift aloft for the others to see, Jackie gave a running commentary—until a soused Clem Norton stumbled and put his foot right through the rare engraving of a scene from the War of 1812 that had been Jackie’s gift to her husband.

It took a moment for the gasps to subside. “That’s really too bad, isn’t it, Jackie?” Jack said as he reached for the next gift. “Oh, that’s all right,” she said, disappointed but determined not to put a damper on the proceedings. “I can get it fixed.” Although Tony Bradlee knew from Jackie’s expression that she was “distressed,” Ben Bradlee was impressed by how “unemotional” Jackie and Jack were. “They both so rarely show any emotion,” he observed, “except by laughter.”

At JFK’s request, the
Sequoia
sailed downriver and back again a total of five times. By the time the captain finally docked the yacht at l:23 a.m., most of the guests were drunk, Teddy had somehow managed to rip the left leg of his trousers completely off, and JFK—with Jackie
and
Mary Meyer right there—got caught up in the moment and chased Tony Bradlee around the boat while crew members roared with laughter. The episode, which apparently went unnoticed by Jackie, left Tony feeling “flattered, and appalled too.”

By the next morning the storms had rolled away, leaving behind warm temperatures and a cloudless sky. JFK, none the worse for the wear, marked Memorial Day by laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Instead of immediately returning to the White House, he decided to take a stroll in the sunshine with Caroline on the cemetery’s well-tended grounds. This had long been one of Jack’s favorite spots, and he took care to point out Arlington’s spectacular views of the Potomac and the monuments of Washington, D.C. beyond.

Caroline was particularly struck by the stately hilltop mansion overlooking the cemetery. “Who lives there, Daddy?” she asked.

“That’s the Custis-Lee Mansion,” he answered. “A very famous Civil War general named Robert E. Lee lived there a long time ago.”

From this day forward, Caroline would scan the horizon for the mansion whenever she was being driven through Washington. “When Caroline was very little,” Jackie said, “the mansion was one of the first things she learned to recognize.”