Jackie After O (10 page)

The Palm Beach house, an old home that Joe Kennedy had bought about thirty years before, had no air-conditioning and was overpopulated with all of his children, in-laws, and grandkids, hardly a place to rest and recuperate. In addition to the White House project, Oleg Cassini was designing Jackie's wardrobe and needed her approval on sketches that conveyed a philosophical “look,” not just pretty dresses. Jack was choosing his cabinet. John Jr. was not thriving and required special care from a local pediatrician who “really saved his life,” Jackie said later. “I was ill and recuperating in the room I shared with dear Jack. The house was so crowded. He was writing his inaugural speech in the room, I remember the yellow [note] pages being strewn all around the room. And when he left I would get up and try to keep them together under some weight on the desk. Someone would come in the room and have conferences with Jack. So I would go sit in the bathroom till it was over. I didn't come to meals, I couldn't hold any food down.”
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Jackie stayed in her room, even rebuffing requests from her mother-in-law to take meals with important guests.

Adding to her stress during what was supposed to be a time of recuperation, a would-be assassin who thought Kennedy had bought the election was carrying seven sticks of dynamite that he planned to detonate as he drove his car into Kennedy's one Sunday at church. But when the attacker saw the couple emerge on North Ocean Boulevard, the sight of Jackie gave him second thoughts. “I did not wish to harm her or the children,” the man, Richard Pavlick, told the Secret Service. “I decided to get him at the church or some place later.”
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His plot was foiled before he could act.

The night after the inauguration, when Jack and Jackie settled in to the private quarters of the White House, they were seated in regal, tall-backed “host” and “hostess” chairs in a formal dining room. They hated the seating, and much of what else they saw. The chairs promptly went into storage, along with a mirrored screen and a silver replica of a ship.
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Their new home reeked of paint fumes. But they couldn't open the windows because they were stuck shut, having not been open for years.

On their second day in the White House, Jackie focused on the children's rooms, huddling with Sister Parish and Joseph Karitas, the White House painter, in Caroline's room, where Jackie instructed him to paint a mahogany bureau off-white, “not too yellow, and she wanted glaze. Then she wanted gold stripes and then she wanted some pink stripes, light pink, to set it off. So she would draw a little plan,” Karitas remembered. He would frequently receive these sketches from her and could see that she was the type who would change her mind about colors and styles. Painting a dresser was child's play compared with the tasks before him, which included repainting of trim, refinishing of floors, and applications of special glazes to make walls look old.
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It is clear that not only was Jackie's taste particular and refined but she also channeled a great deal of her creative energy into an endeavor that seemed suitable for a bored, midcentury housewife, especially one with means—decorating. “I remember when she got that N Street house, it was going to be just right—it was going to be absolutely marvelous,” Jackie's mother recalled of the other Kennedy Georgetown house that Sister Parish had worked on. “It was a house with a lot of feeling about it and a lot of charm, but she did that living room, the double living room downstairs, over at least three times within the first four months they were there. I remember you could go there one day and there would be two beautiful needlepoint rugs, one in the little front drawing room and one in the back one towards the garden. The next week they would both be gone. They would have been sent on trial. Not only that, but the curtains were apt to be red chintz one week …”
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Changing the decor of a townhouse is one thing, but tinkering with the White House, quite another. Two weeks after the inauguration, Jackie and the president had lunch with their trusted adviser and personal friend Clark Clifford, who cautioned Jackie about a lack of funds and how the White House was a “sacred cow,” not to be toyed with. “Woe to any president that changes it,” he told them.

Clifford suggested a fine arts committee to provide some political cover, drew up the legal framework for it, and by February 23, 1961, the group was empowered to “locate authentic furniture of the date of the building of the White House and the raising of funds to purchase this furniture as gifts for the White House.”
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While the committee was mostly stocked with amateur antiques “experts,” they were wealthy and had good networks that would be important for success.

One of Jackie's friends recommended the eighty-one-year-old Republican millionaire and antiques expert Henry du Pont, founder of the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, as chairman of the committee. He accepted. “It was the biggest red-letter day of all,” Jackie said of his appointment to the fourteen-member committee.

With the committee in place, Jackie realized she also needed a decorator who would be able to find and arrange the pieces needed to reflect James Monroe's French Empire style. Parish was known for her “undecorated look” that suited small casual rooms. This was the White House, and it required a much grander approach. So she added to the team Stéphane Boudin of Jansen in Paris, who had renovated part of Versailles and had agreed to do the White House work for free.
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Not surprisingly, his arrival created friction and chaos. Boudin insisted Parish cancel some of her orders so he could take a room in a new direction. He clashed with Du Pont, whose stiff East Coast temperament was at odds with the “dramatic little Frenchman,” as West called him. But Jackie gradually favored Boudin over Parish for a few reasons, confiding that she “learned more about architecture from Boudin than from all the books I could have read.”
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There was also a rumor going around that Parish had kicked Caroline.
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Even if true, Jackie was also upset because she felt Parish had overcharged her for redecorating her rented Glen Ora weekend home in Virginia, the bills for which were sent to the office of her father-in-law, Joseph P. Kennedy, in New York, where all family financial matters were handled. The exorbitant charges for some accessories embarrassed Jackie—or at least she pretended they did—because her father-in-law would have to pay for it, as this memo from a Kennedy family office employee to Parish implies:

It may seem that such things would have been beneath her watch, especially given the enormity of the White House job. But they weren't. West regularly received handwritten lists of instructions that Jackie would jot on her yellow legal pad. West called her “the ideas girl.” She directed fabric orders, requested the story behind a certain antique, set standards for how flowers were arranged, and decided what tables should be used at state dinners (small round ones rather than one large U-shaped table).
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She personally designed ashtray stands, as well as paperweights for official gifts from the president to other dignitaries.
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She was studious and intense about the project, and clearly someone who appreciated history. To complete the Treaty Room. she fired off a memo to West telling him that original documents should be framed and organized to complement their significance:

Despite her annoyances with Parish, she needed to keep the American on the decorating team for political cover. She also knew she needed to hire a “real” curator, and she did—the first one the White House ever had. She was Lorraine Waxman Pearce, a twenty-six-year-old mother who was both an oddity and a media sensation as a working woman at a time when being such was still rare. Pearce was an expert in French influences on American decorative arts of the early nineteenth century, and had been working at the Winterthur Museum. It would be Pearce's job to help bring back American furnishings and artwork that mirrored the periods or presidential namesakes of various rooms.

With the inventory not yet complete and the committee in place, Jackie put out a public call to anyone who had a chair, a desk, a vase—anything at all from the White House that they would be willing to donate. In doing so, she cast a spell on the country and sent families digging through their attics for something with provenance. Her request produced an avalanche of mail from people saying they had something of “importance” to give back.
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On her first day on the job in March 1961, Pearce was ushered into a room that was knee-high with stacks of public mail where people had responded to the announcement. “I've got a chair”; “I've got my grandmother's stays”; “I've got an old toothbrush that belonged to General Grant,” the letters said.
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To create something out of chaos, Pearce, with no staff, began cataloging White House furnishings, their history, and their possible location throughout the world. After Abraham Lincoln's assassination, his destitute wife had sold much of their furniture and locating those pieces was a big part of the restoration effort. And there were many successes. Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon donated a room full of American Empire furniture that included a Dolley Madison sofa. An original Monroe chair was donated by a woman from Pennsylvania. And Sister Parish gave one of her own Victorian settees and two side chairs that had belonged to the Lincolns. There also was a Hepplewhite mirror, with golden eagle decoration, that had once hung in a tavern where Washington bade farewell to his generals.

Meanwhile, it was the committee's job to go through the White House room by room, assess its contents, and decide what pieces needed to be acquired to properly complete it. It was an exhaustive process, with Jackie immersed in it.

One undated memo, written by Jackie and Du Pont, found that the Family Dining Room needed an overhaul.

And that was just one little room.

Despite being exhausted from the work, from parenting, from the relentless stress that she and her husband faced every day, Jackie was determined to make the White House a more memorable place than the one she had seen when she was eleven.

She scoured old receipts and photographs to find objects, their origins, and where they belonged in the White House, snagging four Cézanne paintings originally intended for the White House but hanging in the National Gallery of Art. She hung those in the family quarters and moved a Grandma Moses painting of the Fourth of July into Caroline's room.
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She toured the mansion with those who knew it firsthand—FDR Jr. and Truman. She consulted historians and made spelunking expeditions with Pearce to the basement, plucking out furniture for the fifty-four rooms and sixteen bathrooms. Jackie and Pearce snarled their stockings, got their hands dirty, and found unexpected treasures, including Teddy Roosevelt's rugs, Monroe's gold and silver French flatware and—most important of all—a heavy oak desk that was piled with electronics in the broadcast room. A carved inscription revealed that Queen Victoria had given it to President Hayes; it was built of old timbers from the HMS
Resolute
, a British ship that had sailed to the Arctic in 1852, gotten trapped in
ice
, abandoned, and was later recovered by a Yankee whaler. The ship was refitted in the United States and sent back to Britain as a gift. The Queen returned the sentiment, sending it back as a desk. Jackie had it set up in the Oval office. John Jr. loved to crawl beneath it.