Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (10 page)

Not One to Feel Sorry for Herself
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didn’t believe the stories, yet found them troubling just the same.

Bobby had invited a group of friends, including Dave Hackett and Samuel Adams, chums from the Milton Acad- emy he had attended as a youth, to Hickory Hill for a day of tobogganing. Four inches of snow remained on the ground from a recent blizzard, the air was cold and crisp, and Bobby was relaxing for the first time in a long while. Among the in- vitees was the actress Novak, who had been at the Sinatra party on the night of the inauguration.

Bobby and Kim walked back to the top of the hill, gig- gling and laughing all the way, before getting back on their toboggan.

“Bobby, don’t you want to play football?” Ethel hollered out at him.

“Not now, Ethel,” he answered, as he and Kim positioned themselves on the sled for another trip down the hill.

Ethel finally went back into the house alone.

About an hour later, Ethel’s assistant, Leah Mason, found her employer in the kitchen with Pat Kennedy Lawford. (The divorced Mason, who lived near Hickory Hill and now lives in Europe, would work for Ethel on and off for many years; she says that she was dismissed and rehired “at least a dozen times” over a ten-year period.) As soon as Leah walked into the room, Ethel snapped at her about something. She seemed upset. It was Leah’s feeling that the presence of Kim Novak in her home had made Ethel very uncomfort- able.

“Don’t be mad, Ethie,” Pat said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ethel re- sponded, as she put dishes into a cabinet. “Everything is fine. Bobby’s just having fun.”

Just then Ethel dropped a plate onto the floor. It shattered into pieces. “Oh, no! That was one of my mother’s best dishes.” Ethel crumpled into a chair. “And now it’s broken. Oh, my God.”

When he heard the dish break, Bobby and some of the other guests ran into the kitchen, to find Ethel sobbing. Bobby got on his knees in front of her and asked her to tell him what was wrong. Tearfully, Ethel said that she was dis- traught, that the campaign, the inauguration, and the many before- and after-parties had completely worn her down.

“I know,” Bobby said, patting her on the back softly. “I know.”

Ethel looked up at the ceiling. “Oh, dear Lord,” she said, as Bobby continued to comfort her. Then, after about five minutes, she composed herself, perhaps feeling self-conscious about her outburst. “Well, enough of that.” She stood up and began wiping away her tears. “I’m not one to sit here and feel sorry for myself. You know me, Bobby,” she added. “I have all the energy in the world.”

Bobby grinned at her as he got up off his knees. “That’s my Ethel,” he said to the others in the room. “Never one to let anything get her down.” Everyone agreed. Then, as Bobby, Leah, Pat, and the others left the room, Ethel hollered after them, “We’re going to have dinner soon . . . so don’t think you’re gonna be stayin’ out there too long.”

White House Infidelities

D
uring the Camelot years, the Kennedys’ home and family were unlike most others. Because of their power, money, and influence, Jackie, Ethel, and Joan had different concerns and pressures from most young women. While family val- ues were important to them, power, prestige, and money were also meaningful to Jackie and Ethel. Joan was much less interested in being powerful or famous.

Just by virtue of their prominence in society, the Kennedys and others of their class lived by different rules. In Washington and especially in its tony Georgetown sec- tion, they lived in a world in which one code of behavior ap- plied to the middle class and another to the wealthy upper class. Infidelity was an accepted transgression if the players had wealth and status. Perhaps it was thought that these privileged philanderers were better equipped—just by virtue of their worldly experience—to handle emotional ambigui- ties than were everyday married couples living in the heart- land.

“In the Kennedy world, infidelity wasn’t supposed to matter,” noted the prolific author Gore Vidal, who was obliquely related to Jackie through marriage (his mother had been married to Hugh Auchincloss before he married Jackie’s mother, Janet). “In the rest of the world, yes, het- erosexuality, marriage, and children were—are—ideals. But the Kennedys moved in a world of money and power. Women who cared about money and power knew how to strike a balance between what they had and what they didn’t

have. Someone like Joan Kennedy, I can understand why she never fit in. If she wasn’t interested in money and power, what was she doing in that family, anyway?”

Divorce was a complex matter in the fifties and sixties, especially among Irish-Catholics like the Kennedys. To say that it was “frowned upon” would be an understatement. It was unacceptable. “You just had to live with it,” is the way Joan once put it.

Some of the Secret Service agents who protected Jackie during her White House years recall a marriage that, at times, seemed ideal. “From the way it appeared on the out- side, it seemed to be an excellent relationship,” says An- thony Sherman, who served two years on presidential detail. “I was with them a lot, and I saw what seemed like a gen- uine love there. I never heard any yelling or anger between them. I was with them many times where they had the chil- dren at the beach, or they would go to get ice cream at the local parlor in Hyannis Port, holding hands, being loving. I think that they were best together when they were with the children.”

President Kennedy’s risk-taking and infidelities have been well documented over the last three decades by every- one from mainstream journalists and academic historians to muckrakers and tabloid reporters. Even his friend and Kennedy loyalist Arthur Schlesinger now says, “His sexual waywardness does not constitute John Kennedy’s finest hour.” (He hastens to add, “But exaggeration is possible.”) As George Smathers put it, “I’ve shaken hands with eleven presidents in my lifetime, and the only two who were one hundred percent totally faithful to their wives were Harry Truman and Richard Nixon. Those were the only two. The rest, at some point or another, slipped.”

It would seem that once John F. Kennedy got into office, with an army of Secret Service men to protect his privacy, he more than just “slipped.” Joseph Paolella, an agent who worked at the White House from 1960 to 1964, recalls, “His womanizing was one of those things you didn’t talk about to anyone except other agents. You just accepted it as a part of the job.” Paolella notes that an important part of his job dur- ing the Kennedy administration was to prevent Jackie from stumbling upon the President’s indiscretions—not because she didn’t know about them but, rather, to save the couple from an embarrassing situation.

“Jackie was full of love, and full of hurt,” said Lindy Boggs, who succeeded her husband, Hale Boggs, as a Louisiana congresswoman. “When she really loved some- thing, she gave herself completely. But I don’t think he could love anyone too deeply. They were two private peo- ple, two cocoons married to each other, trying to reach each other. I think she felt that since he was so much older than she was, that it was up to him to reach more than she did. But he couldn’t.”

Jackie was a smart woman who had made a choice to re- main with an unfaithful husband. She was not only standing by her man, she was standing by her political party, her job as First Lady, her country, and, of course, her children. Try as she might to ignore it, though, her husband’s unfaithful- ness had to hurt. Her cousin John Davis referred to it as “Jacqueline’s festering wound, one which remained for a lifetime.” Her longtime friend Joan Braden, the wife of columnist Tom Braden and a close friend of all of the Kennedys since having worked as an aide to Jack in the 1960 campaign, called it “the cross she didn’t have to, but chose to, bear.”

Even though she had decided to accept it, Jackie some- times lashed out at Jack for his behavior, especially if he seemed to be flaunting his unfaithfulness. A source close to the Kennedy administration tells this story: One afternoon while taking inventory of White House furnishings, Jackie walked into the Lincoln Room, where Abraham Lincoln held many cabinet meetings and where his large bed was now kept. There she found her husband and a secretary—not in a compromising position, but suspiciously alone just the same. Jackie discreetly closed the door. When Jack emerged from the room, he found his wife’s clipboard on the floor, propped up against the opposite wall. On a blank page was written in Jackie’s handwriting two words: “See Me.”

Later, Jackie confronted Jack in an argument loud enough for some of the Kennedy staff to overhear, which was very uncharacteristic of the First Couple. Jack denied that any- thing inappropriate had transpired in the Lincoln Room and explained that he was merely showing it to a new secretary who had never seen it. Jackie, exasperated by his feeble ex- cuse, demanded to know if he was “some [expletive deleted] little tour guide or the [expletive deleted] President of the United States.” It would seem that she could live with his unfaithfulness, but she could not accept it when he treated her as if she was completely naïve.

That same week, Jackie and George Smathers were danc- ing together at a White House gathering. “I know you and Jack get so tired of this sort of stuffy function,” Smathers re- calls her saying to him. “I know that you’d much rather be sailing with Jack down the Potomac on
The Honey Fitz
with some pretty girls, like Marilyn [presumably Monroe].” When Smathers protested, Jackie said, “Oh, please, George. Don’t give me that. I’ve watched you guys too long. I know

what’s going on, and I’m not fooled by any of it. When are you two going to grow up?”

George Smathers didn’t have an answer to her question. “That’s what I thought,” Jackie said as she broke free of

his hold.

Jackie, Ethel, and Joan each felt the sting of a cheating husband, and their shared experiences caused them to unite in a special sisterhood. Shortly after the incident in the Lin- coln Room, Jackie hosted one of her small dinner parties at the White House. The sisters-in-law sat with their husbands, Jack, Bobby, and Ted, and a few other friends. After dinner in the White House dining room, beautifully refurbished in an American Federal motif, they adjourned to the Treaty Room for cigars, coffee, and liquor. Once used as a cabinet room by President Andrew Johnson, it had been transformed by Jackie into the Treaty Room, with Grant furniture and framed facsimiles of all the treaties that had been signed in it through the years. (Always with an eye toward history, she would ask Jack, when the time came, to sign the U.S.–Soviet Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in this room, which he did.) There was no personal covenant in the Treaty Room this evening, however, as a brief and heated exchange occurred between Ted and Joan. According to a witness who worked as a so- cial secretary to Ethel at the time, all were eating their
souf- flé au chocolat
when Ted and Joan began discussing a young secretary who worked for Ted. Joan hinted that she felt Ted was becoming “just a little too close” to the woman.

“This is not the place to discuss it,” Ted said angrily. Joan opened her mouth to protest, but Ted silenced her with a stern look. After an uncomfortable moment, he popped open a bottle of 1959 Dom Perignon, poured the bubbly into a glass, and handed it to Joan.

“She feels better after she’s had a little drink,” he told the others with a chuckle.

“Don’t we all,” Ethel said, wryly.

Humiliated, Joan put the drink down and ran from the room. Jackie, who was drinking a daiquiri, handed it to Jack without a word, got up, and followed Joan. After a beat, Ethel rose and followed her sisters-in-law.

The Bouviers

W
hy would an intelligent, beautiful, and graceful woman such as America’s First Lady, Jackie Kennedy, put up with such flagrant infidelity from her husband? The answer is as complex as the woman herself. Part of solving the puzzle is in understanding the qualities and feelings Jackie developed through her relationships with her parents.

While there were a number of superficial similarities be- tween the backgrounds of Ethel Skakel and Jacqueline Bou- vier, there were also important distinctions. Though both women came from wealth, the manners by which they were raised couldn’t have been more different. Ethel was raised in a home full of pistol-shooting, car-wrecking juvenile delin- quents, and she enjoyed every second of it. That kind of lifestyle would have appalled Jackie, who had enjoyed a genteel, elegant upbringing.