Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (50 page)

As the day of the anniversary approached, Jackie wrote a letter about her late husband for a tribute issue of
Look
mag- azine. “I don’t think there is any consolation. What was lost cannot be replaced,” she wrote. “I should have guessed that it could not last. I should have known that it was asking too much to dream that I might have grown old with him and see our children grow up together. So, now, he is a legend when he would have preferred to be a man.”

But Jackie was also a legend when she would have, most of the time at least, preferred to be just a woman. For the rest of her life, she would be the subject of heavy scrutiny in Manhattan and everywhere she went.

After the first anniversary, Jackie decided it was time to force herself to move on with her life. Soon, new clothes in the pale pastels and vibrant rich colors Jackie so loved began to replace the somber blacks and whites of her mourning wardrobe. Having spent enough time in her dreadful limbo of loss and indecision, she now began appearing in public more often, lunching with old friends like historian Arthur Schlesinger and novelist Truman Capote. As she had done with the Warren Report, she would avoid, instead of seek out, all that reminded her of Jack. For instance, she refused to read a volume of poems published after the assassination to honor him. Even her visits to the grave in Arlington, once so poignantly fre- quent, became fewer. And, more importantly, at her small dinner parties she no longer told her “story from hell,” as Ethel called it.

After a year of misery, Jackie Kennedy would begin turn- ing away from the past and look ahead to the future, to the passage of years ahead. As a former First Lady and widow of a national hero, her date book would be filled with fund- raisers in America and abroad and public appearances with other Kennedys for political reasons. Of course, she would never get over her husband’s senseless death; rather, she would just learn somehow to live with the reality of it, and live past it as well.

Two days after the anniversary, while with family friend and artist Bill Walton, Jackie was mobbed by a crowd as she attempted to go shopping in Manhattan. After they escaped

by taxi, Walton said to Jackie, “That kind of thing must drive you absolutely nutty.”

“No, not really,” she sighed wearily. “I’m all they have left.”

Using Jackie—Yet Again

T
hat summer, Jackie would be with the family in Hyannis Port for the Fourth of July. To First Lady historian Carl An- thony, Joan Kennedy recalled, “We would both go off alone [together] and do what we enjoyed. For me, it was music and reading, for her painting and reading. When she painted, she said she liked to listen to chamber music, not sym- phonies or concerto music, but chamber music because it was more subdued and allowed her to concentrate intently without distraction. The rest of the Kennedy family were all off doing things together. And with great glee she said to me, ‘Joan, they think we’re weird!
Weird!
We’re the weird ducks!’ She said the word
weird
in the funniest way. She just made you laugh.

“She took me waterskiing with her,” Joan continued of her favorite sister-in-law. “The Secret Service agent would drive the boat, and I would be the one getting her signals— go faster, go beyond the wake. And she’d stay on those water skis for a good hour, then drop off, and I’d get on while she rested up. After that, she went out again! Then we’d both swim for about a mile from the breakwater back to the shore. She was an incredible swimmer, and in great

Using Jackie—Yet Again
407

shape. And she always used flippers when she went swim- ming because, she said, ‘If you wear flippers, it’s a great way to trim your thighs.’ ”

Meanwhile, against this backdrop of summer frivolity, the political rivalry between the Kennedys and the Johnsons continued—with Jackie as bait. Earlier in the year, Ethel had again complained to Jackie that LBJ was using her. Soon after, it seemed that Bobby began exploiting Jackie as well. He had asked Jackie to call upon her “friend” LBJ to have the Space Center at Cape Canaveral renamed Cape Kennedy. Jackie agreed to do so, and LBJ granted her wish (but later Jackie regretted having asked for the favor be- cause she believed Jack wouldn’t have thought it appropri- ate). Afterward Jackie complained to Charles Bartlett that “Bobby keeps making me put on my widow’s weeds and go down and ask Lyndon for something.”

At 7:30
P
.
M
. on the night of the Fourth, the telephone rang at Bobby and Ethel’s. President Lyndon Johnson was calling from the LBJ Ranch in Texas. After a brief discussion about civil rights, Bobby asked Johnson if he wanted to talk to “your girlfriend,” at which point he put Jackie on the line.

After exchanging holiday greetings with her, Lyndon complained to Jackie that he was “sunburned” and “blis- tered” because he had been out on his boat all that day. Jackie giggled. “You’ll look
marvelous
with a sunburn,” she said. Johnson also mentioned that his daughter Luci had not joined them in Texas, as she was in Washington, “having dates.” Again, Jackie laughed coquettishly. “I though it [her absence] was something sinister like that,” she said. Johnson then mentioned that, as a birthday gift to Luci on July 2, he granted her one wish: that she be allowed to go an entire day without a Secret Service agent at her side. Jackie, who gen-

erally loathed Secret Service protection, exclaimed, “Good work!” When LBJ, his voice carrying a lascivious tone, asked Jackie what she thought might have occurred while Luci was on her unchaperoned dates, Jackie said, “I’d hate to think! And don’t you!”

As he always did when signing off with Jackie, LBJ said that he “longed” to see her. And, as she always did, Jackie promised that they would do just that, “soon.” Then they hung up.

According to his secretary, Marie Fehmer, Johnson was the one feeling “used” after that telephone call. He believed that the only reason Bobby had put Jackie on the line was so that he [Johnson] would feel somehow indebted to the Kennedys when deciding upon a running mate for his up- coming presidential campaign. Johnson believed that Bobby wanted to be that running mate. Of course, the last thing Bobby wanted to be was Vice President, certain that he would be even more useless as LBJ’s Vice President than LBJ was to Jack. Still, Johnson, a master manipulator who felt he knew when the tables were being turned, believed that Kennedy was using Jackie to wrangle such a position.

Says Marie Fehmer, “I remember afterward the look of bemusement on his face. He felt that it took a very ambitious and callous man to use a grieving widow as leverage. I can only say that he thought a lot less of Robert Kennedy after that call than he did before he took it,” if such a thing were even possible.

Joan the Emissary

T
he month of November 1964 would be not only a time of renewal for Jackie Kennedy but also an important month for her sister-in-law, Joan. The John Fitzgerald Kennedy exhibi- tion, which had been successfully touring the country, was now ready to be taken to Europe, and a representative of the Kennedy family would have to accompany the tribute and speak about displayed items. The Presidential Seal, Jack’s rocking chair, his golf cart, certain paintings, plaques, let- ters, and other mementos from trips around the world, and even the coconut shell on which the young lieutenant Jack wrote a message asking for help after his PT-109 boat ran into trouble would all be part of the traveling show. This ex- hibit, which had opened in May in New York, was the fam- ily’s way of showing its gratitude for the worldwide outpouring of sympathy following Jack’s assassination; it was also organized to raise funds for the Kennedy Library, to be built at Harvard.

When it came time to decide who should go to Europe with the exhibit, it was Jackie’s immediate idea to send Joan. She felt strongly that Joan should, once and for all, claim her rightful place in the family by representing the Kennedys in Europe. Jackie had been particularly struck by an odd moment in the White House a year earlier, one that said a great deal about Joan’s inability to feel a part of the “dynasty.”

Shortly after Jack’s funeral, Jackie had asked James W. Fosburgh, a well-known art collector who had assisted her

in choosing artwork for the renovation of the White House the year before, to help her and the family choose a painting that would be hung in the White House in Jack’s memory. It was customary for departing presidents to add one painting to the permanent collection. Fosburgh went to New York and quickly returned with twenty paintings from art gal- leries and collectors there. He displayed them all in the fam- ily room, in front of Jackie, Eunice, Pat, Ted, and Joan. Together, they had narrowed the selection down to six.

“Okay, now, another vote,” Jackie had said.

“Not me,” Fosburgh said, bowing out. “You should de- cide this without me. I’m not a family member, after all.”

Jackie had smiled and nodded her head appreciatively. “Me, too,” Joan blurted out. “I’m not a family member,

either.”

Everyone had turned and looked at her, confused expres- sions playing on their faces. Joan squirmed. “Well, I mean, I . . . I wasn’t
born
into the family, you know?”

“Well, neither was I,” Jackie had said. “We’re all Kennedys, Joan.”

“I’d rather not vote,” Joan said, uneasily standing her ground. “It’s not my place.”

“Oh my God,” Pat said, impatiently. “Let’s just vote and get it over with.”

In the end, the Kennedys settled for a painting of the River Seine in Paris by Claude Monet. It was hung in the Green Room.

Jackie had never forgotten that day in the White House when Joan made it clear that she did not feel a part of the family. “She had decided that she would one day find some- thing for Joan to do that would solidify her position in the family,” Lem Billings once said. “She had also been im-

pressed by the way Joan had campaigned for Ted earlier in the year. No other Kennedy wife had done anything like that for her husband and everyone in the family was excited by Joan’s accomplishment.”

“She’s beautiful and articulate,” Jackie explained, “and Jack loved her. I want Joan to do it. I believe she’ll do a wonderful job.”

Eunice, Pat, and Jean, and even Ethel, agreed that Joan had acquitted herself so nicely while stumping for Ted that she could most certainly handle the exhibit. Some thought that Ethel should go, since Bobby was Jack’s right-hand man, but she wanted to stay home with her children. “I love her like a sister,” Ethel said in a statement, “and I’m proud to see her representing the family in this way.”

Of course, Ethel had a funny way of showing that she loved Joan “like a sister,” especially since she often seemed to go out of her way to belittle her. Richard Burke, who was a senatorial aide to Ted, recalled that “Ethel had a very con- descending attitude toward Joan because Joan was really sick [referring to her drinking]. Ethel didn’t deal very well with anybody’s illness. It was like Ethel had two personali- ties. She could show compassion and be very attentive to people who were ill, but if they were people who were close to her, or people she relied on, she took that as a weakness and acted resentful toward them. That’s the way she treated Joan—in a condescending manner [as if she were] a little girl.”

Alcoholism was a serious problem in the Skakel family. Ethel’s grandfather, James Curtis Skakel, was an alcoholic, as were her parents, George and Ann. Ethel’s sister, Georgeann, would eventually die of the disease, and her brothers were heavy drinkers as well; George Jr. was a par-

ticularly troubling alcoholic whose drinking caused decades of problems for the family and his wife, Pat (also, unfortu- nately enough, an alcoholic).

Ethel believed that she had been strong enough not to suc- cumb, and in her view anyone who did was weak. “Ethel de- spised weakness of any kind,” George Terrien once explained. “It was just so un-Kennedy in her mind.”

Interestingly, Jackie also feared that the disease could be passed down to her. She saw the way alcoholism had rav- aged Black Jack, and she was smart enough to know that she was genetically predisposed. Luckily, she somehow man- aged to get ahold of herself after Jack’s death because she seemed headed down the same road as her father.