Kati Marton (20 page)

Jackie shaped the role of first lady to suit her terms. “I don’t
have to
do anything,” she told Chief of Protocol Angier Biddle Duke. She was
ruthless in controlling her own and her children’s lives. She had no interest in those aspects of the first-lady role she called “dreary,” like lunching with the wives of visiting dignitaries or ladies on the Hill. She let one of the other, more energetic members of the Kennedy family, or the ever accommodating Lady Bird Johnson, fill in for her. I’m not going to go down in the coal mines like Mrs. Roosevelt, she announced.

Jackie knew where she could shine. She would turn the White House into a place of great beauty and serious culture, a place where the best minds and talents would dine and perform in the most exquisite setting. These were things she knew something about: literature, poetry, the performing arts and great homes. Jackie understood the value of scarcity. She made each public appearance count, carefully stage-managing her looks, saying little, allowing the mystery about herself to grow. She was soon on the covers of more movie magazines than Elizabeth Taylor.

As chatelaine, she was armed with the polish and assurance of her breeding. “I want to make this into a grand house,” she told the White House chief usher. She had the confidence to jettison tradition and put her own stamp on the mansion. The now legendary dinner for cellist Pablo Casals sealed the young first lady’s reputation as much more than a hostess. “You know I’ve never seen so many happy artists in my life,” Leonard Bernstein recalled. “It was a joy to watch it. And the feeling of hospitality, of warmth, of welcome, the taste with which everything was done …. The guests were so interesting, and most of all the President and Mrs. Kennedy. It was like a different world, utterly like a different planet. I couldn’t believe that this was the same White House that I had attended a year or so before and performed in.” For Jackie, such evenings were about much more than “entertaining.” They were meant to demonstrate that beauty mattered, that art mattered, that there was such a thing as an American intelligentsia, and that it was every bit as polished as its European counterpart. These evenings at the White House were meant to showcase American civilization.

She had a gift for getting people to do her bidding. A letter from Jackie to Kay Halle, a well-connected Cleveland heiress transplanted to Washington, reveals Jackie’s perfect distillation of grace, flattery and determination. Halle helped to compile the list of literary and artistic notables invited to the inaugural festivities and then put together a private
book commemorating the event. The letter also provides an early glimpse of Jackie’s search for a role as something more than an ornamental first lady. “Dear Kay,” Jackie wrote on July 31, 1961,

Her fragile beauty and the soft, breathless voice camouflaged a will of steel. On occasion, even Jack was intimidated by her. “If Jackie said he had to go,” their friend William Walton recalled, “then he went.” She was so different from other women, from his sisters. “My sisters are direct, energetic types,” he once said, “[Jackie] is more sensitive. You might even call her fey. She’s a more indirect sort.” Jack, who had a remarkably detached, clear-eyed view of himself, knew he had married “class,” a thoroughbred who would sometimes give him trouble. He was also a fatalist and a risk taker, not a man to choose the safe or the predictable option.

The Kennedys shared a love of high-level gossip and a fascination with other peoples’ love lives. When journalist Laura Berquist returned from an assignment in Cuba, the president quizzed her about Castro. “Who does he sleep with?” he asked her. “I hear he doesn’t even take his boots off ….”

Jackie would do wicked imitations of statesmen and their wives,
members of his staff and, behind his back, of Jack. She knew how to cut her husband down to size. When the notoriously unmusical Kennedy asked an aide to relay to Jackie a request that the Marine Band play something livelier, she replied, “I chose the music, but if he insists, have them play ‘Hail to the Chief’ over and over.”

The 1960s preceded the era of self-absorption and self-analysis. Jack Kennedy prided himself on not having an interior life. It was part of his deeply instilled macho ethos, which was reinforced by his frail health. There is no reason to believe that, when they were alone, Jack and Jackie’s conversation delved much below the surface. When her feelings were hurt, horseback riding, shopping and travel were her outlets for tension. She would sulk, and that drove her husband mad. “Jack always did what he had to do to make sure she was happy,” their close friend Walton recalled. “It made him crazy when she wasn’t.”

The beginning was inauspicious. The CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in April 1961 ended in the deaths of 114 Cuban exiles and the imprisonment of more than 1,100 others. For the new president, it was his first and most humiliating failure. Kennedy had trusted his military advisers and was swept along by the sheer bureaucratic momentum of a bad plan. When told of the unfolding catastrophe in the Bay of Pigs, he retreated to the White House family quarters. His wife had seen him cry only in frustration over his agonizing back pain. Now he put his head in his hands, and tears rolled down his cheeks. She held him in her arms. Shaken, they momentarily lost the sense that the sky was the limit for the new administration. What he knew intellectually before, he now understood in the most painful personal way: his was the loneliest job in the world. “Before the Bay of Pigs,” his old friend Charles Spalding recalled, “everything was a glorious adventure, onward and upward. Afterward, it was a series of ups and downs, with terrible pitfalls … cautious of everything, questioning always.”

On May 31, 1961, President and Mrs. Kennedy stepped from
Air Force One
to the accompaniment of a Garde Républicain drumroll and were greeted by President Charles de Gaulle. No one could tell Kennedy was a virtual cripple. For weeks following a tree-planting ceremony in Ottawa, Kennedy’s back trouble had flared, forcing him to use
crutches. De Gaulle, the last great figure of World War II still in power, was transfixed by Jackie, who spoke to him in excellent French. Fifty black Citroëns escorted the mounted, saber-armed Gardes, as millions of Parisians chanted “Kenn-a-dee!” and “Zhack-ee!” Not since the Wilsons had any foreign head of state been accorded such a tribute. At a sumptuous dinner for the Kennedys in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, de Gaulle turned to the president and said, “She knows more about French history than most French women.” She charmed culture minister André Malraux into loaning the
Mona Lisa
to the National Gallery, as a personal gesture to her.

“From the moment of her smiling arrival at Orly Airport,”
Time
magazine reported, “the radiant First Lady was the Kennedy who really mattered.” Jackie knew the effect she wanted: an elegance so simple every other woman looked overdressed, fussy, as if trying too hard. In her white satin gown, she beat the French at their own game of hauteur. “Versailles at Last Has a Queen,” ran a French headline. “She played the game very intelligently,” de Gaulle said, “without mixing in politics. She gave her husband the prestige of a Maecenas.” Kennedy credited his wife with easing his time with the difficult de Gaulle. “De Gaulle and I are hitting it off all right,” he told aides, “probably because I have such a charming wife.” Watching the general and Jackie locked in conversation at Versailles, he marveled, “God, she’s really laying it on, isn’t she?” Under the influence of Jackie’s charm offensive, de Gaulle concluded his final meeting with Kennedy by saying, “I have more confidence in your country now.” The trip ended with Kennedy’s most famous public tribute to his wife. “I am the man,” he told 540 reporters from all corners of the world, “who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” She had accomplished the metamorphosis from timid political spouse, who feared she was a liability to her husband’s career, to regal and respected partner.

Secretly traveling with the Kennedys was the man known as “Dr. Feelgood,” Dr. Max Jacobson. He called his special injections “vitamin shots,” but they were really a potent and dangerous cocktail of amphetamines, steroids, hormones and animal organ cells that he administered to his many celebrity clients. He injected both the president and the first lady during this trip—Jack, to relieve his back pain, and Jackie, for a quick surge of energy. It was another sign of how high a price these two were willing to pay for stellar performances. “I don’t care if it’s horse piss,” Kennedy said when cautioned about the shots. “It works.”

Camelot at its height: the Kennedys entertain André Malraux, the French minister of culture, May 11, 1962, while Lyndon Johnson, flanked by Lady Bird, eyes the scene.

From Paris the Kennedys journeyed to Vienna for the Khrushchev
summit. The talks between the short, feisty Soviet leader and the tall, elegant young president were uncompromising, with neither giving an inch on the major flashpoints: Cuba, Berlin, Laos, and the nuclear arms race. “Roughest thing in my life,” Kennedy said of his talks. The Russian deliberately showed his most threatening, bullying side, to shake up and test the American. Again, it was Jackie who provided relief. During a banquet at the Schonbrun Palace, leaning in close to the first lady, Khrushchev launched into a series of comic anecdotes. When he boasted to her of the number of teachers in the Ukraine, she cut him off with “Oh, Mr. Chairman, don’t bore me with statistics!” The Communist Party boss was beguiled. “She knew how to make jokes,” he said. “As our people say, she was quick with her tongue …. Even in small talk she demonstrated her intelligence.”

Jackie diverted attention away from her husband’s lackluster performance at his first superpower summit. Images of Jackie mobbed by adoring Austrians and giggling behind her white gloved hand at Khrushchev’s wit were beamed around the world. She would fix her deep gaze on other men of consequence, melting their reserve and suspicion about her husband. The chilly Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru found Jack Kennedy highly resistible. During Nehru’s November 1961 state visit, the chemistry between the two leaders was conspicuously poor. Kennedy was unable to mask his view that the Indian was smug and rude. Jackie, applying her most ethereal charm, her powerful blend of intelligence and beauty, connected with Nehru, who spontaneously threaded his arm through hers. She accepted his invitation to visit India.

Standing in the backseat of an open car at Udaipur, Jackie performed the Indian palms-together greeting. The crowds roared in delight,
“Jackie Ki Jai! Ameriki Ran!”
(“Hail Jackie! Queen of America!”) Nehru introduced her to yoga, persuading her to try standing on her head. “What was accomplished,” Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, who accompanied her, said, “was a sense of friendship between the Kennedy family and Prime Minister Nehru.” India’s flamboyance, the colors and the pomp, suited her, but the real audience for her bravura performance was far away. “Jack is always so proud of me when
I do something like this,” she said, “but I have no desire to be a public personality on my own.”

Following such performances, Jackie retreated to the sanctuary of her own world, her children, her horses, her clothes and her books. She was a self-indulgent woman who largely followed her own passions. She was clever enough and young and beautiful enough that she got away with a great deal. She treated the press with an elitist disdain, calling the ladies of the White House press corps “harpies.” She once even suggested that they be restrained by bayonet-wielding presidential aides. The media loved the Kennedys and willingly played by their rules. No picture of Jackie the chain-smoker was ever printed. No article pointed out the number of days and nights she was not in residence in the White House. There were only the most playful references to her wardrobe budget (those expenses were in fact a source of great tension in her marriage).

Few people stayed immune to Jacqueline’s blend of charm and manipulation. When you were on her radar, if you could be useful, there was nothing she would not do for you. When White House aide Gwendolyn King found a valuable eighteenth-century document Mrs. Kennedy had mislaid, “She was so grateful, you would have thought that I was her best friend, the way she was graciously thanking me. The next day, I passed her in the hall and she looked right through me. That was Jacqueline Kennedy.”