Chapter 31
The day after Jack’s State of the Union address, I see him in the colonnade talking to one of the new interns. Dark-haired like several of the others. She’s the one, I remember, who accompanied Jack on his trip to Nassau. As I watch, his hand finds her backside, she glances up at him from under a swoosh of her hair.
I have trouble working that afternoon. I cancel an appointment. I ask Pam to find someone to stand in for me. I go out to the garden, then change my mind. I don’t want to sit. Even the grass feels overwhelming. It’s all just too much, the whipsaw of love, then betrayal after betrayal. He doesn’t even try to hide it.
The children have gone to a friend’s house to play. I’m alone and the sky is exquisite, that unbridled ache in the light—so beautiful, that light. I feel something inside me break.
I slip my sunglasses on and walk away from the garden, away from the Residence, toward the gate, and out to the street. I can feel the burn of tears. I can sense Clint behind me, trailing. I’m grateful he knows me well enough to read my mood and keep a distance, that young man, his shadow self, staying close like some dark angel.
I know what those women are to Jack. Some habit he has, events slotted in on his schedule, another appointment to keep. But now it’s not just the women that bother me. It’s how the rumors bend the air—hushed talk in the corridors, stilted looks from the staff; they seem more gentle with me when I return from a weekend trip. That dirty rub of sympathy I hate. They all know. Do they really think I don’t? Or that I don’t care?
I need to get out from under it, the weight of the shame and the rage—his casual, ruinous lust. The anger rises in me, and the following Tuesday, as I am leading two French reporters through the restoration and the progress we’ve made, walking them from room to room, we come to where the girl they call Fiddle is working, tapping keys on her typewriter. I wave a hand and say in French, “And this is one of the young pretty women my husband is ostensibly sleeping with.” The air drops, a sharp intake of breath from the reporters, then silence. The girl’s pretty head with its pretty red mouth looks up. She clearly doesn’t speak French.
“Shall we move on?” I say brightly.
Jack hears about it, of course.
“You can’t just say things like that, Jackie, no matter how witty you’re trying to be.”
“Do you think I said it to be witty? Do you think I said something everyone doesn’t know?”
“Be reasonable.”
“If you didn’t do things like that, Jack, I wouldn’t have to say things like that, would I?”
“We’re just lucky they aren’t going to print it.”
One named Fiddle, one named Faddle
Mimi
Marilyn
Mary Meyer
It’s like a nursery rhyme. Young girls who come back to their desks, hair wet, after a midday topless dip with drinks and cheese puffs in the White House pool.
I know some of their names. Not all. Just recently I learned the lovely Helen Chavchavadze joined the ranks. Her maiden name was Helen Husted. First cousin to my once-upon-a-fiancé Johnny Husted. What upset me about her, in particular, was that I’d been the one to invite Helen to a dinner party when we still lived in Georgetown. Of all the fish in the sea, couldn’t he have the decency to keep his flings out of my history?
The list is absurdly long. Names I’ve never heard of—women who perhaps had no names. At least to him. It’s like working through a crossword puzzle. One woman across. One woman down. Trying to fill the blanks of all those tiny boxes that pick away at me.
On Valentine’s Day, my television special airs, ATour of the White House. The restoration isn’t done. I have to keep reminding Jack. Just because the show is finished doesn’t mean the work is. I’m drafting new plans for the Green Room.
Jack and I watch the special on a small TV set. I look like a doll in a box. My voice sounds odd, tinny, and I can see the tension in my face underneath the practiced calm—how difficult it is sometimes to keep that kind of expressionlessness. It feels eerie, watching that poised plastic version of myself, that tiny woman in the tiny TV with the bouffant sprayed hair and triple collar of pearls around her neck as she talks through one era of American history into the next, walking from the state rooms to the staircase and explaining how the private rooms of the family were, during Lincoln’s time, the offices of the president. Lincoln’s bedroom once doubled as the Cabinet Room. The woman on the TV climbs the stairs. “I’m so glad it isn’t that way now,” she says, that hushed voice, that little smile.
Just days ago, we learned that André Malraux was targeted for assassination. A bomb in his apartment. He wasn’t killed or even injured, but a four-year-old girl in his building was blinded. Jack wanted to be sure I knew before I read it in the news. Now, as we watch the woman on the small box of the black-and-white TV screen, I think about that blinded little girl, the anonymous collateral horror. I think of the trees, the snow, the faces she will never see again. She might live into old age, but a simple passion has been stripped from her just because one man was convinced he needed to destroy another. Beside me, Jack shifts a cushion behind his back. He’s focused on the woman on the screen, the moving likeness of me, as she talks about the People’s House and its evolving place in history. He’s unusually still, a warmth on his face, a kind of pleasure, and I can tell he is finally grasping the larger, cogent vision I was after, what I’m still working to achieve.
“It’s really good, Jackie,” he says as the show ends, that spark in his eyes I love.
A week later, after four postponed flights, astronaut John Glenn—one of the Mercury 7—orbits the earth in an Atlas rocket. February 20, 1962. The world stops that morning. Americans at work, at school, and at home pause in their ordinary lives to watch the countdown and the launch off Cape Canaveral. Glenn asked his children to help name the rocket. They chose the name Friendship. Jack shows me photographs Glenn took from space looking back toward the curve of the earth, the land masses below, that rim of blue and cloud, the dark of space behind it rising like a new sky.
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” he says.
In March I travel with Lee to India and Pakistan. An informal diplomatic trip Jack has asked me to take. For me it’s an opportunity to explore the art, customs, and architecture of two countries entirely different from anywhere I’ve been. John Kenneth Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to India, is our guide. We land in New Delhi and spend our first evening with Prime Minister Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi. I ask to travel, whenever possible, by rail and car. I want to see where people live beyond the cities and palaces, those smaller villages where older, unmodern traditions can continue outside time. I pick out books on Mughal art to ship home. I let the prime minister’s cousin paint a mark of color on my forehead, green paint made of manure to celebrate Holi, the ancient Hindu festival that marks the end of winter, the coming of spring. The focus in the press—to an almost absurd extent—is on my clothes, Lee’s clothes, and the fact that we ride on an elephant. Jack makes light jokes about the elephant in more than one of his speeches at home.
When we land in Lahore, Pakistan, eight thousand people have gathered to meet us. We’re welcomed by President Khan. A former general and fluent storyteller, he came to Washington once and, in that brief encounter, he and I had an effortless rapport. I’ve been briefed on U.S. objectives in Pakistan, including access to an airbase outside Peshawar, which would allow our military to spy on the Soviets. I know my visit here is, in part, to serve those interests, but I love the tales Khan tells of his adventures as a young man—he fought for the British Indian Army in World War II, then became the first native-born commander in chief of the Pakistan Army. He has such passion for his country and a commitment to peace with India. I love the bold swagger in his voice as he describes seizing the presidency in Pakistan’s coup d’état. He’s arranged a dinner for us in the Shalimar Gardens. We travel to the mountain regions of the country that border Afghanistan. Near the Khyber Pass, once a part of the Silk Road, tribal leaders present me with a sheep and a dagger, curved like a crescent moon. As we drive to the garrison city of Rawalpindi, I admire President Khan’s Karakul hat.
“Then it’s yours,” he says. With a flourish, he takes it off, holding it out to me.
Before we leave to fly home, he presents me with an exquisite bay gelding named Sardar.
“You love horses,” he says. “This gift is for you to remember the time you spent in our country.” The crowds in the streets outside the governor’s palace shower us with rose petals.
It’s the first time an American First Lady has traveled to this country.
“I loved that trip,” I tell Jack on my first night home. “I love how the immersion into an entirely new place changes the way I understand the world and our accountability to it.”
And I forget,I could add. I forget how hard it is to watch that faint wink I just saw you give the new pretty girl in my office. Though I’d been home for less than three hours, I felt you turn away from me, from us, toward her.
I don’t say it that evening, but the hurt feels sharp enough that I could. However short-lived those moments are, it’s become harder to let them skim by. The shame of bearing witness to them and knowing that everyone around us pretends not to see what we all do leaves me fractured. It’s corrosive. I am not fine.
“You all right, Jackie?” he says, the evening edition of the paper on his lap. He turns a page.
I don’t answer.
André Malraux is coming to Washington in May. After declining two invitations I sent through the French ambassador, he accepted when the invitation came from me. I felt my heart lift when I received his note. I began to plan a running guest list for the dinner: bibliophiles; intellectual mavericks; authors, musicians, artists whose works are well received in France—Mark Rothko, Julie Harris, Aldous Huxley, Thornton Wilder, Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg.
The night before Malraux arrives, I completely redraw the seating chart. I run an arrow across the room and move Arthur Miller to my table.
What was it like, I want to ask him, being married to Marilyn Monroe, with her mood swings and sybaritic need? She had quietly filed for divorce, I’ve learned, the day after Jack’s inauguration, maybe hoping the world would be too distracted to notice. I don’t allude to any of this, of course, sitting next to Arthur Miller that night.
“I’ve always been haunted by The Crucible,” I say instead. “There’s something timeless about that play. How every age will have its witch hunt. Tell me more, please, about how you see it.”
I’ve put more personal thought into this dinner than any other. I swapped out all the chairs, exchanging the velvet upholstered ones for delicate bamboo seats. I asked Mr. West to have the bulbs in the chandeliers replaced. The light felt too brash. I wanted it softer, an air of mystery. I spent hours on the menu. Chilled soup, a lobster salad once served to King Louis XV by a French courtesan. After dinner, in the East Room, there will be a concert. Violinist Isaac Stern, cellist Leonard Rose, pianist Eugene Istomin. Performing Schubert’s Piano Trio in B Flat Major.
I care deeply what Malraux thinks.
Earlier that day, shortly after his arrival, I met him for a tour of the National Gallery. As we walked through, he told me he was haunted by one of the Rembrandt oils there, La Balayeuse. We stood in front of the painting—a young girl with a broom leaning over a wooden fence; she stared directly at us. I asked Malraux to tell me what he saw, and he pointed out the nuanced shadow on her face and hands, the strong bravura brushstrokes on her sleeves. I gave him a gift—two rare nineteenth-century books of political caricatures. I’d inscribed the inside of one, How strange to give a book to someone whose books—and words—have given so much to me.
That night at the dinner in Malraux’s honor, I can feel a heady magic working through the room. Between the tapered candles on each table are vases of lily of the valley mixed in with tulips, blue iris. I made sure the vases are low enough so the guests can see one another across the table, talk, debate, laugh.
Lamplight, candlelight, strains of music—words tossed in the quick play of light—strung through the space to mark this singular, intimate stretch of time. I want the night to stay with them days later, like silver through their minds.
Tish finds me at one point to say that George Balanchine almost wasn’t let in when he pulled up in a taxi and stepped out in a tattered raincoat.
“Bring him to me, please,” I say. “Make sure I see him before he leaves.”
Jack is a short distance away, that firm pumping handshake, that flash of smile. His face lit, alive. No matter what other turmoil might be moving underneath, there’s no trace of it in his face.
We are good like this together.
As if he hears me thinking this, he looks up, that smile, conspiratorial, as if to say, We’ve made this, you and I, this night, this world, a fast, luminous mix of art and politics, music and ideas. I hold his eyes for a moment and feel a quiet thrill pass through me. This evening has been all I’d wanted it to be.
At the same time, even as the night ends, I can’t escape the faint sense that something is amiss. But what? It all unfolded according to plan—the food, program, music. Everyone is milling around, laughing, happy. The air rings, and they linger, they don’t want to leave. What is it, then, missing?
It’s not until later, when the guests are gone, the rooms empty, dishes cleared. The staff left some of the candles lit on tables in one corner of the room, as I’d asked. I wanted to be the one to blow them out, and as I go from light to light, my hand cupped around each, wick after wick extinguished, just as I used to love to do in those quieter simpler evenings after the dinners at our house in Georgetown, I hear a sound in the doorway. I look up. Jack. I smile at him and continue with the candles, realizing then, with a strike of sorrow, that what is missing is my heart.
I want her back—that girl who craved a sense of wonder. That girl who was not always nice, who swore and laughed at dirty jokes and pranks and scorned sentimental earnestness—that girl who loved irreverence, who loved to push that dull line of what a young woman was supposed to want and say and think and be—that girl whose mind was wicked in interesting ways—the kind of girl who imagined how much fun it would be to place a tack on Zeus’s chair, any Zeus, just to watch how he’d jump, see his blustery rage. That girl who sometimes felt she was a mass of brooding want and mischief held in by nothing more than skin. That girl whose faith burned—that girl who wanted a life made of future, an edge of horizon she could hurl herself toward.
And then that girl met you.
You
The next day, when Jack and I are at lunch, talking about my ideas for preservation work in Lafayette Square, Nanny Shaw marches in, a stern expression on her face and holding Caroline by the hand. Miss Shaw explains that one of the trainers came to leash Pushinka for a walk, and when Caroline went to pet the dog goodbye, Pushinka growled and bared its teeth. Caroline gave it a kick in the rear end.
“Excellent work, Buttons,” Jack says. “That’s giving it to those damn Russians.”
Miss Shaw looks put out. “But, Mr. President—”
I sit at one end of the table, half a sandwich on my plate. They never quite hit it off, Jack and Miss Shaw. She thinks he’s too lenient. Ordinarily I’d intercede, but today I decide to let Jack solve it. I’m thinking about the Mona Lisa. At a pause in the concert the night before, André Malraux, sitting beside me, said in a low voice, Je vais vous envoyer La Joconde. “I will send you the Mona Lisa.” I felt a surge of triumph. The Mona Lisa has never left France.
An article by Norman Mailer appears in Esquire. “An Evening with Jackie Kennedy.” He’d requested an interview months ago, around the New Year. I turned it down. Now, though, I find the article chilling. Not that he chose to write about me: not only a woman looking for privacy but an institution being put together before our eyes. I know I am fair game. It’s the intimacy of the article that haunts me, the details he brings forward, with visceral precision, of that summer day two years ago when he first came to Hyannis Port. The August before the election. He has recalled it all: the hectic weather, the lawn of chaos—cameramen, aides, journalists, family, friends, tourists peering in for a glimpse of Jack. Then his focus shifts to me. His first impression: a college girl who was nice; his second: a cat, narrow and wild, fur being rubbed all the wrong way. It’s uncanny how he remembers exactly what I said, how I looked, smiled, stood up, left the room, came back. It’s not unflattering, but there are elements that feel derogatory, invasive, and his recall is so clear, I feel sick. A day I imagined was behind us—he’s conjured it back.
“A violent love letter to you.” That’s how my friend Diana Vreeland describes it.
There’s a phrase toward the end of the piece that I have to read twice: She had perhaps a touch of that artful madness which suggests future drama.
I put down the magazine, a ticking pressure in my chest.