Chapter 35
November 1962
We turn the clocks back. It’s dark by four. On nights when we are home and the weather is fair, we take the dogs for a walk.
I call for Clipper, and he claps for Charlie. We slip out and head toward the gates. We laugh together, wondering how long it will take for the Secret Service car to be behind us.
We talk about Steinbeck, who’s going to be awarded the Nobel Prize.
“Hardly a shoo-in,” Jack says.
“I’m surprised it wasn’t Lawrence Durrell.”
“Or Robert Graves.”
“I wanted Isak Dinesen.”
“I heard last summer it would be Dinesen. I think it would have been.”
“If a man had died, they would have given it to him anyway,” I say.
Clipper stops to sniff a hydrant. I clap softly. She trots back.
We talk about Eleanor Roosevelt’s funeral the week before. I mention the piece I read by James Baldwin in The New Yorker, “Letter From a Region of My Mind.” We talk about Thanksgiving plans, the children’s birthday parties, Palm Beach at Christmas. We talk about the opening of the Mona Lisa at the National Gallery in January. Jack laughs when I tell him that, every night, I dream of that painting heading toward us across the Atlantic.
The evening air is cool against my face. I’ve found a piece of land where we can build in Middleburg, Virginia, on Rattlesnake Mountain—acres of rolling hills and fields, a dizzying stretch of expanse looking out toward the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“We have Glen Ora,” Jack says.
“We only rent that. This will be ours. The house will be modest, I promise.”
He rolls his eyes.
“And when it’s finished,” I say, “we’ll call it Wexford.” Wexford is the name of his family’s ancestral land in Ireland. I can tell it makes him happy I’d suggest that.
He asks me then to come with him to Miami when he speaks to the men who were taken prisoner at the Bay of Pigs. His voice breaks off. I wait. He throws a stick. Charlie bounds after it.
“Will you come?” he says.
“Yes.”
“It will matter to them,” he says. We’ve been closer since the missile crisis. The easy banter between us has deepened, and in that deepening, I can feel the softer edges of his need.
“Here, Clipper,” I call softly, and she runs to me.
A week ago, while visiting Lee in New York, I was flipping through the latest issue of Vogue and came to a photo essay on Marilyn Monroe. “The Last Sitting.” There were big orange X’s Monroe herself had drawn through the contact sheet. There were nudes where all she wore was a scarf. Others where she was in a black wig, her hair styled just like mine, a long messy string of pearls.
“What are you thinking?” Jack asks. Surprising. He never asks that question.
I close my mind and smile. “I’ll speak to them in Spanish. The Cuban exiles. When we go.”
Days before Christmas, Bobby brings us a piece from The Village Voice: “An Open Letter to JFK from Norman Mailer.” He gives it to Jack, who skims it, then hands it to me.
Quintessential Mailer—written directly to Jack, with that acerbic, intimate tone like he’s whispering to a friend: Of course, Mr. President, one does not even know whether it pleases you that America is to a degree totalitarian…. Your personality has nuances, almost too many nuances. The letter goes on for paragraphs, without posing the question it purports to ask but deconstructing Jack’s motives during the face-off with Khrushchev that fall: You were like a poker player with a royal flush, a revolver in his hand, unlimited money to raise each bet. He challenges Jack’s conscience, heart, care.
I glance up. “Do I have to finish this?”
“You should,” Bobby says, uneasy.
It’s there, in the last paragraph of that open letter addressed to Jack, that Mailer has floated a suggestion, as insurance against nuclear war: Why not send us a hostage? Why not let us have Jacqueline Kennedy?
I put the paper down.
“Will he ever stop?”
Jack laughs. “Not until he has you. That man’s obsessed with my wife.”
Earlier that year, in another piece, Mailer trashed my tour of the White House, describing me as manufactured, a royal phony. These phrases circle in me now.
“I’m sorry he drags you into it,” Bobby says. “It’s Jack he’s really after.”
It is and it isn’t,I could say. If it was only Jack, Mailer’s insights might be savage, but he wouldn’t target me.
“I don’t think he’s going to let either of us out of this life alive,” Jack says. His eyes dance. It amuses him, Mailer’s wit, the artful power of his mind, even when it’s harnessed to take him apart.
Elaine de Kooning is slight. An almost pixie look, a quick smile. She wears a dark jumper, a white blouse underneath. I watch her eyes move when she doesn’t think anyone’s looking, taking in sofas, vases, art, the play of light along the sills. She’s been hired to paint a portrait of Jack. She arrives in Palm Beach just before the New Year. An abstract expressionist, she’s not as well-known as her artist husband, Willem de Kooning. They’re friends with Krasner and Pollock. I had asked Bill Walton about her.
“She’s the fastest brush in the East,” Bill said.
“Yes, someone told Jack that. I think he agreed for that reason. He can shuffle around, and the thing will still get done.”
“Her portraits are interesting,” Walton said. “Those seated men she makes out of bright jagged edges.”
I read a feature on her in ARTnews, where she described how she wanted paint to sweep through like feelings. I remember those words as I watch her set up her easel. We’ve been told she doesn’t like to hang around. She’ll stay overnight, make a few sketches, then return to her studio and build a portrait out of those. At one point that first afternoon, she mentions to me, in an offhand way, that she’s more interested in character than style.
“Style can be a prison,” she says, then glances at me, apologetic. I smile.
“We all know something about that.”
She laughs. She’s more at ease with me then, but she maintains a remove. She keeps our world at arm’s length. I like that about her.
She stays for four days. I set up a small easel for Caroline next to hers with a little box of paint. I watch Elaine de Kooning watch my husband. I watch her fall a little in love with him. One afternoon, she remarks how different Jack seems from the photographs she’d seen in the papers and when she’s seen him on TV. She noticed that difference, she says, the first day she came.
“Different how?” I ask.
“He never stops moving. And there’s something elusive about him, always changing, like a shimmer. Larger than life.” Her eyes are grayish blue, soft and cool.
“How will you capture that?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She makes dozens of charcoals over those four days. Drawings, watercolors, a few rough sketches in oil. Then she packs her things. I see her on the afternoon she is to leave. Down on the beach, kneeling in the wet sand, sculpting a shape. Later, when she comes up to the house, I walk down. It’s Jack’s face she’s made in the sand. I stand over it. I can see how her fingertips smoothed the bones of his jaw and cheeks, his forehead, and the ridge over his eyes. There’s a weirdly finished quality to the face, the likeness eerie, almost alive, even as the tide begins to work down the edge.