Black Jack and Janet
Jackie Bouvier adored her father. And her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, had much to commend him.
Dashingly handsome in the Clark Gable mold, his year-round tan and Byronic charisma earned him the nickname Black Jack. He doted over his daughters, Jackie especially, and was irresistible to scores of women, his wife Janet occasionally among them. He and his family split their time between Park Avenue and East Hampton. He was athletic, impeccably dressed, rakishly charming—and rich.
Well, he had been rich. Black Jack’s father, Major John Vernou Bouvier Jr., was a former trial lawyer who enjoyed living well—first off of his wife Maude Sergeant’s family fortune, later off a sizable inheritance from his uncle. Black Jack used some of this family money to make a chunk of his own as a stockbroker. But less than a year and a half into his marriage to Janet Norton Lee, in October of 1929—only three months after Jackie was born—the stock market collapsed, commencing the Great Depression and the rapid decimation of Black Jack’s personal fortune. His father’s fortune never recovered either, though that didn’t stop “The Major,” as he liked to be called, from maintaining his extravagant lifestyle.
Though Black Jack borrowed (and borrowed some more) to keep his family living in style, his financial instability provided an ominous hum beneath Jackie’s early life. According to Jackie biographer Sarah Bradford, it would give “Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, a sense of insecurity and fear of poverty that was to last almost all their lives.”
Like Black Jack, Jackie’s mother, Janet, came from a wealthy Wall Street family. But that’s where their similarities ended. Janet was a more formal, inhibited, and brittle person. Sixteen years younger than Black Jack, the petite, fine-featured, dark-eyed brunette was barely twenty-one when they were married in July of 1928, much to the dismay of both families. While Janet’s mother and father disapproved of the union—they thought Black Jack an adventurer and a cad—their authority was diminished in Janet’s eyes: They had already very ably modeled a loveless marriage and were living apart by the time Janet and Black Jack wed.
Just over a year after the East Hampton wedding—on July 28, 1929—Jacqueline Bouvier was born. Her sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, forever known as Lee, was born four years later.
Black Jack may well have been broke, but his marriage to Janet kept the natural consequences of this at bay, at least for a while. They lived rent-free in an eleven-room duplex at 740 Park Avenue—Janet’s father built and owned the building—and rented an East Hampton cottage every summer. Jackie’s early life revolved around Central Park, East Hampton, and horses. Janet was herself an accomplished equestrian, and Jackie was put on a horse as early as age two. She was competing in equestrian events by the time she was five.
Jackie and Lee would both cherish memories of their childhood summers in East Hampton, and Jackie would recall her parents, from the era of her early childhood, as a very glamorous couple. But cracks were already beginning to show in their marriage, which by the time Jackie was age seven was on a clear downward trajectory. Black Jack was a compulsive and quite open—to the point of viciousness—philanderer, and as the 1930s progressed, debts began closing in from several sides: the estate of his great uncle, his father-in-law, the Internal Revenue Service. Black Jack was clearly the scoundrel in the relationship: A photo of him holding a mistress’s hand while standing next to his wife appeared in the New York Daily News, much to Janet’s humiliation. Just as clearly, Jackie and Lee preferred his company to their mother’s. Janet deeply resented this. A neurasthenic woman with a nasty temper, she occasionally hit the girls, which only reinforced Black Jack’s position as the preferred parent.
In a 2013 interview, Lee, her childhood wounds vivid after decades, spoke bitterly of her mother’s “almost irrational social climbing” and glowingly of Black Jack. “He was a wonderful man,” she said. “He had such funny idiosyncrasies, like always wearing his black patent evening shoes with his swimming trunks. One thing which infuriates me is how he’s always labeled the drunk black prince. He was never drunk with me, though I’m sure he sometimes drank, due to my mother’s constant nagging. You would, and I would.”
In September 1936, Janet asked for a six-month trial separation, and Black Jack moved into the Westbury Hotel. Despite a brief réchauffé in East Hampton the next summer, the marriage never recovered. Thereafter, the split was deeply acrimonious, and once Janet filed for divorce in 1940, very public. The New York Daily Mirror reported on the divorce, publishing details of Black Jack’s extramarital dalliances, along with photographs. “There was such relentless bitterness on both sides,” Lee said. “Jackie was really fortunate to have or acquire the ability to tune out, which she always kept.”
Very early on, Jackie became the master of appearing serene no matter what roiled inside of her. But such a nasty and public divorce must have left a mark. “It was like for the years from ten to twenty never hearing anything [from your parents] except how awful the other one was,” according to Lee. It’s easy to see, in Jackie’s later life, the effects of Black Jack and Janet’s tabloid divorce. It’s in the fierce approach she took to guarding the privacy of herself, her family, and their legacy. It’s in her lifelong caginess with the media. And it’s in her absolute insistence, wherever possible, on controlling the narrative. She sought out journalists who would be pliable to her will, such as Theodore White, who dutifully printed the Camelot myth that she pretty much invented in the week after Jack’s death.
She also fought with journalists—most notably William Manchester, author of a book on her late husband titled The Death of a President—who wanted to print things of which she did not approve, regardless of their veracity. And she became famous for excommunicating intimates and employees who committed the sin of writing or talking about their time with her family, no matter how benign their accounts. (Maud Shaw, Caroline and John Jr.’s beloved governess, was to learn this very suddenly after Jackie discovered that she’d secured a book deal.) These are but a few of the examples of the lasting sting of Jackie’s early public humiliation.
In the midst of all this family strife, Jackie attended to the business of growing up. She was, despite whatever sorrows she was repressing, a charismatic, bright, and mischievous child. In 1935 she began attending the Chapin School for Girls—Miss Chapin’s—in New York. It was there that she made several lifelong friends, including Nancy Tuckerman, who would go on to attend high school at Miss Porter’s with Jackie and become the White House social secretary under President Kennedy; she would remain Jackie’s confidante until the end of her life.
Jackie was soon known at Miss Chapin’s for her intelligence and restlessness. In America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, biographer Sarah Bradford notes:
Jackie was already a rebel, unsubdued by the discipline at Miss Chapin’s. She was brighter than most of her classmates and would get through her work quickly, then was left with nothing to do but doodle and daydream. All the teachers, interviewed by Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer twenty years later, remembered her for her beauty and, above all, her mischief. “She was the prettiest little girl,” recalled a Miss Affleck, “very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil.”
Outside of school, Jackie’s joys were books and horses. She shirked naps by reading Robin Hood, The Jungle Book, and Gone With the Wind on her bedroom windowsill. Balancing her mischievousness was a retiring bookishness, and throughout her life the world of literature would offer her a quiet and a nourishment she couldn’t find anywhere else.
Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jackie was winning blue ribbons at equestrian events in the Hamptons. By June 1940, when her parents’ divorce became final, she’d developed a special kinship with one of Janet’s horses: Danseuse, whom Jackie nicknamed Donny. Despite his increasingly limited resources (he’d had to move out of the Westbury and into a smaller apartment on East 74th Street), Black Jack paid for the horse to be stabled at Durland’s livery on West 66th Street, enabling Jackie to ride in Central Park.
In June 1942, Janet remarried. Jackie and Lee’s new stepfather was the “dull” (Lee’s adjective) and extraordinarily wealthy Hugh D. Auchincloss II,known to all as Hughdie. Hughdie was the heir to the Standard Oil fortune, with palatial homes in McLean, Virginia (just outside of DC) and Newport, Rhode Island. Gore Vidal, whose mother had earlier been married to Hughdie, portrayed him as a bit of a dope in his memoir, Palimpsest. “My amiable, long-suffering stepfather,” Vidal called him, “known as Hughdie or, more often, poor Hughdie.” He credited Hughdie with making him “permanently susceptible to the charms of the born bore.” Hughdie and Janet’s son, Jamie, held a more moderate view. He told Sarah Bradford, “He was a kind man and he was a gentle man but he was a man who stayed in the nineteenth century in many ways.” He was never a match for the fierce-tempered Janet, who generally ran the show, with his acquiescence.
Hammersmith Farm, Hughdie’s Newport “cottage,” was a twenty-eight-room nineteenth-century behemoth. “A house more Victorian or stranger you cannot imagine,” according to Lee. “Oh, I longed to go back, to be with my father.” (“There was the ocean,” Lee said. “But naturally my sister claimed the room overlooking Narragansett Bay, where all the boats passed out. All I could see from my window was the cows named Caroline and Jacqueline.”) Lee’s description was apt: originally built by Hughdie’s great-grandfather, the furnishings were heavy and somewhat eerie: the “deck room” featured “dark, musty upholstery, bear-, tiger-, and leopard-skin rugs and, hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed pelican caught by [Hughdie’s] grandfather around the turn of the century.” It wasn’t all gloom and doom, though: Jackie enjoyed the gardens (laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted, famous for designing Central Park) and the view of the sea. Jackie did not share her sister’s feelings about Hammersmith Farm, having by all accounts loved spending her summers on its ninety acres with her dogs, her horses, and the aforementioned cattle.
Similarly, Jackie quickly fell in love with Merrywood, situated on the Potomac River in McLean, Virginia, a “large brick neo-Georgian house” overlooking “the lawn and the woods beyond the lawn and the milk-chocolate-brown Potomac River far below.” Jackie also made a deep connection with her stepbrother, Hugh D. Auchicloss III, known as Yusha, the eldest son from Hughdie’s first marriage. Only two years older than Jackie, the fourteen-year-old Yusha was quite taken with his stepsister-to-be when they first met in December 1941 on a sightseeing trip to Washington. They shared a bookishness, an inquisitiveness, and a fascination with history. Snippets from their later correspondence give great insight into Jackie’s sweetness, her sly wit, and her curiosity about the larger world. “I always love it so at Merrywood,” she would later write to him. “So peaceful—with the river and the dogs—and listening to the Victrola. I will never know which I love best—Hammersmith with its green fields and summer winds—or Merrywood in the snow—with the river and those great steep hills.”
Jackie did her best to become integrated into the new family. “Jackie never once spoke of step-this or half-that,” a cousin told Sarah Bradford. “To Jackie they were all her brothers and sisters.” Though she was bored by Hughdie, she recognized his essential kindliness and what his wealth meant for her, Janet, and Lee; and though she disliked her mother’s rigidity and temper, Jackie appreciated more and more, as she got older, how much Janet sacrificed for the sake of her girls—from braving the world as a divorcée in the 1930s to marrying for money in the 1940s.
Janet’s remarriage must have been a huge blow to Black Jack. The hypersolvency of her new husband aside, the union greatly decreased the amount of time Black Jack was able to spend with his daughters. The only sustained time they spent with him was every August in East Hampton, and holidays were now split with his ex-wife. “I think he counted on us so much,” Lee said. “We were his raison d’être—sports, perhaps, came next and the stock market after that. But we always came first. I think the big responsibility we felt was ours. Mainly because he was so alone and counted on us totally.”
In 1944 Jackie and her horse Danseuse won shows in East Hampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton, and Smithfield, an extraordinary accomplishment at any age, much less fifteen. That fall, Jackie entered Miss Porter’s boarding school in Farmington, Connecticut, for three years of college prep. It took only a little pleading with her grandfather, The Major, for him to agree to have Danseuse stabled in Farmington so that Jackie could ride him while away at the homogeneous WASP enclave.
According to historian Barbara Perry, Miss Porter’s “had begun to concentrate on academics, rather than ‘finishing’ young women, but the norms continued to emphasize elite manners.” There Jackie continued her interest in drawing and poetry and became more interested in art history, French, and literature. She connected to Wordsworth, Chekhov, and of course Byron, “the prototype of the dangerous, risk-taking, heartbreaking men she was drawn to.” Her father visited frequently on the weekends, raising eyebrows every time he zoomed up in his Mercury convertible.
“What we liked to do was run around and shake our behinds at him because he was an absolute lecher, absolute ravening, ravenous lecher,” remembered one of Jackie’s schoolmates, Ellen “Puffin” Gates. “And Jackie, of course, knew it, and it amused her, but I don’t think she was aware—she might have been, she didn’t miss anything—of the extent to which we were teasing her father and making fun of him. . . . This man was decidedly repulsive. He came through as this sort of cartoon example of a dirty old man.”
During the week, however, Jackie split her devotion between her studies, Danseuse, and her friends. And throughout, the Miss Porter’s ethos was inculcating something just as important. Wrote journalist Evgenia Peretz:
From its very start, in 1843, Miss Porter’s has been committed not just to the old-fashioned values of charm, grace, and loyalty but to another, unspoken value as well: the ability to tough it out. Deeply ingrained in the school’s DNA, it makes the school a kind of upper-class, social Outward Bound. Throughout its history, Miss Porter’s has tested girls’ personal fortitude in a variety of ways: through academic rigor, strict rules, and rituals designed to produce anxiety and intimidate. Whatever their problems, Miss Porter’s girls were expected to buck up, not to go crying home to Daddy.
This toughness was something that Jackie would have occasion to rely on in her adult life, time and again. Through a philandering husband, a challenging set of in-laws, an intrusive press, and many tragedies large and small, Jackie maintained a regal stillness, an impenetrability, a quiet but powerful resolve.
At Miss Porter’s, her childhood strain of mischievousness didn’t disappear; it simply matured. “She really had a very dirty sense of humor,” Puffin Gates told Sarah Bradford. “I had more fun with Jackie than almost anybody because of that streak in her which was so naughty and irreverent about almost everything.” She took up smoking, which was to be a lifelong habit, and wrote hectoring letters to Lee. (One advised her twelve-year-old sister that smoking would help her lose weight.) She graduated in 1947, a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, with an A-minus average, the Maria McKinney Memorial Award for Excellence in Literature, and the ambition to “never be a housewife.”
That summer, a Hearst columnist pronounced her “Deb of the Year.” The Auchinclosses threw two events for her society debut; Black Jack was invited to neither. It was during this summer, according to Barbara Perry, that Jackie began affecting the “breathy, cooing tone” that would characterize her speech as first lady. Her self-possession and charisma around men were becoming evident, as well. “I remember that talking with her was very different,” remembered writer George Plimpton. “She sort of enveloped you—rare for someone of that age to be able to learn how to. She had a wonderful way of looking at you and enveloping you with this gaze.” Plimpton would not be the last man to find Jackie utterly bewitching—and she was about to spend four years refining, among other things, her feminine magnetism. That autumn she was to take her poise and self-possession to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York.