A Sporadic Courtship, A Celebrity Wedding
Though we know that Jackie and Lee visited the Kennedys in Palm Beach in late 1951—around the time she was to become unenthusiastically engaged to John Husted—both Jackie and JFK would mark another dinner at Charlie Bartlett’s house, on May 8, 1952, as when they started dating.
In many ways, they were well matched. Their similarities gave each an amount of instant understanding of the other, while their differences added frisson. Both came from at least ostensibly wealthy Catholic families, in which the charming, philandering fathers were beloved by the children. Both also had complicated and ambivalent relationships with their mothers.
But where Jack Kennedy’s family, though dysfunctional in its own way, was strong and tightly knit, Jackie had seen hers fragment bitterly before she was even ten years old. And where a crowded, competitive childhood and a burgeoning political career had inured Jack to a great deal of clamor and bustle, Jackie’s disposition was more retiring and contemplative. Barbara Perry catalogs the differences that made them, in some ways, a genuinely odd couple:
He had no facility for languages; she was multilingual. . . . He cared not a whit for fashion, including his own; she was the queen of couture. . . . He was allergic to horses and dogs; she had grown up surrounded by equine and canine pets. He had never owned a home and had no interest in or taste for decorating; she had a natural eye for the finest decorative arts. His idea of the perfect night out was to see a movie Western and grab a hamburger and malt; she loved the ballet, opera, and symphony and maintained her taste for French cuisine and wine. . . .
To these differences, there were strong and compensating similarities: Each had a sly, wicked sense of humor and tremendous personal magnetism. But perhaps what matched them most was that they shared a wry, stoic demeanor. The violence of war, the premature deaths of his brother Joe and sister Kick, and his own precarious health had bred in Jack a fatalistic streak. For Jackie, the very public and humiliating disintegration of her family had forged her implacable poise.
Lem Billings, Jack’s lifelong best friend and the consummate Kennedy insider, felt he understood their bond, saying: “He saw her as a kindred spirit.They both had taken circumstances that weren’t the best in the world when they were younger and learned to make themselves up as they went along. They were both actors,” he added, “and I think they appreciated each other’s performances. . . . Both of them had the ability to make you feel that there was no place on earth you’d rather be than sitting there in intimate conversation with them.”
Jack and Jackie’s dating life was relatively conventional for the time. They played parlor games at the Bartletts’, went to the movies (Jackie gamely went to the Westerns), and double-dated with Bobby and Ethel. It was a sporadic courtship: Running for the Senate, Jack was frequently out of town. “He’d call me from some oyster bar up on the Cape with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday,” Jackie remembered.
Certainly he appreciated her exceptional book smarts. Both were avid readers of history and poetry. She took part in his intellectual and professional life, editing his senatorial position papers and translating books for him on Southeast Asia from the original French.
In the summer of 1952, Jack invited Jackie to the Hyannis Port compound, where the Kennedys were welcoming, but formidable. “How can I explain these people?” she would later write. “They were like carbonated water, and other families might be flat.” Leisure time with the Kennedys was highly energized. A parlor game could become a debate on current events, which could continue through one of their strenuous touch-football games. They sailed, they played tennis, they swam, they played golf—all of it as competitive as their dinner-table conversations.
Jack’s sisters, Eunice, Pat, and Jean, joined by irrepressible sister-in-law Ethel, were just as competitive as the men, and during that summer they subjected Jackie to something like a sorority hazing. Jackie called them the “Rah Rah Girls” and told Lee that, “when they have nothing else to do, they run in place. Other times they fall all over each other like a pack of gorillas.” They made fun of her cooing lilt and her delicate manners, calling her “The Deb.”
Whatever the sisters thought, the patriarch, Joe Kennedy, loved her. “Joe Kennedy not only condoned the marriage,” Lem Billings said. “He ordained it. ‘A politician has to have a wife,’ he said, ‘and a Catholic politician has to have a Catholic wife. She should have class. Jackie probably has more class than any girl we’ve ever seen around here.’” She was, in Joe’s eyes, the perfect package: well-spoken, photogenic, and poised—and tough enough to handle marriage to Jack.
Jack also dutifully presented himself to the Auchinclosses. “I remember the first time Jackie asked Jack to Merrywood, to pick her up for some dinner,” Lee remembered. “You couldn’t mention the word ‘Democrat’ in my stepfather’s house or even presence—nor in my father’s for that matter—and I felt Jack was in for a rough ride. But he was a senator, so he already had a kind of authority as well as a dazzling personality. He won them over pretty quickly.”
Jack Kennedy was without a doubt reluctant to marry. He enjoyed life as the dashing, rich, young Capitol Hill playboy, and his compulsive womanizing would have made the idea of “settling down” unattractive, if not downright disturbing. But Jack was no fool, and he knew that a wife would be a necessity if he aspired to higher office. And whatever mixed feelings Jack had at the prospect of marriage, Jackie had clearly captured his imagination. “He really brightened when she appeared,” said Chuck Spalding, one of Jack’s oldest friends. “You could see it in his eyes; he’d follow her around the room watching to see what she’d do next. Jackie interested him, which was not true of many women.”
For her part, Jackie went in with an awareness of some of the challenges that would face her and Jack as a married couple. She knew that he had troubles with his back and stomach. “The year before we were married, when he’d take me out, half the time it was on crutches,” she later said. “You know, when I went to watch him campaign, before we were married, he was on crutches. I can remember him on crutches more than not.” And she had heard rumors of his womanizing. But it’s hard to imagine, given her relationship with her father, that she’d have found anything irregular or unforgivable about that. “She wasn’t sexually attracted to men unless they were dangerous like old Black Jack,” Spalding posited. “It was one of those terribly obvious Freudian situations.”
The importance of the Kennedy fortune in Jackie’s calculus should not be downplayed. She saw what happened as the Bouvier family fortune declined, and she experienced a new level of lush living after her mother married Hughdie. But while Hughdie’s biological children were given enormous trusts, no such provisions were made for her or Lee. If she wanted her own fortune, she’d have to marry into it. Though Jackie Bouvier was gaga over Jack, as Sarah Bradford wrote, “she would never have married a poor Jack Kennedy.”
While Jackie continued her work at the Washington Times-Herald, she was ready for a change. In the spring of 1953, she headed to London to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. The stories, sketches, and photos she filed showed her creativity. A telegram from Jack in America read, “Articles excellent but you are missed. Love, Jack.” When she returned, Jack gave Jackie a two-carat diamond-and-emerald engagement ring. The engagement hit the papers in June 1953, and Life magazine wrote a cover story on the couple later that summer.
The wedding was, at Joe’s direction, a star-studded media event: Fourteen hundred invitations were sent and a crowd of three thousand showed up to spectate on September 12 at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Newport. Jackie wore the rosepoint lace veil that Janet’s mother and Janet had both worn for their weddings. While Jackie would have preferred to wear a more contemporary wedding dress, she acceded to the wishes of Jack, who had asked her to wear “something traditional and old-fashioned.” Her mother and father-in-law also argued for something frillier than Jackie wanted. “Joe reportedly was particularly pleased at the potential political capital to be earned by Janet Auchincloss’s commissioning of her African-American seamstress, Ann Lowe, to create the gown.” For Joe, using Lowe rather than a French designer, for example, added a humble and progressive touch that would play well with the public.
One shadow fell over the otherwise joyous occasion. On the morning of the ceremony, Black Jack was found in his hotel room, too drunk to stand up unassisted, much less walk his eldest daughter down the aisle, as he had hoped. Over the weeks preceding, he had conscientiously sobered up. He donned a special rubber suit and ran around the Central Park reservoir to slim down for the big day. But when he arrived in Newport, he barely had time to see Jackie before Janet made it plain that he was not welcome.
“He was on his best behavior,” remembered Gore Vidal. (Vidal’s mother had been married to Hughdie before Janet; he and Jackie shared half-siblings.) “But, inspired by who knows what furies, Janet decided that although she could not bar him from the church, she could disinvite him from the reception. . . . Janet ordered Mike [Canfield, Lee’s husband] to go to Black Jack and tell him he was not to come to the wedding reception. Black Jack went straight to the bar.”
“The only time I ever saw him really drunk was at Jackie’s wedding,” Lee remembered. “My mother refused to let him come to the family dinner the night before. So he went to his hotel and drank from misery and loneliness. It was clear in the morning that he was in no state to do anything, and I remember my mother screaming with joy, ‘Hughdie, Hughdie, now you can give Jackie away.’ During the wedding party I had to get him onto a plane back to New York. . . . It was a nightmare.”
Jackie betrayed none of her heartbreak during the ceremony or the reception, held at Hammersmith Farm. A Life magazine photographer apparently caught photos of Jackie impishly blowing smoke rings; Jack spent their two-week Acapulco honeymoon worrying they’d be published.
The couple stayed in a villa set into a cliff overlooking the sea. “This is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen—Jack adores it too,” Jackie wrote to Rose and Joe. Jack “is absolutely HELPLESS—which is such fun—because he doesn’t speak a word of Spanish.” As the help didn’t speak English, Jackie did all the translating. The maids found Jack “beguiling and are convinced we are NOT MARRIED!” She wrote about their water-skiing and deep-sea fishing adventures and rhapsodized about married life. “I want to tell you how perfect it is being married,” she wrote. “And how unbelievably heavenly Jack is.” For his part, Jack wired his parents that “at last I know the true meaning of rapture. Jackie is enshrined forever in my heart. Thanks mom and dad for making me worthy of her.”
Enshrined she may well have been, but Jack had no intention of putting a stop to his womanizing. As early as a couple of weeks into their marriage, he was making excuses to get away from Jackie and flirting with any attractive woman who came his way. Jack’s compulsive skirt chasing revealed a darker side of what was, in other ways, a genuinely heroic character.