The Senator’s Wife
Jackie returned from her honeymoon to a new role: senator’s wife. Right away she got a crash course in Massachusetts politics.
“I was taken immediately to Boston to be registered as a Democrat by Patsy Mulkern, who was called ‘the China Doll,’ because he was a prize fighter once,” Jackie later remembered. “And he took me all up and down that street, and told me that ‘duking’ means shaking hands, and things. And then there was another man with ‘Onions’ Burke named ‘Juicy’ Grenara. Well, I mean those names just fascinated me so. You know, to sort of see that world, and then we’d go have dinner at the Ritz.”
It was a new world for her, and one which offered little time to sit still.
“It just seems it was suitcases [and] moving,” she said of the first year of their marriage. They rented in Georgetown from January to June and then spent the summer living at Merrywood during the week and escaping to Cape Cod on the weekends as much as they could. In the fall they lived in Massachusetts—at Hyannis or Jack’s tiny apartment in Boston. “It was terrifically nomadic. . . . Such a pace, when I think of how little we were alone, or always moving.”
The novelty of the nomadic lifestyle was fleeting, and that they were so rarely alone frustrated Jackie. She learned, very early in their marriage, that Jack for the most part preferred the company of men. One pillar of his personal cadre was Paul “Red” Fay, a skipper in the same PT squadron during the war. The second leg of their honeymoon was spent with Fay and his wife in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, where Jackie found herself sharing Jack with his old naval buddy. While Jack and Fay attended a 49ers game, Fay’s wife drove Jackie around the Bay Area, showing her the sights. And once they were back in the east, Jack’s closest friend since his Choate days, LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, became “a nearly permanent houseguest, along with his large poodle.”
She also had to share Jack with his large and boisterous family. Having never known much in the way of discipline, either with regard to their behavior or in relation to money, the Kennedys took a great deal of getting used to. In Palm Beach over Christmas, 1953, Jackie gave Jack a very expensive oil painting set. “Almost immediately, all the Kennedys descended upon it,” Lem Billings remembered, “squeezing paint out of the tubes, grabbing brushes, competing to see who could produce the greatest number of paintings in the least amount of time. . . . Jackie was stunned. She stood there with her mouth hanging open, ready to explode.”
It took time for Jackie to find the right posture toward the Kennedy family ethos. While the Kennedy men instantly adored her, the hazing she’d endured at the hands of the women had done nothing to thaw them to her. “I don’t think she ever felt comfortable with the sisters,” Doris Kearns Goodwin said. “They were fiercely competitive women and she wasn’t like that—she didn’t want to play touch football.” Not only did she not fit into the culture of Rose, Eunice, Pat, Jean, and of course Ethel; as the shiny new darling of the men, she was competition, provoking envy in Rose and the girls. Nurturing a young marriage was difficult when Jackie had to compete for attention with so many of Jack’s constituencies.
After Jack’s death, Jackie would put a better face on it. “So he loved the Irish, he loved his family, he loved people like you,” she told Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in her 1966 oral history. “He loved me and my sister in the world that had nothing to do with politics. . . . He loved us all. And you know, I don’t feel any jealousy.” At the time, though, it hurt. In addition to their rarely being alone together, Jack was frequently away during the first part of their marriage, criss-crossing the country to introduce himself to the electorate, traveling around Massachusetts on Senate business, or working long hours in Washington. “I was alone almost every weekend,” she later said. “It was all wrong. Politics was sort of my enemy and we had no home life whatsoever.”
The alacrity with which Jack returned to womanizing after their wedding also surprised and wounded Jackie. Lem Billings remembered that Jackie wasn’t “prepared for the humiliation she would suffer when she found herself stranded at parties while Jack would suddenly disappear with some pretty young girl.”
Without a place to call her own, and feeling lonely without much focused attention from her husband, Jackie found ways to keep herself busy and distracted. When volunteering with other Senate wives, who were mostly much older than she (she was twenty-two when Jack joined the Senate), proved less than stimulating, she took classes in US history at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. She tried, somewhat hopelessly, to learn housekeeping and cooking from her maid, and, with greater success, to improve Jack’s wardrobe. She took JFK, a notably slovenly dresser since his youth, and remade him into the stylish, effortlessly elegant man that history remembers. “After their marriage his suits fit perfectly, were conservatively cut and pressed,” remembered Evelyn Lincoln, who would remain his secretary until his death. Jackie transformed him “from a fumbling person who couldn’t tie his own tie, and it was always too long, to an immaculate dresser.”
Jackie also helped Jack in the political arena, not just by attending the usual speeches, rallies, and receptions, but by improving the mechanics of his public speaking. According to Jackie biographer C. David Heymann:
[Jack] tended to talk on and on, usually much too quickly, never knowing when to take a breath or how to make a point. His voice was rasping and high-pitched. Drawing on her theater training at Miss Porter’s and her natural bent for the dramatic, Jackie slowed him down, helped him modulate his voice and give clearer expression to his thoughts. . . . She taught him the benefits of body language and trained him to harness his overabundant energy.
Beyond the stresses of politics, Jack’s family, and his absences, the early years of their marriage were further complicated by Jack’s health problems. His 1947 diagnosis of Addison’s disease explained a lot of his digestive and immune problems but did nothing to ease the steady recurrence of medical complaints. Kennedy biographer Robert Dallek wrote: “He consulted an ear, nose and throat specialist about his headaches, took medication and applied heat fifteen minutes a day to ease his stomach troubles, consulted urologists about his bladder and prostate discomfort, had DOCA pellets implanted and took daily oral doses of cortisone to control his Addison’s disease, and struggled unsuccessfully to find relief from his back miseries.”
His back pain, by the beginning of 1954, “had become almost unbearable,” Dallek continued. “X rays showed that the fifth lumbar vertebra had collapsed, most likely a consequence of the cortico steroids he was taking for the Addison’s disease. He could not bend down to pull a sock on his left foot and he had to climb and descend stairs sideways.” In August, a team of physicians explained that a complicated surgery could offer the hope of relief, but that the risks of a fatal infection—especially for a patient with Addison’s disease—were substantial.
“Jack was determined to have the operation,” Rose Kennedy later said. “He told his father that even if the risks were fifty-fifty, he would rather be dead than spend the rest of his life hobbling on crutches and paralyzed by pain.”
On October 21, a metal plate was inserted into Jack’s back to stabilize the lumbar spine. In the aftermath, a urinary tract infection nearly killed him. After he sank into a coma, a priest administered the last rites—not for the first or the last time in JFK’s short life. By mid-November, he was off the critical list, but he remained very ill.
“Jackie was magnificent with him,” remembered Charlie Bartlett.
She had this almost uncanny ability to rise to the occasion. She sat with him for hours, held his hand, mopped his brow, fed him, helped him in and out of bed, put on his socks and slippers for him, entertained him by reading aloud and reciting poems she knew by heart, bought him silly little gadgets and toys to make him laugh, played checkers, Categories and Twenty Questions with him . . . Anything to distract him from the pain.
It’s not outlandish to imagine Jackie relishing the chance to spend so much time with Jack, largely removed from the frustrations of their Washington life—or the opportunity to prove to him that she had the toughness requisite for success as a Kennedy.
After a few months, Jack was able to beat back the infection, but he required another operation in February to remove the plate, which doctors feared had itself become infected. He was discharged within three weeks but was forced to spend his Palm Beach recovery time on his stomach: The operation left him with a “huge, open, oozing, very sickly-looking hole in the middle of his back,” according to Florida senator and JFK intimate George Smathers. “I realized then that I’d misjudged Jackie,” he added. “Anybody who could look at that festering wound day after day and go through all that agony with her husband had to have backbone.” Her devotion and toughness in the face of Jack’s illness earned her respect from Jack’s mother and sisters.
She’d later refer to early 1955 as “the winter of [Jack’s] back,” so much did his struggle define that period for her. Looking to occupy his mind during his long and painful convalescence, and hoping to boost his name recognition and credibility as a leader in the event of a presidential run, Jack wrote Profiles in Courage, a study of moments of political courage in US history. The book, which would win the Pulitzer Prize, had many helpers. Robert Dallek wrote that “Jack did more on the book than some later critics believed, but less than the term author normally connotes.” Dallek calls the book “more the work of a ‘committee’ than of any one person.” Jackie was certainly part of that committee, editing and critiquing along the way as Jack and Kennedy aide Ted Sorensen, as well as Georgetown history professor Jules Davids and other academics, hammered out drafts. Jack dedicated the book to Jackie, “whose help during all the days of my convalescence I cannot ever adequately acknowledge.”
As Jack’s recovery hit its stride, the idea of a permanent home for them became more important to Jackie. In October they closed on Hickory Hill, a large, Georgian-Colonial estate in McLean, Virginia, only a couple of miles from Merrywood. “I thought it would be a place where he could rest on weekends the year where he would be recovering from his back,” Jackie later said. She set about making the house comfortable for them and the children they hoped to have. Jackie was pregnant, and she was planning a nursery when she miscarried in mid-1955. She also broke her ankle in a touch football game at Hyannis Port that November.
Meanwhile, Hickory Hill was not panning out as she had hoped. Speaking engagements had Jack gone every weekend, and it was too far outside of Washington to offer him much relaxation during the week. Her ankle injury, plus the hour commute time from McLean to Washington, meant more isolation for Jackie. During this time and through the end of 1959, Jack kept a suite on the eighth floor of Washington’s Mayflower Hotel, where he entertained his sexual conquests. She most likely did not know about the extent of his philandering; she just knew that he was absent.
New Year’s 1956 brought great news, though: Jackie was again pregnant. She spent much of the year transforming the house at Hickory Hill, paying special attention to the nursery. In August, seven months pregnant and in the midst of a heat wave, Jackie accompanied Jack to Chicago for the Democratic National Convention. There, despite feeling weak, she attended rallies, speeches, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. At the convention, where the Democratic party again nominated Adlai Stevenson for president, Jack made a sudden, failed last-minute play for the vice presidential nomination. (It would go to the somewhat less glamorous Estes Kefauver.) It was perhaps here that Jackie’s impatience with the press first began to show. After being pursued across the convention floor for a quote by journalist Maxine Cheshire, the very pregnant Jackie “hiked up her dress and broke into a run.”
After the convention, both Jackie and Jack returned to the East Coast exhausted. Jackie headed to Newport to relax in the lead up to her delivery date. Jack departed for France to spend time at his father’s rented villa on the Riviera before heading on a Mediterranean cruise with George Smathers and several women. As far as Jackie knew, Jack was relaxing with his dad and a couple of friends in the south of France, and nothing more. JFK’s main mistress at the time—a tall blonde socialite who referred to herself as “Pooh”—joined them for the voyage.
Jack was enjoying himself enough that it didn’t occur to him to return home when he was notified that Jackie had delivered a stillborn baby girl, via Caesarean section, following an internal hemorrhage on August 23. It was a particularly horrid example of the way his decency so often deserted him when it came to the women in his life—especially his wife. Jackie, unconscious during the Caesarean, was informed of the child’s death by Bobby, who was sitting at her bedside when she awoke. Jack didn’t speak directly to Jackie until he reached Genoa on August 26, and he flew home two days later. Only after Smathers warned him that a divorce would destroy Jack’s presidential ambitions did he agree to cut short his vacation and return to the States.
In a letter to Rose shortly afterward, Jackie practiced her bittersweet stoicism. “Everything is getting better now—and the bad time seems far behind. All I can think of is what a close shave it was and how lucky I am to be able to have more children,” she wrote. “Everything else fades into unimportance.” It’s not hard to see the sadness behind her brave face. “Don’t worry,” she wrote. “I’ll make you a grandmother yet!”
Having built a nursery at Hickory Hill and invested the home with so much expectant joy, Jackie now associated the house with loss. She later said plainly, “I didn’t want to live there any more.” They sold Hickory Hill to Bobby and Ethel for $125,000, the same price they originally paid for it, and rented a house in Georgetown, on P Street. In March, she found out that she was once again pregnant; buoyed by the news, the couple again sought out a permanent home, and they finally settled on a Federal-era house at 3307 N Street NW in Georgetown. Built in 1812, the three-story redbrick house gave Jackie a broad canvas on which to practice what was becoming a passion of hers: redecoration.
“I remember that when she got the N Street house, it was going to be just right—it was going to be absolutely marvelous,” remembered Jackie’s mother, Janet.
It was a house with a lot of feeling about it and a lot of charm, but she did that living room, the double living room downstairs, over at least three times within the first four months they were there. I remember you could go there one day and there would be two beautiful needlepoint rugs, one in the little front drawing room and one in the back one towards the garden. The next week they would both be gone. They would have been sent on trial. Not only that, but the curtains were apt to be red chintz one week . . .
Decoration was, like many of Jackie’s other passions, an expensive one. Her ability to spend huge sums of money—on couture, on decor, on food—annoyed Jack and his family. While there were arguments and confrontations about Jackie’s spending throughout the years, it seems that the mode Jack adopted was one of bemused resignation. George Smathers quipped, “They had an entirely average marriage—she spent and he seethed.”
Jackie’s mother, Janet, told an amusing, and revealing, story from that period:
We were having dinner there one night and Jack didn’t get home until quite late, after we had finished dinner. He was having dinner on a tray. At that moment the room was entirely beige: the walls had been repainted a week or so before, and the furniture had all been upholstered in soft beige, and there was a vicuna rug over the sofa . . . And let’s see—rugs, curtains, upholstery, everything, was suddenly turned lovely different shades of beige. I knew how wildly expensive it is to paint things and upholster things and have curtains made, but I can remember Jack just saying to me, “Mrs. Auchincloss, do you think we’re prisoners of beige?”
Nesting in preparation for the baby had done much for her morale, but Jackie suffered another blow in August when her father died of liver cancer. Years of drinking had taken their toll. Jackie took charge of his obituary and funeral arrangements while Lee and her husband, Michael Canfield, flew in from Italy. On August 6, after a funeral attended by fewer than two dozen mourners (many of them Black Jack’s mistresses), John Vernou Bouvier III was laid to rest near St. Philomena’s in East Hampton, where he’d married Janet almost thirty years before. Buried next to his mother, father, and brother, his casket was covered with yellow daisies and cornflower, Jackie’s favorites.
In losing her conflicted, charismatic father, Jackie’s world had undergone a seismic shift—John F. Kennedy was now the titanic male figure in her life. Black Jack Bouvier had provided Jackie with her first and most influential picture of what a man was. Joined in Jackie’s mind with so much love, affection, and nurturing, her father’s example provided the foundation for her most basic, unexamined ideas of what a man could and should be. In a sense, Black Jack had prepared Jackie to fall in love with a man like John F. Kennedy. In JFK she’d found a man with the same dangerous attractiveness, the sense of insouciant fun, the jet-set good looks and lavish lifestyle. She’d also found a man who, like her father, was incapable of being faithful.
Her world would change again only four months later, when she gave birth to Caroline Bouvier Kennedy, named after Jackie’s sister, in New York.