Jackie

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It was Inauguration night, 1957, and throughout Washington jubilant Republicans celebrated the second term of Dwight D. Eisenhower. But perhaps the gayest party of all was held by a group of Democrats. Deciding that the opposition should not be allowed to have all the fun, Mrs. Frances Lanahan, daughter of F. Scott Fitzgerald, was hostess at an "Anti-Inaugural Ball" in her Georgetown home. Of those present, none seemed to be having a better time than the radiant young wife of the junior Senator from Massachusetts. Dressed in a simple, Empire-waisted white satin gown, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy laughed and danced into the early morning.

Jackie Kennedy might well recall that carefree night four years ago with a certain wistfulness, for she will probably never know another like it. After this week Jacqueline Kennedy will be First Lady of the Land. She will live as a cynosure. Her every public act will cause comment, her chance remarks will raise controversy, and the way she raises her children will bring criticism. Her clothes may arouse cheers from the ateliers of Paris--or anguished screams from the lofts of Seventh Avenue. Whether she wants to or not, she will influence taste and style. Hers will be a difficult, demanding and often thankless role, and no one knows it better than Jackie. "I feel as though I had just turned into a piece of public property," she said recently. "It's really frightening to lose your anonymity at 31." At that age, Jackie Kennedy will be one of the youngest First Ladies in U.S. history, and by every outward standard, she would seem perfectly suited to the part. Born to wealth and high social position, she has beauty, a swift intelligence and rarefied cultural interests. As Jack Kennedy's wife, she has lived for years in the public's gaze and should be well accustomed to the limelight. But in fact she shrinks from it. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy's struggle to maintain her own separate and private identity has been lifelong. It marked her girlhood. It has marked her marriage. It is the key to her past--and to her future.

"Our Bridge." Jacqueline Bouvier's birth, on July 28, 1929 in Long Island's Southampton Hospital, was duly recorded in Manhattan society columns. Such notice was only proper: the Bouviers were rich, Republican, Catholic, socially impeccable, and in their own less boisterous fashion, fully as overwhelming as the Kennedys of Massachusetts. No fewer than 24 of Jackie's ancestors came over from France to fight in the American Revolution. All went back to France with Lafayette, but young Michel Bouvier, inspired by his cousin's tales of the new frontier, came to Philadelphia in 1814 and became a prosperous importer. The Bouviers have been prominent on the American side of the Atlantic ever since. Jackie's grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr., was a spellbinding trial lawyer, an authority on George Washington, and a noted orator. At the dedication of the George Washington Bridge, he delivered a stirring address--and the Bouviers ever since have referred to the span as "our bridge."

John Bouvier III was a swarthily handsome stockbroker who cut a dashing figure around New York and, because of his year-round suntan, was known variously as "Black Jack," "the Black Orchid" and "the Sheik." His marriage in East Hampton to Janet Lee, the handsome daughter of an indigo-blueblooded, wealthy (Manhattan real estate, banking) family, was a major event in the 1928 summer season. And just one year later, the Bouvier family doctor was summoned from Manhattan to preside at the birth of Jacqueline.

From birth to young womanhood, Jackie and her younger sister Lee (now married to her second husband, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, a Polish nobleman turned London businessman) lived according to a social pattern as undeviating as a cotillion. Winters were spent in a Park Avenue apartment (where Black Jack indulgently permitted Jackie to keep a pet rabbit in the bathtub) while Jackie attended fashionable Chapin School. At six, Jackie had her own pony, by twelve she was riding in horse shows, and her love of horses is abiding. As Jackie and Lee grew older, they met their beaux under the Biltmore clock, fox-trotted through subscription dances at the Plaza and St. Regis with a beardless stag line known for decades as the "St. Grottlesex" set. The languid summers were whiled away in East Hampton, where Jackie played tennis on the grass courts of the Maidstone Club and modeled at the annual Ladies Village Improvement Society fashion show.

But even then, Jackie Bouvier seemed somehow removed from her group; her friends noticed it and still recall it. In 1940 her parents were divorced. Two years later, Janet Bouvier married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a Washington broker, but Black Jack, who died in 1957, never remarried. Jackie adored her father, and her eyes still glisten when she speaks of him. "He was a most devastating figure," she says. "At school all my friends adored him, and used to line up to be taken out to dinner when he came to see me."

After the divorce, Jackie became even more withdrawn, more apart from the St. Grottlesex group. "Her father," says one friend, "was the closest person in her life."

For Jackie Bouvier, the locale changed after the divorce, but the routine was much the same: Holton-Arms, a blue-chip girls' school in Washington, replaced Chapin, and the gilded summers in East Hampton gave way to the 75-acre waterfront Auchincloss estate in Newport, R.I. If anything, life was more mutedly elegant than before: Merrywood, the Auchincloss chateau in suburban Virginia, is rich with taste and culture: soft-spoken butlers pad across the wine-colored carpets; mellow, morocco-bound classics line the walls; and television is relegated to a tiny recess on one side of the vast fireplace. While the Kennedys were haranguing one another with political questions at their Hyannisport table, dinner at Merrywood was often conducted in French.

"Pure Defense." In 1944 Jackie was sent off to Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Conn.--accompanied by Danseuse, her mare. One summer she made the grand tour of Europe with three other girls, a chaperone from Holton-Arms and a drip-dry wardrobe. ("We would spend all night washing.") She had a keen and retentive mind, effortlessly stayed in the top tier of her classes. But she seemed to fear scaring her friends away by being both beautiful and bright, often hid her intelligence behind a mask of schoolgirl innocence. Recalls Socialite Jonathan Isham: "She was so much smarter than most of the people around her that she sublimated it. Therefore, she sometimes comes across as a wide-eyed, sappy type. It's pure defense. When I'd take her to the Yale Bowl, and it'd be fourth down and five to go, she'd say to me, 'Oh, why are they kicking the ball?' I'd say, 'Come on, Jackie, none of that.' She felt she ought to play up to the big Yaleman. The truth is, she probably knew more about football than I did."

At 18, Jacqueline Bouvier was presented to society in a glittering affair at Newport's Clambake Club, and Society Columnist Cholly Knickerbocker (Igor Cassini, whose Designing Brother Oleg is now Jackie's exclusive couturier) was moved to announce: "This year, for the first time since our predecessor selected Brenda Frazier as the Queen of Glamour, we are ready to name the No. 1 Deb of the Year and the nine runners-up. Queen Deb of the Year is Jacqueline Bouvier, a regal debutante who has classic features and the daintiness of Dresden porcelain . . . Her family is strictly 'Old Guard.' "

But despite such acclaim, Jackie remained vaguely, restively dissatisfied. "I really did enjoy the parties and dances," she now recalls. "But Newport--when I was about 19, I knew I didn't want the rest of my life to be there. I didn't want to marry any of the young men I grew up with--not because of them but because of their life. I didn't know what I wanted. I was still floundering." Her friends sensed her feelings. "She had the reputation of being very frigid," says Jonathan Isham. "She was rather aloof and reserved, but everybody liked her, although she seemed to talk an awful lot about animals."

Then, in 1950, Jackie Bouvier found an outlet. After two years at Vassar, she went to Paris for a year's study at the Sorbonne. It was an experience that has shaped all her tastes, and her letters of the time bubble with her excitement. "Dearest 'Yush,' " she wrote to her stepbrother, Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., "At last I allow myself the luxury of writing you! I have been so busy up till now and have to write Mummy a ream each week or she gets hysterical and thinks I'm dead or married to an Italian . . . It is so different, the feeling you get of a city when you live there. I remember last summer when we were here, I thought Paris was all glamour and glitter and rush, but of course it isn't. I was so goggle-eyed at the nite club you took me to--I went to the Lido the other day and it just seemed too garish. I really lead two lives--flying to the Sorbonne and Reid Hall--in a lovely quiet gray rainy world--or like the maid on her day out--putting on a fur coat and going to the middle of town and being swanky at the Ritz Bar! I really like the first part best . . ."

Bartlett's Pair. Returning to the U.S., Jackie cringed at the prospect of "being a little girl at Vassar again." She decided to stay with her mother and stepfather and complete her studies at George Washington University. She had matured, and her tastes had taken lasting form. Says Charles Bartlett, Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times, and an old friend: "She was no longer the round little girl who lived next door. She was more exotic. She had become gayer and livelier."

It was at Bartlett's insistence ("He got to be quite a bore about it") and at a dinner in his home in 1951 that Jacqueline Bouvier first met the young, handsome, rich and highly eligible young Democratic Representative from Massachusetts. Sunday-supplement legend claims that Jack Kennedy "leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date." Jackie denies the story; asparagus, she says, was not on the menu. But Jack Kennedy was far from impervious to beautiful young women, and, admits Jackie, "it was more than just meeting someone. It started the wheels turning."

They moved slowly at first. Jack, heavily involved in his Senate race against Henry Cabot Lodge, spent most of his time in Massachusetts. "He'd call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington." Meanwhile, Jackie had gone to work for the Washington Times-Herald for $42.50 a week as an inquiring photographer. It was an insipid job, and Jackie had her difficulties with it ("I always forgot to pull out the slide"), but she managed to enliven it occasionally with bright questions. Asking a group of prominent matrons which presidential candidate, Eisenhower or Stevenson, they would like to be marooned with on a desert island, she got a much quoted response from Mrs. Edward Foley Jr., wife of the Under Secretary of the Treasury: "I'll take Adlai any time. Where's the island?" Jackie ended her venture into journalism with a flourish and her own byline, covering the coronation of Elizabeth II.

With her certain instinct for fashion and lively writing flair, she won Vogue's Prix de Paris in competition with 1,280 other girls. (Her answer to one question--which three eminent men of the past she would prefer to meet?--gives another small clue to her character. She picked Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Diaghilev.) But Jackie regretfully declined the prize--a return trip to Paris--when her mother objected. There was a brief engagement to John Husted Jr., a socially registered Manhattan broker, but, both agree, it was never really serious.

And then, fresh from his senatorial triumph, Jack Kennedy returned to Washington, renewed his courtship with increased ardor. For six months Jack campaigned relentlessly for Jackie's vote, in and out of Georgetown dinner parties, Washington art theaters and movie houses (he even learned to tolerate Ingmar Bergman), at hunt breakfasts, up and down the Atlantic littoral from Palm Beach to Cape Cod. In June 1953, their engagement was announced. The Bouviers received the news with mixed reactions. Black Jack and his son-in-law-elect hit it off immediately. "They were very much alike," recalls Jackie. "We three had dinner before we were engaged, and they talked about politics and sports and girls--what all red-blooded men like to talk about." But other Bouviers were not so enthusiastic. "She telephoned me to tell me the news," recalls Jackie's aunt, Maude Davis, "but she said, 'You can't say anything about it because the Saturday Evening Post is about to come out with an article on Jack called "The Senate's Gay Young Bachelor," and this would spoil it.' " Sniffs Aunt Michelle Bouvier Putnam: "The whole Kennedy clan is unperturbed by publicity. We feel differently about it. Their clan is totally united; ours is not."

In September, John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Jacqueline Lee Bouvier were married by Boston's Cardinal (then Archbishop) Gushing in a Newport extravaganza that moved society columnists to transports of joy. There were 26 groomsmen and bridesmaids, 700 guests (ranging from Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt to Marion Davies) at the nuptial Mass and 900 at the reception.

A mob of 3,000 spectators broke through the police cordon around the church, nearly crushed the bride. After cutting the wedding cake, Jackie acknowledged the toasts gracefully, then noted that her mother had always told her to wait and judge a man by his correspondence. With quiet humor, she held up a postcard from Bermuda with a picture of a passion flower. On the back was scrawled: "Wish you were here. Cheers. Jack." "This," said Jackie, "is my entire correspondence from Jack."

Forty for Lunch. But life with Jack was not all rose petals. "It was like being married to a whirlwind. Life was so disorganized. We never had a home for five years. Politics was sort of my enemy as far as seeing Jack was concerned." She coped with problems that would have sent the average bride sprinting home to mother. "One morning the first year we were married, Jack said to me, 'What food are you planning for the 40 guests we are having for luncheon?' No one had told me anything about it. It was 11 a.m., the guests were expected at 1. I was in a panic."

Along with the unforeseeable misfortunes--Jack's near-fatal illness, Jackie's two miscarriages--the Kennedys had some basic areas of incompatibility, and both were vigorous, determined individuals with emphatic tastes. Jack was a meat-and-potatoes man; Jackie favored the haute cuisine of France. Her arty friends bored him (on one occasion, when the lively arts dominated the dinner conversation, Jack simply left the table and retired early). The Senator thrived on large crowds of people; his lady preferred intimate groups of close friends. Jack read American history; Jackie wolfed down four or five novels, ranging from Colette to Kerouac, a week. They bought an estate at McLean, Va.--and soon discovered it was a mistake. Commuting to the Senate, Jack was frustrated by the 20-minute rush-hour traffic jams at Chain Bridge. "I was alone almost every weekend while Jack traveled the country making speeches," says Jackie. "It was all wrong." In the gossipy circle they moved in, it was an open secret that the Kennedys' married life was far from serene.

"The Way It Should Be." Some time before their third anniversary, Jack and Jackie Kennedy had a searching reappraisal of their problems. Concessions--many of them minor, but all of the sort that can make a difference over long periods of time--were made by each. Jack learned to like cheese and fruit for dessert. Jackie boned up on American history (and got an 89 on her final examination in a special course at Georgetown University), learned golf and water skiing. She has cut her smoking down to five cigarettes a day in deference to his wishes, and like Jack, will drink a daiquiri or old-fashioned before dinner. Under his wife's urgent supervision, Jack became a fastidious dresser, even went to art galleries to inspect pictures with her (he likes seascapes). Dinner parties became a ragout of mutual interests, with conversations ranging from the humanities at Jackie's end of the table to politics at Jack's. "The men all do talk most of the time," says Jackie. "But that's the way it should be. The women add something from time to time. You don't ring a bell and say, 'Now we are going to talk about books.' " By the time Caroline was born and they had settled in their comfortable Federal home in Georgetown, the Kennedys were well clear of the marital reefs.

In the larger bear hug of the Kennedy family, Jackie flatly refused to be smothered. After breaking an ankle at touch football, she resolutely withdrew from the family scrimmages. She firmly refused to attend the nightly family dinners at Hyannisport, where a dozen or more argumentative Kennedys were always in attendance ("Once a week is great. Not every night"). Last summer, during the Democratic Convention, she had a stockade fence erected around her Hyannisport home, as much to fence out the neighboring Kennedy small fry and animals as the prying public. The proof that she had won her intramural war of independence was evident on a recent cruise aboard Jack's sloop Victura, when Jack and the Radziwills sat with her in the stern, while she passed around oeufs en gelee and vin rose from her hamper, and her Kennedy in-laws sprawled in the bow and lunched on peanut butter sandwiches and Cokes from a picnic basket.

The Duck with Moxie. Jackie took pains to study and analyze each member of the Kennedy family. Once, in Palm Beach, she was 15 minutes late to lunch with her father-in-law. "That can be fatal with Joe when he's in one of his Emperor Augustus moods," says Investment Banker Charles Spalding, who was present. "So when she came in, he started to give her the needle, but she gave it right back. Old Joe has a lot of old-fashioned slang phrases, so Jackie told him: 'You ought to write a series of grandfather stories for children, like "The Duck with Moxie," and "The Donkey Who Couldn't Fight His Way Out of a Telephone Booth." '

When she said this, the old man was silent for a minute. Then he broke into a roar of laughter." The clan was enchanted with Jackie's thoughtful Christmas gifts--beautifully bound books, her own bright, primitive paintings (executed in a manner that suggests a liaison between Raoul Dufy and Grandma Moses)--and soon stood in awe of her because she had the stamina to stand up for her own tastes. "They seem proud if I read more books, and of the things I do differently. The very things you think would alienate them bring you closer to them."

Marriage brought Jackie's motherly instincts surging to the surface. She is dedicated to her children, spends much of her days playing with and reading to Caroline. She is especially vigilant for the first signs of the brattishness that sometimes afflicts children. If Caroline shows the symptoms, "someone--her father or me, or the nurse, will draw the line. To check her in time is the biggest favor we can do her." Observes Ethel Kennedy, wife of Robert Kennedy and the mother of seven: "I've revised the way I'm going to bring up my own children."

Toward her husband Jackie is equally protective. "When somebody cuts Jack, she is unforgiving," says Ethel. "She has an elephant's memory." When Kennedy's political activities began to mount, Jackie worried "because he never would eat lunch, and kept getting thinner." One day her butler turned up in Jack's office with a hamper, expertly laid out a gleaming white cloth on his desk, then served a savory hot lunch in a baby's hot plate, "the kind you eat to the bottom and find a bunny rabbit." Impressed, Jack began to invite friends in for lunch, and the daily hamper load grew to six portions served on Sevres china.

"Just a Pretty Girl." Jackie's biggest hurdle was her husband's profession. Completely apolitical and shrinking instinctively from the hail-fellow habits of politicians, she has had a hard time adapting. But politics are Jack Kennedy's lifeblood and the White House his promised land--so Jackie has done her best. Nowadays she says gamely, "Politics is in my blood; I know that even if he changed I would miss politics. It's the most exciting life I know. This 18th century I'm supposed to like--it's a history of courtiers seeking favors. I'm fascinated by seeing it again today." But, encountering an old friend on the Hyannisport golf links last summer, she had an unguarded moment: "Oh God, why didn't you tell me you were here? When I think of all those awful politicians!"

Unlike Pat Nixon or Muriel Humphrey, Jackie takes no part in her husband's political planning. "Jack wouldn't--couldn't --have a wife who shared the spotlight with him," she says. Her political role is mostly visual: she is never consulted about political matters. On the stump

Jackie provides decor and more, sometimes delivers graceful little speeches to ethnic groups in whispery French, Spanish or Italian. Her retentive mind vacuums odd details from the newspapers and matches them with her own inside information.

("Oh," she told a disconcerted aide recently. "You must have leaked that story!") Once, when Jack lost some notes from Tennyson's Ulysses that he wanted to use in a speech, Jackie obligingly quoted excerpts, from childhood recollection.

At times Jackie displays a political naivete that makes reporters wonder if she is not reverting to the dumb Dora masquerade of her St. Grottlesex days. When a reporter told her in mid-campaign that he reckoned Jack's New York margin at more than half a million votes, she looked wide-eyed and uncertain: "Really? That's important, isn't it? How nice.'' And when her political duties are over, Jackie shucks her toga with obvious relief. Last October, after the tumultuous ticker-tape parade through Manhattan, she whipped off her reversible coat, turned it inside out and went off, like a girl just out of school, with her friend and neighbor, Artist William Walton, to look at avant-garde paintings in the Tibor de Nagy Gallery.

In the course of the 1960 presidential campaign, Jacqueline Kennedy got a full quota of wound stripes. A malicious rumor was dry-docked at New York's River Club that Joe Kennedy had given Jackie a million dollars not to divorce Jack. An Ohio woman remarked darkly that "she's both French and Catholic. The wine will flow in the White House." Gossip columnists reported seriously that Jackie was not pregnant--that it was all an elaborate hoax to remove her from the campaign scene. Her biggest battle--the affair of the sable underwear--was touched off when Women's Wear Daily reported that Jackie and her mother-in-law spend $30,000 a year on French clothes. Jackie retorted that she could not possibly spend that much, "even if I wore sable underwear," added gratuitously that she doubted that her wardrobe "cost as much as Mrs. Nixon's."

Muumuus if Necessary. Actually, reports an old friend and Florida neighbor of the Kennedys who is something of a clotheshorse herself, "Jackie has a completely American concept of fashion understatement. She wears very little jewelry. She buys very practically. She plans her wardrobe as a whole. In the fall and spring, she will buy one wonderful suit. She has never worn mink. She wears a wool coat over a suit or dress for lunch or dinners. She has one or two evening dresses--classic and simple and terribly chic, not startling." In the aftermath of the battle of the garment district, Jackie has vowed to buy only American clothes in the future, and will resort to muumuus if it will save Jack from embarrassment. Says she: "I am determined that my husband's Administration--this is a speech I find myself making in the middle of the night--won't be plagued by fashion stories."

Preparing for her new role, Jackie has been reading every available book on the White House, is "riveted" by the multitudes of facts that are giving her a connoisseur's knowledge of the place. The shortcomings of the household budget astound her ("It's stone broke, this White House"). She hotly denies the story that she will hang modern paintings everywhere: "The White House is an 18th and 19th century house, and should be kept as a period house. Whatever one does, one does gradually, to make a house a more lived-in house, with beautiful things of its period. I would write 50 letters to 50 museum curators if I could bring Andrew Jackson's inkwell home." Under Jackie's direction, the old mansion will change in subtle ways: the elephantine official functions will be held to an irreducible minimum. The dinners will be more intimate, the menus more French. The guests will be variegated--artists, writers and professors joining the politicians and diplomats. To the family quarters, Jackie will bring some of her own delicate Louis Quinze furniture, her books and paintings.

Sometimes Jackie shows signs of panic at the prospect of her own new frontier. "I'll get pregnant and stay pregnant," she told a friend, only half in jest. "It's the only way out." But when she considers the alternative--if Jack had lost the election--she surveys her fingernails as if ready to bite them, and admits that there are worse prospects than the White House. "How could you fill his life? If he had lost, he'd have been around the world three times and written three books. But it wouldn't be the same.

"Happiness is not where you think you find it. I'm determined not to worry. So many people poison every day worrying about the next. I've learned a lot from Jack." And Jack Kennedy, this week to become the 35th President of the U.S., has plainly learned a lot from Jackie.

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