These Few Precious Days Read online

  Any hope of somehow avoiding a stressful pregnancy ended when Jackie learned that Black Jack Bouvier was upset with her for not calling with the news that she was expecting. “I’m the grandfather,” he complained bitterly, “and I have to read about it in the New York Times?” A recluse living in a four-room apartment on New York’s Upper East Side, the once-dashing Black Jack now spent weeks on end drinking alone.

  Jackie, who was at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, flew straight to New York to tell her father how sorry she was and beg his forgiveness. But instead of accepting his daughter’s apologies, Black Jack lambasted her for turning his back on him in favor of the Auchinclosses and the Kennedys. “We may not have as much money,” he told her. “But what we do have is considerably more valuable: breeding.”

  Throwing up her hands, Jackie flew back to Cape Cod. When Black Jack checked into New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital complaining of stomach pains on July 27, the eve of Jackie’s twenty-eighth birthday, she called to check on him. She was told he was resting comfortably, that he was likely to be released soon, and there was really no need for her to make a special trip to visit him.

  Just five days later, Black Jack Bouvier lapsed into a coma. It was then that Jackie was told for the first time that her father was suffering from terminal liver cancer.

  Jackie and Jack rushed to the hospital, but it was too late. Black Jack died just forty-five minutes before they got there. He was sixty-six. As difficult as it was for Jack, he put a comforting arm around Jackie while the nurse on duty told them that Jackie’s name was the last word on her father’s lips.

  “I know she cried a great deal when her father died,” Yusha Auchincloss said. “It took her completely by surprise, and she was terribly, terribly hurt.” Guilt-ridden over not being there for her father at the end, Jackie assumed the burden of making all the funeral arrangements—from writing the obituary to picking out the flowers and the coffin.

  Matters only got worse when Jack was admitted to New York Hospital suffering from another virulent staph infection in his back. He quickly recovered, but Jackie, now five months along, was beginning to buckle under the strain. “She was a basket case,” Evelyn Lincoln said. “Everyone, including Jack, was worried about the baby.”

  On November 27, 1957—the day before Thanksgiving—Jackie gave birth by caesarean section to a seven-pound, two-ounce girl at the Lying-In Hospital of New York–Cornell Medical Center. Janet Auchincloss was especially struck by Jack’s reaction, particularly given the callousness he had shown over her daughter’s still-birth the year before. “I’ll always remember Jack’s face when the doctor came into the waiting room and told him that the baby was fine,” she said, “the sweet expression on his face and the way he smiled.” She was also impressed that Jack “seemed perfectly at home with babies,” and the “sheer, unadulterated delight he took in Caroline from that first day on. The look on his face, which I had never seen before, really, was … radiant.”

  As Jackie came out of anesthesia, the first sight she saw was Jack walking toward her, their baby in his arms. A nurse propped Jackie up and then helped Jack hand the baby to her. This was a feeling that, until this very moment, she feared she might never experience. “Oh, Jack. Isn’t she gorgeous?” she asked him. “Isn’t she the prettiest baby girl you have ever seen?” They named her after Jackie’s sister, Lee, whose full name was actually Caroline Lee.

  Members of the Kennedy, Bouvier, and Auchincloss clans trooped in for a peek at little Caroline, and then friends began to arrive. Lem Billings was the first. Looking at the babies lined up in the hospital nursery, Jack clasped a hand on his friend’s shoulder and asked, “Now, Lem, tell me—which of the babies in the window is the prettiest?” Lem, without hesitating, pointed to the wrong infant. “He didn’t speak to me for two days,” Billings recalled. “Jack was more emotional about Caroline’s birth than he was about anything else.”

  Everyone was surprised at how effortlessly Jack had taken to fatherhood. The impact of Caroline’s birth was so profound, in fact, that it enabled him to connect with others in a way he had not been able to before. “Caroline’s birth was a magical thing for Jack,” Lem observed. “It changed him. I’m not sure he ever would have had what it takes—that extra sparkle—to make it all the way to the White House. And her arrival really changed the whole situation with Jackie—made it stronger, at least for a while.”

  Other friends saw the changes, too. “Jack was able to release some of his emotions to her,” Betty Spalding said, “and it freed him from the fear of it.” That meant he could communicate with Jackie “better, and she with him. Until he had Caroline, he never really learned how to deal with people.”

  If Caroline’s birth rekindled the romance in her marriage, it was in large part because it bolstered Jackie’s flagging self-esteem. She no longer felt inferior to the prolific Kennedy in‑laws, or in the shadow of either her own domineering mother or the equally domineering Rose.

  In fact, no one took child-rearing more seriously than Mrs. JFK. “If you bungle raising your children,” Jackie later said, “I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much.”

  Once back at the house on N Street, Jackie took charge. Now that she was wife, mother, and mistress of the first home she could call entirely her own, Jackie called the shots—and hired a staff to implement them: a valet, two upstairs maids, a cook, a full-time chauffeur, a laundress, her own private secretary, and a personal maid that would remain with her for years to come, Providencia “Provi” Paredes.

  Then, of course, there was the British nanny, Maud Shaw. It was up to Nanny Shaw to change diapers, wake up for the midnight feedings, and make sure that the master and mistress of the house were not unduly disturbed by the presence of a newborn in the house. Still, Shaw gave credit to Jackie for paying attention to her children from the very beginning. In the coming years, Jackie would “do a lot of little things for Caroline,” Shaw said, “dress her, and take her out, and play with her in the garden.”

  At the house on N Street, Jackie put an inflatable pool in the backyard and used a garden hose to fill it up herself. “We spent a number of hours playing in the swimming pool,” she said, “and having these little afternoon teas and lunches together.”

  NO ONE WAS MORE SMITTEN with Caroline than Daddy. Yet Jack also saw something else in their daughter—a valuable political asset. “Jack’s desire,” Charlie Bartlett said, “was to get the bountiful positive publicity only a child might yield.”

  Jackie would have none of it. “No pictures of the baby, Jack,” she insisted. “That’s final. I’m not going to let our child be used like some campaign mascot. I don’t care how many votes it costs you.” But in April 1958, as Jack positioned himself to become his party’s 1960 presidential nominee, Jackie finally caved in—with the understanding that Jack would take a break from campaigning that summer and take her to Paris. On April 21, Life hit the stands with a beguiling Kennedy family portrait on the cover. “It looks wonderful, Jack,” Mommy said when he proudly showed the magazine to her. “And that’s good because we won’t be doing that again any time soon.”

  Jack, however, was not about to give up so easily. He would ultimately turn to photographer Jacques Lowe, a refugee from Nazi Germany who had befriended Bobby Kennedy, to create the Norman Rockwell image of a perfect American family, frame by frame. At times, Lowe found Jack the Front-runner to be “grumpy, awkward, and preoccupied. But he perked up whenever I asked him to sit with Caroline.”

  The charming, wholesome images seemed at odds with the fact that Jack soon returned to his extracurricular pursuits. In addition to a brief fling with Quincy, Massachusetts–bred actress Lee Remick, Jack began his sporadic, two-and-a-half-year affair with Marilyn Monroe. A year after divorcing Joe DiMaggio, Marilyn married the playwright Arthur Miller. The couple settled in bucolic Roxbury, Connecticut, but within months Marilyn was meeting Jack secretly at his suite in New York’s Carlyle Hotel, a duplex that occupied the thirty
-fourth and thirty-fifth floors and boasted two terraces and glass-enclosed solarium—all with wraparound views of Central Park and the Manhattan skyline.

  “As Jackie saw it,” Betty Spalding said, “her main job was to keep Jack interested.” That Christmas of 1957, she proudly handed Jack the keys to a white Jaguar sedan. Although she used only a small portion of the money her father had left her to purchase it, Jack insisted the British-made luxury car was “too showy.” He promptly traded it in for Joe Kennedy’s vehicle of choice, a sedate, dark green Buick.

  This time Jackie was determined to keep a closer eye on her husband. She joined Jack on the campaign trail for the first time as he sought reelection to the Senate in 1958—a race he needed to win by a landslide as prelude to a White House run. She posed for pictures alongside the candidate, stared adoringly at him whenever he gave a speech, and helped man the phone bank with her Kennedy sisters-in-law as part of an “Ask Senator Kennedy” telecast paid for by Papa Joe.

  Ironically, Jackie’s very first campaign speech was not in English, but in French, delivered to members of Worcester’s Cercle Français. Since Jackie also spoke Spanish and Italian, Jack took her to Boston’s North End. When she addressed one crowd with a few phrases in flawless Italian, it erupted in cheers. Jack won his reelection with an unprecedented 73.6 percent of the vote.

  By the time Jack formally declared his presidential candidacy on January 20, 1960, he had already logged tens of thousands aboard his campaign plane—a ten-passenger DC‑3 Jack named, with Jackie’s blessing, the Caroline. Given her father’s frequent absences, the real Caroline’s first spoken word—“Goodbye”—seemed particularly poignant.

  The goodbyes weren’t only for Daddy. Jackie gamely tagged along in her role as the candidate’s adoring wife. Flying through blizzards, dense fog, and thunderstorms aboard the Caroline (“I’d be turning green, and they’d both just be sitting there reading,” Lowe said), the Kennedys crisscrossed the country at a breakneck pace. Once airborne, Jack usually strategized or worked on speeches with Sorensen, O’Donnell, Salinger, and Powers between bowls of fish chowder—JFK’s favorite dish. Jackie sat quietly doing needlepoint or reading Jack Kerouac—“an island of serenity in the chaos,” Jacques Lowe said. “But you always knew she’d rather be someplace else.”

  Jackie, considered cold and aloof at first, gradually proved herself to be a valuable asset to the campaign. West Virginia campaign organizer Charles Peters worried that she was too “high-toned” for his state, but he admitted that he was “dead wrong. It turned out that the voters loved her. She was perceived as the princess, and they basked in her glamour rather than being offended by it.” Pierre Salinger, who had signed on as Jack’s press secretary, conceded that “Jackie did a credible job of concealing her natural distaste for politics from the voters. But God, she just hated it. She kept saying she knew her husband was involved in a ‘great struggle’—meaning the race against Nixon—and that as his wife she knew she had to be a part of it.”

  Now that he was facing a tough battle for the White House against the well-financed, well-organized, and even better-known incumbent vice president, Jack wanted Jackie by his side in the general election. But that was not going to happen. When he returned from racking up primary victories in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, Jackie told the candidate she was expecting another baby in December.

  This time Jack did not even consider asking his wife to attend the Democratic National Convention, to be held in Los Angeles. He did not have to be reminded that the strain of campaigning in 1956 cost them the life of their infant daughter and almost killed Jackie in the process. “Now Jack understood what it was to be a parent,” Larry Newman said. “He already saw his baby as a human being, and not a thing … He was a changed man in 1960.”

  The day after Jack beat back a last-minute challenge by Texas senator Lyndon Johnson and secured the nomination on the first ballot, reporters descended on Hyannis Port wanting to talk to the candidate’s wife. While Caroline careened about, Jackie apologized for her decision to stick close to home for the rest of her pregnancy. “I suppose I won’t be able to play much part in the campaign,” she allowed, “but I’ll do what I can.

  Privately, Jackie was less eager to oblige. Her spies at the convention—including her sister, Lee, now married to Polish Prince Stanislas (“Stas”) Radziwill—had kept her abreast of Jack’s dates with Marilyn Monroe. (Marilyn told Jack’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford that she found her time spent with JFK to be “very penetrating.”)

  “She was no dumbbell,” Smathers said. “Jackie knew all about Marilyn and what they were up to at the convention.” Much of the time, “what they were up to” occurred at Jack’s secret Los Angeles hideaway in an apartment house owned by a close friend of Joe Kennedy, Wizard of Oz Tin Man Jack Haley.

  Jackie assumed that Marilyn wasn’t the only woman her husband had been involved with during this period, and she was right. On the eve of the pivotal New Hampshire primary back in March, Jack had begun an affair with a slender, blue-eyed, raven-haired twenty-six-year-old named Judy Campbell at New York’s Plaza hotel. Campbell, who had been introduced to JFK by Frank Sinatra, also happened to be the girlfriend of Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. During the convention in Los Angeles, Campbell spent the night with Jack at Peter Lawford’s Beverly Hilton hotel suite.

  Jackie wasn’t worried about losing Jack to any of these women, but she did live in fear of one thing. “So long as she was not held to public ridicule,” Gore Vidal said, “Jackie accepted Jack’s womanizing as a fact of life. It’s not that they didn’t care about each other. I think she eventually grew quite fond of Jack, and he took a certain pride in her.”

  “Jackie was not threatened—not even by Marilyn Monroe,” Clare Boothe Luce claimed. “But if somehow word had gotten out, it would have upset her terribly. She could not bear the thought of being publicly humiliated.”

  “Jackie was anxious, confused,” said their Hyannis Port neighbor Larry Newman. “She thought a child would make all the difference, and it didn’t, not really.” As she faced the inevitable demands that would be made on her, said Newman, “there were plenty of moments when there was this look in her eyes—somewhere between sadness and panic.” As for crowds: “They terrified her.” Whenever she saw people approaching, or the car she was in was about to be swallowed up by the throng, “she always looked like a frightened deer.”

  Yet she was not about to let her true feelings show to the voters. “She hid it,” Newman said, “from the press, the cameras, the public.” But not, as it happened, from Jack’s election team. “Get the hell out!” she shouted at Kennedy advance man Frank Morrissey when he came to drive her to meet Jack at Cape Cod’s Barnstable Airport. “I’m staying right here!” It was to be Jack’s triumphant homecoming, but at first Jackie did not want to give him the satisfaction of seeing her play the part of loyal wife.

  She came around, of course, but not before telling Newman that she didn’t want to go because the same thing always happened: She was going to run up the gangway and join Jack in the Caroline, and reemerge with him to the roar of the crowd. Then someone would shove a bunch of roses in her arms and Jack would then desert her to shake hands. “I hate it,” she said. When everything happened exactly the way she predicted, Jackie, clutching her roses, turned to Newman and said, “What did I tell you?”

  Even though Jack could always count on crowds being twice the size if Jackie was with him, he didn’t seem particularly interested in her welfare on the hustings. Jacques Lowe said JFK was “never intentionally rude” to his wife, but instead was “very focused on what he was doing and not always paying that much attention to her. He could be walking out into a crowd and she’d be about a half-mile behind him, just trying to keep up.”

  According to Betty Spalding, this had less to do with campaigning than it did with Jack’s “terrible manners” when it came to the opposite sex. “He didn’t have any manners, in the sense of letting women
go through the door first or opening doors for them or standing up when older women came into the room. He was nice to people, but heedless of people.”

  BEFORE THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST HIS old friend Richard Nixon started in earnest, Jack unwound with his family at Hyannis Port. Not that summers at the compound were ever particularly restful. Presided over by Caroline’s fiercely competitive grandparents, “vacations” were invariably a frenetic blur of swimming, sailing, tennis, snorkeling, badminton, golf, and of course the compulsory games of rough-and-tumble “touch” football on the lawn. Always looking for ways to indulge his passion for speed, Jack would ignore his bad back and take the wheel of a golf cart, careering around the grounds as Caroline and her cousins held on tight and shrieked in terror.

  Once she had settled back into the rhythm of life at Hyannis Port, Jackie was able to tamp down her own anxieties and offer words of comfort to her new sister-in-law, Ted’s wife, Joan. When Joan confided that Ted wasn’t even bothering to hide his interest in other women, Jackie laughed it off. “Kennedy men are like that,” she said. “They’ll go after anything in skirts. It doesn’t mean a thing.”

  UNLIKE JOAN, WHO CAME FROM a more traditional, suburban, upper-middle-class background, Jackie had had plenty of practice looking the other way. The same “boys will be boys” rationale had made it possible for Jackie to excuse her own father’s womanizing. “People try to make them into John and Jane Smith of Dayton, Ohio,” Vidal said. “But theirs is a world of money and power, and to the rich and powerful quaint things like fidelity and domestic bliss simply don’t matter.” To them, he continued, “sex is something you do like tennis. It can become quite competitive.”

  Jackie had time enough to sort out her feelings, and to contemplate what life might be like for her as first lady. In the meantime, she agreed to help Jack neutralize wife Pat Nixon’s Republican cloth-coat image by gamely posing for photographs. For one shot, Jackie, who managed to stave off the inevitable baby bulge by smoking even more than usual, put on a one-piece bathing suit and a bathing cap to frolic with her husband on the beach. At one point she pretended to steady him in a dinghy before tipping the boat over, toppling Jack into the surf.