Jack Kennedy - Chris Matthews [70]
The wedding weekend was not proceeding without discord. Jack had asked Red to be the master of ceremonies at the bachelor dinner. Eventually, this favoritism seemed to cause resentment among his fellow ushers, especially as the evening wore on and more alcohol was imbibed. “Torby Macdonald stood up at the other end of the table, took his water glass, and hurled it the length of the table; and it hit me on the chest. Then it fell to the table and shattered. Since I’d had a few drinks, the natural response was to start down the table after him. Luckily for me—because I’m sure Torby would have taken me apart—Jim Reed and the president, then senator, grabbed me and the thing was averted.”
Also in attendance at the wedding and the dinner were Ken O’Donnell and Larry O’Brien. As the former describes it, “There were only a few political people invited, and we stayed together and talked politics. I met some of the gentlemen for the first time, like Spalding. I’d known Lem through Bobby. I met Smathers for the first time. And Charlie Bartlett. But we didn’t talk to them much. The Boston political guys sat with the other Boston political guys and drank with the Boston political guys, and we mostly talked politics and what the future might be for the senator.”
Lem Billings, Jack’s oldest friend, felt the need to have a personal heart-to-heart with the bride. “She was terribly young, and I thought it would be best if she were prepared for any problems. So I told her that night that I thought she ought to realize Jack was thirty-six years old, had been around an awful lot, had known many, many girls—it sounds like an awfully disloyal friend saying these things—and that she was going to have to be very understanding at the beginning. I said he had never really settled down with one girl before, and that a man of thirty-six is very difficult to live with. She was quite understanding about it and seemed to accept everything I said.”
Rather amazingly, Lem then reported this exchange to Jack. “Of course, later I told him everything I’d said to her—and he was pleased because he felt it would make her better understand him.”
Chuck Spalding had his own telling memory of the weekend. To him, it was as if his friend were actually two people at his own wedding—one being the groom, and the other a grand observer of the entire event, watching it as if from afar, the way an outsider might see it. To Spalding, this other Jack was totally detached from what was happening, this lifetime pairing of him with another.
On the wedding weekend, one thing is sure, which is that the newlywed Jack Kennedy was clearly thinking beyond the imaginings of the ordinary groom. Sailing in the waters off Hammersmith Farm, he gazed at his wife’s family’s cove on Narragansett Bay and said to Bartlett, “This would be a helluva place to sail in the presidential yacht.”
By the time the honeymooning couple arrived in San Francisco—they’d gone first to Acapulco and then on to San Ysidro Ranch in the hills above Santa Barbara—the reality of the union between the thirty-six-year-old Jack Kennedy and twenty-four-year-old Jackie Bouvier was asserting itself. Here’s Red Fay’s account of hosting the two near the end of their wedding journey: “When Jack and Jacqueline came to the West Coast on their honeymoon, the pressures of public life too often intruded on the kind of honeymoon any young bride anticipates. For example, on their last day on the West Coast, Jack and I went to a pro football game. I’m sure this didn’t seem a particularly unusual arrangement for Jack.”
Jack Kennedy continually craved such fresh company. He liked the rush of excitement that came with it. Perhaps that enjoyment was rooted in those times in his youth when he’d been confined to bed. Bored easily by sameness, he preferred to keep moving, wanted the movie to stay exciting, liked people to be forever fascinating—and he wanted never to be alone, or too long with the same person.
The trouble was, as at least one friend saw it, those around him let him get away with