The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [204]
Her father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier, had lost everything in the Depression except his charm and his eye for a well-turned ankle. Black Jack worked the magic of his charm on no one more than his own daughter. When she went to see Gone With the Wind, she thought the irresistible Rhett Butler the image of her father, while the beautiful, manipulative Scarlett O’Hara resembled her mother and gentle Ashley Wilkes reminded her of her new stepfather.
After the debacle of her first marriage, Janet Bouvier, Jackie’s mother, decided not to marry for romance the second time. She proved her case by managing to marry Hugh D. Auchincloss, a gentleman whose most important assets were his name, his wealth, and his constancy. She expected her two daughters to follow her own lead in choosing a man to marry.
Jackie was a subtle, impeccably mannered, immensely literate young woman fascinated by the rebel artistic spirits of her age. In her essay that won Vogue’s fifteenth Prix de Paris Contest, she wrote that the three men she would most like to have known were Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, and Sergey Diaghilev.
Jackie admired Baudelaire and Wilde as “poets and idealists who could paint their sinfulness with honesty and still believe in something higher.” That was a heretical thought. Jack’s mother and sisters would have found Jackie’s creative heroes little more than pied pipers of decadence, hardly the models for a proper young woman. These daring artists lived on the dangerous edge of their time, and Jackie was drawn to them and their art and lives.
Jackie wrote: “If I could be a sort of Over-all Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair landing in space, it is their theories of art that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and paintings and ballet composed to.”
Jackie knew all about Jack’s sexual proclivities, and she condemned him no more than she did Baudelaire and Wilde, or her father for that matter. She was swept away by love for this handsome young politician. Jack, however, appeared more distant.
Jackie flew off to London to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth on June 2, 1953. On the return flight, Jack surprised her by greeting her plane when it stopped in Boston on its way to New York City. Jackie’s mother was a superb judge of the male ego, and she had set up Jackie’s trip and paid for it in part just so something like this might happen.
“If you’re so much in love with Jack Kennedy that you don’t want to leave him,” she told her daughter, “I should think he would be much more likely to find out how he felt about you if you were seeing exciting people and doing exciting things instead of sitting here waiting for the phone to ring.”
Even though Jack had decided to marry Jackie, he was not swooning with courtly love. When he called Jim Reed to tell him about Jacqueline Bouvier, he was so uncertain about the whole business that he told Jim that he “might” marry Jackie while at the same time asking his friend to be one of the ushers. Jack wrote Red Fay asking him to be best man at his wedding. The prospective groom made one small oversight that suggested his inquietude about the approaching nuptials: he did not mention the name of the woman he was marrying.
The women Jack had gone with over the years had understood the sophisticated game he was playing. Dinner at the Stork Club, ‘21,’ or other elite watering holes. Lighthearted repartee. Quick, efficient sex. A few smiles. A laugh or two. No painful revelations. No cloying commitments. No midnight phone calls. No grasping emotions. No jealousies. And good-bye.
Jack had been especially attracted to wealthy divorcées who played the game as well as he did. One of the women he had dated for years was Florence Pritchett. Flo was a gorgeous model who had a laugh that rang out like struck