The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [205]
“I was very stuck on her [Pritchett],” Jack told James MacGregor Burns in 1959. “It was rough, but … I’m not … the tragic lover…. At least that was the girl I liked, and I’ve had some other girls that I’ve liked but … it’s never been sort of a depressing experience.”
Jack told Fay that he was both “too young and too old” to marry. He was not far wrong. He was too young in that he still had a bachelor’s eye. He was too old in that he was not only set in his ways but embedded in them, and he was self-aware enough to know that no mere ceremony was going to change that. Beyond that, as he wrote Red, he knew the extent to which his political career depended on his appeal to women. “This means the end of a promising political career as it has been based up to now almost entirely on the old sex appeal,” he told his friend.
When his son left for a trip to France in the weeks before the wedding, Jack’s father worried that he might get “restless” about the marriage, for Joe knew where Jack’s restlessness usually led him. “I am hoping that he will … be especially mindful of whom he sees,” Joe wrote Torby Macdonald, who was planning to accompany Jack. “Certainly one can’t take anything for granted since he became a United States Senator. That is a price he should be willing to pay and gladly.”
Along time before Inga had talked of those two roads that faced Jack, the one toward freedom and love and wondrous uncertainty, the other a well-defined, arduous track leading toward power and a place in history. For all her beauty and charm, Jackie represented another long, hard step up that narrow road to power. And though that was the direction Jack had chosen, he still looked fitfully over his shoulder at the road not taken.
That August, Jack flew over to southern France for his last few days as a single man. One evening he was in Cap d’Antibes when a blue sedan stopped. “Jack! What are you doing here?” exclaimed Gavin Welby, a British acquaintance. “We’re going to have dinner at Le Chateau at Haut-de-Cagnes. Why don’t you join us?” As Welby spoke, he nodded toward the two stunning young Swedish women he had picked up in Cannes where they had been hitchhiking.
Jack hadn’t said whether he could make it for dinner, but he managed to arrive at the romantic restaurant high above the valley before his host and his two other guests. A few minutes later the two young women walked into the famous restaurant wearing simple dresses that set off their fresh features, which glowed with youthful health. Gunilla Von Post and Anne Marie Linder were staying in a nearby villa. Gunilla came from a distinguished old Swedish family and would never have hitchhiked if the stipend from home had not been so late in arriving.
For the two friends, summer had a meaning that an American or an Englishman could never understand. It was short-lived and intense; a sensuous, passionate time when the sun seemed to burn all the moroseness out of the dark Scandinavian soul. For the women, it was adventure lying in the hot sand, feeling the Mediterranean sun beating on them.
Gunilla was small and delicate with refined features and deep, melancholy eyes that suggested a Garbo-like mystery. Jack liked wellborn ladies, and there was an exquisite juxtaposition between this seemingly carefree, hitchhiking Swede and her aristocratic background.