The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [206]
That evening, as Jack sat next to Gunilla in the banquette, once gently touching her hair, he never once mentioned Inga. But he could hardly have failed to think, at least momentarily, of his Danish lover and of how close he had come to walking with her up that unknown pathway to a free and open life. And now, days before his wedding, he sat with another beautiful young Scandinavian woman, a woman without a past, a woman who with her laughter and smiles beckoned him up that dangerous pathway again.
Jack was never one to talk much about his family and his past, but this evening he went on and on about his father and mother and brothers and sisters. Europeans are often appalled at the way some Americans tell the most intimate details of their life to strangers and mistake these revelations for friendship. Jack’s admissions, however, were a true sign of intimacy, a mark not only of how much he was thinking about his past as his wedding day closed in on him but of how affected he was by this young woman and by these days in southern France.
After dinner, Jack led Gunilla to Jimmy’s Bar, a popular nightclub, where the couple danced and talked some more. Jack usually considered sentimentality a weak man’s emotion. Yet this evening he suggested that they drive to Hotel du Cap Eden Roc at Cap d’Antibes, where he had spent so much time as a boy and young man. The couple sat there looking out on the Mediterranean near the very spot where Joe Jr. and Jack had dared Teddy to jump off the cliff into the water. And there he kissed Gunilla and, as she remembers it, told her, “I fell in love with you tonight.”
This was not some tired romantic verbiage that Jack used to impress a gullible young woman. Jack was not a man to say such a thing. He was, however, in a sweetly melancholic mood that was as rare for him as were these words. It was almost a decade and a half since he had trod on this grass and had swum in the ocean below with his brothers and sisters, two of whom were now gone and one of whom was locked away.
Jack was a U.S. Senator able to lead the discourse on the most serious problems of the age, but in his personal life he rankled at taking on all the tedious responsibilities of adulthood. He had chosen the road he would travel, but on this sweetly scented evening he stopped and looked back in the other direction and for a moment wished he could have chosen the other path.
“I’m going back to the United States next week to get married,” Jack said suddenly. He did not have to admit that. He could have played the evening out, taking his chances at bedding Gunilla before heading back to the States, but he felt more than that. “If I met you one week before,” Jack said starkly, “I would have canceled the whole thing.”
Jack may have believed what he was saying. But he would never have thrown over his life and commitments so cavalierly. He was speaking, however, to something more than simply the beautiful young woman sitting next to him. Gunilla represented freedom and sensuality and an exotic European world within whose pleasures a man could disappear.
In the early morning hours, Jack drove Gunilla back to her house. “May I come in for a nightcap?” Jack asked, as Gunilla recalls. “One for the road.” Gunilla knew what he was asking and part of her wanted to invite him in. She knew instinctively that if he spent the night with her, she would never see him again.
“You take your own road,” she said. “And good luck, my dear.” And so Jack turned around and drove back up the road he had come.
Jackie had set the wedding for September 12, 1953, in Newport, Rhode Island, where the Auchinclosses lived in the genteel world of the Protestant upper class. Joe was openly disdainful of this aging, pretentious enclave where