The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [208]
The audience roared with laughter, but the reality was that Jack was less than deeply solicitous of his high-strung young bride. For all of his natural charm, he was full of the high selfishness of an ambitious politician, eager to use every public moment to advance himself. That included even his wedding.
Jackie had wanted an intimate ceremony with guests who knew and cared for them, not the massive spectacle that the Kennedys had made of what after all was her wedding. There were 750 guests, most of whom she did not know. Worst of all, she abhorred the hordes of journalists, the photographers with the snouts of their cameras pointing at her, the reporters pressing forward in sweaty earnestness. At the church, she suffered a further humiliation when her father was too drunk to give her away.
After the couple had said their wedding vows at St. Mary’s Catholic Church and stepped outside on the steps, a scene took place that was a harbinger of what much of their public life would be like. First stood rows of photographers, like a media Praetorian Guard, all pointing their cameras up the steps. And across the street, behind a police barricade, stood over three thousand onlookers, clapping, whistling, and shouting, pushing forward so fervently that they knocked over the barricades and surged forward, a human tide. Jack was amused at the circus, and he surely must have realized that by marrying, he had not lost his appeal that so transcended politics but perhaps had enhanced it.
Jack was not a man for a lengthy honeymoon filled with little but hand-holding and vows of devotion. The newlyweds went to Acapulco, where Jack caught a swordfish. From Mexico, the couple spent some quiet days in Los Angeles and then traveled on to Pebble Beach to play golf with Red Fay before driving two hours north to San Francisco with Red and his wife, Anita.
Jack seemed not to care that the Fays were not necessarily Jackie’s kind of people, and definitely not participants in her kind of honeymoon. As much as Fay enjoyed his best friend, even he saw that this was no longer “the kind of honeymoon any young bride anticipates.”
Jack, however, had apparently had enough of romantic solitude and wanted his own life back. He even may have suggested that Jackie go home early, an idea that his bride declined. Nonetheless, Jackie was so smitten with her husband that she gladly accepted whatever else Jack wanted, even if it meant on the last day of their honeymoon going off with Anita while Jack and Red attended a San Francisco Forty-niners football game.
Jackie read literature and poetry not as a pallid diversion but as life’s vision written big and clear, and she saw that men were great in their failings too. She saw her Jack as she might a hero in an epic poem, as a grand romantic figure living a transcendent life. Like Inga before her, she sensed that there were two directions that Jack could travel, toward personal fulfillment or up that difficult path toward a place in history. She saw where Jack was heading when in California he admitted to her that he wanted to be president. Afterward she wrote a poem to Jack containing the lines:
He would find love
He would never find peace
For he must go seeking
The Golden Fleece.
16
Aristocratic Instincts
Jack’s bride was not simply the youngest and most beautiful of the Senate wives, but also one of the most dutiful. She turned her sloppily attired husband into a fashion plate and brought him lunch that he could digest on his nervous stomach. When the couple had a dinner party in their rented house in Georgetown, Jackie led Jack and his guests into the dining room for a meal full of dishes exotic to the American palate.
Jack’s taste in food went to meat as long as it was steak not gussied up with silly sauces. Jackie, however,