The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [209]
Jackie returned one day with a spectacular find in eighteenth-century French chairs for the living room. Jack could hardly contain his displeasure before his old friend David Ormsby-Gore, later Lord Harlech. “I don’t know why!” he fumed. “What’s the point of spending all this money? I mean a chair is a chair and it’s perfectly good the chair I’m sitting in—what’s the point of all this fancy stuff?” The point of all this fancy stuff, as Jack took a number of years to realize, was that it impressed the hoi polloi enormously and brought him a cachet for high style that until then he neither possessed nor valued.
During the first winter of their marriage, Jackie worked on a private little tome for her half-sister, Janet Auchincloss, called A Book for Janet: In Case You Are Ever Thinking of Getting Married This Is a Story to Tell You What It’s Like. The book was a wistful romantic account full of gentle caricatures of the couple—for instance, Jackie looking to see whether a flag flew over the Senate chambers, signaling that her Jack was off doing the nation’s business. And there was a drawing of a slightly risqué Jack in bare hairy legs saying: “I demand my marital rights.” It was in some ways like a children’s book yet in its way was a sophisticated fantasy.
Charley Bartlett observed a marriage so different from the one portrayed in Jackie’s book that he at times regretted that he had ever introduced the couple. Bartlett felt that this exquisite young woman who had talked so fervently of art and culture had become a dispirited wife who sought in things what she could not find in marriage. He noticed “a sad look in her eyes.” One day the same woman who was writing a fantasy about her marriage got into her car and drove over to the Walter Reed Antiques Shop on Georgia Avenue to sell many of her wedding gifts.
Jackie grew gloomy and withdrawn, and around Jack that was simply unacceptable. “Jack went crazy when someone sulked,” said Lem Billings. “He couldn’t stand the tension, and he’d go absolutely crazy trying to contrive ways to restore a friendly atmosphere. Jackie saw this almost immediately and used her sulks masterfully.”
Jack, who considered faithfulness a fool’s virtue, was continuing with his affairs. Like his father, Jack had learned to cloak his marital deceits in an elaborate garb of euphemism. He had an unlikely admirer of his adulterous trysts in his father-in-law, Jack Bouvier, who continued to cut his own wide swath through the female population. “Miss New Zealand isn’t too bad, and it might be fun to run into her again some time,” he wrote Jack, like a gourmet discussing meals he has eaten. “I would like to see that English nurse of yester-year, she of my twenty minute romance, which you and your gang so rudely but effectively interrupted. All this providing … I still have the ‘wherewithal.’”
In the summer of 1954, while his bride of less than a year was in Europe, Jack traveled up to Northeast Harbor, Maine, for a house party. Jack’s host was an old friend, Langdon P. Marvin Jr., who Life magazine had dubbed “Harvard’s outstanding [1941] graduate,” endowed with “name, wealth and brains.” The godson of FDR, Marvin had played an important role in the war managing the air shipment of strategic imports. After the war, Marvin became an important public advocate of air transportation, but he enjoyed his pleasures as much as Jack. Marvin presumably knew that his dissembling this weekend was not just for Jackie but also for a public that would not look kindly on this most blessed of married men having a romp among the women whom Marvin had so graciously assembled.
Jack was on crutches, and he should have been thinking of anything but embellishing his sexual reputation. This weekend was little more than a consolation prize. Since March he had been writing Gunilla seeking to set up a rendezvous with her in the summer. His letter that month was doubly