The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [210]
When Gunilla responded positively to his entreaties, Jack aggressively raised the stakes. He told her that he was willing to come to Sweden to meet her in August, but that was not his preference. “I thought I might get a boat and sail around the Mediterranean for two weeks—with you as crew,” Jack wrote her. Gunilla tentatively agreed to see him in Paris, but he kept pushing her to go off on a private cruise. He was so sick, however, that in September 1954 he had to cable her: LEG INJURED AND HOSPITALIZED TRIP POSTPONED WILL WRITE MANY REGRETS JOHN.
Jack was so weak that he could not even attend the sailboat races but instead had to watch them on land sitting in a chair, observing the finish line with binoculars. That did not prevent him from more vigorous nocturnal activities that attracted the prurient attention of Mrs. Kelly, who oversaw activities at the Old Kimball House, where the group was staying. The maids started spending more time examining Jack’s sheets than changing them. Marvin thought that hotel personnel were listening in on phone conversations.
As good fortune would have it, Mrs. Kelly was Catholic. Marvin and his friends decided that Jack would have to take the good lady to mass. “We plopped him into a bathtub of cold water, got him down to the lobby,” Marvin recalled. “There was Mrs. Kelly with her car in the driveway. After that, no espionage, no gossip, full security, full cooperation.”
Jack had what in many ways was an aristocratic conception of life. He identified with Cecil’s Melbourne and the young lord’s “Renaissance ideal of the whole man, whose aspiration it is to make the most of every advantage, intellectual and sensual, that life has to offer.” He could be acerbic about his déclassé fellow citizens, but such views were anathema in his egalitarian nation, doubly so in a politician seeking the votes of many people he thought well beneath him.
Down in Palm Beach over the Christmas holiday, Jack read Cecil’s new biography of the adult Melbourne, Lord M. or The Later Life of Lord Melbourne, a companion volume to the biography of young Melbourne that he had admired so much as a young man. Then he had read those eloquent pages portraying a dispassionate, elegant, hedonistic, young aristocrat who was the model of what he himself aspired to be. Now he read about a Melbourne who came as close to a portrait of what he had become as anything else he was likely to have read.
Even as prime minister, Melbourne had a temperament that was “all salt and sunshine. The world might be a futile place, but how odd it was, how fascinating, how endlessly full of interest! By now he had acquired the skill of a life-long hedonist in extracting every drop of pleasure from life that it had to offer…. A cynic who loved mankind, a skeptic who found life thoroughly worth living, he contrived to face the worthlessness of things, cheerfully enough.”
This Melbourne was as wearily aware of the sheer futility of most human endeavor as he had been as a young man. Yet as prime minister he became one of the great leaders of his time, and a gracious mentor to the young Queen Victoria. He loved the ladies still and was named a correspondent in a famous divorce case, a charge that he beat, as he did any challenge to his honor.
Jack loved to read the story of Melbourne and other richly ornate tales of European history. Like Melbourne, he had an aristocratic conception of marriage. His was not a middle-class union in which adultery was a crime against the human trust that held the couple together during the ceaseless competition and uncertainties of life. Nor did he hold the bourgeois illusion that a mere marriage saved one from the essential isolation of life. He did not give all of himself to Jackie in part because all of himself could not be given. He had his own world-weary sense