The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [225]
One of the problems with the drug was that it quickly wore off, and the temptation was to inject it all over again. Although Dr. Travell was widely and positively known, she had her skeptics among the most esteemed leaders of her profession. “The use of novocaine in this way is of long standing and very widespread knowledge,” wrote Dr. Alexander Preston to Jack’s authorized biographer, James MacGregor Burns, in 1959.
For some reason or other Travell has developed a special reputation. [Dr.] Bayard Williams and [Dr.] Jim Leland whom I talked to about it, feel that there is a little more than goes through the needle or meets the eye in the results she obtains … in many medical procedures, there is an overlay of patient-doctor identification, hope, [and] confidence … which brings a success to many procedures that would fall short, of themselves. Apparently … she has this power whether it be psychological or mystic, which brings more than average success to an ordinary procedure…. Of course, anybody that can take an unsuccessful orthopedic operative casualty and reconstitute it by any means whatever deserves great credit. Apparently this is what she does to many and what she has done to Kennedy. Anyone after two unsuccessful major operations on the spine has to have something to hook onto and she apparently provided the fix.
When the Senate adjourned early in August, Jack was on crutches, a condition that merited his spending the next couple of months at Hyannis Port recuperating. Instead, he sailed on the USS United States to Le Havre. From there he traveled to meet Gunilla at Skånegården, a hotel in Båstad, a charming Swedish resort town. His old friend Torby Macdonald, now a freshman congressman from Massachusetts, accompanied Jack. Torby was not only a boon companion but, as Joe had taught his sons, a defense against being compromised or blackmailed.
Gunilla rushed into Jack’s hotel room and soon fell into his arms. “Tender? Oh, he was tender,” Von Post recalled. “Very tender. He was really wonderful to me. He never talked about his brother who died. We didn’t have time. It was only love. It really was. He didn’t talk about Jackie. Only Torby talked about Jackie, how she had not been in the hospital as much as she should have. And his mother he never talked about either. It was his father he talked about. I think he looked up to his father very very much. And he wanted to please his father. He was pleasing him. He wanted to please everybody. And also, he was very witty and funny and amusing, and we laughed with him. Oh yes. He was on crutches and with all his suffering, he was always smiling. We drove around the south of Sweden, and he was singing ‘I Love Paris in the Springtime,’ and we sang together. Like a dream. And I think it was one of the few weeks in his life that he was free as a bird.”
Torby met a Swedish woman who became his lover, and the two couples drove around the country. Jack had once again traveled up that open road to freedom, but when the week was over, he flew to Nice and from there to Hotel du Cap. The last time he had been there he had sat in the moonlight kissing Gunilla and telling her of his love. This time he waited in the daylight for Jackie to arrive. “I just got word today that my wife and sister are coming here,” he wrote Gunilla, addressing her as “Dearest,” a salutation he had not used before. “It will all be complicated by the way I feel now—my Swedish flicka [girl]. All I have done is sit in the sun and look at the ocean and think of Gunilla … All love, Jack.” He telephoned and wrote her trying to arrange another meeting in Capri, where he was staying with Jackie, or perhaps a few weeks later in Denmark. He sent her a picture postcard from Capri, being careful enough not to sign his name (“I wish you could have been here”).
Jack was like an actor playing theater in the round, turning toward one part of the audience to play one role, turning to another group to inhabit a whole different character,