The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [348]
“Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui! Vive Jacqui!”
As the president and first lady drove in a long motorcade through Paris, a chant echoed through the elegant boulevards and the old quarters. The worldly Parisians greeted Jackie as one of their own, celebrating her the way they had no previous first lady. Jack realized that though this was his state visit, it was his wife’s triumph.
Jackie’s success was in part the result of calculation and planning. Many of the extraordinary series of gowns and dresses that she wore in Europe and America might have borne the label of her American designer, Oleg Cassini. In truth, many of them were primarily the result of collaboration between Jackie and Cassini’s assistant, Joseph Boccehir. As first lady, Jackie could not be seen in the French haute couture that was her preference. Instead, she perused fashion magazines, cutting out pictures and sketches of French clothes that she admired, suggesting changes, a new fabric, a bow, a cummerbund, and sending her ideas to Boccehir, who brilliantly created her vision. In Paris an exquisite pink lace gown, though officially dubbed a Cassini creation, proved to be similar to a Pierre Cardin dress in his spring collection. It was “so identical,” Women’s Wear Daily noted, “that the Paris couture couldn’t believe their eyes.”
Kennedy had dreamed of the great ladies of history, a Catherine the Great or Marquise de Pompadour, ladies of wit, grace, and nuance who talked of art and music and politics, moving seamlessly from subject to subject. He had thought only European women were capable of that, but the thirty-one-year-old woman sitting between him and President Charles de Gaulle at the brilliant dinner at Versailles was proving herself precisely such a woman. “This evening, Madame, you are looking like a Watteau,” the French leader greeted her, but it was not only her looks that proved exquisite. The two leaders dispensed with their official interpreter, and instead Jackie translated. That was no mere ceremonial honor, for Kennedy and de Gaulle discussed substantive matters during the elegant repast. “She played the game very intelligently,” the French leader reflected after she left France with a president who called himself “the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” De Gaulle said that “without mixing in politics, she gave her husband the prestige of a Maecenas,” referring to a Roman diplomat and counselor to the Emperor Augustus.
In most circumstances, Kennedy would have found the grand fete at the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles a wondrous diversion, but he was momentarily so disoriented that he did not recognize his sister-in-law, Princess Radziwill, and shook her hand politely as he would that of any other guest. That faux pas appeared to startle him, and as he walked on with the imperious President de Gaulle he turned away a glass of orange juice and asked for champagne instead.
During his three days in Paris Kennedy was suffering immensely from pain. Not only Dr. Travell and Dr. Burkley accompanied the president, but Dr. Jacobson as well. Although Kennedy called in Dr. Jacobson to deal with his back pain, he appears to have used Jacobson’s treatment primarily when he needed to be especially alert. After the long flight the doctor attended to the president on the morning of his first long, event-filled day in Paris. Dr. Travell shot him up with novocaine two or three times a day, but that was not enough to relieve his back pain, and when he was in his suite at the Quai d’Orsay, he got into the golden bathtub to see whether hot water could dull his pain.
It was raining as Air Force One flew into Vienna, raining as the motorcade moved through the old streets full of cheering crowds, and raining as Kennedy arrived at the American embassy residence for the start of the two-day summit. At around noon, just before Kennedy’s first meeting with Khrushchev, the president called in Dr. Jacobson. “Khrushchev is supposed to be on his way over,” Jacobson recalled Kennedy saying. “The meeting may last for a long time. See