'America's Queen' Excerpt: Part III

— -- Below is the continuation of the first chapter of Sarah Bradford’s America’s Queen, published by Viking Books.

The family’s life revolved around animals: dogs-Hootchie the Scottie; Sister, a white bullterrier; Tally-Ho, a Dalmatian; Caprice, a Bouvier des Flandres; and Great Dane King Phar-and, above all, horses. Janet was a fine, highly competitive horsewoman, winning prizes at horse shows throughout the east and at the annual National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden. She kept four horses including the chestnut Danseuse, Jackie’s favorite. Impeccably turned out, she featured regularly in the society press-”She wears the very smartest riding habits at Long Island horse shows … ”-and in the sports pages, where her courage, skill and determination on a horse were admiringly recorded: “[Her expression was] as determined as tennis champion Helen Wills Moody when clearing difficult jumps and that once over and done, her dazzling smile was worth coming miles to see.” Under her mother’s guidance, Jackie lived for horses and riding; at age two she was put on a horse, the leading rein held by her mother, and photographed. At five, she and her mother took third prize in the family event at the East Hampton Show; another photograph from that same summer shows her, face set in angry frustration, leading her pony away from defeat at a Smithtown, Long Island, show.

In photographs of the time Jackie appears as a sturdy, dark-haired child, staring directly, even aggressively, at the photographer. She had the Bouvier wide-set eyes, although hers, like her mother’s, were brown, in contrast to Black Jack’s dazzling blue, and thick, dark, curling hair. Like her mother, she was physically courageous and intensely competitive; when her pony threw her at the East Hampton Show she dusted herself off and climbed on it again.

On March 3, 1933, her sister, Caroline Lee Bouvier, was born. Named after her Bouvier great-grandmother, Caroline Maslin Ewing of Philadelphia, the little girl was always known as Lee. “I was so sorry I’d never been called my Christian name, which was Caroline,” Lee said, “but it was to please this rather unpleasant grandfather. It certainly was to no avail at all and I got lumbered with being called Lee, which was, you know, both our middle names.” The family nicknames for the two sisters were “Jacks” and “Pekes.”

Jackie’s relationship with her younger sister was curious from the beginning: a mixture of closeness and intense rivalry, protectiveness and the desire to dominate, jealousy and interdependence. It was a relationship that eventually soured, but was important to both for most of their lives. “Jackie’s relationship with Lee was very much S & M,” said Gore Vidal, who was connected to the sisters through his mother’s previous marriage to Hugh D. Auchincloss II, who subsequently became their stepfather, “with Jackie doing the S and Lee the M.” “I think you always have some sibling feelings,” Lee said, “but I felt more devotion than anything else. As a small child I think I was probably as annoying as any younger sister. I was knocked out by a croquet mallet for two days-that sort of thing-so we had plenty of those sibling rows and fights.” From the beginning it was a rivalry in which Lee, except for brief periods, was always the loser, Jackie the star. Lee felt this most strongly in their relationship with their father: Black Jack adored both his daughters and was proud of their looks and accomplishments, but his passion for Jackie (and hers for him) was overriding and semi-incestuous. “They were so close and then this horse, Danseuse, was the trio in their relationship for a good ten years. My father, the horse and Jackie. I have a book that she did for herself and for me after my father’s death with nearly every letter he’d written to each of us-at least half of it was about this horse and the next step of what hunt team she could go into, what class she thought she could do next year at the [Madison Square] Garden.” Lee could not compete with Jackie in the equestrian field; her father would put her on the piebald pony, Dancestep, which she disliked. “He wanted me to be a rider as well as Jackie and he forced me to have five, six falls in a row with the horse continuously refusing a fence … ” Asked if she minded her father’s obvious preference for Jackie, Lee admitted that she was hurt by it “because I revered him and just longed for his love and affection. What I loved the most was being here with him in East Hampton and he would take me out way beyond those breakers and that was my special moment with him.” Being four years younger than Jackie obviously made a great difference: “I was too young to be that athletic and to be able to challenge everything. I just couldn’t live up to what he wanted at that age.”