'America's Queen' Excerpt: Part I
— -- Below is the first chapter of Sarah Bradford’s new biography America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, published by Viking Books.
Chapter One, Golden Gatsby YearsShe was born with a sense of theater, of carefully choreographed exits and entrances, an eagerly awaited baby, who arrived an improbable six weeks late in Southampton Hospital, Long Island, on July 28, 1929. The birth had been scheduled to take place in a New York City hospital but Jackie, characteristically, chose to make her first appearance on a hot Sunday at the height of the summer season in the newly fashionable Hamptons. She was the first child of Janet Norton Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III, born just over a year after their wedding in nearby East Hampton, where both her grandparents owned comfortable summer houses in what was virtually Wall-Street-on-Sea. Within months of her birth, the stock market crash of October 1929 had cast its shadow over the Bouvier family fortunes, giving Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, born four years later, a sense of insecurity and fear of poverty that was to last almost all their lives.
From early on Jackie became aware of sexual politics within her family, of power emanating from the dominant male, with women as lesser elements competing for his attention. It was a game she quickly learned to play, extracting the maximum she could from the situation. All her life she would be irresistibly drawn to the most powerful, successful man in a group. (A cousin said of her fondness for a man like her future father-in-law, Joseph P. Kennedy,”If Jackie was at the court of Ivan the Terrible, she’d say, ‘Ooh, he’s been so misunderstood … ’”)
The two dominant males in Jackie’s early life were her paternal grandfather, Major John Vernou Bouvier Jr., and her father. Her grandfather, known as “Grampy Jack” or “Grampy Bouvier” to his ten grandchildren and “the Major” to everyone else, was the center of summer family life at Lasata, the stucco, ivy-clad house on Further Lane. It was strategically situated near the ocean and the Maidstone Club, the heart of East Hampton social life, where the Bouviers had purchased a cabana in 1926. At Lasata, the Major was not only the undisputed head of his household but a personage in the village of East Hampton as well. As a former trial lawyer he was fond of the sound of his own voice and would regularly deliver the speech at the Memorial Day celebrations in East Hampton, which marked the opening of the summer season.
When the Bouviers first arrived in East Hampton as summer visitors in 1912, the place was still a “simple” resort compared with the more sophisticated Southampton, with saltbox houses, a duck pond and a village green sheltered from the ocean by huge sand dunes. Inland, flat potato fields stretched to the horizon. The Bouviers’ first house was a three-story, verandaed building called Wildmoor on Appaquogue Road; in 1925 the Major’s wife, Maude Sergeant, bought Lasata with her father’s money. It was not until 1935 that the Major, having inherited a considerable fortune from his uncle Michel Charles “M. C.” Bouvier, took over the house and began to live the expansive life to which he felt entitled, and which ended, at his death, in the financial ruin of the family.
Each May the various Bouvier households would move out of their Park Avenue apartments for the summer to East Hampton, where Maude would transplant her entire household staff to Lasata. Lasata-an Indian name meaning “place of peace,” a misnomer as far as the explosive Bouvier family was concerned-stood on a comfortable twelve acres, with a tennis court, Black Jack Bouvier’s stables for eight horses, each stall marked with its occupant’s name in gilded lettering, tack room, jumping ring and paddock, extensive vegetable gardens, a grape arbor and Maude’s “Italian garden,” edged with boxwood and dotted with classical statues. Bouvier accounts of Lasata as “built along the lines of an English country manor” exaggerate its size, but the Bouviers, following the Major’s example, were given to exaggeration.
The gardener/caretaker, Paul Yuska, was the only year-round employee at Lasata, but the permanent servants from Manhattan were an important part of the Bouvier household, particularly Pauline, former nursemaid, governess and housekeeper to the John Vernou Bouviers in their less prosperous days in Nutley, New Jersey, where they had lived for twenty-two years before moving to Park Avenue, and Esther, who gambled on the stock market and the races and was always a source of ready cash for the family.
John Vernou Bouvier Jr. was a dapper figure given to loud explosions of temper-”God damn it to hell!” Although the Major was proud of his army rank, his war experience was limited. A lawyer by training, a graduate of Columbia Law School, he was commissioned aged fifty-two on July 22, 1918, as Major in the Judge Advocate Section of the Officers Reserve Corps of the U.S. Army and honorably discharged five months later, in December 1918. Subsequently he became a partner in his uncle’s Wall Street firm.
Sunday was the day for Bouvier gatherings, either at the Major’s apartment, 765 Park Avenue, after Mass, to which he would take his granddaughters, or in summer at Lasata, for a ritual Sunday lunch of roast beef followed by peach ice cream (homemade on the back porch by the French chauffeur) around the huge oak table in the beamed dining room. While Maude remained a gentle figure in the background, organizing the household from her upstairs bedroom or looking after the flowers in the garden and the house, the Major was a dominant-and always audible-presence. Maude’s once delicate features and figure had been transformed by dropsy (she wore long, flowing skirts to conceal her swollen legs and ankles), but the Major, aged sixty-five when Jackie was born, preserved an immaculate physique, the result, he claimed, of very hot baths followed by very cold ones; during this routine, his yells of anguish could be heard throughout the house.
He was a snappy dresser: his invariable East Hampton Sunday attire was a brown tweed jacket, white shirt with high, stiff collar, white linen trousers, black socks and white shoes. He was intensely proud of his Hercule Poirot-like mustache, carefully groomed every morning and waxed until the points stood out beyond his cheeks. He owned a red Nash convertible with primitive gearshifts, which he would rev in an earsplitting racket for some five minutes until the vibrating floorboards (he was stone-deaf) told him the engine was ready. Then he would take off in a shower of gravel and hurtle dangerously-he was also shortsighted-through the village lanes to the old Catholic church of St. Philomena. Afterward at Sunday lunch he would turn off both his hearing aids and sit oblivious to the noisy bickering of his family, composing a poem for one of them, to be read out at the end of the meal.
Although the Major’s literary style was florid and his verse no more than doggerel, his interest in poetry transmitted itself to Jackie, his favorite grandchild. “He really adored her and I think felt that she had enormous potential in the field that he cared about, which was literary,” Lee said. “They had quite a correspondence together and many flowery letters were exchanged. I don’t know if he got her interested in poetry but she started to love poetry at an exceptionally early age and she gave him great pleasure. It was mutual, and it was very nice to watch them together. When he would come to see her ride in Madison Square Garden I remember he would lose his control completely and start screaming at the horse and jumping up, and it was amusing and touching. I think that if it hadn’t been for this exceptional bond she had with my grandfather Bouvier and my father that she never would have gained the particular strength and independence and individuality she had. Because we didn’t have a very normal family … ”
One particular fantasy of the Major’s became an important influence on how his family saw themselves. Throughout Jackie’s childhood he was engaged on the construction of an elaborate-and mythical-genealogical family treatise, which was privately published in 1940 as Our Forebears. The Bouviers were Catholics of southern French descent; the Major took pride in his ancestry and, according to his own account, spoke French, having spent a year at school in France. Being the Major, however, mere French descent was not enough: it had to be aristocratic, and as two French families were involved, doubly so. As recorded in Our Forebears the Bouviers were “an ancient house of Fontaine near Grenoble,” but later research revealed that the Bouviers in question were not their ancestors. That honor belonged to a family of artisans and small shopkeepers in the village of Pont-Saint Esprit, near Arles, whose descendants still live there. The American Bouviers were descended from Michel Bouvier, who arrived from France in about 1815 in Philadelphia where he established a successful business as a cabinetmaker (one of his clients being Napoleon’s brother, Joseph Bonaparte) and importer of marble and mahogany. He made a solid fortune that his son, Michel Charles Bouvier, vastly increased by successful operations on the stock exchange. The Bouviers were descended from the second French family through Michel’s second wife, Louise Vernou, daughter of John Vernou, whose family, according to Jackie’s grandfather, “is one of the most illustrious and ancient of the Province of Poitou.” However, there is no proof of any connection between the aristocratic Poitevin family and the John Vernou who arrived in Philadelphia, possibly from the French West Indies, in the last decade of the eighteenth century. His signature on his application for citizenship on October 25, 1808, is barely literate, certainly not that of an educated aristocrat.
Our Forebears was treated by the Major’s descendants with the reverence accorded the family Bible, and in 1961 Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer’s authorized biography of Jackie as First Lady was still peddling the aristocratic family line. However, it was then that the fake was gently unmasked by an American historian. The truth is that the Bouviers were third-generation French immigrants who had made good but felt it necessary to fantasize about their ancestry, converting shopkeepers into nobles. In the class-conscious America of the Bouvier sisters’ youth everyone “in Society” knew exactly where everyone else came from and White Anglo-Saxon Protestant families ruled the roost. Even after the Bouviers’ unmasking in the sixties, Jackie’s eccentric cousin Edie Beale boasted to writer Gail Sheehy in 1972, “We’re all descended from fourteenth-century French kings.” When Jackie married John F. Kennedy in 1953, newspaper reports trumpeted the alliance of the wealthy Boston Irish senator with the descendant of a family of French aristocrats. “I don’t know how Janet [Jackie’s mother] got away with this,” Gore Vidal said. “Well, it only worked with the press, I mean they were somehow Plantagenets and Tudors-it was just nonsense. They were pretty lowly born … ” They were Catholics, but not grand Catholics, of Mediterranean descent in a Protestant WASP world. None of this was to matter outwardly to Jackie, as the classy beauty she grew up to be, but it contributed to an inner sense of apartness; as she told society bandleader Peter Duchin in reference to Newport, many years later, “You and I, Peter, both outsiders.” It did not make her feel in any way inferior, but the opposite, contributing to her sense of her uniqueness. She never found it necessary to be part of a crowd, and felt an affinity with creative people, artists, oddballs. It is worth noting that of the three important men in her life-John F. Kennedy (Boston Irish Catholic on both sides), Aristotle Onassis (Greek) and MauriceTempelsman (Jewish)-not one could remotely be called a WASP.
Beyond her love for “Grampy Jack,” Jackie adored her father, the glamorous, larger-than-life John Vernou Bouvier III, known as Jack, who resembled his father in looks but in nothing else. Her grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr., was by nature a “joiner” and committeeman: he was on the standing committee of the Columbia Law School Alumni, vice president of the College Alumni and member of the Council of the Delta Kappa Epsilon Fraternity, as he records proudly in Our Forebears, member of the Society of the Cincinnati of Maryland (through his great-grandfather Captain James Ewing), president of the Sons of the Revolution in the State of New York (through a great-great-grandfather, John Griffith), General-President of the General Society of the Sons of the Revolution, member of the Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, etc. On the other hand, John Vernou Bouvier III was a free spirit, who seems to have handed down his dislike of committees and pompous organizations to his daughter. Possibly under pressure from his father he joined the New York State Sons of the Revolution, and the Cincinnati of Maryland, but the only organizations in which he showed any active interest were his Yale Senior Society, Book and Snake, and his clubs in New York-the Yale Club and the Racquet and Tennis Club. Jack Bouvier adored his overindulgent mother but clashed frequently with his father, who disapproved of his son’s undisciplined, self-indulgent way of life. They had noisy rows during which the Major would roar at him, threatening to disinherit him, a sanction that showed diminishing returns.
Reprinted from America’s Queen by Sarah Bradford by permission of Viking Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 by Sarah Bradford. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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