'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.”

Janet Bouvier was extremely highly strung, possibly as a result of a tense, unhappy atmosphere in the Lee household. She told her daughters that her own childhood had not been happy. She used to sit at the table with her two sisters and their parents, the mother whom she adored and the father she seems rather to have disliked, who were not even on speaking terms. “Her father would say, ‘Would you please tell your mother this … ’ and her mother would say, ‘Would you please tell your father that … ’ and so it was very sad. And then they separated, and we were never close, to say the least, to my grandfather Lee. He was a very severe man, a miser and a terribly successful businessman. He didn’t have much warmth or charm.”

Nor was the Bouvier household serene. A strong strand of individuality bordering on eccentricity ran through the family, and relations between the adult members were often explosive and fueled by sibling rivalry. The Major disapproved of Black Jack, but grandmother Maude spoiled him. Jack was not close to his sisters, the twins Maude and Michelle, who had inherited their mother’s delicate features and red-gold hair, or to Edith, who had resented the twins since their birth. Edith was always known as “Big Edie” to distinguish her from her daughter “Little Edie,” both of whom had the striking Bouvier looks. Big Edie, married to Phelan Beale, a Philadelphia lawyer, had a great voice, which she liked to make heard, warbling the “Indian Love Call” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” to the intense irritation of her siblings. Little Edie’s stunning looks and figure made her the star of the family; she once lost her bathing suit diving into the Maidstone Club pool and was thereafter known as “the Body” for obvious reasons. She had a string of beaux and claimed to have been practically engaged to John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Joe Jr. Big Edie’s rampant infidelities and bohemian lifestyle lost her her husband; her marriage became another casualty in the Bouvier family.

Jackie’s favorite among her cousins was her godfather, Michel “Miche” Bouvier, whom Black Jack treated virtually as his own son and who often stayed with them in New York and at Wildmoor, where they now spent their East Hampton summers. Among her own generation were “Scotty,” Henry C. Scott Jr., two years older, a daredevil she admired; his sister, “Shella,” Michelle, her exact contemporary; and John H. Davis, also born in 1929, the future family biographer. (When his first book on the family appeared, Jackie, regarding it as a betrayal, froze him out.)

In any case, Black Jack Bouvier was too much of an individual to fit in with any cozy family scene, even had it been provided. He considered himself and his daughters superior to the rest of the Bouviers, with the result that Jackie and Lee, unlike the Kennedys, never regarded themselves as part of a clan. It was fun being a Bouvier on the East Hampton social scene, on the beach or around the pool at the Maidstone, playing with the cousins and taking part in the East Hampton Shows, but Jack Bouvier always wanted his daughters to be the stars. On family occasions and at Sunday lunches he would deliberately stir things up by complimenting one of them: “Lee’s going to be a real glamour girl someday. Will you look at those eyes … and those sexy lips of hers?” The rest of the family called these effusions “Vitamin P [Praise].” More usually the doses of Vitamin P were for Jackie: “Doesn’t Jackie look terrific? Girl’s taken all prizes in her class this year … and she’s the prettiest thing in the ring to boot.”

Years later Lee wrote lyrically of her memories of East Hampton summers, of the ocean, which both girls loved (an early poem of Jackie’s, written at the age of ten, was entitled “Sea Joy”), evoking the sense of freedom they felt as they escaped from New York at the beginning of June in the four-door navy blue Ford convertible, often pursued by the police (Janet was frequently stopped for speeding), their arrival and the unpacking of summer clothes-four pairs of shorts, red, blue, white and gray, four striped shirts and two pairs of sneakers. For Jackie it meant riding Donny, the family nickname for Danseuse, and going to the station on Friday nights to meet her father on the Cannonball Express from New York, rushing to put pennies on the track before the train arrived. There would be a brief return to East Hampton for Halloween and then it was back to New York until next June.

As Jackie turned seven, her family began to disintegrate. Her parents argued constantly and Janet took out her frustrations and pent-up anger on her children, sometimes slapping them. In the latter half of the thirties the balance of power between the couple shifted in Janet’s favor. Black Jack was in the wrong and knew it, although he was unable to give up his pursuit of women. A photograph of the period shows Janet in riding clothes, perched stylishly on a fence, but behind her back her husband is openly holding the hand of a pretty young woman, Virginia Kernochan. It was published in the New York Daily News the day after it was taken, with the inevitable insinuations, which were deeply humiliating to Janet. James T. Lee, anxious to get rid of his detested son-in-law, advised his daughter to consult a divorce lawyer but Janet, still unwilling to abandon her marriage, refused. The incorrigible Black Jack, reckless as ever, was not about to change his ways: he used Wildmoor out of season as a rendezvous for parties with stockbroker friends and showgirls and, while his family were safely in East Hampton during the summer, the New York apartment for similar purposes. Asked why her mother had shown such bitterness toward her father, Lee said, “I suppose she’d been incredibly hurt by him in the early days, or years, rather, of their marriage … He looked at other women and he liked to flirt. I know thousands of men do that but I guess she just couldn’t handle it … ”

An additional cause of friction was finance. Black Jack’s stock-exchange fortune had dipped severely; in 1933 and 1934 he had been forced to apply to his father-in-law for a loan to keep going, and was only too aware that even his Park Avenue home was dependent on James T. Lee’s grudging charity. As his sense of failure deepened, his pride was wounded. Although there was a temporary improvement in his stock-exchange fortune in 1936, he was being pressed by the estate of M. C. Bouvier for outstanding debts, including a loan of $25,000 dating from 1930, and by the Internal Revenue Service for a considerable sum in back taxes. For her part, Janet was bitterly resentful of his inability to provide the stability, love and affection that she needed to make up for her chilly relationship with her father. She resented, too, that the children so obviously adored their father, preferring his company to hers. Subconsciously the girls took the part of their fascinating, loving father against their disciplinarian mother. “Both girls hated their mother,” said a friend who knew them at Farmington. “Jackie had a very close semi-incestuous relationship with her father who at the same time she was ashamed of. Janet didn’t like her daughters, only her Auchincloss children.” Janet’s violence toward her children continued even when they were adults: “Michael Canfield told me that Janet would strike her [Jackie] in fits of temper,” a cousin said. “He said they were very violent, that she’d strike out and she [Jackie] didn’t like that at all. I can see that because you could tell with Janet: she had one of those tempers that was like a thunderstorm, you could see it coming.” Perhaps it would have been truer to say that the girls resented Janet’s constant carping criticism. “She expected so much from each of us,” Lee remembered, “that I don’t recall exactly but it was never defined in a particular area … [just] simply excelling and perfection so there was an awful lot of criticism. But that may have been her unhappiness with herself … ”

At the end of September 1936 Janet demanded a six-month trial separation; Black Jack moved out of the apartment to a room at the Westbury, almost a home away from home for him since the Polo Bar was one of his favorite rendezvous for assignations. The couple were together again for the following summer in East Hampton but on their return to New York after Labor Day they parted for the last time. According to one of Jackie’s biographers, that last summer in East Hampton as a family had been a sad ordeal. In East Hampton everyone knew each other’s business and at the riding club, where Jackie spent most of her days, “all the kids knew and some made a point of needling Jackie. But when she didn’t want to hear something she didn’t listen. She had a lot of grit for a little girl.” Another member of the club remembers a wistful Jackie wandering around “like a motherless kitten,” talking to the grooms and lavishing attention on the horses. “You somehow sensed she was a thousand miles away, existing in a world of manufactured dreams.” With some justification, the Lees blamed Black Jack: “There was no excuse in the world for Black Jack,” Janet’s younger sister, Winifred d’Olier, said. “He was a terrible guy … He was the worst man you could possibly find.”

The next summer, 1938, Janet rented a house at Bellport, forty miles from her daughters’ beloved East Hampton, to set a distance between herself and Black Jack. The girls spent August with their father, but even at Lasata life was falling apart at the seams and the family were more than ever at each other’s throats. The Major had fallen in love with an Englishwoman, Mrs. Mabel Ferguson, who lived and worked in New York. “When Grandmother found out about it,” Edie Beale said, “her heart shattered. The affair killed her … ” Maude died less than two years later, on April 2, 1940.

For Jackie, the heartbreak was private, the humiliation public. On January 26, 1940, the New York Daily Mirror broke the news of her parents’ separation under the headline “Society Broker Sued for Divorce,” and published details-supplied apparently by Janet’s lawyer-of Black Jack’s women, with dates and photographs. Then the big news services ran the story and it was reprinted in tabloids and newspapers across the country. In public Jackie developed a protective shell of reserve, so none of her school friends or teachers seem to have realized the hurt that lay behind it. “It was, of all the divorces I’ve heard about and watched, I think probably one of the very worst,” Lee recalled, “because there was such relentless bitterness on both sides, only myself and Jackie, one felt constantly pulled in the other one’s direction, and then they spoke of each other in such very unpleasant ways.”

It was now that Jackie developed the capacity to shut out things she didn’t want to hear, to block out pain, which stood her in good stead later in life. “Jackie was really fortunate to have or acquire the ability to tune out, which she always kept,” Lee said. “It was like for the years from ten to twenty never hearing anything [from your parents] except how awful the other one was. Until it gets like a broken record and you start to ignore it because you know when it’s coming … I envied her [Jackie] so much being able to press the button and tune out … ” But even Jackie could not tune out entirely. The bitterness of her parents’ divorce and its public nature left her with deep insecurities, repressed anger and a fawnlike shyness of the world beyond a circle of trusted friends. It also enhanced the escapist, romantic side of her nature, her love of poetry and books, a fantasy world in which she could lose herself and hide from unpleasant reality. All her life she preferred to skim the surface, afraid to probe at what might lie beneath. She found physical release from her demons in riding hard over fences, and was a courageous, competitive horsewoman. Black Jack told her future husband, John F. Kennedy, “If you have any trouble with Jackie, put her on a horse.”

In 1939, as her East Hampton world was breaking up, Jackie, aged ten, wrote a poem celebrating her love for the ocean, illustrating it with a drawing of herself, head thrown back, hair blown by the wind, standing in front of huge rolling breakers:

When I go down to the sandy shoreI can think of nothing I want moreThan to live by the booming blue seaAs the seagulls flutter around about meI can run about when the tide is outWith the wind and the sea all aboutAnd the seagulls are swirling and diving for fishOh-to live by the sea is my only wish

END

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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