The House of Kennedy(21)
As they begin to spend time together, exchanging gifts of books on history, poetry, and art, the new couple is quick to confide parental difficulties on both sides. While many would later name her father as the only man Jackie ever truly loved, despite his philandering, “Jackie really didn’t like her mother,” recalls Bouvier cousin and family biographer John Davis. Jack could cut even deeper on the subject of Rose. “My mother was a nothing.” And he chafes against Joe Sr.’s control. “I think my destiny is what my father wants it to be.”
Jack struggles even more deeply with the numbing grief that comes from the loss of two siblings in less than five years. He bleakly describes Joe Jr.’s death in 1944 as having “a completeness…the completeness of perfection.” He keeps Joe Sr.’s 1935 letter that tells of beloved younger sister Kick who “thinks you are quite the grandest fellow who ever lived and your letters furnish most of her laughs.”
Impatient with his son’s melancholy in the midst of a tough political contest, Joe delivers a stern mandate. A senator needs a wife. After all, Jack’s younger brother Bobby has been married to Ethel Skakel since 1950 and has already had the first of what will be eleven children.
Jack is then campaigning against incumbent Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge. “He spent half of each week in Massachusetts,” Jackie recalls. “He’d call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington.”
The distance gives Jackie time to make her own calculations, according to opinion writer Helen Lawrenson. “Jackie knew about it all, or, if not all—[the] hundreds of other women from secretaries and hotel maids to starlets, socialites and wives of his friends—she knew the score.”
On November 4, 1952, Congressman Jack Kennedy defeats Lodge by just over seventy thousand votes to become the new senator from Massachusetts.
In spring 1953, Jackie receives two big opportunities: an assignment to cover twenty-five-year-old Queen Elizabeth II’s June 2 coronation, and a proposal of marriage from Jack. She first heads off to London before answering, putting an ocean’s distance between them. Jackie “realized that if she married into that family, she would be expected to cater to their every whim. Kennedy women were treated like second-class citizens. Jackie wasn’t prepared to tolerate that,” fashion designer Estelle Parker opines. On the other hand, Jackie declares, the Kennedys “are nothing if not the most exciting family, perhaps in the world.”
Despite her concerns, Jackie makes her decision and accepts Jack’s proposal—and the diamond and emerald engagement ring from Van Cleef & Arpels, the two central stones totaling nearly six carats. Their engagement is announced on June 24, 1953, and she resigns from the Times-Herald.
“We are all crazy about Jackie,” Joe declares, although at first the Kennedy women are puzzled by her disdain for athletics, her independence, her elegance, and her writerly pursuits. “‘Jack-leen,’ rhymes with ‘queen,’” Eunice says. Dinah Bridge, a family friend, says, “Jackie was put through her paces by the whole family. And she stood up extremely well to the Kennedy barrage of questions.” Rose settles on distant praise: “It would be hard to imagine a better wife for Jack.”
Engagement doesn’t slow Jack’s philandering, however. A month before his wedding, the now thirty-six-year-old senator takes a bachelor adventure on the French Riviera. There he peels off from his Harvard roommate Torbert Macdonald to romance twenty-one-year-old Swedish socialite Gunilla Von Post, who recalls, “He spoke of his parents, his late brother, his sisters and brothers—but for the moment, there was no mention of a fiancée.” In 2010 and 2011, correspondence detailing further liaisons between the socialite and the then-future president fetched six figures. Jack’s last letter to Gunilla was dated 1956, three years after he wedded Jackie.
Evelyn Lincoln, Senator Kennedy’s longtime executive secretary, whose upstanding Midwestern sensibility was often challenged by her employer’s personal assignments, said in an interview, “Half my time was spent with women trying to find out about him.”
Regardless, on September 12, 1953, eight hundred elite guests gather at St. Mary’s Church in Newport, Rhode Island, to witness what Rose describes as “a splendid wedding” that introduces Jackie to “her new life as the wife of a political figure.” The mother of the groom details a press account, “It took almost two hours for the guests to pass through the reception line to greet the couple.”
“It was a beautiful, fairy tale of a wedding,” says family friend Sancy Newman, noting how it was perfection personified. “Everyone said the most perfect things, wore the most perfect clothes, and had the most perfect manners. It was picture perfect.” According to another guest, it was “just like the coronation” of Queen Elizabeth that Jackie had reported on earlier that year.
Less fittingly perfect is the incendiary rumor that their Newport wedding was not Jack’s first trip to the altar. Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims that in 1947, Jack, on a whim, had married Palm Beach socialite Durie Malcolm.
Family friend Charles Spalding’s wife, Betty, quotes Eunice as confirming the quickie marriage: “There was a drunken party and they [Jack and Durie] went off to a justice of the peace to get married” at two in the morning. Spalding admits that at Jack’s request and with the help of a lawyer, he stole the marriage certificate from Palm Beach County offices, erasing any trace of a “high school prank, a little bit of daring that went too far.”