The House of Kennedy(22)
But Durie, who was widowed by her fourth husband in 1996, denies the marriage to the Sunday Times of London: “I wouldn’t have married Jack Kennedy for all the tea in China. I’ll tell you why, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t care for those Irish micks, and old Joe was a terrible man.”
The marriage may have been quietly annulled. Certainly, there is no record of a divorce, allowing the scandalous possibility that when Jack married Jackie in 1953, he became a bigamist, clouding the family record of his children.
At the time of the wedding, the press vigorously investigates the Durie Malcolm story but doesn’t print it. Meanwhile, rumors of Jack’s further infidelities never quiet. Journalist and longtime family friend Arthur Krock warns of the consequences of a scandalous news story to Jack’s presidential aspirations, but Joe disagrees. “The American people don’t care how many times he gets laid.”
“Kennedy men are like that,” Jackie herself would caution Joan Bennett before she became Mrs. Ted Kennedy in 1958. “You can’t let it get to you, because you shouldn’t take it personally.” Her words are a near echo of Josie Fitzgerald’s 1929 warning to Rose over Joe’s affair with Gloria Swanson.
As Jackie writes to her friend and confidant, Reverend Joseph Leonard, an Irish priest she’d met in 1950, “Jack’s like my father in a way—loves the chase and is bored with the conquest—and once married needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy.” It only takes Joan a few years of marriage to learn that her sister-in-law was right. “You just had to live with it.”
The early days of the marriage are bumpy. “I was thirty-six, she was twenty-four. We didn’t fully understand each other,” Jack says, and Jackie, too remarks, “I found it rather hard to adjust [to married life as a politician’s wife].” It doesn’t help that Jackie is unfamiliar with—and uninterested in—politics, and Jack is often away from home. “I was alone almost every weekend,” she says. “Politics was sort of my enemy, and we had no home life whatsoever.” Complicating matters was Jack’s poor health, which needed to be constantly downplayed.
Had the truth about Jack’s health gone to press, the American people might have felt the same way as Jackie did: afraid. “Jackie was usually the type to never show fear,” Lem Billings recalls, “but she was scared, very much so, about all of Jack’s illnesses. Not only did he have Addison’s disease [caused by underactive adrenal glands], he had a variety of back problems. He was on different drugs and medications, so many you couldn’t keep track of them all, including cortisone shots to treat the Addison’s. He had muscle spasms, and was being shot up with Novocain all the time. He was always very sick.”
In October 1954, thirteen months after their wedding, Jackie stands alongside the priest speaking in Latin by Jack’s bedside at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. An attempted double fusion spinal surgery has left the senator in need of last rites. Jackie faces the very real possibility of losing her new husband. “I remember Jackie placing her hand on his forehead and saying, ‘Help him, Mother of God,’” Lem recalls.
Miraculously, the senator survives, and in 1954 Jackie writes to Reverend Joseph Leonard, “I love being married much more than I did even in the beginning.” To Jack, she writes, “You are an atypical husband,” but “you mustn’t be surprised to have an atypical wife—each of us would have been so lonely with the normal kind.”
By August 1956, the Kennedy clan has expanded. Eunice, Pat, and Jean have all gotten married. Eunice already has two children, Ethel is pregnant with her fifth, Pat with her second—and Jackie with her first. Despite the impending birth of their first child, however, Jack has gone off to cruise the Mediterranean, smarting from having recently lost the Democratic nomination for Adlai Stevenson’s Vice-Presidential running mate. So he’s nowhere to be found when Jackie is rushed to the hospital on August 23, 1956, only to deliver their daughter—whom she names Arabella—stillborn.
The tragedy of that loss stays with her, but as she tells Reverend Leonard, she can see “so many good things that come out of this—how sadness shared brings married people closer together.”
A little over a year later, on November 27, 1957, Jack and Jackie welcome a healthy daughter, whom they name Caroline.
Jackie is delighted to be a wife and mother, but Jack’s main focus is still the possibility of a run for the presidency in 1960. While as of July 1958, Jack has still “said not a public word about wanting his party’s nomination,” the ambitions of “the handsome, well-endowed young author-statesman from Massachusetts” are easily understood, as outlined in a New York Times article entitled “How to be a Presidential Candidate.”
Despite her new obligation to Caroline, Jackie isn’t going to sit at home simply missing Jack again. She accompanies him on the campaign trail, to excellent effect. While Rose sniffs that her daughter-in-law is “not a natural-born campaigner,” Kennedy aide Kenny O’Donnell recalls, “When Jackie was traveling with us, the size of the crowd at every stop was twice as big,” and Jack finds his wife’s judgment invaluable.
She cannot stay on the road with him full-time, however, but often attends functions just for the chance to see him. At one such event, she remarks, “This is the closest I’ve come to lunching with my husband in months!” The campaigning pays off, and in July 1960, Jack Kennedy wins the presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. His wife, Jackie—now pregnant again—has done much to burnish his image, but many feel Jack is still a long shot against the seasoned Republican vice president Richard Nixon.