Jackie and Me(31)
said no, it was just a little tousled from despair, and this is how two shameless hours slip away, ladies and gentlemen, without your even knowing.
Now, I don’t want you to think we were always slum—
ming. One weekend, we went to see lithographs by Toulouse—
Lautrec. Another time, it was Eskimo art at the Whyte
Gallery and Peruvian tapestries at the Textile Museum. The
National had just reopened, so we caught Ethel Merman in
Call Me Madam and then, a few weeks later, Carol Channing in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Washington in those days was a sleepier, more palmetto kind of place, but you could still stumble across jazz singers at Loew’s Capitol or the National Guard Armory, and there was a National Ballet, though I can’t recall what it was doing, and once, operating merely
on rumor, we found a concert version of The Magic Flute in the bowels of the Agriculture Department.
Rather gradually and then rather completely, Sunday
afternoons became our time. We never exactly defined them
that way—certainly we never consulted Jack—but in the
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act of dropping me off at Union Station, Jackie might suggest something for the following Sunday, or I might suggest something back, and by the time I’d hopped on the train, we would already have set the coordinates. It had to fall
somewhere in the District of Columbia—no Mount Vernon
tours, no Skyline Drive excursions—and we had an informal rule that, if either of us got second thoughts over the course of the week, we’d phone with a definite alternative.
“I’m not feeling gung ho about Karl Knaths, but there’s
a William Walton exhibit at the Corcoran.” Or “Listen,
it’s been a week, and I don’t think I’m up for Okinawa.
Can we watch Skirts Ahoy! instead?” Where possible, we steered clear of tourists, but we strolled with great content-ment through the Dumbarton Oaks garden and circled the Wright Brothers’ plane in the Arts and Industries Building.
In late May, on an impulse, we forsook the Freer for the
lowbrow joys of the Ringling Brothers, which would have
been the first and last time I ever saw Jackie with cotton
candy. It took her unholy hours to get it peeled from her
skin, and she claimed to have carried it all the way to
work the next morning, along with her ceramic Ringling
Brothers tankard, which disappeared under still-unexplained circumstances.
As I write it down, it sounds frenetic, but the parts that
truly linger in my memory are the still points, the after-moments when she and I would gather to discuss what we’d just seen. I remember Jackie, for instance, diligently putting in a good word for Grandma Moses—“mysterious charm,”
“taproots of myth,” that sort of thing—and me sailing back
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with “Madison Avenue rube” and “world’s most commercial
primitive artist.” But the thing is I liked Grandma Moses, much as I hated to admit it. As for Jackie, I think it’s fair to say the old lady’s canvases did not get mounted on the White House walls while the Kennedys were living there.
One conversation in particular comes to mind. We
had got to talking about Ingrid Bergman, a beautiful and
acclaimed and, I don’t think it’s going too far to say, sancti-fied actress (hell, she played Saint Joan) who had made the surprising decision to leave her husband and bear a child with an Italian film director. This was in the late forties, and the news did not go over well. She was evicted from Hollywood, denounced from the Senate floor. To judge from
the gossip columns, America would have stoned her to death
if it could have found an arena convenient to all. “And what for?” asked Jackie. “She wanted to be with another man.”
“She might have told the first man first.”
“Oh, you mean like all those husbands who tell their wives?”
This was the first time I felt her to be standing in Janet’s shoes, and maybe she could only do it by proxy.
“So,” I said, “you’re telling me a famous husband
wouldn’t get the same business for leaving his wife?”
“Ask my employer, Mr. Hearst.”
“All I’m saying is if you follow your hot pants out the
door, people will have an opinion.”
“Oh, hot pants. That’s not why a woman leaves a man.”
“Why then?”
“Freedom.”
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Well, I had a bit of a laugh, I confess. The idea that a
millionaire movie actress with a swimming pool and someone squeezing oranges for her every morning was in some
way unfree, but Jackie kept insisting that was money, not freedom. We went back and forth, and then she fell quiet for a space, and at last she smiled, very indulgently, and rested her hand on mine. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Lem, but you’re a man. Freedom is what you know.”
For the first time in our still-young acquaintance, I had
the feeling of falling short. Of a standard I didn’t yet know existed. I suppose I could have listed for her all the ways I wasn’t free, the interlocking manacles of family and liveli-hood—I could make a pretty good list right now, but I get tired just thinking about it.