Jackie and Me(36)
I think, for instance, of how we used to swan into La
Salle du Bois, Jackie already scattering her Sorbonne French.
“Bonsoir, Messieurs! La table dans le coin, s’il vous plait, pour deux. Et peut-être une carte des vins? Ah, vous êtes si gentil. ” With any other girl, I suppose, it might have sounded affected, but it made the mere act of being seated before a white-linen tablecloth eventful.
Wherever we went, she knew the ma?tred’, the assistant
ma?tred’, the headwaiter. Joe at the Hi-Hat, Stephen at the Congo Room. The night chef at Duke Zeibert’s. “You get out a lot,” I once suggested.
“Oh, I just write them up sometimes.”
The one place where she had no pull was Harvey’s on
Connecticut Avenue. On our first voyage there, we arrived a little after five and had to wait nearly two hours for a table.
Our reward was a side view of J. Edgar Hoover, alone at
a corner table, jowly and bison-shouldered and dining on
white toast, grapefruit, cottage cheese and Bibb lettuce.
“Do you think he has stomach trouble?” Jackie mused.
“Somebody should sell him Bromo-Seltzer.”
“It won’t help, he’s being consumed by his secrets.”
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“No,” she insisted. “He’s eating them himself.”
“Of course. He has to eat them or they’ll pass into enemy hands.”
That was all the premise we needed to plot out J. Edgar
Hoover’s Diet of Secrets. A list of Red sympathizers for
breakfast. A list of Red agents with midmorning coffee.
Perverts for lunch. Philandering Cabinet officials for high tea. Radical Jews for cocktails, Negro-lovers and folk-music listeners for appetizers, and for dinner—well, we thought about what was piled on that lettuce and came up with
naked postcards of Bess Truman. Then, having still a lot of time on our hands, we theorized there must be an FBI agent tasked with catching the secrets when Hoover passed them
out again.
“Very delicate task,” I suggested. “Far above GS-6.”
“Major security clearances. And asbestos gloves. Of
course, it’s widely considered a plum job.”
“A road to power. He who sifts Hoover’s stool . . .”
“Charts America’s course.”
“Exactly.”
It seems to me now we were all but daring him to turn
our way—without, of course, fully appreciating that we
didn’t merit a dram of his attention. A biographer might
speak to the irony of Young Jackie beholding the man who
would play such a key role in her own life, entrapping her
husband’s secrets like flypaper. I find it more interesting to ponder Jackie on the other side of Fame, pressing her nose to it. Was it as lonely as it looked?
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JACKIE & ME
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How little we spoke of Jack, though neither of us had
exactly stipulated that. If anything, Jack had instructed me to keep his name in the mix, but the conversation seemed to flow more easily without him in the middle. If ever we
drifted his way, Jackie would call us back. “No,” she’d say.
“Not yet.”
Sometimes, to be sure, she came at him in a roundabout
way. Was it true, she once asked, that I’d proposed marriage to Jack’s sister? I explained that every man who’d known Kick Kennedy had proposed to her at some point because
she was the best pal and livest live wire and you’d have done anything to keep her around a bit longer, only marriage was the stupidest way to go about it. If you’d asked me to call one person back from the dead, I said, it would be Kick. Jackie was quiet and then said: “He misses her, too.”
One night, over screwdrivers, she volunteered that she’d
first laid eyes on Jack not at Charlie Bartlett’s row house, as everyone (including Jack) believed, but at the Syosset wedding of Charlie’s brother a full two years prior, and she might have missed him altogether had it not been for another wedding guest. Gene Tunney, of all people, the ex-boxer, who was still a fit specimen in middle age (he raised Hereford cat-tle in Stamford) and who was disposed to like her, he said, by the fact that she wasn’t smoking (though she’d binged three cigs before coming) and who, in the midst of inveigh—
ing against tobacco, paused to point out, with grudging
approval, the only other guest who was abstaining. “You
see that fellow there? I happen to know he has the spinal
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LOUIS BAYARD
column of an eighty-year-old broncobuster. No, it’s true, he can barely stand, let alone walk, and would you know it to look at him? The picture of health, and that’s because his
lungs are pure.”
But not his thoughts, Jackie silently added, for the gentleman in question was conversing with a blonde in a gray foulard dress, and from the unhurried precision of his movements, the coolness of his stare, there seemed only one possible outcome.
Even then, of course, Jackie knew who he was. Could
have recited in a vague way his war record, some of the East Hampton slurs about his provenance. This was the first time she had ever paused to consider him. She paused a little longer than she meant to and might have crossed over into staring had Gene Tunney’s voice not drawn her back.