First lady to the last
Harry Mount
AMERICA'S QUEEN: THE LIFE OF JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS by Sarah Bradford Viking, £20, pp. 690 Jackie has been called America's Queen before, not least by Frank Sinatra, who, on her death, sent two dozen red roses with the message, 'You are America's Queen'. In fact Jackie practically said it herself, if not in so many words. It was Jackie who, shortly after Kennedy's assassination, first compared his two years in the White House to King Arthur's reign at Camelot.
But Guinevere didn't sleep with Arthur's brother, as Jackie did with Bobby Kennedy. And Arthur didn't bed half the royal court, as JFK did. Still, to be fair to Jackie, she only ran around with men after her hus- band's death. She was something of a saint during their marriage. She never com- plained of the gonorrhea she picked up from JFK which meant she had a terrible time conceiving and miscarrying — one daughter was stillborn, a son lived for two days. All the while her smug Kennedy in- laws were producing great broods of chil- dren, at the same time mocking Jackie's elegant manners and soft speech, calling her 'the deb'. She was the one who careful- ly dressed his war wounds and designed his dressing room so that he wouldn't have to bend over to pick up his shoes and set off the excruciating back pain he had suffered since the war; back pain that could not have been helped by having sex in the bath with Marilyn Monroe at her largest, while JFK's brother-in-law, Peter Lawford, took photographs of their exertions.
JFK had never really wanted to get mar- ried in the first place. He would have much preferred to have gone on, in his words, `pooning' with every available girl he came across. He said to a slightly stunned Harold Macmillan that if he didn't have sex at least once a day, he had a headache, which along with the back pains and the gonorrhea real- ly would have been unbearable. But as he hit his mid-thirties and his senate career took off, he knew he needed a wife — and a smart, French-speaking one at that, to counter disapproval of his peasant Irish roots — in order to get on and avoid accu- sations of homosexuality. He did little to hide his lack of enthusiasm for his beautiful bride: while watching the coverage of the wedding of Prince Rainier and Grace Kelly, in front of Jackie he said, frowning, `I could have married her.'
Still, apart from his pooning, JFK's inter- ests went beyond the normal brutish Kennedy pleasures. He shared with Jackie a deep love of literature. They read to each other, he wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, and she, much later, showed skill as an editor: she was the first to pub- lish the works of Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian Nobel Prize-winning novelist, in America. And so, after a difficult patch in the middle of their marriage when they could well have divorced, they had reached a sort of loving equilibrium as they headed for Dallas in November 1963.
The assassination flattened Jackie. She had what amounted to a year-long nervous breakdown and for several years after that, at emotional times, she would drag her hand through the air and describe the arc followed by the fragment of JFK's skull that she tried desperately to stuff back into his head on that hot afternoon in Texas. She thought her life was over and that she was destined to live out her days as a Washington widow. With her beauty and desirability — and need to be desired this was unlikely. And, for all her indepen- dence, devotion to her children and her later publishing career, she always needed a man. When she left school, under 'Ambi- tion' in her graduation year-book, she wrote, 'Never to be a housewife'; in fact her most dazzling moments were as the greatest housewife in the world.
Sarah Bradford's style is engaging. She piles interview upon interview, fact upon fact. And she's got some pretty good facts: Aristotle Onassis upholstered his bar stools in whale's scrotum, so he could ask women if they enjoyed sitting on the largest balls in the world; the day after the assassination, still wearing the bloodstained pink suit, she WImm . breakfast in bed!' insisted that she should be driven by the man who had driven her and JFK in Dallas to show that she did not blame him for the tragedy.
When it comes to drawing conclusions, given that the author seems never to have met Jackie, she sensibly relies on the opin- ions of the more perceptive of the people who did know her, like Norman Mailer. At a low point in the Kennedy marriage in 1960, he writes movingly of 'a hint of gone laughter' in Jackie. Given the horrible thing that happened three years later, it's a wonder the laughter didn't go altogether.
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