Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

torn by bitter discord. She often saw her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, sprawled drunk on the living-room sofa. Dressed in nothing but his underwear, socks and garters, and shoes, he ranted against “kikes” and “micks” and “wops.” He cursed God for the unfair way the world had treated him, and hurled abuse at Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee Bouvier.

Janet generally gave as good as she got, hurling the family china at her husband. She denounced him in front of Jackie and her younger sister Lee as “a no-good drunk,” and constantly threatened to leave him. Sometimes the fights went beyond words, and there were blows, blood, and black eyes.

As the older, more responsible daughter, Jackie was expected to help her mother carry her drunken father into the bedroom and undress him. Before they put him to bed, they had to clean up the mess left by his night of debauchery—his semen, vomit, and urine. The next morning, Jackie would watch in shame and pity as her father poured out his tearful apologies and begged his wife for one more chance.

When he was sober, her father was a totally different man. He was especially warm and compassionate toward Jackie, whom he favored over Lee. Jackie responded to his affection by secretly siding with him in the explosive marital battles. She came to see her father as a victim. If she had been his wife, she would not have driven him to drink. She would have known how to make him happy.

In later years, Jack Kennedy joked that Jackie had “a father thing.” Her friends agreed; they said that the men Jackie found attractive bore a striking resemblance to her roué of a father, whose dark good looks accounted for his nickname, Black Jack. She was drawn to older men, piratical types with rampant sexual appetites.

However, that was only part of the story. Black Jack Bouvier was Jackie’s first and greatest mentor in the art of life. He had an eye for color, shape, and form, and he delivered lectures to his daughter on everything from architecture and art to antiques, interior decoration, and fashion.

For Black Jack the most interesting art of all was the mating game between men and women. Pay attention to everything a man says, he told Jackie. Fasten your eyes on him like you are staring into the sun. Women gain power by affiliating themselves with powerful men.

He called her “Jacks”—a sexually ambiguous term that stuck as her family nickname. And in many ways they were more like sexual confidants than father and daughter. He engaged her in sexually stimulating conversations and bragged about his conquests. Jackie was flattered, because her father made her feel as though she was his most important girl.

When Jackie was a teenager, her father visited her at her boarding school, Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut. They played a lewd game in which Jackie would point to the mothers of her classmates.

“That one, Daddy?” she would ask.

And if Jack Bouvier had not slept with the woman in question, he would reply to his daughter, “Not yet.”

And Jackie would point to another mother and ask, “That one, Daddy?”

“Oh, yes,” he would say, “I’ve already had her.”

“And that one, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“And that one, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

As the child of an alcoholic—and a verbally incestuous alcoholic at that—Jackie sought ways to deny the existence of the painful and ugly. She did not hear things she did not want to hear; she did not see things she did not want to see.

“If something unpleasant happens to me, I block it out,” she once said. “I have this mechanism.”

Jackie’s father provided her with the mechanism: style.

“Style is not a function of how rich you are, or even who you are,” Black Jack told Jackie in what was his most important lesson. “Style is a habit of mind that puts quality before quantity, noble struggle before mere achievement, honor before opulence. It’s what you are. It’s your essential self. It’s what makes you a Bouvier.”

It was the Bouvier in Jackie that had prompted her to enter Vogue magazine’s famous Prix de Paris writing contest when she was in college. The first-prize winner was offered a trial period as a junior editor on French Vogue, and a permanent position on the staff of New York Vogue if she made good.

Asked by the organizers of the contest to write an essay on “People I Wish I Had Known,” Jackie chose three unusual artists: the French poet Charles Baudelaire, the Irish author Oscar Wilde, and the Russian ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Her choices reflected her father’s influence.

“If I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space,” Jackie wrote in her essay, which won first prize, “it is [the theories of Baudelaire, Wilde, and Diaghilev] that I would apply to my period, their poems that I would have music and painting and ballets composed to.”

Here, in her own words, was the best definition the world would ever get of Jackie. She saw herself as a detached observer safely suspended in space, a sort of celestial figure who employed the power of male gods to make things turn out her way.

“It was a sensibility best described as ‘artistic’ in that it was her own ‘version’ of things,” wrote her stepsister Nina Auchincloss Straight. “Sometimes it was caught in her caricatures—simple, yet detailed, intimately funny pen, ink, and watercolor sketches of family and friends. But her singular view of life could best be seen in a photograph. Pictures were about being beautiful, brave; they were about family relations and friends. Her photograph of choice would have been the kind selected for a postcard: what to look like in life. Jackie knew what kind of a ‘postcard’ she wanted to send, as well as what message she wanted to deliver on the flip side.”

Jackie’s genius for staging artistic effects was apparent from the moment she entered the White House, her “chair hanging in space,” where she reigned