Maybe I will be remembered as the person who start[ed] restoring the White House—but you will be remembered as the one who PRESERVED it—and made sure for all time it would be cared for. That was the moment I was always scared of—Would the next President’s wife scrap the whole thing as she was sick to death of hearing about Jacqueline Kennedy.
The women of the White House press corps, whom Jackie had dubbed “the harpies,” had never warmed to the aristocratic Mrs. Kennedy, and they were eager to see her go. In the dispatches they sent back to their local newspapers, they noted that Eleanor Roosevelt had vacated the President’s House the day after Franklin’s death. When, they asked Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird’s press secretary, would Jackie make way for the Johnsons?
“So I went to Mrs. Johnson and I said, ‘They just keep asking when are we moving in,’ “ recalled Liz Carpenter. “It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Mrs. Johnson really angry. She turned and said with rather intense indignation at the question, ‘I would to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort. I can at least serve her convenience.’ ”
“Everything was in a jumbled state as we were packing for the move,” recalled Mary Barelli Gallagher, Jackie’s private secretary. “The third floor was the busiest those days, fairly buzzing with activity. All the storage rooms had been opened and the things brought out to be packed. That moved smoothly enough. But the complication was Jackie’s clothes: special tall cartons had to be made to hold the closets full of gowns.”
“Now that I look back on it,” Jackie admitted later, “I think I should have gotten out the next day. But at first I didn’t have any place to go.”
HALF-FORGOTTEN DREAMS
Jackie received a call from Mrs. Averell Harriman, the wife of JFK’s patrician undersecretary of state, offering the use of her house on N Street in Georgetown until Jackie could make more definite plans about a place to live.
Marie Harriman had attended Miss Spence’s School with Jackie’s mother, and she was a popular figure in Washington social circles. She had an appreciation for expensive Impressionist and Postimpressionist artists—van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso—and for rich, handsome men. She was the kind of woman who could amuse a man for an entire evening by telling off-color jokes in a husky voice out of the side of her mouth. Jack Kennedy had been very fond of her.
“You need a place to live while you get your act together,” Marie told Jackie.
It was a generous offer, and Jackie immediately accepted it. But she knew that the Harriman house, like all the houses she had lived in since her marriage, would be just one more way station in her life. She clearly yearned for something more permanent.
During the Depression, when her father lost most of his money, the family had been forced to move a number of times. They lived a rootless existence until Janet Bouvier’s father, James T. Lee, a real-estate investor whom everyone called Old Mister Lee, let them borrow an apartment he owned in Manhattan, a grand Art Deco duplex at 740 Park Avenue, which had been designed by the famous architect Rosario Candela.
“Remember, you’re living rent-free in my house,” Old Mister Lee barked at Black Jack, humiliating him in front of Jackie.
After Jackie’s parents divorced, Janet had married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., an heir to the Standard Oil fortune and a prominent member of the hereditary WASP ruling class that had set the standard of behavior in America for nearly three centuries. But Janet and Black Jack had continued to carry on their bitter feuding. Mostly, they argued about money. As one of Jackie’s biographers wrote:
Perhaps it was the growing-up years in the Depression, her mother’s complaints about the size of her alimony payments, her parents’ constant bickering over dentists’ bills, the graveside quarreling among the Bouviers over wills, estates, and trusts—whatever it was, [Jackie] had learned to draw an equation between money and peace of mind.
Jackie’s teenage years were spent at Merrywood, the Auchinclosses’ storybook estate in Virginia just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. But even there, she was aware of the disparity between her luxurious surroundings and her own fragile financial state. Five of the seven children at Merrywood were the direct descendants of her stepfather Hughdie Auchincloss; they bore his family name, and they received trust funds from the matriarch of the family, Grandmother Auchincloss, the former Emma Brewster Jennings. By contrast, Jackie and her sister Lee were impecunious Bouviers.
Jackie considered herself an outsider. Born into an aristocratic Catholic family, she never felt at home in the narrow-minded world of the WASPs. But as much as she wished to be emancipated from that world, she loved Merrywood—and everything it stood for. To her, Merrywood was a golden place of idealized beauty, splashed with sunlight and provided with every comfort and convenience.
What she remembered most about this lost Camelot of her youth was her bedroom. It was located on the third floor of the imposing Georgian mansion. The ceiling of the room slanted sharply beneath a gambrel roof, which gave the space a cozy feeling. The furnishings were simple: a few pieces of painted furniture, twin beds, and fleur-de-lis wallpaper that also ran across the low ceiling. An easel stood near a window. On the dresser, there were scrapbooks bulging with newspaper clippings, society columns, and hundreds of photos of Jackie.
After John Kennedy’s assassination, the place that made Jackie feel the safest was the bedroom in her home in Hyannis Port. It was an almost exact replica of her bedroom at Merrywood: gambrel roof, patterned wallpaper on the ceiling, bulging scrapbooks. There was even an easel, which Jackie used when she and Caroline painted in the afternoons.
With only three days to go before she would move into the borrowed Harriman house, Jackie asked her maid Provi Paredes to bring the President’s clothes to the third floor. After Provi put
