First Ladies (5 page)

Although the Monroes began their administration with a magnificent and popular reception in the restored White House on New
Year’s Day, 1818, their entertaining slid swiftly downhill. Elizabeth found Washington dismally provincial—which it almost certainly was in 1818 and to some extent still is. Here is a glimpse of what she had to contend with at a typical White House reception, as seen by a contemporary newspaperman: “The secretaries, senators, foreign ministers, consuls, auditors, accountants, officers of the army and navy of every grade, farmers, merchants, parsons, priests, lawyers, judges, auctioneers and nothingarians crowd to the President’s house every Wednesday evening, some in shoes, most in boots and many in spurs… some with powdered heads, some frizzled and oiled; some whose heads a comb has never touched, half hid by dirty collars, reaching far above their ears, stiff as pasteboard.”

Elizabeth found this assortment hard to take and entertained as little as possible. She spent months away from the White House, visiting her married daughters—which meant no women could come to the Executive Mansion while it lacked a lady chaperone. Fuming congressional wives and daughters never had a chance to unpack much less display their party dresses. When and if they finally received an invitation from the First Lady, they were intimidated by her fifteen-hundred-dollar Paris ensembles. All her clothes came from France.

The dark-haired, queenly Elizabeth was forty-eight when she became First Lady but looked thirty-something. One woman visitor became positively indignant when she was introduced to the First Lady’s twelve-year-old granddaughter (who looked, she said, eighteen or nineteen). There was only one explanation, the already outraged ladies of Washington concluded: the First Lady was using “paint”—a shocking accusation in 1818, when cosmetics had an aura of immorality. Although no one had said a word when Dolley Madison applied rouge with abandon, this supposed transgression became more fuel for the whispering campaign against her successor.

In another display of her sense of superiority to the locals, Elizabeth absolutely refused to call on congressmen and their wives. This inspired many of them—and their friends—to boycott the White House. In 1819 a Monroe reception was peopled by a “beggarly row of empty chairs,” according to one eyewitness.

How did Elizabeth Monroe get away with this behavior? The answer would seem to be what historians call “the era of good feelings”—a sort of bipartisan Bermuda triangle in which party politics temporarily disappeared from the American scene, leaving President Monroe with virtually no opposition for a second term in 1820 and no great sense of urgency to use the White House as a vehicle for wooing Congress and public opinion.

Although they had functioned wonderfully as partners in Paris, in the White House the Monroes operated with only the barest interest in the political side of the First Lady’s role. More than once in the rest of this book, we shall see the importance of partnership in shaping a First Lady’s career. Without this motivating force, Elizabeth Monroe’s upper-class inclinations turned her White House years into a kind of historical vacuum. In spite of Mrs. Monroe’s beauty and exquisite taste in clothes and furniture, the most memorable First Lady of this era is the berouged, buxom daughter of a Philadelphia boardinghouse keeper, Dolley Madison.

—

T
HERE IS ONLY ONE
F
IRST
L
ADY WHO HAS SUCCESSFULLY NEGOTIATED
the perilous passage between democracy and upper-class style. We all know her name: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Entering the White House under the flag of the Democratic Party, the supposed voice of the poor and downtrodden, Jackie established a reign of genteel taste which managed to mesmerize Americans without alienating them.

At first, Jackie viewed the First Lady’s job with dread. Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas was amazed to discover that this “polished American aristocrat” hated crowds, abhorred the political handshake, and avoided official White House functions as often as possible. Jackie said she felt like a moth on a windowpane; she hated her title—she claimed it made her sound like a saddle horse. She shuddered at becoming public property and feared for her children’s equilibrium.

How did Jackie transform these liabilities into immense popularity? The onrush of the television era played a part—complemented
by Jackie’s beauty. But there is much more to it than the ubiquitous camera eye. The shyness Jackie projected was part of an aura of mystery, of elusiveness, that her father, John Bouvier, a profound student of women, had taught her to create. It was a public personality, one of many roles she played in the White House. “Jackie wore so many masks, she was impossible to decipher,” said a former schoolmate, the journalist Charlotte Curtis. “With her elevation to First Lady she became even more elusive, more secretive, more dramatic.”

Among her few close friends Jackie was never shy; on the contrary, she had always been talkative, witty, and, with men, more than a little flirtatious. She did wicked impersonations of everyone from the Queen of England to her own husband, whose Massachusetts accent and chopping hand motions she parodied perfectly. Given the chance, she could also be more than a little sarcastic. In an interview with Nan Robertson of
The New York Times
early in the 1960 campaign, Jackie mocked Pat Nixon’s “Republican cloth coat”—a phrase Richard Nixon had enshrined in his famous 1952 speech, defending himself and his wife against accusations that they lived lavishly off a secret slush fund. Jackie noted that Pat bought her clothes at Elizabeth Arden, where you could not get a cloth coat for under $250. She also assailed John Fairchild, owner and publisher of
Women’s Wear Daily
, for saying she spent $45,000 a year on clothes. “I couldn’t do that without wearing sable underwear!” she said.

When Jack Kennedy saw this remark on the front page of
The New York Times
, he reportedly exclaimed: “That’s the last thing Jackie’s going to say in this campaign.” His reaction underscores the curious, not to say precarious relationship between Jackie and her husband. New York and Washington had abounded with rumors that before Jack Kennedy ran for President, she had seriously considered divorcing him for his compulsive womanizing. Nancy Dickerson, a TV reporter who knew her well, noted that in her pre-White House days, wifely devotion was not one of Jackie’s outstanding traits—and you could hardly blame her.

In short, this was not a political partnership at work, in spite of some campaign rhetoric from both Jack and Jackie that strove to give
that impression. The Kennedys, male chauvinists all, made no attempt to tout Jackie’s intelligence, mostly because they did not believe it existed. In their eyes, she was, like all the other women in their lives, strictly for relaxation. Bobby Kennedy, utterly unaware of his condescension, told one reporter Jackie never bothered her husband with questions like “What’s new in Laos?” JFK said the same thing in a slightly more flattering way: “I don’t have to fight the day’s political battles over again at night.”

Note the assumptions underlying those two statements. RFK obviously thought Jackie lacked the brainpower to be interested in Laos. His brother the President seems to have assumed that if he discussed politics with his uncomprehending wife, the result would be warfare.

None of the New Frontiersmen had the slightest inkling that Jackie would size up the situation and cope with it her way. First, she chose an old friend, Oleg Cassini, to advise her on her White House wardrobe. From the start, she and the Paris-born designer seemed to have an almost mystic communion. The first sketch he showed her, while she was still in the hospital in December 1960, recovering from the birth of her son, John, was a white full-length evening dress for the inaugural ball. The fabric was an opulent Swiss double satin. The lines were unusually modest; overall the dress was a unique combination of the simple and the regal. “Absolutely right!” Jackie said.

Next Cassini showed her a fawn-beige wool coat, with a small sable collar and muff and a matching pillbox hat. Cassini urged her to wear this outfit to the inauguration. “All the other women will be wearing [full-length] furs. This coat will set you apart, emphasize your youth. It will set the tone for the whole administration.”

“I’m convinced,” Jackie said. “You’re the one.”

From that moment Cassini became her official designer. He was a wise choice. The inaugural outfit created a fashion revolution—the “Jackie look.” Within days of the ceremony, pillbox hats filled the shelves of the nation’s stores and knockoffs of the coat sprouted on a thousand racks. One magazine assured its readers they could get “the look” for $68.68. None of this bothered Jackie in the least. She had worn it first.

Jackie’s conversations and correspondence with Cassini reveal how quickly she grasped the essence of the challenge she faced. She told him she wanted to avoid any taint of sensationalism in her clothes. She had no intention of becoming another Marie Antoinette. At the same time she did not want to look stuffy—“there is a dignity to the office [of First Lady] which suddenly hits you.” Trying to sum up the style she was aiming for, she told Cassini she required dresses “I would wear if Jack were President of FRANCE.” She also insisted on exclusivity. She wanted only original creations—there was no way she would tolerate “any fat little woman hopping around in the same dress.”

With her fashion persona under decisive control, Jackie found a cause in the White House itself—redecorating it, not only to suit her own good taste but to make it a museum, even a historical pageant of American taste. The mansion was far from that estate in 1961. Soon after she moved in, Jackie remarked that the place looked as if it had been decorated by B. Altman, New York’s prim and proper department store. She told Oleg Cassini most of the rooms reminded her of another now defunct prototype of conventional taste—a Statler Hotel.

As I mentioned in the opening chapter, Jack Kennedy disapproved of overhauling the White House almost as violently as he disliked Jackie’s campaign remarks about sable underwear. Later Jackie would acidly recall she had been “warned, begged and practically threatened” not to go anywhere near the project. JFK asked an old Truman hand, my father’s White House counsel, Clark Clifford, to talk her out of it. Clark arrived with terrifying tales of the flak my father had encountered when he decided to add what is now known as the “Truman Balcony” to the South Portico. Jackie’s ears had already been filled with horror stories of other Presidents, going all the way back to Martin Van Buren, who had wound up losing votes and even elections for trying to refurbish the White House. Along with political sharpshooters in Congress who were always ready to scream about presidential extravagance (perfect camouflage for their own perks and privileges), there were numerous architects and other self-appointed watchdogs ready to pounce on any supposed desecration of a national shrine.

In his memoirs, Clark Clifford maintains he thought Jackie’s idea was wonderful from the start—which strikes me as just a bit dubious when the man who called him into the fray, the President, was furiously trying to talk Jackie out of it. Whether Clark became an instant convert or an eventual one, he soon found himself working as Jackie’s right-hand man. Not only was he a good choice because of his insider’s knowledge of Washington’s pitfalls but he also brought with him memories of our experience in Dad’s second term, when the White House was gutted and rebuilt just in time to save the Trumans from being buried in its rubble.

In 1948 we discovered the mansion, after decades of halfhearted, often half-baked repairs, was close to literal collapse. Among other things, a leg of the piano in my sitting room broke through the ceiling above the Family Dining Room, and the architects informed Dad that the ceiling of the State Dining Room was staying up only from force of habit. We had to move to nearby Blair House, the historic town house normally used for VIP guests, for almost three years, while the entire building was reconstructed using twentieth-century steel and concrete.

The cost of that operation ignited Congress’s traditional parsimony toward the White House, and the lawmakers declined to put up any serious money to decorate the place. Dad left Washington grumbling that the exterior had been improved but the interior looked worse than ever. Like the historian that he was in his spare time, Dad had wanted to do exactly what Jackie did—make the inside of the house as historic as the outside. Unfortunately he was distracted by a few pressing problems such as Senator Joe McCarthy’s Communist witch-hunts and a war in Korea.

This harking back to the Truman White House gave Jackie the key idea that enabled her to overhaul the mansion with an amazing minimum of fuss. Instead of using the scare word
redecorate
, which was certain to arouse penny-pinching congressmen and other assorted busybodies, Jackie chose the golden word
restoration
to describe her efforts. The term cast an aura of irreproachable disinterested authenticity on the project, rendering it almost immune to criticism. No
matter that it was a misnomer which could not be applied in any literal sense. There was no previous perfect White House in the past which diligence and research could restore. For most of its long career, the place had been an unnerving mixture of the elegant and the shabby. No President ever had the time—or could persuade Congress to cough up the money—to create the kind of splendor that its spacious public rooms and lofty corridors demanded.

Jackie hurled herself into her task with a passion that swept away obstacles and enlisted enthusiasts everywhere. With Clark Clifford’s help, she formed the Fine Arts Committee for the White House, to seek out furniture, paintings, and other historic objects. She did not a little of the seeking herself. Clad in jodhpurs and riding boots, she plunged into the cavernous Fort Washington warehouse on the Maryland side of the Potomac, where White House castoffs were stored, rummaging through hundreds of dust-covered crates to rescue long-discarded chairs and tables and lamps for restoration. She also pursued historic paintings, rugs, and furniture with pleading phone calls to their startled owners, frequently persuading them to surrender valuable family heirlooms on the spot.