Mrs Kennedy
Barbara Leaming
Weidenfeld £20, pp399
Absolute obscurity was the very best thing that could have happened to one of the most iconic women of the twentieth century. The worst destiny that could have befallen Jacqueline Bouvier was the fate she embraced when she became Jackie Kennedy. Her story is a compelling illustration of one of the great and perpetual paradoxes of celebrity and power. Those treacherous beasts so often most seduce those who are least equipped to master them.
A tormented upbringing at the hands of a mother who displaced her hatred for the dissipated father onto the child produced a young woman with a fanatical craving for security and a pathological obsession with privacy. These were the commodities most starkly absent from marriage to Jack, the most powerful man on the planet, and the most compulsively promiscuous leader to have occupied high office since the Roman Empire.
Barbara Leaming endeavours to unravel the conundrum: why did Jackie plunge into a world in which she was so obviously going to be made miserable? The author's reconciliation of how she hated being 'on stage' and yet simultaneously desired a 'big life' is reasonable. So is the suggestion that a woman terribly insecure about her physical attractiveness thought it would be validated by marrying America's most eligible bachelor. As it turned out, JFK's relentless and indiscriminate priapism resumed while the honeymoon bed was still warm. Where she yearned to find validation of her sexuality in this match, it was instead further destroyed by Jack's compulsive infidelity.
His sex mania may be a well-ploughed literary furrow, but even now the recklessness and brutality of his behaviour still leaves you gasping for air. When Jackie's first child is stillborn, Jack is getting laid in the south of France. He still hasn't surfaced when the baby is buried. The President's procurers would go trawling among the tourist tours of the White House to pick up women. He used his wife's bed for screwathons so numerous that Kennedy called most of his women 'kid' because he could not remember their names.
His most notorious and dangerous mistress during the Oval Office years was Mary Meyer, who had a potty fantasy about ushering in universal peace by drugging all of the world's leaders with LSD. Jack not only expected his wife to tolerate the presence of Meyer around the family dinner table, he even expected Jackie to wine and dine his mistress in his absence. When the world is hours away from nuclear meltdown, Kennedy takes time out to make arrangements for one of his mistresses to share the family quarters in the underground bunker.
This biographer - whose previous subjects include Marilyn Monroe - is insightful and astute about the psychology of self-loathing famous women who are worshipped as sex objects by everyone except themselves, and revered by all except the men in whom they place their trust.
The other side of the Jack and Jackie enigma is why he married her in the first place. She was quite unlike his pre-marital (or post-nuptial) girlfriends. His wife evidently did not possess what it took to satisfy his gargantuan appetite for junk sex. JFK and his aides, who reduced most issues to a cost-benefit analysis of political advantage, also regarded her as an electoral liability whose 'jet set' dress - Jackie's attempt to disguise her self-perceived ugliness - would turn off Middle America.
The explanation offered is that Jack never desired a wife at all; what he was really after was a substitute sister. In spirit and temperament, Jackie filled the void left by the death of Kathleen ('Kick'), Jack's closest soulmate in the Kennedy clan. This argument is fresh - to me, at any rate. The pity is that, in common with rather a lot of the conjectures in this book, it would be more persuasive were it to be supported by ampler evidence.
The author's claim to the special attention of British readers is a hitherto neglected bond between Jackie and Harold Macmillan, the victim of his wife's long adultery with the Conservative MP Bob Boothby. That is not the only intriguing parallel between Jackie and the Old Etonian Prime Minister who was more than three decades her senior. In both cases, the public image of suave control was the mask of private agony. Leaming places great weight on a 'dear friend' correspondence between Jackie and Macmillan only to frustrate the reader with the paucity of quotes from the letters.
As justification for burdening the shelves with yet another inquest into the Kennedys, the author's unique selling proposition is that previous accounts of either his life or hers have not done justice to Jackie's contribution to the triumphs of the Presidency. Even if we accept that this tarnished Camelot can still be equated with very much worthy of being called successful, the evidence tendered by the author tends to undermine her own thesis about the cruciality of Mrs Kennedy.
She persuades me that Jackie helped restore JFK's battered reputation abroad by wowing Paris using the easy expedient of telling the French how much she adored their culture and history. She evidently charmed the notoriously curmudgeonly de Gaulle. She also seems to have got the measure of Krushchev, JFK's Soviet protagonist, more quickly than her husband. Otherwise, it is telling that Jackie disappears from view for long stretches whenever the book touches on the seminal episodes of the Kennedy Presidency.
Even on the account of an author trying to put her subject at the centre of events, Jackie is 'watching from the sidelines' as the Bay of Pigs fiasco unfolds, and the most this book can claim for Jackie's involvement in the second and bigger Cuba Crisis is that Kennedy 'wanted her nearby as he agonised about the missiles'. Jackie had about as much influence over the conduct of the Presidency as she did over her husband's serial infidelities. That is to say: zero.
A miserably insecure First Lady at the tender age of 31, by the age of 34 she was the blood-drenched First Widow, her assassinated husband's exploded head cradled in her hands as she desperately tries 'to keep the brains in'.
Even at its umpteenth telling, the story of Jackie Kennedy is a rending caution about the tragedies of power and celebrity.
