Costumes from Camelot
Jacqueline Kennedy's true style lay in the ways she allied her femininity with her tremendous strength
In America we have a tradition of sending curious and entertaining phenomena—Tutankhamen's treasures, the Ice Capades—on national tours, so that everyone can get a look-see. Currently making the rounds are Jackie Kennedy's clothes. That the tour's venues include some of our nation's most highly regarded art museums (its Washington port of call is not the Smithsonian, which houses a collection of First Ladies' inaugural gowns, but rather the Corcoran Gallery of Art) seems to have created a measure of anxiety in certain of its organizers, who have produced a catalogue full of serious essays intended, one can't help suspecting, to lend substance to the proceedings.
Philippe de Montebello, the director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, kicks things off, and he's all business. The collaboration between his institution and the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum (which owns the clothes) has resulted in "a fruitful sharing of methodologies and interpretations." Caroline Kennedy contributes a characteristically gracious letter, one that perfectly embodies her mother's dictum of giving the press "minimum information ... with maximum politeness," and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. reports for duty uncomplainingly, firing up his computer and punching out several thousand words on "Jacqueline Kennedy in the White House." Next up ought to be Letitia Baldrige, but she is curiously absent, perhaps because she recently pawed the same ground in In the Kennedy Style. In her stead we get a not unappealing understudy, Rachel Lambert Mellon, the former First Lady's friend (she redesigned the White House Rose Garden for the Kennedys), who sweetly stamps her foot over the many "made-up, untrue fantasies" that have tarnished her patron's legend. The final hurdle is "Defining Style," by Hamish Bowles (he seems to think that Jackie's greatest adversary was perhaps not Lee Harvey Oswald but rather Mamie Eisenhower, who spent her tenure as First Lady stinking up the White House with her tiki sofas and potted succulents and "department-store furnishings"), and then—at last!—we're on to the clothes. They're disappointing.
Displayed on limbless mannequins, photographed against a gray background under clinical lighting, they have an embalmed quality. Although the word most commonly associated with Jackie Kennedy's sense of style is "timeless," the clothes seem anything but; they suggest several decades' hibernation in the cedar chest of a fashionable granny. A few pieces transcend their unforgiving presentation. A black Chanel suit (lined, in the customary manner, with the same fabric used for its blouse, in this case dot-embroidered ivory silk satin) captured my immediate attention—but not because of the lesson Montebello hopes it might impart on "an aesthetic response to the highly public and ceremonial role of first lady." Rather, because it's smashing, something I'd like to have in my closet for a fancy lunch out. The evening gowns look best, particularly those by Oleg Cassini: long, sleeveless columns of uninterrupted color. But many of the clothes look fusty, even—how can this be?—dowdy. There's a Givenchy dress and overblouse in gray wool jersey that, the catalogue informs us, achieves an "effect of absolute simplicity." Truer words were never written; it looks like something a nun or a prison matron might wear. The tidy suits and coats, constructed of nubby wool, look nice but unremarkable, more like the typical stewardess uniforms of the day than like couture. The hats, floating jauntily in midair like the Invisible Man's telltale fedora, look ridiculous.
Ultimately, the effect of the collection is dispiriting. For all that we have been instructed to regard this exhibit as an opportunity to view "the originality and workmanship of some of the best designers of the day," what we hope these clothes will do is perform a powerful act of evocation, and the person we want them to evoke is not Cassini or Chanel but, of course, Jackie herself. Her clothes manage to suggest less than nothing about her.
No matter, because each of the bloodless specimen photographs is accompanied by pictures of Jackie actually wearing the clothes, and—my God—she looks sensational. Every piece is transformed. The Oleg Cassini suits, whose dimensions (enormous buttons, huge pockets) make them look slightly childish on the mannequins, assume the most sophisticated proportions when set in the context of vast tarmacs and high-ceilinged staterooms. (Cassini was once a Hollywood costume designer, and he brought to his couture a cinematic sensibility that was perfectly in sync with the Kennedy master plan, in which photographs of the beautifully dressed family at work and play had been regularly offered to the public since the days of Joe Jr.'s infancy.) In a photograph of Inauguration Day, Lady Bird Johnson's hat, with its net veil, looks positively geriatric next to Jackie's cream-colored semi-crown. (Clutching her mink, grizzled and glowering, poor Lady Bird looks like a troll beside her pretty young companion—but, of course, her highway beautification campaign would eventually do more to improve the aesthetic dimensions of American lives than all of Jackie's Chippendale highboys and "tastefully designed vitrines" and glittering nights at the White House put together.) Even the prison matron's dress, perfectly accessorized with a large brooch and Richard Nixon, is a knockout.
I will confess that when it comes to looking at pictures of the Kennedys, I fall into a kind of stupor, and everything I know about the bad marriage and the political misdeeds (of the Cuban missile crisis, Christopher Hitchens is said to have remarked that like many people, he would never forget where he was and what he was doing when President Kennedy tried to kill him) flies out of my head, the way the times table used to the moment the test paper was set down on my desk. There's a full-page photograph in the catalogue of the couple and their daughter in pre-White House days. It's early morning; mother and child are dressed for a photo op, father is dressed for the Senate, and they're all standing at the open door of the Georgetown house. The light in the street is intense, the foyer shadowed and inviting. The editors of the catalogue want my attention focused on Jackie's asparagus jersey suit, but my attention is not focused on Jackie's asparagus jersey suit; it's riveted on the way the baby is reaching for her father and her parents' shadows are falling on the gleaming floor. I've read chapter and verse about the President and his women, but show me a picture of Jack and Jackie in a convertible, dressed to the nines, her hair blowing loose in the wind and her husband reaching across to lift a strand of it behind her ear, and I'm sunk. It is impossible for me to look at these pictures and not impose on them the exact sort of narrative that inspired the family to make themselves so available to photographers in the first place.
The cotton is high these days for unreconstructed Jackie fans. The clothing exhibition has brought us a new flood of hagiography, mostly in the form of picture books, such as Jay Mulvaney's Jackie: The Clothes of Camelot and Pamela Clarke Keogh's Jackie Style. It's best to stick to the transfixing, luminous photographs in such books, and not dwell too long on the text. Keogh's is chock-full of the usual claptrap: Jackie was a "breath of fresh air," the "creator of Camelot." The author believes that "although her life can be seen as one continuous act of courage, more than anything else, Jackie is associated with style." The part about "one continuous act of courage" is so silly that it hardly bears consideration (although striking the set of Camelot and putting up Zorba the Greek in its place certainly required a measure of pure pluck). But associating her most closely with her "style," in any sense of the word, seems wrong also. To me, her life is most "associated" with the way she conducted herself during the days following her husband's murder. For people of my generation (I was three when John Kennedy was killed) it's difficult to have any authentic response to his assassination and to Jackie's behavior afterward, because the whole thing has been so endlessly interpreted for us by our parents' memories and by countless books and movies and television shows. We know that it was "shocking" because we are told that it was; but for us, really, it wasn't. After all, the first thing we learned about JFK was that he had been assassinated. It's one of the immutable truths of our childhood. The series of images used to telegraph the events—Jackie scrambling up and out of the touring car, standing stoically beside LBJ on Air Force One, appearing beside the casket in glamorous widow's weeds—has the predictability of the events of Holy Week. For anyone more interested in Jackie's "style" than in her "courage," her appearance at her husband's funeral in a sheer black mantilla, her children beautifully turned out in their good winter coats and shined shoes, may seem like a triumph of fashion over rotten luck. But in fact her every decision about those events came hard on the heels of horror on an epic scale, horror that is only hinted at by the memories of, for example, Nellie Connally, who was in the jump seat across from the Kennedys, and who described the moment the second bullet hit the President: "I felt something falling all over me," she told the Warren Commission. "My sensation was—buckshot."
In an instant of pure and almost unimaginable carnage, Jackie Kennedy lost her husband, her job, and her house. Certainly, two of those losses were mitigated by her wealth: the job was an unpaid diversion rather than an economic necessity, and the house was quickly exchanged (after a brief kip at Averell Harriman's Georgetown home) for a series of glamorous houses at drop-dead addresses. Nonetheless, the life that she had lived was ripped away so completely and so roughly that she could have been forgiven almost any response. Yet at every turn she did the right thing, and not always because the cameras were watching. Days after burying her husband, she returned to Arlington Cemetery in the dead of night so that their two children who had not survived—Arabella, who had been stillborn, and Patrick, who had died a few days after birth, might be reburied next to their father. ("He seems so alone here," John Kennedy is said to have told two friends who visited Patrick's grave in Brookline, Massachusetts, with him.)
For the cynical, the entire Kennedy enterprise is a kind of all-you-can-eat buffet of hypocrisy and untrammeled personal ambition, and in this construct Jackie's composure at the time of the assassination was the result of her considerably cooled ardor for her husband. But in fact her actions at the time—and at so many times in her life—resist easy and inflexible interpretation. For example, during the long, rambling interviews that she granted William Manchester not long after the assassination (their taped voices are punctuated by the rattle of ice in glasses and the lighting of cigarettes), she told him that before leaving Parkland Memorial to board Air Force One, she freshened her lipstick. Later she greatly regretted this confession, and begged (in fact, sued) to have it omitted from his account; however, it came to light—and now we can bring to her small gesture the full force of our feelings about her: Did she freshen her lipstick because she realized that she was moments away from the greatest photo op of her life, and didn't intend to look washed-out and cuckoo, like Mary Todd Lincoln? Or was she hewing to old-fashioned notions of decorum and propriety in the face of a national disaster in which she had just figured prominently? We will never know.
"For four days in November," writes Pamela Keogh, whose book is marked by a truly impressive reluctance to break new ground, "Jackie's public dignity held the country together." This sentiment is so uniformly expressed in biographies of Jackie Kennedy that it must be a prerequisite for a publishing contract. The more thorough biographers give credit for the idea to its originator: Donald Spoto, for example, the author of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: A Life, says, "De Gaulle was right: she did indeed teach the world how to grieve." But it was another of De Gaulle's remarks that was on the money: Jackie, he said, "gave the world an example of how to behave," and he was precisely right. To respond to personal catastrophe with public dignity—as have so many people this fall—represents human conduct at its most impressive. Her behavior during those four days, derived from the old values of forbearance and restraint, was girded by a kind of internal fortitude that was not at all in conflict with other aspects of her character—aspects that many of today's feminists would lambaste as pathetic and weak. ("Her instincts were completely feminine," William Manchester wrote of her; "if she met your plane at the Hyannis airport, she automatically handed you the keys to her convertible.") The ways in which she allied her matchless femininity—which only a fool would believe she deployed naively—with her tremendous strength are central to her intrigue, and they are why, so many years later, so many people will turn out to see a few dozen coats and dresses and pillbox hats.
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