Oh, there was much I wanted to tell her, even—exit sociology, enter insanity—that the obscene had a right to exist in the novel. For every fifteen-year-old who would be hurt by premature exposure, somewhere another, or two or three, would emerge from sexual experience which had been too full of moral funk onto the harder terrain of sex made alive by culture, that it was the purpose of culture finally to enrich all of the psyche, not just part of us, and damage to particular people in passing was a price we must pay. Thirty thousand Americans were killed each year by automobile crashes. No one talked of giving up the automobile: it was necessary to civilization. As necessary, I wanted to say, was art. Art in all its manifestations. Including the rude, the obscene, and the unsayable. Art was as essential to the nation as technology. I would tell her these things out of romantic abundance, because I liked her and thought she would understand what one was talking about, because as First Lady she was queen of the arts, she was our Muse if she chose to be. Perhaps it would not be altogether a disaster if America had a Muse.
Now it is not of much interest to most of you who read this that a small but distinct feud between the editors of Esquire and the writer was made up around the New Year. What is not as much off the matter was the suggestion, made at the time by one of these editors, that a story be done about Jackie Kennedy.
One liked the idea. What has been written already is curious prose if it is not obvious how much one liked the idea. Pierre Salinger was approached by the magazine, and agreed to present the same idea to Mrs. Kennedy. I saw Salinger in his office for a few minutes. He told me: not yet a chance to talk to the Lady, but might that evening. I was leaving Washington. A few days later, one of the editors spoke to him. Mrs. Kennedy’s answer: negative.
One didn’t know. One didn’t know how the idea had been presented, one didn’t know just when it had been presented. It did not matter all that much. Whatever the details, the answer had come from the core. One’s presence was not required. Which irritated the vanity. The vanity was no doubt outsized, but one thought of oneself as one of the few writers in the country. There was a right to interview Mrs. Kennedy. She was not only a woman looking for privacy, but an institution being put together before our eyes. If the people of America were to have a symbol, one had the right to read more about the creation. The country would stay alive by becoming more extraordinary, not more predictable.
III
Nor with a kind eye then did I watch Mrs. Kennedy give the nation a tour. One would be fair. Fair to her and fair to the truth of one’s reactions. There was now an advantage in not having had the interview.
I turned on the program a minute after the hour. The image on the screen was not of Mrs. Kennedy, but the White House. For some minutes she talked, reading from a prepared script while the camera was turned upon old prints, old plans, and present views of the building. Since Jackie Kennedy was not visible during this time, there was an opportunity to listen to her voice. It produced a small continuing shock. At first, before the picture emerged from the set, I thought I was turned to the wrong station, because the voice was a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin.
Now I had heard the First Lady occasionally on newsreels and in brief interviews on television, and thought she showed an odd public voice, but never paid attention, because the first time to hear her was in the living room at Hyannis Port and there she had been clear, merry, and near excellent. So I discounted the public voice, concluded it was muffled by shyness perhaps or was too urgent in its desire to sound like other voices, to sound, let us say, like an attractive small-town salesgirl, or like Jackie Kennedy’s version of one; the gentry in America have a dim ear for the nuances of accent in the rough, the poor, and the ready. I had decided it was probably some mockery of her husband’s political ambitions, a sport upon whatever advisers had been trying for years to guide her to erase whatever was too patrician or cultivated in her speech. But the voice I was hearing now, the public voice, the voice after a year in the White House had grown undeniably worse, had nourished itself on its faults. Do some of you remember the girl with the magnificent sweater who used to give the weather reports on television in a swarmy singsong tone? It was a self-conscious parody, very funny for a little while. “Temperature—forty-eight. Humidity—twenty-eight. Prevailing winds.” It had the style of the pinup magazine, it caught their prose. “Sandra Sharilee is 37-25-37, and likes to stay in at night.” The girl who gave the weather report captured the voice of those pinup magazines, dreamy, narcissistic, visions of sex on the moon. And Jackie Kennedy’s voice, her public voice, might as well have been influenced by the weather girl. What madness is loose in our public communication. And what self-ridicule that consciously or unconsciously, wittingly, willy-nilly, by the aid of speech teachers or all on her stubborn own, this was the manufactured voice Jackie Kennedy chose to arrive at. One had heard better ones at Christmastime in Macy’s selling gadgets to the grim.
The introduction having ended, the camera moved onto Jackie Kennedy. We were shown the broad planes of the First Lady’s most agreeable face. Out of the deep woods now. One could return to them by closing one’s eyes and listening to the voice again, but the image was reasonable, reassuringly stiff. As the eye followed Mrs. Kennedy and her interlocutor, Charles Collingwood, through the halls, galleries and rooms of the White House, through the Blue Room, the Green Room, the East Room, the State Dining Room, the Red Room; as the listeners were offered a reference to Dolly Madison’s favorite sofa, or President Monroe’s Minerva clock, Nellie Custis’s sofa, Mrs. Lincoln’s later poverty, Daniel Webster’s sofa, Julia Grant’s desk, Andrew Jackson’s broken mirror, the chest President Van Buren gave to his grandson, as the paintings were shown to us, paintings entitled Niagara Falls, Grapes and Apples, Naval Battle of 1812, Indian Guides, A Mountain Glimpse, Mouth of the Delaware; as one contemplated the life of this offering, the presentation began to take on the undernourished, overdone air of a charity show, a telethon for a new disease. It was not Mrs. Kennedy’s fault—she strove honorably. What an agony it must have been to establish the sequence of all these names, all these objects. Probably she knew them well, perhaps she was interested in her subject—although the detached quality of her presence on this program made it not easy to believe—but whether or not she had taken a day-to-day interest in the booty now within the White House, still she had had a script partially written for her, by a television writer with black horn-rimmed glasses no doubt, she had been obliged to memorize portions of this script, she had trained for the part. Somehow it was sympathetic that she walked through it like a starlet who is utterly without talent. Mrs. Kennedy moved like a wooden horse. A marvelous horse, perhaps even a live horse, its feet hobbled, its head unready to turn for fear of a flick from the crop. She had that intense wooden lack of rest, that lack of comprehension for each word offered up which one finds only in a few of those curious movie stars who are huge box office. Jane Russell comes to mind, and Rita Hayworth when she was sadly cast, Jayne Mansfield in deep water, Brigitte Bardot before she learned to act. Marilyn Monroe. But one may be too kind. Jackie Kennedy was more like a starlet who will never learn to act because the extraordinary livid unreality of her life away from the camera has so beclouded her brain and seduced her attention that she is incapable of the simplest and most essential demand, which is to live and breathe easily with the meaning of the words one speaks.
This program was the sort of thing Eleanor Roosevelt could have done, and done well. She had grown up among objects like this—these stuffed armchairs, these candelabra—no doubt they lived for her with some charm of the past. But Jackie Kennedy was unconvincing. One did not feel she particularly loved the past of America—not all of us do for that matter, it may not even be a crime—but one never had the impression for a moment that the White House fitted her style. As one watched this tame, lackluster, and
halting show, one wanted to take the actress by the near shoulder. Because names, dates, and objects were boring down into the very secrets of her being—or so one would lay the bet—and this encouraged a fraud which could only sicken her. By extension it would deaden us. What we needed and what she could offer us was much more complex than this public image of a pompadour, a tea-dance dress, and a Colonial window welded together in committee. Would the Kennedys be no more intelligent than the near past, had they not learned America was not to be saved by Madison Avenue, that no method could work which induced nausea faster than the pills we push to carry it away?
Afterward one could ask what it was one wanted of her, and the answer was that she show herself to us as she is. Because what we suffer from in America, in that rootless moral wilderness of our expanding life, is the unadmitted terror in each of us that bit by bit, year by year, we are going mad. Very few of us know really where we have come from and to where we are going, why we do it, and if it is ever worthwhile. For better or for worse we have lost our past, we live in that airless no-man’s-land of the perpetual present, and so suffer doubly as we strike into the future because we have no roots by which to project ourselves forward, or judge our trip.
And this tour of the White House gave us precisely no sense of the past. To the contrary, it inflicted the past upon us, pummeled us with it, depressed us with facts. I counted the names, the proper names, and the dates in the transcript. More than two hundred items were dumped upon us during that hour. If one counts repetitions, the number is closer to four hundred. One was not being offered education, but anxiety.
We are in the Green Room—I quote from the transcript:
Mr. Collingwood: What other objects of special interest are there in the room now?
Mrs. Kennedy: Well, there’s this sofa which belonged to Daniel Webster and is really one of the finest pieces here in this room. And then there’s this mirror. It was George Washington’s and he had it in the Executive Mansion in Philadelphia, then he gave it to a friend and it was bought for Mount Vernon in 1891. And it was there until Mount Vernon lent it to us this fall. And I must say I appreciate that more than I can say, because when Mount Vernon, which is probably the most revered house in this country, lends something to the White House, you know they have confidence it will be taken care of.
A neurotic may suffer agonies returning to his past, so may a nation which is not well. The neurotic recites endless lists of his activities and offers no reaction to any of it. So do we teach with empty content and by rigid manner where there is anxiety in the lore. American history disgorges this anxiety. Where, in the pleasant versions of it we are furnished, can we find an explanation for the disease which encourages us to scourge our countryside, stifle our cities, kill the physical sense of our past, and throw up excruciatingly totalitarian new office buildings everywhere to burden the vista of our end? This disease, is it hidden in the evasions, the injustices, and the prevarications of the past, or does it come to us from a terror of what is yet to come? Whatever, however, we do not create a better nation by teaching schoolchildren the catalogs of the White House. Nor do we use the First Lady decently if she is flattered in this, for catalogs are imprisonment to the delicate, muted sensitivity one feels passing across Jackie Kennedy from time to time like a small summer wind on a good garden.
Yes, before the tour was over, one had to feel compassion. Because silly, ill-advised, pointless, empty, dull, and obsequious to the most slavish tastes in American life as was this show, still she was trying so hard, she wanted to please, she had given herself to this work, and it was hopeless there was no one about to tell her how very hopeless it was, how utterly without offering to the tormented adventurous spirit of American life. At times, in her eyes, there was a blank, full look which one could recognize. One had seen this look on a nineteen-year-old who was sweet and on the town and pushed too far. She slashed her wrists one night and tried to scar her cheeks and her breast. I had visited the girl in the hospital. She had blank eyes, a wide warm smile, a deadness in her voice. It did not matter about what she spoke—only her mouth followed the words, never her eyes. So I did not care to see that look in Jackie Kennedy’s face, and I hoped by half—for more would be untrue—that the sense one got of her in newspaper photographs, of a ladygirl healthy and on the bounce, might come into her presence before our deadening sets. America needed a lady’s humor to leaven the solemnities of our toneless power: finally we will send a man to Mars and the Martians will say, “God, he is dull.”
Yes, it is to be hoped that Jackie Kennedy will come alive. Because I think finally she is one of us. By which I mean that she has not one face but many, not a true voice but accents, not a past so much as memories which cannot speak to one another. She attracts compassion. Somewhere in her mute vitality is a wash of our fatigue, of existential fatigue, of the great fatigue which comes from being adventurous in a world where most of the bets are covered cold and statisticians prosper. I liked her, I liked her still, but she was a phony—it was the cruelest thing one could say, she was a royal phony. There was something very difficult and very dangerous she was trying from deep within herself to do, dangerous not to her safety but to her soul. She was trying, I suppose, to be a proper First Lady and it was her mistake. Because there was no need to copy the Ladies who had come before her. Suppose America had not yet had a First Lady who was even remotely warm enough for our needs? Or sufficiently imaginative? But who could there be to advise her in all that company of organized men, weaned on the handbook of past precedent? If she would be any use to the nation she must first regain the freedom to look us in the eye. And offer the hard drink. For then three times three hurrah, and hats, our hats, in the air. If she were really interested in her White House, we would grant it to her, we would not begrudge her the tour, not if we could believe she was beginning to learn the difference between the arts and the safe old crafts. And indeed there was a way she could show us she was beginning to learn, it was the way of the hostess; one would offer her one’s sword when Henry Miller was asked to the White House as often as Robert Frost and Beat poetry’s own Andy Hardy—good Gregory Corso—could do an Indian dance in the East Room with Archibald MacLeish. America would be as great as the royal rajah of her arts when the Academy ceased to be happy as a cherrystone clam, and the weakest of the Beat returned to form. Because our tragedy is that we diverge as countrymen further and further away from one another, like a spaceship broken apart in flight which now drifts mournfully in isolated orbits, satellites to each other, planets none, communication faint.
Suicides of Hemingway and Monroe
(1962)
YOUR COLUMNIST would warn you. These pieces will be written two months before publication. The art is to anticipate what may be interesting in sixty days. I was talking about this with a columnist. “Write your column so it can still be read with pleasure ten years from now,” he said. Good advice. I will try to entertain some of you. I will try to drive others a little closer to their deaths.
This week the news is of Marilyn Monroe and the drug thalidomide. In sixty days most of you will have forgotten thalidomide so I remind you now that it was the drug which gave tranquillity to pregnant women suffering from morning sickness. As a side effect it seemed to affect embryos. They grew little flippers for arms. In West Germany, five thousand of them grew that way. It encouraged a joke:
“Darling,” said the German bride, new and pregnant, “these pills seem to have an odd effect on me.”
“Don’t worry, dear,” says husband, “doctor knows what he’s doing.”
The joke is sexually displaced. It is men who distrust doctors. Women adore them. If a hero cares enough about a lady he must be ready to enter the lists against Richard Burton, Fidel Castro, Jack Kennedy, Cary Grant, Paul Getty, Yuri Gagarin, Sinatra, Glenn, early Brando or middle Pinza, it does not matter. If one wants a woman enough, there is some kind of chance. Do not give up, advises your columnist. Do not, unless your lady is an actress or
a beauty and your opponent is a doctor or a psychoanalyst. Then it is hopeless.
“Darling,” says the German bride, “these pills seem to have an odd effect on me.”
“Throw them out,” says her groom.
“Are you being stupid again?” cries she. “Doctor knows what he’s doing.”
I know a doctor who’s intelligent, cynical, and an expert on cancer research. He heads a program in a New York hospital. He was fascinated by thalidomide. Thought it might represent a breakthrough. “It means we are able to affect the direction of evolution.”
“To what end?” I asked.
He shrugged. Not interested in that. It is not the end but the immediate power which calls to scientists. In modern man there is a profound rage against nature. One hears it everywhere: in the sound of an air conditioner, the electronic hiss of a public address system, in automobiles passing on a superhighway. One feels this invasion upon nature when one touches a plastic toy. I hate the thought of children using plastic toys. I would as soon give them blown-up prophylactics for dolls.
And then there’s the cry of nature answering back.
I am torn in two, says the air. Take away your jet planes.
Stop screaming, pal. We need the jets to get there.
Get where?
Move on, says fuzz.
The worst story I ever heard about Jack Kennedy was that he sat on his boat one day eating chicken and threw the half-chewed bones into the sea.
So few people understand what I mean, it forces me to explain that you don’t give the carcass of an animal to the water. It was meant to seep back into the earth.