| Subject: Articles on All Too Human, #1 |
Author:
Marilyn
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Date Posted: 13:38:45 03/11/05 Fri
In reply to:
Yas
's message, "All Too Human: Jack and Jackie Kenedy" on 12:20:16 03/11/05 Fri
DAILY NEWS (NEW YORK), RUSH AND MOLLOY, JULY 28, 1996
BRIEF AND SHINING MOMENTS IN CAMELOT
After all that has been written about President John Kennedy's supposed flings with a stripper, a Mafia moll and some of the world's most dazzling actresses, Ed Klein now stands ready to deliver the most
Brace yourself: JFK actually loved his wife.
Damaging as this allegation is to the Kennedy scandal industry, Klein is ready to take the heat.
"This is the story of redemption," says Klein, whose Pocket Book, "All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy," is due in October. (The first excerpt will run in the next issue of Vanity Fair.)
The book promises to be the 1990s version of William Manchester's "The Death of a President" restoring Jack and Jackie as a couple worth revering, the original partners in power.
"All Too Human" adds no new names to the list of JFK's romantic conquests. Indeed, Klein scoffs at the claim by Christopher Andersen, author of "Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage," that JFK dallied with Audrey Hepburn. (Klein vouches that Hepburn met Kennedy exactly once and that their backstage chat after "Gigi" was brief and chaste.)
Still, sources who have seen the book's galleys say Klein doesn't stint on details about the marriage's misery. Relying on more than 200 interviews, he contends that JFK did romance his wife's sister, Lee Radziwill, among others. Betrayed again and again, but trapped as a Catholic and as America's First Lady, Jackie found comfort where she could. Traveling in Italy without her husband in 1962, she showed an intimacy toward Fiat kingpin Gianni Angelli that stunned and saddened onlookers (who probably weren't aware of her personal hell).
But 1962 was also a turning point. JFK, only 43 when he took the job of leader of the Free World, was beat up by Khrushchev, Castro and the loss of Laos. Worse still, a stroke had felled his father, the man he depended on for advice. He tried to find strength in his brother Bobby, Klein writes, but Bobby had already made Jack into his father figure.
Finally, he turned to the 32-year-old woman who was idolized by most of the rest of the world.
He weathered the Cuban missile crisis by summoning her back from their country retreat. He cried in her arms when they lost their baby Patrick. Once more, they were seen holding hands.
As Klein sees it, Jackie brought out real compassion in a man who had been reared in selfishness. The author, who will be feted at a party in two weeks at Calvin Klein's beach house, says, "They both grew, and after considerable torment, they fell in love again."
KENNEDY BOOK MARS IMAGE OF VIRTUOUS BRIDE
THE TIMES, August 8, 1996
AMERICA'S "royal" family, the Kennedys, had a taste yesterday of the treatment normally reserved for the House of Windsor.
Lurid details of the personal lives of the late Jacqueline and John Kennedy were published, from descriptions of where the young Jackie Bouvier first made love (in a creaking, ascending Paris lift) to the venereal disease that afflicted Kennedy through much of his adult life.
The claims, made in a new book, were given an extensive run in Vanity Fair magazine. They included descriptions of snobbery and underhand social plotting at the Bouvier-Kennedy wedding in 1953, of Kennedy confessing to his fiancee that he was a philanderer, and the disclosure that many of the Bouvier family and their friends referred to the Kennedys, who were of Irish descent, as "Micks".
The claims were made by Edward Klein, author of All Too Human; the Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. He alleges that Jackie Bouvier was physically abused by her mother, who also sabotaged her courtship with a bibulous writer called John Phillips Marquand - the man in that Paris lift.
The way Klein describes the meeting of John Kennedy and Jackie Bouvier at a Washington dinner party, their union appears to have been the result of adroit social manoeuvring by two ambitious families. Love was a secondary concern, even for the bride and groom.
An America which only months ago demonstrated its enduring affection for "Jackie O", when some of the former First Lady's effects were auctioned for $ 35 million (almost Pounds 23 million), was presented with the claim that the future President Kennedy demanded that his bride should not be an "experienced voyager" in the sexual sense. Americans often express horror that Buckingham Palace made certain inquiries about Lady Diana Spencer's romantic past before her marriage to the Prince of Wales, but it now appears the Kennedys went through the same process - although their language was more coarse.
Klein cited former Senator George Smathers, now 82, who described Kennedy's decision to own up to his fiancee about his sexual shenanigans. "Jack unloaded," Mr Smathers is quoted as saying. "He confessed everything. She handled it pretty well. She was aware that Jack was a Kennedy."
Jackie's engagement ring was bought for her by her future father-in-law, the scheming Joe Kennedy. Jack Kennedy himself "had no interest in such sentimental things" claimed Klein.
Stephanie Larson, a political science professor and media commentator at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, said yesterday that the allegations about the Kennedys would be seen by some Americans as "spitting on someone's grave". "Enough is enough," she said.
SEXSATIONAL BOOK TELLS TALE OF JFK AND JACKIE
DAILY NEWS (New York), August 07, 1996
John F. Kennedy told his bride-to-be about his womanizing before their wedding, but young Jacqueline Bouvier was unfazed, according to a new tell-all about the Camelot Couple.
The book also claims that Jackie lost her virginity in a Paris elevator and alleges that her mother was often physically abusive.
The book, "All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy," by Edward Klein, is the second titillating tome about the Kennedys to appear this year. An excerpt appears in the latest Vanity Fair magazine.
Among the other highlights:
Jackie's mother, Janet Auchincloss, plotted to stop her alcoholic ex-husband from walking his daughter down the aisle. She sent a relative to get Jack Bouvier drunk before the ceremony. Bouvier showed up at the church anyway, but he was relegated to sitting in a corner.
On one of their early dates, July 4, 1952, Jack and Jackie were caught in flagrante in a car parked in Hyannis Port, Mass., site of the Kennedy compound. Friends surprised the couple and found Jack on the floor of the car and Jackie reclined on the seat with her dress bunched up. "We, uh, lost the cigaret lighter," Jack said.
Jackie almost became a spy. Fresh out of Washington's Georgetown University, she was offered an entry-level job at the CIA. Being Jackie, she went to Paris instead to become a junior editor at Vogue.
The 1953 Kennedy wedding was so carefully arranged by the two families that Jack, 36, didn't even pick out his 24-year-old fiance's engagement ring. His father, Joseph Kennedy, did the honors, buying the emerald-and-diamond sparkler without even asking the clerks at Van Cleef & Arpels how much it cost.
The book alleges that Jackie's mother was a vicious social climber who often slapped her daughter across both cheeks.
Auchincloss also refused to let Jackie marry aristocratic author Jack Marquand because he wasn't rich enough, according to the book.
Klein alleges that Jackie lost her virginity to Marquand in an encounter against the decorative grillwork in a creaky Paris elevator.
Despite Jack Kennedy's confession to his fiance, he allegedly kept up his womanizing throughout their marriage.
Jackie was not scared off, however, because her father had regaled her with stories of his own compulsive dallying, the book says.
"She was aware that Jack was a Kennedy, and that [his father] Joe had never been an example of virtue," former Sen. George Smathers (D-Fla.), a Kennedy confidant, told Klein.
BOOK TAKES SHINE OFF JACKIE O AS PARAGON OF VIRTUE
THE GUARDIAN (London), August 8, 1996
JACKIE Kennedy Onassis, long regarded as a paragon of chaste virtue in the face of her first husband's relentless womanising, lost her virginity in a Paris lift, according to a new book.
All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy, by Vanity Fair writer Ed Klein, says the young Jaqueline Bouvier was deflowered by John Marquand junior, a Waspy young writer, during a college year spent in France.
The revelation comes less than two months after Jackie O's saintly image was besmirched by another book claiming she had an affair with Hollywood legend William Holden to avenge John F. Kennedy's infidelities.
According to an extract from Mr Klein's book published in the September issue of Vanity Fair, Jackie was in love with Marquand, when family friends organised a dinner in 1951 for her to meet the future president.
The young congressman was taken with her "exotic beauty", but did not ask her out on a date for almost a year.
By then she was engaged to John Husted, a Wall Street bond dealer. When she went to visit Kennedy at his Washington office a few weeks later, she told him: "I've found the man of my dreams."
But the engagement to Husted did not last long, and Jackie agreed to marry Kennedy in June 1953. Before that, according to Mr Klein, Kennedy warned her he was a compulsive womaniser.
Senator Goerge Smathers told the author: "Jack unloaded. He confessed everything to Jackie. She handled it pretty well. Women of that class and generation were raised to turn a blind eye to sexual peccadilloes."
Kennedy was rather more demanding, according to Mr Klein. Soon after meeting Jackie for the first time, he reportedly told his friend Langdon Marvin: "I don't want to marry a girl who is an experienced voyager. And I'm not referring to travel on sea."
In life, Jackie was elevated by adoring Americans to the status of surrogate princess. Since her death in May 1994, the floodgates have opened, releasing a stream of revelations about her private life, long considered off-limits by the American media.
According to Mr Klein's new book, published by Pocket Books, Kennedy's father, Joe, the former ambassador to London, regaled Jackie with stories of his own affairs, telling her in graphic detail of his dalliance with the "insatiable" Gloria Swanson.
TWO VERSIONS OF JACKIE'S PARIS LIAISON
THE BOSTON GLOBE, August 10, 1996
It's been two years since Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died, time enough for a new wave of spicy - even steamy - stories to find their way into print.
Already out is "Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage," by Christopher Andersen, six weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. Coming next week: "All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy," by Edward Klein.
September brings "Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir," by her first cousin, John H. Davis. Due next year is a Jackie book by Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh.
Andersen and Klein traverse similar territory - but at rather different paces, as reflected in their accounts of Jackie's night in Paris in 1951 with novelist John Phillips (J. P. Marquand Jr.).
Andersen: "After a night of club hopping, they returned to his pension, and Jackie lost her virginity to Marquand when the lift to his apartment 'stalled' between floors, a maneuver Marquand had used before. Jackie's supposed comment at the time: 'Oh! Is that all there is to it?' "
Klein: "Then one night, after a few too many grasshoppers, as they were going up to Marquand's apartment on the slow, creaky French elevator, Jackie let herself get carried away. She was in Marquand's arms, her skirt bunched above her hips . . . her thighs pressed against the decorative open grillwork. And when the elevator jolted to a stop, she was no longer a demi-vierge."
Both argue the troubled Kennedy marriage actually strengthened during the White House years. Andersen calls the death of infant son Patrick, in August 1963, a pivotal event - though it came too late (three months before Dallas) to have a lasting effect, he notes.
Klein puts the turning point a year earlier, after the Cuban missile crisis. As JFK was relaxing in the bathtub, chatting with aide David Powers, Klein reports, Jackie came in from riding, "whip in hand . . . wearing a long white riding shirt - and nothing else." Stopping Powers in mid-sentence, Jackie ordered: "Just cancel the rest of his appointments."
AUTHORS MINE CAMELOT DIRT
DAILY NEWS (New York), August 11, 1996
If you're thinking of ducking into an air-conditioned bookstore to escape the humid streets this summer, forget it.
With two steamy books about John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy dueling for spots on the bestseller list, a browser could get sweaty just flipping pages.
"All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy," by Edward Klein, is the latest addition to the endless trove of Camelot books. Its publication date was moved up after Christopher Andersen's "Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage" became a top seller.
Both page-turners are chock-full of spicy stories about sex and drugs guaranteed to shatter any remnants of the myth of Camelot.
Part of that is due to Jackie's 1994 death, which loosened the lips of those who didn't dare dish dirt while she was alive.
So we have Andersen detailing Jack Kennedy's affair with Audrey Hepburn who "out-Jackied Jackie" in the slender regalness division and Jackie's revenge fling with actor William Holden.
Klein agrees that Jackie escaped into other men's arms, but he says they were Italian multi-millionaire auto mogul Gianni Agnelli and Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, whom she married after Kennedy's assassination.
Klein, a former New York Times Magazine editor, writes that Jack Kennedy's inability to maintain a prolonged sexual encounter caused him to seek out orgies including one just after he became engaged to Jackie. He also alleges that he and Sen. Estes Kefauver publicly made love to each other's dates at a wild Washington party after Kennedy's wedding.
Andersen, who has written bios of Madonna and Mick Jagger, details the First Couple's addiction to amphetamines and Joe Kennedy's payment of $ 1 million to Jackie to head off a threatened divorce.
Klein portrays Kennedy as an ambitious young politician, sitting in a hot tub and telling a friend, "I want to marry a virgin." Then he describes Jackie's first sexual encounter, which reportedly took place against the decorative grillwork in a creaky old Paris elevator with her first love, Jack Marquand.
According to these books, Jackie married the Boston politician because he was rich. And Kennedy married the aristocratic Jackie to get elected.
But there are slivers of romance left.
Klein's book is full of evocative touches like the sparkles from Jackie's glittering eye shadow that drifted onto Jack's black padded shoulders as they danced to Cole Porter's "From This Moment On" on the night in 1952 when they became a couple.
But there are also mistakes such as calling Kennedy's book "Why England Slept," instead of "While England Slept" which force the reader to question the spicier assertions.
And one has to wonder when Kennedy found the time to run the country if he was bedding all those women.
But after dwelling on their infidelities including Jack Kennedy's shipboard romp with a statuesque showgirl named Pooh while his wife went through a miscarriage both books say the First Couple had rediscovered their love for each other when they jetted off to meet fate in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
For those who just can't get enough Kennedyana, more books are due soon most of which sound fairly scandal-free.
"Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir" by her first cousin, John Davis deals with Jackie's childhood and her life up to her first wedding.
"Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Postwar America," by Christopher Matthews, examines the political competition. And "Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: The Making of a First Lady" will showcase photographs by lensman Jacques Lowe.
OF PARAMOURS AND POT
Why JFK was a womanizer
Andersen: Steroids for his back problem heightened his sex drive.
Klein: Chronic venereal disease caused fear of impotence. Anxiety over death of older brother and sister could be relieved only by sex.
What Joseph Kennedy bribed Jackie with
Andersen: A cool $ 1 million.
Klein: A trust for her children. No figure mentioned.
Who Jackie had revenge fling with
Andersen: Film star William Holden.
Klein: Italian car magnate Gianni Agnelli.
JFK's Hollywood conquests
Andersen: Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, Lee Remick, Gene Tierney, Angie Dickinson, Marilyn Monroe.
Klein: Marlene Dietrich, Marilyn Monroe.
Jackie's other affairs
Andersen: Defense Department official Roswell Gilpatric, 22 years her senior.
Klein: A serious flirtation with Greek shipping magnate (and future hubby) Aristotle Onassis.
Kennedy drug use
Andersen: Both addicted to injections of speed.
Klein: Both on speed, plus JFK smoked marijuana in the White House.
PUBLISHERS CRANK OUT STORIES OF CAMELOT'S QUEEN AND HER KING; JACKIE O'S MYSTIQUE
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL (Wisconsin), August 27, 1996
Social critics say our country's obsession with celebrity verges on the pathological, and judging by the way we gobble up books and magazines splashed with famous faces, it's hard to argue the point.
Most of these faces are 15-minute wonders, cashing in on their Andy Warhol quarter-hour of fame, here today and leaving not the smallest impression on our collective synapses tomorrow.
With the exception, that is, of a few shooting stars who somehow permanently imprint themselves on our minds. Like Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
If there was any doubt that Camelot still lives in the American imagination, the Sotheby auction of Jacqueline Onassis's possessions settled the question. Many simply cannot get enough of Jack and Jackie, the golden couple who reigned for such a brief time so very long ago.
On the heels of the Sotheby hysteria comes a barrage of Kennedy books.
Within the last month, four have arrived in the bookstores: "Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: The Making of a First Lady," with photos and words by photographer Jacques Lowe (General Publishing Group, $30); "Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir" by Jackie's cousin, John Davis (Wiley, $24.95); "All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy" by Edward Klein (Pocket, $23), with excerpts in the September issue of Vanity Fair; and "Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage" (Morrow, $24) by Christopher Anderson.
If you read all these books, get ready for a parrot effect exactly the same quotations repeat in several of the books. Lines from Davis and Lowe appear in their own books and in Anderson's.
Here's a rundown on what to expect, based on a close reading of all four.
ABOUT JACKIE
John Davis' book is especially revealing about Jackie's childhood. Her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, was a cold, domineering woman who was emotionally and even physically abusive to her daughters, especially Jackie. (This came out in testimony by their nanny during the Bouvier divorce.) Janet knew Jackie and her sister, Lee, preferred their warm, supportive albeit flawed father, "Black Jack" Bouvier, and their mother resented it terrifically.
As a child, Jackie was a cross between a tomboy and a princess. (Lee was considered the true beauty.) Athletic and strong, Jackie could outrun her boy cousins and outperform nearly anyone her age on a horse. She was an excellent student, but so disruptive and difficult at Miss Chapin's school in Manhattan that her headmistress told Janet Bouvier: "I mightn't have kept Jacqueline except that she has the most inquiring mind we've had in this school in thirty-five years," according to Davis.
While Jackie grew up surrounded by wealth and opulence, none of it was hers; she always felt like a poor relation, which must have fueled her later acquisitiveness. When she attended elite Miss Porter's boarding school in Farmington, Conn., Jackie's allowance was just $50 a month a pittance among girls of her social status but all that her father could manage.
Janet, who dominated Jackie's life well into her 20s, demanded Jackie marry someone with "real" money (make that multimillions). All the books except Lowe's suggest the calculating Janet orchestrated events so that "Black Jack" drank too much and was unable to walk Jackie down the aisle at her wedding.
Joe Kennedy, aided by Arthur Krock, chief Washington correspondent for the New York Times, hand-picked Jacqueline Bouvier as the perfect wife for a president and pushed Jack into it, according to Klein in "All Too Human."
Jackie always preferred older and dangerous when it came to men. She may have retaliated against Jack's womanizing by having relationships with Fiat exec Gianni Agnelli and William Holden. Christopher Anderson ("Jack and Jackie") says Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell Gilpatric admitted he and Jackie were "romantically involved" and that Gilpatric's wife sued for divorce because of the relationship. In "All Too Human," Klein speculates that Jackie's fertility problems may have been caused by her husband's chronic venereal disease.
ABOUT JACK
Like Jackie, JFK grew up with a cold, unaffectionate mother. As a result, "he hated to be touched," says Sen. George Smathers in the Anderson book. Having children thawed his emotions to some extent; one of the few times he was ever seen to cry was at his infant son Patrick's funeral, Anderson reports.
Kennedy's health was far worse than anyone imagined. Addison's disease had destroyed his adrenal gland; only a daily dose of cortisone kept him functioning. In 1954, he weighed only 125 pounds (at 6 feet tall) and his back was so painful that he was forced to use crutches to walk. After back surgery that year, doctors told the family that they expected him to die.
In September 1960, just before the presidential election, a friend introduced JFK to Max Jacobson, a physician everyone referred to as "Dr. Feelgood." Jacobson was known for the remarkably revitalizing shots that he gave a huge lineup of Hollywood and New York celebs. Jack and Jackie became regulars, according to both Anderson and Klein; the shots allowed the disabled president to function and helped Jackie overcome postpartum depression after baby John was born. She continued to take shots and to smoke throughout her last pregnancy, which ended with the death of baby Patrick.
The shots were amphetamine "cocktails" composed mainly of Dexedrine (speed) and vitamins. Both speed and cortisone create an inflated sense of power and confidence a dangerous situation for a president who had nuclear bombs at his command.
Anderson says the shots also revved up Kennedy's almost pathologically out-of-control sex drive, a compulsion shaped in part by his father, Joe, who advised him as an adolescent to have sex as often as possible. Anderson names the usual suspects and says Jack romanced Audrey Hepburn throughout his courtship of Jackie. He also may have slept with Jackie's sister, Lee.
In "All Too Human," Klein says JFK found one-on-one sex boring and preferred group sex.
ABOUT JACK AND JACKIE
A bittersweet ending. After the death of Patrick in September 1963, (just two months before JFK's assassination), Jack and Jackie grew closer together, says Anderson. He quotes Theodore White, who created the Camelot legend:
"And for the first time, Jack reached out to her as he had never done before, had never been capable of doing before. There had always been this wall between them, but their shared grief tore that wall down. At long last, they were truly coming closer together. But it would prove to be too late."
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