Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

“The arts had been treated as a stepchild in the U.S.,” she later recalled. “When the government had supported the arts, as in many WPA projects, artists were given a hand and some wonderful things emerged. I had seen in Europe how proud those countries were of their arts and artists. Of course, they had a longer tradition of patronage, going back to kings, popes, and princes, but modern governments continued this support. Our great museums and great performing companies should be supported, but the experimental and the unknown should also be thrown a line.”

After her famous 1961 trip to Paris, when she had met President Charles de Gaulle and his culture minister, Andre Malraux, Jackie was determined to create an American department of the arts. As a first step in that direction, she persuaded her husband to appoint August Heckscher as a “special consultant to the President on the arts.” And Kennedy had been scheduled to sign an executive order realizing one of Jackie’s greatest goals: the appointment of Richard Goodwin as the first special assistant to the President for cultural affairs. Her dream was ultimately realized when President Johnson created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The notion that government should take a leading role in promoting the arts became a permanent part of the American cultural landscape.

Oliver Smith’s most celebrated accomplishment was his over-the-top design for the Lerner-Loewe musical Camelot. When Jackie told Teddy White “there’ll never be another Camelot,” she was thinking of Smith’s pastel jousting fields and golden castles. She shared Smith’s talent for turning reality into a stage set.

Oliver Smith’s ability to create the perfect mise-en-scène was on permanent display in the garden in the back of his house. The garden was a masterpiece of landscaping, with its splashing fountain, heavy slate patio, and arbor laden with thick, twiny wisteria. In the spring and summer, the feeling was very Southern, like a miniature Tara, and indeed the house appealed to many Southern writers, such as Truman Capote, who for a time lived in the basement apartment on Willow Street with his lover Jack Dunphy. Billy Baldwin helped Capote decorate it with dark green wallpaper, and a pair of gold mirrors in the shape of butterflies.

“He was just an alley cat that wandered around the neighborhood eating whenever he could,” Oliver Smith said of Truman Capote. “He was thin—very thin—and he would stand on the porch looking wistfully into the kitchen. He was determined to get into the house, but I didn’t want him. I had four other cats, which was a big enough feline population.”

“Do you remember?” Jackie said. “At lunch in your dining room, Truman told me, or at least strongly implied, that the whole house was his.”

“I remember,” Smith answered.

“And then in the middle of lunch I got the idea that it wasn’t his,” she said. “That it was yours.”

Oliver Smith’s house figured prominently in the social life of New York’s influential community of homosexual artists, writers, and musicians. Smith gave famous parties, and he was known as a brilliant raconteur, a man brimming with the latest bawdy gossip. He had a dry wit, and talked in a slow, thoughtful way about art, style, and having a good time.

Many of the friends Jackie made after she moved to New York were gay. There were, of course, heterosexual men in her cultural circle, too, men like Mike Nichols, Jason Epstein, and Norman Podhoretz. But with gay men, there was no layer of sex, which meant that there was one less thing for Jackie to worry about. Once, for example, when Truman Capote visited Jackie in her Fifth Avenue apartment, she invited him into her bedroom while she dressed to go out for the evening.

Jackie’s friendship with gay men like Oliver Smith, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and Leonard Bernstein had a profound effect on her outlook. When she was a young girl, she had heard her father heap contempt on “faggots.” The nuns and priests taught her that homosexuality was a sin. Later, the Kennedys scorned any behavior that lacked manly strength and purpose.

As part of her New York education, however, Jackie saw all the harm that was done by this effort to stigmatize homosexuality. She came to believe that no good would ever come from trying to sanitize or standardize behavior.

She was growing more broad-minded and tolerant, even about herself. She started to accept the fact that, like homosexuals, she herself was not what most people considered “normal.” In a way, she was “almost normal,” just like her gay friends.

After Oliver Smith and Jackie finished their drinks, they went upstairs. On the second floor there was another guest apartment, which was frequently used by Tyrone Guthrie, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario.

“Tyrone must be six foot six, and his wife is a big woman, too,” said Smith. “It is always a puzzle to me how two such huge, flamboyant figures can fit into such a small room.”

Smith’s studio was on the third floor, and it was here that he and Jackie worked side by side at his drafting tables. Smith had studied architecture, and was an accomplished illustrator. But his real skill was as a teacher.

“What do you think of this?” Jackie asked, pointing to the landscape she was working on. “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

“Not at all,” he said. “Just a trifle primitive. It looks like a fried egg.”

“A fried egg!” Jackie said, horrified. She looked at her work again, and started laughing. “Well, I suppose it does,” she said.

While they drew, Smith spoke of art and literature. Art was his whole life, and his words flowed in a languid, unforced stream of consciousness. He was a great traveler, too, and extremely well read in most of the world’s literature, and his conversation jumped without a hitch across centuries and disciplines and cultures.

Before Jackie knew it, their time was up. She put away her things and stole a glimpse