Happily Ever Aftering : ALL...

Who has the real story? Is the devil in the conflicting details of Edward Klein’s “All Too Human” and Christopher Andersen’s “Jack and Jackie”?

Did Jack propose by cablegram or during an overseas phone call? Did Jackie love Jack? Did Jack love Jackie? And why have I consumed each page of the Jack & Jackie books like some slightly stale bonbons gloriously tasty when found after a midnight chocoholic kitchen plundering?

I can manage a knowledgeable answer only to the last question: I am addicted. There is no Betty Ford Clinic for the social-celebrity dependent. So now I am overstuffed like a Dickensian Christmas goose on a too-rich infusion of private lives, and spread before me are the mucked around leftover messes of two people’s private lives. Or are they?

As their titles tell, both Klein and Andersen set out to explore the private relationship of Jack and Jackie Kennedy. Both hit the expected historic road-blocks--refusals on the part of closest friends to share secrets, a lack of hard data (drafts of speeches get saved, not scraps of love notes), an overabundance of already-published books on JFK and Jackie and sadly Zelig-style bit players who have this one shot at center stage. There are moments, in both books, when it’s the intimacies of Hamlet as revealed by Yorick.

Klein’s is the slightly better effort. In interviews with more than a 150 people, he manages to better intertwine politics (Jack taking on a French general during a 1951 trip to Indochina) while layering on dishy, tongue-in-cheek details (Jackie entering adulthood without “a piece of serious jewelry to call her own”).

But Klein is bothersome in that his sources are second- and third-hand. One story, for example, quotes Morton Downey Jr. quoting Morton Downey Sr. on a supposedly private conversation between Joe Kennedy and his soon-to-be daughter-in-law in a supposedly frank discussion about sex and money.

“Money,” Joe Kennedy allegedly said. “She talked straight to me. . . . And if Jack didn’t look after her properly, I would.” Klein, without attribution, relates another part of the supposedly same Joe-Jackie chat: “ ‘Gloria Swanson liked to make love here. Let me tell you, that woman was insatiable. . . .’ He did not spare Jackie any of the details of his affair, including a description of her genitals. . . . But as the daughter of Black Jack Bouvier, Jackie had heard worse.”

One source for both Klein and Andersen turns out to be perhaps more revealing of herself than her subjects. In Klein, she is called Priscilla Johnson, described as the “young Russian translator whose dark Mediterranean looks and whispery voice reminded [Jack] so much of Jackie.” In Andersen, she is called Priscilla Johnson McMillan, a product of Long Island’s North Shore, whose mother found it “loathsome” to dance with Black Jack. Andersen says she researched a speech for Jack on French Indochina, for which she was to be paid by Joe Kennedy.

McMillan recalled that Jack Kennedy told her he was coming to New York and wanted to have a drink with her. “I wore my best black suit and waited, but he never showed, he never called. He stood me up.”

Now, I don’t know how it works with Russian-translating, Indochina-researching North Shore dames, but in my part of Northeast Philadelphia, a stood-up girl got cranky and maybe held a bit of a grudge. So what to make of McMillan’s memory of a young Jackie coming out of a powder room at a North Shore dance? “A striking beauty, but you definitely had the sense that she was ambitious, that she was pushing it socially. She was a little too well dressed, a little too glamorous.”

Another woman who has seemingly kept watch, kept notes and stored up resentments like chestnuts is Nina (nickname Nini) Auchincloss Straight, Jackie’s step-sister and also the half-sister of Gore Vidal. Nini comes up with a real lulu for Klein, revealing a confidence from Lee Bouvier Canfield Radziwill Ross (Jackie’s “sexpot” sister who had her eyes on Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli but was out-shone by the bikinied first lady). According to Nini, Lee was bedded by JFK as Jackie recuperated from the birth of her daughter, Lee’s niece and namesake Caroline Lee Kennedy. Klein juxtaposes this tale with Kennedy chum Charlie Bartlett’s contrary remembrance that Jack told him that he “passed the test of character” by staying in the apartment with his sister-in-law.

The romance between Jackie and Jack actually manages to trickle in. Yusha Auchincloss, Nini’s half-brother and Jackie’s stepbrother, insisted to Andersen, “Jack and Jackie had a very close, very romantic relationship . . . you would see them together all the time. Technically, they had separate bedrooms, but they slept together. . . . They enjoyed each other. They had fun.”

Couturier Oleg Cassini (who lost actress Gene Tierney to a young and single JFK, then went on to design most of Jackie’s clothes) explained that as America was falling in love with the young first lady, “Jack began to think, Hey, wait a minute--I discovered her! . . . And he, so to say, ‘fell in love’ with Jackie all over again.”

They were products, more than most, of their history. Their fathers lived on the edge, gaining and, in Black Jack Bouvier’s case, losing millions. Their mothers shopped and endured, pictured in these books as cold, withholding women, similarly worried about promptness and French spoken at meals and neither averse to a few swats to instill graciousness and manners.

The names on marquees and couture and jewels are bandied about when not being bedded: Sinatra, Audrey Hepburn, Gene Tierney, Oleg Cassini, Gianni Agnelli, Marilyn Monroe (but you knew that), Maria Callas, Sister Parish, Cole Porter (a reported attachment of Black Jack’s), the Kennedy clan and the United States government.

There are reports of Dr. Feelgood, his magic “cocktails” that zipped up a president--and, Andersen details, made him want to zip down. There’s a clinical discussion of Addison’s disease, of cortisone, Jack’s back injury, the stillborn daughter, the death of infant Patrick, venereal disease and swimming nude.

So, in the end, we know quite a bit about sex and bodies. What’s missing? Romance. Love. Affection. Yet, somehow this couple was and still is magic, so much so that the authors feel compelled to show their personal connection to the couple.

Andersen’s story is that his parents were caught in the traffic jam caused by Jack and Jackie’s nuptials. Klein, who had lunched with Mrs. O and had been to her Christmas party, manages in the first three pages to give both the name of Jackie’s plastic surgeon and her facial salon.

But no one has the tie that her cousin, John H. Davis, does, exploiting it from Page One with the dedication to his mother, “Maude Bouvier Davis and to the memory of her late niece, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.”

Davis might not be a household name, but he has written eight other books--not surprisingly, six of which concern the Kennedys and Bouviers. Davis’ style and substance is as follows: Jackie’s mother, Janet, was the “petite yet athletic daughter of a nouveau riche Irish family. . . .” Or, “In her first meetings with Joe Kennedy, Jackie . . . played on the insecurities of the once-poor Irish boy . . . and did not divulge her mother’s 100% Irish ancestry.” OK, that’s Davis’ dish. Jackie was Irish.

I’ve sat at weddings with old men who have a faint air of mothballs about them, who spend the entire evening going through a tired family tree, exposing every cut, every bent branch. Davis seems one of the few who’s been able to turn such mindless chatter into a career.

Enough. I’ve got to clear my head and my palate. I’m going back to Klein, to Jackie’s early days. She’s at Merrywood, lighting up a Pall Mall, listening to “Bongo, Bongo, Bongo. I don’t want to leave the Congo. Oh, no no no no no,” getting ready for an evening at Martha and Charlie Bartlett’s, where she will be fixed up with John Fitzgerald Kennedy and her destiny.