Casual Elegance: A Portrait of Jackie Kennedy

By J. B. West

As a beloved American icon, Jackie Kennedy is known for her poise, wit,and instinctive sense of style. But as White House Chief Usher J. B. West discovered, she was also an enigma. In the vignette below, shared from Upstairs at the White House, West offers a glimpse at the glamorous and often baffling First Lady.

Jacqueline Kennedy whispered. Or so I thought, at first. Actually, she spoke so softly that one was forced to listen intently, forced to focus on her face and respond to her direct, compelling eyes. There was wonder in those eyes, determination, humor, and — sometimes — vulnerability.

When she looked around a crowded room as if searching for the nearest exit, people assumed that she was shy, uncertain. I don’t think she was ever shy. It was merely her method of studying the situation: memorizing the room, or assessing the people in it. She spoke no small talk — no “I’m so very glad to meet you and what does your husband do?” She limited her conversation merely to what, in her opinion, mattered. Her interests were wide, however, as was her knowledge, and she had a subtle, ingenious way of getting things accomplished.

The new First Lady turned the White House inside out, and she imprinted her own rarefied life style upon the mansion. But the greatest change in the White House was brought about by the presence of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy herself. She was thirty years younger than any of the First Ladies I had served, and, I was to discover, had the most complex personality of them all. In public, she was elegant, aloof, dignified, and regal. In private, she was casual, impish, and irreverent. She had a will of iron, with more determination than anyone I have ever met. Yet she was so soft-spoken, so deft and subtle, that she could impose that will upon people without their ever knowing it.

Her wit — teasing, exaggerating, poking fun at everything, including herself — was a surprise and a daily delight. She was imaginative, inventive, intelligent — and sometimes silly. Yet there were subjects that did not amuse her one bit.

Relaxed and uninhibited, she was always popping up anywhere, wearing slacks, sitting on the floor, kicking off her shoes, her hair flying in every direction. We all had fun along with her. Yet she also drew a line against familiarity which could not be crossed.

It was only with the cameras grinding or guests coming in the front door that the seriousness, the poise, the coolness that were also part of her, began to appear.

She had a total mastery of detail — endless, endless detail — and she was highly organized, yet rarely held herself to a schedule. For others, she insisted upon order; for herself, she preferred spontaneity. She took advice readily, but only when she asked for it, and she strongly resisted being pushed.

The trick was to read her correctly, to accomplish everything she wanted, and not to oppose her in anything. And it was a trick, because sometimes she was so subtle she needed a translator.

I saw her move swiftly into three different roles: wife and mother to her young children; commander-in-chief of the White House restoration; and chatelaine of the Great Hall.

During those first weeks, I had discovered two things about Mrs. John Fitzgerald Kennedy: her innate sense of organization and planning, and her irrepressible humor. Every day, she said something that was just plain funny.

Comic metaphors cropped up in all her notes to me, amusing me no end. She thought the bedroom curtains were “seasick green,” their fringe like a “tired Christmas tree.” The ground-floor hall was a “dentist’s office bomb shelter,” the East Room floor a “roller skating rink.” Guests had to use “Pullman car ashtray stands,” but the lobby, finally, was “just like De Gaulle’s.” When she despaired of ever being able to adjust the thermostats, she thought surely “the greatest brains of army engineering can figure out how to have this heated like a normal rattletrap house!”

Instead of having a regular 9:00 a.m. staff conference at her bedside, as Mamie Eisenhower did, Mrs. Kennedy might pop up anytime with a new plan for a room arrangement, a surprise dinner, a request for a stage or a stepstool. Our daily conferences took place in my office, in a storeroom, on the back stairs, on the south lawn, in a boat. She and I sat on the floor with drawings spread out all around us, we sprawled on the marble stairs to discuss the ceilings above, or we poked around in a dusty warehouse for some lost White House possession.

She learned quickly to put everything in writing, and kept on her desk a yellow legal-size pad with my name on it. Any time of day or night, when she thought of something to tell me, she’d jot it down. Anything that happened to pop into her mind, from picture frames for Caroline’s drawings or sleeping arrangements for Kings and Queens, would find its way to me, on her notepad. Her incredible attention to detail, in every subject she put her mind to, made the difference for me in managing an institution (for by now the White House had indeed become so) without the morning staff meetings to which I had been so accustomed.

For Mrs. Kennedy herself never kept regular hours. Despite the discipline that imposed order on everything around her, she usually did what she pleased, whenever she wanted to. The only truly inviolate time of her day was the children’s hour, in the evening, when she read to or played with John and Caroline.

She had breakfast served on a tray, in bed, whenever she woke up. Sometimes at 8:00, sometimes, after a long evening of partying, at noon.

The President was usually up at 8:00, however, and Miss Shaw brought the children in to visit with him while he ate breakfast.

Caroline walked him over to his west wing office every morning, then walked back to the kitchen, where she picked up her little brown-paper-bag lunch, and headed for the play school that Mrs. Kennedy had designed and installed in the third-floor solarium.

After greeting her children, Mrs. Kennedy dressed in pants and a sweater or shirt (I can’t remember her ever wearing a dress in the White House unless she had company) and took a brisk hour’s walk, alone, around the sixteen acres of White House grounds.

Before she developed her system of memos, she’d stop by my office on her way out, to discuss her plans for the day. After the memos started appearing, our meetings, though unscheduled, were actually more frequent. I learned to carry my yellow legal pad (with her name on it) around under my arm whenever I left my office. No telling where I might run into her, for a full-scale executive conference.

Following her walk, she’d return to the West Hall, where she worked at her desk. That ornate French Empire desk with big brass appointments was her most prized possession. She worried more about scratches-in-transit, or its improper care, than about any other piece of furniture or art in the White House or in her own house. The desk had belonged to her late father, stockbroker John Vernou Bouvier, whom she had adored and of whom she spoke quite frequently.

Jacqueline Kennedy devoted considerable time, energy, and concentrated attention to her children, yet you could hardly call her the typical American mother. Even when she pleaded for a “simple, unspoiled, normal life” for the children, it would mean the simple, normal life of a very wealthy family.

She did want to shield Caroline and John from public curiosity, from the pomp and pomposity of White House life. And yet there were always nannies and nurses, chauffeurs and clowns, and a butler who served hamburgers on a silver tray.

It was evident that Mrs. Kennedy intended to keep their lives separate from the White House operation. Caroline and John, in fact, never were a problem for the staff, as nurses were in attendance at all times. They never ran up and down the State halls by themselves, never slid down the banisters or romped in the East Room, as Teddy Roosevelt’s boisterous youngsters are said to have done.

Instead, Caroline and John played in their rooms — or in the third-floor solarium. When they did appear, the staff was delighted, for they were well-behaved if exuberant youngsters, and totally charming.

“I don’t want them to think they are ‘official’ children,” she told me. “When I go out with them or when they go out with their nurses, please ask the doorman not to hover around to open the doors for them.” At first, with three-year-old Caroline at her heels, the President’s wife pushed her baby son’s carriage around the circular driveway, under the trees, and back again. When little John learned to walk, they took the same route, Caroline skipping merrily ahead and Mrs. Kennedy slowing her pace to match the toddler’s.

I believe that Jacqueline Kennedy enjoyed playing as much as the children did. Many times, when I watched her play with them, exactly as a child plays, I felt, strangely, that this was the real Jacqueline Kennedy. She was so happy, so abandoned, so like a little girl who had never grown up. Many times, when she was performing with such grace and authority the role of First Lady, I felt she was just pretending. She really longs for a child’s world, I thought, where she can run and jump and hide and ride horses. I thought of her as an actress — constantly playing a role.

Excerpted from Upstairs at the White House by J. B. West. Copyright © 1973 by J. B. West. Reprinted by permission of Open Road Media. All Rights Reserved.

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