The White House :
Court Gossip
From D. W. BROGAN
PHILADELPHIA
TT is in what are formally small things that 'great social changes are registered. The great state secret of the Eisenhower regime was the President's golf average and, a minor example of the secret du roi, the presidential putting green on the White House lawn was treated in an ingenious trompe-Coil fashion to enable him to putt in peace. That sacred enclosure is now open to the public eye, for hundreds of fascinated youngsters and oldsters can see, through the railings, Miss Kennedy (aged three) playing on the swings and slides with her contemporaries. And the spectators are as moved by the discovery that the President's daughter is, in very sooth, a little girl, as the most drooling English matron making the same discovery about Princess Anne could be. The President and his wife wish warmly that their daughter could play in private, but that is probably imagining a vain thing.
But there is a new state secret. It is no longer a matter of the President's golf score. That has been revealed and, having a lot on his mind, Mr. Kennedy has not been doing very well. It is a more `U' secret. Mrs. Kennedy, so it is asserted, has asked that when she goes hunting (in the English sense, riding to hounds}, there is to be no reporting of whether there was a kill or not. For the anti-blood-sports lobby has been bom- barding the White House with protests against Mrs. Kennedy's participation in fox-hunting. It is asserted, also, that the Pr'esident has asked his wife to stop hunting and that she has refused to change the habits of a short lifetime merely be- cause a lot of voters object to fox-hunting. For the President's wife is determined to be more than that, to be herself and to ignore many of the claims, positive and negative, made on her as the President's wife.
Some of Mrs. Kennedy's attempts to have a private, as well as a public, life will get a lot of sympathy. She spent Easter at Palm Beach with her husband's numerous and energetic family and thus escaped the ritual of egg-rolling du the White House lawn. But the merchants (i.e., shop- keepers) of Palm Beach know a good thing when they see it, and Florida hasn't been having it so good lately, so they invited (if so mild a term is the word) Mrs. Kennedy to take part in an Easter Parade that would commemorate what Easter and Passover are traditionally supposed to commemorate—and give local business a shot in the arm. Mrs. Kennedy not only didn't play; it is believed that she didn't bother to answer. Not much sympathy was or will be wasted on the merchants of Palm Beach, but Mrs. Kennedy is presenting a social and political problem of a novel kind.
The Kennedys are the handsomest couple who have ever occupied the White House. President Kennedy is not the handsomest President of this century. That honour has to be divided between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Warren G. Harding. Mrs. Kennedy is not the most impressive mistress of the White House. That honour belongs to the most distinguished of living American women, Eleanor Roosevelt. But Mrs. Roosevelt would be the last woman in the world to claim that she was or is a beauty. She is impressive and winning as the late Queen Mary was, but a beauty, no. But President Kennedy, if not provided with a noble profile like FDR—and WGH—is still, at forty-three, what American female teenagers used to call, and perhaps still call, 'a dream boat.' And Mrs. Kennedy is dazzling with elegance and charm. Of the presidential wives in this century only Grace Coolidge, whose portrait has been given (so I am told) a place of honour in the new ddcor df the White House, could have competed in looks—and she could not, for a moment, have competed in elegance.
And there's the political bother. Is elegance democratic? Having listened to and overheard a great deal of female 'scuttlebutt,' as the Ameri- cans put it, in the past few weeks I have some doubts. The American woman has a hard time of it, especially in the aspiring grey flannel sec- tions of the population. She has to run a house, bear and rear children, be a good citizen, take an interest in the schools, the Red Cross, the under-privileged, the United Nations and be smart, soignee, abreast of and exemplifying the latest styles in hairdo's, dress, female accessories. She has to know or find out what are the 'in' things in decoration, culture (literary and musi- cal), feeding. She has to know about wines. (Wine snobbery is now rampant. What this country needs is Cyril Ray.) And she has to entertain, relax and fortify her husband, back from a hard day at the office, moaning about 'the rat race' and depressed by reading too many novels and sociological works on the horrors of life in suburbia or, a little higher up, in exurbia. Where does Mrs. Kennedy fit in? The danger point is that she doesn't.
What is the representative young matron of Mrs. Kennedy's age (thirty-one) to do, when trying to decide on a new hairdo, when she realises that the President's wife, even when she was only a Senator's wife, didn't bother, since she set the fashion and hadn't any need to follow it? What is the harassed housewife with, perhaps, a maid hired for one evening, when the big dinner to impress the boss is on, to think when she hears the charge that Mrs. Kennedy's secre- tary tried to steal the cook of the French Ambassador in London (a story too horrid to be believed for a moment; still it Went round)? What does she do when she learns that the President has hired and is paying for a French cook for the White House? Isn't American cook- ing good enough? Well, let's give that one a miss.
Suppose you study one of the half-dozen shiny magazines that tell you how to be abreast of the latest ways of making your home smart, and then learn that Mrs. Kennedy called in a close friend, who is an abstract painter, to rearrange the White House pictures and a French interior decorator to give the White House a look over? What do you make of the news that Mrs. Ken- nedy (nee Bouvier) has had to get an extra secre- tary to deal exclusively with correspondence in French? What—but I could go on.
The sad truth is that nature is unfair. To be rich, to be beautiful, to speak French and Spanish, to be the President's wife and never to have had to study the books or magazines that make the average housewife, in her own mind, a com- bination of Madame Recamier and Madame de Montespan, is the thought of this not more than female human nature can bear? It is more than some female human nature that 1 have run into recently, can bear. Many a proud wearer of a new Easter bonnet has wondered, uneasily, whether it would be noticed by her husband if Mrs. Kennedy came over the horizon. And re- membering Bagehot's words of wisdom, that half the human race consists of women, I have listened to ladies hinting, more than hinting, that Mrs. Kennedy is too elegant, not democratic enough, smiles past people not at them. The smile is dazzling but impersonal. But I have watched husbands, too, and their aspect is more dreamy, less troubled by the undemocratic char- acter of elegance and beauty. And half the human race consists of men. It also consists of young people of both sexes for whom there is a wonderful fairy-tale atmosphere about Washing- ton today. absent under two much-liked women, Mrs. Truman and Mrs. Eisenhower. It is not unworthy of notice that President Eisenhower called the presidential yacht Barbara Ann, after his granddaughter. He is the oldest man ever to serve in the White House. President Kennedy changed the name to Honey Fitz, in memory of his grandfather—again a natural gesture in the youngest man ever elected to the Presidency. And perhaps the country is settling down to the new regime. One of the smart magazines this month is telling us how Princess Grace is after five years of marriage. She's still wonderful, but she's not the wife of the President of the United States. And if Mrs. Kennedy does establish the fact that a President's wife is entitled to private life, future chatelaines of the White House may call her blessed.
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