Great Romances of the 20th Century (1997) s01e01 Episode Script

ln June 1961 US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, visited Paris.
Public enthusiasm for the handsome young President and his beautiful wife was overwhelming.
At a glittering series of state occasions, Jacqueline looked stunning Even the austere President de Gaulle was bowled over.
The French took the elegant First Lady to their hearts.
They queued patiently in the rain for a glimpse of her in one of her trademark Oleg Cassini outfits.
There were shouts of ''Vive Jackie!'' wherever she went Her husband observed ''l do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience, l am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris''.
The presidential visit to France saw the flowering of what became known as ''Camelot'', the enchanted court of the Kennedys in which their youthful style blew away the dowdy cobwebs of the Eisenhower years.
The President's dominating father, Joe Kennedy, had impressed upon his son that, in public, the most important thing is not what you are but what people think you are Joe Kennedy came from a powerful lrish-American political dynasty based in Boston.
A multi-millionaire businessman, he was US ambassador to Britain as World War two began his defeatism wrecked his own political ambitions.
They were transferred to his eldest son Joe Jr.
When Joe Jr was killed in the war, Jack stepped into his shoes.
Joe Kennedy was determined that Jack would be the first Catholic President of the United States.
When the young Jack Kennedy entered the Senate in January 1953, he was universally recognised as one of the most eligible bachelors in the United States He was a war hero, an author and devastatingly good-looking And he could charm his constituents and the wider public.
''Here we have a picture of the former President Hoover, l was Chairman of the subcommittee on re-organisation which considered all the Hoover commission recommendations, we passed about thirty of them in the Senate and he expressed his appreciation as l believe its done a good deal for economy, this is a model of PT boat on which l served, PT109 on which l served during the war, and of course this is the democratic donkey.
'' ''What about that coconut on your desk that's a rather interesting object''.
''Well our PT boat was sunk by a Japanese destroyer and we found a native and gave him a coconut which he took through the lines and wrote a message on it and a boat came and picked us up about ten days later and l put the coconut in plastic and kept it as a momento of a more unpleasant day''.
At a Washington dinner party in 1951, the 35-year-old Jack Kennedy had met the 23-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier.
ln the autumn of 1952 they began what Jackie later described as a ''spasmodic courtship''.
Prising Jack from the protective embrace of his large family was to prove a tricky task.
Jacqueline Bouvier was descended from a French cabinetmaker who had emigrated to America in 1815 and made a fortune The money was eventually dissipated.
Although Jackie always looked like a rich girl, and lived in great houses, the Bouviers never really had a bean.
What was left of the family money was squandered by Jackie's father, John V.
Bouvier lll, a notorious philanderer popularly known as ''Black Jack''.
ln 1940 Jackie's mother Janet divorced ''Black Jack'' and married a millionaire, Hugh D.
Auchincloss, whose main interests were collecting pornography and saving electricity ''Black Jack'' remained the centre of Jackie's universe.
The young Jackie graduated from George Washington University in 1951 and then won ajournalism scholarship sponsored by the fashion magazine Vogue.
But she stayed in America, fearing that if she went to Paris for Vogue, she might never come back.
She got ajob as a photojournalist on the Washington Times Herald, and then met Jack Kennedy.
Kennedy already had a reputation as a womaniser.
Joe Kennedy had encouraged his sons to adopt his own rapacious attitude towards women.
Many young women shuttled in and out of Jack's Washington house.
But he soon realised that Jacqueline Bouvier was different from these one-night stands.
Behind the wide-apart eyes, soft voice and wistful smile lay an independent young woman with a cultured intelligence, barbed wit and a mind which, many years later, a private secretary likened to a steel trap.
Jackie's reserve contrasted with the raucously competitive Kennedy clan, who dubbed her ''The Debutante''.
Joe Kennedy was the architect of his children's lives.
His sons were to fulfill their destiny by bearing the Kennedy standard into public affairs His daughters' role was to attract capable husbands whom marriage would make ''honorary Kennedys' and whose task it would be to serve as loyal staffers to the Kennedy sons And of course they would all produce lots more Kennedys.
Joe had it all worked out.
Jackie Bouvier fitted uneasily into this world of endless joshing and relentless activity.
She remained in a state of undeclared war with Jack's sisters.
She hated the bruising games of touch football on the lawn at the Kennedy summer home in Hyannis Port on Nantucket Sound.
She gave them up after breaking an ankle in a scrimmage.
She had been warned about Jack's womanizing and the unlikelihood of it stopping if she married him.
But as a Kennedy friend observed, Jackie was not sexually attracted to men unless, like her own father, there was an element of danger about them.
Not surprisingly, she developed a strong rapport with Joe Kennedy - as dominating a father figure as her own adored ''Black Jack''.
Jacqueline Bouvier married Jack Kennedy at St Mary's Roman Catholic Church in Newport, Rhode lsland, on the 12th of September 1953.
Joe and his wife Rose had ensured that the wedding was the social event of the year.
The groom's face bore the scratches from a strenuous early morning session of touch football.
But as Jackie waltzed with the Kennedy menfolk there was one notable absentee from the celebrations.
''Black Jack'' Bouvier had assumed that he would give his daughter away.
On the morning of the wedding he was drunk but not incapable.
But his ex-wife Janet had other ideas.
Somehow, ''Black Jack'' never got from his hotel to the church.
Jackie was given away by Janet's second husband, Hugh D.
Auchincloss.
Marriage cast Jackie in the role of political wife.
''When l was first married out life was almost as hectic as it is now and l found it rather hard to adjust, but now l think politics is one of the most rewarding lifes a woman can have to be married to a politician l think every woman wants to feel needed and in politics you are so much more than in any other field''.
ln private Jackie confessed to the strain of living with Kennedy ambitions and Jack's ill-health.
His handsome profile and apparent vigour belied a fragile constitution.
A bad back caused him constant pain.
Worse, he suffered from Addison's disease, a rare and life-threatening condition which required him to take regular doses of cortisone.
But Jack's political future demanded that he Addison's disease be kept a family secret.
At the 1956 Democratic convention, Jack narrowly failed to secure the vice-presidential nomination.
lt was a bitter blow - his father had taught the boys that Kennedys were always winners.
But losing spared Jack the landslide defeat which buried the Democrats the following November and would have consigned him to political oblivion.
After the convention, Jack went to the South of France on holiday.
He was not at Jackie's side when, traumatically, their first child was stillborn.
The marriage teetered close to breakdown but was patched up, reputedly with a million-dollar pay-off to Jackie.
Divorce would have spelt the end of Jack's political career.
Jackie had had an earlier miscarriage and now the stillborn child.
Having married into a family overrun with children, she fretted that she was incapable of childbearing.
The longed-for baby, Caroline, came in the autumn of 1957, just before the Kennedys moved into a new house in Washington.
Caroline's arrival coincided with Jack's drive for the presidency.
With his brother Bobby acting as chief counsel, Jack served on the McClellan Committee investigating union racketeering.
He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for Profiles in Courage, a study of politicians in adversity.
Jack Kennedy's own political profile was expanding to fit his presidential ambitions while his wife publicly stood by his side.
''ln a way it was the best training for everything, for the life l lead now you've got to know so much about people how they spoke how they felt, granted the exhaustion is their but you're with your husband in the major endeavor you share and then when you look back on it you've seen so much of the country all the people you've met its just made you a person you weren't before''.
Kennedy organisation and will to win secured Jack the presidential nomination at the Democratic convention of 1960.
''l can assure all of you here who have reposed this confidence in me that l will be worthy of your trust, we will carry the fight to the people in the fall and we shall win''.
On the stump, Jack pressed the flesh till his right hand was swollen and bleeding.
Jackie, now pregnant again, hated campaigning.
Watching her work a wintry street with her husband, the journalist Joe Alsop likened Jackie to a ''lost child''.
Jack's youthful energy shone throughout the campaign, and his approachability contrasted with his prickly Republican opponent Richard Nixon Nevertheless, the contest was a desperately close run thing.
ln the Hyannis Port communications room, the Kennedy family followed the unfolding drama.
Jack squeaked home by the narrowest of margins - only just over 100,000 votes separated the two candidates.
Victory was followed by a tickertape parade in New York.
Enthusiastic crowds surged around the Kennedys' open-topped car, at one point threatening to turn it over Jack told reporters that the nation could now prepare for a new administration while he and Jackie prepared for a new baby.
The campaign had taken its toll on Jackie.
On the 25th of November she was rushed to hospital, where an emergency Caesarian was performed to deliver a boy, John Fitzgerald Jr, one month prematurely.
The proud parents emerged with the new addition to the Kennedy dynasty.
On the 20th of January 1961, in bitterly cold weather, Jack Kennedy and his wife took their places for his inauguration parade.
Accompanied by Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, the President watched the US Navy march past his viewing stand.
Then came a PT-boat in the markings of Jack's old wartime command, PT-109, manned for the day by his former shipmates.
Two floats struck an ambivalent note in the Cold War climate which added an extra chill to the new decade.
At the inaugural ball held in the Washington Armory, Jackie wore a stunning Oleg Cassini gown of white chiffon, covered with a floor-length silk cape.
lt seemed like the dawn of a new era of elegance.
Jackie was radiant, but once installed in the White House she seemed somewhat aloof to the American public.
Compared with the homely Mamie Eisenhower, the new First Lady was a little too chic for the taste of most Middle-Americans.
Jack exuded all-American charm.
The President was super-confident and surrounded by the best and brightest of his New Frontiersmen But he was quickly brought down to earth when a ClA plan to topple Fidel Castro, the Cuban leader, came to grief in the Bay of Pigs.
An invading force of Cuban exiles was quickly overwhelmed.
President Kennedy was still recovering his poise when he met the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in June 1961.
Mrs Khrushchev seemed to have stepped straight from the tractor factory, while Jackie dazzled her husband, who could scarcely contain his delight at sitting next to her.
Jackie was now box-office.
Her husband quickly grasped that she was a political asset.
She provided the style for which the Kennedy family had striven but had never quite achieved.
Their fairytale marriage was now a matter of mutual convenience.
lt could never have survived Jack's insatiable appetite for casual sexual encounters.
But it became the basis for Camelot.
Jackie's contribution, and one of her greatest challenges, was the refurbishment of the White House She had a clear message for the public who filed through its rooms.
''As l remember the first time l came here as a child l was eleven years old and my mother bought me here on Easter vacation, when l think of all the school children who came through here, l think their should be flowers when their can be and fires going and the pictures, to make it look rather like a home and not so frightening''.
Much of the cultural dazzle of her husband's presidency derived from Jackie's good taste and inclinations.
There was a magnificently staged reception for Pakistan's President Ayub Khan at George Washington's home Mount Vernon.
Here the First Lady was in her element.
lt was Jackie who brought to the White House poets, Nobel prize winners and the musical giants like lgor Stravinsky and Pablo Casals.
Jack's personal preference was for country music and the James Bond thrillers he helped to popularise.
007 would have relished the Cuban missile crisis which erupted when an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft photographed Soviet missile installations on Cuba.
For a week in October 1962, as Soviet ships carrying more missiles steamed towards Cuba, the world hovered on the brink of nuclear war Kennedy issued a stern warning.
''l call upon Chairman Khrushchev to halt and eliminate this clandestine reckless and provocative threat to world peace and the stable relations between our two nations'' The crisis passed.
The Cold War unfroze a little.
But in June 1963 the sight of the Berlin Wall moved Kennedy to eloquence.
''Today in the world of freedom the proudest boast is lch Bin Ein Berliner''.
Jackie had now become a public figure in her own right.
Her solo trip to lndia in 1962 was a public relations triumph.
Prime Minister Nehru was the latest in a long line of haughty middle-aged statesmen to succumb to her charm.
Younger members of the population proved equally receptive.
But lndira Gandhi was determined not to be upstaged by Jackie Kennedy.
The First Lady had an easier ride on an elephant And looked composed and beautiful when she visited the Taj Mahal.
To relax away from the pressures of Washington, Jackie spent weekends riding at Glen Ora, a country house in Virginia which the President had bought her.
She was an accomplished horsewoman And was riding in a Virginia horse show when Marilyn Monroe stole the show during her husband's 45th birthday party at Madison Square Gardens, breathily serenading the President in a skintight dress which left little to the imagination.
ln public the Kennedys were the world's most glamorous couple.
ln private the gulf between them was widening.
But there was still time for some unforced moments.
When Caroline's pony Leprechaun seemed intent on munching Jack's ear, the President commanded the cameraman to ''Keep going You are about to see a President eaten by a horse''.
ln the winter of 1962, Jackie was pregnant again.
ln August 1963 she gave birth to a son, Patrick, who lived for only a few hours.
The strain and the sadness were etched on to the faces of the President and his wife.
Ten days later Jackie flew to Athens where she embarked on a cruise of the Aegean aboard the Christina, the yacht owned by the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.
lt did not escape everyone's attention that Mrs Kennedy was the only unescorted woman on Christina and Onassis the only unescorted man.
The children bridged the gap between the Kennedys.
Jack's natural affection for his own and other people's children was one of his most endearing personal traits.
There was always time to play in the Oval Office.
Meanwhile there was a little local political difficulty to sort out in Texas.
At 11:39am local time on the 22nd of November 1963 Air Force One touched down at Love Field.
Sixteen minutes later the President's motorcade was bound for Dallas.
lt was a hot, clear day and the bullet-proof bubble was not fitted to the presidential Lincoln.
lnto Dallas the Kennedys drove, past cheering crowds.
And on towards Dealey Plaza, where Death waited for Jack Kennedy.
Jackie Kennedy flew back to Washington with her husband's body.
Distraught, she was still wearing the pink suit blotched with Jack's blood.
With immense self-possession, she began immediately to plan her husband's funeral.
Jackie orchestrated every detail for maximum effect.
Joe Kennedy, now paralysed and speechless after a stroke, watched his son's funeral on television, isolated from the teeming Kennedy world he had created.
Jackie's dignity was intensely moving.
At this moment of shock, she held the nation together A whispered reminder and little John Kennedy said goodbye to his father.
ln 1961 the Journalist Kenneth Crawford wrote of the President and his wife: ''Those attractive Kennedys enlist our sympathy.
We want them to be all they seem to be''.
lt was an impossible wish, but for a brief moment they almost made it come true.