Brothers: The Hidden History of the Kennedy Years (No Series) by David Talbot

“fey, elfin quality” and her curiosity about books and art. She liked his bohemian style, with his fondness for wearing tight blue jeans and work shirts years before it became a popular look, and his love of gossip. Walton was twenty years older than the wide-eyed gamine, but he had a wonderful, boyish spirit and crooked grin that brought to Gellhorn’s mind “a clever and funny Halloween pumpkin.” Like other women, Jackie was also surely drawn to Walton’s valiant effort at single fatherhood, raising son Matthew and daughter Frances by himself after he was divorced from his mentally unstable wife.
    After the Kennedys moved into the White House, the first couple made Walton a frequent sidekick, finally giving him an official role in 1963 as the chairman of the Fine Arts Commission, where he and Jackie joined hands to save Washington’s historic blocks from the wrecking balls of philistine developers. She sent him flirtatious notes on White House stationery, including a collage featuring a photo of Walton with the inevitable cigarette in hand and the inscription: “Hate cigarettes—but I simply can’t resist those Marlboro men! Will you be my Valentine?”
    He was in a “unique position,” Walton later noted, because he was equally close to both Jack and Jackie. They each confided their secrets in him and they used him to communicate with each other. “I figured out later that I was a real link for both of them. You can well imagine how tough that period is in anybody’s life…it is the eye of the hurricane.” Walton—witty, worldly, dishy—helped ground them both. They could act around him as if they were still the young, carefree couple they had been back in Georgetown.
    One summer day Walton brought an architectural model of his proposed renovations for Lafayette Square, which JFK had taken a strong interest in, to Hyannis Port, where the Kennedys were vacationing. “[Jack] got down on the floor and just loved it. And played with it. And Jackie came in and said, ‘You two,’” Walton recalled with a laugh. “And later another time she caught us on his bedroom floor. He was supposed to be taking a nap, meaning he just had on his underpants, and it was like 2:30 in the afternoon. He’d had a little sleep, and then I’d been let in because I had a crisis on something that had to be decided that afternoon. We’re on the floor with another [model], and she went out and got her camera and took pictures and sent me a copy of it. And it said, ‘The president and the czar,’ because the newspapers had started calling me ‘czar of Lafayette Square.’”
    “Bill thinks that Jack’s flirtatiousness with men is a part of his sexual drive and vanity,” Walton’s friend, Gore Vidal, recorded in his journal in September 1961. Vidal, who years later called his friend “the only civilizing influence in that White House,” enjoyed encouraging Jackie’s own naughty side.
    That summer he teamed up with Walton to escort Jackie, with whom he had a family connection, on an adventure in Provincetown, already a gay mecca. “Jackie and Bill Walton arrive at the Moors Motel at 5:30,” Vidal wrote in his journal. “That morning Jackie had been pondering over the phone to me—should she wear a blond wig ‘with braids’ in order not to be recognized. Instead, she wears a silk bandana, a jacket, capri pants, and looks dazzling. Bill wears a dark blue sports shirt; and the usual lopsided grin…. They came into my room at the motel. No one about. Jackie flung herself on the bed—free!”
    The first lady of the United States and her male companions then plunged into a night of frivolity that could surely never be repeated in today’s dreary, political climate, with its all-seeing media eye. They attended a performance of Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession at the Provincetown Playhouse—bad enough considering the scandalous history of the play about prostitution and the hypocrisy of Victorian high society,