My Life in the Kennedy White House, Part 3

A Lady, First: My Life in the Kennedy White House and the American Embassies of Paris and Rome
by Letitia Baldridge

(Page 3 of 3)

Nana wore a pale gray silk dress, ghostlike, with a fresh rose at the V-shaped neckline. I was sure that it would stay fresh all the way to heaven, and of course she was wearing her pearl necklace. I never saw her without that. Maybe they wouldn't let her into heaven without it.

The Blue Room loomed large in my mind because it was also the reposi-tory of my parents' rare collection of large brown leather volumes on World War I, hidden away in bookshelves, behind metal mesh doors. The Baldrige children were forbidden access to these books, so of course we looked at every page, some bearing photographs of horribly burned, gassed soldiers in France. The books were there because they had been given to my mother by the U.S. Army medical corps. My mother's cousin, Dr. Karl Albert Connell (named for Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, which lent him a special cachet), had invented the gas mask, a remarkable innovation that saved many lives in World War I, but not in time to prevent the loss of thousands of earlier gas attack victims.

Our other grandmother, "Bawa," who actually owned our big old house, came to live with us shortly after Nana's death. I had been named for her, and she had been named for Letizia Bonaparte, Napoleon's mother. (Bawa explained to me how the first Letitia in her family line was named for Napoleon's mother, as were thousands of other baby girls born in western Europe in the early nineteenth century. The mothers must have been hoping to raise their own Napoleons.) She was really Letitia Blanche Coffey Baldrige, but since Bawa was the only sound my oldest brother could make of the combination of the "Grandmother" and "Baldrige" names, "Bawa" was it. She was the closest thing Omaha had to a dowager duchess, I suppose-even if she did scandalize Omaha society by leaving her husband and young son for a two-year fling in an apartment in Paris on the avenue Foch in the early 1900s. Years later, when I was in my early twenties and living in Paris, I often used to drive down the avenue Foch to the Arc de Triomphe, looking at the magnificent apartment buildings lining both sides of the wide boulevard, trying to guess which building housed my grandmother's apartment, and also wondering about what went on there. The rumor was that she had a French lover, and my cousin Keating Coffey heard from his parents that Omaha people talked a lot about it, just as they did about the cigarettes she came home puffing. Ladies did not smoke in those days in the Midwest, only non-ladies did. My grandfather Howard Malcolm Baldrige was, from all reports, exceedingly dull, and I remember that one of Bawa's friends made a remark to me at an age when I couldn't quite comprehend it. She said, "If I had been married to a man like your grandfather, I would have sought a lover, too."

Bawa came back from that Parisian experience with trunkfuls of fabulous dresses, hats, boas, and boxes of exotic-looking cigarette holders, which she put away in the attic of our house. By the time I was four, my friends and I were hounding her to be able to dress up in her Parisian creations. I would steal a cigarette from her cache and stick it into one of those ebony, rhinestone-studded works of art. With a feeling of misguided sophistication, I would stand in front of a mirror with my teeth clenched on the holder, sucking on it and pretending to smoke. When I wrapped around my forehead one of Bawa's silvery embroidered headbands, which she wore with her evening dresses, and waved the cigarette holder at my reflection, I felt that nothing more glamorous had ever been seen in the world at large. Unfortunately, the inhalation of stale nicotine fumes from the holder made me slightly nauseous every time. (Bawa was to pay for that smoking habit later in life with terrible emphysema, which eventually killed her.)

Bawa would show me countless times, simply because I asked her to, her photo album filled with postcards, menus from her sojourn in France, place cards, and invitations to the parties she attended. "Ah," she would say, turning to look out the window longingly, dreaming of her experiences in Paris, "comme je me suis bien amusée!" Her stories were all equally wonderful: she described everything from listening to the rhythm of the clip-clops of the horses and carriages taking their elegant passengers to lunch in the Bois de Boulogne, to dining on oysters while seated on a crimson velvet banquette at Maxim's (when she showed me drawings of the plates of oysters, I couldn't imagine eating "those things"). Listening to her was like being in a cinema, watching an ever-changing, fascinating film that portrayed only beautiful, chic people. I copied her little French phrases, using the words "Oh, ça c'est tellement chic!" without having any idea what they meant, but I loved the sound of the French words. Someday, I would learn them, too. She told me I would, but I knew it before she told me. "You must travel, Letitia," she said many times. "You must see everything, not just Omaha." She needed to tell me that only once.

Bawa returned to Paris in World War I to serve for a short time with the American Red Cross, again a gutsy action for a woman of her era. I adored her. She was a free spirit, a rebel, one strong woman. "Leadership is in your genes, don't forget it," she wrote me once. "Remember, you must work at it. Nothing permanent comes without work. Just go do it." When I would inevitably ask the same question, "What is it that's supposed to be in our genes?" she always gave the same puzzling answer, "Leadership. I expected it of your father, and I expect it of the three of you children. Don't ask what it means. Just do it. Take charge. You're strong enough."

If there was one place in the house that I adored and in which I felt completely safe, it was my bedroom, with its never-changed pale peach wallpaper festooned with gold stars, and its pale blue ceiling. (In the 1930s, once wallpaper was put up, it stayed up.) Nana's old maple bedroom furniture had been painted white for me. It was very ordinary, but to my eyes, with its fake bronze gilt drawer pulls, it looked like the furniture in the Palais de Versailles that Bawa had shown me on her postcards. The bedroom door didn't lock, but it slammed beautifully as a sign to my brothers that they could not enter. At nap time I would remove the contents of the bureau, drawer by drawer, laying all of the "merchandise" out on the bed. Then I would play a double role-that of salesperson and customer. I sold my ribbons, underwear, socks, and barrettes over and over to Mrs. Imaginary Customer. I even had a little toy cash register with nickels and pennies to handle the sales.

Sitting on the top shelf of my white bookcase was a lovely statuette of the Virgin Mary, dressed in pale blue and white. During the month of May ("Mary's Month," as the nuns called it) I made an altar and placed white votive candles in glass cups in front of her statue. I picked fresh lilacs and lily of the valley from our front yard. Empty jelly jars made fine vases. At night, before going to sleep, I would turn off all the lights after lighting the votive candles. I would kneel, say a few prayers, and watch the El Greco-elongated shadows of the Madonna on the wall. The flickering candlelight made lacy patterns on the ceiling through the flowers and leaves. It was very magical. It made me feel pious and spiritual-at least for a half hour every night during the month of May. The Blessed Virgin Mary became my good friend during those early years of my life, a friendship that would remain forever.

My brothers, aware of this devotion, kept telling their friends that their sister was going to enter a nunnery, ha, ha, but I denied it vehemently. Nuns were not allowed to hit their brothers back, so it was not to be a vocation for me.

Copyright © 2001, Viking Press, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc, used by permission.

About the Author

Letitia Baldridge is perhaps best known for her role as Chief of Staff for Mrs. Kennedy and Social Secretary to the White House during the Kennedy Administration. She has also served as an advisor to four other First Ladies. The head of her own PR and marketing firm, Letitia Baldrige Enterprises, she is a prolific author whose etiquette books have sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide.