Review: “Jackie & Me,” by Louis Bayard

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Louis Bayard’s 10th novel, JACKIE & ME (Algonquin, 352 pp., $27.99), commences with a prospect face. Our narrator, Lem Billings, is in the East Village when he places a familiar figure sauntering down Avenue A in a linen skirt, a black shirt and Nina Ricci sunglasses. “I’m humiliated to say that at the sight of her I did what each New Yorker does,” Lem tells us. “Stopped and gawked.”

The year is 1981, and the female is Lem’s aged friend Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis he has not seen her in six years. We really do not know the instances of their estrangement, or why he doesn’t say good day, but Lem guarantees to convey to the tale of “the Jackie nobody else realized but me.” He tells viewers: “The only hard component will be locating myself in the blend. For, of class, I was there as well. Some version. Which, in this instant, feels like it needs to be recognized, far too, no issue the reckoning.”

Bayard, a veteran at imagining presidential relationships (“Courting Mr. Lincoln,” “Roosevelt’s Beast”), opens his acknowledgments web site with a disclaimer that “Jackie & Me” is, “without apology, a fictional get the job done and an exercising in alternate heritage.” His matter was a actual particular person: Kirk LeMoyne Billings, who satisfied John F. Kennedy as a teenager and turned a longtime fixer and confidant for his friend. Billings was homosexual, a fact that is alluded to but under no circumstances stated in “Jackie & Me.” His loneliness is an invisible character on just about every web page.

Lem satisfies the youthful Jackie Bouvier in 1952, when he accompanies Kennedy — by then an ambitious congressman — to decide on her up for a gathering at Bobby and Ethel Kennedy’s house. His very first impression is prescient: When he sees her standing outside Merrywood, her grand childhood residence, he thinks, “She doesn’t glimpse like she belongs there any more than I do.”

The two outsiders strike it off, and Jack is dependent on his nonthreatening close friend to entertain Jackie even though he lays the groundwork for a political occupation. On Sunday afternoons, we see Lem and Jackie strolling about Dumbarton Oaks or the Smithsonian. Ultimately they undertaking to the Kennedy homestead in Hyannisport, the place they endure limitless rounds of charades and video games of soccer.

Lem is protecting of Jackie, attentive in a way Jack is not. By means of his eyes, we get to know her as a witty, opinionated, pushed younger lady, the starry-eyed precursor to the stylish 1st woman and tragic veiled widow who will supplant her in the well-liked creativeness. What a pleasure it is to see Jackie snapping pictures for her newspaper column, that includes strangers’ solutions to concerns like “If you were being set in solitary confinement and could only just take one book, what would it be?” Her queries evolve along with her partnership — for occasion, “Should engaged couples expose their previous?”

Bayard reveals how Jackie gamely shouldered Jack’s boisterous relatives, stratospheric ambitions, health and fitness troubles and dalliances. But the authentic star of this tale is Lem, who is caught in the gravitational pull in between an old pal and a new a single. To whom does he owe a bigger credit card debt of honesty — Jack, who has embraced him like a brother but asks way too much as a go-concerning or Jackie, a kindred spirit whose solutions are as limited as Lem’s, many thanks to the corset-restricted constrictions of the era? Of system, Jackie may not want to hear what Lem has to say about the realities of becoming near to Jack. And he could be just the tiniest little bit jealous of their long run.

There are times in “Jackie & Me” when I discovered myself asking yourself how Lem could have regarded what Jack and Jackie mentioned to every single other when they had been alone in a visitor area or the back again seat of his car. But it was these a voyeuristic enjoyment to be a fly on the wall (or windshield), and Bayard is this kind of an exuberant storyteller, I was happy to established aside my disbelief.

Even if you are not a Kennedy enthusiast — even if your grandmother did not have a framed picture of J.F.K. in her kitchen, as mine did, along with a person of Pope John Paul II — this elegant, alluring, nostalgic tale will linger like Jackie’s signature scent of Pall Malls and Chateau Krigler 12. It is a sophisticated bouquet of bitter and sweet.

Dialogue Concerns

• Imagine your self in Lem’s sneakers. What would you do otherwise? Would you warn Jackie that she was, in a sense, throwing herself to the wolves? Or would you rely on, as he did, that her intelligence would preserve her?

• Lem overhears Jackie describing him as “that cozy funny fellow.” Why was this all he aspired to be? Did he have a selection?

Recommended Studying

“Jack and Lem,” by David Pitts. Bayard describes Pitts’s guide as the “definitive nonfictional take” on Lem Billings’s lifetime. The guide commences when the boys had been 15-yr-aged college students at Choate. “Lem’s emotions for Jack went past friendship,” Pitts writes. “Jack turned down the sexual overtures, but not the friendship.”

“Meant to Be,” by Emily Giffin. If you’re hunting for a lot more fictionalized Kennedys, this lively website page-turner is influenced by the courtship of John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy, who died together in a tiny-aircraft crash in 1999. Giffin writes: “I normally talk to myself what if. And it is this issue that I often return to when I consider of John and Carolyn. What if John hadn’t flown his plane that night time?”