The Stylishness of Her Privacy

By LANCE MORROW

Vaclav Havel was talking about the mouth-breathing heavies who ran Czechoslovakia during the communist years.

One of the worst things about them, Havel said indignantly, was their awful taste. Havel gestured around a sitting room in his presidential residence in Prague. The room was handsomely simple and bathed in morning sunlight. "This was hideous when they were here," he said. "The furniture, the curtains . . ." Bad taste, he suggested, corrupts government.

I thought of Havel's idea when Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis died, and wondered what it is that good taste does.

In Havel's mind, brutality, stupidity and kitsch all belonged to the same local gang: dead-drunk communists and evil smells, ghastly heavy velvet drapes and torture. Havel's formula was a variation on Stendhal's rule: "Bad taste leads to crimes."

It depends, of course: Bad taste in what? There were Nazis who came home from work at Auschwitz and listened to Mozart. An elegant emperor may also be a sadist or an idiot or a weakling. If good taste were the qualification for leadership, the greatest Presidents might be interior decorators.

) I am not sure about the bad-taste rule as it applies to styles of government, except in the way that it points to a sometimes desirable elegance of leaderly thought, or might remind Americans of a President long ago who designed his own house at Monticello.

But surely Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis proved something about the rules of good and bad taste as they apply to that strange and sometimes rotten religion of the late 20th century -- celebrity. It is a religion that, as she knew as well as anyone, demands human sacrifice. Somehow, she managed to escape. And the escape was the most stylish and elegant part of her life.

Young Mrs. Kennedy, in her early 30s, in the pillbox hat, or the bloody pink suit, or the black veil, became one of the urdivinities of the paleotelevision age. By the time she died, she was still arguably the most famous woman on earth. Who else -- Madonna? Princess Di? (The falloff in quality is steep.)

It may seem an odd way of appreciating Jacqueline Kennedy, but think for a moment what she might have been had she possessed a different character. And, for that matter, what her children might have become, given their fame, their money, their trauma -- their excuse. Instead, she was what she was, and they are, admirably, one gathers, what they are, thanks to their mother. Important things are unfakeable.

She had excellent taste in art and music, of course; the "classy" (to use John Kennedy's word) side of Camelot -- the stylish redecorations, Pablo Casals at the White House and so on -- was her doing mostly. But it seemed to me that over the years her truly superb taste expressed itself in what might be called the stylishness of her privacy.

Part of John Kennedy's charm derived from his reticence, from a sense one had of something withheld. That was his personality. In a more difficult way, in an earned way, Jacqueline Kennedy's achievement was what she was able to withhold. Celebrity Zen, perhaps: the mystique of reticence.

She belonged to a time -- a tragedy -- when large literary lines did not seem off, or ridiculous, as they might now. Hamlet and Lear, "if worthy their prominent part in the play," wrote Yeats, "do not break up their lines to weep." She, magnificently, did not break up her lines to weep. There was another thought that was associated especially with her husband: Courage is "grace under pressure." But that line applied to her in some truer way than it applied to him. She earned it in a harder fashion.

Jacqueline's father-in-law Joseph Kennedy went off to Hollywood decades ago and figured out the fundamental rule of the Age of Celebrity: "It doesn't matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are." The principle works for the short run, which is usually the only run that celebrity needs. Jacqueline Kennedy endured in the long run. Even in the earliest days after the Inauguration in 1961, she located the saner and contrary principle in a memo she wrote to her press secretary: "I feel strongly that publicity in this era has gotten completely out of hand -- and you must really protect the privacy of me and my children."

She was a civilized woman (John Kennedy was about half-civilized). Her civilized quality derived in large part from her insistence that her life belonged to her and her children. It is hard enough for a celebrity to be sane; fame is a distorting, corrupting and even psychotic environment. People in a healthy community gossip about people they know. It must disturb something in human nature to gossip so addictedly about people one doesn't know -- all of those brightly painted, artificial familiars.

Jacqueline Onassis was clearly a sane woman. She kept a seemly silence. And for all the fragility she may have suggested in the big, round sunglasses and the head scarf, she wore some inner armoring; she possessed an eerie talent (a strategy of self-protection well known to those who handle dangerous animals) to make herself disappear, to dematerialize. If you saw her on the street, she would seem to abstract herself out of public attention, a kind of elegant vanishing. She would be, as she finally is now . . . elsewhere.