SO HAPPY TOGETHER?

By ELIZABETH GLEICK

Marriage," the handsome young Senator John F. Kennedy told a friend as he contemplated the not entirely palatable prospect, "means the end of a promising political career, as it has been based up to now almost completely on the old sex appeal." How quaint that fear seems now, at a time when the desire to own third-rate objects that Kennedy and his wife Jackie once merely touched can set off a frenzied auction--at a time, that is, when the hunger for all things Kennedy appears ever unsated. Whatever other image problems the assorted Kennedys have battled over the years, loss of the old sex appeal has not been one.

That helps explain the appearance of not one but two books that dip into the seemingly bottomless well of Kennedy effluvia. Despite enough volumes about the clan to line a presidential library, no biographer until now had chosen to focus so explicitly on the relationship between the fun-loving, womanizing John Kennedy and the more aloof Jackie--perhaps no one dared do so until Jackie was safely in her grave. But though both Christopher Andersen's Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage (Morrow; $24) and Edward Klein's All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy (Pocket Books; $23) purport to be about the marriage, what they are mainly about is sex, sex, sex--with the emphasis on extramarital.

As in the unions of mere mortals, of course, the true dynamics of the Kennedy marriage remain essentially unknowable. But encountering this mystery at the core of their projects slowed down Andersen and Klein not at all. Using dozens of interviews and piles of documents--with a fair amount of overlap--the authors seize the opportunity to repeat some familiar Kennedy dirt and dig up a few new tidbits of their own. What intimate psychological revelations there are rarely rise above this level: "What drew them together?" Andersen asks. A friend of Kennedy's answers, "They were two lonely people, and they instantly recognized that in each other."

This lack of definitive or even consistent answers has not stopped Jack and Jackie from landing on best-seller lists, and All Too Human will no doubt follow. For in the way of many guilty pleasures, this gossipfest makes for swift and astounding reading, even if we have heard most of it before. Open either book at will and encounter the drunken Black Jack Bouvier perhaps too attached to his beautiful and precocious daughter; the eager Jack Kennedy pressing himself upon every woman he meets; Max ("Dr. Feelgood") Jacobson administering his amphetamine potions to both President and First Lady. Marilyn Monroe makes her usual cameo, and we are offered fresh evidence that Jackie really did have a knack for shopping.

The newsbreaks in these books come not in the form of profound revelations about the Kennedys as a couple but in the addition of new notches to their bedposts. Add Audrey Hepburn to Kennedy's, says Andersen, and William Holden to Jackie's. Andersen says it is likely, and Klein firmly claims, that Jackie lost her virginity in a Paris elevator to author John P. Marquand Jr. Klein describes, in a scene that begs credulity, how Jackie asked a CIA agent to ship her diaphragm from Washington to Italy so she could sleep with Gianni Agnelli.

This is not to say the books are interchangeable. Klein, a contributor to Vanity Fair, uses that magazine's patented "I was there" narrative style to great effect. An acquaintance of Jackie's in the 1980s, Klein offers a reader vivid glimpses of her, as well as poignant descriptions of how she would ask Kennedy allies, such as former Connecticut Governor Abraham Ribicoff and press secretary Pierre Salinger, to talk to John and Caroline about their father.

Somehow, through the accretion of such details, the arc of a relationship does begin dimly to emerge. A marriage that may not have been for love alone, nor for money, nor for political expediency grew to have a measure of each. "He did not object to marrying Jackie because it would put a crimp in his sex life," Klein writes,"...but he knew that marriage would bring certain wrenching changes. For one thing, he would have to trust Jackie with his deepest secrets." Both authors believe that ultimately he did so, and that the bond deepened as Kennedy realized how much the public loved his wife, and how much he loved their children. At the time of Kennedy's assassination, their friends agree, Jack and Jackie were as close as they had ever been. Klein describes how, after the death of their infant son Patrick in 1963, "she hung onto him and he held her in his arms--something nobody ever saw at any other time because they were very private people."

Jack and Jackie, themselves inveterate gossipers and image tenders, would probably not be surprised to see how hard these writers have worked to shatter that privacy. But as Jackie said to journalist Theodore H. White during their famous Camelot interview, "When something is written down, does that make it history? The things they say!"