15 Weird Facts About Jackie Kennedy’s Obsession With Interior Design HT
She walked into the White House for the first time as first lady and described it as looking like it had been furnished by a discount store. She blew through a $50,000 budget in two weeks. She secretly hired a French designer and then had to hide his involvement from the entire country because using French talent on the American president’s home would have been a political disaster.
She fired the first curator she hired because the woman kept making decisions without asking her first. She put antique French wallpaper from 1834 on a government building wall and passed a law to make sure nobody could ever take it down. She went on television and walked 80 million viewers through the rooms she had rebuilt without a single rehearsed line and did it in one take.
And she did all of it in less than a thousand days. Here are 15 weird facts about Jackie Kennedy’s obsession with interior design. Fact one, she first visited the White House as a child and never forgot how disappointing it was. Jackie Kennedy first visited the White House as a child in 1941 when she was 11 years old.
The visit left an impression that stayed with her for the rest of her life, but not for the reasons one might expect. She was not dazzled or inspired. She was underwhelmed. She later told Life magazine that from the outside she remembered the feeling of the place, but inside all she remembered was shuffling through.
She said there was not even a booklet you could buy and that Mount Vernon and the National Gallery of Art had made a far greater impression. That childhood memory of a poorly presented, historically incoherent building became the seed of everything she did 20 years later.
When she moved into the White House in January of 1961 as first lady, she already knew what was wrong with it, and she already had a strong sense of what needed to happen. She was not arriving as someone encountering the problem for the first time. She was arriving as someone who had been thinking about the problem since she was 11 years old.
The contrast between her childhood impression and the building she left behind is one of the more striking details in the entire story of the Kennedy White House. She walked through rooms that made no impression on her as a child. She walked out nearly 3 years later, having turned those same rooms into what historians now credit as the most significant and influential White House interior project in the building’s history.
The disappointment she felt at 11 was not something she forgot. It was something she eventually fixed. Fact two, she called the White House a dreary Mason Blanch and a discount store. When Jaclyn Kennedy first assessed the White House as her incoming home in late 1960, she did not mince words in private.
She privately described the residence as that dreary Maison blah, which is simply French for White House. The phrase carrying the weight of her full disdain. She felt it looked like it had been furnished by discount stores. And she specifically objected to features like drinking water fountains mounted on various walls inside the building, which she found absurdly institutional for a residence that was supposed to represent the highest aspirations of the American republic.
Some of what she found was genuinely understandable given recent history. During the Truman administration from 1949 to 1952, the White House had been structurally condemned. The interior had to be gutted and rebuilt with steel to keep it from collapsing. The reconstruction had been so expensive that when it came to refernishing the rooms, Truman’s administration had gone to department stores and bought modern reproduction furniture in bulk.
The rooms were functional and presentable, but they had no historical character whatsoever. The other problem was my Eisenhower’s fondness for the color pink, which had made its way onto walls, upholstery, and furnishings throughout the private quarters. Jackie’s reaction to the pink was, by the accounts of people who heard her describe it, visceral and total.
The pink had to go. All of it. Immediately, that was the starting point of one of the most celebrated interior design projects in American history. A woman who hated pink and thought the most famous house in the country looked like a discount store, deciding that she was going to fix both problems before she left.
Fact three, she spent the entire $50,000 budget in 2 weeks. When Jackie Kennedy began the White House restoration in January of 1961, she had been allocated a budget of $50,000 for the refurbishment of the private living quarters on the second floor. The JFK library’s own documentation of the project confirms what happened next.
Within 2 weeks of moving in, the entire $50,000 was gone. She and decorator Sister Parish moved through the second floor at a pace that left the household staff struggling to keep up. Furniture was ordered, wall colors were decided, fabrics were selected, and the money evaporated with a speed that reflected both the scale of what needed doing and the decisiveness with which Jackie approached every decision.
There was no period of cautious planning followed by gradual spending. She knew what she wanted and she bought it. Rather than being deterred by the exhausted budget, she immediately began building the financial framework that would fund the rest of the project. She turned to Henry Francis Dupont, the renowned collector of American decorative arts who ran the Winter Museum in Delaware and proposed the formation of what became the fine arts committee for the White House.
The committee gave the project credibility, attracted donors, and eventually generated enough in contributions and guidebook sales to fund a $2 million restoration. But it all started with $50,000 disappearing in 14 days. Fact four, she secretly hired a French designer and hid his involvement from the public.
The official story of the White House restoration, as it was presented to the American public during the Kennedy years, featured two principal creative figures. Sister Parish, an American decorator with impeccable social connections, and Henry Francis Dupont, the American Antiques Authority. Both were real contributors.
Neither was the person Jackie actually trusted most to make the rooms look the way she wanted them to look. That person was Stfan Budan, a Parisian designer who was president of Maison Jansen, the most prestigious interior design firm in France. Bodin had previously worked on the restoration of part of the palace of Versailles.
Jackie had been introduced to his work through her friend Jane Writzman, whose Palm Beach home Bodine had designed. Jackie was immediately convinced he was exactly what the White House project needed. The problem was political. She had already been publicly criticized for her preference for French fashion and French culture.
Having a French designer as the primary creative force behind the renovation of the American president’s home would have generated a scandal. So Bodin’s role was kept quiet. He came to Washington and worked on the rooms. His name did not appear in the press releases or the fine arts committee announcements. He was as the biography.
com account of the project described it kept hidden. The arrangement worked until a Washington Post article in September of 1962 outed his involvement entirely, causing embarrassment for Jackie’s office. By that point, Bodí had already been given increasing control over most of the major rooms. The red room, the blue room, the state dining room, all carried his mark.
He was, as one design historian later wrote, the true taste maker who redefined the White House rooms as stylish, historically inspired backdrops for the Kennedy presidency. He just could not be publicly credited for any of it while it was happening. Fact five, she fired the first White House curator.
She hired in March of 1961. Jackie Kennedy appointed Lorraine Waxman Pierce as the first official White House curator, a position that had never existed before. Pierce was 26 years old. A graduate of the prestigious Winter program in early American culture, and she was exceptionally wellqualified for the job.
She began cataloging the collection, developing acquisitions policy, and collaborating with Jackie on the restoration. She also co-wrote the first White House guide book, By Any Reasonable Measure, she was performing well. Jackie fired her after approximately a year. The Washington Post’s obituary of Pierce, who died in 2017, described the removal as a surprise to Pierce herself.
She was not formally dismissed, but was reassigned from the curator role to write the guide book full-time, after which she resigned, officially citing a desire to spend more time with her family. The reason for the friction documented across multiple sources, including the family handyman’s historical account of the restoration, was that PICE had a habit of making decisions without asking for Jackie’s approval first.
In Jackie Kennedy’s household, that was a rule-ending offense. She had established the curator position and defined its scope. The curator was there to execute Jackie’s vision, not to develop an independent one. After PICE left, Jackie wrote a note to the incoming curator, William Voss, Elder III, telling him that having him on the job was, in her words, paradise.
The comparison was unmistakable. Fact six, she got a law passed to protect everything she put in the White House. Before Jackie Kennedy arrived, there was no law governing what happened to the contents of the White House when a president left office. The furniture, the artwork, the decorative objects, everything in the building was essentially at the disposal of the outgoing president and their family.
President Chester Arthur had reportedly carted away three wagon loads of historic furniture when he departed in 1885. Items that had been in the White House for generations, simply walked out the door with departing administrations, and nobody could stop them. Jackie found this situation completely unacceptable.
She was assembling a collection of historically significant objects, tracking down pieces that had belonged to past presidents, persuading private collectors to donate irreplaceable antiques, and spending enormous effort to build something permanent. The idea that the next administration could remove or sell any of it was intolerable.
In September of 1961, Congress passed public law 87-286, which officially designated the White House a museum. The law meant that anything placed in the White House as part of the museum collection would go to the Smithsonian Institution rather than to departing presidents if they decided they did not want it.
The collection Jackie was building was now legally protected. She had not only redesigned the building, she had changed the legal framework that governed it. Any future president who wanted to gut the rooms she had restored would have to fight a law to do it. Fact seven. She put antique 1834 French wallpaper on a government wall.
One of the most striking design decisions Jackie Kennedy made during the White House restoration was the installation of antique scenic wallpaper in the diplomatic reception room on the ground floor. The wallpaper was not a reproduction or a custom commission. It was original antique paper manufactured in France in 1834 by the firm Jean Zuber AC.
The paper depicted scenes of North America, including Boston Harbor, West Point, and Niagara Falls, rendered in the French scenic panoramic style that was fashionable in the early 19th century. The paper had originally been hung in a house in Thermont, Maryland. Jackie tracked it down, recognized its historical and aesthetic value, and arranged for it to be carefully removed and reinstalled on the curved walls of the diplomatic reception room.
The installation was technically demanding because the room is elliptical and the paper had to be fitted around a curved surface without damaging panels that were nearly 130 years old at the time of installation. The wallpaper is still in the diplomatic reception room today. It is one of the few elements of Jackie’s White House restoration that has never been removed or altered by any subsequent administration.
Every president and every foreign dignitary who has entered the White House through the diplomatic reception room in the past 60 years has walked past Jackie Kennedy’s 1834 French wallpaper. It is in its quiet way one of the most permanent things she ever put her name to. Fact eight. She insisted the word restoration be used instead of redecoration.
Language mattered to Jackie Kennedy in everything she did. And on one point regarding her White House project, she was insistent to the point of correction. The project was a restoration, not a redecoration. She told Life magazine directly that it would be sacrilege merely to redecorate the White House, calling it a word she hated, and that what she was doing was restoring it, which had nothing to do with decoration.
She said it was a question of scholarship. The distinction was not performative. It reflected her genuine conception of what the project required. Redecoration meant expressing personal taste. Restoration meant recovering historical truth. The two activities used some of the same tools, choosing fabrics, selecting furniture, deciding on paint colors, but they were guided by entirely different principles.
A decorator asks what looks good. A restorer asks what was actually there. Jackie was asking the second question, and she wanted everyone around her to understand that distinction and to use the correct word when describing what she was doing. She enforced the language rule consistently. Staff members and committee members who slipped into using the word redecoration in her presence were corrected.
Official White House communications used the word restoration. The fine arts committee was named and framed in terms of historic preservation rather than interior design. Every word choice reinforced the same message. This was scholarship, not decoration. And the woman leading it expected to be taken seriously as a historian, not celebrated as a homemaker with good taste. Fact nine.
She did the entire television tour in one take without a single rehearsed line. On February 14th, 1962, Jacqueline Kennedy led CBS journalist Charles Collingwood through the newly restored White House in a 1-hour television special called A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy. The broadcast aired simultaneously on CBS and NBC.
When ABC rebroadcast it 4 days later, the cumulative audience had reached 80 million people. It was the most watched television program of its day. What the audience of 80 million did not know was that the tour had not been scripted. Jackie wrote her own notes beforehand, studied them, decided the route through the rooms herself, and then performed the entire hour from those personal notes without a single rehearsed line.
The producers later documented that they never needed to reshoot any scenes with her. One account of the production described her as a one-take wonder. >> >> The hour of television that introduced most of America to the concept of historic preservation was delivered by a woman who simply knew the rooms, knew the history, and walked through both without needing a second attempt.
The television academy recognized the broadcast with its trustee award, an honorary Emmy, describing the program as a singular experience. Ladybird Johnson accepted the award on Jackie’s behalf at the ceremony. The tour was taped and sent around the world, shown cinematically in countries including China and the Soviet Union as a piece of American cultural diplomacy.
A project Jackie had fought to have taken seriously as scholarship had become one of the most effective pieces of soft power the United States produced during the Cold War. And she had done it in one take. Fact 10. She was caught in jeans and covered in soot during the restoration.
The PBS American Experience documentary on Jackie Kennedy and the White House included an account from Harris Waford, who had been a special assistant to the president on civil rights. Waford described bringing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into the White House residence for a meeting with the president, a meeting that had to be handled with considerable discretion given the political sensitivity of the civil rights situation in 1961.
The two men got into the elevator and it went down instead of up. When the doors opened, Jacqueline Kennedy got on. She was wearing jeans. Her face was covered in soot. She had clearly been in the middle of hands-on work somewhere in the building. Waford introduced her to Dr. King.
She shook his hand, apparently entirely unbothered by either the unexpected encounter or her own appearance, and the moment passed. The detail was one of several that emerged over the years to illustrate the degree to which Jackie’s involvement in the restoration was physical and direct, not merely supervisory.
She went into storage facilities personally to look through items. She visited Henry Dupant’s Winterthther Museum herself on May 8th, 1961. To begin what Dupant described as her education in American decorative arts, she climbed around half-finish rooms examining work in progress. The woman who appeared on television in a perfectly composed pale pink ensemble, describing the historical significance of each piece of furniture in measured authoritative sentences, was the same woman who rode the elevator covered in soot and introduced herself
to the most prominent civil rights leader in America without missing a beat. Fact 11. She tracked down furniture that had left the White House over a century. One of the more remarkable aspects of Jackie Kennedy’s restoration project was the detective work it required. Pieces of historically significant White House furniture had been leaving the building for over a century, taken by departing presidents, sold at auction, donated to museums, or simply lost track of over the decades.
Jackie and her committee set about finding them. The effort produced extraordinary results. As Time magazine reported at the time, pieces donated back to the White House during the restoration included furniture once owned by George Washington, James and Dolly Madison, James Monroe, Martin Van Beern, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln.
Members of the fine arts committee actively hunted for period appropriate pieces in private collections, museums, and antique markets. Jackie herself approached individual collectors directly, often with charming and difficult to refuse personal letters. One of the more famous of those letters was the one she wrote to Walter Annenburgg, who owned a valuable portrait of Benjamin Franklin.
She asked him whether a great Philadelphia citizen would give the White House a portrait of another great Philadelphia citizen. Annenburgg donated the portrait. The same approach, personal, specific, framed in terms of historical significance rather than as a request for charity, produced hundreds of acquisitions across the life of the project.
By the time the restoration was substantially complete, more than 500 new items had entered the White House collection. Each one tracked down, verified, and placed with the same level of care Jackie brought to every other detail of the project. Fact 12. She was embarrassed when a desk on the TV tour turned out to be a fake.
The Washington Post article from September of 1962 that exposed Stefan Boudin’s hidden role in the White House restoration also reported something else that was considerably more awkward for Jackie’s office. A desk that she had discussed during the televised White House tour presented as an authentic antique was not authentic. It had been constructed around 1880, decades after the period it was supposed to represent.
The desk in question had been donated to the White House as part of the restoration effort, accepted in good faith, and included in the green room. Jackie had mentioned it during the tour as one of the interesting historical pieces in the room. When the Posts reporting revealed it was a reproduction rather than an original, the story became a minor scandal.
Combining the embarrassment of the Budan exposure with the humiliation of having vouched publicly for a fake, the desk was subsequently removed from the green room. The incident illustrated the difficulty of the project Jackie had taken on. She was assembling a collection at speed, relying on expert verification that was sometimes incomplete in a highly public environment where any error would be immediately scrutinized.
The fact that a single misattributed desk was the most significant authentication failure in the entire project out of more than 500 acquisitions was actually a testament to how carefully the process had generally been managed. But it stung and she did not forget it. Fact 13. Henry Dupont.
Privately doubted she could love American furniture. Henry Francis Dupont, the 81-year-old collector Jackie, appointed to chair her fine arts committee, was deeply committed to American decorative arts. His entire life’s work at Winer had been devoted to proving that American furniture and interiors could stand alongside the finest work produced anywhere in the world.
He brought that commitment to the White House project with genuine enthusiasm. He also had one persistent private concern about the woman who had appointed him. Dupant wrote in private correspondence quoted in the classic Chicago magazine account of the winter through exhibition about their collaboration that he had a feeling that Jackie’s real interest was in French things and that she did not believe you could have a swell house with American furniture.
He said he wanted her to see that you could. The concern was not paranoid. Jackie was a lifelong franophile who had spent a year in Paris, studied French literature, hired a French chef, worn French clothes, and secretly brought in a French designer to run most of the major rooms of the restoration. The tension between Dupont’s American vision and Jackie’s French instincts ran through the entire project.
When they disagreed about whether a particular room should feature American Empire or French Empire furnishings, Jackie reportedly resolved the argument by telling DuPont that as long as the piece had an eagle on it, it did not matter whether it was French. Dupont was not entirely reassured.
But the collaboration worked, and the rooms they produced together were historically coherent in ways that satisfied both of their standards, even if they got there by different routes. Fact 14. The restoration cost $2 million and transformed the White House into a museum. The final cost of Jackie Kennedy’s White House restoration was approximately $2 million.
It covered most of the family rooms on the second floor. Nearly all the public stateooms on the first floor and set a standard for the building stewardship that every subsequent administration has been measured against. The project took less than three years to complete and was by the time it was substantially finished in the autumn of 1963 recognized as the most significant transformation the White House interior had undergone in its history.
The funding came from multiple sources. The Fine Arts Committee raised contributions from private donors. The White House guide book, which Jackie helped create and which sold for $1 a copy, eventually generated enough revenue to fund the entire restoration. The White House Historical Association, which Jackie established in November of 1961 as a private nonprofit organization to support the collection, became the permanent institutional structure for maintaining and building on what she had started. It continues to operate today.
What she left behind was not just a renovated building. It was a legal framework, a nonprofit institution, a museum quality collection protected by federal law, a published guide book, and a standard of historic preservation that her successors have been expected to honor ever since.
Nancy Reagan specifically expressed admiration for the Kennedy style and made efforts to recreate elements of it during her own White House years. The $2 million project produced something worth far more than its cost. not in monetary terms, but in the permanent change it made to how Americans understood and related to the building where their presidents lived. Fact 15.
The restoration was still unfinished the day JFK was assassinated when President Kennedy was shot in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963. The White House restoration was not finished. Jackie had been working with Stefane Bodin on the final phase of the project throughout that autumn, and the rooms that remained on their list had not yet been completed.
The sudden end of the Kennedy administration meant that the restoration abruptly stopped at the point it had reached on that specific day. The JFK libraryies documentation of the restoration notes that although the Kennedy restoration abruptly ended with the president’s death, most of the stateooms on the ground and first floors were complete, the rooms that remained undone stayed undone, at least in Jackie’s version.
During the Johnson presidency, most of the completed rooms remained unchanged in deference to the Kennedys. Lyndon Johnson kept JFK’s angel print bedding. He kept Bodin’s blue room. He kept the 1834 French wallpaper in the diplomatic reception room. The unfinished state of the restoration when Jackie left gave her work a quality it might not otherwise have had.
It was not the completed monument of a triumphant project. It was the interrupted work of someone who was not done yet, preserved mid-sentence by the assassination that ended everything else as well. What she managed to finish in less than a thousand days became one of the most enduring interior design legacies in American history.
What she would have done with a room still on her list is something nobody will ever know. Jackie Kennedy walked into a building she had first seen as a disappointed 11-year-old child, blew through its entire budget in two weeks, secretly imported a French designer, fired a curator who made decisions without asking her, passed a federal law to protect the furniture she had hunted down across more than a century of history, and then walked 80 million Americans through the result in one unscripted take.
She did not finish. The assassination stopped her before she was done. But what she completed in less than 3 years changed the way the entire country thought about the building at the center of its national life. And it has not been undone since. If this video gave you something to think about, leave a like and subscribe.
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