It’s easy to imagine cutlery clinking, chandeliers sparkling and two icons staring at each other. On June 5, 1961, John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy dined with Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t a state banquet, but instead a highly formal dinner in the midst of a European tour. All accounts agree on one thing: the evening was anything but carefree, with extraneous guests shunned and personal sensitivities ruffled. In his book Q: A Voyage Around the Queen, British journalist Craig Brown meticulously recounted the waltz of the evening that Camelot came to Buckingham.
According to Brown, Jackie Kennedy had requested the presence of her sister, Lee Radziwill, and her brother-in-law, Polish Prince Stanislaw Albrecht Radziwill, at the dinner. Initially considered undesirable because the former had already been divorced once and the latter twice, Elizabeth II finally relented and extended the invitations after “much hesitation.” However, the sovereign’s strong position enabled her to exact revenge in her own way. According to writer Gore Vidal, a close friend of Jackie Kennedy, the monarch deliberately withheld invitations from Princess Margaret and Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, whom the American first lady had expressly asked to meet. The result, Brown wrote, was an evening of “dreary platitude” that left the first lady unimpressed. “No Margaret, no Marina, no one but every Commonwealth agriculture minister they could find,” she was quoted as saying.
Yet it was in the midst of this staid ceremony that a moment of connivance between the two women is said to have arisen. The Queen is said to have asked Jackie Kennedy about her recent tour of Canada, leading the first lady to confide how “exhausting” it was to perform for hours on end, and Elizabeth II, “looking conspiratorial,” according to Brown, replied: “With time, you become astute, you learn to take it easy.” The line alone sums up a royal philosophy of public survival: Allowing yourself a side exit, a detour, an airlock—in short, keeping your breath to last. According to Vidal, Jackie found the exchange with the sovereign “rather laborious.” When Vidal later reported the phrase to Princess Margaret, she reportedly retorted, with acid phlegm: “But that’s why she’s here.”
This little sound bite says a lot about the era and the contrast the two iconic women embodied. On the one hand, there was Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis, who had then only recently moved into the White House and was astonishingly modern. On the other, a monarch in a woolen suit, crown on her head, who had reigned over traditions for the past decade. Should this be seen as a rivalry? Not necessarily, as their relationship continued without public drama. Jackie Kennedy returned to see the Queen in 1962, and after JFK’s assassination, Elizabeth II honored the late President’s memory in the presence of Jackie and the children. But Elizabeth’s simple advice has endured through the ages, applicable to many public figures, precisely because it sheds light on the intimate mechanics of charisma. Grace isn’t just magnetism, it’s also technique. And at Buckingham, as at the White House, it’s an essential survival skill.
Originally published in Vanity Fair France.
