The Stylishness of Her Privacy

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.