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Estateliest of the Kennedy homes is Jack and Jackie Kennedy's rented, 14-room French Provincial winter weekend retreat, Glen Ora. in Virginia's tweedy hunt country. Built in 1810. Glen Ora is decorated in manored elegance: Louis XV and Regency chairs in the drawing room, a Duncan Phyfe table and Hepplewhite chairs in the dining room. The President's bedroom is off-white with a three-quarter mahogany sleigh bed, a mahogany bureau, and a red and white slipcovered lounge chair; Jackie's bedroom has twin beds, a French desk, and is papered in a mixed pink-on-white flower print. Outdoors, one modern contraption terrifies passersby: a hidden, wired loudspeaker, manned by a security detail, that thunders "What do you want?" at would-be visitors. In spite of Glen Ora's baronial atmosphere, some presidential staffers have complained that it offers no place to loll about during a meeting, except on the floor.
Villas & Beach Houses. Splashiest of the Kennedy homes is Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford's nine-room, neo-Spanish beach house in Santa Monica, Calif. The former home of Movie Magnate Louis B. Mayer, the house is done in Metro-Goldwyn-Modrun. It has marble bathrooms, and in the living room, a movie screen rises from the floor at the touch of a button. To accommodate their four children, the Lawfords have converted Mayer's garden greenhouse into a playhouse; though the Pacific is right off their front door, they have a fresh water swimming pool that is the envy of such neighbors as Actor Brian Aherne and Septuagenarian Siren Mae West.
Cold weather hangout for the Florida-vacationing Kennedy clan is Joe Kennedy's 16-room winter home on Millionaires' Row in Palm Beach. Modest by local Taj Mahal standards, the house has a simple, lived-in look. The living room furniture is slipcovered in durable green and white flowered chintz and is arranged, says one reporter, so that "there are aisles for the children to run through." As in all the Kennedy homes, the center of activities is outdoors, by the tennis court and swimming pool. From poolside, Joe Kennedy telephones around the U.S. to his children and business associates. "I used to work hard," he once said. "Now I just sit here by the pool and make more money than I ever did."
Waystop for the Kennedys abroad is the villa Vista Bella, rented every summer since 1957 by Joe Kennedy (for $2,000 a month) at Cap d'Antibes on the French Riviera. The interior of the villa is as dark as a cave, and is an idle mixture of Louis XV, Louis XVI, Chinese and Magyar decorative styles. Plumbing is in the classic French tradition: huge tiled arenas with a tangled network of pipes and valves from which issue alarming gurgles and lukewarm, pale-beige water. The main attraction of the house is its distance from the crowded resorts at Cannes and Juan-les-Pins and its proximity to the swimming, sunning and water skiing at the Riviera's chic Eden Roc beach.