Dynastic Pickings

THE BOUVIERS by John H. Davis. 424 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $10.

Almost as common as a taxi driver's conviction that his experiences would make a terrific book is the delusion that one's fascinating family would make a colorful chronicle. John H. Davis, 39, who has been working on educational projects for the past ten years, first thought that he had a novel in the shirtsleeves-to-Social Register saga of his forebears and contemporaries, the Bouviers. When a cousin named Jacqueline became America's First Lady and then a fabulous folk heroine, it was immediately obvious to the highly motivated men of the book business that the story of this man's family was too valuable a property to be frittered away in fiction.

Two other writers were persuaded to get off Mr. Davis' literary turf. The publishers were only too glad to let him run on for 424 pages, including three genealogical tables and 19 pages of bibliographical notes--as though the Bouviers were either highly significant or vastly entertaining.

They are neither. As a result, the book is engorged with minutiae that might better have been left in the filing cabinet. Much of it is Dun & Bradstreet; the Bouviers' commonest denominator seems to have been a preoccupation with getting and spending. Getter No. 1 was Michel, a cabinetmaker from the Rhone Valley, who fled France after Waterloo to settle in Philadelphia and accumulate a tidy fortune in real estate. Getter No. 2 was one of his sons, Michel Charles. With his brother John, he bought seats on the New York Stock Exchange right after its reorganization in 1869 and proceeded to make the most of those free and easy times when rigging the market was one of the everyday facts of life. Quite appropriately, Wall Streeters referred to the amateur investors as "lambs." The $2,490,000 that Michel Charles left in 1935, when he finally died at 88, bailed the Bouviers out of the financial doldrums--for a while.

This was not all that he did for the family. He set them up with ten French-speaking servants in his mansion on 46th Street in Manhattan, bequeathing them a luxurious life-style that included a listing in the Social Register and a spuriously noble family tree--an embellishment not unheard of in those days among Americans with pretensions. One of the Auchinclosses, John Davis notes, concocted a chart tracing the family's descent from the royal lines of England, Scotland and France.

The Sheik. Prominent among Bouvier spenders was John Vernou Bouvier III, whose advent in the Bouvier story signals the start of those sections of the book that have induced most of its buyers to shell out their $10. Jack Bouvier was the father of two daughters, Jacqueline and Lee.

Among his Stock Exchange colleagues he was known variously as "Black Jack," "The Sheik" and "The Black Orchid." "The Black Narcissus" might have been more appropriate; he was a love-'em-and-leave-'em sort of fellow who had his shirt collars cut especially high to set off his perpetual sun-lamp tan, and once hung six photographs of himself in his bedroom. He extended his self-preoccupation far enough to include his two daughters --heaping exaggerated praise on Jackie to her face at family dinners and complaining that she did not spend enough time with him. When her mother, Janet, married again, Black Jack was consumed by jealousy of the higher standard of living that their stepfather was able to offer Lee and Jackie. At Jacqueline's wedding to young Senator John F. Kennedy in Newport, he became so incapacitated that he was unable to give the bride away.

Two Funerals. The final section of the book has some small rewards for Jackie-watchers: her charisma for her cousins as a young girl; her crisply efficient organization of her father's funeral (including picking up a favorite picture of him from one of his woman friends and sending Husband J.F.K. with it around to the New York Times); the Kennedys v. the Bouviers at the President's inaugural; John Jr.'s third birthday party on the day of his father's funeral.

What Cousin John Davis saw for himself is well enough observed and described. What he did not is competently served up. For all the attractions of a Bouvier-cum-Kennedy portrait, less than ravenous readers will find this book pretty thin and tasteless pickings.

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