by Edward Klein
More praise for
Just Jackie
“Just when we thought nothing could shock us about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s well-publicized life, along comes Just Jackie: Her Private Years. Edward Kleins new biography of Jackie’s post-JFK years opens with a knockout punch.”
—New York Daily News
“[Klein] ends up doing quite a job of rehabilitating the image of Jackie in those years that she married and divorced Aristotle Onassis, lived and worked in Manhattan, and raised her children…. Touching details of her tragic illness and untimely death.”
—Liz Smith
New York Post
“Klein pumps schoolgirl chums, Secret Service agents, and other intimates to get the dish on the superstar First Lady.”
—Vanity Fair
“Just Jackie gives us a legend, warts and all.”
—Rocky Mountain News
“PLENTY OF REVELATIONS …
These incidents are balanced with other vignettes that show an extraordinary woman battling back from a series of calamities that would have crushed a lesser person.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
“Each [chapter] reads like a quick click of a camera giving readers snapshots of Jackie. By the end Klein has written a succinct biography while engendering enormous feelings and emotions. There are so many memorable moments on these pages…. The real story is about survival against enormous odds and how at the end of her life Jackie found both peace and contentment, as well as a graceful acceptance of where she was, and where she had been.”
—The Book Report
“Klein tracked down hundreds of sources in order to tell how the American icon raised her kids, found true love, and, ultimately, art-directed her own deathbed scene.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“Detail after detail about whom she loved and what she did with her days and, ultimately, how she found happiness.”
—The Providence Journal
“Jackie probably had a greater impact on history than her husband. She provided Americans with an unforgettable performance as a national heroine at a time when it was desperately needed. And, somehow, she survived our adulation to become a person in her own right.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Provide[s] intimate details about the president and first lady’s last night together and her reaction to seeing his body at Dallas’s Parkland Memorial Hospital.”
—Wahsington Times
“[An] enlightening biography.”
—The Register-Herald (WV)
By Edward Klein
NOVELS
IF ISRAEL LOST THE WAR
(Coauthored with Richard Littell and Richard Chesnoff)
THE PARACHUTISTS
NONFICTION
ALL TOO HUMAN: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy
JUST JACKIE: Her Private Years*
*Published by Ballantine Books
Books published by The Ballantine Publishing Group are available at quantity discounts on bulk purchases for premium, educational, fund-raising, and special sales use. For details, please call 1-800-733-3000.
To Michael Sacks
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I first began writing about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis almost a decade ago, in a cover story that appeared in Vanity Fair in the fall of 1989. Over the years, many people have helped me separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of tabloid invention about Jackie. Such guidance proved to be even more important for this book, which is about the least documented—and most controversial—period of Jackie’s life, her private, post-White House years.
Of the several hundred people who agreed to speak on and off the record for this book, I owe a special note of appreciation to Stelio Papadimitriou, Niki Goulandris, John Carl Warnecke, John Loring, Jack Anderson, Les Whitten, Ralph Graves, Peter Beard, Michael Beschloss, and Robert Lindsey.
In addition, contributions were made by Elizabeth Folberth, Linda Puner, Alfred Fariello, Deborah Creighton, Molly Ginty, Justine Fontinell, Anita Goss, and Amy Steiner.
My research assistants and I were steered in the right direction by Eulalie Regan at the Vineyard Gazette, Claudia Anderson at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, and Jane Payne at the John F. Kennedy Library.
At Ballantine Books, I want to thank Judith Curr, who shared my vision from the outset, as well as Peter Borland, Ellen Archer, and Emily Grayson.
My agent Robert Gottlieb and his associate at the William Morris Agency, Marcy Posner, provided wise counsel throughout the project.
My editors, Walter Anderson at Parade and Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, were unstinting in their encouragement.
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my wife, Dolores Barrett. Her intelligence, insight, and loving kindness sustained me throughout the long months that it took to research and write this book.
ONE
THE SUNDOWN OF
CHIVALRY
Friday Evening, November 29, 1963
THE STORYTELLER
A giant thunderbolt split open the night sky, and in the shuddering light a car emerged from a swirl of fog and raced on through the storm. Slumped in the backseat was the journalist Theodore White, a stubby little man in his late forties with thinning hair and an owlish expression. He took a slug from a plastic bottle that contained a decanted pint of Scotch whisky—his self-imposed allotment of alcohol for the long hours that lay ahead.
There was another huge flash of lightning, followed this time by a thumping crash of thunder. White peered out the window at the flooded stretch of highway. It was coming down in solid sheets of water, just the way it had rained a week ago on the night President Kennedy’s body was brought back from Dallas in a dark bronze coffin.
White had covered the assassination and the three-day pageant of Kennedy’s funeral for Life magazine. He was still physically exhausted and emotionally drained from the experience. Now, however, he found himself in a rented limousine, with a strange chauffeur, driving at breakneck speed through an old-fashioned northeaster on his way to another assignment for Life.
“There is something I want Life magazine to say to the country,” the President’s widow, Jacqueline Kennedy, had told White during a brief phone conversation from her home on Cape Cod, “and you must do it.”
White did not know what Jackie had in mind, but he could guess why she had chosen him above all other journalists to carry her message to the American people. He was the author of The Making of the President 1960, a book that had caught the mood and the strains of the election campaign, and that helped give birth to the myth of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Jackie had selected White because he was a storyteller with a talent for hero worship.
The limousine slowed down as it approached the summer resort town of Hyannis on Nantucket Sound. The board of selectmen of Barnstable Township had decked the façade of the town hall with black crepe in memory of the dead President, but the merchants had strung up colored Christmas lights along Main Street in an effort to dispel the gloom. White tossed down another stiff slug of Scotch and instructed the chauffeur to stop at a gas station. He got out, ducked into a telephone booth, and placed a call to New York City.
“How’s my mother doing?” he asked.
The thunder and pelting rain drowned out the reply.
“What? “ White shouted. “I can’t hear you.”
“She’s doing as well as can be expected,” Dr. Harold Rifkin, his family physician, yelled back into the phone.
White’s mother was gravely ill. It was she who had answered the telephone at her son’s East Side town house in Manhattan when Jackie called from the Cape, and in all the excitement, the old woman began having a heart attack. White was forced to make a hard decision: stay with his mother, or answer Jackie’s call.<
br />
On the phone, Jackie had not spoken to White in her tiny, whispery voice. She had used her other voice, the one rarely heard by strangers, the deep, expressive vibrato that she employed when she refused to take no for an answer. You must do it, she had told White, and he felt compelled to heed her summons. He chose Jackie over his mother, and drove off into the raging storm.
He was afflicted by pangs of guilt as his car pulled up to a checkpoint in front of the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. It was not quite eight-thirty on Friday, November 29, 1963. The presidential flag, illuminated by floodlights and tugged by the wind, was flying in the front yard of John and Jacqueline Kennedy’s rented summer house on nearby Squaw Island.
The place was crawling with Secret Service men. No one knew if the assassination had been part of a larger conspiracy, or whether a plot existed to murder Jackie and her young children, too. Two agents, dressed in water-stained trench coats and dripping fedoras, shone flashlights into White’s face, then waved him through an opening in the barricade.
The car crunched up the long driveway, past broad lawns that swept down to the gray, restless waters of Nantucket Sound. White took another snort of Scotch, cupped a hand over his mouth to check the smell on his breath, and climbed out of the limousine into the pouring rain. He dashed up the steps to the big veranda that wrapped around the white clapboard house belonging to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the family patriarch.
He knocked on the door and a maid ushered him into the first-floor parlor, which was filled with comfortable stuffed furniture. In the room, he spotted a number of familiar faces—Dave Powers, the President’s political crony; Chuck Spalding, Jack’s classmate at Harvard; Pat Lawford, the President’s sister; Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr.; and Clint Hill, the agent in charge of Jackie’s Secret Service detail. They greeted him with a chorus of friendly hellos, followed by polite inquiries about his mother.
He placed another call to New York City from the phone in the hallway, and while he waited for the long distance operator to connect him to Dr. Rifkin, he snuck another nip from his plastic bottle. He caught sight of himself in a mirror. His pale and frantic face was glistening with perspiration.
His mind reeled with what seemed like a thousand thoughts. The editors of Life were holding the magazine’s giant presses for him at a cost of $30,000 an hour. He must notify them as soon as possible about what Jackie had to say. His contract with Life called for him to be paid $5,000 for long pieces and $1,500 for so-called white-fang pieces—stories that could be done in one quick bite. He wondered whether his editors would try to pay him the lower rate for tonight’s work.
“There’s no change in your mother’s condition,” Dr. Rifkin informed him.
White put down the phone just as Jackie entered the room.
Out of the dozens of hours of funeral coverage that White had watched on television and events he had witnessed in person, he retained a few indelible images of Jackie: her swollen eyes behind the sheer veil, her sad black stockings, her firm, long stride as she marched behind the caparisoned horse and the President’s catafalque on the way to St. Matthew’s Cathedral. Jackie’s flawless performance during the President’s funeral had transformed her in the eyes of the public into a kind of paragon of virtue, practically a saint, and White half expected to find her here in Hyannis Port still dressed in mourning.
Instead she was turned out in trim black slacks, tapered at the ankles, and a beige pullover sweater. Even in flat shoes, she looked taller than White remembered. This impression of height was enhanced by her long, graceful neck, broad shoulders, and slim hips. Everything about her, even her hands, seemed slightly out of proportion, yet somehow absolutely right.
She had not bothered to fix her hair. It was tucked casually behind her ears, exposing the broad contours of her face with its high cheekbones and full, voluptuous mouth. Without eyeliner or mascara, her eyes seemed to be set even wider apart than they appeared in photos. But that was not what made them look different, White decided. It was their color. They were darker than before. Tragedy had both darkened and deepened her beauty.
“Oh, Teddy,” she said, “you came all the way up here in the storm just for me.”
He was suddenly stone-cold sober.
His fatigue, his anxiety over Life’s idle presses, his concern over his fee—all these worries left him in an instant. Even the guilt about his mother evaporated without a trace. The storyteller in White took over, and he thought: A talk with Mary Todd Lincoln a week after Lincoln’s assassination wouldn’t have been nearly as compelling as this.
“PARTS TOO PERSONAL FOR MENTION”
“What shall I say? What can I do for you?” Jackie asked after the others had left the room.
What could she do for him?
White was taken aback by the question. He unsnapped the leather case of his tape recorder and placed the machine on a table between them. Then, as the cold, driving rain rattled the windows in Hyannis Port, he flipped open his reporter’s notebook and scribbled his first impressions:
Composure … beautiful… eyes wider than pools … calm voice …
“Why don’t we pick up from our telephone call,” White suggested. “You said that journalists like Arthur Krock and Merriman Smith and all those people were going to write about Jack as history, and that isn’t the way you want him remembered. How do you want him remembered?”
Jackie took a long drag on her cigarette, making the tip turn red. As soon as she began to speak, White realized that he was going to hear more than he had bargained for. Jackie regarded him as a friend who also happened to be a journalist, rather than as a journalist who would record everything she said. He felt an obligation to protect her, and he pushed aside his tape recorder—a signal that it was safe for her to speak her mind.
“She poured out several streams of thought which mingled for two hours,” White recalled. “There was the broken narrative, the personal unwinding from the horror, the tale of the killing. Then there was the history part of it. And parts too personal for mention in any book but one of her own.”
White took eleven pages of notes, but as he confided years later to the author of this book and to one or two other close friends, he did not transcribe many of the most personal things that Jackie told him that night….
… How in Fort Worth, on the eve of the President’s assassination, Jackie and Jack had separate bedrooms in a suite on the eighth floor of the Hotel Texas. Her room was a hideous green, and it overlooked a neon-lit parking lot. Before turning in, she went into Jack’s bedroom. He was exhausted from the day’s politicking. Normally she would have said a quick good-night and returned to her room. But something had changed in the chemistry of their relationship, which in the past had been poisoned by Jack’s insatiable need for sex with an endless succession of women.
Jackie attributed the change in the relationship to the death three months earlier of their son Patrick Bouvier Kennedy. The premature baby had put up a stirring fight for life, and Jack had said, “Nothing must happen to Patrick, because I just can’t bear to think of the effect it might have on Jackie.” Then, when the infant died, Jack broke down in tears. It was the first time that Jackie had seen him cry.
Since then their relationship had deepened and been transformed, Jackie told White, and she felt closer to Jack than at any time in their ten-year marriage. And so Jackie slipped into her husband’s bed, and in the sickly green reflection cast by the neon light, she aroused him from the depths of his fatigue, and they made love for the last time….
… And the next morning, in a light drizzle, Jack addressed an outdoor rally of union men and they shouted, “Where’s Jackie?” And Jack pointed to his wife’s eighth-floor hotel window and said, “Mrs. Kennedy is organizing herself. It takes her a little longer, but, of course, she looks better than we do when she does it.”
The truth was, Jackie was delayed because she had just begun her menstrual period. It was her first normal monthly flow since Patrick Bouvier had bee
n delivered by cesarean section, and she remembered that it filled her with joy.
She and Jack had talked about having more children, but she feared that she might never get pregnant again. So the day that ended in blood had begun in blood, but the first blood was a sign of life. It meant that Jackie could begin to try to have another baby….
And White did not record the personal things that Jackie told him about her time alone with Jack as he lay dead in Trauma Room No. 1 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. Or, rather, what White chose to put down in his notebook was a bowdlerized version of the truth.
They kept trying to get a priest … there was a sheet over Jack, his foot was sticking out, whiter than the sheet. … I took his foot and kissed it. Then I pulled back the sheet. His mouth was so beautiful… his eyes were open. They found his hand under the sheet, and I held his hand all the time the priest was saying extreme unction There;.
There was blood everywhere. Not only on Jackie’s hair and gloves and skirt and stockings. Her panties were soaked with menstrual blood, too. She was covered in blood from head to foot. The heartrending Latin words, so familiar to her from her Catholic childhood—Si capax ego te absolvo …—staggered her, Jackie recalled, and she almost lost her balance. She felt that if she let go of Jack, she would collapse in their commingled blood.
She was determined to hold on to Jack at all costs. She did not see how she could go on without a man in her life, she told White. Her own father was dead. Jack’s father, Joe Kennedy, had been left speechless by a stroke, and could not protect her. Her brother-in-law Bobby was as devastated as she was by Jack’s murder.
