Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  He was almost run down by one of the smoke-belching diesel buses that plied N Street day and night with tourists eager for a glimpse of the former First Lady and her children. The front door was raised high off the street by several flights of stairs, and McNamara had to push his way past a group of tourists who were taking each other’s pictures on Jackie’s front stoop. He rang the doorbell, and was ushered inside by Secret Service agent Clint Hill.

  “I’m a freak now,” Jackie told McNamara as she escorted him into the living room. “I’ll always be a freak. I can’t take it anymore. They’re like locusts, they’re everywhere. Women are always breaking through the police lines trying to grab and hug and kiss the children as they go in and out. I can’t even change my clothes in private because they can look into my bedroom window.”

  Jackie had not counted on becoming a national institution as a result of her televised performance after Dallas. She walked over to the living-room windows and drew the curtains, then turned back to McNamara. Her eyes were rimmed in red. Her uncombed hair looked dry and brittle.

  McNamara felt pity for her. She had been elevated to the position of a mythical folk heroine, and yet she was a virtual prisoner in her own home. In the first few weeks after the assassination, she was inundated by several hundred thousand letters of condolence. Congress voted to give her office space for one year, and secretarial expenses of $50,000 to handle the bales of letters that arrived daily. She was assigned ten Secret Service agents—the first time the widow of a president had been given round-the-clock protection.

  Jackie was the widow of the wealthiest man ever to occupy the White House, and people assumed that she was rich. But in fact she had been left with relatively little money. In his will, President Kennedy had given her a lump-sum payment of $70,000 in cash, plus all of his personal effects—furniture, silverware, dishes, china, glass ware, and linens. In addition, there was the interest income from two trusts, valued at $10 million, which he had established for his wife and children. Jackie’s annual income came to less than $200,000—a handsome sum by most people’s standards, but an inadequate amount for a woman who was now expected to play the role of Her American Majesty.

  Like most of the men who came to visit Jackie, McNamara was a little bit in love with her. Eager to please, he wasted no time in unwrapping his present. As the brown paper fell to the floor, an unfinished oil portrait of John Kennedy was revealed. The painter had completed the President’s face and shoulders, but had left a large part of the canvas blank.

  “This artist came to me, and said that he had been working on this portrait from life,” McNamara told her. “He had a few more sittings to go when the President died. He said he didn’t intend to complete it, and that he knew of my love for the President, and thought I’d find the painting appealing, and that I could buy it. So I did. If you want it, Jackie, it’s yours.”

  Jackie was extremely fond of McNamara. He had played a key role in picking out the site of Jack Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, a spot just below the Curtis-Lee Mansion that was in a direct line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It was the perfect place. But as Jackie examined the gift that McNamara had brought her today, she realized he had been the victim of a hoax. Jack had never sat for an oil portrait. The painting was copied from a photograph. And it was not a very good copy at that.

  “Oh, Bob,” she said, smiling through her tears, “it’s lovely. Thank you so much.”

  After McNamara arrived home, however, there was a phone message waiting for him from Jackie.

  “Bob,” she said when he returned her call, “I can’t keep the portrait. You must take it back.”

  “For heaven’s sake, why?” he asked.

  “Because I had it on the floor in the dining room, leaning against the wall where I was going to hang it,” she said. “And Caroline and John came in and saw it. They kissed it. It’s more than I can stand.”

  “DANKE SCHOEN”

  As hard as she tried, Jackie could not escape the morbid pull of the past. The crowds in front of her home on N Street thickened by the day. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John McCormack, insisted on presenting her with no fewer than six flags that had flown over the capitol during the weekend of her husband’s funeral. Lyndon Johnson considered appointing her ambassador to France or Mexico, which, if she had accepted, would have made the new President wildly popular with the legions of Jackie admirers. It would also have had the added benefit of getting Jackie out of Johnson’s way.

  Johnson feared a kind of Kennedy government-in-exile, with Bobby as the heir presumptive and Jackie as the dowager queen. But Jackie did not want a public life. She wanted a private life, and the companionship of men on whom she could lean for support. The trouble was, if she ventured outside her house with a man who was considered a possible suitor, people began to talk.

  That was what happened one night when her sister Lee Radziwill suggested that she and Jackie have dinner with Marlon Brando and his best friend, George Englund, with whom Lee was involved. The four of them went to the Jockey Club, Washington’s most exclusive restaurant, where they drank martinis and got uproariously drunk.

  Jackie and Lee sat together on the banquette, whispering conspiratorially into each other’s ear. The sisters had almost identical voices—rough, whispery vibratos—and the same gestures. They were having a splendid time until someone tipped off the press, and a group of photographers suddenly appeared in the restaurant.

  Jackie, Lee, Marlon, and George fled through the kitchen exit and went back to Jackie’s house. There they mixed a fresh batch of martinis, and Jackie turned down the lights and put a song on the record player so they could dance. She chose Wayne Newton’s rendition of “Danke Schoen.” Lee and Englund started dancing and necking. Jackie and Brando got up to dance, too.

  No one in America was as famous as Jackie, but Brando came pretty close. He still had the perfectly chiseled forehead and jaw line from his Streetcar Named Desire days, but at age forty, he was beginning to lose his hair and put on some weight. His latest movie, The Ugly American, which Englund had directed, had been a big disappointment at the box office. Still, when he chose to, Marlon Brando could be a sexual tidal wave, on or off the screen.

  Many of Jackie’s acquaintances thought that she was a prude, the kind of repressed Catholic girl who ran the faucet when she went to the bathroom, but as Brando later told a friend, this was not the way she behaved with him. As they danced, she pressed her thighs against his and did everything she could to arouse him. When the music stopped, she went over to the record player and dragged the needle back to the beginning of the record. The room was filled again with the sound of Wayne Newton singing “Danke Schoen.”

  Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen,

  Thank you for all the joy and pain….

  Jackie slipped back into Brando’s arms. They talked about going away on a skiing vacation together, just the two of them. Brando could feel Jackie’s breath on his ear. He felt that Jackie expected him to make a move, try to take her to bed.

  However, Brando was not a big drinker, and liquor had more of an impact on him than it did on most people. A friend of Brando’s speculated that the actor was concerned that if he got Jackie into bed, he might not be able to perform sexually. The fear of impotence might not have inhibited another man, but it was enough to stop Brando, who worried about his reputation as a great lover.

  At the next break in the music, Brando abruptly excused himself and bid the sisters good night. With Englund at his side, Brando staggered drunkenly out of Jackie’s house, slipped, and almost fell. The Secret Service men stationed in front of the house rushed forward to catch him, but Brando caught himself at the last moment and managed to walk stiffly down the stairs to the street, then climb into a waiting car.

  At the open door, a totally bewildered Jackie watched Brando disappear into the night.

  BIZARRE BEHAVIOR

  More and mo
re, Jackie was thrown back on the company of the one man in Washington who did not seem to excite any prurient gossip, her Secret Service man, Clint Hill. Tall, handsome, and as laconic as a movie cowboy, Hill had all the attributes of an American hero. He had been a football star at Concordia College in his native North Dakota, and married his high school sweetheart, Gwen Brown, who still sang in her church choir.

  Among his Secret Service colleagues, Hill was considered to be an agent’s agent. One time, Jackie asked him if he would like to bring his children, who were about the same ages as Caroline and John, to the White House to play. Hill gently explained to her why he thought that would not be the professional thing to do.

  In Dallas, Hill had hurled himself onto the trunk of the presidential limousine as Jackie was reaching for a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. Hill grabbed her and pushed her into the backseat, then crawled on top of her and lay there protecting her.

  Since then, Jackie’s feelings toward Hill had passed beyond the realm of gratitude to a kind of deep and dependent affection. She had asked President Johnson to give Hill the Treasury Department’s highest award for the exceptional bravery he displayed in Dallas.

  Hill did not believe that he deserved the medal. On the night before the assassination, he and eight other Secret Service agents had stayed up into the small hours of the morning drinking at the Fort Worth Press Club. They claimed later, rather implausibly, that they had not drunk a lot. In any case, Hill got only four hours’ sleep, and was not at the top of his form the next day in Dallas. He was convinced that if he had reacted only five tenths of a second or perhaps a second faster, he would have taken the third shot, the one that killed the President. It was Hill’s job to take that bullet, and he had failed.

  His closeness to Jackie only intensified his feelings of guilt. Over the past couple of years, he had traveled with Jackie to India, chauffeured her from appointment to appointment in Washington, and become involved in the daily routine of her life. After their withering experience in Dallas, they had developed an even closer bond, the kind that exists between people who escape together from a brush with death. They were like two soldiers returning from the front. No one else could understand what they had been through.

  Like Jackie, Hill wandered around in a shell-shocked state, often unaware that people were talking to him. He was teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and should have asked for a medical leave. But he was too loyal to Jackie to abandon her to their dark memories.

  One evening, about two months after the assassination, Jackie and Hill drove to the Embassy Row section of Washington and parked in a dark and deserted lot. They slipped through a back entrance of the Fairfax Hotel, an unpretentious, family-style establishment that housed such permanent tenants as Senator and Mrs. Prescott Bush, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the family of a future politician by the name of Al Gore.

  Jackie and Hill were greeted by Jack Scarella, the maitre d’ of the hotel’s famous restaurant, the Jockey Club, where she had dined recently with Marlon Brando. Scarella escorted them through the bustling kitchen to the dimly lit dining room. It had beamed ceilings, dark paneling, and equestrian paintings. The restaurant was crowded with customers. Five captains in tuxedos and ten waiters in black pants and red bolero jackets hovered over the tables, serving the Jockey Club’s renowned crab cakes, and its piece de resistance, a half-vanilla, half-chocolate souffle.

  With Scarella leading the way, Jackie and Hill walked through the front section, known as the Royale, where celebrities normally liked to sit so they could see and be seen. Jackie had telephoned Scarella in advance and asked him to reserve an area in the back room, which customers called “Siberia.”

  After they were seated, Jackie ordered a vodka martini. As the evening wore on, she drank two or three more. At one point during dinner, she got up from the table and staggered to the powder room. She did not look any steadier when she came back.

  “Then something really crazy happened,” said a diner who was sitting with a friend in the Royale section, and had a clear view of Jackie and Hill from his table. “Jackie and Clint began engaging in what appeared to be a lot of heavy necking and petting. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Maybe Jackie was just crying on Clint’s shoulder. Maybe he was just comforting her.

  “After a bit, they slumped down in their red-leather banquette and disappeared from sight,” the diner continued. “Every once in a while, they would appear, then disappear again. This went on from eight-thirty to ten-thirty. Jackie’s hair was all messed up, and she looked like a mental wreck. But she didn’t seem to care who saw her.

  “In those days, people treated Jackie like a national institution, and newspapers bent over backward never to take a picture of her doing anything undignified, not even smoking a cigarette. So, for her to indulge in this kind of display at the Jockey Club in front of the crème de la crème of Washington society was totally bizarre behavior.”

  FIVE

  “A GATHERING

  OF THE

  WRECKAGE”

  March 1964

  BUNNY

  “I remember kneeling at the foot of the President’s coffin in the East Room of the White House, and feeling utterly drained,” Bunny Mellon was saying. “The tears would not stop. It was like the fall of all the hopes of youth. As though youth had tried and been thwarted. It seemed to me that the country had symbolically killed something.”

  “It had,” said Jackie.

  It was early one evening during Easter week, four months after the assassination, and a group of friends were having cocktails on Bunny Mellon’s terrace on the grounds of the exclusive Mill Reef Club in Antigua.

  Jackie’s sister Lee was there with her husband Prince Stanislas Radziwill. Stas (whose name was pronounced “Stash”) was the son of a Polish nobleman, and he was a favorite of Jackie’s and the other ladies’ because of his impeccable old-world manners.

  Then there was Jack’s old college chum, Chuck Spalding, a well-born advertising executive. He was at the bar, fixing another daiquiri for Lee.

  Bobby Kennedy was slumped in his chair. He appeared to be listening to the conversation. But nowadays, Bobby was often lost in his own world, deep in grief over the loss of his brother.

  And finally, there was a tall figure standing in the shadows. This was Clint Hill, who was keeping an eye on “Mrs. Smith,” the code name the Secret Service had given Jackie during her stay in Antigua.

  The Mellon house was made of native white limestone, and was surrounded by a mortared wall, six feet tall and three feet thick, that dripped with bougainvillea and hibiscus. Bunny had transformed the grounds into a lush tropical paradise. To irrigate her extraordinary gardens, her husband, the millionaire horse breeder and art patron Paul Mellon, had built a private water supply system that was larger than all of the public reservoirs that serviced the arid island.

  A bright Caribbean moon was reflected in the water of Half Moon Bay one hundred feet below the terrace. A recording of “The Days of Wine and Roses” was playing somewhere inside the house.

  “We were a gathering of the wreckage,” recalled Chuck Spalding. “Jack’s assassination was still very much on everybody’s mind. Everybody was trying as hard as they could to shake the blues.”

  After Dallas, Jackie had turned for comfort to her closest friend, Rachel Lambert Mellon. “Bunny,” as she was known to everyone except her servants, had helped Jackie design the grand visual spectacle of John Kennedy’s state funeral, and she personally took charge of the flowers at the President’s grave site.

  Jackie’s other female mainstay was Lee, who had hardly left her side since the assassination. Though the Bouvier sisters were known for their competitive relationship, their dealings had actually become much more complex in recent years, as sibling rivalry mixed with mutual admiration, emulation, and camaraderie.

  Jackie’s tragedy happened to coincide with a crisis in Lee’s own private life. Lee
was involved with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon, and had petitioned the Vatican to annul her marriage to Stas.

  “Lee and Ari had plans to marry, while Stas Radziwill was supposed to get hitched to Charlotte Ford,” recalled the gossip columnist Taki. “It was all very cozy, and things would have gone as planned except that JFK asked Lee not to divorce Stas until after the 1964 election. Dallas and November 22, 1963, changed all that.”

  Like her mother Janet Auchincloss, Lee was interested in high society and money—and not necessarily in that order. She had conducted a number of famous love affairs with rich and powerful men, and in recent years had begun to compete with the aging opera singer Maria Callas for Aristotle Onassis’s attention.

  Lee and Ari were seen dining alone at Onassis’s table at Maxim’s in Paris. She was a frequent guest on his yacht, the Christina. And when in Greece, she stayed at his sister Artemis’s spacious seaside villa in Glyfada, near the airport in Athens. Lee and Ari became the object of international gossip. Shortly before the assassination, their names had been linked in a widely syndicated Washington Post column written by Drew Pearson.

  “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?” Pearson asked.

  Now in Antigua, Bunny’s guests whiled away the cocktail hour by peppering Lee with questions about Onassis. A third daiquiri had loosened Lee’s tongue, and she was going on about the superabundance of wealth and luxury that she hoped awaited her as the future wife of the Golden Greek.