Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  “People talk about Ari’s airline, his ships, and his private island,” said Lee, “but what they don’t know is that he controls Monte Carlo through his interest in the Société des Bains de Mer et Cercle et Étrangers. He controls his own kingdom.”

  “Perhaps one should start calling him Prince Onassis,” said Stas, who insisted on using his own royal rank, even though Communist Poland had long since abolished its hereditary nobility.

  Lee ignored her husband’s sarcasm.

  “Ari has homes in so many countries that he maintains duplicate wardrobes all over the world,” she went on. “He never has to bother with luggage when he travels.”

  “They say the barstools on his yacht are covered with the scrotums of whales,” Chuck Spalding said.

  “The skin of the scrotums of mature whales,” said Lee, as if the age of the whales somehow made a difference. “The sunken bath in his master stateroom is an exact replica of the one in a palace in ancient Crete. The temperature of the seawater in his swimming pool is regulated so that it’s maintained a few degrees below air temperature. Ari’s business is no longer a means for him to make money; it’s a vehicle for his personal pleasure. He’s rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Nothing I’ve ever experienced compares to the luxe of his life.”

  “Nothing,” Jackie corrected her, “with the exception of Bunny’s life here on Antigua.”

  Everyone laughed—including Bobby—because what Jackie said was true.

  “Oh, Bunny,” Jackie said, “tell us how you picked out the color in your living room. It’s such a good story.”

  “Well,” said Bunny, happy to oblige, “I was trying to describe to my interior decorator the salmon-pink color that I had in mind. And I simply told him, ‘You know how it is when you get up at five o’clock in the morning, and go into your garden, and the sun is just coming up? Well, it’s not the color of the light on the first petal of the rose. And it’s not the color when you pull off the second petal. It’s the color on the third petal. That’s what I’m trying to achieve!’ ”

  Bunny was eccentric, even a bit nutty, but to Jackie she was the beau ideal of all that was romantic, exquisite, and fine. Jackie held her friend in such high esteem that she had even called Jack by her nickname, Bunny.

  Jackie admired her friend’s taste in French fashion (Bunny spent tens of thousands of dollars each season buying Hubert de Givenchy’s entire couture line). Jackie respected Bunny’s opinion on how things should look in a home (“nothing should be noticed,” she said). Jackie subscribed to her friend’s definition of what was boring and vulgar and a nuisance, and to her determination to keep the world at bay. And Jackie appreciated how Bunny dealt with the fact that her husband had had the same mistress for as long as anyone could remember (Bunny lived her own life, apart from Paul Mellon, and even kept her financial assets separate from his).

  Most of all, Jackie admired the fact that Bunny was unbelievably rich. Bunny showered Jackie with presents, everything from the finest handmade stationery to a $5,000 Schlumberger bracelet from Tiffany’s. This generosity may have been Bunny’s special way of overcoming her feelings of timidity. As a young girl, she could not bear for anyone to look at her. She had such low self-esteem that her parents took her to a psychotherapist, who gave her a special exercise to overcome her problem. Bunny was told to stand in front of a mirror and repeat over and over that she was the most glamorous child, the most wonderful child, the prettiest child on earth.

  Bunny never talked about the things that she collected. For instance, Jackie never heard Bunny say, “Oh, isn’t that silver tureen beautiful,” or “Isn’t that a great painting,” or “Aren’t those chairs wonderful.” Bunny did not focus on things as such. She was interested in what people did with those things.

  She took being rich for granted, as her due. Her father, Gerard Barnes Lambert, had built the family fortune on Listerine mouthwash and Gillette Blue Blades, and he instilled in his daughter a view of money that Jackie found captivating.

  “[W]ith the acquisition of almost unlimited funds, all the joy of getting new things disappears…., ” Gerard Lambert wrote in his memoirs, All Out of Step, “You are completely bored with the things for which those less comfortably off would give their souls. In desperation you seek new thrills through material purchases, but find them disappointing when you get them. It is like a Pyrrhic victory, better not achieved…. Wealth has a sort of Siamese twin, satiety, of which it cannot rid itself.”

  To stimulate the jaded appetites of her guests in Antigua, Bunny flew in her chefs and butlers from the mainland to help her local staff with the cooking and serving. Her servants’ uniforms were designed by Hubert de Givenchy, and were of different colors and patterns for each day of the week. When she noticed that the potato chips in the pantry weren’t perfectly round, she dispatched her private Gulfstream jet to fetch ones that were.

  No one could match Bunny’s talent for creating an atmosphere of rarified luxury without a hint of vulgarity. Adjoining her dining room in Antigua was a little slat house, where she grew orchids and seedlings and kept three tree toads that serenaded Jackie and the other guests all evening long.

  Much of what Jackie had accomplished as first lady was done with Bunny’s artistic guidance and financial support. Bunny had donated $485,000 (several million dollars in today’s money) to the United States Park Service to restore Lafayette Square. It was Bunny’s loose, mixed Flemish-style flower arrangements that Jackie had used in the White House. For the state dinner that Jack and Jackie gave for Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan at Mount Vernon, Bunny provided the gold vermeil cachepots on the tables, and the chairs, which she had recovered in fabric that cost $24 a yard. The White House Rose Garden was designed and executed entirely by Bunny.

  In the months after Dallas, when Jackie was at her most vulnerable, Bunny gained a great deal of control over her. Jackie tried to please Bunny, as she had once tried to please her mother, and she frequently asked Bunny for advice. One question that weighed heavily on Jackie’s mind was whether she would ever be able to shake off her melancholy, and feel pleasure again.

  She talked this over with Bunny, and they agreed that she would eventually recover. But a life of refined pleasure, such as Bunny’s, required a great deal of money. And, of course, a very rich husband.

  “I wrote Ben and Tony Bradlee that I would never marry again,” Jackie said to Bunny. “Do you think what I said was right? That I will never want to marry again?”

  Before Bunny had a chance to answer, Lee broke in.

  “Jacks,” she said, “I see no reason why you would ever want to marry again. You have already had a great love affair with a wonderful man. You have children. You have already had everything—love, romance, and all that marriage can offer. Why would you ever want to marry again?”

  “AS CLOSE AS YOU CAN GET”

  “While we were in Antigua over Easter, Jackie and Bobby were as close as you can get,” said Chuck Spalding. “What do I mean by that? Just anything you want to make of it.”

  One person who did not know what to make of it was Clint Hill. The Secret Service agent’s nerves were shot, but he insisted on accompanying Jackie to Antigua anyway. He never let her out of his sight, and what he saw, day after day, was the spectacle of Jackie clinging to Bobby like a moonstruck lover.

  One time, after they had waterskied on Nonesuch Bay, Jackie threw her arms around Bobby’s neck and hugged and kissed him. Another time, on Mill Reef Beach, they strolled arm in arm, heads together, reading aloud to each other from a copy of one of Jackie’s favorite books, Edith Hamilton’s classic study of ancient Greece, The Greek Way.

  “I’d read it quite a lot before, and I brought it with me,” Jackie said. “So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time … reading that and underlining things.”

  Bobby was seeking solace in ancient Greek literature, and he compared his underlined passages with Jackie’s. His favorite,
which reflected the anguish he was suffering over the loss of his brother, came from Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:

  He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.

  Bobby exhibited all the classic symptoms of a severe depression. He had trouble sleeping at night, and was preoccupied with thoughts of death. He appeared physically diminished by his brother’s assassination, as though he had actually shrunk. He was forever wearing Jack’s old garments, as if he was trying to grow into his brother’s clothes.

  Deep creases were etched across his forehead and down the sides of his mouth. His thick mop of hair was suddenly splashed with gray. His blue eyes, which had once seemed so bright and steely, were now dimmed by sadness. There was a tentative quality to the way he talked. He groped for words, unable to express the things he felt.

  “[A] large part of Robert Kennedy’s agony stemmed from his fear that one of his campaigns—whether organized crime, union racketeers, Castro, or white supremacists, or right-wing forces within the government itself—had invited retaliation upon his brother,” writes James W. Hilty, a Bobby biographer.

  “I thought they would get one of us,” Bobby confessed to a friend on the afternoon of the assassination. “But Jack, after all he’d been through, never worried about it. … I thought it would be me.”

  Guilt weighed heavily on Bobby, and he lost his old vigor and zest for life. He had trouble keeping up with Jackie on the beach, because he had recently injured a leg in a touch football game at the Florida home of Treasury Secretary C. Douglas Dillon.

  “It was the roughest, wildest game I have ever seen,” Pierre Salinger, JFK’s press secretary, recalled. “Everybody was trying to get the hate and the anger out of their system. There had never been anything like it at Hyannis Port, Hickory Hill, or anywhere else. Bobby was absolutely relentless. He attacked the man with the ball like a tiger, slamming, bruising, and crushing, and so did everyone else. One guy broke a leg, and you couldn’t count the bloody noses and contusions. It was murder. I was never so battered in a game before. For a week I could hardly walk. Every bone in my body hurt.”

  Bobby’s adjustment to life after Jack was eased by the attention he showered on Jackie and her children. It helped him get out of himself. He talked to Caroline and John about the greatness of their father. He took Jackie with him wherever he went. In February, she had accompanied him to the Waldorf Towers in New York City for a visit with ex-President Herbert Hoover.

  “Bobby bossed his sister-in-law around, and said, ‘Jackie, sit there,’ ‘Jackie, do this,’ ‘Jackie, do that,’ “ Hoover’s nurse said.

  Bobby had always been a commanding presence in Jackie’s life. He was the best man at her wedding in 1953. He was at her side three years later when Jackie had a stillbirth, and Jack could not be found on the yacht he had chartered in the Mediterranean. Bobby was at Andrews Air Force Base in Washington in November when Jackie brought Jack’s body back from Dallas. He put an arm around her and said quietly, “I’m here, Jackie.”

  “Bobby’s the one I’d most gladly put my hand in the fire for,” Jackie said. “I wish Bobby were an amoeba, so he could divide in two…. He’s always there—helpful, willing … a blessing.”

  All the sympathy, guilt, and hope that people felt for the dead President were now focused on Bobby. He was the repository of the Kennedy mystique, what Jackie called Camelot. High public office was available to him, though not the one he wanted the most, the vice presidency. Lyndon Johnson made sure of that. In order to avoid having Bobby on his ticket in 1964, the new President announced his intention to bypass all the members of his cabinet for the position.

  Richard Goodwin, who was now writing speeches for LBJ, told Bobby, “If Johnson had to choose between you and Ho Chi Minh as a running mate, he’d go with Ho Chi Minh.”

  Aloof, shy, and a poor public speaker, Bobby was not a natural politician. He was once described as “the least poised, the least articulate, and the least extroverted of the Kennedy brothers.” His high-strung personality, with its flashes of ruthlessness, seemed better suited to dark, smoke-filled rooms than to the bright lights of television. In Antigua, he talked with Jackie about retiring from the public arena.

  She begged him not to quit, arguing that the country needed him now more than ever. As they talked, Bobby slowly came around to Jackie’s way of thinking. He told her that there was an opening for a Senate seat from New York. But he would have to establish his legal residence in the state. Jackie could not imagine living away from Bobby, and he urged her to follow him to New York if he made the move.

  There were many who thought that Jackie secretly wished to replace Jack with Bobby. And it was true that if Bobby could have been divided in two, Jackie might have considered marrying the half that was allotted to her. But Bobby was not divisible; he was singularly devoted to his wife Ethel, who had just received the news that she was pregnant with number nine—tying Rose Kennedy’s record for childbearing.

  Until the assassination, it was Ethel, not Jackie, who was the center of Bobby’s emotional life. But Ethel had stayed behind in Stowe, Vermont, skiing with her children, while Bobby flew down to Antigua to be with Jackie.

  “Well, what are you going to do about it?” Bobby’s sister Eunice asked Ethel. “He’s spending an awful lot of time with the widder.”

  A small court of friends gathered around Ethel to lend support. It was composed of such Washington social stalwarts as Martha Bartlett and Joan Braden, who resented Jackie’s husband-stealing ways. The Bobby-Jackie-Ethel triangle became the talk of the nation’s capital.

  “I was aware of the appearances,” said the columnist Charles Bartlett, a great friend of the Kennedy family, who had introduced Jackie to Jack. “I don’t understand why Bobby wasn’t more concerned about appearances. This wasn’t the Bobby that I knew. I knew a Bobby who was pure, while everyone else was playing around.”

  “I don’t know if [Bobby] became infatuated or not,” said Paul “Red” Fay, Jack Kennedy’s old PT-boat buddy from World War Two. “[Jackie’s] a fascinating woman. If she’d throw her charm at you, why, you’d be emotionally swayed.”

  Was it possible that in their grief and crushing sorrow Jackie and Bobby had fallen in love? Were they sleeping with each other? Was Bobby the Lancelot in Jackie’s Camelot?

  Many people believed that when it came to understanding the Kennedys, you had to forget all the ordinary rules of behavior. In this view, the Kennedys did exactly as they pleased, and their family motto should have been: If you want to—why not?

  This attitude did not sit well with J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, who knew that any dirt he could dig up on Robert Kennedy would be welcomed by the new man in the White House, Lyndon Johnson. Hoover had FBI memoranda in his private files linking Bobby to Marilyn Monroe. Unfortunately for Hoover, the source of those rumors proved to be totally unreliable.

  Nonetheless, Hoover sicced his agents on Jackie and Bobby. After weeks of surveillance, the agents came up empty-handed. There was not a single incriminating note or memo about Bobby’s relationship with Jackie in Hoover’s bulging files.

  “I was talking to Bobby one day about Jackie,” said his friend, the journalist Murray Kempton. “I was saying something—it wasn’t a probing question—and Bobby said in that sad voice of his, ‘Oh, she’ll never be happy.’ You can say that about someone with whom you’ve slept. But that’s one thing I could not imagine Bobby doing—knowing how he felt about his brother—that he would sleep with his widow. To the extent that he was a very Catholic person, I think he would regard it as a cardinal sin.”

  One person who had a chance to study the subject at close hand was the author William Manchester, who was writing the authorized account of the assassination.

  “When I flew to Washington … for preliminary discussions with Bobby at the Justice Department, I was shock
ed by his appearance,” recalled Manchester. “I have never seen a man with less resilience. Much of the time he seemed to be in a trance, staring off into space, his face a study in grief.

  “Bob said of the book that the family was anxious to avoid flamboyance and commercialism,” Manchester continued. “I replied that he should let me know what was acceptable to him. I did suggest that since the project had apparently originated with Mrs. Kennedy, it might be wise for me to discuss it directly with her. That would be unnecessary, he answered; he represented her.”

  To Manchester, it seemed clear that Bobby and Jackie were enveloped in some kind of love relationship. Each recognized in the other his or her soul’s counterpart. They were both recovering from a terrible trauma, slowly coming back to life, and if love was the exquisite pain one felt for being truly alive, then Jackie and Bobby felt that emotion.

  But that was a long way from sexual consummation. Manchester was a student of the Middle Ages, and the behavior of Jackie and Bobby reminded him of medieval courtly love—passionate but chaste.

  What was more, Bobby was not the type to carry on an extramarital affair. He had once planned to enter the priesthood, and he had a Catholic sense of right and wrong. His fierce self-righteousness had led him to become a prosecutor. Any overt sexual act with his dead brother’s wife would have been antithetical to his nature.

  “The difference between the brothers was that Jack had a voracious sexual appetite, while Bobby was the exact opposite,” said Manchester. “He channeled all of his sexual energies into his marriage with Ethel. An affair with Jackie would have been a violation of every moral fiber in Bobby’s character. It would have been a desecration of his brother’s memory.”

  PUBLICITY MACHINE