Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  By now, the moon had disappeared behind the clouds, casting Half Moon Bay into complete darkness. Bobby got up from his chair on Bunny Mellon’s terrace and disappeared without a word. Soon the strains of “The Days of Wine and Roses” could be heard once again coming from inside the house.

  Chuck Spalding handed Lee her fourth daiquiri. When she drank a lot, there was no telling what Lee might say.

  “I’ve just bought a co-op at 969 Fifth Avenue,” she said after a long sip. “And I’ve been trying to convince Jackie that she should leave Washington and buy an apartment in New York, too. That way, we can live close to each other”—she paused, took another long, slow sip, then added—“after I marry Ari.”

  There was silence.

  Then Stas, who was the intended target of his wife’s remark, chimed in. “But, my dear, what makes you so certain that Ari wants to marry you?”

  “I’m certain that Ari will be more than happy to help us in any way that he can,” Lee said.

  Jackie suspected that Lee was living in a dreamworld when it came to Aristotle Onassis. Most of the published accounts of Lee’s romance with the Greek shipowner had been generated by Ari’s own London-based public-relations consultant, a young New Zealander by the name of Nigel Neilson. Neilson placed articles on Onassis in the better newspapers in England and America, and he kept his employer’s name linked to personalities like Winston Churchill, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cary Grant, and King Farouk of Egypt.

  Onassis’s affairs with some of the world’s most desirable women were all part of this publicity machine. Like Donald Trump in years to come, Onassis had a natural talent for feeding the public’s fantasies about his life as a libertine. Onassis believed that the public liked a man who lived on a large scale, with large appetites and large loves. He projected an image of potency: powerful in bed, and in the larger world. It was his way of impressing his bankers and customers, and making himself a brand name.

  But Onassis was a narcissist, and his interest in women was essentially a reflection of his interest in himself. As he told friends, he loved women—plural—but found it hard to love any one of them in particular. And that included Lee. He had never broached the subject of marriage to Lee.

  “There is an affinity between us,” he said of his relationship with Lee. “No more than a friendship.”

  SIX

  AN UNERRING

  SENSE OF

  STARDOM

  April 1964–October 1965

  MISTER MANCHESTER

  At a few minutes before noon on April 7, 1964, the day after Jackie returned from Antigua, she slid open the mahogany doors in the living room of her Georgetown house, and made a grand, sweeping entrance.

  “Mr. Manchester!” she exclaimed.

  William Manchester, the tall, pipe-smoking Wesleyan University history professor, whom she had chosen to write the authorized version of Jack’s assassination, bolted from his seat. He stared at Jackie as though he could not believe his eyes. She was dressed in a black jersey top and yellow stretch pants.

  “She was beaming at me,” Manchester recalled years later, “and I thought how, at thirty-four, with her camellia beauty, she might have been taken for a woman in her mid-twenties. My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great tragic actress.

  “I mean that in the finest sense of the word,” he continued. “There was a weekend in American history when we needed to be united in our sadness by the superb example of a bereaved First Lady, and Jacqueline Kennedy—unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, a more extraordinary woman in other ways—provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s heroine.

  “One reason for this triumph was that her instincts were completely feminine. If she met your plane at the Hyannis airport, she automatically handed you the keys to her convertible. Men drive, women are driven: that was the logic of things to her, and it is impossible to think of her burning a bra or denouncing romantic love as counterrevolutionary.”

  Jackie motioned for Manchester to sit down, then asked, “Are you just going to put down all the facts, who ate what for breakfast and all that, or are you going to put yourself in the book, too?”

  “I can’t very well keep myself out of the book,” Manchester replied.

  “Good,” said Jackie.

  She offered to pour him a daiquiri from an icy pitcher, then took a nearby chair.

  “Future historians may be puzzled by odd clunking noises on the tapes,” Manchester noted. “They were ice cubes. The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid of great containers of daiquiris.”

  Over the next several hours, Jackie got quite drunk, and proceeded to pour out her heart.

  She described how in Fort Worth, on the eve of the assassination, she had slipped into her husband’s bed, and aroused him from his fatigue, and made love to him for the last time….

  She described sitting at a dressing table, looking for lines in her face, and musing about the tall Dallas blondes who had caught her husband’s eye….

  She told Manchester all the “gruesome stuff”—about Jack’s brains, and the way he looked on the table in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas….

  She told him how she had spent the night of her husband’s death alone in bed at the White House, writhing and tossing while under sedation from large doses of the tranquilizer Amytal….

  She described for him the sounds of Caroline crying when she heard the news of her father’s death….

  She reconstructed a scene in the limousine on the way to Arlington National Cemetery, when Bobby looked down at young John and said, “You’ve got those sissy white gloves on—take them off,” but Jackie made her son keep them on….

  “I had carefully put the Wollensak recorder where I would see it and she wouldn’t,” Manchester wrote. “I didn’t want her to worry about the machine. Also, I had to be sure that the little light on it was winking, that the reels were turning, and all this wasn’t being lost.

  “It was a good plan,” he went on. “Its defect was revealed to me when she took the wrong chair. Then the only way I could check the light was by hunching up. It was an odd movement; I needed an excuse for it. A cigarette box on a low table provided one. Before that evening, I hadn’t smoked for two years. At the end of it I was puffing away, and eight more years would pass before I would quit again.”

  Manchester was deeply moved by Jackie’s candor. Like Teddy White five months earlier, he realized that he was hearing more than he had bargained for. And he, too, felt an obligation to protect her. He worked out a hand signal that she could use when she wanted him to turn off his Wollensak recorder. But she seldom resorted to using the signal.

  “It is true that she … withheld nothing during our interviews,” he wrote. “It is also true that none of that sensitive material found its way into any draft of the book.”

  Manchester protected Jackie out of a tender regard for her feelings, as well as out of his deep respect for her dead husband.

  “I couldn’t disdain Kennedy,” he said. “He was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write. I never dreamed that one day I would write his obituary—the longest presidential obituary in history, and, in the end, the most controversial.”

  DISGUISES AND SMILES

  One fine fall day in September, Bobby entered the lobby of 1040 Fifth Avenue, Jackie’s new home in New York City. Her building was one of those massive limestone palaces that had been designed by Rosario Candela, the leading apartment architect of the 1920s, who had also done 740 Park Avenue, where Jackie had lived as a child.

  Bobby stopped to speak with Clint Hill, who had stationed himself inconspicuously in the back of the lobby. Hill seemed confused and distracted. Unnerved by the agent’s appearance, Bobby got into the elevator and ascended to Jackie’s apartment.

  He stepped off on the fourteenth floor, directly into Jackie’s foyer. A black-an
d-white marble floor led him into a large rectangular gallery, which served as the hub of the fifteen-room apartment. He went into the living room, a square room with a Palladian sense of light and serenity, and stood at one of the tall French windows and looked out over a spectacular view of Central Park and the reservoir.

  Jackie had found the co-op by scouring the real-estate market with Nancy Tuckerman, her old roommate from Miss Porter’s School, who had served briefly as her social secretary in the White House after Letitia Baldrige had left. Whenever they inspected the available New York co-ops together, Nancy dressed up, pretending that she was a rich matron, while Jackie disguised herself as a British nanny.

  Upon finding the apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, Jackie had called Andre Meyer, the senior partner of the investment banking firm Lazard Frères and a brilliant spinner of fortunes. Jackie had come to depend on the gnome-like French banker, who enjoyed playing the role of father confessor to beautiful women who were not too sure of themselves.

  “It’s perfect,” she told Meyer, “and if you think it’s a good investment, I’ll buy it.”

  Meyer looked over the apartment, which was conveniently located near the best private schools, and only a few blocks away from the apartments of Bobby and Lee, and pronounced the $200,000 asking price a fair one.

  After Jackie bought the apartment, she turned to her friend Bunny Mellon for advice on decorating it. Bunny favored light, airy French furniture, sophisticated subtlety, and comfort. Nothing must be gold, nothing dark, nothing frilly. Everything had to be “undercooked.”

  To achieve that look, Jackie once again hired the designer Billy Baldwin, who had not had time to finish her N Street house before she left Washington. In Jackie’s New York living room, Baldwin used the Louis XVI bureau on which President Kennedy had signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and her father’s ormolu-mounted Empire fall-front desk. He hung John Fowler curtains over the tall windows and placed Jackie’s collection of animal drawings and Indian miniature paintings on the walls. On a commode, he displayed Jackie’s most treasured possession, an ancient Hellenistic alabaster head of a woman. The result was pure Bunny: rarified luxury without a hint of vulgarity.

  “The day Jackie moved into the apartment,” Nancy Tuckerman recalled, “we spent the day unpacking, emptying cartons, putting books in bookcases. Around eight o’clock in the evening, the doorbell rang, and Jackie, in her blue jeans and looking quite disheveled, opened the door. There stood two distinguished-looking couples in full evening attire. When they recognized Jackie, they were taken aback. They said they were expected for dinner at Mrs. Whitehouse’s. It turned out that the elevator man, unnerved by the mere thought of Jackie’s presence in the building, was unable to associate the name White-house with anyone or anything but her.”

  Bobby wandered through the sprawling apartment, looking for Jackie. He passed Caroline’s bedroom, and caught a glimpse of the little girl through the half-open door. She was cutting pictures of her father out of a magazine and sticking them on the wall.

  The first anniversary of Jack’s assassination was a couple of months away. In the past ten months, 7,740,000 people had visited the slain President’s burial place—more than all the tourists who visited the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument combined. Sixty books about JFK had already been published, and more were on the way. Two dozen phonograph records had been issued, most of them containing the text of his speeches. The mania for all things Kennedy continued unabated.

  So did the family’s penchant for tragedy. In June, Bobby’s younger brother Ted was in a plane crash in Massachusetts. Two of those on board lost their lives—Ted’s legislative assistant, and the pilot, Ed Zimny, who had flown Janet Auchincloss to Rhode Island on the day Baby Girl Kennedy’s body was exhumed. Ted fractured his back, and was still recuperating.

  Bobby found Jackie and Nancy in the master bedroom, putting away books. The walls were covered in ivory silk, as were those in the adjoining master bathroom. Bookcases held Jackie’s collection of Persian miniatures. The iron four-poster was a gift from Bunny, who had ordered it from her own ironsmith on her estate in Middleburg, Virginia. It was covered by a rare guanaco fur spread that had been given to Jackie by Jack. A photograph of Jack rested on the bedside table next to a small vase with fresh flowers. Apart from Caroline’s clippings, it was the only picture of the dead President in the entire apartment.

  Nancy went over to shake Bobby’s hand, and he winced in pain. His hand was swollen and tender from campaigning.

  Bobby’s campaign for the Senate was his first attempt at winning elective office. He was running on an idealized version of his brother’s legacy. Whereas Jack had been a give-and-take politician comfortable with compromise, Bobby preached the liberal ideals of youth and public service.

  “President Kennedy,” Bobby told the New York crowds, “was more than just president of a country. He was the leader of young people everywhere. What he was trying to do was fight against hunger, disease, and poverty around the world. You and I as young people have a special responsibility to carry on the fight.”

  Jackie was delighted with Bobby’s noble message. She had attended the Democratic Party’s national convention that past summer in Atlantic City, and was thrilled when the crowd gave Bobby a twenty-three-minute standing ovation. His emotional reception was interpreted as a humiliation of President Johnson. Everyone in the convention hall was aware that war had broken out between Bobby and Johnson. Bobby was eager to score a landslide victory in the 1964 New York Senate race so that he could challenge Johnson for the presidential nomination in 1968.

  As the art director of Camelot, Jackie played an important role in Bobby’s political plans. She had recently learned that, despite her efforts to stop him, Jim Bishop intended to publish a book called The Day Kennedy Was Shot. She wrote Bishop, appealing to him to abandon the project.

  As you know—it was my fear as long ago as December—that all sorts of different and never ending, conflicting, and sometimes sensational things would be written about President Kennedy’s death.

  So I hired William Manchester—to protect President Kennedy and the truth. He was to interrogate everyone who had any connection with those days—and if I decide the book should never be published—then Mr. Manchester will be reimbursed for his time.

  Bobby objected to Jackie’s use of the words “hired” and “reimbursed,” and so she sent a second letter to Bishop.

  I chose Mr. Manchester because I respect his ability and because I believe him capable of detachment and historical accuracy…. I exercise no surveillance over what he is doing, and I do not plan to. He will present his finished manuscript and it will be published with no censorship from myself or from anyone else…. I have no wish to decide who writes history.

  That, of course, was untrue. Jackie had called in Manchester for the express purpose of stopping Jim Bishop. As always, she was trying to be the puppeteer who controlled the strings of history. She envisioned Manchester’s book not only as a beautiful and brave account that reflected her version of her husband’s murder, but as one that would also serve as a manifesto for Bobby’s long march to the White House.

  “You must win,” Jackie told Bobby of the Senate campaign. “You will win.”

  One way of assuring an impressive victory was for Jackie to campaign by his side.

  “You could do it with dignity,” Bobby told her. “An appearance here, a few TV spots there.”

  But Jackie, who occasionally showed up for private fund-raisers for Bobby, had other ideas.

  “What if I attend some of your rallies in disguise?” she asked. “You know, wearing a wig or a turban or something? I could lend moral support.”

  “That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” Bobby said. “What about the children? Can I use Caroline and John?”

  “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “This campaigning is a lot tougher than I expected,” Bobby said. “All that smiling …”<
br />
  “You could turn on a very low-level smile,” Jackie said. “It’s the really broad smiles that wear you out. A gentle little smile would wear better.”

  LESSONS IN SELF-IMPROVEMENT

  A smiling Oliver Smith was waiting for Jackie when she arrived by limousine at his yellow town house on Willow Street in Brooklyn Heights. It was the dead of winter in 1965, and Jackie was wearing a tailored wool coat that looked like it came from Halston. She stepped past the ornately carved black door that Oliver Smith held open for her, and entered his house.

  “Welcome to the house that Sam Goldwyn built,” Oliver Smith said, helping her off with the coat. “I bought this place with the earnings from my first Hollywood film, Band Wagon.”

  Oliver Smith was a theatrical designer, and everything about him was theatrical in an understated sort of way. A tall, lanky figure with closely cropped hair, he was dressed in a custom-made double-breasted blue suit from Dun-hill. A cigarette dangled from a long, delicate hand that emerged from a cuff fastened with a small gold cuff link. He looked like a Noel Coward creation, a man who knew how to live in grand style.

  He led Jackie into the living room, and began mixing martinis. He had spent the past ten years restoring the four-story, Federal-style house, and the place was a marvel of visual imagination. The high-ceilinged room featured a spectacular spiral staircase, a silver chandelier, and an ornate Chippendale mirror over a black Belgian marble fireplace. Two cats snoozed in front of a blazing, stagy fire.

  Oliver Smith handed Jackie her drink, then sat down facing her. Once he had a martini in hand, he needed a cigarette, and he lit another Marlboro. When he crossed one long leg over the other, it touched the floor.

  Jackie came to Oliver Smith’s house once a week to take drawing lessons. She had always possessed a talent for drawing amusing figures in the children’s-book style of Ludwig Bemelmans, the creator of the Madeline series. In fact, Jackie and Bemelmans had once corresponded about collaborating on a children’s book, possibly with Madeline visiting the White House. Bemelmans had also urged Jackie to keep a daily journal with her personal thoughts and illustrative sketches.