Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  As a biology teacher, Teresa made good use of Central Park.

  “Almost every day I took a group of pupils there,” she recalled. “When Caroline came, her two Secret Service agents came, too…. Jackie joined in as we turned over stones to find wood lice and earwigs. As our little group of schoolgirls laughed and skipped their way along, she would talk about her childhood in the country. She loved horses.”

  The frogs, lizards, and white mice in biology class fascinated the children, and they begged to be allowed to take them home for the holidays. Shortly before Christmas vacation, Caroline turned up with a note from Jackie written on a piece of yellow-lined paper that had been torn from a notebook.

  “Dear Mrs. Gorman,” it said, “Caroline has my permission to bring home a mouse.”

  Teresa phoned Jackie and asked, “Are you sure you really want this mouse? It could escape.”

  “Caroline’s in love with the idea,” Jackie said. “She absolutely insists.”

  A few days later, Caroline, Teresa, Bobby Kennedy, and two Secret Service agents all went shopping for a mouse cage at Bloomingdale’s. Bobby, who had just been elected senator in a landslide, moved down the crowded aisle with both arms extended, allowing people to stretch out and shake his hands. It was a scene of utter pandemonium.

  “I don’t mind for myself,” Jackie told Teresa, “but I’m nerve-wracked about the safety of the children. There are so many nutcases out there.”

  Caroline chose a cage that looked like a Chinese lantern.

  “You’ll need some wood chippings, and something for the mouse to nibble,” Teresa said.

  “I’m beginning to think it would have been simpler to send the children away to camp for the holiday,” said Jackie.

  A couple of days after the school closed for Christmas, Teresa received a phone call from the mother superior.

  “Mrs. Kennedy would like a word with you,” she said.

  Teresa called Jackie.

  “You must come and take this mouse away,” she said. “It’s stinking up the apartment.”

  “But won’t Caroline be heartbroken?” Teresa asked.

  “Yes, she will,” said Jackie, “but the mouse is killing my social life.”

  Teresa smelled the problem as soon as she stepped off the elevator into Jackie’s apartment. The mouse had turned out to be a male, and the combination of wet wood chippings and central heating was producing an over-powering effect.

  “Ah, the dominance of the male,” said a man’s voice, which came from the depths of a sofa in the living room.

  “This is Andy Warhol,” said Jackie, introducing a pale-faced man with large round spectacles and a platinum wig.

  At first blush, the pop artist seemed like a strange choice as a friend for Jackie. Andy had won worldwide acclaim by painting portraits of Coke bottles and Campbell soup cans, as well as of celebrities, and he was as starstruck as Jackie was publicity shy.

  However, people often misunderstood Jackie’s relationship with her public. Her true goal never was to avoid publicity as much as it was to control it. One of her greatest strengths was her own unerring sense of stardom. In this she resembled other strong personalities—Greta Garbo, Charles de Gaulle, Cary Grant—who had the connoisseur’s appreciation of their own persona.

  Moreover, it was not true that Jackie hated being photographed. In fact, she loved to be photographed—if it was done under her control. She had her own camera, and she was forever asking Jimmy Mason, who was in charge of her horses at her weekend house in Peapack, New Jersey, to take pictures of her mounted on Frank, her jumper. She collected these photographs in bulging scrapbooks, along with the clippings about herself from newspapers and magazines.

  On the other hand, she was ambivalent about photography because of the paparazzi who stalked her.

  “I remember going out with her,” said Karl Katz, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “and at the end of the evening, there was always this mess, this barrage of people. We went to the opening of a film once, on Broadway, and got separated. Photographers just got in the center, and I was pushed away. It was violent, and truly frightening for her.”

  “I understand you’re introducing Caroline to the facts of life,” Andy Warhol said to Teresa Gorman, “including some we don’t talk about in polite society.”

  Teresa could not think of what to say. She collected the mouse, and Jackie and Andy walked her to the foyer, where she rang for the elevator.

  “We’re going skiing next week,” Jackie said. “With a bit of luck, Caroline’ll have forgotten about the mouse by the time we come home. I’ll tell her you’ve taken it to the vet.”

  Teresa got into the elevator, and as the door began to slide shut, she caught a glimpse of Andy Warhol and Jackie—the artist and his icon—waving good-bye to the mouse in the Chinese cage.

  SEVEN

  THE OTHER

  JACK

  October 1965–July 1966

  ROSEBOWL

  “Right after Dallas, Jackie called and asked if I would help her design a permanent memorial grave for the President,” said John Carl Warnecke, an architect who had gained considerable fame a few years before the assassination for his design of the American Embassy in Thailand. “The burial site had been put together in haste by Bill Walton, the painter, who was chairman of the Fine Arts Commission and the Kennedys’ expert on all things aesthetic. Walton told Jackie that in his view the final design for a monument would be a landscape problem, and so Jackie naturally turned to her friend Bunny Mellon, who was a brilliant landscape gardener.

  “Jackie and Bunny agreed that the Eternal Flame should remain the primary symbol at the grave,” Warnecke went on, “and that everything else should be kept simple and dignified. They did not want statues or buildings, just some slate tablets engraved with passages from Jack’s Inaugural Address. Bunny had in mind the kind of gray slate that was used for tombstones in Colonial New England.

  “A couple of days after Jackie called me, she and Bobby picked me up at a barbershop in Georgetown, where I was getting my hair cut, and we drove to Arlington National Cemetery. There must have been at least fifty reporters and photographers waiting for us when we got there. Jackie and Bobby got down on their knees and crossed themselves.

  “We walked up the hill to the Lee Mansion. Jackie was quiet. But then all of a sudden she came to life when she saw the view—the axis looking from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, and then to the dome of the Capitol. It was a thrilling moment, truly electrifying.”

  Jackie had chosen Warnecke for this important assignment because, like Teddy White and William Manchester, he was a Kennedy family favorite. Back in 1940, while Jack Kennedy was recuperating from one of his many serious illnesses, he had spent a few months in California auditing writing courses at Stanford University. That same year, the strapping Warnecke—six foot three inches tall and 215 pounds—played left tackle on the famous undefeated and untied Stanford football team that went to the Rose Bowl. The sickly Kennedy worshipped Warnecke from afar as a hero.

  The two Jacks did not actually meet face to face until 1956, when Kennedy returned to California to campaign on behalf of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate. For the occasion, Red Fay, Jack’s buddy from his PT-boat days in the Pacific, lined up an attractive young woman for the married junior Senator from Massachusetts. Coincidentally, Red had been Warnecke’s fraternity brother at Stanford, and he asked the architect to be the beard for the evening and pretend he was the young woman’s date. Kennedy was delighted to meet his old football hero, and before he disappeared with the woman, he dubbed him “Rosebowl” and made him promise that they would stay in touch.

  By this time, Warnecke was something of an architectural renegade. As the architecture critic Benjamin Forgey noted in The Washington Post, “Warnecke was … a Californian who didn’t altogether take to the rigid principles of modern architecture advanced by his teachers (the famed Walter Gropius among them) at th
e Harvard Graduate School of Design. At the University of California campus at Berkeley, and elsewhere in his native state, he had taken great pains to design buildings that fit the historical context, a quality not high on the usual modernist list.”

  After he became President, Kennedy asked Rose-bowl to help Jackie with one of her pet projects—the crusade to save Lafayette Square, the quadrangle of splendid nineteenth-century town houses directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The houses had been targeted for demolition by the Eisenhower Administration.

  “I applied my theory of contextual design and proposed new buildings that would fit behind and work with the historical structures,” Warnecke explained years later. “But my design was bitterly opposed by members of the Fine Arts Commission and the architectural community. All of the President’s advisers gave up on saving the historic buildings, but Jack gave Jackie permission to make one last-ditch effort. She wrote a letter to the people in charge of the demolition, telling them that she would not permit the wrecker’s ball to touch one of those old buildings.

  “The night before I was to present my plan for Lafayette Square, I went to a party at the British Embassy, and met Jackie for the first time. I danced with her, and we talked, and of course I fell instantly in love with her. She was full of spirit and play. She was delightful to be with. Inquisitive as hell. She said she wanted to see the design and models I had done.

  “So I met her the next morning. She was wearing the same pink suit she would wear in Dallas, or one that looked very much like it. She was thrilled with my plan. She took over the reins of the project for the President, and attended the follow-up meetings. From then on, we got to see a hell of a lot of each other.”

  Warnecke was a bachelor; he and his wealthy socialite wife Grace Cushing had been divorced in 1960. It was said that he was worth several million dollars. He kept homes in a number of places—on Russian Hill overlooking San Francisco Bay, in the exclusive Georgetown section of Washington, and in Hawaii. He had his own three-hundred-acre ranch on the Russian River, forty miles north of San Francisco, where he went trail riding on his horses.

  “Jack Warnecke was very self-assured,” said Robin Duke, the wife of JFK’s chief of protocol. “Like most great big men, he looked down on people physically, which sometimes gave the impression that he was pompous. But he was not pompous. He understood what the French call placement, and knew where he wanted to be. I thought him attractive, and I’m sure that Jackie thought him attractive, too.”

  Working together on Lafayette Square, Jack Warnecke and Jackie discovered they had a lot in common. She admired his knowledge of design, especially that of the Beaux Arts school, which emphasized historic forms and details. He admired her pluck and determination.

  “No one in Washington gave a damn what happened to Lafayette Square,” he said. “Jackie was the only one.”

  In her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs had criticized the destructive American habit of razing large areas of cities and replacing them with sterile, modern buildings. Jacobs was not a preservationist herself, but she did sound a clarion call about the large-scale development that was ruining America’s cities.

  Before Jackie entered the White House with Jack, public officials thought nothing of destroying beautiful buildings of historic value in the name of progress. By taking a stand on Lafayette Square, Jackie forced people to think in a new way. She was the first person at a high level to give support to the preservation movement that flowered in the early sixties. She legitimized a movement that changed the face of urban America, and she continued to champion it for the rest of her life.

  As a result of his work on Lafayette Square, Warnecke became the unofficial Kennedy family architect. He designed Teddy Kennedy’s house in Hyannis Port, and Bobby’s pool house. He worked on Hickory Hill, Bobby’s home in Virginia, and he was designing a new windmill to replace one that had burned down at the Auchinclosses’ Hammersmith Farm.

  “I got all involved with Jack and the Kennedy Administration,” Warnecke said. “I was invited to Jackie’s private parties upstairs in the White House. I was a bachelor in the middle of the Kennedy White House, and I took part in some of Jack’s womanizing, too. A month before the assassination, I helped Jack pick out a site at Harvard University for the library and museum that would someday house his personal and official papers.”

  The friendship between Jackie and Warnecke went completely unnoticed for a long time. At first they were so deeply engrossed in the design of the grave site that they themselves were unaware of what was happening to them. The only person who seemed to notice that they were developing feelings for each other was Bobby Kennedy.

  “Jackie and I talked a lot about Bobby,” Warnecke said. “She’d show me family pictures and say, ‘Look, that’s Bobby. When he was growing up, they called him the little runt.’ She started telling me all kinds of strange things about Bobby. At the same time, she was telling Bobby about me. Bobby and I became close because of Jackie.”

  As time went on, however, Jackie and Warnecke realized that their relationship was maturing into something more profound. This both surprised and alarmed them. They began to take precautions so as not to arouse Bobby’s suspicions. They used private code words, and arranged to meet alone when no one else was around. The need for discretion added a new dimension to their budding romance—the delicious aura of secrecy.

  DUMPING THE SECRET SERVICE

  The leaves were a brilliant red and gold along Ocean Drive, the boulevard of Gilded Age dreams in Newport, Rhode Island. John Warnecke turned his car up a long gravel driveway, past a herd of prize Black Angus cattle grazing on a vast lawn, and to the porte cochere of Hammersmith Farm, the Auchinclosses’ shingle-style Victorian manor.

  A maid greeted him at the door and escorted him into the foyer, where she left him to examine a wall hanging with the Auchincloss coat of arms, which included the motto Spectemur Agenda (Judge Us by Our Action). It struck Warnecke as ironic that Jack Kennedy, the President who had unlatched the door of opportunity for so many millions of Americans, had married the stepdaughter of Hughdie Auchincloss, a man who epitomized the tradition of WASP exclusion.

  In a few minutes, Janet Auchincloss came down the broad, red-carpeted stairway. She gave Warnecke a long, friendly hug.

  “Dear Jack,” she said, holding him at arm’s length by his broad shoulders and looking him square in the eyes, “it is sooo good to see you.”

  “I could never understand those people who put down Janet,” Warnecke said. “They described her treating Jackie like a person whipping a horse. I never saw any of that. Janet had real sparkle, and great spirit. She liked me, and I adored her, and thought she was attractive. Quite frankly, I always felt that she favored the relationship between me and Jackie.”

  Janet had been thinking a lot about Jackie’s future. Her daughter’s year of mourning was almost up, and it was time for her to get on with her life. Jackie needed a husband. And as far as Janet could see, Jack Warnecke was made to order.

  He was forty-five years old and at the zenith of his personal and professional powers. He was tall and handsome, though not too handsome, the way Jack Kennedy had been. Warnecke was not as rich as the Kennedys, either, but he could afford to keep homes on two coasts. He led the life of a rich man, and he appeared to be in a financial position to care for Jackie and her children.

  What was more, he was well-spoken, had good manners, and made the right impression in society. He was not mixed up in politics, which Janet always considered a dirty business. He was a creative person, and he shared Jackie’s passion for design, architecture, painting, and nature. They both had an eye for color, shape, and form. They had that most important ingredient for a good marriage—common interests.

  If Warnecke harbored any doubts about Janet’s feelings toward him, they were dispelled on this visit to Hammersmith Farm. Motioning with the curved index finger of her right hand, Janet led him up the gra
nd staircase to a large bedroom with a view of Narragansett Bay.

  “This is where the President used to stay when he came to visit us,” she told him. “I want you to sleep here tonight in his bed.”

  The symbolic meaning of Janet’s gesture was not lost on Warnecke. Over the past several months, he had made a great effort to replace Jack Kennedy as the man in Jackie’s life. This goal was not as far-fetched as it might have seemed. Wamecke was often described in magazine profiles as a contextual architect, which meant that he designed buildings that fit into their environment, but he could just as accurately have been called a contextual person. He had the capacity to put himself into the place of others, to feel their emotions. His talent for empathy was just what Jackie needed at this time.

  “In order to work full-time on the grave site memorial, I had moved my office from San Francisco to Washington, and set up my operation in Georgetown, within a block of Jackie’s house on N Street,” he said. “I moved three of my four kids east for the summer. We were all together that summer of nineteen sixty-four—my family and Jackie’s family. We went to Williamsburg together, and visited Civil War battlefield sites.

  “Meanwhile, all kinds of people—Jack’s friends, and family, and political associates—were visiting my office to look at the design of the grave. Jackie came frequently. Her sense of grieving was always there. The passion we were beginning to feel for each other was all mixed up with the sorrow. We were going through a terrible experience together. I remember, Bobby would come to my office, and just stand there with his mouth open, not able to talk.

  “By the end of the summer, I was ready to choose the stone that I would use for the engraved words of Jack’s Inaugural Address. I needed a great stone carver, because I did not want any joints in the stone. I found one living in Newport, and hired him. That’s why I had come back to Newport just a few weeks before the assassination anniversary, to get final approval of the stone from Jackie.”