Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  The next day, Jackie drove down to Newport from Hyannis Port with two Secret Service agents. After lunch, Warnecke took her to inspect the stonecutter’s work. She loved it. The approval of the stone meant a great deal to both of them.

  “It was really the turning point in our relationship,” Warnecke told the author of this book. “Now I could schedule a press conference, and formally announce that the design had been approved before the first anniversary of the assassination. It put a closure to Jackie’s year of mourning.”

  When they got back to Hammersmith Farm, Jackie announced that she planned to return to Hyannis Port the next day.

  “Why don’t you dump the Secret Service and let me drive you back?” Warnecke said.

  “That would be great, Jack,” Jackie said.

  “I had learned early on how to handle the Secret Service,” Warnecke said. “Those guys liked and trusted me, because I was a football player, a jock, and one of them.”

  The next day, Jackie and Warnecke got into her black Mercury convertible, put down the top, and headed off for the Cape. The Secret Service followed at a discreet distance.

  It was a fine autumn day, as crisp as a Granny Smith apple, and Jackie and Warnecke felt exhilarated as they sailed along with the wind in their hair. When they arrived at Jackie’s house in Hyannis Port an hour and a half later, they found that Jackie’s Italian housekeeper Marta Sgubin had arranged for Caroline and John to spend the night at another house in the Kennedy compound.

  “We were all alone,” Warnecke said.

  Jackie showed Warnecke her collection of landscape paintings by Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac. Warnecke admired the seascapes that she had done herself. They had dinner, then Jackie gave him a tour of the rooms upstairs.

  Warnecke’s head almost hit the sharply slanted ceiling in Jackie’s bedroom. He stood with Jackie for a few moments at the window, looking out at the choppy waters of Nantucket Sound. Then, wordlessly, he led her over to the bed that she had once shared with Jack Kennedy, and they began to make love.

  “After a year of pent-up feelings,” said Warnecke, “it was like an explosion. I remember saying to myself, What am I doing here? What’s happening?

  “A lot has been written about Jackie’s being cold,” he went on. “That image is all wrong. There was nothing inhibited or cold about her. All those aspects that made Jackie so delightful—her sense of fun and joy—were also part of her lovemaking.”

  Afterward, Warnecke told Jackie that he loved her.

  “I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you at the British Embassy,” he said.

  “I love you, too, Jack,” she said.

  “She was so excited by what had happened between us that she wanted to tell Bobby at once,” Warnecke said. “But I told her that I thought she should wait. I was sure Bobby would think that such a commitment was premature.”

  A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

  A few weeks later, Jackie suggested to Warnecke that they spend a night in a cottage on Bunny Mel-Ion’s property on the Cape, about twenty minutes away from Hyannis Port. Warnecke hesitated to accept Bunny’s invitation.

  “I was getting a bit fed up with Bunny,” he said. “She had become a problem on the design of the memorial. Jackie had found it too painful to deal with the grave design herself, and she had delegated a lot of authority to Bunny.

  “Bunny thought she was in charge,” he continued. “Once I entered the picture, and became romantically involved with Jackie, Bunny felt that Jackie had been taken away from her. She had lost her control over Jackie. Bunny was very possessive.

  “In any case, Jackie talked me into going to Bunny’s place. And when we got to this little cottage deep in the woods, we found that Bunny had decorated it for Halloween with pumpkins and candles and flowers. It was fixed up as only Bunny Mellon could do it. It was perfect, completely romantic. And it was a total surprise to both of us.”

  HAWAIIAN WAR CHANT

  When school let out in the summer of 1966, Jackie and her children boarded a plane at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport and flew off to the West Coast with a nanny and two Secret Service agents in tow. In San Francisco, they were joined by Jackie’s brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, his children Christopher and Sydney, and his longtime friend John Spierling. Then the entire party got on the United Airlines mainliner Hilo and headed across the Pacific for Hawaii.

  In the first-class compartment, John played in his stocking feet, while the older children watched an in-flight movie, Harper, starring Paul Newman. Jackie relaxed with a drink and chatted with Buck Buchwach, the managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser.

  “I hope to get a real rest in Hawaii, almost out of the twentieth century for a little while,” she told Buchwach.

  But it was not the twentieth century that Jackie was escaping from. It was the black-tie dinners with doddering elder statesmen and their dreary little wives. It was the boring charity events. It was the dreadful committees that supported all those noble causes.

  Jackie would have none of it. She liked dressing up in miniskirts. Shopping. Eating out at restaurants. She liked going to nightclubs. Dancing. Smoking. Drinking. Gossiping. Staying up late. She liked having fun. The only trouble was, whenever she had fun, she seemed to inflame the passions of the media.

  “It was the year she discovered that, like the huge idol in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, she had feet of clay,” wrote Liz Smith. “Or rather, she discovered that a large segment of her ordinarily adoring public now seemed to feel this way…. She began to behave like a private person again, like a human being with feelings, passions, desires, opinions, and a penchant for action, rather than a semi-deity to be worshipped from afar.”

  The first inkling the public had that Jackie had grown weary of playing the saint came when she and attorney William vanden Heuvel gave a midnight dinner-dance in honor of their friend, former ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, at the Sign of the Dove restaurant, which had just opened in New York. Jackie’s guests were a curious mixture—the crème de la crème of old New York-Newport-Palm Beach society, a melange of jet-setters like Gianni Agnelli and Count and Countess Rudi Crespi, and such denizens of the demimonde as Andy Warhol and underground movie queen Edie Sedgwick. Vogue called them “the Beautiful People,” and said that Jackie had invented a new kind of society.

  “Somehow, word got out that Jackie was having the party,” said vanden Heuvel, “and it seemed like there were fifteen thousand people in the street, trying to get a peek at her.”

  Jackie had hired Killer Joe Piro and his rock ‘n’ roll band, and she danced the frug and the jerk until one-thirty in the morning. On her way out of the restaurant, someone stopped her at the door, and she introduced her escort for the evening.

  “This is my very, very special friend,” she said, glancing up at John Carl Warnecke.

  A few months later, Jackie took off for Spain to attend the annual fair in Seville, a six-day post-Lenten fiesta of glamorous parties and superb bullfighting that had been made famous by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. The Duke and Duchess of Alba installed her in their Palacio de las Duefias in a bedroom once used by France’s Empress Eugenie, the great-grandaunt of the present duchess.

  Newspapers back in America ran headlines like JACKTE AND THE JET SET IN SPAIN. She was shown in photos astride a white horse, wearing a dashing Andalusian traje corto riding habit—black-trimmed red jacket, flowing chaps, and flat broad-brimmed hat.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jackie said as she made a leisurely paseo of the fair, “but it’s all very exciting.”

  Some people thought it was a little too exciting for the widow of the slain President. When she attended a bullfight featuring Manuel Benitez, who was known to his devoted fans as “El Cordobes,” she was criticized for encouraging the barbarism of bullfighting. When Jackie stayed until three in the morning at a charity ball, Princess Grace of Monaco was said to be piqued at finding herself upstaged. And when Jacki
e was seen being escorted around town by Spain’s ambassador to the Vatican, Antonio Garrigues, a sixty-two-year-old widower with eight children, Spanish newspapers ran stories that she was about to get married.

  Angier Biddle Duke, America’s ambassador to Spain, issued an official statement quashing the absurd rumors.

  “I really felt that you were a knight in armor and I don’t know how to thank you,” Jackie wrote Angie Duke when she returned home.

  Spain had not provided Jackie with the escape she wanted. So now she was on her way to an even more distant destination—Hawaii. The trip took many hours in the four-engine prop plane, and it gave Jackie the opportunity to think about her future.

  Jack Kennedy had been dead for almost three years, and Jackie’s mother was urging her to make a decision about marriage. However, Bobby had other ideas. He was against marriage for Jackie altogether. If she got married now, Bobby said, she would undermine his chances for winning the White House. Why not wait for the right man to come along?

  Jackie herself was torn. John Warnecke reminded her of her father, or at least one side of her father, his aesthetic side. With Warnecke as a husband, Jackie could pursue refined artistic sensations and celebrate the pleasurable effects of art. Warnecke had impeccable taste. He offered a life of private pleasures, as well as a respite from the world’s spotlight.

  “Jack was highly romantic and very sexy in those days,” recalls a woman who knew him well. “He was very creative. He had this artistic vision and saw things in an artistic way. There was also an element of danger about him. He was the kind of person, when he walked into a room, everyone knew he was there. And he was always a notorious womanizer. These were all things that would appeal to Jackie.”

  Just before the plane landed at Honolulu Airport, Jackie changed into an ivory-colored faille coat and an A-line skirt. She stepped down the ramp into the bright sunshine, bareheaded and wearing a pair of wraparound sunglasses. A crowd of five thousand people was on hand to greet her, and she smiled broadly, holding her hair, which blew in the brisk trade winds.

  Mrs. Pat Lam of the Hawaii State Department of Transportation hung two leis around Jackie’s neck. A band struck up “Hawaiian War Chant,” and a hula troupe began swinging and swaying to the music. Embarrassed by the corny ceremony, Jackie stood stiffly on the tarmac, flashing her patented smile. Then she thanked everybody and ducked into a waiting Lincoln Continental.

  She was whisked off to her $3,000-a-month rented house on fashionable Kahala Beach, about a mile from Diamond Head. The four-bedroom redwood-frame house was set back only about forty feet from busy Kahala Avenue, but it had a tall hedge and tropical trees that shielded it from view. Six burly members of the Metro Squad were standing guard as Jackie got out of the car and went inside.

  There, waiting for her in the living room, was John Warnecke.

  TINY BUBBLES IN THE WINE

  “We had spent a year and a half together before she came out to Hawaii,” said Warnecke. “I was with her every weekend. We were together in her apartment in New York, at her place in New Jersey, at Hammersmith Farm, at Hyannis Port. We went to the movies, and to football games. We did everything together. Then I invited her to spend the summer with me in Hawaii.”

  Warnecke had won a huge commission to design the capitol of the newly admitted state of Hawaii. He knew the governor, the mayor, and the editors of the Honolulu newspapers. He promised Jackie that if she came to visit him, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin would leave her alone, and that she would be treated like a private citizen. This was quite a promise to make to a woman who had received more publicity in the years following her husband’s death than she did in the years when she shared the spotlight with the President.

  “I had to prepare the groundwork for Jackie’s Hawaiian trip very carefully so as not to arouse suspicion,” Warnecke said. “I asked a local Hawaiian socialite by the name of Cecily Johnston to come to New York beforehand in order to meet Jackie. After they had been seen around town together, and had become quote best friends unquote, Cecily invited Jackie to Hawaii, and arranged for the rental of the house. Just as I had been the beard for Jack Kennedy back in the fifties, Cecily was now the beard for me.”

  Even so, Jackie felt squeamish about accepting Cecily Johnston’s invitation. She asked Peter Lawford to accompany her as a kind of chaperon. Lawford agreed to provide her with additional cover, and be on hand at the nearby Kahala Hilton Hotel if she needed him.

  Shortly after they arrived, Cecily Johnston gave a pool party at her home for the Kennedy and Lawford children. The singer Don Ho, who was known as the Sinatra of the Islands, was on hand to warble his favorite song.

  Tiny bubbles in the wine

  Make me happy, make me feel fine.

  Christopher Lawford pushed his sister into the pool, and John followed suit by pushing Caroline in. Don Ho got caught up in the spirit of things. He came up behind Jackie and pushed her in, clothes and all. A Secret Service agent leaned over with a helping hand, and Jackie jerked him in.

  Just as Warnecke had promised, everyone was having a good time. However, Jackie had failed to inform Peter Lawford’s estranged wife, Pat Kennedy Lawford, about the arrangements. And when Pat saw photos of Jackie and Peter getting off the plane together in Honolulu, she called Peter’s manager, Milt Ebbins.

  “How dare he do that?” Pat screamed.

  “Peter was planning to go there anyway,” Ebbins said, “and so was Jackie. They decided to go together. So what?”

  Next, Pat called Peter directly.

  “I won’t put up with this,” she said. “How dare you go away with this woman!”

  “Pat,” Peter said, “we’ve got the children with us.”

  “How could you go to Hawaii with her?” said Pat. “That’s where we went on our honeymoon.”

  Pat was not the only one who was upset by the arrangements. Caroline and John were confused by their mother’s relationship with Warnecke. Three days after their arrival, Caroline cut her left foot on a jagged piece of coral reef while swimming in front of their Kahala guest home. She had to have five stitches. She was on crutches when the family attended the Kamehameha Day Parade in honor of the monarch who united the islands of Hawaii.

  Several weeks later, while on a camping trip at Kapuna Beach on the island of Hawaii, John stumbled and fell backward into a pit of hot coals left over from a campfire. He let out a cry, then instinctively stuck his right arm down to push himself up. The hand and part of his forearm suffered first- and second-degree burns. He was flown to Honolulu, where Dr. Eldon Dykes, a plastic surgeon, treated several blisters on his arm and buttocks.

  Though Jackie was concerned by these mishaps, she failed to make the connection between her children’s accident-prone behavior and her barely disguised love affair with Warnecke. When her month-long lease on the Kahala house expired in late June, she decided to extend her stay in Hawaii for another month.

  She and the children moved into a luxurious guest accommodation on the eight-acre Koko Head estate of Henry J. Kaiser, the fabulously rich industrialist, who had made his first fortune building Liberty ships during World War Two, and then a second fortune manufacturing steel, aluminum, and automobiles after the war.

  “The part of the estate where Jackie stayed was called the Boathouse,” recalled Michael Kaiser, Henry’s adopted son, who was home from college at the time. “It stood on a cliff and had a view of the back side of Diamond Head across the bay.”

  The Boathouse was built in the shape of a horseshoe. The first level was where the Kaisers kept their fifty-six-foot motor launch, which had its own indoor berth. The next level was for storage. And the third had a living room and bedrooms that wrapped around a large oval swimming pool.

  “My mother had sent her decorator, George White, all over Asia for a long period of time,” said Michael Kaiser, “and he came back with fabrics from India and Indonesia. The cushions and pillows in the Boathouse were covered in this colorful fabric,
and they made a wonderful contrast with the modern furniture.”

  Jackie had brought her own cook, who made breakfast and lunch. During the day, she took lessons in Chinese painting. At night, she went to the main house for dinner, and to watch screenings of the latest movies.

  Mrs. Kaiser took little John to a Pacific Coast League baseball game, and introduced the five-year-old boy to Hank Allen, the batting star in the team’s 10–2 victory over Denver.

  “This is John-John,” Mrs. Kaiser said.

  “My name is not John-John,” he corrected her. “It’s John.”

  Caroline developed a crush on Charles Kaiser, the younger son in the family, who was in his early twenties.

  But for the first time since the assassination, Jackie was too preoccupied with her own life to pay much attention to her children.

  “Do I have your permission to have Jack Warnecke land a helicopter on the grounds to take me out from time to time?” Jackie asked Mrs. Kaiser one night.

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Kaiser.

  However, when Mrs. Kaiser informed her husband about this new arrangement, she expressed concern that Warnecke, who had the reputation of being a ladies’ man, was not the most appropriate escort for the President’s widow. Perhaps, Mrs. Kaiser suggested to her husband, someone should tell Bobby Kennedy.

  Henry Kaiser and the Kennedys got on well. A progressive businessman who treated his workers fairly, Kaiser had pleased the Kennedys by keeping the Kaiser Steel Corporation operating during the steel industry crisis in 1962.

  Henry Kaiser called Bobby and told him what was going on between Jackie and Warnecke. As soon as Bobby hung up, he called Jackie.

  “Bobby was trying to kill off a possible marriage to Warnecke,” according to Richard Goodwin. “He knew that’s what Jackie was contemplating, and he did not approve of it. I don’t know why he felt that way, but obviously he thought Warnecke wasn’t the right guy.”