Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  “She was laughing when she said it,” Schlesinger continued. “She seemed cheery and hopeful, perhaps to keep up the spirits of her friends, and her own. Chemotherapy, she added, was not too bad; she could read a book while it was administered. The doctors said that in fifty percent of cases lymphoma could be stabilized. Maybe she knew it was fatal. Maybe she didn’t know at all, but even if she did, she still had hope for some other future.”

  Jackie may have been laughing when she spoke with Schlesinger. But she also must have been thinking of the tragic trail of destruction that had followed her for so much of her life. She had once demanded that a clergyman explain her husband’s assassination. “Why, why? How could God do something like that?” she had asked. No one had an answer then. And no one had one now.

  HOPE

  “She came in early in January under an assumed name, and swore us to secrecy,” said one of her doctors at the New York Hospital, where Jackie began receiving the first course in chemotherapy and steroid drugs. “It was a cloak-and-dagger operation. She wanted anonymity.”

  The same secrecy was employed when Jackie went to the Stich Radiation Therapy Center for periodic CAT scans. She arrived at seven o’clock in the morning wearing a hooded cape. While she waited outside in the car, Maurice made sure that no one was in the waiting room. When all was clear, he brought her in on his arm.

  Maurice carried a small bag containing Jackie’s breakfast, which she ate after the CAT scan. However, one morning she could barely wait.

  “I’m really hungry,” she told one of the doctor’s assistants. “Would you bring Mr. Tempelsman here?”

  “Gee, I hope he hasn’t eaten your breakfast,” the aide teased. “But I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s a special person.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jackie, “he is.”

  Jackie was soon displaying the side effects of her chemo-and-drug treatment—hair loss, blotchy skin, and bloating. She was forced to wear a wig, and people noticed that there was something wrong with her. She knew that it would not be possible to hide the nature of her illness much longer, and so she instructed her old friend Nancy Tuckerman to release the news to The New York Times. In the story, which appeared on February 11, 1994, Nancy confirmed that Jackie was being treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but pointed out that her doctors were very optimistic.

  “She’s fine,” Nancy said. “She goes in for routine visits, routine treatment. That’s what it is.”

  This was no exaggeration. As Jackie’s treatment progressed through four standard courses of chemotherapy, her doctors gave her consistently optimistic reports. The cancer, they said, appeared to be in remission. She was greatly encouraged by their outlook, and continued to go to her office at Doubleday three days a week.

  “She enjoyed doing these books,” said John Loring. “We’d laugh about it, and talk about all these titles of books we were going to do, and what the next one was.

  “And one day she said, ‘Oh, yes, isn’t that wonderful. When we’re eighty we can write Tiffany Mushrooms. We can just do this forever.’

  “And this may sound naive, but I honestly did not believe she was going to die. She seemed invincible. And if you knew her well, you just couldn’t believe that this was a hopeless case. You believed that she would get over this, too. That she’d gotten over everything else, and she’d get over this. That this was not going to do her in.”

  In February, Jackie had lunch in her apartment with her friend Peter Duchin, who had just begun to write his memoirs. Duchin asked Jackie what she remembered about his father, bandleader Eddy Duchin, and his mother, Marjorie, who had died in childbirth. His question elicited a poignant recollection from Jackie, whose illness had obviously stirred some deep feelings from the past.

  “I remember your parents only indirectly,” Jackie told Peter Duchin. “But I’ll never forget the night my mother and father both came into my bedroom all dressed up to go out. I can still smell the scent my mother wore and feel the softness of her fur coat as she leaned over to kiss me good night. In such an excited voice she said, ‘Darling, your father and I are going dancing tonight at the Central Park Casino to hear Eddy Duchin.’ I don’t know why the moment has stayed with me all these years. Perhaps because it was one of the few times I remember seeing my parents together. It was so romantic. So hopeful.”

  PREPARING FOR THE WORST

  But the cure proved almost as bad as the disease, and Jackie aged considerably in a matter of a few weeks. Her face grew sallow, and more hair fell out. She wore a beret to cover her wig. Throughout the harsh, stormy winter of 1994, she was too weak to continue her yoga sessions with Tillie Weitzner. Instead, she took strolls in Central Park with Maurice. She was familiar with the park’s paths from years of jogging, but now she was unable to venture very far before she became utterly exhausted. She leaned on Maurice’s arm for support. When she got back to her apartment, she went to bed and took a nap.

  She was puzzled. If the cancer was in remission, why didn’t she feel better? She refused to think about her own mortality. She could not believe she was going to die. Not yet, anyway. She was only sixty-four years old. As her favorite Greek poet, Cavafy, wrote in “Ithaca,”

  But do not hurry the voyage at all.

  It is better to let it last for long years.

  She encouraged Nancy Tuckerman to feed the press optimistic assessments of her progress.

  “She’s doing so well,” said Nancy. “She was coming in to a focus group meeting today [at Doubleday], but it was called off because of the snow. She had her grandchildren come over to see her yesterday.”

  Jackie was the one who did the most to promote the image of herself as a woman on the mend. She wrote dozens of sunny letters to friends, like this one to Brooke Astor:

  … being with you would make me laugh. The greatest healer. This is your gift. … I shall look forward to our doing something together in a little while when all this first part is over….

  And to John Loring:

  … Everything is fine. Soon we can have another festive lunch….

  One day in March, she experienced an alarming spell of mental confusion. She went to see an eminent neurologist at the New York Hospital, who told her that the cerebellum portion of her brain had been affected. Another type of scan, an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), showed that the lymphoma had disappeared from her neck, chest, and abdomen, but that it had spread to the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.

  “I can’t believe this has happened,” Dr. Anne Moore, Jackie’s cancer specialist, said.

  “Of all her doctors, no one saw this coming,” said someone who was close to the case. “Her doctors were all totally shocked. They thought they had beaten the disease. The whole team was stunned when they got the results of the CAT.”

  A specialist in neurological diseases informed her that once cancer got into the brain it was very difficult to kill with chemotherapy. The brain had a natural barrier that kept out most chemotherapy drugs.

  “Your best hope of survival is a very sophisticated procedure,” the specialist told her. “We drill a hole in the skull, open a shunt, and insert a tube for feeding an anticancer drug directly into the brain. We combine that with radiation therapy to the brain and to the lower spinal cord for about a month.”

  It sounded horrific. But Jackie told the doctor that she was ready to try anything.

  As a result of this radical treatment, she began to lose weight. Her speech slowed. And she was less alert.

  “The moment I realized there was really something wrong with her was the last time we ate lunch at Le Cirque,” said John Loring. “Sirio loved to send over a sampling of desserts after lunch. Jackie would never touch them. She might stick her fork in and eat two crumbs and say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful,’ and that was the end of that.

  “She was obviously not looking terribly well, but she was in a wonderful mood, and we were having a good time. And at the end of lunch, the usual four or five desserts appeared, cove
ring the whole table.

  “And she said, ‘You start that one. I’m going to start this one.’

  “And she actually started to eat this dessert. And I thought, Well, that’s remarkable.

  “So I said, ’You’re not going to finish that, are you? I’m going to have the waiter take this away right this minute.”

  “She said, If anyone tries to touch one of those, I’m going to stab them in the hand with my fork. I’m going to eat every single one of them.”

  “And she did. We sat there and plowed through every single dessert on the table. It was astonishing, but it was also terrifying, because it was like she had decided that this was not going to work out, and so why not eat all the desserts on the table. She might as well eat everything if she wanted to.”

  On April 13, Jackie had lunch at Carly Simon’s sprawling apartment on Central Park West. Carly invited three of Jackie’s friends: Joe Armstrong, the publisher; Peter Duchin, the band leader; and Duchin’s wife, Brooke Hayward. As an added attraction, she invited the talented documentary maker Ken Burns, who was in the process of editing his Public Broadcasting System series on the history of baseball. Carly was featured on Burns’s sound track singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  Jackie was fascinated by Burns’s project, and she asked him a lot of questions. But he could only stay for a part of the lunch. After he left, someone asked Jackie how she was feeling.

  “Only four more weeks and I’ll get my life back,” Jackie said, referring to what she expected to be the last course of radiation treatment. “But,” she added, reverting to the third person, “one does not look forward to a summer on the Vineyard with a bad wig.”

  Someone else then asked Jackie about her sister Lee.

  “She stopped by for tea,” Jackie said.

  “Do you see her often?”

  “We’ve only seen each other once this whole year,” Jackie said. “I guess she called me so she could say that she saw me. I never could understand why Lee is so full of animosity.”

  On Jackie’s way out, Carly handed her a big folded piece of paper.

  “I wanted to give this to you,” Carly said. “I wrote this for you.”

  It was the lyrics to a new song called “Touched by the Sun.”

  Often I want to walk

  The safe side of the street

  And lull myself to sleep

  And dull my pain

  But deep down inside I know

  I’ve got to learn from the greats,

  Earn my right to be living

  Let my wings of desire

  Soar over the night

  I need to let them say

  “she must’ve been mad”

  And I, I want to get there

  I, I want to be one

  One who is touched by the sun, one who is

  touched by the sun.

  The next day, Jackie collapsed with a perforated ulcer in her stomach, a complication of the steroid therapy. She was rushed to the hospital, where surgeons sewed up the hole.

  When she came out of the hospital, her whole mental outlook had changed. She now seemed prepared for the worst. She reviewed her living will, which stated that doctors were not to use aggressive medical treatment to keep her alive if her condition was hopeless. She had one final discussion with her attorney Alexander Forger about her last will and testament, in which she left the bulk of her estate to her two children, and asked that they help maintain in death the privacy that she so fiercely guarded while alive. She went through the books in her library, picking out a few as gifts for friends and her doctors. And she summoned Nancy Tuckerman to her apartment.

  A roaring blaze was going in the fireplace when Nancy entered the library. Jackie was sitting before the fire, an astrakhan thrown over her lap. On the table beside her were bunches of letters, all neatly bound with ribbons. These were letters that Jackie had received from famous people over the years.

  Jackie unbound the letters, and read some of them to Nancy. Then, when she was finished, she tied them together again with the ribbon, and tossed them into the crackling fire.

  PART OF HISTORY

  “Caroline says you should come over now.”

  The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Marta Sgubin, the Italian housekeeper who had worked for Jackie for twenty-five years. Marta was calling Carly Simon, and she did not have to explain the reason for her urgent tone of voice.

  Three days before, on Monday, May 16, Jackie had developed shaking chills, and had become disoriented. She was admitted to the New York Hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia. The doctors told her that the cancer had spread to her liver and throughout the rest of her body.

  “Let’s try more chemotherapy,” Dr. Anne Moore said.

  “No,” Jackie said, “I want to go home to die.”

  On Wednesday, she discharged herself from the hospital and returned to 1040 Fifth Avenue.

  As soon as Carly Simon got the call on Thursday from Marta, she and Jackie’s other great friend, Joe Armstrong, headed over to Jackie’s building. There were thousands of people out on the street on Fifth Avenue, throngs, some hysterical, newsmen and ordinary people. The police were taken by surprise, and they did not have their barricades up, and people spilled off the sidewalks on both sides of Fifth Avenue into the street.

  Traffic was brought to a virtual standstill. Rubberneckers were trying to see what was going on. TV was capturing the whole thing via huge satellite transmitters on the tops of trucks, and beaming it around the world.

  Upstairs in Jackie’s apartment, John Kennedy Jr., dressed in an impeccably tailored navy-blue suit, greeted those who had been summoned to say a last farewell to his mother. In the front hall, Caroline was sitting on a bench and softly crying. Her husband Ed Schlossberg was by her side, consoling her. In the library and roaming around the apartment were family members—Lawfords, Kennedys, and Shrivers. The guests could hear a Gregorian chant dimly coming from Jackie’s bedroom.

  Members of the family and a few close friends were led singly back to Jackie’s bedroom, which was done in coral and peach tones, and had a fabric canopy over the bed. Except for Maurice Tempelsman and John and some other male members of the family, only women were being allowed in the bedroom. One of Jackie’s last wishes had been that none but a few women friends outside the family be permitted to see her at her time of dying.

  As Carly Simon entered the room, Bunny Mellon was sitting on a chair by the bed holding Jackie’s hand. No one in the room seemed to be as comfortable with what was going on as Bunny. She was in her spiritual element. She had a smile of acceptance and serenity.

  “You sit with her now,” Bunny said to Carly.

  Carly exchanged places with Bunny, and looked at Jackie.

  Jackie was unconscious. She had a print scarf over her head. She was under the sheets. There was an intravenous needle in her arm, which may have been carrying morphine. There was an attempt to keep her comfortable, but there was no sense that she was taking her own life, that this was some kind of assisted suicide. There did not seem to be any rush. A visitor had the sense that Jackie was art-directing these last moments of her life in her own very dignified way.

  In repose, her face was completely smooth and translucent. Her mouth was slightly open, and there was the sound of a delicate exhalation. As the Gregorian chants continued to play, various members of the family filtered in and out of the room. Everybody was talking in hushed tones.

  Carly felt privileged that the family had allowed her to be in the room with Jackie. She spoke to Jackie in a low and comforting voice, telling her how much she loved her. Maurice stood at the end of the bed, observing. Bunny, not far away on a settee, was praying.

  “During the time I was sitting with Jackie and holding her hand,” Carly later told a friend, “I felt as though I had a direct communication with her—an experience that was deep, personal, and untainted by self-consciousness. And as I opened the door and left the room, and walked
through the halls, and said good-bye to the family members, I started crying.”

  Outside on Fifth Avenue, Carly and Joe Armstrong were assaulted by the lights of a hundred cameras. The crowds had grown even larger on the street, and it was impossible not to feel the sudden shift from the personal to the public. It was a sensation that Jackie’s friends had experienced many times before—that whether she liked it or not, she was part of history. And as Carly and Joe disappeared into the throngs of Fifth Avenue, it seemed to them that once again Jackie was being taken over by the world.

  NOTES

  ONE: THE SUNDOWN OF CHIVALRY

  The description of Theodore H. White’s trip to Hyannis Port, his heavy drinking, his telephone calls to his mother’s doctor, his thoughts upon seeing John F. Kennedy’s widow, and his “Camelot” interview with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy for Life magazine are drawn from a variety of primary sources, including the author’s own notes of a lengthy discussion that he had with White in 1985 about that famous interview.

  In addition, Ralph Graves, assistant managing editor of Life in 1963, provided much corroborating material. In particular, Graves recounted for the author a discussion that he had with White many years after the “Camelot” interview about some of the unpublished details, including the fact that Jackie caressed the dead President’s penis in Trauma Room No. 1 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. David Maness, Life’s articles editor, is the source for the description of the telephone call that White placed to Life from Hyannis Port.

  Further documentation for the missing portions of the “Camelot” interview came from Joan Braden, who learned during her interview for the John F. Kennedy Library’s oral history project with Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, that Jackie was menstruating on the day of the assassination. That section of Mrs. Auchincloss’s interview has been suppressed by the Kennedy Library. The fact that Jack and Jackie slept together the night before the assassination is contained in William Manchester’s tapes for The Death of a President (Harper & Row, 1967), according to Don Congdon, William Manchester’s literary agent. Those tapes, which Manchester donated to the Kennedy Library, will not be available to the public until 2063.