In early spring of 1962, Lee and Ari began to meet for cocktails or dinner at Claridge’s in London or Maxim’s in Paris and share confidences with each other. Onassis was so flattering, viewing Lee as one of the most interesting people he’d ever met. He found her to be creative and admired her imagination. He loved hearing her stories of the times she and Jackie spent in Europe and appreciated the fact that she seemed so close to her mother and sister. Family had always been important to him. Because he also thought she was uncommonly beautiful, poised, and collected, he was baffled by her lack of self-esteem. Whereas Maria Callas was self-confident to the point of being exhausting, Onassis thought of Lee as a broken person and wondered how that had happened to someone so beautiful with so much to give. He figured she’d probably experienced a lot of pain in her past. “But pain is a part of everyone’s life,” he told her. “We can’t escape it.”
He fascinated her as much as she did him. She loved his attitude about life and, especially, about money. “Money isn’t just luxury,” he told her, “it is power,” he said, echoing a philosophy that had also been her maternal grandfather’s, Jim T. Lee. “That power can be yours, too, if you’d like to be at my side,” he told her. He even said he wanted to marry her, someday. Was he serious? Lee wasn’t sure, but she thought maybe so. “It didn’t take long before she was completely swept off her feet by him,” said Agnetta Castallanos, a vice president of Onassis’s Olympic Airways since 1960. “I was with Onassis as a lover just before Lee came into the picture,” she recalled. “We ended it because the business we shared complicated things. He talked a lot about Lee. He was crazy about her. I told him I felt jealous, the way women do when they’re being replaced. He wanted me to befriend her, telling me she was a sad and lonely little creature. ‘Ari, I tend to shy away from charity work,’ I told him. But I called her anyway and invited her to dinner.”
“So, what’s it like to have a sister who is the most famous woman in the world?” Agnetta asked Lee over their meal at Claridge’s.
“I make it a policy to never talk about her,” Lee snapped, as if by instinct.
“That’s probably wise,” Agnetta said.
“Indeed.”
“So, what’s it like being with one of the wealthiest men in the world?” Lee later asked.
“I make it a policy to never talk about him,” Agnetta said with a wink.
“That’s probably wise,” Lee countered with a smile.
“Indeed.”
“We became instant friends after that night,” Agnetta said. “I thought she was fabulous. I saw what Ari saw. At first, she seemed like a winsome little thing, but once you got to know her, you saw the inner resolve. The stories she told about her mother! ‘With a mother like mine, you have to be resilient,’ she told me.
“Eventually, after a couple weeks, she opened up about Ari to me. She said they had a deep connection. ‘It is not insignificant,’ she told me. ‘It’s profound.’ I said, ‘Lee, I think you’re falling in love with this man.’ She said, ‘I know. It was love at first sight, I admit it. But I also love my husband.’ However, I believe Stas had come to represent sadness in her life—her postpartum depression, an affair he’d apparently had. I don’t think she fully trusted him. Being with Ari was just better for her. She asked me if I thought a woman could love two men at the same time. I said I didn’t know.”
Stelio Papadimitriou added, “I saw Ari and Lee together many times in the spring of ’62 and she would look at him with such adoration, I thought, ‘My God, she worships this man, doesn’t she?’ To call it an affair I think might be reductive of it. Maybe for Ari it was simply that, but for Lee it was more.”
After Ari and Lee became involved, Ari’s sister, Artemis, opened her seaside estate in Glyfada to Lee whenever she was in Greece; the two women began to think of each other as family. Meanwhile, still standing in the wings was Maria Callas, watching and seething. Ari was not willing to let her go, and Lee knew it. She didn’t mind, at least not yet. It gave her a little time to figure out what to do about Stas, who was back in London with their children, seemingly unaware, at this juncture anyway, of what was going on between his wife and the Greek tycoon. Maria, though, minded Lee’s involvement with Onassis. A lot. The writer Leo Lerman, who worked for Condé Nast for more than fifty years, wrote in his diary that Maria told him—and this was in the summer of ’77, many years after that spring of ’62—“I never disliked Jackie, but I hate Lee. I hate her.”
“Enough of Her!”
On a Sunday night in the summer of 1962, Lee and Stas were watching television in their Buckingham Place home with four of their closest friends. As the small group of six watched a broadcast and drank expensive cognac, a special report commenced about Jackie. The commentator droned on and on for at least twenty minutes about Jackie’s beauty and influence while everyone in the room fidgeted and tried not to look at Lee. Finally, Stas stood up, walked over to the television, and turned it off. A small smile flitted across his face as he said, “My God! Enough of her!” All eyes went to Lee for a reaction. Acting blasé, she swirled her cognac in her glass, took a sniff and a sip. “Yes, well, my sister is quite the spectacle these days,” she remarked, staring off into the distance.
“We all understood,” recalled Terrance Landow, who was present. “When you have spent your life in competition with your older sister for attention and you suddenly find yourself in a situation where there can be no competition, it’s not easy. Lee would complain about it—though not often—and I would say to her, ‘But, Lee, what have you done to deserve acclamation?’ This question would upset her. ‘What has Jackie done?’ she would ask me.”
Lee had a point. Jackie had just found herself in the right place at the right time and married someone who would become President. Lee believed that if it had been her in the same circumstance, she would have had as much impact on the world. She was just as chic, just as personable, and just as engaging as her sister, and some might argue even more so. But it wasn’t Lee. It was Jackie, and this was difficult for her.
At this same time, Lee was still devastated by Stas’s brief affair and, even though she was still seeing Onassis, decided to also find comfort in the arms of Taki Theodoracopulos, who by this time was a handsome Greek tennis pro and bon vivant. It was as if once she had broken the rules with Onassis, Lee felt emboldened to further experiment outside her marriage. She had met Taki back in the summer of ’61 at Gianni Agnelli’s palatial villa on the Riviera. (Agnelli, one of the richest men in all of Italy, was a successful industrialist and the head of Fiat.) “I was twenty-four and impressed with her,” recalled Taki, “because, well, she was beautiful, she was the sister-in-law of the President of the United States, and she was flirting with me, all of which was a lethal combination. When I saw that she had a rather loose marriage, I started pursuing her. Two years of on-again off-again romantic behavior then began.
“I had mixed emotions about Lee,” Taki recalled. “On one hand, she was a magical creature who, when we were alone together, was romantic, charming, and lovely. However, when we were out in public, she would change. I never understood why. She would become bitchy, critical. She would say dreadful things about me, be very condescending. I would have to wonder, who in her life spoke to her like that, giving her license to then think she could speak to others the same way? Looking back, I think she just wasn’t happy. She wanted love and acceptance so badly, it was crippling for her. The more time I spent with her, the more I knew she wasn’t the one for me, nor was I the one for her. That said, for a little sliver of time there, I was crazy about her.”
No doubt adding to Lee’s discontentment during these years—which she sometimes called “the political years”—was that she wasn’t really that fond of Jackie’s other side of the family, the Kennedys. Though she loved the excitement of the White House—being in the presence of so much power and entitlement was intoxicating—paradoxically, she thought the Kennedys themselves were incredibly dull. It wouldn�
��t be until many years later that she would look back on these years with wonder. “At the time, I didn’t realize how special everything was,” she would observe, “although [I was] aware certainly that there was magic in the air. We were presumptuous to assume this magic would continue. President Kennedy borrowed a credo from Sophocles, and inspired those around him to live their lives along the lines of excellence. Everyone wanted to give the most of themselves because that expectation was returned.”
Lee was wise to Jack’s indiscretions and she made sure he knew it. She didn’t seem to mind them, though, maybe because she knew she had little room for judgment. “Jack used to play around and I knew exactly what he was up to and would tell him so,” Lee recalled to Cecil Beaton years later, in June of 1968. “And he’d have absolutely no guilty conscience about it and would say, ‘I love her [Jackie] deeply and have done everything for her. I’ve no feeling of letting her down because I’ve put her foremost in everything.’”
“Do you realize that I can reach anyone I want to from the White House?” Jack once asked Lee. “Do you understand the power of that?” The two laughed. It really was a heady thought. “Jackie doesn’t get it,” Jack told Lee with a wink. “She doesn’t see how much fun this can be.” Lee didn’t comment, but she had to have smiled to herself. It’s true that Jackie was solemn about her position. In her mind, Lee would have had more fun with it.
It wasn’t as if Jackie didn’t try to include Lee in the excitement of being First Lady, though. Earlier, in the summer of ’61, Jackie had made plans to visit Greece on a vacation and thought it would cheer up Lee if she were able to tag along. The next year, in the spring of ’62, the Bouvier sisters enjoyed another vacation abroad: their much-publicized and written-about trip to India and then Pakistan. If ever Lee could be thought of as a good sport, it was during this trip because, in the minds of most observers, especially in the press, she was an afterthought to the main attraction, the much-idolized First Lady. “Mrs. Kennedy was received as the wife of the President and Lee was kind of like her lady-in-waiting when we were overseas,” recalled Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who was on the trip. Many thousands of people came forth to pay homage to Jackie, to give her gifts and to bear witness to what had become an international phenomenon. “We were always surrounded by too many people,” Lee would later recall. “The banquet at the presidential mansion was absolute hell.” Lee’s memory aside, the popular pictures of the two sisters sitting atop an elephant (Lee wearing white leather gloves, of course!) and smiling as if they hadn’t a care in the world seemed to suggest that a good and memorable time was had by both. Even that moment was a bit marred by what seemed to some to be a Freudian slip by Jackie. “Lee, let me take the reins,” she famously said while the girls were on top of that elephant.
There would be yet another trip for the sisters in August of 1962, this one extended time off to enjoy Italy. Reams of press coverage were generated by this vacation as well, with hundreds of photographs published worldwide of Jackie and Lee in beautiful locations such as Amalfi and Ravello. While they were in Italy, though, the tension between the sisters was obvious to some observers. Nunziata Lisi, an Italian friend of Lee’s, recalls, “Lee had been in Paris and planned to meet Jackie in Ravello. I made all of the arrangements for her. However, the planes were late and there were all sorts of travel problems. When she finally showed up at the resort, she was late, frustrated, and exhausted. Jackie was annoyed. ‘We have plans,’ she told her, petulantly. ‘There are people I am supposed to meet for dinner!’ Lee stared at her and said, ‘I’m very sorry, Jackie, but your need to be loved, worshipped, and adored will have to wait until I shower and change my outfit!’”
At the time, some argued that Lee’s sensitivity about Jackie was a shame because she most certainly had her own personal style and grace. Thanks to a number of photo layouts in fashion magazines after the Kennedy election—and more that she would do in the coming years—Lee would be viewed by some in the fashion industry as a tastemaker and trendsetter. Fashion designer Ralph Rucci noted to Vanity Fair, “Lee has always been an original. Mrs. [Diana] Vreeland said that Jacqueline Kennedy released style in this nation. Well, she had a great deal of assistance, and she had the best tutors. But Lee did it on her own! She understands clothes. Lee could put on a coat and will know how to turn her shoulder and her head and her arm and hold the coat so that it’s perfection.”
People paid attention to the fact that Lee understood fashion and knew what looked best on her model-thin five-foot-six frame, so much so that she would find herself on the “Best Dressed List” for many years in the sixties. She was once asked to judge new fall-winter fashion for McCall’s, in Paris. She was even asked to model some of the clothing. She was also instrumental in introducing the world to André Courrèges, the designer many have credited for the “mod,” pop look of the 1960s.
Not only did Lee receive accolades for her fashion choices and her modeling, she also demonstrated a real knack for writing when she temporarily worked for McCall’s in Paris. It seemed that fashion journalism was a good fit. However, she wasn’t satisfied, explaining that it was too “behind the scenes,” not high-profile enough. Plus, Jackie had already made a huge impact on Paris when she was there as First Lady, speaking in French and handling herself in a way that made her country proud. (Everyone would always remember Jack’s comment: “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.”) That was history, Lee felt, whereas what she was doing was far less significant. Therefore, when McCall’s offered her a permanent position, she asked for so much money she sabotaged herself right out of the job.
“You must look inward, Lee,” Taki told her one day over cocktails, “and find out what you want to do with your life.” Lee seemed completely crestfallen on this particular day. She described herself to Taki as “just a woman trying to make a name for myself separate and apart from my sister’s.” Taki told her there was nothing wrong with wanting to do that for herself. “I say, ‘Go for it, Lee,’” he told her. “Get what you want out of life. You are incredible! Make your own mark.” Lee then lamented that every time she felt she was headed down the right path, it turned out to be the wrong one. “You will figure it out,” Taki told her. “You will find your place. I promise you.” At that, Lee reached out and took both his hands into her own. “Thank you for believing in me,” she said, tears welling in her eyes. “I don’t have a lot of support in my life. The one thing I know for sure is that I must keep daring,” she concluded. “I must keep daring.”
The President and His Mother-in-Law
It was August 24, 1962. Janet Auchincloss was lunching with Betty Tuckerman, mother of Jackie’s secretary, Nancy Tuckerman, at the Colony Club in New York when a waiter approached the table to tell her that she was wanted on the telephone. “Who is it?” Janet wanted to know. The waiter leaned in to her ear and whispered urgently: “It’s the White House calling. It’s the President.” Janet got up and raced to the phone. “How in the world did you know I was here, Mr. President?” she asked her son-in-law. He said he actually had no idea where she was at that moment. He’d just told the White House switchboard to track her down. One of the many perks of being President was that he could find his mother-in-law at any given moment.
At this time, Jackie was in Ravello with Caroline and Lee on a vacation. It had been decided to leave baby John Jr. with his grandmother Janet; the baby’s nanny, Maud Shaw, was also dispatched to Hammersmith. With Jackie and the children all gone, Jack told Janet he was lonely. It’s fascinating to think of JFK as ever feeling lonesome considering all of the relatives usually available to him at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port. “Would it be convenient if I came up and stayed with Uncle Hugh and you?” Jack asked. Janet was delighted. “It would be perfectly wonderful,” she exclaimed. “We’d be thrilled to have you.” He then explained that the plan was for him and his friend Paul Fay to cruise aboard the Marlin around Hyannis Port early in the day. Jack would then arrive at Ham
mersmith in the afternoon of the 25th and stay until the 27th.
Janet later explained: “It wasn’t as easy as all that to have the President of the United States spend the weekend with you because all sorts of furor ensued to which, I supposed, he was rather oblivious. The Secret Service appeared and ninety-nine telephones were pulled in and out, the Newport police went into a tailspin and put little [phone] booths here and there, and the Coast Guard whizzed around the dock.”
Jamie elaborated: “When Jack became President, the government installed thirty phone lines, all connected to the White House switchboard. So when a person called the house to see whether I was going to play tennis with him at Bailey’s Beach, an operator would answer by saying, ‘White House Switchboard.’ That call would be transferred to the Newport Naval Base. It would then again be transferred to the Secret Service command post in our basement. Then, it would be transferred to the pantry, where an agent was always on duty. That agent would then have to figure out where I was in the house, which was likely on the second floor in my bedroom. By the time the call came to me up there, the person on the other line was so frightened and confused, the last thing on his mind was the question of whether or not I wanted to play tennis with him at Bailey’s Beach!”
“Jack always called me ‘Mummy,’” Janet would recall. “For some reason, this always seemed funny to him, that anybody should be called ‘Mummy.’ I don’t know why, but he thought it was very funny.” They were getting along so well these days, Janet had all but forgotten how angry she’d been at her son-in-law for his absence when Jackie gave birth prematurely. It had been a number of years ago, after all, and it was hard for her to hold a grudge against him. He was so charming, she loved being in his company. Of course, he was also the nation’s Commander in Chief and that carried weight with her, as it would with most people. She had great respect for the power of his office. “I remember one family dinner when Jackie contradicted Jack on something, Mummy was actually upset,” recalled Jamie. “‘Jacqueline,’ she said, scolding her, ‘how dare you correct the President!’ Jack loved that. For the rest of the day he kept ribbing Jackie, saying, ‘How dare you correct me, Jackie. I’m the President!’ Also, I think it bears noting that Mummy was only ten years older than Jack; she thought of him as a contemporary,” said Jamie.
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 15
