Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  To Janet, the position of First Lady was so vital a role in the administration, she couldn’t imagine why Jackie would want to take a chance of staining it. Surely, Mamie Eisenhower wouldn’t have considered time away with someone like Onassis. However, she also realized that the Kennedys were a much younger administration—Jackie was thirty-four, Mamie had been sixty-seven!—and not as wedded to conventional wisdom about protocol. Still, this business with Onassis was getting out of hand. It hadn’t even been three months since Janet fought with Lee about him, and now Jackie? As far as she knew, she’d already convinced Lee to end whatever she had with Onassis and marry Stas in the Catholic Church. Now Jackie wanted to go on a cruise with the Greek? None of it made any sense to Janet. She told Jackie not to go. However, Jackie refused to acquiesce to Janet’s will. She said she was going, and that was that. Therefore, Janet decided to take the matter up with the President.

  One of JFK’s Secret Service agents recalled, “I was standing in the Oval when Evelyn [Lincoln, JFK’s secretary] announced that Mrs. A. was on the line. The President looked at me, grimaced, and said, ‘I expected this call.’ By this time, Mrs. A. and the President had a pretty good rapport. During the call, he told her that, obviously, Jackie should not go. However, because she had suffered so much lately he said, ‘Let’s just give her this little break and hope for the best.’ He said he felt the country had such empathy for the First Lady that there was little she could do to jeopardize all of the goodwill. He also said he would appreciate it if Mrs. A. let it go, and he added that he didn’t want to hear another word about it. He was fairly firm with her, while also polite and respectful. She was very obsequious and said, ‘Yes, Mr. President,” and that this was the end of it for her.”

  Not quite. Apparently, Janet then called Lee, upset. After all, it was all Lee’s idea. What was she thinking? “She told Lee that bringing the First Lady of the United States into whatever was going on with Onassis was going too far,” recalled someone with knowledge of the conversation. “However, Lee had had it with her mother by this time. ‘You must stop telling me what to do, Mummy,’ she told her, according to what I heard. ‘I am a grown woman. I know what I am doing. Jackie needs this vacation and I am going to give it to her. One would think you would be proud of me, not cross with me.’ In the end, Janet lost this particular battle. She got nowhere with Lee, just as she’d gotten nowhere with both Jackie and Jack. ‘Has everyone just lost his mind?’ she asked, frustrated. ‘Am I the only one who sees this as a problem?’”

  Sisters in Greece

  On October 1, Jackie, her Secret Service agents Clint Hill and Paul Landis, and her loyal personal assistant, Providencia (Provi) Paredes, left for their two-week trip, first taking a TWA flight from New York to Rome and then on to Athens. When they arrived in Athens, Lee and Stas greeted them, along with the United States ambassador Henry Labouisse. Jackie, Lee, and Stas were then taken to the villa of Greek shipping businessman Markos Nomikos, at Cavouri Bay, a seaside resort about twenty miles or so outside of Athens. Here, they and a few friends would spend a couple of days in seclusion with other guests of Nomikos, including Stelina Mavros, who, for the last three years, had been employed as his special assistant.

  After spending a few days in Athens, the coterie finally made it onto the Christina, which was docked in Glyfada. “There was a big welcoming team of people,” Clint Hill recalled, “and, sure enough, there was Onassis, standing on the deck, all smiles. He wasn’t the best-looking guy in the world. Short. Big nose. Bushy eyebrows. Though he was weathered, he did have a certain presence. Lee offered her right cheek to him. He kissed it, then the other cheek. He did the same to Mrs. Kennedy. Something about it made me cringe. I didn’t like it, probably because I knew the President would have had a fit had he witnessed it.”

  Also present on the yacht were Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., JFK’s undersecretary of commerce, and his wife, Suzanne Perrin; Silvio Medici de Menezes and his wife, Princess Irene Galitzine, the founder of a glamorous fashion house in Italy (which popularized the wearing of ornate pants as formal wear in the 1960s); Alexis Minotis, the handsome actor who had also directed Maria Callas in Greek productions of Medea and Norma; Onassis’s older sister, Artemis Garoufalidis, and half sister Kalliroi Patronicola; and Lee’s friend Accardi Gurney.

  On their first morning at sea, Onassis had the entire ship decorated with decks of colorful roses and gladioli. The ship had been abundantly stocked with twenty-six different vintage wines, eight different varieties of caviar, as well as a variety of exotic fruits he’d had flown in from Paris. Two chefs—one Greek, one French—were on call to prepare meals, which included caviar-filled eggs, foie gras, steamed lobsters, and jumbo shrimp. Jackie seemed taken aback as she took in her surroundings. She was used to luxury, as was Lee, but Onassis’s love boat really was impressive. “So this is how kings live,” Jackie reportedly whispered to Onassis as he took her by the hand that first day. He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Mrs. Kennedy is in charge here,” the mogul then announced to the throng of media who’d gathered to watch the First Lady board. “She’s the captain,” he said with a roguish glint in his eyes.

  The first stop was Istanbul, Turkey, where Jackie, Lee, and their friends would visit the Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque, and Hagia Sofia, the Greek Orthodox basilica. Then it was off to Crete, where they toured the Palace of Knossos. After that, they would dock in Levkas and then visit Onassis’s private island of Skorpios. He’d bought it about a year earlier and was in the process of spending more than $10 million on improvements, so it wasn’t much to look at yet. Still, it was lush and isolated and the Bouvier sisters loved it.

  Thus far, the vacation had been all fun and games for Jackie and Lee. Things took a serious turn, though, once they got to Smyrna, Ari’s hometown (now known as Izmir). Both sisters wanted Ari to take them on a tour. He agreed. As the small group slowly strolled down a street in town, Jackie and Ari chatted while he pointed out sights and waxed nostalgic about his childhood. Lee trailed miserably behind them with the rest of the group. As he reminisced, according to most accounts, Ari confided in Jackie about his difficult relationship with his father and admitted that the primary reason for his drive and ambition was to prove himself to his dad. Obviously well pleased with himself, he said he had made his first million by the age of twenty-five by purchasing ocean freighters at a bargain price and then charging huge fees to governments to use them to ship supplies during the war. Jackie, with an arched eyebrow, asked, “Isn’t that illegal?” He responded by saying, “That depends on how you look at it, my dear.” Turning personal again, he also discussed his grief over his mother’s death when he was just a boy. As he opened up to Jackie, she listened attentively. It was as if they had reached a surprising level of intimacy.

  “I remember we were all sitting on a curb watching people go by on one side of the street, and she and Ari were sitting together on the other side,” recalled Stelina Mavros. “I looked at Lee and she appeared to be confused and unhappy. She and Stas had, apparently, had a fight and he fled the cruise, headed back to England. So she was alone. At one point, she got up and sort of meandered across the street and sat with Ari and Jackie. Finally, she got up and crossed the street and joined the rest of us. It was as if she didn’t know her place, where she was supposed to be.”

  Imagine it: just four months earlier, Onassis had invited Maria Callas to cruise on the Christina simply to demonstrate to Lee that he would always choose her. Now it had to feel as if he was choosing Jackie. This is how quickly things could change in the Onassis world. “I think when Lee looks back on this trip she believes it was the second biggest mistake she ever made,” said one person who knew her at that time, “the first one being renewing her vows to Stas.”

  Any tension didn’t last long, though. Before returning home, the sisters stopped off to see Morocco. At one point, they found themselves at the king’s palace waiting for his late arrival. They had a terrible time making
small talk with about a hundred women—his harem, his father’s harem, and his grandfather’s. Dressed in golden caftans, all of the women sat in rapt adoration of Jackie as she and Lee tried to figure out what to say to them. Finally, Jackie stood up in the middle of the room and announced, “My sister would now like to perform our mother’s favorite song for you, ‘In an Old Dutch Garden Where the Tulips Grow.’” Lee was horrified but, ever the trouper, she stood right up and began to sing—while Jackie burst into gales of laughter.

  On October 17, the Bouvier sisters and their entourage finally boarded a Pan Am flight headed back to New York City. “It will be so wonderful to get home,” Jackie told Clint Hill and Paul Landis. “I’ve missed the President so much.” It was apparently true because, from Greece, Jackie wrote JFK a letter that would later be widely quoted in biographies about her: “I think how lucky I am to miss you … I realize here so much that I am having something you can never have—the absence of tension. I wish so much I could give you that. But I can’t. So I give you every day while I think of you. [It is] the only thing I have to give and I hope it matters to you.”

  Jackie and Lee would spend most of their flight home talking about their fun time, sitting directly behind the Secret Service agents. They were both lighthearted and eager to chat, not whispering conspiratorially but talking openly while sipping sparkling wine. Bringing her tapered fingers together in an arc, Jackie said, “He’s a bit of a pirate. Or maybe he’s like Odysseus,” she added, painting Onassis’s earthy and dominating masculinity in a romantic light by comparing him to the hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey. In the end, the sisters had to agree that Onassis was also a lot like “Daddy” in terms of sex appeal and persuasive charm, and that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. “You two are just friends, right?” Jackie asked Lee. “You know how I feel about these things.”

  “It’s complicated, Jacks,” Lee told her.

  “I’m a smart woman, Pekes,” Jackie countered. “Explain it to me.”

  “No,” Lee said. “Not here!” she exclaimed, lowering her voice. Obviously, not there—people were listening, and she knew it! She then added with mock solemnity, “I would never do anything to bring embarrassment to the First Lady.” Jackie winced. “That sounds so dreary,” she said, rolling her eyes. “The First Lady! Why, it should be the name of a horse, not the title of a woman.” It was an old joke of Jackie’s, but every time she made it, she and her sister laughed.

  According to an agent sitting with them, Jackie thanked Lee for allowing her to have what she called “this wonderful time away.” It was exactly what she needed, she said. She then reached into her purse, pulled from it an antique crystal rosary, and gently placed it around her sister’s neck. She explained that it was from the Vatican, and that it had been blessed by the Pope. She then kissed Lee on the forehead and told her that she loved her.

  PART SIX

  THE ASSASSINATION

  11/22/63

  It was like a knife to Janet’s heart. “Mummy, he’s dead,” Jamie told her. “I just heard it on the news. Jack is dead.” The phone dropped from her hand. She steadied herself against a wall and then crumpled into a chair. She picked up the receiver and tried to speak, but her throat tightened with a rush of emotion. “Are you sure?” Janet managed to ask. He said he was certain. There was no doubt about it. The President was dead. “I need you to come home right now, son,” she said. “Take the next plane. Get here as soon as you can.” Then she hung up and began to shake.

  One of the reasons most people who were alive remember where they were when President John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated on Friday, November 22, 1963, is because, of course, it started out just like any other day. By early afternoon, however, it had become a day defined by shock, despair, grief, and anger. For the family, though, those directly impacted by the tragedy, it was a day from which they would never truly recover.

  About an hour before she received that fateful call from her son, Janet Auchincloss had returned to her new home at 3044 O Street, centrally located in Georgetown’s East Village—on the corner of O and 31st—after a pleasant outing. Always full of drive and energy, she’d just played a lively round of golf with her British-titled friend, Lady Margaret Walker, wife of John Walker, director of the National Gallery of Art. Though Janet had taken the morning off for fun and exercise, she knew that the rest of the day would be busy. At this time, her work on the board of the Hearing and Speech Center of Washington Children’s Hospital was taking up a lot of her time; she was in the midst of planning its annual picnic and pony ride for the kids at Hammersmith in the spring. Opening the estate for the young ones was always a joy for her. She was also active at this time on the committees of the American Field Service, the Red Cross, and the World Affairs Council.

  Janet and Hugh had bought the enormous house on O Street about a year earlier after selling the Merrywood estate. As much as the Auchinclosses hated to admit it, it had become impractical to afford both Merrywood and Hammersmith. Therefore, they put Merrywood on the market in 1959 for $850,000 (about $7 million today). Anticipating the sale, in January of ’60, Janet compiled a scrapbook of black-and-white photos taken of Merrywood and gave it to Hugh with the inscription: “For Hugh D.—A souvenir of 18 years together at ‘Merrywood.’ With all my love, Janet.” It took two more years for the house to sell, though, and for $650,000. Janet hated to see it go. However, at least they still had Hammersmith, and she was determined that that property would never be sold. After the Merrywood sale the Auchinclosses bought the O Street house, a monolithic four-story, nine-bedroom, Queen Anne–style structure with all of its impressive towering peaks and gables.

  Upon her return from her golf outing, Janet was on her way up the stairs to her bedroom when the telephone rang. It was Nancy Tuckerman. Janet had known Nancy for years, going all the way back to when she and Jackie attended school in Farmington together. Nancy had recently taken over as Jackie’s social secretary from Letitia Baldrige, who had left the White House exhausted from Jackie’s schedule. “I’m afraid I have some bad news,” Nancy told Janet. Then, perhaps realizing that there was no good way to say it, she just blurted it out: “The President has been shot.”

  Janet would recall suddenly feeling light-headed and bracing herself against a wall. “Jacqueline,” she managed to say. “What about my Jacqueline?”

  Jackie had not been injured, Nancy told her, though she was with Jack when it happened. Nancy then explained that there had been a motorcade in Dallas, that the President and First Lady were in an open car, and that Jack had been struck by a sniper’s bullet. Nancy told her that Jackie was still in Dallas and would soon be en route to Washington. “I promise to let you know as soon as Air Force One leaves Texas,” she told her. Janet said she needed to call Lee in London. It wasn’t necessary, she was told. Bobby had already been in touch with her and Stas, and the Radziwills were on their way to the States.

  “Is he…?” Janet couldn’t even finish the sentence.

  Nancy said she wasn’t sure of the President’s condition, but it didn’t look good.

  After hanging up with Nancy, Janet had to sit down to collect herself. The first order of business was to contact her other family members. First, she called her daughter Janet Jr. at Sarah Lawrence and told her to make plans to come to Washington as soon as possible. Yusha, who was also in New York, was Janet’s next call. She was about to call sixteen-year-old Jamie at Brooks, her hand on the phone and ready to dial when it rang.

  “I had a terrible time reaching Mummy,” Jamie Auchincloss would recall. “Trying to call Washington from outside of Boston was impossible. I dialed the number accurately three times and each time was connected to a wrong number in three different states. In those days, telephone companies had lines that would only accommodate a normal amount of traffic. But the number of people calling Washington after the assassination was so much greater than usual, it fouled up the system. So, before finally reaching Mummy, I found myself callin
g perfect strangers and telling them that the President had just been murdered. They would then break down in tears and hang up. To think that these people found out about the tragedy from me, the President’s brother-in-law, by way of my dialing a wrong number is difficult to fathom even today, so many years later.”

  After hanging up with her son, Janet’s hand was still on the phone when it rang. It was Hugh calling from the Metropolitan Club, where he’d been having lunch. He wanted to make sure his wife had heard the terrible news. She asked him to please come home as soon as possible. Then Janet summoned her butler and told him to please gather the household staff in the drawing room for an important announcement. “By this time, it was about one-thirty in the afternoon,” recalled Adora Rule, “and I had just gotten to work, having been with Mrs. Auchincloss late the night before at a charity event. I walked into the house to find the entire staff of eight sitting in the drawing room, crying. Then Mrs. A. came into the parlor. She asked me to take a seat. ‘I have terrible news,’ she said, standing before us all. ‘The President is dead.’ There was a collective gasp. I noticed her knees buckle. I leapt from my chair to steady her. ‘No, no, I’m okay,’ she told me. ‘I’m fine.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I must go upstairs and change,’ she said. ‘I’m going to church and then to the White House. My daughter needs me.’ She then walked out of the room on unsteady footing.”

  No sooner had Janet gone upstairs than there was a knock on the front door. Adora, in tears, opened it to find Katherine del Valle Jones, wife of John Wesley Jones, ambassador to Peru, and the second-highest-ranking member of the diplomatic corps. Already, people were coming to the house to extend their sympathies. “I told her that Mrs. Auchincloss was indisposed at the moment,” recalled Adora Rule, “but she insisted that she see her. So I took her card. Following strict Auchincloss household protocol, I went to the desk and found a small white envelope. I slipped the card in the envelope and handed it to the butler. He put the envelope on a round, silver tray. He then went upstairs with the tray. Five minutes later, Mrs. Auchincloss appeared wearing a knee-length black dress, which I had seen her wear at the function the night before, but which now seemed perfectly appropriate given the circumstances of the day. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she told the visitor. They spoke for a few moments and I couldn’t help but notice how composed Mrs. Auchincloss appeared, how she continued to push aside her tremendous emotion in order to receive the ambassador’s wife.”