Jackie’s Little Cemetery
November 1964.
Two lone figures were walking through a lush oasis behind Hammersmith Farm called the Sunken Garden. They were holding hands. “What do you think of this one?” the man asked. They stopped at a small gray block of marble protruding from the ground. It was about two feet long and just as high. He bent over and pushed aside a cluster of red and gold leaves obstructing the engraving of a small cross and the words “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy—1917–1963.” The woman stood before it and scrutinized it. “Too shiny,” she decided as she studied the marble. He agreed. They walked another couple of feet. “How about this one?” he asked as they stopped before another stone. This one was slate, its hue slightly darker than the marble. Inscribed on it were the same words: “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy—1917–1963.” She crouched down to get a closer look. “I actually like this one,” she said. “Put this one on the top of the list,” she added, saying she appreciated the way the light shimmered off it. She noted that the slate came from Vermont, whereas the marble had originated in New Hampshire. As the two talked, the heavy cloud cover began to clear to reveal the sun. With the new flickering light, shadows of at least fifty similar stones began to take shape around them, each emblazoned with the name of her deceased husband, his date of birth and of death. It was like being in a miniature cemetery, but with all of the gravestones paying respect to the same person: “President John Fitzgerald Kennedy—1917–1963.”
Jamie Auchincloss recalled: “I loved taking unsuspecting visitors there, preferably on a foggy night. As we walked along carefully, they would inevitably stumble over a gravestone and scream out, ‘My God, what is this?’ And I would shine a flashlight on it, and the stone would say, ‘President John Fitzgerald Kennedy—1917–1963.’ It would completely freak people out that my sister actually had a faux graveyard at Hammersmith.”
Jack Warnecke had come to Hammersmith Farm to help Jackie make the final selection of stone for the JFK memorial at Arlington, upon which would be engraved words from Jack’s inaugural address. The actual tombstone itself would have etched on it just a simple cross—nothing like what Eunice and Sargent Shriver had earlier suggested in terms of grandiose religious symbolism. Janet had recommended a stone carver in Newport, which was why the two were at Hammersmith walking through a plot of ground Jackie called “my little cemetery.” Hopefully, their final selection would be made this weekend.
This project had consumed Jack for the last few months, so much so that he had opened another office in Georgetown, just a block away from where Jackie had lived on N Street. He also had his children come east with him, giving his ex-wife a nice summer break. It had been a fun few months, the Warnecke brood getting along well with Jackie’s children, Caroline and John, all of them taking road trips together, such as one to Williamsburg, where the adults had a chance to teach the young ones about the Civil War. Though Jack’s kids returned to California in September for school, he stayed on and continued to work on the JFK site. Throughout this time, he and Jackie grew even closer.
Jack, who was now forty, realized that Jackie was in no shape to jump into another relationship. She wasn’t herself, and he knew it. Once, they were in her kitchen when someone in the house slammed a door. She began to shake and have trouble breathing. He took her into his arms to calm her.
That night, Jack and Jackie had dinner with Janet and Hugh. They had a lot of laughs; Hugh could really get on a roll with his corny jokes once he had a few drinks in him. After the foursome put Chubby Checker’s new album on the stereo in the Deck Room, Jackie tried to teach her stepfather how to do the twist while Jack and Janet watched and good-naturedly criticized poor Hugh. Finally, Janet decided to call it a night and took her husband up to their room, leaving Jack and Jackie curled up in front of the roaring fireplace. “Jack, if you’d like your shoes polished,” Janet said before she took her leave, “just leave them outside your bedroom door and they shall be polished by morning.” After Janet and Hugh were gone, Jackie mentioned that she needed to go back to Hyannis Port in the morning. Jack suggested that she let him drive her there. She then dozed off at about eleven; he placed a wool blanket over her to keep her warm and then went up to his room—the same one President Kennedy used to sleep in when he would visit Hammersmith.
“Money Is Power”
The next morning, the two rose before Janet and Hugh. Jackie noted that it was good that they’d gotten up on time, that if they missed breakfast, they could forget about eating anything until lunchtime. With a laugh, she observed that her mother ran Hammersmith Farm like a hotel, “a very strict, very mean hotel in a Communist country.” After they ate, Jackie wrote a note saying she would call Janet later that day. At the bottom of the note, Jack scrawled: “My dearest Janet—The room was not too hot. Nor was it too cold. It was just right. Love, JW.” The couple then left the manor and jumped into Jack’s black Mercury convertible. It was a beautiful fall day, and the drive to Hyannis Port was invigorating.
When they got to the compound, Jackie took Jack into the home she had once shared with her late husband, walking him up the stairs and onto the porch. They stood there for a while, admiring the view before going inside. They were alone; the kids were in Georgetown with the housekeeper. Therefore, the two spent the day walking along the shore, taking about their lives. “What matters to you?” Jack asked her. It was such a broad question, Jackie hardly knew how to answer it. “Freedom,” she said, after a moment’s thought. “I want to be able to live a good life and not have any restrictions put on me by the public.” She talked about how much she loathed the public’s and the media’s desire to keep her as, what she called, “The Widow Kennedy.” She said that she didn’t want to be locked in time. “I had a life before I was a Kennedy and I hope to still have one now that my husband is gone,” she said. She also said she wanted her children to be able to live “as normally as possible” and spoke a little about how much she hated the Secret Service protection of them, even though she knew it was necessary. She said she longed, more than anything, to be able to just remember details of what happened in Dallas in 1963 without also reliving those terrible events.
Then, as Jack would later recall it, Jackie said something apropos of nothing that took him by complete surprise. “Power is important,” she said, succinctly. From the expression on his face, she must have known she had to elaborate. “Power matters, Jack,” she added. “I don’t necessarily have to wield it but, definitely, any man I am with has to have it at his disposal.”
“Are you talking about money?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said. “Money is power,” she continued, repeating the family’s long-standing mantra. “I’m a practical woman, just like my mother, like all of my relatives, really.”
This conversation, which he would always remember, left Jack Warnecke feeling uneasy. He wasn’t sure what Jackie intended by sharing this information with him, he only knew that he felt a little bothered by it. He was also under the impression that she was a wealthy woman. She was getting $175,000 a year from Jack’s estate—more than a million dollars a year in today’s money—so she wasn’t exactly broke. However, Jack would later say he felt Jackie was worth a whole lot more. Maybe he felt she would be entitled to the Auchincloss fortune but, of course, this was not the case. She had big spending habits, though, and he knew that about her, too. While he had his own money, would it be enough for her?
“Don’t get it wrong, my dad was all about power, too,” said his son Fred Warnecke. “Being with Jackie Kennedy, part of that was about power for him. As much as he liked her and maybe even loved her by this point, he understood that associating with her helped his business. Being with the Kennedys, those relationships gave him a certain power. He wasn’t some naïve guy who didn’t understand the importance of power. He liked his position in life as a powerful man. But I’m not sure he understood, at least until she cleared it up for him, that Jackie had the same kind of interest
, except that hers was tied more to money in the bank.”
That night, Jack and Jackie ate clam chowder from Millie’s, one of her favorite little diners, closed for the season. Jackie had some of the soup frozen in containers in the refrigerator. She heated the soup on the stove for dinner. It tasted awful. “Just goes to show you that you can not freeze clam chowder,” she said, slightly embarrassed.
After dinner, they spent a couple of hours in the living room, chatting. They began to kiss. “I love you, Jackie, you know that, don’t you?” he said to her, according to his later memory. “I love you too, Jack,” she said. “I’m not sure, though…” she added, her voice trailing. “I fell in love with you the first time I ever saw you, at the British embassy,” he then told her. “Do you remember?” She laughed. “We danced and danced that night,” she recalled with a smile. “It was wonderful.”
From there, it all just seemed to unfold naturally between them. Eventually, Jackie took Jack by the hand and walked him up the stairs to the room she once shared with the other Jack, the first one in her life. She kissed him fully on the lips. They reaffirmed their affection for each other. She then led him to the bed, the one in which, tonight, they would first make love.
After Jack left her home, Jackie spent a couple of days alone there, trying to put into perspective what had happened. Now she was filled with regret. What in the world had she been thinking? It wasn’t that she didn’t have feelings for Jack, but making love to him in the bed she had once shared with her late husband? One year to the month since Jack’s murder? That was definitely going too far. It was as if her judgment had been severely crippled. Jackie felt she had moved too fast with Jack, and now she wanted nothing more than to slow things down. “It all happened with my dad so quickly after the President’s death, she had questions,” said Jack’s son Fred. “‘Is this really right? Is this what’s best for my kids?’” She spent the next week drinking, taking pills, and trying to come to terms with her rash decision, all the while still suffering from nightmares.
Of course, Jack was disappointed that Jackie wanted to put the brakes on their romance, but he understood. “We’ll take things at your pace,” he told her. Was her reluctance because she was interested in other men? In fact, there would always be rumors of other affairs—Roswell Gilpatric and William David Ormsby-Gore (better known as Lord Harlech) would be seen with Jackie at times.
However, there was still another man on the periphery, and he seemed to show up when Jackie least expected it. It had happened more than a few times in the last six months: a call from the front desk with someone announcing that “Mr. Onassis is here to see you.” Surprised, Jackie would tell the guard to let him into the building. Moments later, the elevator into her apartment would open and there would stand Aristotle Onassis, again a Greek bearing gifts for her and the children. They would talk. He would make her laugh. “Are you trying to live your life?” he would ask her. “Are you recovering from what happened?” She would tell him that it was difficult but she was trying her best. Then, as suddenly as he appeared, he would vanish. She would then think to herself, “What a nice man” and just go about her day like any other.
PART EIGHT
TRANSITION
When Was Lee at Her Happiest?
“I’m sick of all of it,” Lee Radziwill said at the beginning of 1965. She told friends that she was “sick of money, power, politics, and family. I want out!” She was also tired of Stas, Taki, and, now, especially Ari. What had happened to change her view of him? Put it this way: in the last two years, they had gotten no closer. In fact, recently, Ari seemed to not even mind that she was still with Stas. He liked Stas so much he even gave him a position on the board of his Olympic Airways. Stas took the chair and actually enjoyed working for Onassis, which Lee found very disconcerting. Onassis, famously known for his jealous temperament, would ordinarily insist that the woman he was with not be with anyone else. He certainly wouldn’t allow Maria Callas to have other paramours, let alone a husband! He also wouldn’t have befriended that husband. What was wrong with this picture? Onassis should be jealous!
This inner conflict about Onassis seemed to make Lee painfully conscious of the emptiness of her life. She would often quote an early mentor, the art historian Bernard Berenson, who believed that people in a person’s life were either “life enhancing” or “life diminishing.” In fact, as Lee explained it, “The life-diminishing people are passive—they don’t care about anything, have little curiosity, and always want and expect to be amused or entertained. The life-enhancers aren’t always creative, but they always have an appreciation, a caring that make everyone around them feel bigger. They’re the givers.” She said she had grown very weary of the “life-diminishing” variety.
Time seemed to be of the essence, too. Lee’s bout with postpartum depression had profoundly changed her. She was more keenly aware than ever of the finite nature of life and determined to now make the best of it. Certainly, what Jackie was going through also served to underscore that fact for Lee.
At this time, at a cocktail party at Lee’s home in Manhattan, a good friend who had a successful career as a television producer suggested to her that she stop looking outward for satisfaction and validation. She would be better served by looking within—pretty much what Taki had once told her. This time, the suggestion resonated with Lee. “I’m full of shit, aren’t I?” she asked that friend, as if struck by the revelation. His answer? “Yes, Lee, I’m afraid you are.”
As a result of that one simple conversation, 1965 would turn out to be quite the watershed year for Lee Radziwill. She would spend much of it trying to come to terms with her life. “What people often mistake as her cold, insensitive nature hides, in fact, a deeply pragmatic and sensible outlook,” said her friend the writer Nicky Haslam. “She certainly recognizes her own faults, which are sometimes dusted with a longing for fairy-tale glitter, and flattery, but when anyone is as ravishingly beautiful as she was and even now is, that’s understandable.”
In 1965 Lee started exploring books about feminism and New Age thinking, grappling with life-affirming ideas and notions she’d never before considered. As sometimes happens, once Lee opened the doorway to self-discovery, people began to walk through who might assist her in her new quest. Through connections made in high-society London, she’d recently become friendly with the talented dancers Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. Both talked to her about the freedom of self-expression and how valuable it was to the purpose of living a good and fulfilling life. Her new friend Truman Capote—who really did idolize her, and the feeling was mutual—talked to her about his great work as a writer, how it gave him a reason to live, and how, without it, he would truly be lost. His book In Cold Blood was about to be published; his star was sure to be ascendant. The photographer and designer Cecil Beaton also encouraged her, assuring her that if she committed herself to something of artistic value, she would most certainly not regret it. These friendships and others like them seemed to blossom for Lee at a time when she was trying to come to terms with the age-old question of what makes a person happy and, specifically, what would make her happy.
Certainly, whatever Lee had been doing of late hadn’t been working for her. Therefore the question before her was: When was she at her happiest? The answer was easy. It was back when she was working for Harper’s for that brief sliver of time before she married Michael. Or when she was working for Vogue in Europe. “I hate floating,” she would say. “I’m never happy unless I am deeply involved.”
Lee realized she was happiest when she was doing something creative for herself or others, something that had nothing to do with Michael or Stas or Ari or just staying at home and raising children. She was happiest when she was engaged with people, with art, with culture. “What I am seeking is self-expression by exploration and by opening up my mind to different ways of life,” she told her friends. She said that a quote from Jean Cocteau kept coming to mind: “To be gifted is to be defeated if you do not
see clearly enough in time to build up the slopes and not go down them.” She said she felt she had many talents and that she just needed to explore them to then find her passion or, at the very least, some degree of personal satisfaction.
“I was brought up to be the fat, delicious one that everyone liked to squeeze,” Lee would later recall, “the fat, happy child who would marry someone in the Racquet Club and drive around in a station wagon all the time to pick up the twelve children and bring them home to the rose-covered cottage.”
That was never going to be Lee Bouvier Radziwill. She had other ideas.
Actress
In the summer of 1965, at a cocktail party, Lee Radziwill asked the actress, singer, and popular game-show panelist Kitty Carlisle Hart, a good friend, what she felt she might do with her life in terms of a new career. “My God,” Kitty exclaimed without a second’s hesitation. “You’re a natural for the stage, Lee!” Maybe Kitty had a point. Certainly few people were as dramatic as Lee Radziwill in the way they led their lives, or in their telling of their outrageous adventures to others. Possessing such flair, though, didn’t necessarily mean Lee could act. However, it was an intriguing proposition. Lee asked Kitty to make a few inquiries as to how she might proceed.
At the time, Kitty was in rehearsals for a play called The Marriage-Go-Round, with the famous theatrical producer Lee Guber. Kitty asked Guber if he would be willing to have Lee do a reading for him, not exactly an audition in that she wouldn’t have to memorize anything, just a reading to see what she sounded like onstage, and how she looked in a spotlight. He agreed to have Lee read a scene from a comedy called Catch Me If You Can, which Guber was then mounting (not to be confused with the 2002 Leonardo DiCaprio film of the same name). It was set for an afternoon from the stage of the Morosco Theatre, near Times Square. Extremely nervous about it, Lee brought Jackie along for moral support.
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