Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  As Lee read for Lee Guber, Jackie sat in the back of the theater, watching in the dark. She was impressed. She probably didn’t know if Lee was good or if she was bad, but it didn’t matter to her. She was going to support her sister, and that was the end of it for her. “Fantastic,” Jackie exclaimed in front of the others as she embraced Lee, who seemed a little embarrassed. “Was I really good?” Lee asked. “Yes,” Jackie answered. “Absolutely.”

  “I thought the princess terribly attractive in that well-bred Dina Merrill style,” Guber later said, referencing a popular blond actress of the 1950s and ’60s who, at the time, was touted as “Hollywood’s New Grace Kelly.”

  “Do you have any magazine articles about yourself that I might be able to read?” Guber asked after the audition.

  “I do, but they’re all lies,” Lee answered. “Each and every one of them. Lies!”

  “Except, of course, for the one written by your wife,” Jackie said quickly. Guber was married to Barbara Walters, who happened to have written an in-depth article about Lee for Good Housekeeping.

  “Oh, yes, except for that one,” Lee said. She glanced at her sister with appreciation.

  Lee would have two more readings in front of Lee Guber. In the end, he decided she wasn’t ready to be onstage. She had potential, though. She just needed training. Of course she needed training. This wasn’t news to her, and Lee welcomed the challenge. If she was going to act, she decided, it had to be a legitimate endeavor, not just a vanity project.

  Finally, Lee felt she had a real purpose, something to which she could and would commit herself fully. She began taking classes in London with a drama coach who believed from the start that Lee had great potential. She did express concern that Lee was starting out in such a competitive field so late in life—she was about thirty-two at the time. However, Lee was already famous and that was currency that would make a big difference to anyone interested in casting her in a movie, television program, or play.

  It was good that she was encouraged by her coach because others in Lee’s life were not so forthcoming with support. Back in the States, Janet and Hugh and some other members of her family viewed acting as just another passing fancy for Lee. They were also worried that endeavoring to be an actress would expose her flaws to the world and set her up to be judged. Stas agreed with the naysayers. “Why are you doing this to yourself?” he asked his wife. Her answer was simple: “Because I must.”

  “I tried to tell her she wasn’t cut out for the stage,” Stas told the writer George Carpozi at the time, “but she just wouldn’t listen to me. I believe she is overcome with the mania to be an actress.” He added that he would “set her free to pursue that desire. I shall not stand in her way.” Today his son, John Radziwill, concurs, that “my dad wasn’t really that supportive, but he was a man of a certain era.”

  Making things all the more complex—and troubling—for Lee was the fact that Aristotle Onassis didn’t seem to have any problem at all with her career aspiration. When Lee told him about it, he was actually encouraging! Contrary to what one might imagine, she did not take this as a good sign. After all, this was a man who had spent years discouraging Maria Callas in her opera career, wanting her all to himself. He would do anything to make her quit, and she did so many times, just for him.

  On the one hand, Lee didn’t want Ari to feel about her acting aspirations the way Stas felt about them, but on the other hand … she did. The fact that Ari was as complacent about her career as he was about her marriage to Stas made Lee question, now more than ever, whether or not there was a future with him. Recently, he’d also been given to kissing her on the forehead instead of on the lips. This, too, did not bode well. In fact, it was a gesture that reminded her of Michael Canfield. She definitely needed a little more time to figure out what was going on with Onassis. Meanwhile, she started outlining what she wanted to do with her new career as an actress.

  “I’d like to do new plays or films,” Lee told a reporter at this time. “Tennessee Williams, Capote, interesting older women, alcoholics. I have the greatest sympathy for those who end in despair.”

  Certainly Lee had experienced enough despair in her life—especially given her postpartum depression, the effects of which still lingered—to be able to empathize with those who were struggling. The press didn’t know this about her, though. No one other than her immediate family knew of her postpartum difficulty; it was a closely guarded secret. Therefore, most writers took her to task, observing that she had enjoyed an entitled existence and hadn’t a clue as to how the other half lived. When Lee read criticism of herself before she’d even so much as acted in one scene, she realized then that she would have an uphill battle with the media, that every word she ever uttered would be scrutinized, analyzed, and then somehow used against her. It wasn’t going to be easy, this new endeavor upon which Princess Lee Radziwill had settled. She was definitely willing to put in the work, though.

  Jackie’s Hawaii Love

  On June 5, 1966, Jackie Kennedy arrived in Hawaii with her children, Caroline and John Jr. She and Jack Warnecke had decided on a vacation together, time away to take her mind off her problems. Jack was in the middle of a major design project, the mid-century modern Hawaii State Capitol building. He wanted her to be at his side for as much of the summer as possible. He would recall, “I would ask how she was doing and she would say she was well, but I knew better.” He suspected that she was struggling, that it took real effort for her to appear happy and upbeat and to look to the future. He loved her all the more for her courage to try so hard not only for herself, but also for her children.

  A good friend of Jack’s, Cecily Freitas Johnston, an accomplished real-estate developer from Hawaii, arranged for Jackie to lease the Honolulu home of Colorado Senator Peter Dominick and his wife, Nancy. A team of security guards stood at the ready when Jackie arrived at the very private estate. “I was already there when she walked in the front door,” Jack Warnecke recalled. “I had three of my four children with me—Roger, Fred, and Margo. We were staying at a house I’d just bought at Diamond Head whereas Jackie was staying in the rented house two properties away from Cecily Johnston’s. She’d said she wanted her privacy, and I wanted to respect that.”

  “I certainly had no clue that Jackie Kennedy would be visiting,” recalled Cecily Johnston’s son Don. He would meet the former First Lady at a dinner party at his mom’s. “I bent down to kiss my mother hello and out of the corner of my eye, who did I see? The most famous woman in the world,” he recalled, laughing. “I didn’t even know my mother knew her! Mom said, ‘I’d like to introduce you to . .,’ and I said, ‘Please, Mom. I know who this is!’ It was a pretty heady experience.”

  The next morning, as Jackie and Cecily enjoyed their coffee, Cecily said she wanted to play a joke on her son. She got a tray from the kitchen and arranged on it an elegant breakfast. She then gave it to Jackie, who took it and knocked on Don’s door. “Who is it?” he asked from his bed. The door opened and there standing before him was Jackie, wearing a brightly colored muumuu and a matching head scarf, breakfast tray in hand. “‘Oh, man!’ I exclaimed, ‘My mother has the best help ever these days, doesn’t she?’ We had a laugh; she was a good sport. She sat down and I gave her some pointers, some touristy ideas. It was fun. She was fun.”

  In Jack Warnecke’s mind, he and Jackie had an understanding: they were eventually headed to the altar. Maybe it was wishful thinking, though, because he also knew she had reservations. “As much as he loved her, she was a total mystery to him,” said Thomas McLaren, an architect who was working with Jack at the time on the Hawaii project. “She was not forthcoming. She seemed sad. They had fun, but when it came to in-depth conversations about her life, there was little of that. He hoped that would change when they married, that she would open up to him. I told him, ‘No, that kind of thing doesn’t change, Jack. It just gets worse.’ Still, he wanted to marry her.”

  Apparently, the idea of marriage came up when Ja
ck took Jackie on a tour of his new five-bedroom house on Diamond Head Road on Black Point. One night, the couple went out on the upstairs veranda of the master bedroom to enjoy the colorful sunset. Standing behind her, his arms wrapped around her, Jack asked what she was thinking. Jackie said she was thinking about the little den off the living room. He nodded knowingly. “You want to redo it, don’t you?” She turned around and smiled at him. “You know me so well,” she said. “The answer is yes!” He looked at her and, according to what he would later remember, he had a feeling that she was agreeing to more than just a remodel of a den. “Do you want to?” he asked, eagerly. “I do,” she said with a big smile. “And that was it,” he would recall many years later. “I knew we were getting married. I thought she was sure. In that moment, anyway, I thought she was sure.”

  In the coming days, the two would become more specific about the future. Jack said that the capitol wouldn’t be finished for another three years—“Who knows,” he said, “but we may buy another house here before then.” Jackie said she wanted a Catholic Church wedding. However, because Jack had been raised a Presbyterian, he agreed that he would take catechism classes as soon as they returned to the mainland and then convert. “What are we going to do about Bobby Kennedy?” he asked. “I’ll take care of him,” Jackie said, reassuring him. Meanwhile, she went to work redesigning the den. (Jack’s son Fred still has one of the prized sketches she made of her remodeling ideas, signed “JBK.”)

  The month flew by. When Jackie called Lee in England to tell her about her plans, Lee was worried. She’d heard that Bobby didn’t approve of Jack and was sure he would make life difficult for Jackie if she married him. Also, she had met Jack a number of times and thought he was nice enough, but she didn’t see any spark between him and Jackie. However, she would say she never saw anything much between Jackie and JFK, either, “and that’s just the way my sister is.” Lee didn’t want to be discouraging, just cautious. She knew that Jackie was not yet over Dallas, and she wondered how the effects of such trauma might impact a new relationship. She wanted a chance to talk to her about it again. “Don’t elope, that’s all I ask,” she told her.

  When the month was over, Jackie wanted to stay in Hawaii longer. Since her lease was up, Jack assumed they would now stay together, but she said she needed time alone. This was strange. Why, if she loved him and was preparing to marry him, would she need to be on her own? “It’s like she gets close, then pulls away, then gets close and pulls away again,” Jack told Thomas McLaren.

  Jack arranged for Jackie and the children to move into the enormous cliffside guesthouse of the sprawling Koko Head estate of wealthy industrialist Henry J. Kaiser. Almost every day after that, and at great expense, Jack chartered a helicopter to pick up Jackie, Caroline, and John on the front lawn of Kaiser’s estate and then take off for exciting destinations. “This is when things started to go bad with the business,” said Harold Adams, by this time Jack’s firm-wide administrative assistant and also manager of his Washington, D.C., office. “Jack was not out drumming up new accounts as usual. He was spending not only all of his efforts on Jackie, but all of his money, too. He was having a hard time keeping up with the financing of her lifestyle.

  “At this same time, Jack jumped into opening up a New York office,” continued Harold Adams. “I felt sure that the reason for this office was solely for him to be close to Jackie. The business was falling apart pretty quickly. A lot of money was owed by Jackie and the Kennedys, too, for different services. Most of it was to be paid for by the Army Corps of Engineers but there was some dispute about even that. It was such an emotional time, however, we never felt right about bringing up the subject of money.”

  Jack tried to ignore what was happening on the mainland with his business and focus on what mattered to him most at this time: Jackie.

  Of course, as often happens, there were a few scrapes with the children while the families were on vacation in Hawaii. In particular, Caroline cut her foot on coral and John burned himself on a charcoal fire. There was a strange moment, too, one that anyone who witnessed it would likely never forget. Coincidentally, the house next to the one Jackie leased was owned by Hugh’s nephew John Nash (Hugh’s sister Esther’s son from her first marriage, Esther being the one who had suggested that Janet Bouvier meet Hugh Auchincloss many years earlier). Nash had six children, all of whom became playmates of John and Caroline. One afternoon, one of Caroline’s little friends found a lipstick in someone’s purse, and the girls proceeded to use it draw on each other’s faces. When Jackie saw what Caroline had done, she completely lost it. She slapped Caroline hard, first with the palm on one cheek, and then with the back of her hand on the other—just like Janet! Caroline screamed out in pain; the other children were terrified. “I thought, wow,” recalled John Nash. “I was only a little older than Caroline, but I had never seen anything like that before. All the kids stood there stunned.”

  One night soon after that little fracas, Jack recruited his son Fred to babysit Caroline and John. It was then that Fred realized how difficult this transition in their mother’s life was to her children. “They both started crying and telling me how much they missed their father,” he remembered. “They were nervous that their mom was with this new guy, my dad. I went through the same thing when my dad divorced my mom, so I tried to talk to them, comfort them a little. I couldn’t do much, though. I was only twelve and even I wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my father’s intentions.”

  If there was any ambiguity in little Fred’s mind about what was going on between his father and Jackie, it was soon cleared up for him. One evening, Jackie spent the night at the Diamond Head house with Jack. Early the next morning, there was a telephone call. “Freddie, go up and get your dad and tell him he has an important telephone call,” said the family’s cook, Hazel. Fred dutifully ran over to his father’s bedroom in the private suite of the estate. He knocked on the door. No answer. Since he was told that the call was “important,” the youngster felt that he’d better rouse his dad. He opened the door, and much to his dismay, he found his father in bed having sex with Jackie. “Jackie jumped up in shock and started screaming,” Fred Warnecke recalled many years later, “and my poor dad was saying, ‘No, no, no, Freddie! Get out! Get out!’ So I slammed door and ran away as quickly as I could. It was pretty mortifying,” he recalls. “My dad never mentioned it to me, and neither did Jackie. Of course, I stayed clear of her for a few days.”

  Jackie and the children finally returned to the mainland on July 26, two days short of her thirty-sixth birthday, which she would spend with Janet at Hammersmith. Jack stayed behind with the intention of meeting her in Manhattan in about a week.

  Janet Jr.’s Wedding

  It was July 30, 1966. “Thank goodness you aren’t marrying a politician, that’s all I can say,” Jackie was telling her half sister, Janet Jr. Jackie, Janet Sr., and Janet Jr. were seated on an outdoor patio at Hammersmith Farm, admiring the sweeping lawns and pastureland, the rock gardens with Egyptian tiling and Italian vases amid charming lily ponds encircling the Big House “There’s nothing wrong with politicians,” Janet Sr. said. “You did well with one, didn’t you, Jacqueline?” Ignoring her mother, Jackie continued her conversation with her sister. According to a witness to it, Jackie told Janet that the life of a politician was nothing but “dreary.” She said that the only thing that made it worthwhile for her was that Jack Kennedy had been such a charismatic, powerful person. Janet Jr. asked if such was not the case with most men in politics. “Not the ones I’ve met,” Jackie said, laughing.

  As it would happen, Janet Jr., who was twenty-one in 1966, almost did end up with someone in politics; she had been dating John Forbes Kerry, twenty-two, for the last couple of years. Kerry, of course, would go on to become a United States senator, Democratic nominee for president (in 2004), and secretary of state in the Obama administration. Back in ’66, though, he’d just graduated from Yale and was beginning his political career first as the chair
man of the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union, and then as president of that union. “I introduced John Kerry to President Kennedy,” recalled Jamie Auchincloss. “I had this aspiration that Kerry would make a good president, and I hoped that introducing him to JFK would maybe inspire him in some way. I also thought that the fact that Kerry’s initials were JFK was a coincidence maybe too good to pass up. My sister Janet would have made an excellent First Lady, by the way. She was bubbly and personable and, to be honest, maybe even a little more than Jackie.”

  For a brief time, Janet thought she was in love with John Kerry—even though her stepbrother Yusha wasn’t too crazy about him—that is, until she took another look at Lewis Polk Rutherfurd, a Princeton senior and later Harvard graduate. The two had been introduced by Virginia Guest Valentine, Lewis’s first cousin, during a spring break in Hobe Sound, Florida. Lewis was the tall and good-looking son of Winthrop Rutherfurd II, whose father, Winthrop I, was best known for his marriage to Lucy Mercer, mistress to President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (Lewis is not Mercer’s son, though; his mother was Winthrop’s first wife, Alice Morton.) “He was just dazzling,” recalled Sylvia Whitehouse Blake of Lewis. “He looked like a movie star. We all thought, my gosh, what a great catch for Janet!”

  “Lewis was so bright,” recalled his cousin Virginia, “with a great sense of humor. He decided he wanted to be in Oriental studies. After he graduated from Princeton with his bachelor’s degree in East Asia Studies, he won a fellowship at Chung Chi College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.”

  In the few years since she was fretting to Jack Kennedy about her debutante party back in ’63, Janet had grown into a lovely and smart young woman. She was also remarkably unspoiled, considering her entitled background, and full of upbeat energy. By the age of twenty-one, she was ready to take on the world. Majoring in music, she’d attended Sarah Lawrence College and had just landed a job as a secretary at Parke-Bernet Galleries, the nation’s largest auction house. However, she decided against taking it when Lewis asked her to marry him. She said yes, and then agreed to move to Hong Kong with him. It was not easy for Janet Sr. to accept, but she wanted her daughter to be happy.