Janet’s Entreaty to Onassis
There are many different accounts of Janet’s meeting with Onassis in New York at the Pierre Hotel, from relatives to whom she gave details to members of her staff with whom she discussed it to members of Hugh’s staff who heard about it secondhand from him. What we know is that the meeting was at least cordial. Janet—like most people—found Ari to be exceedingly charming. On a superficial level, she could probably understand what Lee saw in him. He reminded her—as he had Jackie and Lee—of that dark figure from her long-gone past, Black Jack Bouvier.
Now that Jackie was no longer First Lady, the biggest problem Janet had with Lee and Onassis was that Lee was still married to Stas. Janet remained committed to the sanctity of marriage, and that would not change. Other than that conundrum—and it was a big one—Janet took no issue with Onassis. At least he had money, and a lot of it. If Lee was going to leave Stas, it may as well be for someone as wealthy as Onassis. Janet wanted her daughter to be set for life, and Onassis could certainly do that for her. “As always,” she told one of her relatives, “Lee thinks I’m the enemy,” she said, echoing her words to Lee back when Michael Canfield was the subject of contention between them. “I am not,” Janet said. “If she would confide in me about Onassis, I just might have some good advice for her.”
In talking to Aristotle Onassis in his suite at the Pierre, the biggest problem Janet saw was that he was as uncommitted as Lee when it came to defining his relationship with her. “She may risk her marriage for you,” Janet reportedly told him, “and I need to know that it will be worth it to her. Stas is a good man!” Onassis said he understood that Janet was concerned about her daughter’s future. He said that his son, Alexander, was in a romantic relationship with someone he didn’t approve of—this would have been Fiona Thyssen, sixteen years Alexander’s senior, divorced from a baron and with two children—and that what he’d learned from the experience was that his meddling in it only caused dissension between them. “We have to let our children live their own lives, as difficult as that may be,” Onassis said.
Janet had never heard a more ridiculous statement. According to what she later recalled, she told Onassis that she’d been protecting her children since the day they were born, that she would continue doing so until she was dead and buried, and that if they thought she was meddlesome, that was just too bad for them. She was doing her job as their mother. At that, Onassis chuckled. “I like you, my dear,” he told her. “I think I understand your daughter Lee better now. You two are exactly alike.”
“Janet left the meeting feeling she had an ally in Onassis,” said Delores Goodwin. “From what I understand, Janet asked Onassis to keep the fact that they’d met between the two of them because she knew how Lee would feel about it. She didn’t want trouble with Lee. She just wanted to meet him face-to-face so that the two could know one another and have an understanding.” The fact that Onassis agreed to a secret pact with Janet probably made her feel that they had a relationship of sorts. It also likely gave Janet the feeling that maybe she had a little more agency in how things might work out between him and her daughter.
While she was in Manhattan, Janet tried to set up one of her Mother-Daughter Teas with Jackie and Lee, but it was impossible. It was as if they both knew what the topic might be and went out of their ways to make themselves unavailable. Instead, Janet had tea with her other daughter, Janet Jr. However, for some reason, the idea of the Mother-Daughter Tea only felt right when it was with Jackie and Lee. Some people believed that Janet favored her older daughters. They were a link to her first husband, after all, who was probably the love of her life. There was a history there that the three of them shared. Of course, Janet always got along well with Janet Jr.—the two rarely fell out with each other. However, it seemed to most family members that she had something deeper, something maybe more profound, with Jackie and Lee. She was definitely more protective of them.
After her trip to New York, Janet felt reassured that she could keep an eye on what was going on with Onassis. Apparently, though, she wanted to exert a little more control over the situation. One afternoon, back at O Street, she told Adora Rule that she was being reassigned to New York, working out of Hugh’s office. She explained that Hugh needed a new assistant. Adora protested. She’d just moved to Georgetown with the Auchinclosses and didn’t want to now pick up again and move to Manhattan with her young daughter, Janine, “and I’m not doing it,” she said, putting her foot down. Janet glared at her. “I have a temper, too, Adora,” she said, “but I know when to use it and when to just be quiet.” She told her not to be so shortsighted; she was presenting her with a wonderful opportunity. However, Adora soon suspected that Janet had an ulterior motive when she said: “You can also keep an eye on my Lee for me there.”
Since Adora needed the job, she packed up her things and moved to New York. Janet set her up in a spectacular apartment overlooking Central Park. It took about two weeks, but sure enough Adora had something substantial to report. “Mrs. Kennedy and the princess had a meeting at Mr. A.’s office about some financial holdings,” she remembered, “and from the moment they arrived, it was tense between them. Mr. A. was delayed. The sisters were in his office arguing while I was in an adjoining office. I couldn’t hear the details. I just heard Mrs. Kennedy angrily ask, ‘How dare you say that?’ Then, I heard her say, ‘Don’t you dare lecture me!’ Then … a loud crack. It sounded to me like a slap. Then another. I thought to myself, is it possible? Two slaps? Can it be? So, I went to the doorway and just as I got there I saw Mrs. Radziwill bolt from the office. Mrs. Kennedy then ran after her. They never returned.”
This was unusual; the sisters ordinarily didn’t have these kinds of dramatic scenes. Some thought they would have been better served if they had, that it would have helped clear the air between them. However, it was rare. Usually, they just let things fester until it was too late to do anything about them.
Did Adora report the scene to Janet? “No,” she said. She explained that she didn’t because “I didn’t know for sure what had happened, if those were slaps or not—even who slapped who?—and Mrs. A. would have wanted me to be sure of every detail. Otherwise, in her mind, it would have just been idle gossip. I could just hear her saying, ‘Now, Adora, don’t be so quick to judge. It’s not becoming.’ So I decided to just stay out of it.”
A Surprising Confession
By March 1967, Jackie Kennedy and Jack Warnecke had been together for two and a half years, if one considers their lovemaking in November of 1965 to be the true commencement of their romance. They hadn’t set a wedding date, but Jackie seemed to be in no hurry. Bobby Kennedy still posed a big problem. He didn’t believe Jack was the man for Jackie, telling her that he didn’t have the financial stability he knew she would require. Jackie thought that was hogwash. After all, since the day she met him, Jack had been lavishing her with expensive gifts. He owned a couple of estates, and they’d even been talking about buying another one when they married. He’d just opened an office in New York. Obviously, Jack had money … or so she thought. One day in March, he called her in New York from his home in California. “There’s something I have to tell you,” he said, this according to his memory.
“What is it, Jack?”
“The thing is…” He paused and stammered a bit, clearing his throat. “Well, Jackie, I’m in a little trouble. I think I’m … I’m … $650,000 in debt.”
“Oh?”
“But the bank is telling me it’s more like a million,” he said, “and I don’t have it.” Later he would explain that because he knew how much Jackie equated money with power, this was a difficult conversation to have with her. However, he felt strongly that if they were to be married, he should be completely transparent.
“What are you going to do, Jack?” Jackie asked, alarmed. Was he asking her for a loan? She probably hoped not.
“I have to focus on my business,” he said. He told her that this decision would mean fewer extravag
ant trips for them. Whatever they could do to cut back was what they now needed to do, he explained. She told Jack she was confident he would “figure things out,” sounding—as Jack would later recall it—“rather distant.” He wondered if his surprising admission would change things between them. No, she said, of course it wouldn’t. He closed by saying, “I love you, Jackie.” He then waited for a similar response. Instead, she simply whispered, “Good-bye for now, Jack.”
“The truth was that Jack was stretched to the limit,” recalled his personal assistant, Bertha Baldwin. “He had about two hundred employees in five offices—San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, Boston, and the new one in New York. There were people depending on him. He had no partners. It was all him. The time he spent away with Jackie was unusual for him and showed how much he loved her because, really, Jack was usually all about business. ‘Everything I do is business,’ he once told me.”
“At the end of the year [1966], our employees didn’t get their bonuses,” Harold Adams remembered. “That’s when I knew we were in trouble. Turned out, Jack had spent their bonuses on Jackie. Our employees began to say, ‘We think our careers are more important than Jack Warnecke’s pursuit of Jackie Kennedy.’ Therefore, we started to lose some key people. I could see the pressure weighing on Jack. He was at a crossroads. I asked him, ‘Are you prepared to throw away your life’s work, self-respect, pride, integrity, and everything else for Jackie? Or has the time finally come for you to focus on business, take control of your firm, and live up to your responsibilities?’ I’m proud to say he decided on the latter.”
When Jackie discussed Jack’s revelation with her mother, Janet was astonished. She liked Jack very much but, given these new circumstances, was now completely unwilling to endorse marriage to him. Still, even given that Jackie was raised to place a premium on a man’s bank account, she couldn’t completely dismiss Jack. He was a good man, had been kind and generous to her and also wonderful to her children. She loved him even if perhaps she wasn’t in love with him. She was torn. He must have had good reasons to have been so withholding about his finances, she told Janet. Janet wouldn’t hear of it, though. “Everyone who lies has a reason,” she countered. She added that Jackie “better wake up and smell the coffee” because Jack’s indebtedness would end up being hers, too, if she married him.
The timing couldn’t have been worse for Jack’s confession. JFK’s body was about to be reinterred at Arlington National Cemetery. This was, of course, the new memorial Jack and Jackie had been working on for the last few years. It was beautiful in its simplicity, exactly what Jackie wanted. However, she didn’t count on how difficult it would be having another service not only for her late husband, but also for Patrick and Arabella, who would remain buried close by their father. It took place in a secret ceremony the night of March 14, 1967, attended by Jackie, Teddy and Bobby Kennedy, as well as President Lyndon Johnson. Afterward, without Jack Warnecke to lean on, Jackie just sank deeper into despair, taking prescribed amphetamines to get through the days and sleeping pills to get through the nights.
Making matters even more complex, at about this same time, Janet confided in Jackie that she and Hugh were having problems with the upkeep of Hammersmith Farm. She said that they were up late at nights trying to figure out what they could do to cut back, afraid for the future of the family homestead. The point she was really making was that the Auchincloss fortune was presently being challenged, so Jackie definitely shouldn’t expect to be bailed out by it. Instead, she needed to find a man who could support her and her children in the manner to which they’d long been accustomed, and if that man wasn’t Jack Warnecke, so be it.
Jackie Chooses
The next major event in Jacqueline Kennedy’s life happened so suddenly, it was probably difficult for her to imagine that it was even true. Certainly others in her life would spend the next few years trying to figure it all out. It started with a simple phone call in the summer of ’67, Aristotle Onassis calling Jackie to ask how she was doing, as he often did. Though she said she was fine, he seemed to know better and invited her to spend time with him on Skorpios. She decided to go. She also opted not to tell Lee about it. She also didn’t tell Jack Warnecke; after his confession about his finances, she had seemed to pull away from him. Now she just wanted to go off and have a good time with an exciting man, and not have to explain it to anyone.
Jackie had a wonderful time with Ari in Skorpios. Of course, as expected, he was smart, funny, and spent the entire week doing anything he could think of to make her happy. When they went to dinner, she would unfold her napkin on her lap and an expensive jewel would fall from it. He was unfailingly romantic and wanted nothing more than for her to forget her horrible past and live for the good moment. Simply put, he completely swept her off her feet, just as he had done to Lee years earlier. If Lee crossed their minds, from all accounts anyway, Jackie and Ari didn’t discuss her. By the time Jackie returned from Skorpios, she was as clear as she could be that she wanted to end it with Jack Warnecke and explore at least the possibility of a future with Aristotle Onassis. Her choice was made. “I hope you understand,” she told Jack. “I have to do what’s best for me and my children,” she said. “I want to see what might be there for me with Aristotle Onassis.”
Jack was stunned. Aristotle Onassis? He wasn’t even aware that he was in competition with one of the richest men in the world. Had he known as much, maybe he wouldn’t have confided in Jackie about his financial setback. “Is it the money?” Jack asked.
“Of course not,” Jackie answered.
“Jack immediately realized that he would not be able to provide for her like Onassis could,” said Bertha Baldwin. “He was still in love with her. He felt that, okay, maybe later we can make this work. I’ll let her go now and do what she has to do with Onassis, but when the time is right and she sees what she has with me, maybe things will change. He didn’t stop loving her just because she had chosen Onassis.”
Jack’s son Fred recalled, “What I heard was that Bobby said, ‘Look, Warnecke is not right for you. What you want is someone who can support you and take care of you in the lifestyle you’re used to.’ Bobby certainly didn’t mean for her to run to Onassis, though. This was tough on my dad. He obviously had money; this was just a temporary problem. In fact, he would have it sorted out within two years. But by then it was too late.”
The Philadelphia Story
June 20, 1967.
“I am so nervous, I can’t stand it,” Lee was saying. She was in her makeup chair backstage at the Ivanhoe Theater in Chicago. It was opening night of The Philadelphia Story. She’d put everything she had into preparing for this moment—months of rehearsal along with intense acting lessons. “Who am I fooling?” she kept telling her friends. “I’m not an actress!” However, she still believed she had to try.
“I knew how lucky I was to have such an opportunity,” Lee said at the time, “but there was a price to be paid. I was walking into an incredible barrage of criticism—much more than most actresses onstage for the first time. I knew everybody would be out for blood. People were waiting to laugh. But it would have taken more than that to stop me.”
Lee fully expected Jackie to be present for this momentous occasion. “Talk to her,” she had said, handing her costar Jack DeMave the telephone a couple of days earlier. Jack was a little starstruck and reluctant. “Just talk to her,” Lee insisted, smiling. “She can be nice.” He got on the phone with Jackie. He said how much he was looking forward to seeing her at the show. “Oh, but I’m not coming,” Jackie said. She explained that she didn’t want to steal Lee’s spotlight, that it was her sister’s time to shine and that wherever she (Jackie) went, a circus was sure to follow. She asked him, as one of Lee’s leading men, to please take care of her. “I want her to be okay,” Jackie said. “Do you promise?” Jack told her he would do as she asked, and then handed the phone back to Lee. She took it to a corner and quietly finished her conversation with her sister.
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br /> At that time, Jackie was on her way to Ireland with her children. On the day of Lee’s opening, she planned to be greeted by Eamon de Valera, President of the Republic of Ireland, and his wife, Sinéad, at the house of Arus An Vactaria. That night, she was scheduled to attend a state banquet at Dublin Castle. She said she probably wouldn’t be able to fly back at all, not for any performance during Lee’s entire four-week run! This was strange. After all, Jackie had months of advance notice. For jet-setting women like the Bouvier sisters, Lee knew that jumping on a plane to the States for a day or so and then returning to Europe wasn’t that big a deal. So what was really going on?
Lee was not naïve. She and Jackie had the same friends; they ran in the same circles. She knew that Jackie had gone to Skorpios at Aristotle Onassis’s invitation. This was upsetting, especially since Jackie hadn’t told her about it. She heard it through the grapevine and then confirmed it with Onassis’s secretary. To make things a little more disconcerting, Ari was suddenly unavailable to her when she called him. He was always in a business meeting or in some other way indisposed. What was going on? Beyond her concern about her relationship with Ari, one thing was certain: Lee needed Jackie in Chicago more than she needed anyone else there. Instead, Jackie sent a mauve jewelry box as an opening night gift, along with a telegram: “Dearest Pekes, As many good wishes for your last night as for your first and all love. Will call when you are in New York. Jackie.”
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 28
