Jackie, Janet & Lee

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  While he and his mother sat through the service, Jamie couldn’t help but fear for her future. In fact, Michael Dupree, Janet’s chef and a registered nurse who worked with Alzheimer’s patients, observed, “Many times, the disease is hastened by trauma, and I definitely believe her daughter’s illness and then death accelerated the disease in Mrs. Auchincloss. She loved her children, I always knew it. At Janet Jr.’s funeral, she told me, ‘A mother losing a child is a terrible thing, and my poor Jackie lost two. I can’t imagine the strength she must have had to be able to survive that. I don’t think I have it in me. I’m not Jackie.’”

  Of course, everyone who loved Janet Jr. was completely devastated by her death; those who worked at Hammersmith were at the funeral, including Mannie and Louise Faria and their kids, Joyce and Linda, both of whom were close to Janet’s boys, Andrew and Lewis. “Mrs. A. was overwhelmed with sadness,” said Joyce Faria. “You could see it all over her face that day, her heart completely broken.”

  Lee did not attend the service. While some thought she should have been present to support her mother through the ordeal, she chose not to do so. Winthrop Rutherfurd III noted, “I don’t think I saw Lee more than maybe a couple times in my entire life. I’m not suggesting anything negative, I just never saw her.” Jamie added, “She never clicked with Janet Jr. for some reason. I always thought maybe having one challenging relationship with a sister was more than enough for Lee to handle.” Lee may have found the service meaningful, though, especially given that a poem by Robert Frost read by Jackie from the lectern sounded like a nod to Lee’s own belief system: “The utmost reward of daring should be still to dare.”

  Bingham Morris was also not present at the service. Apparently, there was some tension between him and Jackie on this day—no one quite remembers what was at issue, only that the family was afraid it would further upset Janet to have “Booch” at the service in Jackie’s company. Therefore, in what some viewed as a magnanimous gesture, Bingham decided to absent himself from the funeral rather than take a chance on further troubling his wife.

  After the service, Janet was taken back to Hammersmith Farm by Michael Dupree. Meanwhile, Jackie waited for her own car in the parking lot, nervously smoking one Pall Mall after another. “I tried not to be too maudlin,” she told Jamie as she reflected on her eulogy. “Ari used to always say, ‘There should never be a wedding without some tears or a funeral without some laughter.’” The two then remembered that at JFK’s private service in the East Wing at the White House, Jamie, who was then sixteen, remained at the Communion railing in front of the casket for a very embarrassing few moments hoping for wine, only to find out that none would be forthcoming. Janet didn’t think it was at all funny, but everyone else did. All these years later, Jackie still got a charge out of the memory of her half brother solemnly on his knees with his eyes closed, waiting patiently for his wine. “I don’t know if you realize this, but I was even a little tipsy at your wedding to Jack,” he now told her. “But, Jamie, you were six!” she exclaimed. “I know!” he said. After they shared a laugh, Jackie became serious again. “Janet was so brave,” she remarked. “I’m not sure I could be that brave in the face of all she went through.”

  “But you have been brave, Jackie,” Jamie reminded her. “The whole country admires you for your bravery.”

  Jackie smiled. “My God, that was so long ago, Jamie,” she said. “I was a completely different person back then. I can barely remember that dreary woman in black.”

  “Well, I remember,” Jamie said as he began to walk her to her arriving car. He tried to put his arm around her, but she pulled away. “Everyone in America remembers,” he continued. They then talked a little about the second planned service for Janet, which would take place at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City on April 15. Jackie wasn’t sure she would be able to attend, saying she didn’t know if she could possibly go through it again. She brought up Janet’s daughter, Alexandra. “She’s only two,” Jackie said, shaking her head in despair. “She will never know how wonderful her mother was and how much she loved her.”

  “We’ll make sure she knows,” Jamie said.

  “Yes, we will,” Jackie agreed. In fact, Alexandra’s aunt Jackie would make a special effort to remain an important part of her life as she grew up. She would even leave her the sum of $100,000 in her will. Her daughter, Caroline, is very close to Alexandra to this day.

  The half siblings then stood and stared at each other without words, maybe wondering why their rapport was so often interrupted by such incredibly awkward moments. Jamie realized, though, that Jackie really didn’t trust him, not after the Kitty Kelley book. Though he loved her deeply, he would just have to accept it. Of course, as par for the course with his family, he and Jackie never actually discussed the problem. He had sent her what he thought was a sincere letter of apology; she didn’t respond. Therefore it wasn’t as if they had a full airing of things. Instead, they just tried to go on with their lives despite this unresolved issue between them, never again feeling truly at ease with each other.

  Compartmentalization

  One warm day in the spring of 1985, Jackie had dinner with her old friend Roswell Gilpatric (JFK’s former deputy secretary of defense) at Sardi’s in New York City. After Ari died, she said, she never imagined she’d ever be in another serious relationship. While she’d had a brief flirtation with the noted writer Pete Hamill, it never materialized into anything because Maurice Tempelsman seemed to always be in the wings. “I’m fifty-five,” Jackie exclaimed, tossing back her thick fall of hair. “I’m old, Ros,” she added. The two friends laughed. “And I’m so stubborn. You know me. I’m quite fussy, aren’t I?” Rather than answer the question and state the obvious, Roswell smiled at her and assured her that these were her best years and that it was fun to sometimes throw caution to the wind. “But must I do it for another man who smokes cigars?” Jackie asked, laughing.

  Since being with Maurice, Jackie had experienced a renaissance, of sorts; she had a very nice, satisfying life at home and at work. However, most people were unaware of the tension that sometimes existed between her and her immediate family members. She’d always been adept at compartmentalizing things, but never more so than during the period of time her mother was suffering from Alzheimer’s. Jackie recognized her duty where her mother was concerned and she rose to the occasion with diligence, but also great discretion. It was as if she had two distinct, very different lives: the one in New York as a publishing executive with Maurice Tempelsman and her children at her side, and the one in Newport with Janet and the other Auchinclosses and, occasionally—and becoming more rarely than ever—with Lee. She tended to keep people from one another, maybe as a way of controlling things: Jamie, for instance, never once even met Maurice!

  In fact, if one really considers the notion, Jackie actually had yet another life, didn’t she? The one she still shared with the Kennedy family. There was always some cataclysmic drama unfolding in their lives, and Jackie remained an integral part of each story. For instance, she was vital to Joan Kennedy’s support system as Joan struggled to maintain her sobriety; important to Joan’s husband, Ted, as he rehabilitated his political career after the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick. She and Rose, Ethel, Eunice, and all of the Kennedy women were still close, contrary to what a lot of people said and wrote about them. (Don’t forget that she took Aristotle Onassis to meet Rose and the family at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port before she took him to meet her own mother at Hammersmith!) However, her life with the Kennedys pretty much never intersected with the one she had with the Auchinclosses.

  Whenever Maurice asked Jackie how Janet was faring, Jackie would usually respond vaguely that she was “as well as could be expected.” She did complain to him once in front of an associate that she’d recently dropped in at Hammersmith without warning and, much to her dismay, found all of the employees out of their uniforms. “Mr. Dupree was wearing an Oxford shirt and khakis,” s
he exclaimed. She said she now suspected the staff only dressed formally when they knew she was coming. Maurice told her to leave the workers alone, that the last thing she needed to do was alienate them, especially given the tension that existed between her and Bingham Morris. “You need them a lot more than they need you,” he warned her. “As long as they are taking care of things over there, you’d better not make trouble for those people.” Jackie listened to his advice.

  Jackie Lays Down the Law

  “Your background is phony, Janet, and you know it,” Bingham Morris was telling his wife over dinner. As the staff waited on them, he began to rail at her. “You have been lying about it for years,” he said, “and you know it. Your kids know it. Everyone knows it!”

  “That is not true,” Janet said, crying. “Why are you being so mean to me, Booch?”

  “Oh, don’t give me that,” he told her, annoyed. “It’s time for you to face the truth. You’re Irish, Janet. Deal with it. Jesus Christ! There’s nothing wrong with being Irish.”

  Janet stood up and rushed out of the room in tears. One of her servants raced after her.

  Something had definitely switched in Bingham Morris’s personality by the spring of 1985. Frustrated by his wife’s debilitating disease, he had become difficult and argumentative. While he’d started out as an amiable, almost comical presence at Hammersmith—maybe even a breath of fresh air—by the middle of ’85, he was disliked by pretty much the entire staff. Needless to say, when these household workers reported back to Jackie certain upsetting exchanges they’d witnessed, she was concerned.

  According to what Jackie told a colleague, who was also an editor at Doubleday, it all came to a head one day when she was visiting Janet and noticed black-and-blue marks on her arm. “What is that, Mummy?” she asked as she rolled up the sleeve to Janet’s dress. Surprise then immediately turned to horror. The marks on Janet were clearly an imprint of a hand. Janet quickly reached over and pushed down the sleeve, saying she didn’t want to discuss it. Jackie then called Yusha into the room and showed him the markings. He was shocked, so much so that tears instantly sprang to his eyes. The two then had one of the servants track down Bingham, who was listening to the radio out on the pier.

  Leaving Janet in the kitchen, Jackie and Yusha went down to the pier to interrogate Bingham about what they’d discovered. Naturally, he was irate and defensive. He explained that Janet had almost slipped down the stairs and that he’d reached out to catch her just in time. They should be thanking him, he said, not indicting him. He was so convincing, Yusha tended to believe him. He actually had seen Janet nearly stumble from time to time; it was not unusual these days. Jackie didn’t buy it, though. “How hard did you grab her?” she demanded of Bingham. “Those black-and-blue marks are a distinct impression of your hand!” He didn’t want to discuss it any further, saying he would never win with Jackie, so why try?

  When Jackie and Yusha then went back to the Castle to question Janet, she said she had no memory of how she got the marks. She also didn’t remember almost falling down any stairs. Her whole demeanor was skittish and fearful. Was she really just too embarrassed to admit that Booch had been violent with her? Was Jackie just now discovering abusive behavior that had been going on for years? With so many questions unanswered, Jackie was, at first, heartbroken that her mother had had to endure even a moment of suffering. Then, of course, she became quite angry. “She, basically, didn’t know what to do,” said her colleague at Doubleday. “She said to me, ‘I know I am not imagining things. What is going on here? I need to get to the bottom of this!’ Her protective instincts went into overdrive, I think that’s maybe the best way to describe it.”

  “Pretty much overnight, Jackie felt we had a big problem on our hands with Booch,” confirmed Jamie. “She wanted it solved by, basically, evicting him from the Castle. It was at around this time that we decided we’d better have Yusha move into the Windmill to keep an eye on things. It was the only sensible thing to do under the circumstances. From this point on, Yusha would split his time between his apartment in New York and the Windmill.”

  In a subsequent letter to Yusha after he was settled into the Windmill, Jackie laid it on the line: “Booch’s visits to [Janet] must be limited to the minimum at one weekend a month. These visits to her should be planned to include [her emphasis] holidays, anniversaries, etc.… Those events should not be supplementary weekends.” In other words, she didn’t want Bingham to use special occasions to, as she put it, “fit more weekends in.” Furthermore, she wanted someone to be with him and Janet “at all times” when he was at the Castle, and that someone should sleep in the house with them. And when they went for walks, she wanted a caretaker to follow them. When he called on the telephone, she wanted someone standing right next to Janet during the entire conversation. Jackie added that she was worried that Bingham’s mistreatment of the staff, had them “on the verge of leaving and if Mummy should lose any of the devoted people who care for her, who are irreplaceable, she will have a terrible relapse.”

  When Yusha relayed Jackie’s terms to Bingham, he was furious and demanded to talk to Jackie, himself. A couple of days later, the two had angry words. While he recognized that “these walls have ears,” Bingham told her he felt that he and Janet still deserved their privacy. He accused Jackie of being overprotective and controlling. He reminded her that he was still Janet’s husband. How dare she tell him to leave? “We’re married, Jackie,” he said. “You don’t get to tell us how to live our lives.” Undaunted, Jackie said her decisions were final, and that if he didn’t adhere to them, she would call the police on him. “I promise you that I will protect my mother from you if it is the last thing I ever do,” she told him in front of witnesses.

  “Mrs. O. had come to believe that Booch was mistreating her mother and she wasn’t going to tolerate it,” said Janine Rule. “When she asked Janet about it, sometimes Janet would say yes, and sometimes she would say no. She was confused. Because of her disease, it wasn’t easy to get a straight answer from her. Jackie wasn’t going to take a chance, though. The ‘yes’ was all she needed to hear to take action. But then Booch didn’t adhere to her demands. He kept showing up when he wasn’t supposed to, and Jackie kept getting calls from Michael Dupree and Mannie Faria that Booch was there when he wasn’t supposed to be.

  “I was with my mother [Adora Rule] at Jackie’s home when a call came in from Michael, and Jackie became very, very upset. ‘Why is he there?’ I overheard her ask. ‘He shouldn’t be there!’ Finally, she said, ‘Goddamn that Booch! I’m coming up tomorrow and I’ll take care of it.’

  “She slammed down the phone, furious. ‘If he stuck to the rules, even then I would be upset and I’d want him out altogether,’ she said. ‘But he doesn’t. He shows up whenever the hell he wants. I always knew this man was trouble. I always knew it!’”

  Janet’s Surprising Gift to Lee

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” Janet would ask Jamie more than a couple of times a day. “For instance, do you need any money?” This was certainly a gentler, maybe it could be said more benevolent, Janet Auchincloss, now often asking her children if she could be of financial assistance. “No, Mummy, I’m just fine,” Jamie would say. However, he would find his mother’s persistent question a little troubling. If Janet were taken advantage of, he feared, who knew what she might do in her current state? His concern was prescient; in the end, Janet’s offer of money would come between her daughters, Jackie and Lee.

  Shortly after buying the condominium she owned at the Watergate complex, Janet had decided to sell it. Of course, again, this sale made no sense to most people. However, Janet was supposedly making her own decisions, even though everyone felt that Bingham was controlling things. She then bought a small town house at 3224 Volta Place in Georgetown.

  In December of 1986, there was a fire in Janet’s new home. Though she was at Hammersmith at the time, the blaze was still quite upsetting to Janet. “These days, she just couldn�
�t handle any kind of upheaval in her life,” recalled Jamie. “We all did our best to step in—Jackie kept up with Mummy’s correspondence, for instance.” For example, Jackie wrote to Dr. John Lattimer, one of the doctors who had treated Janet Jr., to thank him for a letter he had written to Janet Sr. (on May 13, 1986). “Thank you for your thoughtful letter about Janet,” she wrote. “She was brave and courageous throughout her illness. We will never cease to think of her or miss her. Sadly, my mother has a bad memory problem and while I know she would be happy to hear from you, I thought I should tell you about her condition, as I do not believe she will be able to answer you.”

  Under the circumstances, Jackie didn’t think Janet should make major decisions about her finances. Janet disagreed, and vehemently. She may not have had a memory for names, but she still felt she knew what she wanted to do with her money.

  After the fire damage was repaired at the Volta Place residence, Janet decided to sell it, as well. Jamie Auchincloss recalled, “My mother then asked Lee the question she often asked us: ‘What can I do for you? Do you need any money?’ Apparently, Lee said yes and explained that she was having some financial difficulties.”

  At around this same time, Lee decided to abandon her designing business. It had become too costly for her to run and she never seemed able to turn a profit with it. Though as optimistic as ever, Lee actually had no idea what she was going to do next. From critiquing fashion, to acting onstage and then on television, to producing a documentary, to hosting a talk show, to writing a book, to running her own design firm … she’d certainly done a lot with her life. If not for the fact that she was Jackie’s sister, she might not have had so many opportunities. Being related to one of the most famous women in the world had to have helped. However, no matter the field, Lee’s great efforts somehow always turned to ashes before her.