Once there, Onassis stayed inside, spinning more business deals over the phone while Jackie and the kids went riding to the hounds. At the end of the day, John came rushing into the house with the news that he had almost been thrown from his mount when it caught its hind leg on a fence. By that time, Ari had already departed for Paris.
Onassis continued to insist that maintaining a little distance from his new family was a good thing. “They need time,” he said of John and Caroline, “to understand that their mother has remarried and that I want to be their friend, and not replace their father, whom I admired so much. A father cannot be replaced, especially one like John Kennedy. I only desire that they consider me a best friend.”
Undeniably, John delighted in Jackie’s newfound happiness, as well as in Ari’s seemingly limitless largesse. Onassis did more than just shower his stepson with luxuries and pricey toys. From the very start, he worked hard at being a role model and father figure for John—a better one, he insisted to Salinger, than even Bobby had been.
Ari often canceled business plans just to spend time with the children on Skorpios. According to Moutsatsos, Ari made it seem as if “there was no other place he’d rather be” than with John and Caroline.
On fishing excursions, he kept John entertained with tales of his own rough-and-tumble boyhood, and when the fish refused to bite, Onassis made sure that a crewman slipped a fish on John’s line so that he could still experience the thrill of a catch. Then there were the long, thoughtful strolls through the island’s woodlands, with Ari patiently pointing out the island’s animals and birds.
Now that he was spending more time in New York, Onassis did not want to disturb Jackie and the kids with his round-the-clock conference calls and endless deal-making. Instead, he operated out of an opulently furnished, full-floor suite at the Pierre Hotel, twenty-four blocks south of 1040 Fifth.
On the streets of Manhattan, Ari continued to pursue a genuine father-son relationship with JFK Jr. Jackie often looked down from the window of her apartment and saw Ari and her son walking hand in hand, Onassis leaning down to say something to John, then tilting his head to hear the boy’s response.
“Just what is it you two talk about?” Jackie asked Ari after dinner one evening.
“I am teaching him,” Onassis replied enigmatically.
Jackie looked at him quizzically. “Teaching him what?” she asked.
“To be a successful man,” Ari said, as if the answer were perfectly obvious.
Later, she told Kiki Moutsatsos that she wondered exactly what her husband meant. “Probably how to act like a grown-up person,” Moutsatsos answered with a shrug, “not a little boy. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
Jackie was not convinced. “Oh, dear,” she said, shaking her head. “I just hope he isn’t spending all their time together telling John how to get a woman.”
In truth, Onassis was doing most of the listening. During their marathon walks through Central Park and around the Upper East Side—usually punctuated with a stop for hot fudge sundaes at Serendipity—John chattered on about his schoolwork, his sports, his friends, basically anything that popped into his head. “John was a very talkative little kid,” Plimpton remembered, “and Ari wasn’t pretending—he seemed genuinely interested in what he had to say. It was important because, surrounded by so many famous adults like he was, well, a child could easily feel lost in the shuffle. Ari understood that.”
There were times when John’s running commentary proved especially valuable. When Ari took John to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets take on the Baltimore Orioles in the third game of the World Series, he relied on the boy to explain the rules of American baseball to him.
Following Jackie’s lead—at Collegiate she was famous for being the only parent with a perfect record when it came to attending school events—Ari showed up at a number of soccer games and plays. “More than most of the other fathers, in fact,” allowed another Collegiate mom. Where he used to search the stands only looking for Jackie’s familiar face, John now expected to see Ari there as well. “It sort of shamed the rest of us, if you want to know the truth. What were we doing that could possibly be so important if Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis could make the time to be there?”
As the bond between them strengthened, Ari and his stepson felt comfortable enough for teasing and a little good-natured horseplay. When John’s cocker spaniel, Shannon, lifted a leg and peed on Ari’s shoe, they both dissolved in hysterics. Ari, meantime, took no small pleasure in chasing John around the deck of the Christina and then tossing him into the pool.
Each night at bedtime, Jackie tucked in both children, but only after Ari crept into John’s bedroom, tickled him, and finished off with a big Greek bear hug. “Ari seemed to enjoy both children immensely,” Plimpton said. “They kept him young.”
Because of John, Ari was also on the lookout for members of the press who chartered boats, hung from trees with telephoto lenses, and leaped out at them from behind trash cans and parked cars. Like Jack, Onassis did not wish to risk Jackie’s wrath by letting photographers too close to her children. Placed in charge of John one weekend when Jackie jetted off to New York, Ari locked John belowdecks for four hours while press boats circled the Christina. On Onassis’s orders one of the yacht’s crewmen launched a speedboat from the stern and zigzagged among the press boats, propelling photographer after swearing photographer into the drink. Finally, John appeared on the deck and climbed onto Ari’s Chris-Craft for a quick tour of the neighboring islands—but not before tossing towels to the journalists who’d been given a good soaking.
Notwithstanding the bond of affection that now existed between them, John always felt that an “invisible barrier” existed between him and Onassis. “He was too old, too foreign, too rich, too much,” said a friend. It spoke volumes that John never stopped calling the man who married his mother “Mr. Onassis.”
Nevertheless, John and Caroline now found themselves in the embrace of Ari’s own family. As much as they despised Jackie (and Callas and any of Ari’s other women, for that matter), Alexander and Christina instantly warmed to the Kennedy kids. A licensed pilot at twenty, Ari’s brooding only son shared John’s abiding love of aviation—more specifically, his fascination with helicopters. Over the next few years, Alexander would occasionally take the controls of his father’s private chopper and invite John along for the ride. Lee recalled that her sister “was so thrilled to see John so happy and excited. She knew how much he loved flying, especially helicopters.”
For the rest of the Kennedys, such positive signs of harmony between Jackie and her Onassis in-laws were of no consequence. They still treated the marriage with “abject horror,” Pierre Salinger observed. “That made John and Caroline even closer and emphasized for all of them that they were three against the world: Bouvier-Kennedys, as opposed to their garden-variety Kennedy cousins.”
That did not mean Jackie was willing to forgo their Kennedy birthright. Eventually, Jackie would invite Salinger to Skorpios for the express purpose of telling them all about their father. “I want you to come here and every hour or so tell them something new about Jack,” she said. “They don’t have anyone here to keep his memory alive, and they need to know about him, Pierre. John especially. Caroline remembers everything, but John was just too young.”
JFK’s former press secretary obliged. “I spent a month on Skorpios,” he recalled. “We’d go to the beach or out fishing and I’d tell them all about their dad. I made certain to stress their father’s wonderful sense of humor and his love of life—and especially his love of them,” Salinger said. “I pointed out that even though he often had reason to be sad, he was the person who cheered up all the others in the room.”
Salinger “wasn’t sure at first if Jackie would approve, but I thought it was important that they not be spoon-fed all the Camelot stuff—that would just give them a warped, unrealistic view of President Kennedy.” JFK was “a human being and not a myth—and Jackie wan
ted them to know that more than anything.” In the end, John and Caroline both had a “healthy perspective on their father. All the credit,” Salinger said, “goes to Jackie.” For the rest of his life, JFK’s old comrade and friend would treasure the memory of “those two innocent, beguiling faces turned up to me and listening with rapt attention.”
In December, Ethel gave birth to Bobby’s eleventh child. Jackie flew down to Washington alone, took a limousine to Georgetown University Hospital, and went straight to the nursery—bypassing Ethel’s room altogether. After declaring that Rory Elizabeth Katherine was “very pretty,” Jackie spent some time alone with Luella Hennessey, the Kennedy family nurse who had been there for the birth of all four of Jackie’s children.
Before returning to New York, she stopped at Arlington, asking her two-man Secret Service detail to remain in the car while she visited Bobby’s grave, then the spot where Jack, Patrick, and their stillborn daughter Arabella were buried. Stunned tourists remained respectfully silent, but Jackie was noticeably irritated by the incessant click and whir of their cameras.
No sooner was she back behind her Louis XV desk at 1040 Fifth than Jackie dashed off a blistering six-page letter to Secret Service director James J. Rowley complaining “there are too many agents, and the new ones are not sensitive to the needs of little children.” She insisted that John and his sister “must think they lead normal lives, and not be conscious of a large number of men protecting them from further violence.”
It was important, she continued, that her children “not be made conspicuous among their friends by the presence of numerous agents, or have the households in which they live thrown into turmoil by the intrusion of agents who do not care about them or understand their problems.”
Jackie wanted the Secret Service detail cut in half, from eight agents to four. She agreed agents “should be with the children from the time they leave the house in the morning until they return at 5:30 for supper,” but insisted there was no need for a late-afternoon or night shift since at that time the children were secure in their doorman building. In Hyannis and in New Jersey, she had confidence that local police could help provide sufficient protection at night.
Even the Secret Service director could not argue with the fact that Ari’s private seventy-five man army was more than enough to keep John and Caroline safe in Greece. What clearly rankled Jackie most was the way Secret Service agents behaved during the family’s weekends in New Jersey. “Agents tramp outside the children’s windows all night, talking into their walkie-talkies,” she protested. Agents’ cars were “piled up in the driveway so that our little country house,” she said, “looks like a used-car lot.”
Jackie claimed that the folks next door had every reason to be angry when one of the agents “either went to sleep or was listening to the radio so loudly in his car with the windows steamed up that he did not hear a neighbor’s child locked in the car next to him who had been crying hysterically for an hour, and was finally found by her parents. Then there was the time “an agent went in and forcibly dragged my children home for supper though I had told his superior that they might stay, etc., etc.”
Rowley sympathized with Jackie’s frustration, which resounded in her final paragraph. “The children are growing up,” Jackie wrote. “They must see new things and travel as their father would have wished them to do. They must be free as possible, not encumbered by a group of men who will be lost in foreign countries, so that one ends up protecting them and not vice-versa.”
Jackie went on to say that “as the person in the world who is most interested in their security, and who realizes most what threats are in the outside world, I promise you I have considered and tried every way, and that what I ask you for is what I know is best for the children of President Kennedy and what he would wish for them. Thank you so much, dear Mr. Rowley. I hope you have a happy Christmas. Most sincerely, Jacqueline.”
After spending Christmas 1968 on Skorpios, Jackie returned to New York with John and Caroline in tow. As soon as she was out the door, Ari flew to Paris for dinner with Callas at her apartment. As Callas waited for him to arrive, recalled their friend Baroness van Zuylen, she behaved “like a nervous teenager.”
Blithely carrying on with both women, Ari then returned to New York before departing with the children on a cruise to the Canary Islands. Later, bringing Rose Kennedy along on an Easter cruise aboard the Christina, Ari presented John’s grandmother with a gold bracelet studded with rubies and diamonds—her reward for sticking by them when the rest of the clan had tried to scuttle their wedding.
On that cruise, Rose talked excitedly about the family’s newest hope for recapturing the White House—Uncle Ted. At about the same time, reporters traveling with Ted Kennedy aboard a Washington-bound plane overheard the drunk senator repeatedly say, “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby.”
Ted Kennedy’s dreams of advancing from the U.S. Senate to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue ended on July 18, 1968, when he drove his 1967 Oldsmobile off the Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, part of Martha’s Vineyard, drowning his attractive young passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. The tragic accident and Ted’s inept attempt at a cover-up added more fuel to the growing belief in a Kennedy Curse.
“It was unquestionably another blow for Jackie,” Plimpton said. “Ted had stepped up after Bobby’s death, and she and the children were enormously fond of him. It was just another painful twist of fate that seemed beyond belief.” Yet Jackie, who might easily have stayed out of sight on Skorpios, stood alongside her embattled brother-in-law in a show of solidarity. She even asked Ted to take the place of Bobby as Caroline’s godfather. “It was a special trust,” he later said. “It meant a great deal, and so did the support she gave me at the time.”
Just ten days after Chappaquiddick, Ari presented Jackie with a special present for her fortieth birthday: the 40.42-carat marquis-cut Lesotho III diamond. Along with it came a matching diamond necklace and bracelet, and to commemorate the realization that summer of JFK’s dream of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, a pair of 18-carat gold-and-ruby “Apollo II” ear clips designed by Greek jewelry maker Ilias Lalaounis.
“Ari was actually apologetic about them,” Jackie told Greek actress Katina Paxinou, one of the guests at her birthday party. “He felt they were such trifles.” As it turned out, the “trifles” Ari gave to John’s mother that year cost more than $2 million—the rough equivalent of $16 million in 2014 dollars.
Although White House photographs showed him playing with his mother’s pearl necklace, John was in fact much more intrigued by Jackie’s Apollo II ear clips. Each anchored by a large moon of hammered gold, the large globes dangled from links fashioned in the shape of a lunar capsule.
At first, Ari claimed not to be concerned about how much Jackie was costing him—over and above the gifts he bestowed on her, the new Mrs. Onassis spent more than $2 million on herself during their first year of marriage. “God knows Jackie has had her years of sorrow,” he said. “If it makes her happy, she can have anything she wants.”
Jackie was, by any definition, a shopaholic—a manic, insatiable consumer who splurged on herself without abandon. Her compulsive spending had gotten her into deep trouble with Jack, who felt that her high-living image would end up costing him votes; her shopping habit was one of the few things they quarreled about bitterly in front of friends.
Now, without an electorate to offend, she indulged her every acquisitive whim. Clothes remained Jackie’s principal addiction. Frequenting Paris’s top fashion houses, she scooped up entire collections by her favorite designers. St. Laurent, Dior, Valentino, Givenchy, Chanel, and Lanvin all made up mannequins to Jackie’s precise measurements just so they could keep up with her orders. Ari’s longtime confidant Costa Gratsos called her a “pointer”—someone who, without ever inquiring about the price, simply points to an object and asks to have it wrapped up. At one Fifth Avenue store, she purchased $40,000 ($320,000 in 2014 dollar
s) worth of handbags, scarves, and sweaters in less than fifteen minutes. The manager recalled that one salesman “had to be taken home in a taxi and put to bed with a sedative.”
On many occasions, John was present to witness firsthand what he later called Jackie’s “spending jags.” She was, Tish Baldrige joked, a “world-class consumer. There was no stopping her when she got that look in her eye, and you have to wonder what that might look like to a child.”
Apparently it wasn’t much of a concern for John, who around this time went to a dress shop near Collegiate and bought his mother two $19.99 dresses for her birthday. Jackie wore them, but only around the apartment. “She was very convincing,” he later said. “She said she loved them. She said they had style.”
As it had with Jack, Jackie’s profligate consumption would lead to friction within her second marriage—and heated exchanges with Ari. Only this time they were arguing in front of children who were old enough to understand what was going on.
By late 1969, Jackie and Ari were spending even less time together than they usually did. This arrangement suited Jackie just fine, although dealing with an increasingly aggressive press as she actively pursued her high-profile solo life in New York became more and more problematic.
Of course, Jackie also thrived on publicity, actively seeking coverage so long as she called the shots. At times she had her secretary alert newspaper and magazine editors that she was to be at a certain event. On other occasions, said Women’s Wear Daily publisher James Brady, “she avoided us as from the plague.” Brady and the others were willing to put up with Jackie’s shifting moods, and for one simple reason. He confessed she was the ultimate “cover girl. There is a continuous and enthusiastic, and even perhaps morbid interest in Jackie, her life and loves.”
Her son was no less a target—literally. Nicknamed “the Shadow” by Ari, Greek photographer Dimitri Koulouris tossed stones at John hoping that he could snap shots of the boy angrily throwing stones back at him. Another time, according to court records, Jackie was water-skiing off Skorpios when the Greek photographer cut across the stern of the boat that was pulling her, severing her line. As a startled Jackie sank beneath the surface, thrashing as she struggled for air, Koulouris reportedly kept taking pictures.
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 16
