Duchin was one of the old friends Jackie had summoned to Greece to lighten the mood while Ari descended further into illness and depression. On February 3—before any divorce papers could be filed and before Jack Anderson’s exposé of Jackie’s spending could be published—Onassis collapsed in Athens with severe stomach pains.
Jackie rushed to her husband’s side, and then flew with him to Paris, where surgeons at the American Hospital removed his gallbladder. For the next five weeks, he remained comatose in room 217—a first-floor suite in the hospital’s Eisenhower Wing. Jackie was back at home in New York with John on March 12 when Ari, fighting infection and the debilitating effects of his myasthenia gravis, slipped into a coma. Onassis’s doctors told Jackie that her husband could die at any time, and prodded her to fly back to Paris. Jackie chose instead to remain in Manhattan.
Three days later, Ari died with Christina at his side. He was seventy-five.
Jackie had just returned to 1040 after an appointment at Kenneth’s hair salon when Johnny Meyer called her with the news that she was now a widow for a second time. She immediately told Meyer that she would be flying to Paris with John and Caroline aboard Ari’s Learjet. As she rattled off the details, Meyer could not help but notice that Jackie sounded “almost cheerful.”
The first call Jackie then made was to John’s uncle Ted, who had been instrumental in working out her original prenup with Ari. She would need the services of a powerful and well-connected U.S. senator to square off with Christina in negotiating a settlement now that Ari was dead. She then called her favorite designer of the moment, Valentino, and ordered a new black dress to wear to the funeral.
John was at a friend’s house when the call came from his mother—he was third on her list. “I’m afraid Mr. Onassis has died,” she told him matter-of-factly. John registered some small sadness at the news, but he could hardly be expected to react with an outpouring of grief. The outcome had been expected for weeks, and whatever bond Ari had forged with JFK’s son had been irretrievably broken by Onassis’s callous treatment of John’s mother.
Meanwhile in Paris, Christina was so distraught over her father’s passing—coming just five months after her mother Tina’s mysterious death at age forty-five—that she slit her wrist. It might have been expected; the highly unstable heiress had tried to kill herself several times before, and would again. Reporters who spotted the white bandages on Christina’s wrist as she left Ari’s bedside were told it was “an accident, a bathroom slip,” nothing more.
In Christina’s mind, the Black Widow was to blame for everything that had gone wrong for the Onassis family in recent years—including the deaths of her favorite aunt, Eugenie, her brother, her mother, and now her father. “I don’t dislike her, you know,” Christina now said. “I hate her.”
Getting off the plane in Paris, Jackie, wearing a black leather jacket and her trademark oversize shades, was greeted by hordes of photographers and reporters. No one from the Onassis family was there to greet her. Smiling incongruously, she issued a statement to the press. “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows,” she said. “He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together which cannot be forgotten, and for which I will be eternally grateful.”
While Jackie went on to see Ari’s body lying in state in the hospital chapel—his tan restored by mortuary cosmeticians, his arms clutching a large Orthodox crucifix to his chest—John flew on ahead to Skorpios. With him were Caroline, their uncles Ted and Jamie, and their grandmother Janet Auchincloss. Photographers waiting to catch Jackie’s arrival on Skorpios made do with hounding her kids. John buried his head in a comic book, but to no avail. Fed up, he stuck his tongue out at his tormentors, providing them with one of the day’s many perplexing images.
Jackie and Christina clung to each other for support as they were engulfed by the waiting press in Athens. But on the day of the funeral, the Onassises made it clear where they stood vis-à-vis Jackie. The funeral cortege was to wend its way to the fishing village of Nidri, where Ari’s body was to be placed on a launch bound for Skorpios. Christina, Jackie, and Ted sat together in the back of the second car, behind the limousine carrying Onassis’s three surviving sisters.
Just a few minutes into the journey, Ted, briefed on Ari’s plan to leave Jackie with precious little, leaned over to Christina and said, “Now it’s time to take care of Jackie.”
“Stop the car!” Christina shouted at the driver. Leaping from the limousine before it could come to a full stop, she ran ahead to join her aunts in their car.
It quickly became clear that Jackie and her family were not welcome. On Ari’s private island, a half dozen pallbearers carried his casket up the winding, rock-strewn footpath to the Onassis’s private chapel. But rather than being allowed to walk directly behind the coffin as she had done during JFK’s funeral, Ari’s widow was elbowed to the rear by Christina and her aunts. “It was a deliberate move to block Jackie off—to isolate her,” Johnny Meyer said. Even Greek Orthodox archdeacon Stylianos Pirounakis was shocked. “In all my years in the church,” he said, “I don’t recall another funeral where the widow was pushed into the background this way. Mrs. Onassis was made to feel as if she did not really belong. I find this extremely tragic.”
Putting on a united front, Jackie and her mop-topped son clung to each other as they brought up the rear of the funeral procession. “Jackie was humiliated and hurt,” Arthur Schlesinger said, “and John certainly knew it. Just look at the photos taken at the time. The look of dismay in both their faces, especially John’s, is extraordinary.” The moment harked back to that day years earlier when he tried to shield Jackie from the taunts of his St. David’s schoolmates. “From the very beginning,” Salinger said, “John was his mother’s protector.”
* * *
UNFORTUNATELY, WHAT STAYED in the mind of many Greeks was the image of Jackie smiling broadly while Christina and other family members wept. “It was a defense mechanism,” Tish Baldrige said. “No, obviously Jackie wasn’t wiped out the way she was by President Kennedy’s death. But what I saw in that smile was courage—and a lot of defiance.”
Nevertheless, the Greek public was outraged. ONLY CHRISTINA CRIED, read the headline in the Athens Acropolis. JACKIE WAS COLD.
Mindful that she was being portrayed as a grasping gold digger by Ari’s camp—“the Greeks,” she called them—Jackie remained in mourning for weeks. In the meantime, John and Caroline were dispatched to fulfill several of her social obligations.
Just three days after Ari’s funeral, Jackie’s children substituted for her at a lunch given at the Elysée Palace in Paris. “You have the look and smile of President John Kennedy,” French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing told John, “and I am very pleased that his children are here.”
That April, Jackie sent John along on a tour of Russia with his cousins Tim, Bobby, and Maria Shriver and their parents, Eunice and Sargent. Even by Kennedy standards, John was a bouncing, darting, nerve-fraying bundle of energy. When he got bored listening to Sarge Shriver make a speech, he climbed to the balcony and sailed paper airplanes over the heads of his uncle’s audience.
Like her cousin Caroline, nineteen-year-old Maria was struggling to control her weight. She watched in envious disbelief as John wolfed down just about anything he wanted without ever gaining an ounce. John “ate everything—ice cream, caviar, anything,” Tim marveled. “He was a garbage can.”
Even among the fun-loving Kennedy kids, fourteen-year-old John was a standout. When the family posed for pictures, Maria threw her left arm around John—only to have him lift her hand off his shoulder and bite it. As she would so often do when John pulled one of his tricks, Maria shrieked with laughter.
Under other circumstances, Jackie, a devout Russophile, would have tagged along. But she was preoccupied trying to nail down her Onassis inheritance. At one point in May 1975 when Christina met wit
h a group of bankers and oil executives in London, Jackie flew to England under the name “Mrs. Wyberg” in hopes of cornering her. Proceeding straight to Ari’s permanently reserved hotel suite, she discovered that Christina had already canceled the suite and cleared out all of Jackie’s clothes.
As much as she despised Jackie, Christina did not want to go through a drawn-out war in the courts. Yet over the next year and a half, the two women battled fiercely over what Jackie was actually entitled to. Christina was particularly offended by Teddy, who continued to pressure her even after the funeral. “I didn’t need that big walrus sloshing around in my pool and telling me to do right by Jackie,” Christina told Aileen Mehle. “Of course I was going to do right by Jackie—but in my own good time.”
Finally, the two women arrived at the IBM Tower in London to hammer out a deal—this despite Christina’s refusal to meet Jackie face-to-face. “They sat in separate rooms,” said Ari’s longtime spokesman Nigel Neilson, “and legal papers were shuttled back and forth between them by the firm’s clerks.”
In the end, Christina agreed to pay Jackie $26 million in cash—a $20 million lump sum settlement and the additional $6 million to cover taxes. “There is not,” Neilson said at that time, “a lot of love lost between them.”
Indeed, Onassis’s tight circle felt only contempt for the woman they still referred to as the Black Widow. “She’s despicable,” said Gratsos, who ran the day-to-day operations of the Onassis empire following Ari’s death. “I can’t bring myself to even think about her.” As for Christina: “She can’t bear the thought of that woman. She never wants to see her again, or hear her name.”
Christina took small comfort in being the world’s richest woman. Ricocheting from one disastrous affair to another, she never freed herself from her dependence on pills and booze. There would be several more suicide attempts and three more failed marriages before Christina’s naked body was discovered in a half-filled bathtub on November 19, 1988—three weeks short of her thirty-eighth birthday. The cause of death: pulmonary edema, resulting from her abuse of barbiturates and other prescription drugs. Ari’s only grandchild, Christina’s three-year-old daughter Athina, inherited everything.
* * *
JACKIE WAS DETERMINED not to make the same mistakes as a parent that Ari apparently made. “If you bungle raising your children,” she liked to say, “I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.”
An important first step was keeping her kids away from their problematic Kennedy cousins, especially Ethel’s hell-raising brood. Unable or unwilling to discipline her own children, Bobby’s widow presided over a household where chaos reigned supreme. At Hyannis Port, the Kennedy kids were notorious for vandalizing boats tied up on the pier, ambushing tourists with water balloons, firing BB guns at passing motorists, and lobbing lit firecrackers into neighbors’ homes. At a party for one of the neighborhood children, next-door neighbor Larry Newman watched in disbelief as they pulled out a knife and robbed a young girl of her birthday gifts.
Matters only got more out of hand during the 1970s, when John’s cousins began dabbling in drugs. Drifting from one college to another on the strength of his name, Joe Kennedy II, Bobby’s eldest, smoked pot and partied hard. On Nantucket one weekend, Joe took a friend’s Jeep on a joyride with his brother David and David’s girlfriend, Pam Kelley, in the backseat. Their wild ride ended when Joe lost control and careened off the road and into ditch, ejecting all three occupants. Joe emerged unscathed, but Pam was paralyzed from the waist down.
Joe certainly wasn’t alone. RFK Jr. and Bobby Shriver were arrested for marijuana possession. Shriver wasn’t about to repeat his mistake, but the same couldn’t be said for Bobby Jr. Along with his brother David and John’s cousin Christopher Lawford, Uncle Bobby’s namesake began dabbling in heroin.
Jackie tried to keep her children—John in particular—away from the gravitational pull of Hickory Hill. When Ethel called to invite John to spend two weeks there in the summer of 1975, Jackie’s response was swift and unequivocal. “No way!” she told Ted Kennedy’s aide Richard Burke. “With all the stuff that was going on at Hickory Hill—especially with the problems the boys were having—Jackie just didn’t want Caroline and John there.”
In truth, John was perfectly capable of getting into trouble on his own. He was only thirteen when he started smoking marijuana, and remained a frequent pot smoker for the rest of his life. At Collegiate, he was disciplined numerous times. “We were always getting caught,” John’s classmate Wilson McCray said, “for getting stoned.” In addition, John smoked pot on the roof of his mother’s apartment, and in the powder room at 1040 Fifth Avenue.
John was not above pulling potentially deadly pranks of his own under the influence of cannabis. During a family ski trip in Switzerland, John and McCray waited for Jackie to hit the slopes before stealing a Volkswagen van and taking it for a spin.
Between the warnings from school and the pungent aroma wafting from her powder room, Jackie must have known what John was up to. Apparently she had no idea, however, that Caroline was growing marijuana in Jackie’s vegetable garden at Hyannis Port. Caroline and John both routinely availed themselves of this homegrown supply—until a local policeman just happened to glance over the fence and spotted Caroline’s crop nestled between Jackie’s lettuce and zucchini plants.
Fortunately for JFK’s kids, the Hyannis Port cop went straight to Jackie. Enraged, she threatened to ground them indefinitely unless they cleaned up their act. Jackie could be frightening when she wanted to. “Suddenly she’d drop the breathless little girl voice and, boom, you knew you were in trouble,” Salinger said. “Big trouble.”
Not that Jackie assumed they would just stop smoking pot because she ordered them to. For both John and his sister there was an abiding need to be accepted for who they were, not as the children of a martyred president and his impossibly glamorous wife. They would probably continue to break the rules, if only to fit in. So to strengthen her hand, Jackie ordered the staff to keep a closer-than-usual eye on them.
Mindful of the repercussions a JFK Jr. drug bust would have, Jackie’s Secret Service detail turned something of a blind eye to John’s pot smoking. In turn, he ignored the fact that, wherever he went, an agent was only a few yards away. At restaurants, one agent would usually be nursing a ginger ale at the bar while another was positioned near the front door. When John went to the movies, a quick scan of the surrounding few rows would yield one suspiciously clean-cut man in his late twenties or early thirties pretending that he was focused entirely on the screen. If John was riding with a friend, one of the agency’s blue or black Ford Crown Victorias was never more than a few car lengths behind.
Their presence was welcome on several occasions that failed to make the news. There were several instances, usually at bars and clubs in New York, when an agent steered a belligerent drunk or a particularly annoying female fan in another direction. Once they stepped in when, on the stone front steps of the Metropolitan Museum, a chain-wielding street gang descended on John and his Frisbee-tossing pals.
Whatever John’s transgressions were when it came to marijuana, Jackie was convinced that they paled in comparison to what the Kennedy cousins were up to—and she was right. “Jackie did not want her children inhaled into that frenzied macho world of the Kennedys,” said her friend David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and author. “She wanted them to be a part of their father’s legacy, but she wanted them to develop the kind of self-control that many of their Kennedy cousins lacked. Jackie accomplished this very, very shrewdly, bringing them up in New York but letting them show the flag at Kennedy functions. She didn’t want her children sucked in, and they weren’t.”
Peter Duchin agreed that, in terms of her desire to raise children JFK would have been proud of, “one of the big decisions Jackie made in her life was to get the children the hell out of Hyannis Port and away from the Kennedys. The cousins were left to their own devices, and
she knew it could only spell trouble. It was something she worried about all the time.”
Duchin recalled the summer when Jackie sent John on a diving expedition to Micronesia “just to keep him away from the Kennedy kids.” Once she had outlined her plan, Jackie turned to Duchin. “Do you think,” she asked, “that’s far enough away?” Jackie “wasn’t joking,” Duchin said. “She was deadly serious.”
Backed up by nannies Maud Shaw and Marta Sgubin, Jackie taught John and Caroline to be considerate of others—a lesson Ethel clearly neglected to impart to her offspring. “Jackie was all over John,” Noonan said. “She wanted him to be a regular guy but also wanted him to be polite and dignified.” Both of Jackie’s kids were, Tish Baldrige agreed, “sophisticated far beyond their years—very much their mother’s children.” If there was one slice of pie left at a Hyannis Port picnic, John and Caroline would never take it. Their Hickory Hill counterparts would “knock each other and the table over grabbing it for themselves,” said Chuck Spalding, who went on to describe “pretty much all the other Kennedys” as a “loud and rowdy bunch. With them, manners pretty much went out the window.”
Although he shared the Kennedys’ competitive streak, John was reluctant to draw blood during the family’s take-no-prisoners games of touch football. “Sometimes those games were a bloodbath,” Larry Newman said. “From generation to generation—it never changed.” People “really got injured during those games,” Jamie Auchincloss agreed. “But John held back. He wasn’t the kind of person who took pleasure in hurting people.” According to his friend Billy Noonan, John preferred swimming, sailing, and tossing a Frisbee to team sports like football and baseball. “Football on the compound was a little too Kennedyesque—not just for me, but for John,” Noonan said. John joined in, he later confided to another friend, only when he got “roped into it. He didn’t want to seem like a snob.”
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 20
