The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved

by Christopher Andersen

  Even so, Jackie remained resolutely positive. She continued to work, on occasion wearing a turban to the office to cover up her balding pate. “Who knows?” cracked the woman hailed as a fashion avatar. “Maybe I’ll start a trend.” She also redoubled her efforts to land a blockbuster memoir to top Michael Jackson’s 1988 autobiography, Moonwalk, Jackie’s biggest commercial success.

  Toward that end, Jackie telephoned Frank Sinatra, perhaps more out of a desire to hear her friend’s voice one last time. Ol’ Blue Eyes turned her down, but sent flowers with a note: You are America’s Queen. God bless you, always. Love, Frank.

  “She was so sure, so strong,” said her Doubleday colleague Scott Moyers, “and she was carrying on as if this were just a minor nuisance.” When another friend from Martha’s Vineyard, television journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault, wrote Jackie a note praising her “style, grace, and beauty,” Jackie wrote a warm, “joyful” note in reply. Hunter-Gault sensed nothing of her desperate situation. Jackie’s friend ended her letter with “I look forward to seeing you on the Vineyard this summer.”

  “Definitely,” Jackie replied. “This summer.”

  Recalled Hunter-Gault: “You could just see her smiling.”

  * * *

  JOHN, MEANWHILE, HAD his own plans to enter the world of publishing. He announced to the family that he and his business partner, Michael Berman, intended to launch a magazine that would blend celebrity journalism and public affairs.

  “Oh, John,” Jackie teased, “you’re not going to do the Mad magazine of politics, are you?” No, he reassured her—more like the People magazine of politics.

  “Traitor!” was Caroline’s only half-in-jest remark. “Why do you want to join the other team?” Jackie acknowledged that there had always been a family connection to the publishing world—from Jackie’s work as a photojournalist and book editor to JFK’s Pulitzer Prize to Caroline’s own status as a bestselling author. But the leap from newspapers and books to a glossy celebrity magazine was too much for a family that had been at war with the paparazzi for decades. “Are you sure,” Jackie asked her son, “you want to become one of them?” After all, this was the first lady who, when asked what she was going to feed the family’s new dog, replied, “Reporters.”

  At Jackie’s urging, Maurice Tempelsman took John aside and warned him that his chances of success in starting up a new magazine were “slim to none.” Indeed, even the magazines that eventually proved hugely successful usually went years before finally turning a profit—gobbling up millions in investment dollars in the process.

  None of this mattered to John. On a visit to 1040, John kicked around a few title ideas with his mother. “We’re thinking of calling it George,” he told her.

  “George?” she replied, nonplussed.

  “Yeah, you know—George, as in the Father of Our Country? George.”

  “John, I think it would be a good idea if you talk to Maurice again,” Jackie said. “And this time, listen to what he has to say.”

  As snowstorms swept across the Northeast that March, Caroline continued to bring her children by 1040 so Grand Jackie could lead them on “fantasy adventures” around her apartment. One weekend when the mercury dipped into the teens, Jackie still ventured into Central Park with all the Schlossbergs to take part in a ferocious snowball fight. Jackie was even strong enough to grab a sled rope and pull Rose and Tatiana across the snow. Jackie seemed happier than she had been in months, and to some extent resigned to the probable outcome of her disease. “Even if I have only five years, so what?” she told Bunny Mellon. “I’ve had a great run!”

  Plummeting temperatures notwithstanding, Jackie insisted on taking her daily walks. Most of the time she was accompanied by Maurice. But every now and then John, who had temporarily moved into a suite at the nearby Surrey Hotel to be closer to his mother, escorted her across Fifth Avenue and into the park.

  For these strolls, which sometimes lasted an hour or more if Jackie was up to it, John wore a lucky knit cap and brought one for his mother to wear as well. An admitted aficionado of haberdashery, John boasted a large and varied collection of hats—berets, fedoras, boaters, beanies, camouflage hats, and Irish tweed caps. But the knit hats had special significance. It was a tradition for Jackie and Caroline to give him a new one every year on his birthday. “Each had a special meaning,” Sgubin explained. “He became very sentimental about them.”

  “The only thing John enjoyed during those sad months,” said his friend Rob Littell, “was his mother’s company.” Littell believed that John, seeing how bravely his mother was confronting her future, relied “on her strength to carry him through.”

  John was encouraged by reports he was getting from Jackie’s doctors. Despite the fact that she looked and felt terrible, the experts told John that the aggressive chemotherapy treatments had worked; her cancer appeared to be in remission.

  When she was feeling strong enough, Jackie and Maurice would catch a movie. Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s Academy Award–winning film about Holocaust survivors, was her last.

  In mid-March, Jackie suffered an alarming spell of disorientation. At one point, it was apparent to John and Maurice that she had no idea where—or who—she was. A subsequent MRI showed that while the cancer had vanished from her neck, chest, and abdomen, it had now spread to her spinal cord and brain.

  John was crushed. Now there would be more chemotherapy—this time delivered by shunt directly into Jackie’s brain through a hole drilled in her skull. Now she would also have to undergo radiation treatments. “It’s rough,” John told friends, “really rough.”

  Wearing a pastel pink turban, Jackie spent Easter with John and the Schlossbergs at her New Jersey house. The day was spent dyeing eggs in the kitchen and helping Rose and Tatiana make bonnets for the Bernardsville Easter Parade.

  On one of her walks with John, Jackie pointed to fields of tulips and blossoming cherry trees. “Isn’t it something?” Jackie said. “One of the most glorious springs I can remember. And after such a terrible winter.”

  Peter Duchin was one of the friends who paid a call on Jackie around this time. She was, he said, “behaving like you’d expect her to behave—as if she intended to beat this thing.” Another friend, author Edna O’Brien, described Jackie as “definitely up, actually quite cheerful.”

  The singer Carly Simon, one of Jackie’s Martha’s Vineyard neighbors, was another friend who spent time with her during this period. Yet someone was missing. Over lunch at Simon’s, a guest asked Jackie if she saw her sister often. “We’ve only seen each other once this whole year,” Jackie replied. “I never could understand why Lee is so full of animosity.”

  The following morning, Marta Sgubin called John with the news that Jackie had collapsed at 1040 Fifth. She was rushed to New York Hospital and underwent emergency surgery for a perforated ulcer, one of the many common side effects of chemotherapy. Visiting his mother, John learned that Richard Nixon, who had suffered a stroke, was right down the hall. As coincidences went, this one seemed in a class by itself. JFK’s onetime friend turned bitter political rival died eight days after Jackie was admitted, on April 22, 1994.

  As soon as she returned home, Jackie broke out her trademark pale blue stationery and began writing notes to her children. She told Marta that it was something she had to do right now—while she could still think clearly.

  “The children have been a wonderful gift to me,” she wrote to Caroline, “and I’m thankful to have once again seen our world through their eyes. They restore my faith in the family’s future. You and Ed have been so wonderful to share them with me so unselfishly.”

  Her letter to John left no doubt that her expectations for him were great—that she saw him as nothing less than Camelot’s standard-bearer. “I understand the pressures you’ll forever have to endure as a Kennedy,” she wrote, “even though we brought you into this world as an innocent.

  “You, especially,” Jackie continued, “have a place in histor
y. No matter what course in life you choose, all I can ask is that you and Caroline continue to make me, the Kennedy family, and yourself proud. Stay loyal to those who love you. Especially Maurice. He’s a decent man with an abundance of common sense. You will do well to seek his advice.”

  By early May, the pain was simply unbearable. John told his friend Steven Styles that Jackie phoned her son and sobbed, “I don’t think I can take it anymore.”

  John coped with the stress the best way he knew how—with physical activity. He spent additional hours at the gym, on his bicycle, running through the park. On one of these runs, he took Daryl’s dog with him. As John was returning to her co-op on the West Side, he wasn’t paying close enough attention and a car struck the dog. Hannah was justifiably upset at John’s heedlessness—one of the strains in their complicated relationship—but she had no desire to make him more miserable than he already was.

  On May 15—a Sunday—Jackie took Maurice’s arm and embarked on one last walk through her beloved Central Park. She wore tan slacks, a long-sleeved pink sweater, a brown wig, and a scarf wound tightly around her neck. Caroline, pushing a stroller with one hand, walked a few steps ahead. Slowly, they made their way toward the 840 acres of winding paths and woods and lawns and lakes that Jackie had known since she was a toddler. But the entire time, Jackie was grimacing in pain; she managed only a few halting steps past the park entrance before having to turn back.

  Weak and disoriented, her speech slightly slurred, Jackie was back in New York Hospital the next day. She was diagnosed with pneumonia, but tests also showed that the cancer had spread to her liver, which meant that any further chemotherapy or radiation treatments would be futile. In the short run, however, they urged her to remain in the hospital while they administered antibiotics in an attempt to bring her pneumonia under control.

  John knew what his mother would do next. With no interest in prolonging the inevitable, she checked herself out of the hospital. With Maurice holding her hand, she was taken by ambulance to 1040 Fifth, then wheeled into the building on a stretcher. By nightfall, hundreds of camera crews, reporters, photographers, and the just-plain-curious pressed against the blue police barricades set up on the sidewalk in front of Jackie’s building.

  On May 18, family and friends received the call they had all been dreading. Marta Sgubin told them all to waste no time getting to 1040 Fifth. Jackie’s stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss, got the call at Hammersmith Farm in Newport and drove straight to New York, praying that he would make it on time.

  “As you can imagine,” Nancy Tuckerman said, “it was a very emotional time for everyone.” Caroline was too distraught to function; she sat on a bench in the hallway, gently weeping with Ed Schlossberg at her side. It was left to John to greet visitors as they stepped off the private elevator and into the foyer. That night and throughout the next day, John, Caroline, and Maurice took turns at Jackie’s bedside. (Daryl Hannah, on hand to lend John moral support, tried to stay in the background.)

  Spelling each other every hour or so, John and his sister read to Jackie from her favorite works of literature—passages from Jean Rhys, Isak Dinesen, and Colette as well as poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Robert Frost, and Emily Dickinson. At times they sat with her together in the room, sharing treasured memories in hopes that their mother could hear them. Meanwhile Jackie, her head wrapped in a printed scarf, slipped in and out of consciousness.

  John’s aunt Lee arrived that evening, followed by Ted Kennedy and his second wife, Victoria Reggie. When she emerged from her sister’s room hours later, Lee was weeping. Solemn faced as he left for the night, Ted told reporters: “All the members of the family love her very deeply. We wanted to be with her this evening.”

  Moments earlier, Jackie came to long enough to see that everyone—John and Caroline in particular—was exhausted. “It’s late,” she whispered to John. “Go home and get some sleep.” They did, but returned two hours later.

  It was shortly after noon on Thursday, May 19, when Monsignor Georges Bardes of St. Thomas More Church came to the apartment to administer last rites. When John’s uncle Bobby lay dying in Los Angeles twenty-six years earlier, family and friends were allowed to come into his hospital room in groups of two. Once again, they filed in two at a time—Aunt Eunice and Uncle Sargent, Carly Simon and Bunny Mellon, Ted and Victoria, Aunt Pat and Aunt Ethel—to sit by Jackie’s bed, hold her hand, or even share bits of gossip.

  Waiting their turn to say goodbye, family members and friends stood in the living room murmuring to each other. Periodically, someone would start to weep and John would put a comforting arm around them. Yusha Auchincloss had arrived in time to spend most of the evening there. “But first I had to compose myself,” he said. “I told John that I didn’t want Jackie to see me upset. I went in and out of her room for short visits over the next few hours—sitting by her bed, holding her hand, whispering some memories of our childhood. Then I kissed her good-bye . . . Jackie had lived life to the fullest, she had no regrets.”

  That night Jackie lay in her bedroom, bathed in the gentle glow of three antique lamps. Even in her drug-induced sleep, she struggled for breath. Every twenty minutes a doctor came in to check her vital signs and, in accordance with Jackie’s wishes, administer enough morphine to ease her into as painless a death as possible.

  While Caroline sat in the next room, Maurice and John took turns sitting in a chair next to Jackie’s bed. Physically spent and emotionally drained, Maurice left her room for just a few minutes to get some air. When he returned, Jackie had slipped into a final coma.

  An hour later, at 10:15 p.m. on May 19, 1994, Jackie’s heart stopped beating. It had all happened with such mind-spinning swiftness—it had been only four months since the public learned of her illness—that everyone was struggling to comprehend what had happened. “She just,” said Nancy Tuckerman, “sort of slipped away.”

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, THE WORLD waited for any news concerning Jackie’s condition. Initially, Uncle Ted argued that a formal statement should be issued by Nancy Tuckerman. Caroline objected to making any sort of announcement. “We don’t owe them anything,” she told John.

  John, who had always been more media-savvy than his sister, disagreed. He suggested that the best way to break the news was for a family member to speak directly to the press, telling the circumstances of Jackie’s death and then asking for time to grieve.

  The next morning, John stepped before the scores of photographers and reporters camped outside the building where he had grown up. “Last night, at around 10:15, my mother passed on,” he said. “She was surrounded by her friends and family and her books and the people and things that she loved. And she did it in her own way, and we all feel lucky for that, and now she’s in God’s hands.

  “There’s been an enormous outpouring of good wishes from everyone in both New York and beyond,” he went on. “And I speak for all our family when we say we’re extremely grateful. And I hope now that you know, we can just have these next couple of days in relative peace.”

  Needless to say, that did not happen. True to form, hundreds of onlookers who had gathered in the street strained to catch a glimpse of John, Caroline, and Maurice as they got into a limousine and sped off for the nearby Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. There they picked out Jackie’s coffin—“The Presidential” model, dark mahogany with gleaming pewter handles—and discussed funeral arrangements, at least the few they could agree on.

  Once back in the apartment, Uncle Ted began quarreling with Jackie’s children about the size of the funeral.

  Caroline wanted it to be a modest private affair, but the senator insisted that Jackie was simply too important a figure for that. He argued for a funeral at New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral to rival that of Robert Kennedy in 1968.

  John remained neutral, focusing instead on hosting the wake that was now taking place in the apartment, and on small details that he felt his mother would have thought were important. John had h
is mother’s coffin placed next to the fireplace in the living room, and then gently arranged her gold-embroidered bedspread over the closed lid. “We need something intimate,” he explained, “to dress things up.”

  The woman who had so meticulously planned JFK’s state funeral had given their children substantial latitude in arranging hers; she specified only that she wanted the service to be conducted at St. Ignatius Loyola Church, and that she wished to be interred next to Jack at Arlington National Cemetery.

  Showing the gumption she had inherited from her mother, Caroline got her way. There was one small concession: speakers would be set up outside St. Ignatius Loyola so that people gathered on the street would be able to hear the service. John, who had already shown such composure and grace in announcing his mother’s death to the world, was now assigned the task of drawing up the guest list. “It’s fine,” he told Hannah. “I want to keep busy.”

  As far as Jackie was concerned, Daryl was the last serious woman in her son’s life—and the one who, despite Mummy’s disapproval, was likely to land him as a husband. That Sunday, she and John, both wearing shorts and T-shirts, caused photographers to scatter as they Rollerbladed up Fifth Avenue on their way to Jackie’s hastily arranged wake at 1040.

  Many Americans who were having a hard time coping with the suddenness of Jackie’s death were offended by the sight of John skating around town with his star girlfriend. Yet it was all completely in keeping with family tradition. “John felt he was honoring his mother by doing what he loved because he knew that’s what she would have wanted,” Barlow said. Besides, added Larry Newman, “all the Kennedys run out and do something physical at times like these.”