by Sam Kashner
Though her theatrical ambitions, finally, did not pan out, Lee had achieved something that had eluded her for decades—she had kicked off her mother’s shoes and had succeeded in running away from home. Just six years earlier, atop a camel in Pakistan, Lee had resembled Janet. Now, on the cover of Life, her radiant smile announced a buoyant and joyful spirit. Her light brown hair tousled around her face, her sense of exuberance—at last Lee seemed to have come into her own.
When asked if she had pursued acting to become more famous than her sister, she answered, “Look, I am doing this to be myself, my own person, in a way, I feel I’ve never been allowed to be. . . . If one wants fame, I can think of easier ways of getting it.” If she had taken this perilous course to become herself, she had succeeded. But it’s also possible that on some deeper level, Lee never quite forgave Truman for holding her up to public criticism, and she would play out her wounded feelings several years later, when Truman’s star spectacularly crashed.
8
The Golden Greek
Ari was magnetic. He walked like a potentate, noticing and wanting to be noticed.
—LEE
If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets. I want to get out of this country.
—JACKIE
The two men in my life I found the most attractive were Ari and Rudolf—and they couldn’t have been more different,” Lee reminisced one afternoon in the sun-filled aerie of her Upper East Side apartment. (She prefers to spend her winters in New York instead of Paris because, as her longtime friend Reinaldo Herrera observed, “New York in winter has sunny days, whereas Paris, in winter, rarely does.”) Of course she was referring to Aristotle Onassis and Rudolf Nureyev, two men she had loved and inevitably lost—the first to the Kennedys and then, famously, to her sister, and the second to Nureyev’s sexual orientation, perhaps, or simply to fate, which continued to play a hand in the lives of both sisters. (Lee once wrote that Ari always wore dark sunglasses because “he had Mediterranean eyes—you could see the whole story of his life in them.” But what she couldn’t see was Ari’s intention to marry her sister.) The two men, in their fashion, had courted her, and both had offered her—at least for a brief time—a life at the center of the universe.
Many felt that Jackie was betraying her legacy as America’s widowed queen by marrying one of the richest men in the world, considered by many to be a crass vulgarian. But others observed that Ari—known as the Golden Greek—was in fact immensely charming, keenly intelligent, with a deep knowledge of Greek myth and of human nature. Both sisters had been captivated by his Homeric storytelling and command of five languages. Nicholas Gage wrote in his magisterial biography of Onassis and Callas:
Onassis was a brilliant raconteur, in all of the five languages he spoke fluently. He suffered from insomnia, and it was his practice to pass the long nights regaling anyone willing to listen—guests on his yacht or local fishermen in a Greek harborside tavern—with his stories. Randolph Churchill, the journalist who was Sir Winston’s son, once described in The London Evening Standard Onassis’ Homeric gift for oral narration: “he is a born orator with a poetic sense and can build up a list of adjectives in an ascending order of emphasis and weight which are as perfect as a phrase of music.”
When people asked incredulously what Jackie saw in Onassis, Gore Vidal rather waspishly wrote, “Ari was more charming and witty than she, and in the glittering European circus, where, to her credit, she did not particularly want to shine, the word was, ‘what on earth does he see in her?’”
But for Onassis, Jackie was the ultimate trophy—world-famous beyond Lee and even Maria Callas, in need of his protection, and made even more beautiful by her tragic history. With her wide-spaced eyes and elegant lines, she closely resembled the fin de siècle artist Aubrey Beardsley’s rendering of Helen of Troy. But perhaps more than that, this was the ultimate revenge against the Kennedys—Jack and Bobby—who had both loved her, and who had tried but failed to keep Onassis as far away as possible from both sisters.
On June 5, 1968, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, a disturbed young Palestinian, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after winning the California primary in his bid for the presidency. Although Jackie did not campaign for Bobby in terms of giving speeches or hosting events (indeed, she never campaigned for anyone in that way), she had been supportive of her brother-in-law, saying, “Whatever Senator Kennedy will do I know it will be right. I will always be with him with all my heart. I shall always back him up.”
Just as she had accompanied her husband’s body on Air Force One from Dallas to Washington, DC, still in her blood-spattered suit, so Jackie accompanied Bobby’s casket from Los Angeles to New York. Kennedy family friend and NBC correspondent Sander Vanocur saw how disturbed she was, especially as she mistakenly thought it the same Boeing 707 that had carried her husband’s body home. It was not, but she couldn’t help but feel that she was reliving the same cataclysmic event. “There are friends of the Kennedys,” one journalist wrote, “who think that when Senator Robert Kennedy was shot . . . much died in this country, including something of them, and something of [Jackie].”
Jackie was still haunted by the horror of Jack Kennedy’s death five years earlier. When Cecil Beaton visited her in New York to photograph her and escort her to the Balanchine ballet Don Quixote, he wrote in his journal on February 19, 1968:
Jackie shows signs of the awful experiences of the last four years. Her white skin has shadows and creases, as if underneath the surface something had broken . . . happily, none of this shows in photographs, and she is still the most photogenic person in the world . . .
That night at the ballet, when a few revolver shots rang out onstage, “Jackie nearly jumped out of her chair and over the rail in the dress circle,” Beaton recalled. “I felt sorry for her, in such a state of nerves.”
Many believed that it was Bobby’s murder that propelled Jackie into the arms of Onassis, when in actuality, she had considered marrying him several weeks earlier. They had taken an intimate cruise on the Christina around the Virgin Islands, and at least one of her friends, Dorothy Schiff, publisher of the New York Post in its earlier, more liberal days, believed that Jackie was keener on marrying Onassis than the other way around. In any case, she had discussed her plans to marry Onassis with Bobby, whom she completely trusted.
Given his disapproval of Lee’s earlier involvement with Onassis, Bobby denounced Onassis as a “rogue” and asked Jackie to at least wait until the presidential election was over before making any public announcements. Ironically, his sudden death at the hands of an assassin freed her of any agreement to wait, and it also compelled her to seek the protection offered by Onassis.
Skorpios, Onassis’s private four-hundred-acre island in the Ionian Sea, which he had bought for $110,000 in 1963, now seemed the kind of sanctuary Jackie needed. Manhattan, where she had thought she could live unmolested by gawkers, no longer felt safe. The photographer Ron Galella stalked her relentlessly, snapping her photo whenever she stepped onto the Manhattan pavement. He seemed to be everywhere, disguised in various wigs and false mustaches, even dating Jackie’s maid to get inside information. His stalking went beyond Manhattan. Galella hung out on Capri to take photographs of Jackie and Ari dining together, and hunkered down in a skiff just off Skorpios. Like any stalker, he was obsessed with her, and his presence began to feel threatening. She finally went to court in 1970, taking out a restraining order against him. Galella reacted by suing Jackie for $1.3 million for “interfering with the pursuit of his lawful occupation” and—after Jackie had him arrested—for “malicious prosecution, false imprisonment, and harassment.” Jackie countersued for $6 million, on the basis that Galella harassed her and violated her right to privacy. It took three years to resolve in the courts, culminating in a restraining order that required him to stay at least twenty-five feet away from her and thirty feet away from her children.
Even though she ha
d moved to Manhattan in part to preserve her privacy, Jackie was still inundated by fans and curiosity seekers. One evening, Jackie went to the theater with Joan Thring, who recalled:
When the interval came up, I said, “let’s go and have a drink,” and she said, “I can’t, I can’t do that.” And suddenly, somebody said, “there’s Jackie Kennedy,” and there was this thunderous thing of feet running down either aisle . . . they just filed in rows in front of us, just staring. It was terrifying.
Thring asked if this happened often, and Jackie replied, “All the time. Just pretend it’s not happening.”
After the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, Jackie said, “If they’re killing Kennedys, then my children are targets. I want to get out of this country.” Not only that, it seemed everywhere she looked there was a new reminder of the life that was so suddenly and so cruelly taken from her: The National Cultural Center in Washington, DC, became the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts; Idlewild Airport in Queens, New York, was renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport; even Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas—where the unimaginable crime had occurred—was renamed John F. Kennedy Memorial Plaza. Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy (this one at Jackie’s request, to recognize her husband’s devotion to the space program with the goal of being the first nation to reach the moon). If she wanted to forget, it would be far more difficult to forget her former life, and her slain husband, in America. The country itself was becoming a kind of monument to her husband’s martyrdom.
After Bobby Kennedy’s assassination, Jackie felt that her life was “now shadowed by death,” as she confided in her aunt Maude, one of her twin Bouvier aunts:
I can’t escape it. Whether I’m helping with the Kennedy Memorial at Harvard, or taking a plane from Kennedy airport, or seeing a Kennedy in-law, I always think of Jack and what they did to him.
* * *
HAVING MADE UP her mind to wed Onassis, whom she affectionately called “Telis,” Jackie sought approval from Janet and her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, whom she called “Belle-Mère.” One afternoon in June, she brought Onassis to meet her mother at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island. With him were his gracious and stylish sister, Artemis—known for her warmth and wit—and Onassis’s daughter, Christina. Ari was there on a charm offensive, to help win Janet’s blessing.
But Janet had already met Onassis, and she most definitely did not approve. There were all the usual reasons—including social snobbery aimed at the self-made, Turkish-born shipping magnate—but more important, four years earlier Janet had angrily confronted him in his Claridge’s hotel suite in London in search of Lee. Unruffled, Onassis had informed Janet that Lee had just left his rooms.
Rose Kennedy, whom Jackie visited in Hyannis, was more amenable toward the Golden Greek. Their paths had casually crossed during Rose’s trips to Europe. She and Joe Kennedy would sometimes run across him in restaurants, and she described their relationship as a “friendly acquaintance.” Rose admired self-made men of immigrant origins—she married one—and she appreciated Onassis’s commanding masculine presence. (Joe Kennedy, severely incapacitated by a stroke in 1961, was not able to offer an opinion. Did he even know that Onassis had had a fling with the actress Gloria Swanson, a longtime mistress of the Kennedy patriarch?)
Rose Kennedy, who preferred to stay in the dark about such matters, later recalled Onassis’s visit in her memoir, Times to Remember, describing him as “quietly companionable, easy to talk with, intelligent, with a sense of humor and a fund of good anecdotes to tell. I liked him. He was pleasant, interesting, and to use a word of Greek origin, charismatic.”
Jackie must have found that heartening, and even surprising. “She of all people was the one who encouraged me, who said, ‘he’s a good man,’ and ‘don’t worry, dear,’” Jackie later recalled. “She’s been extraordinarily generous. I was married to her son and I have his children, but she was the one who was saying, ‘if this is what you think is best, go ahead.’”
By some accounts, it was Onassis who wasn’t sure about the marriage, not Jackie, although he showered Caroline and John Jr. with gifts and attention. But he continued his affair with Maria Callas and gave little sign of ending that relationship. Maria believed that she and “Aristo” were still a couple.
* * *
WITH BOBBY GONE, younger brother Edward “Ted” Kennedy became the acting head of the Kennedy clan, and he stepped in to negotiate a prenuptial agreement with the Greek tycoon. They met on Skorpios and over two days began to sketch out an agreement, while Jackie discreetly stayed away. Ted Kennedy pointed out how much the Kennedy family, and America itself, were shocked by the impending union, and he asked for an up-front settlement of $20 million for Jackie. He pointed out that she would be giving up her $175,000 per year from the Kennedy trust, as well as her presidential widow’s pension of $10,000 per year from the government, by remarrying.
Ted and Jackie had turned to André Meyer, chairman of Lazard Frères investment banking firm in New York and Jackie’s financial adviser, to work out the details of the agreement. Meyer was very much opposed to the marriage, and, perhaps in a last-ditch attempt to scuttle it, he had devised the idea of a generous up-front settlement.
Furious over the demand, Onassis flew to New York on September 25, 1968, and met with Meyer at the investment banker’s sumptuous apartment in the Carlyle Hotel. Onassis insisted that he wasn’t buying a wife, but Meyer was adamant, and like two heads of state, they thrashed out an agreement.
In exchange for Jackie waiving her right under Greek law to inherit 12.5 percent of his estate upon his death, Onassis guaranteed $3 million for her and $1 million for each of her children. He also agreed to pay all of her expenses while their marriage lasted, and that after his death, she would receive $150,000 per year.
It wasn’t an overly generous settlement for someone of Onassis’s wealth, and in fact it was Ari, not Jackie, who was beginning to wonder what he’d gotten himself into. Was he spooked by the complications of working out the prenuptial agreement? Perhaps, as some have speculated, he was still in love with his first wife, Tina Livanos, mother of his two children, Alexander and Christina, and now married to his archrival, Stavros Niarchos. And he was still in thrall to his mistress Maria Callas, the affair that had ended his marriage to Tina.
According to Nicholas Gage’s interview with Callas’s butler, Ferruccio Mezzadri, Onassis called Maria two days before his wedding to Jackie, asking her to come to Athens to save him.
“How, Aristo?” she answered.
“If you come to Athens, Mrs. Kennedy will get angry and go back to America.”
“You got yourself into this,” Callas said imperiously. “You get yourself out of it.” And she slammed down the phone.
Or, as Lee’s friend Reinaldo Herrera wondered, did Onassis suddenly realize that “he would have been far happier with Lee”?
In any case, Onassis realized it was too late—there was no way he could get out of the marriage, especially after the Boston Herald Traveler reported on October 17, 1968, that the wedding “will take place before Christmas.” (A close friend of Maria Callas, a Dallas socialite named Mary Reed Carter, believed that Ted Kennedy leaked the news to the Boston Herald Traveler in order to force Onassis to go through with the nuptials.) Ari confided to the chairman of Olympic Airlines, Ioannis Georgakis, “If I try to get out of the marriage now, it will cause a terrible scandal. I can’t do that to Jackie. She’s a mother with two young children.”
Some believe that Jackie had not told Lee about her impending marriage. “Can you imagine not even getting a phone call, having to hear about it, reading about it in the newspapers?” Lee’s friend Ralph Rucci marveled years later. But Truman Capote described Lee calling him and weeping bitterly over the telephone before the news was publicly announced. “I can’t tell you what she said,” Truman told friends, “but it’s going to be in the news. It’s the biggest piece of gossip there is, and she’s crying her eyes out because of it. S
he’s crying and weeping and sobbing. I can’t tell you what she said.”
The screenwriter Eleanor Perry, who was collaborating with Truman on adapting some of his short stories for television, was visiting him at his 870 United Nations Plaza apartment when Lee called. Truman had excused himself, taking the call in another room, but Perry claimed that she could hear Lee over the phone, hysterically saying, “How could she do this to me? How could this happen?”
Truman had an answer to that. His biographer noted:
Truman looked upon those special few—the stylish rich—the way the Greeks looked upon their gods, with mingled awe and envy. He believed that money not only enlarged their lives; it also excused them from the ordinary rules of behavior—or, indeed, any rules at all.
Whether or not she knew about the upcoming wedding before the rest of the world, Lee was devastated. She put a brave face on it, however, saying publicly, “I am very happy to have been at the origin of this marriage, which will, I am certain, bring my sister the happiness she deserves.” But it was a staggering blow. For Lee, a marriage to Onassis could have been equivalent to Jackie’s marriage to President Kennedy—and Lee had been genuinely smitten with the Golden Greek. This was a blow from which their relationship would never completely recover, and what made it more painful was that it was Lee, of course, who had brought Jackie and Ari together.
After the news broke in the Boston Herald Traveler, the world seemed to go crazy. Nancy Tuckerman hastily made a public announcement of the forthcoming wedding, fending off journalists who clamored for more information. “I didn’t even know until a half hour ago,” she pleaded. In fact, when Nancy learned of Jackie’s plans, she was taken aback. But Jackie had clearly made up her mind, and she told her friend, “Tucky, you don’t know how lonely I have been.”
Nor could she relieve her loneliness by haunting the streets of New York. She was hounded by gawkers wherever she went, whether to Schrafft’s (around the corner from her apartment) or Bonwit Teller. She was becoming a prisoner of her Fifth Avenue apartment. If Lee had felt liberated by the end of the Kennedy reign, Jackie felt hemmed in by her sanctified widowhood and her indelible fame.
