“Thank you,” Jackie said. “I agree with you.”
As Jackie spoke, she fumbled while trying to insert a cigarette into a long black cigarette holder. She picked up the interphone. “Olga, would you please come here?” she asked. Today her guests were definitely seeing a more imperious side of Jackie. Though she was usually quite down-to-earth, she did have her moments. Within seconds, a small Greek woman appeared, and without saying a word, the former First Lady handed her the cigarette and the holder. The woman put it all together with nervous hands, and then gave it back to Jackie. Jackie held it in her lips while the servant lit the cigarette. “Thank you,” Jackie said as she inhaled. Then, exhaling a puff of white smoke, she turned back to André Meyer and Mona Latham. “So, anyway, I simply have to do something,” she said. “When Jack and I were in the White House, I didn’t have these problems,” she added. She said that the last five years had presented “nothing but headaches for me. And I can tell you this much,” she said with a determined look, “I will not live like this, André! I just won’t do it!”
“Well, that’s why I’m here today,” Meyer said, as Jackie took a finger sandwich from a plate someone on staff had arranged on the coffee table. When he said he wanted to talk to her “about the Onassis matter,” Jackie slowly placed the sandwich back on the platter and gave him a look. “I would prefer that you not refer to it in that way,” she told him. “It is not a matter. That is so boorish, André,” she said. He explained that he was only trying to be discreet, but Jackie shook her head in the negative. She then stood up and suggested that Mona Latham enjoy the lunch that had been prepared while she and Meyer went into the study to chat. The two left the room.
When Jackie and Meyer returned thirty minutes later, Jackie was clearly still not happy. “So, I’ll get back to you, then, okay?” Meyer asked as he went to embrace her. She was stiff in his arms. “Fine, fine, fine,” she said, obviously anxious for him to take his leave. “Goodbye, then,” she added, the severity of her expression unchanging. She then turned and walked away, leaving her two guests to find their own way out of the apartment.
Negotiating for Jackie
In the taxicab on the way back to their office, Mona Latham asked André Meyer what had occurred between him and Jackie Kennedy that had made the former First Lady so cross with him. “André said that he told her he was very much against the marriage,” Latham recalled many decades later. “He said that he knew Onassis quite well and thought he was a crook. ‘You are America’s First Lady, you can’t be seen with this man, let alone marry him,’ he told her. As I understand it, Jackie listened because she had respect for André, but she wasn’t going to be dissuaded, and, more than that, she was insulted.”
Meyer brought up the fact that Onassis—who married his first wife, Athina (Tina), in 1946—was known to have been openly having an affair with the married opera star Maria Callas. It was considered one of the greatest love affairs of twentieth-century pop culture, right alongside that of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. And it also matched the Burton-Taylor affair as a tabloid-fueled scandal. Jackie was not moved by Meyer’s reasoning, though. “Everyone has a past,” she told him.
Finally, André said, “Then at least let me work out a better financial arrangement for you.” Jackie said she was satisfied with what Ted had come up with and feared that Onassis would perceive their going back to the negotiating table as advantage-taking. “But yes,” she decided, “if there’s more we can do, I suppose we should try.” Finally, she agreed, as long as André could promise that none of these negotiations ever made it into the press. “You must act with great discretion,” Jackie said, according to what Meyer later told Mona Latham. “The public images of many people could be hurt by such maneuverings, not the least of which is mine!”
Latham continued, “André said it was all very civil between him and Jackie until he crossed a line with her and said something like, ‘Do you really think Jack would approve of such a marriage?’ That’s when Jackie became upset with him. ‘How dare you talk to me in this manner! Who do you think you’re talking to?’ she demanded. He apologized, but she didn’t want to hear anything more from him at that point. He knew he had gone too far. The meeting then ended. He wasn’t happy about the way it had gone. He hated disappointing Jackie. All he ever wanted was to protect her. He was being candid with her, but maybe a little too much so.”
The next day, Meyer sent Aristotle Onassis a counteroffer: $20 million. Onassis was angry. After all, he and Ted Kennedy had already agreed in principle on an amount that was far less. He immediately arranged to fly to New York, and the two met on September 25, 1968, at Meyer’s apartment at the Carlyle. According to someone with knowledge of the meeting, Onassis at first approached Meyer as if he were Jackie’s father and he was asking permission to take her hand in marriage. “I love her very much,” he told Meyer. “And she’s in love with me. So what will it take for me to make her my wife?” What would it take? Meyer repeated the figure: $20 million. Onassis said that he thought the price was ridiculously inflated. “The two of them haggled over it for about two hours,” recalled Arturo D’Angelo. “Afterward, Onassis went back to his hotel room at the Pierre Hotel. He was very unhappy. As I understand it, he asked his secretary, Lynn Alpha, for a drink, she pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label and poured him a double. Then he dictated a letter to Creon Broun.” That correspondence from Onassis to Broun memorialized the shipping mogul’s discussion with André Meyer. However, Jackie was not mentioned by name but was instead referred to as the “person in question.” It said, in part: “The sum of twenty [million] indicated in the meeting, as a capital, apart from the fact that in the final analysis it would be futile, due to gift, income and other taxes that it would necessarily entail, apart from being detrimental to the feelings of either party, it might easily lead to the thought of an acquisition instead of a marriage.”
When André Meyer went back to Jackie Kennedy with the new deal memo, she wasn’t at all pleased with the language. It sounded like a cold business deal to her. Of course, that’s what it was, but seeing it in black and white was a little unsettling. Meyer spent a few days trying to convince Jackie that if they pushed a little harder they could probably get $10 million from Onassis. He reminded her she was the one who had been complaining about money in recent years, and suggested that this was her opportunity to straighten out that problem. She had to agree. Still, she was ambivalent. Of course, she had her eye on the financial security she could gain by marrying someone like Aristotle Onassis. However, he was the one who had first offered to give her money upon their marriage. She had her limits in terms of how much she would exploit his generosity. Actually, Jackie was walking a thin line. On one hand, she seemed to want to appear as if these negotiations repulsed her. But on the other, she did want the money, and she couldn’t deny it. “As long as he agrees to pay all of my expenses during the marriage,” she said, “I don’t see what the problem is. But, yes,” she decided, “go back and see if you can get $10 million. But then, that’s it, André!” she said, drawing a line.
Meyer came back to Jackie a couple days later with the slightly disappointing news that he could only get the figure up to $3 million. As well as that lump sum, she would receive $30,000 a month tax-free for the duration of the marriage. Also, each of her children would receive $1 million, the annual interest of which would go to Jackie.* Onassis would also pay all of her expenses over the $30,000 she received monthly, which, as he would learn, would be a sizable commitment. However, she also signed a provision that would limit the amount of money she could receive at his death, which probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. “I was surprised that André Meyer agreed to it,” recalled Mona Latham. “And so the deal was struck. ‘Now that’s it,’ Jackie said. ‘Let’s just leave it alone now, before Ari gets the wrong impression.’ ”
On October 15, 1968, the announcement was made with a headline story in the Boston Herald: “John F. Kennedy’s Wi
dow and Aristotle Onassis to Wed Soon.”
“That morning, I got a phone call from Steve Smith,” recalled Pierre Salinger, JFK’s former press secretary. “ ‘I’m not sure how we should handle this goddamn thing,’ Steve said to me. ‘I guess we need to make a statement about it, though.’ I asked him, ‘So, do you know what you want to say?’ And he thought about it for a moment and came back with, ‘How about, ‘Oh… shit!’ ”
Five days later, on October 20, 1968, Jackie took Ari as her husband on Onassis’s private Greek island, Skorpios.
Three days after that, the deal Jackie Kennedy made with Aristotle Onassis for her hand in marriage was signed.†
PART TWO
Eunice
Eunice Kennedy Shriver
Taking a bird’s-eye view of the Kennedy clan—four sons, five daughters—Eunice Shriver, with her barely suppressed nervous energy, her gangly and sometimes rather androgynous appearance, and her predilection for long black cigars and man-tailored slacks, seemed to have had more in common with her brothers than her sisters. Indeed, hers would be a service-driven life fueled by the kind of commitment more in keeping with her male siblings than with her sisters. Even in her choice of husband, Eunice seemed to be guided by instincts quite at odds with her sisters, in that Sargent Shriver matched Eunice in intelligence, in ambition, and in a passionate desire to be of service to his country. He was also a devout Roman Catholic, as are all the Kennedys.
Born on July 10, 1921, in Brookline, Massachusetts—the fifth of nine Kennedy children—Eunice graduated from Manhattanville, a Catholic college in Purchase, New York, after attending a series of exclusive Catholic boarding schools. True to her spirit of individualism, she chose to go to Stanford University rather than the Ivy League of her siblings, graduating with a BS in sociology in 1943. The choice of degree affirmed her commitment to social work. After a short time working in the Special War Problems Division in the U.S. State Department, she moved to the Justice Department as executive secretary for a project dealing with juvenile delinquency, a job that led to a position as staff social worker for the Federal Independent Institute for Women. She accepted an offer in Chicago to join the House of the Good Shepherd women’s shelter and the juvenile court. It was a fateful move in that it was here that she became reacquainted with her future husband, Sargent Shriver, whom she had first met in 1946 at a Manhattan cocktail party. She and Sarge married in 1954. Over the next eleven years, they would have five children: Sarge III (also known by his middle name, Bobby), Maria, Timothy, Mark, and Anthony.
As a mother, Eunice could of course be loving and caring. But she was also her own mother’s daughter, and as such, she could sometimes appear to be emotionally removed. “If the Shriver children wanted affection and understanding, they generally went to Sargent—just as the Kennedy children had gone to Joseph, not Rose,” observed the journalist Helen Thomas. “Sarge always knew how to fill his children with self-confidence. ‘When you walk into a room,’ he would tell his daughter, Maria, ‘everyone there is lucky.’ Eunice was more the type to tell Maria what to say—and what not to say—once she got into the room.”
This isn’t to say that Eunice wasn’t a loving mother. She enjoyed nothing more than nurturing her children and gave each of them the one thing she knew they needed most—the freedom to choose. She supported their decisions pretty much always—after great discussion, of course. “Though her five children—Bobby, Maria, Timothy, Mark, and Anthony—knew that she loved them, she was a woman of action, not necessarily sentiment,” Thomas added. “She was not a patient person. She didn’t suffer fools. Her kids knew to toe the line. If they wanted to be coddled, that’s what Sarge is for. If they wanted direction, if they wanted motivation, if they wanted a good shove in the right direction, that was Eunice’s place.”
Indeed, Eunice wanted her children to work hard, give everything their all, and win at life. When Maria was fifteen, Eunice sent her to Africa to live with a family in Tunis—not unusual in a family where the teens were often sent to far-off places in order to expand their view of the world and do charity work. Maria would call her mom to complain that there was no running water and, in fact, no creature comforts at all. “I don’t want to hear one more yip out of you,” Eunice would tell her. “Get your job done and don’t come back until you’re finished.”
“She wasn’t exactly like any other mother you’d ever seen,” Maria Shriver would say in her touching eulogy of Eunice Kennedy Shriver in August 2009. “As a young girl, I didn’t actually know how to process her appearance much at the time, because most of the mothers were dressed up and neatly coiffed. Mummy wore men’s pants, she smoked Cuban cigars, and she played tackle football. She would come to pick us all up at school in her blue Lincoln convertible, her hair would be flying in the wind, there usually would be some pencils or pens in it. The car would be filled with all these boys and their friends and their animals. She’d have on a cashmere sweater with little notes pinned to it to remind her of what she needed to do when she got home. And more often than not, the sweater would be covering a bathing suit, so she could lose no time jumping into the pool to beat us all in a water polo game. Needless to say, when the nuns would announce her arrival, I would try to run for cover.”
There was rarely a quiet day for Eunice and Sarge or their children, who were constantly engulfed by the productive chaos and vibrant energy of their parents. “We were taught to make the most of every day,” Maria Shriver has recalled. “Our parents never wasted a single second. Yes, it was exhausting. But they had such a love of life and a passion to serve, it just infused everything they did and, in turn, everything we did, too. ‘You will. You must. You can,’ they would tell us.”
In their marriage, the Shrivers provided a great balance for one another. Sargent was levelheaded and grounded, whereas Eunice could sometimes be scatterbrained, brimming with nervous energy. Though he had many important responsibilities, he was organized and structured and had the ability to focus on one project at a time, give his all, and then move on to the day’s next task. Eunice, though, always had at least ten projects going at the same time. Some of them got finished, some of them didn’t. “Oh my God!” she would exclaim as she raced from one appointment to the next. “I’m going to be late!” There just weren’t enough hours in the day for Eunice.
“Whereas Sarge might be followed by two officious-looking male assistants taking careful notes and helping him organize his day,” Hugh Sidey from Time recalled, “Eunice usually had a half-dozen women at her beck and call. They were all equally frazzled with notebooks overflowing with charts and graphs, asking questions, taking orders, and shadowing her every move.”
Despite often being ill with the effects of Addison’s disease—which also plagued her brother Jack—as well as stomach ulcers and colitis, Eunice still managed to keep an extraordinarily busy schedule. She rarely complained, and thus the bar was raised for her kids in how much illness they should be able to tolerate. For instance, they were never allowed to stay home from school with colds or other childhood maladies. “Get to school and I don’t want to hear another yip about it,” she would tell them.
That Eunice and Sargent Shriver seemed to have a happy marriage for so many years—fifty-five years in all—suggests the couple had found a way to navigate the often rocky terrain that had to have gone along with Eunice’s split loyalties between her family and her husband. That said, as much as he was an acolyte of the Kennedys, Sargent Shriver always sought to maintain his and his family’s own identity. A famous story has it that his son Bobby had hurt himself while playing, and though he wanted to cry, he didn’t because, as everyone knew, “Kennedys don’t cry.” Shriver told him, “It’s okay. You can cry. You’re a Shriver.” Bobby Shriver recalled of his father, “He didn’t want us always to do exactly what the Kennedys did.” Indeed, Bobby, like his father and brother Timothy, went to Yale, not Harvard, the traditional Kennedy college. When asked what it felt like to be Kennedys, the Shriver childr
en would almost always answer, “Shrivers are not Kennedys.”
Also vitally important to Eunice and Sarge was their Catholicism; they were very devout. They went to Mass almost every day, says Timothy. He recalls their home being “layered with crucifixes and madonnas and other very Catholic sort of statuary. It was not congregational and stark. It was Catholic.”
Besides their sharing a deep religiosity, not a lot was known about the personal relationship between Eunice and Sargent. They were both very private. If they fought, it was never in front of other people; they were rarely demonstrative in front of others. Occasionally, though, something would slip that would give others a bit of a peek as to what their marriage might be like behind closed doors.
For instance, in the early 1970s during the height of the popularity of his talk show, Phil Donahue aired a program focusing on female vulnerability. The topic sparked a conversation at an all-girls luncheon between Eunice, Jackie, Jean, and a few of their friends, including Joan Braden. “The question posed was, when are you most vulnerable?” Jackie said. “My answer would have to be when I’m with Ari,” Jackie said. “I think that’s when I’m most vulnerable.”
“Definitely, when a woman is with her husband,” Jean said, “that’s when she lets down all of her defenses, isn’t it?”
Joan Braden agreed. Eunice, though, just sat silently.
“So, what would you say, Eunice?” Joan asked.
“I don’t even understand the question,” Eunice said, shrugging. She added that in her opinion, vulnerability suggested weakness. “And I’m never weak,” she concluded. “So I don’t know what to tell you.”
The other women just smiled. That was Eunice.
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