“Let’s Try to Move On with Our Lives”
Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed in shadows,” Jackie said as she stood at a podium in front of the media gathered for a press conference in Paris. As flashbulbs popped all around her, the former First Lady—now twice a widow—was dressed all in black and seemed somewhat dazed in her grief. “He meant a lot to me,” she continued, a bit stiffly. “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.”
The condolences for Jackie on Ari’s death had came pouring in by the time she returned from the funeral. “The sad news, which reached me this weekend, sent my heart winging your way,” Lady Bird Johnson wrote to Jackie on March 17, 1975. “I know that you are heavily involved with painful arrangements now…. The shadow of grief which has pulled at your life seems an unbearable one. I wish there were words to tell you of my sympathy. It is equaled only by my admiration for your strength and composure and courage. I know they have been put to the severest of tests, always in the public eye.” (Jackie immediately wrote back to Lady Bird, thanking her for her “beautiful letter” and adding, “You are a person who is incredibly kind.”)
Now that Onassis was dead at the age of sixty-nine, there was bound to be much haggling between Jackie and his daughter, Christina, over the terms of his will, and likely—as Lady Bird had put it—“always in the public eye.” Jackie had signed all sorts of other paperwork over the years—including the couple’s original marital agreement and several revisions to it—limiting the amount of money she could receive at Onassis’s death. Now it was felt that she had made a number of mistakes along the way. Even with his recent business reversals, Onassis’s estate was still worth half a billion dollars and his wife of seven years was entitled only to $200,000 a year. In fact, Ted Kennedy met with Jackie at her country home in New Jersey to tell her that he felt she should contest the will. Though Onassis had stipulated that if Jackie did so she would be cut from it entirely, Ted felt sure that none of it would hold up in court. He promised Jackie that the Kennedy family would access the best attorneys available and that they would mount a major and lengthy court battle for her. The thought of such public contention made Jackie cringe. Still, if she did contest the will and she won, under Greek law she would be entitled to 12.5 percent of Onassis’s estate, or more than $60 million. That had to make Jackie wonder.
That Christina Onassis showed up in New York one day, cornered Jackie, and demanded to know, “How much do you want to just go away?” did not help matters. What had Jackie done to incur the wrath not only of Aristotle’s daughter but also of so many people connected to Onassis? If she had spent even $10 million of his half billion over the last seven years of marriage, that probably would have been an inflated estimate. Plus, she had tolerated his relationship with Maria Callas the entire time she was married to him, and had never been unfaithful to him. To add insult to injury, she learned that Ari had even called Maria during the last days of his life when Jackie was in New York, and that Callas had visited him at the hospital. It was obviously to be expected given their tempestuous but long-term relationship, and Jackie likely understood as much after she had time to think about it. Still, one would imagine that it hurt her.
In time, the many attorneys representing Jackie and Aristotle worked out a financial settlement for Jackie rather than risk a lengthy and embarrassing court case. In the end, she agreed to a sum of “just” $25.5 million, $6 million of which would go to estate taxes and $500,000 for her attorneys, leaving her with $19 million. She would also receive $150,000 a year for the rest of her life. John and Caroline would each also receive $50,000 a year until they turned twenty-one. At that time, $100,000 a year would be added to Jackie’s annuity. In return, Jackie gave up her interest in Skorpios and the Christina, as well as all of Onassis’s homes.
Most people believe that Jackie was left a huge amount of money when Onassis died. However, when one considers that he was worth at least $500 million at the time of his demise, it’s surprising to learn that she ended up with just $19 million and an eventual maximum of $250,000 a year for life. In fact, Ted Kennedy was bowled over when he heard the final figures from André Meyer. Meyer said that he had suggested to Jackie that she not agree to the terms. He felt strongly, as he usually did when it came to such matters, that she was being shortchanged. “But I will not fight Christina any more than I already have,” Jackie said, exhausted by the whole matter. “So let’s just let it go now, and try to move on with our lives.”
A few weeks after Aristotle Onassis’s death, Jackie had a conversation with a very close mutual friend of theirs about him. “He was also so fascinating and so, I don’t know, so funny, I guess,” Jackie told this friend. “Once, he said to me, ‘You know, Jackie, a woman is like the world.’ I had no idea what he meant and asked him to explain. ‘At twenty years of age, she is like Africa. She is semi-explored,’ he said. ‘At thirty, she is India. She is warm and mature. She is mysterious. At forty, she is America. She is technically perfect, but it is all superficial. Deep down, she remains troubled. At fifty, she is Europe. Completely in ruins. And at sixty, she is Siberia. Everyone knows where she is, but no one wants to go to her.’ We laughed at that because that was so… him,” Jackie said. “You would think there would be something insulting about those observations, but if you knew him, you knew that this was his humor. After we had a good laugh, I made him promise to tell me that story every ten years, and then we kissed,” Jackie concluded, “and I knew in that moment that he loved me. And I knew in that moment that, at sixty, he would still come to me. And I also knew that I would still be waiting for him.”
PART TEN
Rosemary and Rose
“We Must Never Give Up”
In the winter of 1975, Eunice arranged for her sister Rosemary to leave St. Coletta’s in Jefferson, Wisconsin, for a visit with her family in Palm Beach, Florida. Rosemary, who was now fifty-seven years old, had been at St. Coletta’s for more than thirty years. From 1969, with Joseph’s passing, she was a permanent fixture in the minds and hearts of the Kennedys, mostly because Eunice made sure of it. Eunice desperately wanted her sister to be an active part of the family, and even though Rosemary’s visits to Hyannis Port and Palm Beach were usually fraught with problems, Eunice believed them to be of great importance to everyone, especially Rose.
Rosemary still had her own small three-bedroom, one-bathroom house—the Kennedy Cottage—on the well-manicured grounds of the Alverno Nursing Home operated by St. Coletta’s. There she lived with two nuns—not always the same two but rather a number of sisters over the years. “I think it could be said that she had a good life,” said Sister Joseph Marie, who is now retired, but worked primarily at the Alverno Nursing Home from 1973 through 1999. “She was like a little child, and she had a child’s innocence in many ways,” she recalled of Rosemary. “At times, I would think she had the mental capacity of someone who was perhaps five or six years of age, and other times she struck me as a teenager. She was a very large woman with expressive eyes and dark hair, so she could be a bit intimidating. Her hair never really turned gray, no matter her age. It was always very black, and toward the end of her life just streaked with gray.* She could be very temperamental and cause quite a scene when she wanted to.
“The house in which she lived was a lovely little cottage. A small kitchen, very charming. I didn’t live there, but I did visit quite often and would talk to Rosemary. We would have tea, and I would read to her from magazines like Life or Look, and she would sit and listen. Sometimes, I was sure she knew what I was relaying, and other times I wasn’t so certain. She loved game shows—Let’s Make a Deal, those kinds of programs. She also knew all of her siblings, but we never spoke about them in terms of their celebrity. She would sometimes say, ‘My brother Jack is coming,’ or ‘Bob is coming,’ and I would correct her, saying
they are gone, but it never really sank in.
“Rose, Eunice, and many of the Kennedys often came to St. Coletta’s to visit Rosemary,” Sister Joseph Marie continued. “I would often see Ted, Jean, or Pat. Mostly, though, Eunice was present, sometimes every month. Often she would bring Rose, but by the mid-1970s it was just easier for Rosemary to go to one of the family homes for a visit. As for those visits outside of St. Coletta’s, she never really wanted to go. It was not easy to convince her to leave, and I have to say that after every visit she would be agitated and it would sometimes take weeks to get her back on track.”
“Rosemary’s occasional visits to Palm Beach and Hyannis Port, though well intended, were usually a source of great frustration for her,” says Kennedy neighbor Larry Newman, who met Rosemary many times. “She knew she didn’t fit in, and there was no way for her to feel comfortable no matter how much the family tried to accommodate her. This is why two sisters always accompanied her. It was a steadfast rule.” Indeed, Sister Joseph Marie along with another nun, Sister Juliane, accompanied Rosemary to Palm Beach in 1975 to the estate there, La Guerida. It was not easy.”
On the first two days of that particular visit in 1975, Rose did what she ordinarily did when she was with her daughter—she tried to act as if everything were fine and nothing was out of the ordinary. She did her best to make her daughter feel at home. “However, Rosemary felt more comfortable with the chaperoning nuns than she did with her mother,” said Sancy Newman, Larry’s wife, who also knew Rosemary quite well. “At times, she would burst into tears for no apparent reason, causing Rose to run from the room, upset. It was heartbreaking. ‘I have never known how to deal with her,’ Rose told me. ‘After all of these years, one would think I would be able to be a better mother to her, but it’s never happened.’ ”
Rose was always distressed about her daughter’s diet at St. Coletta’s, which was high in fatty foods, and she knew that chocolate was often used to reward Rosemary for good behavior. “She’s fat because you keep giving her French fries,” Rose chastised Sister Joseph Marie in front of Barbara Gibson. “And every time she asks for one, you give her a candy bar. I am opposed to this. I don’t like the way her teeth look!” When her children were young, Rose rarely allowed them to have sweets. Or as Eunice once put it, “That so-called ‘flashing Kennedy smile,’ that got to be a part of the trademark after we grew up and some of us entered public life. Well, you don’t flash unless your teeth are good. Mother monitored our intake of sweets. And the tooth brushing… oh, the tooth brushing!” she quipped.
“The nuns had a system in place for Rosemary, and one that had been in place for many years,” said Gibson. “They were not going to change it.”
“I admit, there was too much chocolate being given Rosemary,” said Sister Joseph Marie many years later. “But she had so few pleasures in life and she so loved chocolate. I’m afraid we overdid it, though.”
The situation changed dramatically on the second day when Eunice arrived with her daughter, Maria, and her sister Jean. As soon as Rosemary saw her two sisters, she lit up. She was seated in a cushioned chair when Eunice and Jean walked into the room. “Don’t get up,” Jean told her sister, “I’m coming over there to give you a big hug.”
For the rest of the week, Eunice doted on Rosemary, telling her stories, reminding her of certain moments in family history, and doing whatever she could think of to make the visit enjoyable. Always present in Eunice’s hand or in her purse was a notepad that she would constantly take out and jot down a note about one thing or another. At the end of the day, after Rosemary was asleep, she would review these notations with both nuns. On one afternoon, her notations included such observations as: “Rosie needs new shoes”; “Too much time in the sun, not good”; “Which books are being read to Rosie?”; and “Find out how Rosie is sleeping. Naps?”
“One day, Eunice insisted on bringing Rosemary out on one of the family’s boats,” recalled Barbara Gibson, “which turned into quite a scene. Apparently Eunice kept pushing Rosemary into the water to try to get her to swim. She was roughhousing with her pretty much the way Kennedys always did with each other, but not taking into consideration Rosemary’s limitations. Sister Juliane was very angry about it. She and Sister Joseph Marie both went to Rose and complained. Rose was in the middle of getting a massage and listening to her French-language tapes when they barged into the room and told her the story. Rose looked at them and said, ‘I find it hard to believe that two grown nuns such as yourselves are tattling on a grown woman. I trust that Eunice knows what she’s doing; have you not heard of the Special Olympics? So I’ll thank you to mind your own business.’ Duly chastised, the two nuns just stood there with their mouths open.”
Barbara Gibson has another memory of that week. “Rosemary was prone to sudden fits of anger,” she recalled, “and we never knew when one would occur. One day I was in the kitchen with Rose having lunch with Rosemary and it was all very pleasant until suddenly Rosemary stood up from the table and started screaming at Rose, ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ There was no provocation for it whatsoever. I bolted out of my chair in fear. ‘Now, now, dear,’ Rose kept saying, looking up at her from her seat, but there was no stopping Rosemary. ‘I hate you!’ she kept repeating. Then she started screaming, ‘Damn that baby! Damn that baby!’ I wondered, where in the world had she heard that? Was she parroting something she had heard in her childhood? I was at a loss, stunned and afraid. In that moment it seemed to me that she really did hate her mother and maybe even blamed her in some way for what had happened so long ago. I thought, what a true family tragedy this is, and there are two victims—Rosemary and Rose. Finally, Sister Juliane got Rosemary out of the kitchen. Afterward, Rose looked up at me with a dazed and very startled expression. Then she stood up and walked over to me at the sink. She opened her mouth and I thought she was about to ask for a glass of water, but instead she just collapsed into my arms. I don’t think I had ever seen her cry before, and of course the family would always say that she never showed emotion. But on that day, she certainly did cry, and the tears kept flowing.”
In the middle of a week that certainly had its troubling moments, Jackie Kennedy Onassis showed up with her daughter, Caroline. (John Jr.’s whereabouts at the time remain unknown all these years later.) “Jackie seemed to have no problem communicating with Rosemary,” said Larry Newman. “In fact, I recall seeing the two of them easily conversing on the beach, Jackie often with a patient smile on her face. Caroline and Maria also got along well with their aunt and spent a lot of time swimming in the ocean with her or on the beach lying in the sun and just talking.”
At one point that week, Ted flew down to see his sister Rosemary and spend the night. Rosemary would have all of her meals with the family, and during the evening when Ted was present he sat next to his sister at the dinner table and tried to interact with her as much as possible, but she seemed uninterested. Trying to be helpful, Rose repeatedly prompted her son, making suggestions such as, “Tell her the story about when…” or “Maybe Rosie would like to hear what happened when…” Always a great storyteller, Ted would do his best to entertain Rosemary, but there seemed no reaching her. “Oh, she’s just tired,” one of the nuns explained. Jackie didn’t say a word during the meal, just smiled nervously, whereas Caroline and Maria tried to lighten the mood by telling stories about their friends at school.
Finally, after an uncomfortable hour, Rosemary suddenly announced, “I want to go to bed now.” With that, the nun helped her from her chair and took her to her bedroom. As soon as she left the dining room, a heavy silence fell over the room as the Kennedys spent the next moments just staring down at their plates. Finally, Jean said, “Well, she seems healthy, doesn’t she?” Rose didn’t respond. “Yes, I suppose one could say that,” Ted remarked, still looking at his plate. Eunice smiled knowingly at her family members. “It’s difficult, I know,” she told them with characteristic assurance. “But we must keep trying. We must never give up on he
r.”
The next morning, Rose Kennedy and Barbara Gibson were swimming together in the sparkling Olympic-sized pool, which had been enclosed for year-round use. As the two women swam and talked about the day’s schedule, one of the nuns rolled in Rosemary in a wheelchair. (Though Rosemary was fully ambulatory, she often used a wheelchair to navigate the Kennedy compound.) Without saying a word, the nun stopped the chair right in front of Rose at the lip of the pool. Then she turned the chair so that Rosemary was not looking at her mother but instead was in profile. It was a very odd thing to do. The nun then locked the brake so that the chair wouldn’t move, and she left the area. There Rosemary sat in her chair, her outline an imposing presence as she stared blankly into the distance while her mother and her mother’s secretary floated in the water. Barbara Gibson recalled that it was as surreal a scene as she ever witnessed in all of her years working for Rose Kennedy. As Rose paddled in the water she looked at her daughter with great sadness, shook her head, and then murmured, “Oh, my sweet Rosie. What did we do to you? What did we do?”
Rose’s Precious Yesterdays and Priceless Tomorrows
In September 1975, the Kennedy family congregated at their compound for a weekend-long celebration of Rose Kennedy’s eighty-fifth birthday. All of her surviving children (with the exception of Rosemary), sons-in-laws, daughters-in-law, and twenty-nine grandchildren came together to pay homage to the family’s enduring matriarch.
When one considers the life of Rose Kennedy—and at 104 years, it would be a long one—one is struck by the immensity and consistency of its tragedies. She was preceded in death by her husband of almost fifty-five years, Joseph P. Kennedy, after he suffered a debilitating stroke. There were the losses of four of her nine children within a twenty-four-year span, the near death of her youngest in two separate accidents, and in years to come she would suffer the death of a beloved daughter-in-law and the demise of two grandchildren. She also spent decades coping with the mental incapacity of her daughter and namesake, Rosemary, to whom she dedicated her 1974 autobiography Times to Remember. In the book, Rose acknowledges that it was her faith and commitment to God that got her through the unimaginable horrors she endured, events that she shared with reporter Robert MacNeill in 1974 in a lengthy interview conducted in Palm Beach for A&E’s Biography: “God will never give me a cross heavier than I can bear,” adding that her strength also came from “the thought of Mary standing at the foot of the cross as She watched Her Son being crucified.” In the same interview, Rose remembered thinking after the murder of her third son, Bobby, “It seems impossible that the same kind of disaster would befall our family twice in five years. In fiction, I would have just put it aside as incredible.”
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