Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  Closer to the Kennedy home front, there was one woman who was unhappy about Jackie’s upcoming vacation with the controversial Onassis and, as usual, she was not afraid to make her views known: Ethel.

  Ethel, still recovering from her difficult pregnancy, also had other matters that weighed heavily on her mind. At this time her sister Ann was involved in an extramarital affair with a wealthy, married New York businessman whom she had met at a cocktail party. Eventually Ann would become pregnant, give birth to a girl, and have to confess to her husband that the child was not his. Divorce proceedings followed this revelation. At the same time, Ethel’s brother, George, left his spouse and became romantically involved with a Swedish stockbroker. Ethel, with her high moral standards, was deeply troubled by these turns of events. To her mind, divorce was sinful; she would never have considered it, no matter what Bobby might do.

  Ethel became preoccupied with Jackie’s controversial cruise plans. Her concern was not unreasonable: Bobby might have a chance at the Presidency one day, and any scandal that tarnished Jack would also, by association, affect Bobby. As sorry as she was for the loss of Patrick, Ethel was distressed by Jackie’s decision to cruise with Onassis, a man she referred to as “a known criminal if ever there was one.”

  Usually a much more politically minded woman than Jackie—and an alarmist as well—Ethel had a meeting with Jackie at the White House and warned her sister-in-law that she could be playing into the hands of one of the world’s biggest scoundrels.

  In a series of telephone conversations between the sisters-in-law that took place over a three-day period, Jackie stood her ground. She was cruising with Onassis, she said, and it would be none of Ethel’s business.

  “But there are political ramifications to everything you, as First Lady, do,” Ethel protested, as if Jackie didn’t realize it. Ethel was amazed that Jackie couldn’t see the potential public relations problem of such a cruise, and even more astounded that Jack was allowing her to go.

  “Well, I think they’re both crazy,” she told Lem Billings. “Jack is so cavalier about these things, and so is Jackie. This country will not be happy seeing pictures of the First Lady, so soon after Patrick’s death, carousing with the likes of Onassis. When Bobby and I are in the White House,” Ethel decided, “not one decision will ever be made that could cause any controversy whatsoever.”

  Finally, perhaps out of frustration because Ethel would not drop the subject, Jackie was forced to tell her to keep her opinion to herself. Her patience tried, the First Lady then took the matter up with the Attorney General. According to George Smathers, Jackie told Bobby, “I don’t mean to be rude, but someone needs to remind your wife of her place. I’m going on this trip, and that’s final. I don’t do what Ethel wants me to do. She’s my friend,” Jackie continued, “but this is not her best moment.”

  Aboard the Christina

  At the beginning of October 1963, Jackie Kennedy went off to Greece. This would be her second visit, for she had stayed in Greece previously, in June 1961, for nine days, after accompanying Jack on state visits to Paris, Vienna, and London. Even though she was supposed to curtail all engagements, the day she was scheduled to leave she decided to attend the welcoming ceremony for Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, reportedly because she just couldn’t resist meeting him.

  After the African leader presented her with some choice leopard skins, she graciously bowed out and headed to the airport. Before she left, a floral arrangement was delivered to the White House for her—lilies from Ethel with a simple, handwritten card: “Have a safe trip to the land of the Hellenes.”

  On the way to Greece, during the last leg of her flight between Rome and Athens, Jackie suddenly became nauseous and overcome with fatigue. She called for oxygen, and a stewardess quickly brought it to her seat. “Maybe this was a bad idea, after all,” she observed, weakly. Although she used only a small amount of oxygen, the concern for her need was great, and the President was immediately contacted about it. “She’ll be fine,” he said. “She’s strong as a racehorse.”

  By the time she landed in Athens and was greeted by Lee, U.S. Ambassador Labouisse and other officials, Jackie looked pale but eager to begin her adventure. She and Lee were whisked by automobile to the villa of Greek shipping businessman Markos Nomikos, at Cavouri Bay, a seaside resort fifteen miles southeast of Athens. Here Jackie would spend the next couple of days in semiseclusion with her hosts and other guests, including Stelina Mavros, who worked as special assistant to Nomikos.

  Mavros, who worked for the Greek mogul for three years, recalls, “We were all amazed at how weak the First Lady was. She had to be helped from a chair, for instance. Immediately, Lee began to hover over her, doing this and that for her, until Jackie finally said, ‘Please, I am not an invalid. Let me be.’ She stayed with us for three days until finally, we all boarded Ari’s yacht. She seemed unhappy, dreary, but determined to have a good time, anyway.”

  A lifetime of living in the affluent homes of the Bouviers, the Auchinclosses, and the Kennedys had accustomed Jackie to luxury, yet even she was impressed by the opulence that awaited her on Onassis’s magnificent yacht. First of all, the Christina itself was staggering—more than a luxury liner, it was a floating paradise resort, complete with a beauty salon, movie theater, doctor’s office, forty-two telephones, and a mosaic swimming pool. There were also nine staterooms, each named for a different Greek island.

  Among those aboard the cruise were Lee Radziwill and her husband, Stanislaw; dress designer Princess Irene Galitzine and her husband; Mrs. Constantine Garoufalidis; Stelina Mavros; Lee’s friend Accardi Gurney; and several others, including Kennedy’s Undersecretary of Commerce, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jr., and his wife, Susan. (Roosevelt was sent to accompany Jackie, as Jack put it, to “add respectability to the whole thing.”)

  While wandering about, guests would discover the ship to be lavishly, if gaudily decorated. Bar stools upholstered with scrotums of whales, lapis lazuli fireplaces, and gold-plated bathroom fixtures were a few of the yacht’s more garish embellishments.

  Delighted to be entertaining the First Lady of the United States, Onassis outdid his own legendary extravagance. On their first morning at sea he had the entire ship decorated with hordes of red roses and pink gladioli. For passengers’ snacks, he had the ship abundantly stocked with rare delicacies, vintage wines, eight kinds of caviar, and fruits flown in from Paris especially for the occasion.

  To further pamper his guests, the eccentric Greek hired a staff of sixty, including two hairdressers (hired just for Jackie), a Swedish masseur, and a full orchestra to entertain during dinner and for after-dinner dancing. Two chefs, one Greek, one French, were on call to prepare the passengers sumptuous feasts, which included caviar-filled eggs foie gras, steamed lobsters, and jumbo shrimp.

  For a woman like Jackie, who had a remarkably discriminating eye for the finer things in life, the delicious excess of this cruise and the dazzling lifestyle it represented were not to be soon forgotten. Jackie, it was decided, would take the principal stateroom occupied at various times by Greta Garbo, Lady Pamela Churchill, Maria Callas, and Jackie’s own sister, Lee.

  “Mrs. Kennedy is in charge here,” the sixty-three-year-old Aristotle proudly told the press, which had assembled to gawk at her while she boarded. “She’s the captain.” It was thought that Jackie would put the ship on course to the Aegean Islands, which she had enjoyed so much on her 1961 cruise. Instead, she said she wanted to go to Istanbul, then Lesbos Island, then Crete.

  “By the time we got to Crete—which was, I think, the sixth day—Jackie seemed to be getting some of her strength back,” recalled Stelina Mavros. “She was very excited about seeing the relics of the Minoans [a 3,500-year-old civilization]. That afternoon, we all got into our bathing suits and went for a swim off the shore. Where we were headed next was the big question. It really was up to Jackie. She had a map, and she knew just where she wanted to go. We were in her hands.”

  Jacki
e’s next stop was the harbor of Itea on the island of Delphi, then to the island of Levkas, and finally on to Smyrna. When the ship finally reached Smyrna, Jackie and Lee wanted a tour of Ari’s hometown. Up until this point, Ari had not emerged from his cabin when the Christina docked and everyone disembarked for tours, out of respect for the First Lady’s desire for privacy. He knew that if he made an appearance with Jackie, the paparazzi would descend upon them. But apparently Jackie didn’t care as much about that as Ari thought she did. She just wanted to see Smyrna, and so he obliged. The two toured Onassis’s childhood haunts as he told her more about his life, his loves, and in particular, his romance with Maria Callas. His father, with whom he had an acrimonious relationship, had been a successful tobacco merchant in the Turkish port of Smyrna. His mother died after a kidney operation when Ari was six years old. He was an only child, driven all of his life by his desire to be successful in order to win his father’s approval. A dejected-looking Lee trailed behind with some other friends as Ari and Jackie walked, hand in hand.

  After Ari told Jackie his story, he asked her for her own. He encouraged her to talk about the one subject around which everyone else in her life tiptoed: Baby Patrick. “He had a son of his own whom he loved dearly,” says Stelina Mavros, “and he had great sympathy for what Jackie was going through. ‘You should talk about it,’ he told her. ‘You shouldn’t hold it in. It’s not good for you.’ First slowly, and then eagerly, Jackie opened up to Ari about her pain, her sorrow. He was a good listener, very sensitive, very compassionate, a good friend. Jackie told Lee that she really appreciated Ari’s ear. She so craved attention, she so craved understanding, someone in whom she could confide,” recalls Mavros. “I remember thinking, ‘How is it that the First Lady of the United States could be so desperate for a human touch?’ I overheard her say, ‘I would have loved that baby. I would have loved him so much.’ It made me cry.”

  No man had given Jackie so much personal time and attention in a long while. Jackie would not forget Onassis’s compassion. It was clear that the two had a chemistry; photos taken of the two of them while they toured Ari’s homeland show a Jackie who was glowing once again. When those photos appeared in the press, the President was not happy about their publication, especially after Bobby telephoned him and asked, “Now, how does that look? Maybe Jackie should have listened to Ethel.”

  According to Jack’s personal secretary of twelve years, Evelyn Lincoln, Ethel also logged a number of telephone calls to make certain that Jack knew that she had “warned Jackie, but would she listen to me? No. Never. She never listens to me, that one.”

  Jack Summons Jackie—To No Avail

  The President missed his wife, and he wanted her to come home. Rita Dallas, Joe’s nurse, remembered that Jack was “listless and moody” in Jackie’s absence. Using the excuse that the cruise was generating negative publicity, he called Jackie and demanded that she return. She refused. She was enjoying herself, she said, and she found Onassis a gracious host. When Jack protested, Jackie made it clear she would not be back in Washington a day sooner than the previously agreed-upon date of October 17.

  Jack would later receive correspondence written by Jackie from the cruise, making it clear that her feelings for him were stronger than ever. “I miss you very much, which is nice,” Jackie wrote, “though it is a bit sad. But then I think of how lucky I am to miss you. I realize here [in Greece] so much that I am having something you can never have—the absence of tension. I wish so much I could give you that. But I can’t. So I give you every day while I think of you. [It is] the only thing I have to give and I hope it matters to you.”

  “Jackie intimate with Ari? Rubbish,” says Stelina Mavros. “Everyone would have known about it because Ari would not have been so discreet to not let us all know in some way that he had won that prize. He did want her, I know that, because he said so after the cruise. ‘One day, she and I will meet again,’ he said, ‘and this time, nothing will stand in my way.’ He was very dramatic, like a fictional character in a play. That’s just how he spoke.”

  Joseph Paolella, one of Jackie’s Secret Service agents, says that because the agents all knew what Jack was doing outside his marriage, they sometimes mused among themselves about the possibility of Jackie also being unfaithful.

  “We used to ask, you know, ‘Does she have any boyfriends?’ She must have something going on,” recalls Paolella. “Or point to one of the guys on her detail and say, ‘How ’bout you? Are you the one?’ It was a common joke,” he says.

  “If anything was going on, it most certainly would have been relayed through the agents. There was never a hint of anything like that going on with her. She spent a great deal of time away from Jack during the week at Glen Ora and if she ever wanted to do anything, she had plenty of opportunities. But she was devoted to her children, to her horses, and to living a good, country life.”

  Jackie’s sexual relationship with Jack had been influenced for years by his roving eye, as well as his health problems, and she just had to learn to adjust to his approach to their private time together. Also, Jackie knew that her husband suffered from the chronic venereal disease nongonococcal urethritis, or chlamydia. A nurse who worked for Dr. Janet Travell, Kennedy’s physician, says that Jackie was terrified of the disease.

  “It was one of her greatest fears, and certainly made her husband less than appealing as a sexual partner, let’s face facts,” said the nurse. “She told Dr. Travell that she believed Jack’s VD had something to do with the death of Patrick, and the other problems she had with pregnancies. Even John had had a tough time, almost died shortly after birth.”

  In fact, according to the nurse, Dr. Travell confirmed to Jackie that the female partner is always infected after the first time she has intercourse with a man suffering from Jack’s condition. Her pregnancies can then be affected by the disease, sometimes resulting in premature births, sometimes in miscarriages, sometimes in stillbirths. That Jackie suffered from severe periods of postpartum depression after her pregnancies can also be explained by her having been infected by Jack’s sexually transmitted disease.

  “I’m not sure, but I think I want to be thought of as desirable,” Jackie once told Ethel in a candid conversation about their husbands early in their marriages. According to what Ethel later recalled to Leah Mason, Jackie giggled nervously when she made the confession; women of her generation rarely spoke of such things.

  “Then you shouldn’t have gotten married,” was Ethel’s response. “You don’t get fireworks with marriage. You get children.”

  Ethel may have been like her mother-in-law Rose in the Victorian approach she took to physical intimacy with her husband: intercourse was not to be enjoyed, it was to be endured; it was a woman’s duty, and the reason to do it was to have children—not for joy, or passion. When Rose felt she had fulfilled her marital duty and had enough children, nine of them, she cut Joe off. As a devout Catholic, birth control was out of the question for her, and there was no other way she knew of to limit her brood.

  Joan had her own emotional issues surrounding her sexuality, most having to do with self-esteem. Was she good enough for Ted? She never really believed so, and said so time after time. Still, in the first ten years of her marriage, Joan’s sex life with Ted was active. When they were together, she was making love to her husband.

  Jackie was a healthy, vibrant, young and beautiful woman, brimming with self-confidence, always ready to take on the world. She had none of Ethel’s perhaps old-fashioned views about sexuality, and none of Joan’s self-esteem issues. Unfortunately, what she did have was a philandering husband who suffered from chlamydia.

  “Ari Is Not for You”

  Jackie’s relationship with her sister, Lee, was at this time what it had always been: complex. They loved each other dearly; each was often the other’s closest and most valued friend. In many ways, Jackie was Lee’s healer, and vice versa. They helped each other recover from life’s blows, from dramatic changes and prob
lems, and from bad relationships.

  The flip side of their relationship is that Jackie and Lee engaged in a not-always friendly competition for attention for many years, with Jackie usually the victor. When they were younger, Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, once observed, “Jackie always looked marvelously put together, while her sister Lee seemed blown out of a hurricane.” Both were stylish, glamorous, and charming but, as First Lady, Jackie was the one the world really cared about, not Lee.

  While in Smyrna, Jackie and Lee had a heart-to-heart talk, during which Jackie explained the harm it would do to Jack’s political career if Lee continued the affair with Onassis. Also, Jackie said, Ari’s romance with Maria Callas and the way he had so heartlessly left his wife, Tina, did not bode well for Lee if she was considering anything of a long-term nature with him. Jackie said she was genuinely concerned about Lee.

  “You really need to think about this,” she told Lee, according to Stelina Mavros. “Ari is not for you. Trust me.”

  “I know this because, afterward, Lee told me that she was in turmoil over Jackie’s advice,” said Mavros. “Did Jackie want him for herself, was she really looking out for Lee’s best interest, or was she only concerned about her husband’s political career? Lee was never sure and, of course, what happened between Ari and Jackie just five years later only added to Lee’s uncertainty about her sister’s true motivations. The fact that she was even suspicious of them, though, I guess says a lot about their relationship.”