Jackie After O

by Tina Cassidy

  But paradise was a fiction, a place where Onassis had dynamited rock to build roads, ravaged trees from other islands, laid imported grass from South Africa, and sprayed chemicals to kill snakes and insects.24 This island was indeed a place that stung on many levels, its natural beauty in jarring juxtaposition to the physical, emotional, and financial devastation unfolding there.

  Onassis lost his only son, Alexander, in what the father believed to be a suspicious plane crash in January 1973. Within a year, Onassis was offering a $500,000 reward for anyone with information about whether the Piaggio plane Alex was flying in was tampered with—or suffered from improper maintenance, or pilot’s error—but the cause was never determined.25 His body was laid to rest next to the chapel where his father’s wedding to Jackie had taken place. Onassis would visit the grave often, and his son’s death plunged the old man into an isolating depression that made him mean, paranoid, and an even more difficult husband.

  After five years of marriage, during which he basked in Jackie’s light, Onassis was also shadowed by the legacy of JFK, whose tenth assassination anniversary—and its many official events—was coming up that year. Add to that the discord that two sets of stepchildren can create, arguments over money—specifically Jackie’s spending on clothes and shoes—Callas, and the differences that resulted from their respective cultures, ages, geographies, and interests, and the relationship was, not surprisingly, wearing thin. And after Alex’s death, Onassis’s inner turmoil made him angry, withdrawn, and preoccupied.

  Compounding his troubles, in August 1974 Onassis’s only daughter, Christina, attempted suicide in London, purportedly over a man, but her mental health had been an issue for some time. The next month, September, brought another painful stretch. Aristotle Onassis had checked into a New York hospital under the pseudonym “Phillips” for further tests for a disease called myasthenia gravis (which literally means “serious muscle weakness”). Doctors gave him six months to a year to live. Knowing the end was near, he quietly discharged himself and flew to Skorpios—alone. In October, Onassis’s ex-wife, Tina, remarried and died—supposedly of a barbiturate overdose. Onassis had married her when she was a teenager and he was in his forties, and despite the couple’s vicious fights and his flagrant affairs, particularly the passionate and long-lasting one with Callas, he still considered Tina his “true” wife over Jackie. Although an accidental death was a likely scenario given Tina’s addictions, these circumstances were also suspicious, but her husband, Onassis’s shipping rival Stavros Niarchos, was not charged. (Niarchos’s previous wife, Tina’s sister, had also died of suspicious causes, but he was not charged then, either.)

  Onassis’s family was not the only thing falling apart. His business enterprises were struggling, in part due to the Middle East’s oil embargo with America, which directly reduced tanker traffic. On top of that, local residents in New Hampshire had just blocked his plans for an oil refinery there. And after nearly twenty years of ownership, he was being forced to turn over Olympic Airways and its thirty jets to the Greek government, due in part to the global economic crisis and rising fuel prices, which led to austerity measures and a pilot strike, halting all flights26 to five continents as the company lost tens of millions of dollars.27 His dreams for turning Haiti into the next Monaco had collapsed. And only a fraction of the apartments in his 250-unit Olympic Tower in New York had been sold despite an expensive advertising campaign. By November 1974, Onassis was back in the New York hospital using the same pseudonym. Christina, clinging to her sole surviving immediate family member, was by his side. Jackie was not.

  She had given Onassis more prestige than money could buy. She had tolerated his tantrums and flagrant infidelity with Callas, embarrassingly displayed in front-page photos of them together in Paris. It was easier for Jackie to stay married to him because there was often an ocean between them: he in Europe, she in her comfortable Manhattan apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, where she had moved a year after the assassination. The fifteen-room apartment, a few blocks from her sister’s, had been constant and comfortable as a family base over the last six years while she was shuttling back and forth between Athens, Skorpios, Paris, and New York—between a needy husband and school-aged children.

  By now, however, the distance between Jackie and Onassis had never been greater—even though they were, at the moment, in the same city. When he checked out of the hospital, he had a few pieces of business to attend to in Manhattan.

  On December 3, Onassis had lunch in Midtown at 21—the same storied restaurant where JFK dined the night before his inauguration—with Bobby’s old boss, Roy Cohn. Cohn, a ruthless lawyer, was now in private practice, and Onassis was asking him to begin divorce proceedings.28 Not long after, Onassis also secretly met with Washington Post gossip columnist Jack Anderson for lunch at La Caravelle. Onassis sat slumped at the table wearing dark glasses, trying to plant a story about how awful Jackie was; it was a high-stakes agenda with no immediate outcome. Onassis was either too subtle with Anderson, or the story was not good enough for the gossip columnist to write immediately after they spoke. “He had little to say about his famous wife,” Anderson would later divulge, “except for a mild complaint about her extravagance and her horsy friends.”29

  Although Onassis did not know it at the time, the meeting with Anderson would be his last with a reporter. His nasty business done, Onassis returned to Athens, leaving Jackie behind in New York.

  On New Year’s Eve, Onassis was at his apartment in Paris, seriously ill but entertaining his own circle of friends as 1975 dawned. Jackie, in New York, tried to be in a celebratory mood, but she was keenly aware that her marriage was likely to end in divorce or Onassis’s death, bringing many dramatic changes and opportunities. That night, she brought her children—each wearing formal clothes—to a Broadway opening, where they were met by the flash of paparazzi. Jackie smiled broadly without looking directly at the camera. If she was upset by the deteriorating condition of Onassis or her marriage, she did not show it at the theater. In many ways, she was at her best under the worst circumstances.

  Onassis, meanwhile, skipped champagne that night and opted instead for whiskey and water to soothe his bleeding gums. Knowing this might be his last such occasion, he handed out gifts to his closest associates—including a worthless share of a deal to redevelop Haiti as a gambling destination—to his oldest and closest friend, Costa Gratsos.30

  Jackie attends a Broadway opening with her children to celebrate the new year, 1975. (Robin Platzer/Twin Images/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

  With the holidays over, Jackie and her children headed to Europe—not to be with Onassis, but to ski at Crans-sur-Sierre, in the heart of the Swiss Alps.31 Photographers buzzed around the slopes, watching her fall into a split; John gave the paparazzi the finger.

  Jackie was back in New York by early January and jumped right into society functions, attending the American Ballet Theatre’s thirty-fifth anniversary celebration at City Center. Mikhail Baryshnikov was onstage and he attended the after-party with Jackie, Caroline, and Lee’s daughter, Tina. Lee’s marriage had ended the previous July and since then, as a woman who had never worked, she had been searching for a purpose. She had given acting a try, had published the scrapbook One Special Summer, did a stint interviewing people for a TV talk show, and was working on her memoirs. But mostly, Lee occupied herself with big social events, such as a fund-raiser for the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House on January 4. She and Jackie arrived at the event together, dressed in leather coats and boots, to see the auction of an oil portrait that William Draper had painted of JFK in 1962.32

  In addition to her society functions, Jackie was busy moving her belongings out of a house in Peapack, New Jersey, that she had rented as a weekend getaway. Now she had her own country retreat—a converted barn she had recently bought for $200,000 in nearby Bernardsville, in the north-central area of New Jersey. Only her name—not Onassis’s—was on the deed. Jackie had called William Doyle, a New York auc
tioneer, to help her discard the second-home things she no longer wanted. Doyle agreed to take some of John’s nursery furniture, JFK’s wooden chair with a golden Choate School emblem on the backrest, a table that her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, had given them as newlyweds, and a five-foot-high mirror with a carved wooden frame.33

  “I wish you’d take more,” she told Doyle as he paid her $2,000. “What’s left I’m going to give to the thrift shop.”34

  But the rest truly was junk. An auction house staff member bought the Choate chair for $300 for his grandson. John Jr.’s antique pine desk fetched $175.35 In total, the items sold for about $3,000.

  With her second husband (who was worth nearly $500 million) on the verge of death, gossips began to wonder if Jackie was reselling clothes and furniture to stockpile cash—like a typical child of the Depression—in case Onassis died and cut her out of his will. But cleaning house and preparing for a new beginning felt good. Jackie was rediscovering the things she loved, hidden for too long behind mounds of history. It was time to dust them off and take them out of the shadows.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Writer

  Mr. Shawn?” she breathed into the phone. “This is Jacqueline Onassis.”

  William Shawn was the legendary editor of The New Yorker, magazine arguably the most competitive literary outlet in which a writer could be published. He was surprised to hear Jackie’s voice on the other end of his office phone explaining that she had an idea for an article.

  Although Jackie may not have known it, and may not have cared if she did, it was an audacious act for her to call him. Shawn was famously shy and many of the world’s most renowned writers knew better than to invade his solitude with an unsolicited query. In fact, Shawn preferred speaking to a writer’s secretary rather than have to deal with the person directly. But Shawn rose to the occasion and agreed to have lunch with her in the fall of 1974 at La Caravelle, then a four-star restaurant considered to be Manhattan’s best, a place that JFK’s father enjoyed so much that its chef trained and handpicked the one for the Kennedy White House.1 The restaurant—with a pastel dining room staffed with solicitous captains serving roast duck, soufflés, and martinis—was a favorite of Jackie’s because other celebrities didn’t gawk at her and the staff gave her the privacy she craved. In fact, the quiet setting was a gift for both of them because Shawn also spoke in a whisper.

  Jackie picked lightly over her lunch the way thin women do—a little bit nervous, no doubt, given the task before her—and suggested an article on the new International Center for Photography and its executive director, Cornell Capa, former photographer for Life, a magazine whose cover Jackie had already graced three times. Capa had photographed Kennedy’s presidential campaign, capturing some of its most memorable events, and had done a book on JFK’s first hundred days in the White House. He had helped create Camelot. Shawn said he was interested in the photographer’s latest endeavor. And then Jackie took the conversation one step further, pitching Shawn on writing regularly for the magazine.2 She had been a faithful reader of the magazine’s Talk of the Town section and proposed being a contributor. As the waiters came and went, she looked him in the eye and told him that she knew about a lot of things, but especially she knew people. She had met lots of them, from all walks of life.3

  Shawn, who was highly formal, addressed her as Mrs. Onassis and said he was willing to see her work. Although it may have been a stretch for Shawn to accept a piece from anyone else with such thin experience—celebrity aside—the assignment was a natural fit for Jackie. For one thing, she knew a lot about photography, from both sides of the lens. She had made her first paycheck with a camera. And as part of the Kennedy family, which cultivated its image through photographic sessions on the beach in Hyannis Port, in the Oval Office, or around the Christmas tree in Palm Beach, allowing access for legendary photographers such as Richard Avedon, Jacques Lowe, and Capa, she understood the power of pictures. On top of that, she had always been a good writer, even drafting poems as a little girl. The craft of writing, especially about topics she loved, was good therapy, long overdue for a woman who had stifled her literary instincts for nearly two decades.

  Words and books, like money and horses, were central in Jackie’s life from the very beginning. She was born on July 28, 1929—a few months before the stock market crash that precipitated the Great Depression—in East Hampton, Long Island, where both sets of grandparents had summer homes. Jackie’s sister, Lee, was born in 1933. Before Jackie was five, her stockbroker father, John Vernou Bouvier III (called “Black Jack” and occasionally “the Sheik”4 because of his tanned skin, dark wavy hair, and ways with women), had lost his fortune. His bank account was so depleted that he had to ask his father-in-law, James T. Lee, for a loan to make ends meet. Instead of loaning him a great deal of money, Lee allowed Black Jack and the family to live rent free in a large duplex at 740 Park Avenue, the luxury co-op apartment building Mr. Lee had just built but in which he still had many vacancies as a result of the Depression.5 Jackie’s horse-riding, chain-smoking, and insecure mother, the volatile Janet Norton Lee, was irate not just at her husband’s financial instability but also by his serial philandering—often right under her nose. But Jackie adored her father despite his being a cad, a trait she later seemed willing to accept in her own marriages.

  By 1940, Jackie’s parents were going through a bitter, public divorce that Manhattan society columns relished reporting. After the split, Black Jack moved into a room at the Westbury Hotel. On Sundays he would toot a special horn signal from his convertible when it was time to pick up Jackie and Lee. Perhaps because he had no sons, or because his daughters were adventurous spirits, he encouraged them to climb trees, ride a handle-free bike, play in the outdoor sculling seats at Columbia University, or watch baseball tryouts there. When the activities made them hungry, he treated them to predinner sweets, like pistachio ice cream.6 When Jackie wanted a pet rabbit, he indulged her by allowing it to live in the bathtub in his Park Avenue apartment.7

  Whether he was instilling or nurturing their rebellious spirits, Black Jack soon saw some familiar traits, especially in Jackie, who looked very much like her father. In the first grade at the Chapin School in New York, Jackie was regularly sent to the principal, Miss Stringfellow, and when Janet found out about the disciplinary action she asked her daughter what was going on.

  “What happens when you’re sent to Miss Stringfellow?” Janet pressed one day while walking home from Central Park.

  “Well, I go to her office and Miss Stringfellow says, ‘Jacqueline, sit down. I’ve heard bad reports about you.’ I sit down. Then Miss Stringfellow says a lot of things—but I don’t listen.”8

  Miss Stringfellow made it her mission to bring the girl in line, telling her, “I know you love horses and you yourself are very much like a beautiful thoroughbred. You can run fast. You can have staying power. You’re well built and you have brains. But if you’re not properly broken and trained, you’ll be good for nothing. Suppose you owned the most beautiful race horse in the world. What good would he be if he wasn’t trained to stay on the track, to stand still at the starting gate, to obey commands? He wouldn’t even pull a milk truck or a trash cart. He would be useless to you and you would have to get rid of him.”9

  It was an analogy that Jackie, who spent most weekends in equestrian gear, even winning her first fashion prize for coordinating her jodhpurs and cravat, could understand. The words penetrated and many years later, after she had become First Lady, Jackie would credit Miss Stringfellow as being the “first, great moral influence” on her life.10

  In 1942, Janet remarried, to the gentle and twice-divorced Hugh D. (“Uncle Hughdie”) Auchincloss II, whose grandfather was a founder of Standard Oil. Hughdie already had a smattering of kids: a son, Hugh D. III, nicknamed Yusha, from one ex-wife; another son, Tommy, and a daughter, Nina, as well as a stepson—an aspiring writer named Gore Vidal—from another ex-wife. Janet and Hughdie went on to have two children of the
ir own, “Little Janet” and Jamie. In the summer of 1942, the blended family moved from New York City into Merrywood, his neo-Georgian estate in McLean, Virginia. That property, on a hill with forty-six acres of woods near the Potomac, was complete with a swimming pool, an enclosed badminton court, and a small stable.11

  Starting the next year, the family spent their summers at Auchincloss’s other property, the twenty-eight-room shingled “cottage” called Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, the Gatsbyesque community that had its own tight-knit high society, much like the Hamptons. The Gilded Age mansions built by the bank, steel, and railroad barons were monuments to money and power, and constant reminders of the enduring appeal of both.

  Given the upscale path she was on, Jackie was enrolled in Miss Porter’s, a finishing school in Farmington, Connecticut. It was one of the obvious choices for prep schools for young women at the time. Jackie flourished there, joining students in boosting the 1944 presidential campaign of John Dewey, the Republican challenging FDR. She dutifully enrolled in the drama club, and whenever she could, rode her horse, which she had convinced her grandfather to send up to her. But her literary life was what truly blossomed at Miss Porter’s. She wrote for the school newspaper, the Salmagundy, and earned a literary prize in her senior year for “consistency of effort and achievement.” The award should not have been surprising. Jackie was always a precocious reader and writer even by age six, when one day, she remarked, “Mummy, I liked the story of the lady and the dog.” Her mother, momentarily confused, discovered that instead of napping, Jacqueline had been reading a book of Chekhov’s short stories, their sophisticated plots and names no problem for the girl’s comprehension.