by Tina Cassidy
In late April 1962, the county, by a 5 to 2 vote, approved the necessary zoning change to turn Merrywood into an apartment complex, prompting a mass protest at a local school. Auchincloss, meanwhile, was coming under heavy fire from the media about his plans to push forward. The fight had many of the hallmarks of a local zoning battle, but the intrigue of a much bigger story involving Jackie, Bobby Kennedy—whose house at Hickory Hill also was in McLean—and the president himself.73 Despite the legal drama, the developer vowed to exercise his option to build.74 And he did.
Then Associate Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas got in the act, calling the proposed apartments “destructive of the [Potomac] river’s shoreline beauty.” And the Federal Aviation Agency administrator asserted that pilots approaching National Airport would object to the buildings’ height. Auchincloss was asked to cancel the sale, but he declined. “I’ve got to stick to my contract. I think it’s a good thing for the county to have … It will bring a lot more money into the county, which they need badly. The apartment buildings didn’t appeal much to my aesthetic but that’s their (the developers’) business.” As for the protesters, he said, “I think they are setting a bad example.”75
While just about everyone she knew was being sucked into the Merrywood vortex, Jackie was studiously avoiding the situation, at least publicly.76 But it is clear where the Kennedy administration stood.
By November 16, 1963, a week before Kennedy’s assassination, the developer had begun clearing the land when the US Department of the Interior made an unprecedented move. Instead of negotiating, it went straight to court to block construction, eventually paying $744,000 for scenic rights. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, an early environmentalist who also lived in McLean and wanted to preserve the Potomac bluffs, slowed the matter to a near halt, saying he would personally have to give written permission for any tree thicker than eight inches to be cut down.77 The next day, when Interior officials posted signs at Merrywood saying they had acquired a scenic easement on the property preventing further clearing, they were greeted by a front-end loader driver and a pile of burning trees.78
But the fight was over. And given how much Jackie had influenced Lafayette Square behind the scenes, it is possible that she had a hand in this one, too. Acknowledging it was a losing battle, the developer would sell the property for $650,000 in 1964 to Wyatt Dickerson, who moved into Merrywood with his wife, Nancy, the CBS (and later NBC) newswoman who was friendly with Udall. By 1968, Dickerson had figured out a solution: build clustered townhomes that preserved much of the woods. The idea was approved and the project completed. Meanwhile, Nancy Dickerson needed some decorating help for Merrywood. She knew just whom to call: Sister Parish.79
Although Jackie had completed most of the White House restoration, she felt there was still much to be done. But fate intervened. In her final hours as a resident of the White House, in a haze of sadness, Jackie was readying to leave her home of the last one thousand days. There was so much unfinished. Every breath felt incomplete. President Kennedy’s vision for the New Frontier—its light was gone.
Jackie’s work—indeed her entire life—had also been upended by his wrenching death. And whether she was conscious of its symbolism or not, she needed to complete one final personal touch before leaving the White House for good. She called the executive mansion’s painter, Joseph Karitas, the man who had helped decorate Caroline’s chest of drawers with stripes. “Can you please come up to the second floor?” she asked him.
He found her standing there, with her sister, Lee, and West, the usher, in front of a large oil painting that was damaged with scaling, exposing the canvas. Karitas sidled up to her before the painting, and noticed that its gold frame was also badly scarred.
“Look at it,” she begged. “Can you please fix it? Mrs. Johnson is moving into the White House this afternoon. I want it to look nice for her.”
Karitas went down and got his paint and art brushes. He began painting the picture, filling in the image where the paint had been knocked off the canvas. Then he touched up the gold frame. Jackie watched from a chair and then encouraged a little mischief.
“Joe, Mr. West said you should paint some Indians in the picture while you’re painting there.” He went along with the gag, hoping it would cheer her up. He knew how she felt.80 Jackie then told Karitas to sign his name on the bottom. He obliged.
In the days and months after she left the White House, she again turned to Warnecke for help—and more. “Rosebowl” had earned Jackie’s respect as an architect and a person, and she repaid him with yet another historic commission: to design the president’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, a prominent slope of grass, with white stones set in the earth and an eternal flame—a monumental exercise in restraint.81
Grand Central was anything but minimalist. Its size and scope were monuments to industrialism, and in its smallest architectural details the space offered visual gifts to those who took time to notice. Jackie appreciated good design no matter what the form, so she was prepared to dive into the scrum of yet another preservation struggle, most likely thinking about her other decade-old accomplishments and hoping to keep her winning streak alive.
Jackie entered the vaulted concourse of Grand Central on January 30, 1975, wearing a tan dress, gold chain, and her trademark Cartier watch beneath her coat and scarf. She had arrived by cab promptly for the morning press conference—just as Kent Barwick had hoped—alone, as usual, with no security trailing behind her. Inside, as her suede bootheels clicked across the marble floors, an old feeling stirred within her. She was inspired to erase the grime, to uncover the gem of this Beaux-Arts beauty in the same way she had been moved to free the White House of its dowdy Eisenhower furnishings, to stop the bulldozers in Lafayette Square, and to silence the saws at Merrywood.
She walked from the concourse down the ramp leading to the Oyster Bar, Grand Central’s lower-level restaurant. The Oyster Bar, as old as the terminal, had offered to host the event, not just for the short-term publicity but as an act of self preservation, knowing construction would surely disrupt or kill its business. The Municipal Art Society, after a frenzied week of preparations, agreed that the location would be perfect, a place that spoke to tradition and fond memories.
In the left-side area of the catacomb-like space, staff had set up a banquet table near the bar that was already filled with oysters. A breakfast spread of bagels and coffee was next to it. The table was long enough to seat about a dozen members of the Committee to Save Grand Central, a gilt group that was only partially in attendance. Committee chairman Robert F. Wagner Jr., who had created the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965 when he was mayor of New York, was getting married that day and missed the event.
As Jackie entered the room, she saw other notable New Yorkers preparing to take their seats, including Bess Myerson, who was both the first Jewish Miss America and the city’s former commissioner of Consumer Affairs; New Yorker writer and man-about-town Brendan Gill; Hughdie’s grandnephew, Louis Auchincloss, president of the Museum of the City of New York; architect Philip Johnson; and Manhattan borough president and civil rights activist Percy E. Sutton.82 Overall, the committee had some ninety members, mostly East Coast elites, including writer George Plimpton, Jackie’s friend who had been standing next to Sirhan Sirhan when the assassin pulled the trigger on Bobby Kennedy.
The event had been carefully planned for the morning in order to give the television crews time to run their stories for the noon and evening broadcasts. Radio had the whole day to run the report. And even international newspapers such as the Times of London were able to meet their deadlines for the next day. The seating was also arranged to highlight the guest of honor; she had just arrived. The space, which can seat 250 people, was jammed with supporters and media from around the world, and they had really only come to hear what Jackie had to say. The crowded space buzzed with anticipation.
Jackie’s seat was in the middle of the table, befitting her sta
tus as the star. But she, like everyone else there, knew that she did not need the press coverage, she was giving it. As she took off her black cloth coat and scarf and settled into the seat, her eyes noted the details of the room—the vaulted ceiling, the coziness of the subterranean space, the blue-check tablecloths, the bank of cameras before her, and the reporters stuffed in every nook, some on bended knee before her.83 Kent Barwick, as head of the Municipal Art Society, took his seat beside her, but in a last-minute dash to take care of some details, he stood up and lost his spot to then congressman Ed Koch—who understood that not only were there millions of eyeballs on the event but there were also millions of dollars on the line. He had never seen press interest like this before and he knew he was part of something big. He noted to himself that this could be a case important enough to go all the way to the Supreme Court.84
January 30, 1975. Jackie at the Oyster Bar press conference to save Grand Central Terminal. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
Against another wall, the group had hung a bedsheet, the backdrop for a slide projection that would “educate” the media about the importance of Grand Central. The concept was the brainchild of Frederic Papert, another former advertising executive who had done advance work for Bobby Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Aside from knowing Jackie well, he had joined MAS as president after creating New York’s Carnegie Hill Historic District in the early 1970s.
There must have been a twinge between Papert and Jackie when they saw each other that morning. They both knew a thing or two about campaigns—how to motivate the public, how to use the media, and how to influence the influencers—but here they were, trying one last time to win, not for a Kennedy, but for the soul of a city.
Papert had assigned the slide show to Hugh Hardy, a young sole-practice architect who had grown up in nearby Westchester County and had taken the train to Grand Central as often as he could as a young teenager, enthralled by the sight of the platforms sparkling from the ice chips used to wash them down. Where else could you come to a city with sparkling platforms? With stars twinkling in the ceiling? He had volunteered to join the fight to save the terminal before knowing who else was on the committee. When he heard Jackie was involved, he didn’t say, “Oh, wow, this was the most amazing thing ever,” which he later admitted it turned out to be. He was surprised that when she talked to him she talked to him—a trait that is rare in New York. There was no aura to penetrate. She was right there.85
With everyone seated, the lights dimmed for Hardy’s show, and waiters who had been preparing the room for lunch stopped working and lined the walls to watch.
The twenty-minute slide show used old photographs from books and the MAS archives to show the history of Grand Central, its complex engineering and design that allowed for a mix of pedestrians, real estate, cars, and short- and long-distance trains all coming together in a seamless, functional design.
“It represents one of the greatest success stories of architecture and planning in the world,” Hardy told the room, clicking through the images. “We intend to demonstrate that Grand Central can again function as the symbol, marketplace and economic engine, with which a preeminently important part of midtown Manhattan can be rejuvenated.”86
Like a maestro in the dark, Hardy was finding a special way to move the crowd, helping them understand that this was an extraordinary place that was threatened, a place a hundred times superior and far more important than Penn Station ever was because it was an integral part of the city. When Hardy was done, the room cheered.
Then the lights came up. Bess Myerson read a statement from Wagner, who explained that the committee had plenty of private attorneys “standing ready to support the city’s case with a ‘friend of the court’ brief,” words that would make it more difficult for Mayor Beame to find excuses about appealing, especially if it would cost the city money. Beame, struggling to manage a metropolis heading toward bankruptcy, was in the midst of laying off teachers and trash collectors,87 so it would have been politically acceptable for him to explain that New York was too broke to fight the railroad. Wagner did not want to give him that chance, saying the Committee to Save Grand Central was going to “sound an alarm in New York and across the country that the battle against the thoughtless waste of our manmade environment is farther from being won than many of us had thought. What’s at issue here is the very concept of landmark preservation.”88
After Myerson finished reading the statement, Philip Johnson, tall and bespectacled, an architectural rival of Breuer’s, and one of the key voices behind the failed attempt to save Penn Station, stepped to the microphone. “Europe has its cathedrals and we have Grand Central Station,” Johnson said. “Europe wouldn’t put a tower on a cathedral.”
The audience cheered again and then fell silent, except for some clinking of dishes and silverware in the kitchen, as Jackie began to speak.
“If we don’t care about our past we can’t have very much hope for our future,” she said into a bank of microphones and over the din of flashbulbs popping. “We’ve all heard that it’s too late, or that it has to happen, that it’s inevitable. But I don’t think that’s true. Because I think if there is a great effort, even if it’s the eleventh hour, then you can succeed and I know that’s what we’ll do.”89
January 30, 1975. Architect Philip Johnson (at left with glasses), Jackie, Bess Myerson, and Ed Koch, leaving the Oyster Bar press conference, with Grand Central Terminal in the backdrop. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
Her words, which she had written herself, were sparse. She knew from her political experiences that if she delivered a forty-five-minute speech it would lose its effectiveness and she would have a greater chance of being misquoted. Deliver a sound bite just right and the press had to use it. They had nothing else.
Before Jackie left, Beckelman brought her over to meet the waiters and chefs. She shook hands with all of them, one of whom had taken JFK’s order there years before.
“He ordered two glasses of milk and a cup of custard,” the waiter fondly recalled on the spot. “He gave me a dollar but I lost the dollar.”90
She smiled at him and turned to walk back up to the daylight of the city with Koch, Johnson, and Myerson. Outside, photographers ran past the group, turned on them, and walked backward as they focused their lenses on Jackie’s face in front of Grand Central: one icon playing off of the other.
The next day, the papers everywhere were filled with pictures of Jackie, Myerson, Koch, and Johnson walking south on Park Avenue, with Grand Central behind—the perfect photo op. Jackie had generated so much coverage that the committee’s volunteer public relations agency, J. Walter Thompson, pinned up clips in its conference room covering all four walls with articles from small-town papers and large-scale dailies around the globe, including those from Europe.
No doubt, Onassis saw the papers and read what Jackie had been doing. With his glasses on, if he looked closely, he could see in the photo’s background the giant carved mythical figures that topped the terminal—Mercury (the god of travel), Hercules (labor), and Minerva (knowledge). He called Jackie on Sunday from his villa in the Athens suburb of Glyfada—directly beneath the flight path of many of his own airplanes landing in Athens—and complained of being alone.91
While Onassis’s health continued to deteriorate, the Municipal Art Society stepped up its efforts to succeed, asking the Times to cover the story in greater detail, enlisting Ed Koch to complain to the US secretary of transportation, and forming a quiet alliance with the sympathetic Metropolitan Transit Authority, which leased space at the terminal.92 But MAS remained very worried about what Beame might do—or more precisely, not do. They needed him to appeal the case.
And so once again, Jackie threw herself into the cause, knowing the battle was at a critical stage. MAS could not lose the momentum coming off of the Oyster Bar press conference, an event that was so successful in making ordinary people suddenly care about preservation that it had instigated a campaign in the Midwest with donors sending in $5 bills t
o save the station.
Jackie was not afraid to take on people seemingly more powerful than she. And she knew when a fight was worth fighting. After Robert Kennedy’s assassination, his wife, Ethel, wanted nuns from her old school to sing at the funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. Female voices were not allowed and Leonard Bernstein, who was in charge of the music for the Mass, was told no by the monsignor. Jackie went straight to Archbishop Terence Cooke and said, “This is the way it is going to be.” His reply: “Of course.”93
In addition to being the consummate strategist, she had little patience for process, knowing it could subsume purpose. She was also impatient with the bureaucracy and sluggish pace of committees. She—because of Onassis’s grave illness—was running out of time to help Grand Central. She hatched a plan on her own to write to the mayor herself.94 Surely Beame would be too embarrassed to ignore her pleas and compliments. She did not underestimate the power of her own pen and knew the value of her letters. Those she had written on behalf of the White House restoration had moved people to part with priceless objects. Other notes had helped save Lafayette Square. Her letters sent to friends and strangers alike after JFK’s assassination had touched them deeply. Even seemingly inconsequential letters of hers set the world atwitter. A 1964 auction fetched $3,000 for a note she sent in 1955 in response to a man in England suggesting that there were better ways for the Kennedys to spend money than on a $20,000 party. “True, my husband and I are well off,” she wrote to the Englishman. “But after taxes household and business expenses and charity, there is not just a great pile of money lying around.”95 The sales price for her letter was nearly double the amount a Martha Washington letter had sold for at that time.
This letter to Beame, though, would be more thought through than the note to the Brit, and would show her now-significant political instincts. She liked strategizing about how to tell the story. In this case, Jackie understood that Beame, in desperate straits politically, needed to be a hero.
