by Tina Cassidy
She pulled out a sheaf of her trademark blue stationery with the simple 1040 Fifth Avenue engraved at the top. Dated February 24, she wrote the letter longhand, her loopy print leaning slightly to the left. Knowing what she had just been through in Athens and Paris, the anger, passion, and indeed much of her language in the letter could have reflected how she was feeling about her marriage and Onassis—as well as his decision to divorce her.
Dear Mayor Beame
I write to you about Grand Central Station, with the prayer that you will see fit to have the City of New York appeal Judge Saypol’s decision.
Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud moments, until there is nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?
Americans care about their past, but for short term gain they ignore it and tear down everything that matters.
Maybe, with our bicentennial approaching, this is the moment to take a stand, to reverse the tide, so that we won’t all end up in a uniform world of steel and glass boxes.
Old buildings were made better than we will ever be able to afford to make them again. They can have new and useful lives, from the largest to the smallest. They can serve the community and bring people together.
Everyone, from every strata of our city, is wounded by what is happening—but feel powerless—hopeless that their petitions will have any effect.
I think of the time President Kennedy was faced with the destruction of Lafayette Square, opposite the White House. That historic 19th century square was about to be demolished to make way for a huge Eisenhower-approved Government Office Building. All contracts had been signed. At the last minute he cancelled them—and as he did so, he said, “This is the act I may be most remembered for.”
Dear Mayor Beame—your life has been devoted to this city. Now you serve her in the highest capacity. You are her people’s last hope—all their last hopes lie with you.
It would be so noble if you were to go down in history as the man who was brave enough to stem the tide, brave enough to stand up against the greed that would devour New York bit by bit. People now, and people not yet born will be grateful to you and honor your name.
With my admiration and respect
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Beame, a steady man of simple tastes, could have read the letter seated on a wooden chair with black leather seat pads in his city hall office, with its flags and fireplace and rich red drapes, a setting that seemed to exacerbate his stature—just five foot two. Since his election the year before as the city’s first Jewish mayor, Beame had been mired in New York’s calamitous budget, proving impossible for even a numbers whiz like himself. Beneath his silver hair and furrowed brow, his dark, bushy eyebrows set off his eyes, focused on this letter, presenting yet another difficult choice for a leader prone to indecisiveness. This one was about a building, in the heart of the city, a cause involving powerful people who could make or break him. The more he considered it, the less choice he seemed to have.
Within a week, Beame announced that his administration would appeal Judge Saypol’s decision.
“This case has great significance to the future of preservation in New York City and in the entire United States,” Beame said in a press release his office issued. “Grand Central Station was designated a landmark because it is a landmark in every sense of the word; it is a symbol of life in the City of New York … Grand Central, like all our landmarks, helps define the greatness of the City. We must work hard to preserve it as part of the integrity of the City of New York.”96
It was a victory. But for how long? If the case did go to the Supreme Court—a first for a historic preservation issue—every press release, every rally, every call for supporters that MAS would organize would be done to influence public opinion and perhaps those of the judges. Back at 1040 Fifth, smiling at what she had helped achieve, Jackie was already thinking about the composition of the Supreme Court and who might be swayed.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Widow
The day after her phone call from Onassis, Jackie was jolted by another overseas call—from her stepdaughter, Christina. She told Jackie that she had cut short an early February ski trip in Gstaad with her boyfriend because Onassis had collapsed with severe stomach pains. She was keeping vigil with her aunts outside her father’s bedroom in Greece, an uncluttered room with few furnishings. He was struggling with the flu and a gallstone attack. Dr. Jacques Caroli, Onassis’s personal physician based in Paris, was on his way. Christina said Jackie should come, too.
Jackie jumped on an Olympic Learjet that day, flying with Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, a New York cardiologist who had treated Onassis the previous November. Rosenfeld was worried that Onassis’s heart was too weak to survive the removal of his gallbladder, which Caroli was recommending doing in Paris. As it was, Onassis could barely chew or hold up his head.
When Jackie arrived the next day, she was stunned to see him lying in bed forty pounds lighter and ashen. Outside, the media had been clamoring for hours to know if this was the end for Onassis.
Onassis’s sister Merope sent her husband outside to address the reporters.
“He is suffering from influenza with complications but he is resting comfortably now and you can go home,” he told them. The reporters, however, knew it was more serious than that, and United Press International (UPI) reported the next day that the myasthenia gravis was threatening his vital organs and endangering his life.1
The doctors continued to assert their divergent opinions, as did the family. Christina, who wanted her father to go to Paris to receive what she believed would be the best care, was sobbing over his condition and the stress of having to decide what to do.2 Onassis, seemingly resigned to die, did not want to go anywhere. But Jackie felt strongly he at least go to Paris.
“He’s my husband, and I believe this switch is necessary,” said Jackie. “Let’s not argue.”3
Jackie took Onassis, bundled in a heavy overcoat and scarf, to the Athens airport Thursday, where they boarded an Olympic Learjet specially equipped with a bed and medical equipment that had been on the runway on standby for three days.4 Doctors and his entourage boarded a Boeing 707.5
In France, before checking into the hospital, Onassis wanted to spend one last night at his apartment at 88 Avenue Foch, near the Bois de Boulogne. He arrived there by limousine, slumped between Jackie and Christina. Set on one of the city’s most prestigious streets, lined with chestnut trees and grand palaces, and occupied by super-rich families such as the Rothschilds, the fifteen-room apartment had romantic views of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.6 And on this day, the entrance was swarming with shouting paparazzi when he arrived. Onassis looked gaunt, his silver hair greased back, black-as-night arching eyebrows framing his bugged-out eyes, his large nose further exaggerated by weight loss. Still fiercely proud, he insisted on walking in unaided.7
February 6, 1975. Jackie and Christina arriving at Onassis’s apartment in France, after a flight from Athens, the night before he entered the hospital. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
“I don’t want those sons of bitches to see me being held up by a couple of women,” he snarled.8
Jackie stayed at the apartment that night while Christina—who knew of her father’s plans to divorce—took a room at the Plaza Athénée.9 Onassis settled in to his large bedroom on the fifth floor. The room had a stone fireplace, an antique brass bed, and family photographs. There were red velvet drapes, a gilt dressing screen, and fake Watteau paintings on gray silk walls. On his nightstand were a crucifix and a calculator. He put on blue silk pajamas and a robe custom-made by Lanvin.10 But he moaned through the night, struggling to get comfortable enough to sleep.11
The next day guards drove him in a Peugeot from the apartment’s underground garage to the hospital, and he settled in a spacious room in the more modern wing named after Eisenh
ower, the thought of whom would have reminded Jackie of her painful preinaugural tour of the White House, as well as the threat to Lafayette Square.12
On February 9, surgeons removed his gallbladder.
“It was a small operation and now he is feeling much better,” Onassis’s right-hand man, Johnny Meyer, told a press conference at the hospital. “He can stand up. That’s all I can say.”13
February 7, 1975. Onassis arrives at American Hospital in Paris. (Richard Melloul/Sygma/CORBIS)
In truth, there were complications. Onassis developed hepatitis and pneumonia. He was on massive doses of antibiotics and staff fed him intravenously while he was on a respirator in the intensive care unit.14 Over the next week, the hospital issued a statement downgrading his status to “guarded.”15 The Onassis women held vigil, with Jackie avoiding the hospital room when Christina was there, and vice versa. When Onassis was awake for brief moments, he spoke mostly Greek.16
Jackie visited him daily, but the intensive care unit restricted visiting hours. In her free time, she went to Notre Dame, lit a candle, and said a prayer for her husband. She also visited the Louvre, the Orangerie, the hairdresser, and shopped, with the retail therapy going especially deep at Ungaro.17
Ten days after the surgery, Onassis remained unconscious but his condition had stabilized. Doctors told Jackie—away from her kids for nearly three weeks—that it was safe to fly home. But before she left by Olympic Learjet on February 19, she consulted with a trusted physician in New York who told her she should stay. Onassis’s condition was grave, and the whole world was watching, he said. She ignored his advice. John, always a rascal, was fourteen, and in New York alone with only secret service agents and their longtime governess and cook, Marta Sgubin, watching over him. It was also the season for him to visit boarding schools he might attend the following year. Caroline, reserved and mature for her age, was a senior at Concord Academy, a boarding school outside of Boston. On top of Jackie needing to be with John, a documentary that Caroline had worked on about Tennessee coal miners was airing on NBC.18 Caroline had traveled in the summer of 1973 to the Appalachian community with a high school friend after learning about it through the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, which was funding an oral history project led by a New York nun. Jackie didn’t want to miss the documentary’s debut and she planned to host a party in her daughter’s honor.19
Back at her apartment in New York, Jackie immediately called the hospital to check on Onassis. Artemis, the sister-in-law with whom Jackie was closest, said his condition was unchanged.
Jackie’s apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue had the classic look inside and out of a prewar building: large windows, detailed moldings, nickel fixtures, arched doorways. After deciding she could no longer live in Washington after the assassination because tourists were so aggressive that they picnicked outside the home where she and the kids stayed, this home felt pleasantly familiar to her. It was designed in the 1920s by Rosario Candela, the same man who did 740 Park, her grandfather’s apartment building where she had lived as a girl. The apartment at 1040 Fifth, part of a stately limestone building, had cost her $200,000, an enormous sum in 1964.20 It had five bathrooms and five bedrooms,21 and black-and-white marble flooring greeted guests as they stepped off the private elevator directly into her fifteenth-floor home. The large, square, paneled living room with parquet floors and tall French windows, dressed by the famous drapery master John Fowler, could have felt stiff with art by John Singer Sargent, velvet Louis XVI chairs, and Roman sculptures of Hercules and a boy’s head, both of which JFK had bought in Italy for his wife. But John’s drum kit kept it real, along with a world map covered with pins that showed where Jack had traveled during his presidency. From the living room, she enjoyed the view of the Central Park Reservoir and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, watching the people below through a telescope.22
February 13, 1975. Jackie leaving the hospital in Paris. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
She was there, in her home, on Saturday, March 15, 1975. When the phone rang just after 7:30 AM, she heard the news from Artemis: Onassis had taken a turn for the worse. Jackie made immediate plans to leave. Before she could get to the airport, Artemis called again.
“He’s dead,” she said. “Christina was with him when he left us.”23
The loftily named Aristotle Socrates Onassis, short and square with black eyes and a shock of silver hair, was consumed by pneumonia and took his last breath in American Hospital in Paris.
Although many reported him to be six years younger because he had lied about his age for so long, he was seventy-five, Jackie just forty-five. She was not there to cradle his head, to watch his final breath, or to hear his last words. She did not call the priest to administer last rites. In more ways than one, there was an ocean between them, more awkward than ever, and Jackie knew that she must cross it one last time, in spectacular fashion, for his funeral.
She hung up the phone, called her sister Lee, and told her not to come to the funeral. Funerals were one thing whose stagecraft Jackie was an expert in and the last thing anyone wanted was the media bringing up the old story about her sister’s relationship with Onassis, which had happened before Jackie’s engagement to him.
The next call went to her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy, who had assumed a paternalistic role after Bobby’s assassination and remained a close confidant to Jackie. Ted would meet her in Paris. She also phoned Nancy Tuckerman, who agreed to meet her at the airport for the next Air France flight out.24 Finally, she called her mother, and arranged for her to bring her kids on a separate flight.
But Jackie had one other person to tell—a guest in her house. The documentary film that Caroline had been working on was under the watch of producer Karen Lerner, the ex-wife of Alan Jay Lerner, who had written the musical Camelot. Indeed, this was the same Camelot that had been the inspiration for the Kennedy presidential myth, a concept that Jackie herself had applied in an interview a week after her husband’s assassination. Karen Lerner had slept at Jackie’s the previous night in preparation for the film’s debut and the party Jackie had planned to host the next night. Lerner was still there, in the room where Onassis had typically stayed, when Jackie came in and said, “Ari’s dead. I’m going to Paris, so you stay here and be the hostess … I don’t want anything to disturb this—it’s for Caroline and I just want it to go ahead.”25
Then Jackie dressed for mourning, again, this time in a black turtleneck sweater, skirt, stockings, and shoes, topped with a black leather trench coat cinched at the waist, looking more like a chic urbanite than a devastated widow. It was a long day, stuck in her apartment, with a throng of media outside, waiting for her to leave for the overnight flight to Paris.
March 15, 1975. Jackie, barely visible in the scrum and wearing sunglasses, leaves her New York apartment for Paris, where Onassis had died earlier that day. (Ron Galella)
March 15, 1975. Jackie leaves 1040 Fifth Avenue for the airport on the day Onassis died. (Ron Galella/WireImage)
When it was finally time to go in the early evening, she stepped onto the elevator. To brace herself for a crush of cameras, she slid on her oversize sunglasses, despite the day’s last light at just past 6:00 PM. While the glasses covered much of her face, they could not hide everything. Some of the hundred gawkers and journalists on the sidewalk clustered around the canopy at 1040 saw a faint, odd smirk on her face. For a woman whose stoicism and perfect manners defined the most public and analyzed funeral of the twentieth century—that of John F. Kennedy—people wondered if her smile was the mask of shock, a reflexive, almost embarrassed pose, or a signal to the world that she had finally been liberated.
Escorted by four uniformed New York City policemen and four secret service agents, the brisk wind tussled her center-part hair. The sidewalk was so packed that she could not have noticed Ron Galella, the stalking paparazzo she had sued in 1972; he was maintaining his court-ordered twenty-five-foot distance from her.
Galella focused his lens on her, not
ing what a “madhouse” it was, and watching as she pushed her way through the crowd before she disappeared.26
The chauffeur drove away to the airport named after Jackie’s first husband.27 The grin did not fade as she left. When she arrived at the airport, she was escorted directly to the gate and boarded the plane.
There is nothing quite like the darkness over the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night. And as Jackie hurtled through it on Air France flight 070, she had to prepare for what she would say to the world about the loss of another husband. Thankfully, she was good at conjuring quotes for speeches or finding the right words about death. She had given many suggestions to JFK and RFK over the years, including the Shakespeare quote that Bobby read at Jack’s funeral:
When he shall die
Take him and cut him out in little stars
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.
Her words for Ari would surely be a lot less poetic.
France is a country that loved her as much as she loved it. After her junior year abroad studying at the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne, and her special summer with Lee, Jackie’s next trip to Paris happened a decade later when she returned with President Kennedy on his first state trip to the continent. For the presidential gala there, she wore a simple sheaf gown adorned with pink-and-white lace creatively made of raffia. She lit up the room. Or, as one writer said about that evening, “Truly la vie was very much en rose.”28 The next night, at a state dinner at Versailles, she wore a Givenchy gown with a cream robe, prompting Charles de Gaulle to say she belonged in a Watteau painting.29 With her command of the language and knowledge of French culture, she interpreted de Gaulle for her husband, who acknowledged his wife’s popularity there by saying, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”
