Jackie After O (13 page)

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.”
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While just about everyone she knew was being sucked into the Merrywood vortex, Jackie was studiously avoiding the situation, at least publicly.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 status 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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,
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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.”
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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.”