Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (35 page)

Blood, the red on the last surviving Kennedy brother’s lips, annihilation: This nexus of associations provides a fascinating window into how her mind was working in the weeks before she rocked the world anew by her decision to become Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Fourteen

On the rainy evening of October 20, 1968—to a chorus of squawks and screams from frustrated journalists aboard the many hired fishing vessels that the junta had prevented from coming too close to Skorpios while the Greek Orthodox wedding ceremony was in progress—Jackie began the latest iteration of what she persisted in calling “my new life.”

There had been a time, shortly after Dallas, when she questioned whether she wanted JFK to be able to see what had become of the world following his death. Five years later, she felt certain that could he “see and know all that has happened … since he died,” he would have understood her decision to marry Aristotle Onassis. Indeed, Jackie maintained, the marriage was “what Jack might have wished for me” under the circumstances.

Few other people viewed things as she did, however.

“Jackie, Why?” demanded one international headline. “Jackie, How Could You?,” “Jack Kennedy Dies Today for a Second Time,” “America Has Lost a Saint,” and “Jackie Marries Blank Check” proclaimed some others.
The New York Times
suggested that “it was almost as though an American legend had deserted her people.”

Jackie’s plunge from grace at the time of the Manchester controversy had been as nothing compared to what happened to her after the October 17 public announcement of her marriage plans. Much had changed in American society since she had been assailed in print for a willingness “to prolong the nation’s trauma.” Following on a year of assassinations and urban riots, including the so-called “police riot” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Richard Nixon was seeking the presidency on a campaign pledge to restore law and order to the United States. In this fraught climate, JFK’s widow, who had played such a prominent part at both the King and RFK funerals, became an even more inconvenient symbol than before. A nation that was weeks away from electing Nixon proved more eager than ever to distance itself from a woman who, in her unabated suffering, was a living reminder of the tragedy and trauma of the 1960s that her countrymen were so impatient to leave behind. In a sense, the very turmoil at home that had caused Jackie to seek safety on Skorpios led many Americans to welcome the opportunity she had provided to cast her out. Looked at from that angle, it was perhaps less the American legend who had deserted her people than it was the other way around.

By contrast, instead of viewing Jackie as tainted by the trauma, the Greek colonels could scarcely wait to embrace her. At the time she married him, Onassis was in talks about a business partnership with the Greek government that, the Onassis organization calculated, had the potential over the next ten years to make him the world’s richest man. From the perspective of the bridegroom, his spectacular marriage seemed likely to elevate him in the dictators’ eyes and assure the success of his new undertaking. From the perspective of totalitarian Athens, Jackie’s presence in the mix promised to soften the eighteen-month-old regime’s international image, perhaps even to lure some of the coveted U.S. investment dollars the strongmen had so far failed to attract. Eager, like LBJ and RFK before them, to bask in the aura of JFK, the junta sent in the Greek police and coast guard to smooth Jackie’s approach to Skorpios in advance of her nuptials. The military government also kept all non-Onassis shipping at a safe distance from the island on the joyous day itself.

The shipping ban, however, did nothing to stop the excluded reporters’ disembodied cries from competing with the chants of the black-bearded, gold-brocade-wearing prelate who performed the marriage ceremony amid gusts of incense before an audience of twenty-one guests in a tiny, candlelit eighteenth-century chapel. Clutching ceremonial candles, John, aged seven, and Caroline, aged ten, stood on either side of the couple. Unlike the journalists who longed to be allowed onto the island, certain of the invitees would surely have preferred not to be there at all. Janet Auchincloss continued to be inconsolable. In the conspicuous absence of Teddy Kennedy, two of JFK’s sisters, Pat and Jean, represented the late president’s family, which was known to have made repeated efforts to prevent the wedding. Onassis’s children, Alexander, aged twenty, and Christina, aged seventeen, who had hoped that their father might yet remarry their mother—whom he had forsaken in 1960 in favor of an affair with Maria Callas—looked on miserably as Jackie and the old man exchanged rings and sipped red wine from a silver goblet. The father had informed neither birdling of his marriage plans until days before the wedding.

Following the ceremony, more shouts from the fishing boats punctuated the festivities on the
Christina
until Onassis finally invited some of the excluded press people aboard. At moments, Jackie seemed terrified of all the clicking cameras. Still, the consensus among press and public, then and later, was that she had brought the media onslaught upon herself by callously, calculatedly marrying a man old enough to be her father. Five years after she had epitomized human vulnerability and terror as she crawled along the rear of the speeding Lincoln in the iconic images seen by all the world, her unlikely marriage made it possible to conceive her completely anew: as the adventuress who, far from being helpless, had helped herself very nicely to Onassis’s fortune.

Two days after the wedding, Jackie’s children were flown back to New York, where, still in school, they would be looked after by a governess and the Secret Service detail that continued to be assigned to them. Their mother, on the contrary, automatically forfeited her Secret Service protection when she remarried. Within forty-eight hours of the children’s departure, Jackie found herself alone on the
Christina
when Onassis traveled to Athens to resume his business talks with the junta’s top dog, George Papadopoulos. Henceforward, she was to be guarded by her husband’s private security force, but no number of armed men would be sufficient to protect her against the incubi that had slipped through Onassis’s and the dictators’ bulwarks combined when the bride-elect arrived on the island the week before.

Thus the strangely lighted scene that Billy Baldwin observed one evening soon after Jackie was wed. She and the decorator, whom she had summoned from Manhattan, were on the
Christina
when they heard the roar of a seaplane’s engine. At first, Jackie remained motionless, scanning the sky for the aircraft on which her husband was due to return from Athens. When she saw the plane at last, she waved happily. But then her body froze, rigid with tension and dread. So long as his client remained like that, Baldwin dared not utter a word. Only when, at length, she heard the splash of the landing did she finally appear to relax. “Thank God he’s safe,” Jackie declared. Though Onassis had landed without incident many times in the past, Jackie’s experience of the two Kennedy assassinations had upended fundamental assumptions about safety and predictability, as well as burdened her with the expectation of imminent danger and doom.

Disconnected from the present, she was constantly, helplessly looking forward in time—or backward. Also during the “honeymoon” period that fall of 1968 when Onassis was frequently off to dicker with Papadopoulos, Jackie spoke to her husband’s sister, Artemis Garoufalidis, of the memories of Dallas that continued to vex her. On one such occasion, Artemis had noticed that Jackie seemed sad and uncommunicative. Asked if anything was wrong, Jackie began to weep. “I know I should be happy now,” she said after the tears had ceased, “but all I can think about today is my first husband and what happened to him in Texas.” The difficulty proved to be a good deal more complicated than the intrusive recollections themselves. “Sometimes I think I will never be able to be truly happy again,” Jackie went on. “I try but I cannot forget the pain. And when I am feeling happy, I am just waiting for it to return.”

That last sentence was key. Though the memory might not actually be before her at a given moment, Jackie, by her own account, was ever anticipating its reappearance. The here and now, to the extent that she was able to experience it, was ceaselessly, insidiously eroded by the trauma. The sense of apprehension disclosed to Artemis was not a matter of anticipating an encounter with some new external trigger, as when the very thought of seeing the Bishop or Manchester books, or references to them in the media, had proven so distressing. In this case the dreaded event was strictly internal. Jackie had come to Skorpios in search of protection from the dangers that loomed in the outer world. But, as her words to her new sister-in-law suggest, her inner world was no less of a danger zone than the violence and chaos she had fled. Sometimes her deeply etched memories took the form of physical sensations, such as the intermittent, at moments unbearable throbbing in her neck that, she explained to Artemis, was the result of nerve damage suffered as she held President Kennedy’s head in both arms after the shooting.

On November 1, 1968, Onassis called a news conference in Athens to report that the government had indeed designated him to build the complex of industries—an oil refinery, an aluminum plant, a thermoelectric power plant, an air terminal, and myriad other entities as yet unspecified—that he touted as the largest individual investment ever made in Greece, as well as proof of the stability of the Papadopoulos regime. In closing the deal, Onassis had outmaneuvered his longtime personal and business rival, Stavros Niarchos, who also had been keen to establish himself as the commercial partner of a dictatorship that routinely imprisoned and tortured anyone who dissented from its policies. But no less important to Onassis’s self-image as a man at the apex of his powers—“the sun king,” as an associate characterized him in this period—was his having single-handedly overcome the monumental opposition of the Kennedys, the Vatican, and world opinion combined when he married Jackie. For Onassis, the outraged and bewildered international headlines had merely underscored the magnitude of his accomplishment in having persuaded Beauty to marry the Beast. In the wake of his press conference, he hosted a celebratory dinner party in honor of Papadopoulos. Jackie, attired in a snug black gown and a diamond necklace, was later reported to have been the evening’s “pièce de résistance.”

Afterward, the newlyweds embarked on a weeklong cruise of the Sporades Islands in the northwest Aegean Sea, at the conclusion of which a stopover in England to visit the Radziwills was marred when a jewel thief entered a second-floor-bedroom window of the house where the Onassises were staying and removed various gems. Jackie, escorted by one of her husband’s senior executives, flew to New York on November 18 in order to be with John and Caroline on their respective birthdays, his on the twenty-fifth and hers two days later. As always, Jackie spent the anniversary of the JFK assassination in seclusion, this time at Wind Wood, her rented country house in Peapack, New Jersey. Onassis, who had arranged for the property to be surrounded by guards, flew in from Paris to join her there that night. Two days later, Jackie was walking alone on her property, as she liked to do, when a French photographer suddenly leapt out and pursued her across a field as he attempted to take her picture.

The jewel thief, the photographer-trespasser, not to mention the grenade- and pistol-wielding hijackers who commandeered an Onassis-owned Olympic Airways jetliner on November 8 in protest against the Papadopoulos regime: As early as the second month of the Onassis marriage, these episodes already suggested that no location, however carefully guarded, was impregnable. So it was a measure of Jackie’s need to idealize her new husband that, at this point, she asked the Secret Service to reduce considerably the government protection afforded to her children, both in New York and on their visits to Europe. Part of this, to be sure, was the old privacy issue that had long been so dear to her, as well as the sense, expressed soon after Dallas, that it was essential to give the children as normal a life as possible. But Jackie struck a new note in a December 11, 1968, letter to Secret Service director James Rowley, when she insisted that the security measures Onassis had previously put in place for his own purposes would amply serve her and the children’s needs as well. At a moment when Jackie had been much excoriated for betraying the memory of President Kennedy, she maintained that, with regard to John and Caroline, she was only doing what JFK would have wanted: “The children will never be safer than they will be on Skorpios or the
Christina
.… As the person in the world who is most interested in their security, and who recognizes most what threats there are in the outside world, I promise you that I have considered and tried every way, and that what I ask you for is what I know is best for the children of President Kennedy and what he would wish for them.”

At a glance, Jackie’s request seems paradoxical in view of recent incidents. But the very sense of helplessness and terror that had led her to put herself under Onassis’s protection after the second Kennedy assassination persisted in fueling her need go on believing in this particular tutelary deity. She clung to the illusion of mastery—the notion that Onassis could foresee and forestall any potential dangers—that had drawn her to Skorpios in the first place. Rowley for his part urged her to take a more realistic view. Alluding to the episode the year before in Ireland, shortly after the death of Lady Harlech, when Jackie’s strange blindness to certain forms of danger had nearly caused her to be drowned, Rowley proposed that she reflect on what might have happened had the agent on duty not disregarded her wish to be left alone. The director suggested that security was a less clear-cut affair than Jackie imagined, and that not every danger was capable of being anticipated and averted if only the right thought processes were applied. As far as Rowley was concerned, it was the function of security “to guard against more than only the obvious and the foreseeable threat.” Implicit in all of this was that Onassis must inevitably fail to live up to her idealized expectations. In the end the Secret Service prevailed with regard to specifics, even if the director did not succeed in actually changing Jackie’s mind.