Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (36 page)

For the moment anyway, her illusions, threadbare though they might be, did often seem to sustain her. At such times, she appeared “serene and happy.” Or so Joe Alsop judged her to be when, in New York in the spring of 1969, he saw Jackie again—scrutinizing her, it may be imagined, over his large round horn-rimmed spectacles—for the first time since her controversial second marriage. Alsop, who made a point of assuring her that he had “always” liked “Ari,” was no longer the arbiter he had once been. His raving advocacy of the Vietnam War, not only in print but also at table, had led him to be regarded in certain circles as the thing he most detested—a bore. In dread of Alsop’s tirades about Vietnam, a good many people made a point of declining all invitations to the deep-red-lacquered dining room that had once been an important gathering place of the Washington tribe. Such was the dizzying degree to which the political world of JFK, and even of RFK, had already vanished that Alsop, once the high priest of the religion of Kennedy, had found himself uncomfortably welcoming the November 1968 election of Richard Nixon.

Despite Alsop’s fall, to Jackie he remained the adored preceptor, the man who had gripped her hand as she spoke of Dallas, the rare friend who had not abandoned her when she sought to start anew in Georgetown early on. As she fondly acknowledged, he had loved both Jack and Bobby, though in the end he had assailed RFK for having betrayed what Alsop believed had been President Kennedy’s unambiguously hawkish position on Vietnam. Writing to Alsop in the weeks before she remarried, Jackie had made it clear that she would never be able to love or care about anyone again, and that whatever she may once have hoped, she knew now that grief was an element she would always live in—“like sea or sky or earth.” So, less than a year after she had expressed those sentiments, Alsop had been pleased and no doubt relieved to find her apparently so contented and so well. He compared the happiness she radiated in Onassis’s company to “a good fire” in a cold English room.

Strange to say, at this juncture the prototype for the newlyweds’ relationship was perhaps less Onassis’s fiery liaisons with Maria Callas (whom, it later turned out, he was still seeing on the side) and other inamoratas as it was his role as devoted caregiver to the aged Winston Churchill. Far from ignoring or minimizing the injuries that had propelled Jackie into this marriage, Onassis made it his mission to rescue her from what he liked to call her “years of sorrow.” Early on, he communicated to his staff and intimate circle that his emotionally fragile bride was going to require special care. “It was as if Mr. Onassis had married an injured creature,” his longtime private secretary Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos recalled, “and we were all responsible for helping her wounds to heal.” The doting husband whispered to Jackie, laughed with her, told her stories, sang to her, and otherwise danced attendance. These days, she was ever bedizened with the jewelry he lavished upon her, such as the heart-shaped ruby earrings and matching raspberry-sized ring that obscured the entirety of her rather large knuckle and had to be removed whenever she made a telephone call. Though some observers were put off by the extent to which Onassis flaunted his sex life with his younger, taller wife (pawing at her in ways that seemed at odds with his insistence on her fragility), not all of his gestures were as desperate and self-serving. The man who mobilized planes and police on her behalf was also capable of more intimate demonstrations of concern and affection. A heavy smoker himself, he tried to make Jackie smoke less by snatching at her cigarette pack whenever she reached for it. He rarely succeeded in preventing her from lighting up, but his attempts, often accompanied by a display of mock exasperation, were among the couple’s fond private jokes, as well as a sign to others of what looked to be his sincere solicitude.

Crucially, Onassis took marvelous care not just of Jackie, but also of John and Caroline. When the children came to spend their first summer in Greece, he toured them about his scorpion-shaped island, which included an untamed, heavily forested area, where he pointed out the unique animals and plants that thrived there. He escorted the boy and girl on motorboat rides and fishing expeditions and, in a voice said to resemble “soft gravel,” regaled them with tales of his own childhood. Though John and Caroline were accompanied by Secret Service agents, Onassis insisted that his private security men be responsible for the children.

Jackie, who turned forty that summer, spent her days swimming, water-skiing, walking, painting, reading, and studying. In flight from a previous identity that she regarded as dangerous, she sought to reinvent herself. She learned Greek. She studied the history and culture of her new home. She elicited the guidance and advice of various experts and connoisseurs. She accompanied her husband on long, leisurely walks about his island kingdom, during which Onassis, between puffs on his cigar, declaimed poetry to her in Greek. She arrayed the old house that he had had painted pink for his new bride with carefully chosen Greek furnishings and art. To explain her obsession with redoing the edifice and its environs, she declared that there were many things in the world that she could not change, but that when it came to such matters as furniture and draperies and flowers, it was quite within her capacity to make all the changes she desired. And that, she emphasized, was very satisfying to her.

Despite everyone’s efforts, not least of them her own, this relatively tranquil first phase of the marriage proved to be short-lived. Jackie had considered enrolling one or both children in school in Switzerland after the summer, but at length she decided that New York was still best. Accordingly, she was back in Manhattan with John and Caroline in the early autumn as they began the new academic year. Though Jackie certainly did not recognize it then, the afternoon of September 24, 1969, was the start of something very important. No sooner had mother and son exited through the cast-iron front door at 1040 Fifth Avenue, en route to ride their bicycles together in the park, than a photographer leaped out from behind the canopied limestone building’s sidewalk plantings. Six years after the first Kennedy assassination, Jackie continued to be easily startled, and she later remembered feeling terrified when the lone cameraman began shooting.

Still, the encounter, however unpleasant, was in itself nothing unusual. The marriage to Onassis seemed to have obliterated any respect for her widowhood that the press had retained following the Manchester controversy. Ironically, the union that was supposed to have shielded Jackie’s privacy had done much to further erode the belief that she was entitled to any such thing. Eleven months previously in Greece, Billy Baldwin had been stunned and not a little frightened by “the bedlam of professional Jackie-watchers and photographers” who crowded furiously in on her whenever she was in public. When Baldwin went so far as to admit that he feared for her life, she assured him that the best possible response to all those aggressive press people was simply to smile at them. In the course of the September 24, 1969, incident, however, when the lensman who had just alarmed her outside her New York residence reemerged, jack-in-the-box-like, from some shrubbery in Central Park, causing John to swerve his bicycle, Jackie was no longer inclined to smile.

Nor would a staged response have been likely to satisfy the thirty-eight-year-old Bronx-based freelancer Ron Galella. He defined himself as an artist, had studied art photography, and considered the type of camerawork he practiced to be unique. He wanted something more than just contrived expressions from the famous people he stalked. Aiming to capture, in his phrase, “the full range of human emotions,” he depended on the element of surprise. He frequently camouflaged himself, but when at last he did pop out of hiding, rather than look through a viewfinder, he preferred to lock eyes with his prey. Far from posing a problem, a subject’s discomfiture, involving as it did the revelation of authentic emotions oozing through the carefully composed celebrity veneer, was hugely desirable. Galella prided himself on his intrepidity. So when, at Jackie’s instigation, John’s Secret Service guards had the photographer charged with harassment, the result was far from what she seemed to have intended. Hardly had the charges been dismissed in Manhattan Criminal Court in October 1969 when a defiant Galella returned for more of the pictures he passionately believed he had every right to go on taking. Thereafter, he maintained a vigil in front of Jackie’s building and otherwise pursued her on foot and by automobile and aircraft. To be sure, other paparazzi hunted and haunted her in these years, but none perhaps with Galella’s Manchester-like doggedness and sense of personal mission.

Galella had something else in common with the author of
The Death of a President
. Manchester’s intensive interviewing technique, which encouraged Jackie to minutely relive the events of November 22, 1963, had repeatedly, disastrously, hurled her back into the trauma. Galella’s aesthetic, with its emphasis on surprise and provocation, instilled her with feelings akin to the sense of vulnerability and powerlessness she had known in Dallas. From 1969 on, Jackie, by her own account, lived in fear of Galella’s sudden, startling intrusions in her daily life. She could never be certain how or when he would spring out at her, only that eventually he would and that there was really nothing she could do to stop him. True, he sought merely to take Jackie’s picture; but in important ways, she responded to his presence as if she were being attacked again. In this respect, her behavior with the paparazzo may be compared to that of Pavlov’s dogs. Faint reminders had been transformed into conditioned stimuli for the summoning up of unbearable feelings and associations that properly belonged to the past.

Galella’s many “candid” shots of Jackie were a new iteration of her shifting relationship with a society still struggling to suppress the painful emotions attached to an earlier set of images produced by a very different photographer. Compare, on the one hand, Abraham Zapruder’s raw, visceral film stills of her as she drags herself along the rear of the presidential limousine in an apparent state of dissociation and, on the other hand, Galella’s emblematic image, “Windblown Jackie,” in which, caught unawares on Madison Avenue, she turns to direct a “Mona Lisa smile” at her pursuer. In both the Zapruder and the Galella pictures she has been ambushed—by an assassin in the former and by a paparazzo in the latter. In the work of both photographers, she is depicted in what looks to be a state of flight. But in the Galella, the material disarray to which the moment has subjected her is limited to the filigree of hair that prettily streams across her face. For all of Galella’s talk of spontaneity, he was also a painstaking craftsman with a fine sense of pictorial composition. As he would point out, in “Windblown Jackie” he had captured not just any moment, but rather the precise instant when the smile has begun to form. “When you see the teeth,” Galella clinically explained, “it’s too late and not as great.”

By producing an emotionally distanced and highly aestheticized version of certain of the cardinal elements (victimhood, powerlessness, attempted escape) in the Zapruder footage, Galella in “Windblown Jackie” and numerous other images tapped into conservative impulses in the society that aimed to defuse and disavow the collective memory of suffering. Jackie expressly intended her scintilla of a smile to deny Galella the display of emotions he contrived to provoke. He, in turn, used her facial expression to give credence to the claim, central to his legal and aesthetic argument, that Jackie, far from being harassed and terrified, really “loved” being pursued and photographed by him.

So, he went on startling her with flash guns, chasing her along dark Manhattan streets, and compelling her to resort to exiting her apartment house through a rear entrance. Wearing fake mustaches, wigs, and other disguises, her tormentor materialized suddenly in restaurants, nightclubs, theaters, and shops where Jackie, whether alone or with her husband and children, happened to be. On one signal occasion, Galella even managed to get past Onassis’s private security force in order to surprise Jackie on Skorpios. Thereafter, the island kingdom touted as the place where her children would be safest no longer seemed so secure.

In the course of one of the walks with her husband that had formerly been so pleasing to her, Jackie panicked when the couple found themselves trapped in some especially dense foliage on the untamed patch of Skorpios. “I was frightened by the lizards and the mice,” she subsequently recalled, “but mostly, I was terrified that someone would harm the two of us.” When they failed to return to the
Christina
in the gathering dusk, staff members went out to search for them. So thick was the brush in which the couple had become entangled that employees had to use a hatchet to free them. Safely back on the yacht afterward, Jackie continued to be acutely agitated. Onassis scoffed at her apprehensions, adding, RFK-like, that if someone wanted to kill him the attacker would surely find him no matter what preventive measures had been taken. Whereupon Jackie shook her head in anger and walked off. The episode crystallized her growing sense that the supposedly omnipotent rescuer she had turned to after the second Kennedy assassination was scarcely capable of protecting himself, let alone her.

In other ways as well, Onassis was manifestly no longer the figure he had seemed to be at the time of the wedding. The U.S. investors that his marriage to an American legend was supposed to have attracted had failed to materialize. Perhaps it was the hubristic negotiating positions he had taken in the aftermath of having snared both Jackie and the prized government deal. Perhaps it was simply that the brutal Papadopulos regime proved to be a tougher sell to U.S. investors than Onassis had imagined. Even after—to Onassis’s fury—the junta had insisted on bringing Stavros Niarchos into the picture, the efforts of the two Greek business titans combined could not save the mega-deal. As disillusioned with his trophy bride as she was with him, Onassis began more and more to be seen in public with Maria Callas, to whom he felt he could speak of his troubles as he could not to his wife. On Skorpios, he and Jackie quarreled fiercely and often, and she increasingly gravitated to New York, where he visited her at intervals.