Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (43 page)

At the end of 1993, when Jackie, as was her twice-yearly custom, went to Virginia to foxhunt, work on manuscripts, and—she said half in gaiety, half in gravity—exist on Lean Cuisine dinners in her rented, toile de Jouy–wallpapered cottage on a rural dirt road near Middleburg, she was sixty-four years old. Jackie expected the trip to be absolutely routine, but it did not turn out that way. While in Virginia, she fell from her horse. She was taken to a hospital, where, in the course of an examination, a doctor detected a swelling in her groin. Convinced that the problem must be a swollen lymph node caused by infection, the physician prescribed a course of antibiotics, which reduced but did not eliminate the swelling. After Christmas, Jackie was sailing with Tempelsman in the Caribbean when a severe cough, combined with abdominal pain and swollen lymph nodes in her neck, prompted her to contact her doctor in New York, who advised her to fly home immediately. A biopsy indicated that she had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer, and in early January 1994 she began chemotherapy.

“I feel it is a kind of hubris,” Jackie told Arthur Schlesinger in an important conversation after her cancer diagnosis. “I have always been proud of keeping so fit. I swim, and I jog, and I do my push-ups, and walk around the reservoir … and now this suddenly happens.” As she had done so many times in the decades since Dallas, she again grappled with the randomness of the world and the abruptness of tragedy. On the present occasion, however, instead of going over the myriad actions she might have taken to make life turn out otherwise, she did something very different. She enumerated what had been her determined efforts to stay fit and healthy, and she ruefully remarked on the fact that the dreadful diagnosis had come in spite of them. And, crucially, as she spoke of all this she laughed—not just in acknowledgment of the futility of her efforts, but also of the hubris (Jackie specifically used the ancient Greek term for excessive pride) of which she had been guilty in believing that she had more control over her destiny than she actually did.

Meanwhile, a public announcement of the former first lady’s condition went out via a spokesperson, who noted that Jackie’s prognosis was excellent. In fact, the doctors had informed Jackie that there was only a 50 percent chance that the lymphoma could be stabilized. Jackie, often sporting Band-Aids and bruises from the treatment, continued to appear at the publishing house as though nothing very much were wrong. In mid-March, however, an MRI detected that the lymphoma had migrated to her brain and spinal cord. Doctors inserted a tube in her brain to administer powerful anti-cancer drugs, but at length the lymphoma proved to be unconquerable.

Maurice Tempelsman, who had established a temporary office in Jackie’s apartment, remained with her throughout, pressing her hand, stroking her cheek, whispering to her. On Sunday, May 15, he accompanied Jackie on one last visit to Central Park, though she had become exceedingly fragile and could hardly go any distance before she had to be guided back to her residence. The following day Jackie grew disoriented as she lapsed into a fit of shaking chills. Tempelsman brought her to New York Hospital–Cornell Medical Center, where tests found large amounts of the lymphoma in her liver. Jackie, when she learned that the doctors had nothing more to offer, chose to go home to die.

Jackie was in her own bedroom—the same where she had received the news of Bobby Kennedy’s shooting—when her life ended on Thursday evening, May 19. Tempelsman and both of her children were with her at the time. The next day, thirty-three-year-old JFK Jr., reverting to a theme that had often preoccupied his mother in her various endeavors, highlighted the degree of control she had at least exerted over the circumstances of her passing. “She did it in her own way and in her own terms,” John told reporters gathered in front of the apartment house, “and we all feel lucky for that.”

Three days later, crowds watched from behind police barricades along Park Avenue as Jackie’s coffin, which was covered with ferns and a cross of white lilies of the valley, was carried into the limestone nineteenth-century St. Ignatius Loyola Church. At the service, which was attended by some one thousand invited guests, JFK Jr. read from the prophet Isaiah, and Caroline and Maurice recited poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay and C. P. Cavafy, respectively. Not a few attendees took note that the eulogy, delivered by Teddy Kennedy, involved an instant rewrite of history, as there was not a single mention of Jackie’s controversial second marriage. After the funeral Mass, her body was flown by chartered jet to National Airport in Washington. President Clinton was waiting when the aircraft landed, and he accompanied the family to Arlington National Cemetery, where Jackie was to be buried alongside JFK.

Caroline had asked the eighty-one-year-old Archbishop Philip Hannan, whom her mother had designated to deliver the eulogy for President Kennedy at St. Matthew’s in Washington in 1963, to preside over Jackie’s burial. At the time of the marriage to Aristotle Onassis, the priest had been severely critical of Jackie’s decision to enter into a union that he regarded as one “of convenience,” so he was at once surprised and delighted by Caroline’s summons. His violet zucchetto and robe, along with the peach-hued lapels of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s black suit, provided the sole jolts of color amid the black-attired funeral procession, which accompanied the coffin from the hearse to the hillside burial site overlooking the Potomac River. “O, God,” Archbishop Hannan intoned, “you are our promised home. Lead your servant Jacqueline to that home bright with the presence of your everlasting life and love, there to join the other members of the family.”

In 1963, this same priest had secretly come to Arlington Cemetery at Jackie’s request to reinter the two tiny white coffins that held the remains of Arabella and Patrick. That night, so soon after Dallas, Jackie, who was then still in residence at the White House, had bombarded him with questions about the suddenness and senselessness of her husband’s death, but also with her concerns about the unwanted role that had already been thrust upon her by an anguished American populace that, in her view, regarded her less as a woman than as a symbol of its own pain. She had spoken, too, of her uncomfortable sense that henceforward she was destined to have to bear the weight of popular opinion, the public’s shifting, not always favorable, feelings about her.

And so, at length, it had occurred. Because of the disparity between Jackie’s needs and those of the society in which she lived, she went from being idealized to stigmatized. A dozen years would pass before she began in earnest the long, slow, painful, not always linear and logical process of resolution and recovery. As she sought empowerment through her publishing career and landmarks-preservation advocacy; as she acquired acreage and built a new home; as she faced her fears by participating in the last Kennedy brother’s campaign for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination; as she enjoyed her “vengeance on the world” due to her children’s successes; as she managed to connect again with political Washington through the vehicle of the Clintons—Jackie had been healing, however imperfectly and incompletely, before the nation’s eyes.

And then suddenly, she was gone.

In the aftermath of JFK’s funeral, Jackie had voiced resentment to Archbishop Hannan about the many people who had praised her bearing during the ceremonies. Again, at the time of her own death, many were the tributes, published and spoken, to the manner in which she had comported herself, both in 1963 and in the decades that followed. Edited out were the messy, disquieting, enigmatic parts of the picture—the quintessentially human story of one woman’s thirty-one-year struggle with the memory of horrific events that her countrymen had long been impatient to banish from consciousness. In a sense, during this period of national commemoration and remembrance of the life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, they at last found it possible to forget.

When the old priest had finished his prayer, the bells at Washington’s National Cathedral, across the river, tolled sixty-four times, once for each year Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had lived. Caroline thereupon placed a white flower on her mother’s casket, and both she and John kissed the mahogany surface. After Caroline left to join her husband, John lingered to kneel at and touch the graves of his father and the babies.

SOURCE NOTES

The page numbers for the notes that appeared in the print version of this title are not in your e-book. Please use the search function on your e-reading device to search for the relevant passages documented or discussed.

One

recounted the episode: Jackie to Woodley, n.d., Hantman’s Auctioneers.

petrified: Ibid.

In the aftermath: John H. Davis,
Jacqueline Bouvier: An Intimate Memoir
(New York: Wiley, 1996).

“devastatingly witty”: Jackie to Woodley, n.d., Hantman’s Auctioneers.

agony: Ibid.

“all physical:” Ibid.

She acknowledged: Ibid.

said she would love it: Ibid.

While Bev’s letters: Ibid.

prison: Jackie to Bev, n.d., Christie’s.

“If schooldays…”: Ibid.

Sarah Porter: Nancy Davis and Barbara Donahue,
Miss Porter’s School
(Farmington, Conn.: Northeast Graphics, 1992).

Harvard-Yale game: Jackie to Woodley, n.d., Hantman’s Auctioneers.

“the most beautiful…”: Kathleen Bouvier,
Black Jack Bouvier: The Life and Times of Jackie O’s Father
(New York: Pinnacle, 1999).

Jackie’s first husband would laugh: Betty Coxe Spalding, author interview.

“a most devastating…”: Bill Adler,
The Uncommon Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words
(Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel, 1994).

cartoonish dirty old man: Puffin Gates quoted in Sarah Bradford,
America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
(New York: Viking, 2000).

she had confessed: Jackie to Woodley, n.d., Hantman’s Auctioneers.

blazing away: Ibid.

It struck her: Ibid.

solemnly advised: Ibid.

a huge lonely place: Jackie to Bev, n.d., Christie’s.

“I do love…”: Ibid.

“I do think…”: Ibid.

“I’ve always…”: Jackie to Bev, January 20, 1946, Christie’s.

“that goddamn Vassar”: Davis,
Jacqueline Bouvier
.

“round out”: Mark Pottle, ed.,
Daring to Hope: The Diaries and Letters of Voilet Bonham Carter, 1946–1969
(London: Orion, 2002).

“Not because of…”: Adler,
Uncommon Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
.

Most were in: Louis Auchincloss, author interview.

“I didn’t know…”: Adler,
Uncommon Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
.

“like the maid…”: Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer,
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
(Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1961).

“As to physical…”: Ibid.

“Shall we go…”: Charles Bartlett, interview, John F. Kennedy Library.

“little girls”: Frank Waldrop, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“hang around”: Ibid.

“What I hope…”: Jackie to Bev., n.d., Christie’s.

seemed to clarify: Louis Auchincloss, author interview.

“spunk”: Louis Auchincloss,
Sybil
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1951).

“the assembled tribe”: Ibid.

“Oh, you’ve written…”: Louis Auchincloss, author interview.

“That’s it.…”: Ibid.

Two

during Christmas: Frank Waldrop, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“Hell, there’s…” Ibid.

John White: Author background interviews with Betty Coxe Spalding, Elizabeth Cavendish, Richard Holderness.

The Front Page
: John White, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

favorite daughter: Rose Kennedy to Nancy Astor, June 14, 1948, University of Reading.

“It is a…”: Lynne McTaggert,
Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times
(New York: Doubleday, 1983).

“came at”: John White, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“winsome”: Ibid.

“fadeaway”: Ibid.

“kooky”: William Walton, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“insipid”: John Husted quoted in Kitty Kelley,
Jackie Oh!
(Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, 1978).

“just a glimpse…”: William Walton, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

no one had been closer: Jean Lloyd, author interview.

“comfortably close”: John White, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“the charm that makes…”: Inga Arvad, unpublished memoir.

“I wouldn’t trust…”: John White, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

Patsy Field assumed: Patsy Field, interview, Massachusetts Historical Society.

“drivel … It doesn’t mean a thing”: Quoted in Kelley,
Jackie Oh!

Joseph Alsop: Author background interviews with Deborah Devonshire, Betty Coxe Spalding, Elizabeth Cavendish, Nicholas Henderson.

“one of the most enchanting…”: Joseph Alsop,
I’ve Seen the Best of It: Memoirs
(New York: Norton, 1992).

“ornamental”: Ibid.

believed she was the one to change him: Jane Suydam, author interview.

“pathetic”:
Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy
(New York: Hyperion, 2011).

“vulnerable”: Ibid.

a man could retire: John P. Mallan, “Massachusetts: Liberal and Corrupt,”
New Republic
, October 13, 1952.

“He has got to…”: Dorothy Schiff’s notes quoted in Jeffrey Potter,
Men, Money & Magic: The Story of Dorothy Schiff
(New York: Coward, McCann, 1976).

“won’t leave me alone!”: Deborah Devonshire, author interview.

Janet had begun to worry: Janet Auchincloss, interview, John F. Kennedy Library.

Jackie indignantly refused: Ibid.

“Very few people…”: Jacqueline Bouvier to Rose Kennedy, June 29, 1953, in Amanda Smith, ed.,
Hostage to Fortune: The Letters of Joseph P. Kennedy
(New York: Viking, 2001).