Just Jackie (12 page)

B
y now, the moon had disappeared behind the clouds, casting Half Moon Bay into complete darkness. Bobby got up from his chair on Bunny Mellon’s terrace and disappeared without a word. Soon the strains of “The Days of Wine and Roses” could be heard once again coming from inside the house.

Chuck Spalding handed Lee her fourth daiquiri. When she drank a lot, there was no telling what Lee might say.

“I’ve just bought a co-op at 969 Fifth Avenue,” she said after a long sip. “And I’ve been trying to convince Jackie that she should leave Washington and buy an apartment in New York, too. That way, we can live close to each other”—she paused, took another long, slow sip, then added—“after I marry Ari.”

There was silence.

Then Stas, who was the intended target of his wife’s remark, chimed in. “But, my dear, what makes you so certain that Ari wants to marry
you?”

“I’m certain that Ari will be more than happy to help us in any way that he can,” Lee said.

Jackie suspected that Lee was living in a dreamworld when it came to Aristotle Onassis. Most of the published accounts of Lee’s romance with the Greek shipowner had been generated by Ari’s own London-based public-relations consultant, a young New Zealander by the name of Nigel Neilson. Neilson placed articles on Onassis in the better newspapers in England and America, and he
kept his employer’s name linked to personalities like Winston Churchill, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Cary Grant, and King Farouk of Egypt.

Onassis’s affairs with some of the world’s most desirable women were all part of this publicity machine. Like Donald Trump in years to come, Onassis had a natural talent for feeding the public’s fantasies about his life as a libertine. Onassis believed that the public liked a man who lived on a large scale, with large appetites and large loves. He projected an image of potency: powerful in bed, and in the larger world. It was his way of impressing his bankers and customers, and making himself a brand name.

But Onassis was a narcissist, and his interest in women was essentially a reflection of his interest in himself. As he told friends, he loved women—plural—but found it hard to love any one of them in particular. And that included Lee. He had never broached the subject of marriage to Lee.

“There is an affinity between us,” he said of his relationship with Lee. “No more than a friendship.”

AN UNERRING
SENSE OF
STARDOM

April 1964–October 1965

A
t a few minutes before noon on April 7, 1964, the day after Jackie returned from Antigua, she slid open the mahogany doors in the living room of her Georgetown house, and made a grand, sweeping entrance.

“Mr. Manchester!” she exclaimed.

William Manchester, the tall, pipe-smoking Wesleyan University history professor, whom she had chosen to write the authorized version of Jack’s assassination, bolted from his seat. He stared at Jackie as though he could not believe his eyes. She was dressed in a black jersey top and yellow stretch pants.

“She was beaming at me,” Manchester recalled years later, “and I thought how, at thirty-four, with her camellia beauty, she might have been taken for a woman in her mid-twenties. My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great tragic actress.

“I mean that in the finest sense of the word,” he continued. “There was a weekend in American history when we needed to be united in our sadness by the superb example of a bereaved First Lady, and Jacqueline Kennedy—unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, a more extraordinary woman in other ways—provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s heroine.

“One reason for this triumph was that her instincts were completely feminine. If she met your plane at the Hyannis airport, she automatically handed you the keys to her convertible. Men drive, women are driven: that
was the logic of things to her, and it is impossible to think of her burning a bra or denouncing romantic love as counterrevolutionary.”

Jackie motioned for Manchester to sit down, then asked, “Are you just going to put down all the facts, who ate what for breakfast and all that, or are you going to put yourself in the book, too?”

“I can’t very well keep myself out of the book,” Manchester replied.

“Good,” said Jackie.

She offered to pour him a daiquiri from an icy pitcher, then took a nearby chair.

“Future historians may be puzzled by odd clunking noises on the tapes,” Manchester noted. “They were ice cubes. The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid of great containers of daiquiris.”

Over the next several hours, Jackie got quite drunk, and proceeded to pour out her heart.

She described how in Fort Worth, on the eve of the assassination, she had slipped into her husband’s bed, and aroused him from his fatigue, and made love to him for the last time….

She described sitting at a dressing table, looking for lines in her face, and musing about the tall Dallas blondes who had caught her husband’s eye….

She told Manchester all the “gruesome stuff”—about Jack’s brains, and the way he looked on the table in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas….

She told him how she had spent the night of her husband’s death alone in bed at the White House, writhing and tossing while under sedation from large doses of the tranquilizer Amytal….

She described for him the sounds of Caroline crying when she heard the news of her father’s death….

She reconstructed a scene in the limousine on the way to Arlington National Cemetery, when Bobby looked down at young John and said, “You’ve got those sissy
white gloves on—take them off,” but Jackie made her son keep them on….

“I had carefully put the Wollensak recorder where I would see it and she wouldn’t,” Manchester wrote. “I didn’t want her to worry about the machine. Also, I had to be sure that the little light on it was winking, that the reels were turning, and all this wasn’t being lost.

“It was a good plan,” he went on. “Its defect was revealed to me when she took the wrong chair. Then the only way I could check the light was by hunching up. It was an odd movement; I needed an excuse for it. A cigarette box on a low table provided one. Before that evening, I hadn’t smoked for two years. At the end of it I was puffing away, and eight more years would pass before I would quit again.”

Manchester was deeply moved by Jackie’s candor. Like Teddy White five months earlier, he realized that he was hearing more than he had bargained for. And he, too, felt an obligation to protect her. He worked out a hand signal that she could use when she wanted him to turn off his Wollensak recorder. But she seldom resorted to using the signal.

“It is true that she … withheld nothing during our interviews,” he wrote. “It is also true that none of that sensitive material found its way into any draft of the book.”

Manchester protected Jackie out of a tender regard for her feelings, as well as out of his deep respect for her dead husband.

“I couldn’t disdain Kennedy,” he said. “He was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write. I never dreamed that one day I would write his obituary—the longest presidential obituary in history, and, in the end, the most controversial.”

O
ne fine fall day in September, Bobby entered the lobby of 1040 Fifth Avenue, Jackie’s new home in New York City. Her building was one of those massive limestone palaces that had been designed by Rosario Candela, the leading apartment architect of the 1920s, who had also done 740 Park Avenue, where Jackie had lived as a child.

Bobby stopped to speak with Clint Hill, who had stationed himself inconspicuously in the back of the lobby. Hill seemed confused and distracted. Unnerved by the agent’s appearance, Bobby got into the elevator and ascended to Jackie’s apartment.

He stepped off on the fourteenth floor, directly into Jackie’s foyer. A black-and-white marble floor led him into a large rectangular gallery, which served as the hub of the fifteen-room apartment. He went into the living room, a square room with a Palladian sense of light and serenity, and stood at one of the tall French windows and looked out over a spectacular view of Central Park and the reservoir.

Jackie had found the co-op by scouring the real-estate market with Nancy Tuckerman, her old roommate from Miss Porter’s School, who had served briefly as her social secretary in the White House after Letitia Baldrige had left. Whenever they inspected the available New York co-ops together, Nancy dressed up, pretending that
she was a rich matron, while Jackie disguised herself as a British nanny.

Upon finding the apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, Jackie had called Andre Meyer, the senior partner of the investment banking firm Lazard Frères and a brilliant spinner of fortunes. Jackie had come to depend on the gnome-like French banker, who enjoyed playing the role of father confessor to beautiful women who were not too sure of themselves.

“It’s perfect,” she told Meyer, “and if you think it’s a good investment, I’ll buy it.”

Meyer looked over the apartment, which was conveniently located near the best private schools, and only a few blocks away from the apartments of Bobby and Lee, and pronounced the $200,000 asking price a fair one.

After Jackie bought the apartment, she turned to her friend Bunny Mellon for advice on decorating it. Bunny favored light, airy French furniture, sophisticated subtlety, and comfort. Nothing must be gold, nothing dark, nothing frilly. Everything had to be “undercooked.”

To achieve that look, Jackie once again hired the designer Billy Baldwin, who had not had time to finish her N Street house before she left Washington. In Jackie’s New York living room, Baldwin used the Louis XVI bureau on which President Kennedy had signed the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963, and her father’s ormolu-mounted Empire fall-front desk. He hung John Fowler curtains over the tall windows and placed Jackie’s collection of animal drawings and Indian miniature paintings on the walls. On a commode, he displayed Jackie’s most treasured possession, an ancient Hellenistic alabaster head of a woman. The result was pure Bunny: rarified luxury without a hint of vulgarity.

“The day Jackie moved into the apartment,” Nancy Tuckerman recalled, “we spent the day unpacking, emptying cartons, putting books in bookcases. Around eight o’clock in the evening, the doorbell rang, and Jackie, in
her blue jeans and looking quite disheveled, opened the door. There stood two distinguished-looking couples in full evening attire. When they recognized Jackie, they were taken aback. They said they were expected for dinner at Mrs. Whitehouse’s. It turned out that the elevator man, unnerved by the mere thought of Jackie’s presence in the building, was unable to associate the name White-house with anyone or anything but her.”

Bobby wandered through the sprawling apartment, looking for Jackie. He passed Caroline’s bedroom, and caught a glimpse of the little girl through the half-open door. She was cutting pictures of her father out of a magazine and sticking them on the wall.