Just Jackie (18 page)

But for the first time since the assassination, Jackie was too preoccupied with her own life to pay much attention to her children.

“Do I have your permission to have Jack Warnecke land a helicopter on the grounds to take me out from time to time?” Jackie asked Mrs. Kaiser one night.

“Of course,” said Mrs. Kaiser.

However, when Mrs. Kaiser informed her husband about this new arrangement, she expressed concern that Warnecke, who had the reputation of being a ladies’ man, was not the most appropriate escort for the President’s widow. Perhaps, Mrs. Kaiser suggested to her husband, someone should tell Bobby Kennedy.

Henry Kaiser and the Kennedys got on well. A progressive businessman who treated his workers fairly, Kaiser had pleased the Kennedys by keeping the Kaiser Steel Corporation operating during the steel industry crisis in 1962.

Henry Kaiser called Bobby and told him what was going on between Jackie and Warnecke. As soon as Bobby hung up, he called Jackie.

“Bobby was trying to kill off a possible marriage to Warnecke,” according to Richard Goodwin. “He knew that’s what Jackie was contemplating, and he did not approve of it. I don’t know why he felt that way, but obviously he thought Warnecke wasn’t the right guy.”

Warnecke’s chartered helicopter touched down on the front lawn of the Kaisers’ main house. He reached out a
hand and pulled Jackie on board. Moments later, they lifted off and disappeared into a perfect blue sky. Jackie’s infuriated Secret Service men were left behind.

That day they visited Maui, where they lunched at Lahaina’s Pioneer Inn. Another time, they hopped over to the island of Hawaii, which was sometimes called the Big Island, where they enjoyed the privacy of Laurance Rockefeller’s guest cottage on the Parker Ranch. Once, they went trekking in the mountains of Kauai, where they hunted goats and wild boar.

“Sometimes we would just go off alone to a remote beach and swim,” Warnecke said. “We had endless conversations about JFK. His memory was the thing that had bound us together in the first place. The John F. Kennedy Memorial Grave was nearing completion. I knew that despite the monument, his reputation wasn’t inviolable. Stories about his womanizing would be coming out sooner or later.

“I told Jackie about some of those stories involving Jack and other women. I did it so she wouldn’t be shocked when she read about them later. She was prepared for the worst when it came.

“I told her stories about my own personal experiences with women, too,” he went on. “One story took place when I was in Thailand, designing the American embassy, and one of my Harvard classmates, a Thai, invited me to dinner at his home in the mountains of northern Thailand. At dinner I was told that I would be given twelve beautiful women for dessert, and that I could choose any of them I desired.

“ ‘Oh,’ Jackie said, ‘to think you had your choice!’

“And I said, ‘Well, it was all very proper. It was arranged by the family. After all, I had to be polite.’

“She loved that, and broke into gales of laughter.

“She teased me with her own stories, except that she didn’t have many sexual experiences to talk about. She told me about her first love, John Marquand Jr., the son
of the famous novelist, whom she had met during her junior year abroad in Paris.

“ ‘Were you seduced by Marquand before you married Jack?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Well, just let’s say I came very close,’ she said.

“I thought maybe she said ‘very close’ because she couldn’t bring herself to admit to me that she had gone all the way when she was so young.

“And we talked about getting married. I had a beautiful five-bedroom house on Black Point off Diamond Head Road. Jackie decided that a room off the living room, a nice soft den, needed remodeling. She did a watercolor-and-ink sketch, and set to work redecorating the room with fabric. She did the whole thing in no time flat. But we talked about starting out fresh, and buying another house after we got married.

“ ‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if we could live in a house on a hill overlooking the harbor?’

“I was a good Presbyterian with a grandmother who had been a Christian Science practitioner, but Jackie was pleased when she found out that I could not remember having been baptized as a child. She thought I could be baptized as a Catholic. She was exultant over the idea.

“ ‘I’m going to turn you into a Catholic to make you more suitable as a husband,’ she said.

“All this time, the Secret Service guys were looking after the kids, and leaving Jackie and me pretty much alone. Our summer together in Hawaii was a fairy tale.”

When it was time for Jackie to return to the mainland, she wrote a farewell thank-you letter to the editors of the
Honolulu Advertiser
and the
Star-Bulletin
.

But as she prepared to leave Hawaii, Jackie had to face some hard questions. Did she truly want to be unwatched and unnoticed, and pull a disappearing act like Greta Garbo? And even if she could somehow vanish from public view, would she be satisfied by such a life?

She was less sure of the answers to these questions than she sounded in her letter to the editors. No one, perhaps not even Jackie herself, knew exactly what was in her heart. But before she left Hawaii she had a conversation with Mrs. Kaiser in which she alluded to her future.

“My mother told me later about that conversation,” said Michael Kaiser. “Jackie made it clear to my mother that she had no present intention of marrying Jack Warnecke.”

Of course, Warnecke did not know that.

“Before she left,” Warnecke said, “I told her that my goal was to get her back to a normal life. A private life, not a public one. I wanted to let her be her own person. Away from the press. Away from prying eyes. Away from all that pressure. And I was a little surprised by her response.

“ ‘One of the biggest forces of all between two human beings is the search for power,’ she told me. Tower is a strong force and motivation in people. I don’t want to wield power myself, but I’ve observed that the ultimate motive in humankind is power.’ ”

TARNISHED
HALO

July 1966–August 1967

S
oon after Jackie returned from Hawaii, she learned that
Look
magazine had bought the serial rights to William Manchester’s book,
The Death of a President
, for the astounding sum of $665,000. It was the biggest deal in magazine history (the equivalent in today’s money of more than $5 million). Jackie did not think that Manchester had any right to profit so obscenely from her husband’s murder.

It was not only the money that bothered Jackie. She and Bobby had enlisted the editorial help of several old Kennedy friends: Edward Guthman of the Los Angeles
Times
, John Siegenthaler of the Nashville
Tennessean
, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, former JFK speech-writer Theodore Sorensen, and Jackie’s private secretary, Pamela Turnure. When these proxies came back with scores of suggested revisions to the manuscript, Manchester balked. He refused to make many of the changes. Now, to make matters even worse, he had sold his unacceptable text to a popular weekly magazine.

Who was going to choose the excerpts that ran in
Look!
Jackie asked. And what about the photographs? The art director in Jackie always thought in terms of packages—visuals and text together.

The trouble was, Bobby had already approved both the publication of the book and the
Look
serialization. In a telegram that he had sent to Manchester, Bobby promised:

Jackie did not care what promises her brother-in-law had made. She wanted
Look
to cancel the serialization. In late August, she summoned Mike Cowles, the chairman of the board of the media company that owned
Look
, to Hyannis Port.

Cowles arrived the next day with his lawyer Jack Harding at his side. To their surprise, Jackie was there to greet them at the small airport. She was wearing a pretty smile and a Pucci dress.

They drove to the Kennedy compound, where she served them iced tea and sandwiches and took them on a tour of her house. Then she, Bobby, and her attorney Simon Rifkind, whose law firm was one of the most prestigious in New York, got down to serious business.

“Bobby doesn’t represent me,” Jackie explained to Mike Cowles. “He sort of protects me.”

Jack Harding, Cowles’s attorney, pointed out that
Look
had paid $665,000 for the serial rights.

“If it’s money, I’ll pay you a million,” Jackie said.

No, no, said Harding, it was not just the money.
Look
wanted to excerpt the book because it was an important historical document.

It was a huge mistake for Harding to lecture Jackie Kennedy about history.

“You’re sitting in the chair my late husband sat in,” she said. “I will demand that publication of both the book and the serialization be stopped.”

“No,” Bobby interjected, “not the
book.”

Jackie turned to Mike Cowles and demanded to know: “Are you going to serialize?”

“First, let me ask a question,” Cowles replied. “I sense an undercurrent of feeling that
Look
didn’t act in good faith.”

“Look
acted in good faith,” Bobby conceded.

“Well, then, yes, Mrs. Kennedy,” Cowles said, “we will publish.”

No one had dared to say no to Jackie in a very long time. She exploded in a fit of anger.

“You’re a son of a bitch!” she told Cowles. “And a bastard! You can’t do this!”

The men sitting around the table stared at her, aghast.

“She became quite hysterical and violent, verbally violent,” said William Attwood,
Look’s
editor in chief, “to the point that Mike Cowles came back [to New York] a little amazed that the great lady of the funeral and all that could talk just that way. …

“I agreed that [Manchester’s] prose was very purple,” Attwood continued, “and we all decided that the [series] could easily have been trimmed down…. But Manchester is a very baroque writer, and he loves to describe the color of the brains on the lapels, that sort of thing. And so, nevertheless, this is what
he
wanted.

“We were caught between two rather neurotic people—Manchester, who is subject to fits of depression, and exhilaration, and all that… and Mrs. Kennedy, who had by this time become really out of control.”

D
esperate now, Jackie turned for help to Richard Goodwin, JFK’s old speechwriter and political jack-of-all-trades. With his craggy face, hirsute appearance,
and slightly slurred speech, Goodwin reminded some people of a man with a perpetual hangover. But he was one of those brilliant Renaissance men who seemed to know everything and have friends everywhere—in politics, academia, the arts, publishing, medicine, and business.