Just Jackie (49 page)

“She was obviously not looking terribly well, but she was in a wonderful mood, and we were having a good
time. And at the end of lunch, the usual four or five desserts appeared, covering the whole table.

“And she said, ‘You start that one. I’m going to start this one.’

“And she actually started to eat this dessert. And I thought, Well, that’s remarkable.

“So I said, ’You’re not going to finish that, are you? I’m going to have the waiter take this away right this minute.”

“She said, If anyone tries to touch one of those, I’m going to stab them in the hand with my fork. I’m going to eat every single one of them.”

“And she did. We sat there and plowed through every single dessert on the table. It was astonishing, but it was also terrifying, because it was like she had decided that this was not going to work out, and so why not eat all the desserts on the table. She might as well eat everything if she wanted to.”

On April 13, Jackie had lunch at Carly Simon’s sprawling apartment on Central Park West. Carly invited three of Jackie’s friends: Joe Armstrong, the publisher; Peter Duchin, the band leader; and Duchin’s wife, Brooke Hayward. As an added attraction, she invited the talented documentary maker Ken Burns, who was in the process of editing his Public Broadcasting System series on the history of baseball. Carly was featured on Burns’s sound track singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Jackie was fascinated by Burns’s project, and she asked him a lot of questions. But he could only stay for a part of the lunch. After he left, someone asked Jackie how she was feeling.

“Only four more weeks and I’ll get my life back,” Jackie said, referring to what she expected to be the last course of radiation treatment. “But,” she added, reverting to the third person, “one does not look forward to a summer on the Vineyard with a bad wig.”

Someone else then asked Jackie about her sister Lee.

“She stopped by for tea,” Jackie said.

“Do you see her often?”

“We’ve only seen each other once this whole year,” Jackie said. “I guess she called me so she could say that she saw me. I never could understand why Lee is so full of animosity.”

On Jackie’s way out, Carly handed her a big folded piece of paper.

“I wanted to give this to you,” Carly said. “I wrote this for you.”

It was the lyrics to a new song called “Touched by the Sun.”

The next day, Jackie collapsed with a perforated ulcer in her stomach, a complication of the steroid therapy. She was rushed to the hospital, where surgeons sewed up the hole.

When she came out of the hospital, her whole mental outlook had changed. She now seemed prepared for the
worst. She reviewed her living will, which stated that doctors were not to use aggressive medical treatment to keep her alive if her condition was hopeless. She had one final discussion with her attorney Alexander Forger about her last will and testament, in which she left the bulk of her estate to her two children, and asked that they help maintain in death the privacy that she so fiercely guarded while alive. She went through the books in her library, picking out a few as gifts for friends and her doctors. And she summoned Nancy Tuckerman to her apartment.

A roaring blaze was going in the fireplace when Nancy entered the library. Jackie was sitting before the fire, an astrakhan thrown over her lap. On the table beside her were bunches of letters, all neatly bound with ribbons. These were letters that Jackie had received from famous people over the years.

Jackie unbound the letters, and read some of them to Nancy. Then, when she was finished, she tied them together again with the ribbon, and tossed them into the crackling fire.

“C
aroline says you should come over now.”

The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Marta Sgubin, the Italian housekeeper who had worked for Jackie for twenty-five years. Marta was calling Carly Simon, and she did not have to explain the reason for her urgent tone of voice.

Three days before, on Monday, May 16, Jackie had
developed shaking chills, and had become disoriented. She was admitted to the New York Hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia. The doctors told her that the cancer had spread to her liver and throughout the rest of her body.

“Let’s try more chemotherapy,” Dr. Anne Moore said.

“No,” Jackie said, “I want to go home to die.”

On Wednesday, she discharged herself from the hospital and returned to 1040 Fifth Avenue.

As soon as Carly Simon got the call on Thursday from Marta, she and Jackie’s other great friend, Joe Armstrong, headed over to Jackie’s building. There were thousands of people out on the street on Fifth Avenue, throngs, some hysterical, newsmen and ordinary people. The police were taken by surprise, and they did not have their barricades up, and people spilled off the sidewalks on both sides of Fifth Avenue into the street.

Traffic was brought to a virtual standstill. Rubberneckers were trying to see what was going on. TV was capturing the whole thing via huge satellite transmitters on the tops of trucks, and beaming it around the world.

Upstairs in Jackie’s apartment, John Kennedy Jr., dressed in an impeccably tailored navy-blue suit, greeted those who had been summoned to say a last farewell to his mother. In the front hall, Caroline was sitting on a bench and softly crying. Her husband Ed Schlossberg was by her side, consoling her. In the library and roaming around the apartment were family members—Lawfords, Kennedys, and Shrivers. The guests could hear a Gregorian chant dimly coming from Jackie’s bedroom.

Members of the family and a few close friends were led singly back to Jackie’s bedroom, which was done in coral and peach tones, and had a fabric canopy over the bed. Except for Maurice Tempelsman and John and some other male members of the family, only women were being allowed in the bedroom. One of Jackie’s last wishes
had been that none but a few women friends outside the family be permitted to see her at her time of dying.

As Carly Simon entered the room, Bunny Mellon was sitting on a chair by the bed holding Jackie’s hand. No one in the room seemed to be as comfortable with what was going on as Bunny. She was in her spiritual element. She had a smile of acceptance and serenity.

“You sit with her now,” Bunny said to Carly.

Carly exchanged places with Bunny, and looked at Jackie.

Jackie was unconscious. She had a print scarf over her head. She was under the sheets. There was an intravenous needle in her arm, which may have been carrying morphine. There was an attempt to keep her comfortable, but there was no sense that she was taking her own life, that this was some kind of assisted suicide. There did not seem to be any rush. A visitor had the sense that Jackie was art-directing these last moments of her life in her own very dignified way.

In repose, her face was completely smooth and translucent. Her mouth was slightly open, and there was the sound of a delicate exhalation. As the Gregorian chants continued to play, various members of the family filtered in and out of the room. Everybody was talking in hushed tones.

Carly felt privileged that the family had allowed her to be in the room with Jackie. She spoke to Jackie in a low and comforting voice, telling her how much she loved her. Maurice stood at the end of the bed, observing. Bunny, not far away on a settee, was praying.

“During the time I was sitting with Jackie and holding her hand,” Carly later told a friend, “I felt as though I had a direct communication with her—an experience that was deep, personal, and untainted by self-consciousness. And as I opened the door and left the room, and walked through the halls, and said good-bye to the family members, I started crying.”

Outside on Fifth Avenue, Carly and Joe Armstrong were assaulted by the lights of a hundred cameras. The crowds had grown even larger on the street, and it was impossible not to feel the sudden shift from the personal to the public. It was a sensation that Jackie’s friends had experienced many times before—that whether she liked it or not, she was part of history. And as Carly and Joe disappeared into the throngs of Fifth Avenue, it seemed to them that once again Jackie was being taken over by the world.

The description of Theodore H. White’s trip to Hyannis Port, his heavy drinking, his telephone calls to his mother’s doctor, his thoughts upon seeing John F. Kennedy’s widow, and his “Camelot” interview with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy for
Life
magazine are drawn from a variety of primary sources, including the author’s own notes of a lengthy discussion that he had with White in 1985 about that famous interview.

In addition, Ralph Graves, assistant managing editor of
Life
in 1963, provided much corroborating material. In particular, Graves recounted for the author a discussion that he had with White many years after the “Camelot” interview about some of the unpublished details, including the fact that Jackie caressed the dead President’s penis in Trauma Room No. 1 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. David Maness,
Life’s
articles editor, is the source for the description of the telephone call that White placed to
Life
from Hyannis Port.

Further documentation for the missing portions of the “Camelot” interview came from Joan Braden, who learned during her interview for the John F. Kennedy Library’s oral history project with Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, that Jackie was menstruating on the day of the assassination. That section of Mrs. Auchincloss’s interview has been suppressed by the Kennedy Library. The fact that Jack and Jackie slept together the night before the assassination is contained in William Manchester’s tapes for
The Death of a President
(Harper & Row, 1967), according to Don Congdon, William Manchester’s literary agent. Those tapes, which Manchester donated to the Kennedy Library, will not be available to the public until 2063.

Other details of the “Camelot” interview are taken from White’s handwritten notes of his interview with Jackie. White donated these notes, known as the “Camelot Documents,” to the Kennedy Library in 1969, but they were not available to researchers until May 1995, one year after Jackie’s death.

Books that were used in this section include Theodore White’s autobiography,
In Search of History
(Warner Books, 1978), and Joyce Hoffman’s
Theodore H. White and Journalism as Illusion
(University of Missouri
Press, 1995), which aided the author in his understanding of the Camelot myth and the ways in which Theodore White and Jackie collaborated in creating it.

The author conducted interviews with Theodore White’s former wife, Nancy Hechtor, and his children, David and Hay den.

Descriptions of the weather in New York and Hyannis on November 29, 1963, were drawn from
The New York Times
, November 30, 1963.

The account of Jackie’s Thanksgiving weekend in Hyannis Port, and how she coped with Caroline’s reaction to her father’s death, are drawn from several published sources: Rita Dallas’s
The Kennedy Case
(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973), a memoir written with Jeanira Ratcliffe by the head nurse to Joseph P. Kennedy during the last eight years of his life; Robert Curran’s
The Kennedy Women
(Lancer Books, 1964); Lester David’s
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
(Birch Lane Press, 1994); C. David Heymann’s
A Woman Named Jackie
(Lyle Stuart, 1989); and Marianne Means’s
The Woman in the White House
(Random House, 1963).

Caroline’s first words are quoted in
A Life in Pictures: Remembering Jackie {Life
, special commemorative edition, July 15, 1994).