Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  She pedaled up a long, meandering gravel road, which passed over a creek, and came to a large forecourt in front of a cluster of three gray-shingled, white-trimmed buildings. Off to the side, there was a tall osprey pole for nesting that had been erected by Gus Ben David, director of the Audubon sanctuary at nearby Felix Neck. On the path leading to the main house, one of Jackie’s grandchildren had abandoned an old red wagon.

  The breathtaking wetlands site had once belonged to the Hornblower family of the Hornblower & Weeks stock exchange firm. In the late 1970s, Robert McNamara and a group of friends, including Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, put together a syndicate to buy the property, but before they could close on it, some local Wampanoag Indians complained that part of the land was the sacred burial ground of Chief Moshup and his wife Squant. McNamara tried to settle the legal dispute, but while he dithered with the Indians, Jackie came along in the person of her attorney Alexander Forger and stole the land from under McNamara’s nose.

  Jackie took the Indians to court and eventually won the legal battle. However, her well-publicized victory inflicted some damage to her reputation as a dedicated preservationist. The property, which was assembled by Forger piece by piece over a period of years for about $3.5 million, constituted 464 acres, one third of the entire town of Gay Head. By the early 1990s, it was estimated to be worth more than $25 million.

  “I worked with Jackie for two years on the purchase,” said David Flanders, the real-estate broker who sold her the land. “The first time she flew into the airport on Martha’s Vineyard, she came on Bunny Mellon’s private plane. Bunny Mellon was her chief adviser, and she and Jackie came frequently together, walking the property, looking at it from different angles. Jackie was very impressed by what Mrs. Mellon had to say.”

  Bunny not only was involved in the purchase of the land itself, she also helped Jackie select the architect, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, who designed the traditional salt-box house. Bunny showed up on weekends with Jackie to check on the progress of the construction, and to plan the landscaping. Bunny influenced the interior decor, and she lent Jackie her private jet to fly in the furniture that Jackie selected to fill the house’s nineteen rooms. And, finally, Bunny designed an apple orchard on the property. She left intentional gaps between some of the trees, explaining that she wanted it to look “as if a few old trees had died.”

  Jackie leaned her bike on its kickstand and went inside the house. Even with the door closed, she could hear the ocean roaring. She entered the living room, whose large picture window afforded a spectacular view of Squibnocket Pond and the Atlantic. Toys were strewn all over the bleached oak floor. Grandjackie, as she was called, was a permissive grandmother, and she let Caroline’s three children—Rose, Tatiana, and the baby, Jack—have free rein in the house.

  Jackie took justifiable pride in the way Caroline had turned out. Considering the snares and pitfalls of growing up a Kennedy, Caroline was amazingly well adjusted. She was thirty-six years old, and married to Edwin Schlossberg, a teddy-bearish man thirteen years her senior. Schlossberg, the scion of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, was a former acolyte of Buckminster Fuller’s and an avant-garde artist in his own right.

  “Exactly what Ed Schlossberg does,” the writer George Plimpton once confessed, “is obscure.”

  Apparently what Schlossberg did best was to look after Caroline, who had put her career as a lawyer on hold in order to take care of her children. Jackie never really warmed up to the humorless Schlossberg, who guarded Caroline as though he were her Secret Service agent, rather than her husband. But Jackie knew that Schlossberg functioned as a kind of protective screen around Caroline, who harbored a suspicious attitude toward strangers, and assumed that most people were trying to exploit her.

  “Ed has taken Caroline out of the world of publicity and made her feel as though he has saved her,” said one of Jackie’s friends.

  “When they were in the city, Caroline and Jackie saw each other a couple of times a week,” said one of Caroline’s best friends. “Being the daughter of a famous mother made it hard for Caroline to understand that her problems with her mother were the average person’s problems with their mother. On the other hand, I think that Jackie was a woman who knew that she was thin and attractive, and it may not always have been easy for her to relinquish the spotlight to her daughter. Mother-daughter relationships are always complicated, and that could really be the case when it was carried to the grandeur of this particular family.”

  Caroline’s close friend Alexandra Styron, daughter of writers William and Rose Styron, added:

  “Caroline seemed to have come into her own in the last few years. I’d never seen her happier than she was now. She looked beautiful. She was stick-thin. Her skin was glowing. She and Ed were as much in love as any married people I had ever seen. They had a very quiet social life. They went out to an occasional dinner party given by a friend. They faithfully went to see friends who were actors in plays. They stuck pretty close to home. Caroline was really an extremely unassuming, down-to-earth person.”

  The same could not be said of John Jr., who at age thirty-three had movie-star looks that were a devastating blend of the Bouviers and the Kennedys. Like his sister, John struggled to be as normal as possible, but he had to contend with the invidious comparisons that people often made between him and his famous namesake. It was not easy being the son of a man who was associated with so much power—sexual as well as political—and who still came out on top in the polls of Americans’ favorite presidents.

  When John was growing up, Jackie sent him to see Dr. Ted Becker, a well-known adolescent psychiatrist. And when it was time for him to go away to college, Jackie passed up Harvard, JFK’s alma mater, and enrolled John in Brown University, an Ivy League school that had no core requirements for graduation (John had flunked math at Andover), and where each student was allowed to design his own learning program. Brown was an innovative school. For example, the year after John arrived at Brown, Harriet Sheridan, the dean of the college, created a special program for learning-disabled students.

  After graduating from New York University Law School, John embarrassed himself (and his family) by twice failing the New York State bar exam. In the presence of friends, Jackie sought to make light of John’s failure, pointing out that he had not prepared adequately for the tough exams. In private, however, she was furious, and demanded that John hire a tutor, which he did. He passed on the third try. John also had to pay $2,300 in parking tickets to clear himself of all outstanding legal judgments in order to qualify for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.

  “Compared to his sister, John had a more open personality,” said one of Jackie’s friends. “He was more open to stimulation and to being led in wrong directions. In that regard, John was more a person after Jackie’s own heart, more a loose cannon, unpredictable. John was always leaving crazy messages on his answering machine. And he always concerned Jackie, because she was worried that he could do something that could darken the family name.”

  Jackie summed up the difference between her children this way: “Caroline is focused and dedicated. John is spread out.”

  Once, while Jackie was away on a Memorial Day weekend, John threw a wild party for sixteen friends, including actress Daryl Hannah, at his mother’s Martha’s Vineyard house. When the maid later discovered marijuana in the mess left behind by the guests, Jackie banished John to the silo section of the detached guest cottage, which was two hundred feet away from the main house.

  Jackie was less than thrilled about John’s relationship with Daryl Hannah, a spacey five-foot-ten blonde from a broken home.

  “Jackie called me one time, and asked me to look at that week’s TV section of the Sunday New York Times,” said a friend. “There was a photo of Daryl Hannah in her role as a twenty-foot-tall woman in some kind of silly science-fiction movie. It made her look like a giant amazon, or a cavewoman, and Jackie was appalled.

  “Jackie
told me that she would often stay in her bedroom and have dinner on a tray while John and Daryl were eating in the dining room,” the friend continued. “There was a lot of tension between John and Jackie. There was something in him where he just resisted any authority. He liked to play with fire. He was a pretty explosive guy. He went out and slammed doors. It was a very volatile relationship between mother and son in the last few years. She’d tell him, ‘You can’t be in acting.’ She wanted him to do something of substance, something worthwhile. She worried about him, what he would do. He had never had a job except in the district attorney’s office, and Jackie sure didn’t get his magazine idea.”

  THE MAN WHO WON ART BUCHWALD

  On Martha’s Vineyard, Jackie took care of her grandchildren one afternoon a week. She liked to play with them on the beach, tossing a Frisbee back and forth. Sometimes she would let the children play by themselves while she did her yoga exercises.

  She spent most of her evenings alone with Maurice Tempelsman and her family. Every so often, she would invite a special friend to come and visit her on the Vineyard. Joe Armstrong, the magazine publisher, spent a whole week with her one summer. Occasionally she dined with her son and friends at the Ocean Club. It was there that she met the singer-songwriter Carly Simon, who became one of her closest friends, and who wrote a series of four children’s books for Jackie at Doubleday.

  Once, when Jackie was still new to the Vineyard, and had not become quite such a loner, she agreed to go to lunch at Katharine Graham’s house. Kay felt the need to gather some interesting people to entertain Jackie, so she invited the playwright Lillian Hellman; the novelist William Styron and his wife, the poet Rose Styron; and humorist Art Buchwald.

  “Art called Kay back and asked her if she planned to organize a tennis game before lunch,” said someone who attended the lunch. “Kay inquired why Art wanted to know. Well, it just so happened that a tennis game with Art Buchwald had been auctioned off as a prize at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Boston, and Art wanted to bring along the guy who had won.

  “Naturally, Kay was cool to the idea, and said, ‘You know, Art, I’ve invited Jackie to lunch.’

  “And Art said, ‘Oh, she’ll like this guy who won me.’

  “On the morning of the lunch, Art called Kay again, and told her that the guy wanted to bring his daughter, too. The idea of Jackie facing this situation folded Kay up, but there was nothing to do but proceed. She called Jackie and told her.

  “Jackie showed up alone in her car. And at lunch, the guy who had won the tennis game with Art turned out to be atrocious. He kept bellowing at his daughter. Worse, he sat down with this dazzling array of people and acted as if it was only his just due.

  “At one point, Jackie turned to the guy and said, ‘Now tell me again. How did you win Art?’

  “And he said, ‘I won him in an auction.’

  “And you know what? Jackie thought it was funny. She was very equal to this kind of thing. She was equal to just about anything.”

  A REAL TROOPER

  “Tillie’s here!” Jackie called to Maurice as she passed his room on her way to answer the doorbell of her apartment. It was five in the afternoon, and she was wearing a pair of old black tights with holes in them. She swung open the door and greeted Tillie Weitzner, her tall, stately yoga teacher.

  They went into Caroline’s old room, whose dominant color was orange. It had been left exactly as it was when Caroline lived there before she got married. The walls were hung with fading black-and-white photos of Caroline as a young girl. Her schoolwork still filled the bookcases.

  Tillie took off her jacket and began leading Jackie through a series of yoga postures. Jackie had just maneuvered a leg around her neck when Maurice suddenly poked his head in the room, said something to Tillie in her native Dutch, then disappeared.

  “The yoga was quite intensive,” Tillie said, “and Jackie was very good. She was incredibly disciplined, and eager to do it well. We had been working out together twice a week for sixteen years, since 1977, and I used to say, ‘It’s boring—always the same.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, Tillie, it’s never boring.’

  “We worked straight for an hour, and sometimes we would talk,” Tillie continued. “Once, Jackie mentioned Onassis, and said, ‘We had a good time together. My kids had a good time. It was fun.’ She never made any negative reference to Onassis. But she felt that she had to please Jack Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, while she did not have to please Maurice Tempelsman. It was maybe the only relationship where she was totally herself.

  “The purpose of our yoga was to work out the spine and keep it flexible. Jackie was incredibly limber. She had youthful movements, and was hardly ever sick. She was stoic, not a sissy. We did yoga at times when there was no air conditioning in the room and it was one hundred degrees, and it was unbelievably uncomfortable, and she was a real trooper.

  “She was a horsewoman, which gave her strong legs. She had made several falls over the years. They could have been deadly, but she was so limber she didn’t hurt herself. We talked about old-ladyhood, and she said that the only thing she wanted to be able to continue to do was ride.”

  SIXTEEN

  TOUCHED BY

  THE SUN

  November 1993–May 1994

  A DUET WITH DEATH

  The nation was about to commemorate another anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination, an event still filled with trauma for Jackie. She had once sent John Jr. out of the country to India for the occasion, then followed close behind. This November marked the thirtieth anniversary, and Jackie decided to avoid the dreaded klieg lights of attention and escape to the horse country of Middleburg, Virginia.

  “We teased each other about being fit,” said Charles Whitehouse, one of her oldest friends and a man with whom she rode in Middleburg.

  “I said to her, ‘I get fairly out of breath, going around this course.’

  “And she said, ‘Well, I never get out of breath. I jog around the reservoir, as you know.’

  “But when we finished, there she was at the finish line, her tongue hanging out.

  “And I joked, ‘Jackie, I don’t think you’re doing as much jogging as you pretend!’

  “During one of our team point-to-point races, I entered our group for the ‘best older team.’ She pretended to be outraged. And I said, ‘But, Jackie, we weren’t born yesterday, you know.’

  “In fact, she didn’t think of herself as ‘older,’ and it was hard to believe that she had been First Lady thirty years before.”

  That same weekend, Jackie fell off Clown, her show jumper. She had taken many spills before, but this was a particularly nasty one, and she lay on the ground unconscious for thirty minutes.

  “Oh my God, she must have broken her neck!” screamed a spectator.

  “I’m perfectly fine,” Jackie said when she finally came to.

  But the emergency medics who responded to the call for help insisted on taking Jackie by ambulance to nearby Loudon Hospital Center. There, she was examined by Bunny Mellon’s personal physician, who noticed that Jackie had a slight swelling in her right groin. The doctor diagnosed it as a swollen lymph node. He suspected that she had an infection, and administered antibiotics. The next morning, the swelling in her groin had diminished, and she was released from the hospital.

  “She was in some pain,” said Jerry Embrey, captain of the Middleburg Rescue Squad, “but I think she was in shock more than anything else. For a lady of her years to have taken such a fall and come through pretty much unscathed is almost a miracle.”

  A couple of weeks later, Jackie felt well enough to spend Christmas with Maurice Tempelsman and her family at her country retreat in Peapack, New Jersey. As she drove along in her BMW, she slipped a CD into the player and listened to her friend Carly Simon accompany Frank Sinatra in a selection from his latest album, Duets. As Sinatra crooned “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” Simon joined in on some of the verses of that song, then interwove part of the s
ong “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

  Jackie sang along.

  Over the holidays, while sailing in the Caribbean with Tempelsman, Jackie developed a persistent cough. She thought she had the flu, and asked a local doctor to prescribe antibiotics. But then she developed painful swelling in the lymph nodes in her neck, and she began to feel stabbing pains in her stomach. She cut the vacation short and flew back to New York.

  There, she consulted Dr. Carolyn Agresti, a head and neck surgeon at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, who found enlarged lymph nodes in her neck and her armpit. A computerized axial tomography examination, commonly known as a CAT scan, showed that there were swollen lymph nodes in Jackie’s chest and in an area deep in her abdomen known as the retroperitoneal area.

  Dr. Agresti ordered a biopsy of one of the neck nodes. It revealed that Jackie had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A pathologist told Lawrence Altman, a medical expert who wrote for The New York Times, that the cells were anaplastic—that is, they were undeveloped, what doctors call “embryonic” or “primitive,” indicating that the disease was highly malignant, and could spread to other parts of Jackie’s body.

  Maurice Tempelsman was at Jackie’s side in the living room of her apartment when she broke the news to Caroline and John. Her children were devastated. They hugged her, and then they and their mother wept.

  “She said, ‘I feel it is a kind of hubris,’ ” Arthur Schlesinger recalled of his conversation with Jackie shortly after she learned of her cancer. “I have always been proud of keeping fit. I swim, and I jog, and I do my push-ups, and walk around the reservoir—and now this suddenly happens.”