“Fine hotel you have here,” Onassis told Nicky and Bob. “This place had to have cost a fortune,” he said, looking around and seeming impressed.
“Well, yeah, but my dad has a fortune,” Nicky said. It was as if he was suddenly in competition with Onassis over who was wealthier.
“Really,” Lee remarked, “talking about money is so gauche, don’t you agree?”
“Not if you have it,” Ari said with a smile. He went to kiss her on the cheek, and she pulled away. He then grabbed her roughly and kissed her on the lips. She seemed dazed.
“Why in the world are all these photographers here?” Lee later asked Nicky. He looked at her like she was daft. “Because this is a Hilton hotel opening,” he exclaimed. “This is big news, and we are all at the center of it. You gotta love it, right?”
“Not really,” Lee said, looking around with a bewildered expression. It appeared that she really didn’t wish to be the center of so much attention while with Ari, and that, somehow, she had misconstrued the high-profile nature of the event to which she and Onassis had been invited. Later, Bob Wentworth overheard a strange conversation between Nicky Hilton and Onassis. Wentworth recalled, “Nicky told him, ‘She’s a real looker that one,’ referring to Lee, ‘you’re a lucky man.’ Onassis said, ‘I am lucky. She’s magnificent, isn’t she? You know she’s Jackie Kennedy’s sister, don’t you?’ The way Onassis said it was as if this was what distinguished Lee most, her relationship to Jackie. Nicky looked at Onassis with a puzzled expression. ‘Well, I think she’s even lovelier than the First Lady,’ he said. Onassis smiled and said, ‘She is, isn’t she? Jackie seems empty-headed. But not Lee. Lee is smart.’ Later, I saw Ari and Lee in a corner, deep in conversation, completely captivated by one another as if no one else was in the room. Even from a distance, you could feel the heat between them.”
A couple of days later, the Washington Post columnist Drew Pearson wrote about the couple’s appearance at the hotel opening and posed the question: “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?” That same day, Jackie called Lee in Greece to ask her what was going on with Onassis, saying that their picture was in all of the newspapers in America. She said she was concerned about how Stas would react. From all accounts, Lee told her that she would worry about Stas, that Jackie should not concern herself with it. Besides, she said, she and Onassis were just friends.
Lee then went back to Onassis and told him she was angry that their picture had been published everywhere, along with Pearson’s tantalizing commentary. In front of his attorney, Stelio Papadimitriou, Lee angrily accused Onassis of having planted the item. “First of all, you do not raise your voice to me,” he told her, putting her in her place. “I can all but guarantee you that your present tone will never serve you well,” he added. Then he blew up at her. After choosing Stas over him, how dare she be the least bit confrontational with him about anything? She was lucky, he said, that he would even be seen with her at all! He berated her and brought tears to her eyes, telling her that she was obviously naïve about the way it works when one is seeing Aristotle Onassis. “I make news,” he said, “and whoever is with me makes news. This is something you’ll have to learn to live with,” he told her, “that is, if you want to be with me.” Did she still want to be with him? She said yes, she did. “And do you want to make news, Lee?” he asked her, looking deeply into her eyes. “Do you want people to notice you?” he asked her. It was like a crazy mind game. First, furious. Then, loving. “Because you deserve to be noticed, Lee,” he said, “if that is what you want. Is that what you want, Lee?”
She didn’t even have to think about it for half a second: of course, that’s what she wanted.
Anniversary at Hammersmith
It was September 12, 1963, Jack and Jackie’s ten-year wedding anniversary. The Kennedys would celebrate it at Hammersmith Farm, lately referred to by the media as “the Summer White House.” (The Secret Service’s moniker for the estate was “Hamlet.”) Jackie arrived early in the afternoon. Physically, she was better. However, emotionally she was in bad shape, depressed and sad. She was expected to stay at Hammersmith for several weeks; Jack would visit on weekends.
As the household staff awaited the President’s arrival, Janet’s assistant, Adora Rule, dutifully typed out correspondence on a small desk set up in the corner of the large, red-carpeted, and beautifully appointed formal living room. This was her makeshift office while the one she usually used off of the kitchen was being recarpeted. Earlier in the day, she’d placed two framed photographs of family members on her desk. However, Janet asked her to put them away. She didn’t want pictures of people she didn’t know displayed in her home. This living room was practically never used except as a reception room where guests were greeted. It was big and roomy, though, and Janet liked to stretch out in the middle of it to do her exercises.
As Adora typed, she witnessed an enlightening conversation between mother and daughter. She hadn’t heard the beginning of their talk, but quickly gathered that it was about Patrick’s death.
At the time, Janet was reclining on a slant board propped up on the cushion of an antique French director’s chair with wooden gilded-swan arms. She had covered the gold-and-brown upholstery with a large white towel. She had a pad over each eyelid soaked in her special concoction of witch hazel and boric acid, a part of her beauty regimen. Meanwhile, Jackie was sitting “Indian-style” in the middle of a large cabbage-rose-patterned overstuffed sofa in front of the bay window with its burgundy-and-gold drapery and white sheer curtains.
Jackie’s brown eyes were sunken; she looked drained. She said that she thought the new baby would change things between her and Jack, and with him now gone she wasn’t sure what to think.
As much as Janet liked Jack, she would never approve of his unfaithful behavior. By this time, she had almost an expectation that elite men would cheat on their wives, but that still didn’t mean she liked it. She did her best to look the other way and not to dwell on it. “So many women, so little sense” is how she put it at the time. (Others weren’t so forgiving; Jackie’s protective stepbrother Yusha, for instance, would be conflicted about it his entire life.) Janet felt strongly that Jackie loved Jack more than he loved her, “but,” she asked Sherry Geyelin—the daughter of Hugh’s partner, Chauncey Parker—“when is it ever equal between partners?” She knew that Jack’s cheating was ripping Jackie apart, but she also knew he was her whole world. What could she, as the mother, do about it? It was bigger than just a private dysfunction between a married couple, anyway. Any decision Jackie made about it would likely end up involving the whole country.
Earlier in the year, Janet had sat next to Jackie and Lee as JFK gave his State of the Union address. That was a proud moment, the kind upon which she preferred to dwell. She now noted that if Jack was to run again in ’64, Jackie would probably have to be at his side, no matter how she felt about him. The party would expect it of her. Jackie shook her head. “I know,” she said, “but I don’t know that I trust him, Mummy.”
“Trust is for the weak,” Janet said brusquely, still on her slant board with her eyes covered. She seemed a little leery of where the conversation was headed; she wasn’t good with these sorts of emotional moments, and she must have felt one in the offing.
Changing course, Jackie wondered if maybe Patrick’s death had been the result of her smoking habit. At this, Janet took the pads off of her eyes, sat up, and looked at her daughter. She reminded her that dreadful things had happened to all of them in the past, and she said that she was afraid that more of the same would occur in the future, “because that’s just how things work.” For now, though, she wanted Jackie to swallow her sadness and pull herself together before Jack arrived from Washington. She said she was certain Jackie wouldn’t want him to see her upset. She wanted Jackie to try her best to make the anniversary weekend a good one, for everyone’s sake. She then reclined once again and placed the pads over her eyes.
Jack was scheduled to join Jackie at Hammersmith Farm on the afternoon of September 12. To that end, Newport police were put on high alert, with six officers assigned to guard the two entrances to Hammersmith on Harrison Avenue. Phone booths were installed along the route for their use. Meanwhile, the Secret Service would stay in accommodations in the main house. Early in the day, Jack’s duties included the signing of an order that would amend the draft to prevent the conscription of married men. Other than that, it was a light day, and he was, therefore, eager to join Jackie in Newport.
On his way, Jack would take Air Force One from Washington to Quonset Naval Air Station in Rhode Island. Along with him would be the famous reporter (and Jack’s fellow Harvard alumnus) Ben Bradlee and his wife, Toni. From Quonset, the Kennedy contingent took a helicopter to Hammersmith. As usual, the chopper landed on the beach between the main house and the shoreline, with everyone—Janet Jr., Jamie, and Yusha as well as his children, Maya and Cecil, along with Janet and Hugh—noisily running out to meet the President with hugs and good cheer.
Also already present was Sylvia Blake, the wife of the American diplomat Robert Blake, who was stationed in the Congo at the time. (Sylvia’s mother, Mary, was a good friend of the Auchinclosses.) Ben Bradlee would later describe the moment Jack arrived at Hammersmith as “a scene that was half space-age pomp and half Wuthering Heights.” He would recall that Jackie greeted Jack “with by far the most affectionate embrace we had ever seen them give each other. They [were] not normally demonstrative people, period.”
“We loved the helicopter,” Cecil, who was four at the time, recalled. “As kids, we were like, ‘Wow! It’s a big bird coming down!’ All the children would run out to greet him. The other thing [Jack and Jackie] had when they were staying here was this great big white convertible—a Lincoln or a Cadillac. It was huge and it was all white with red leather interior. All of us children would sit on the backseat and just ride around Hammersmith Farm, because we had all these roads. We would all play football out where the teahouse is. Everything that the President did with us was very active. He would be tossing a football around, throwing the Wiffle ball, or whatever. And there would be big family dinners and cocktails. Grampa and Aunt Janet—my father’s father and stepmother—always loved to have their cocktails out on the terrace of the big house overlooking Narragansett Bay. All of the kids would be sort of gathered for that and running around.”
The first night of the Kennedys’ visit, a lavish dinner was served by uniformed waitstaff in the dining room at a table that could open to seat sixteen people. The chandelier above the table was lovely and ornate, made of bronze and crystal and from the English Regency period, an heirloom from Janet’s side of the family. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out at the bay. Controlled by buttons on the wall, the window could be lowered all the way into a casing in the basement.
“After dinner, drinks and deserts were served in the Deck Room,” recalled Sylvia Whitehouse Blake. The Deck Room was quite large, with highly polished teak floors and a cathedral ceiling of matching redwood beams. It was said that it had been built to resemble an upside-down ship, the beams of the ceiling like the ribs of a sea vessel. In this room, there were also four large overstuffed purple sofas situated atop large gold area rugs. Even given the Victorian and eighteenth-century pieces carefully placed about the space, it had a casual atmosphere, comfortable in its airiness. A grand piano sat in one corner—the same one that was played at Jackie’s wedding—a large chess table for Hugh in another and, in another, a small television with period antennae. The green tiled fireplace—with iridescent tiles chosen by Emma Auchincloss decades earlier in Italy—was roaring, especially this late in the season. Four sets of doors led out to the adjoining covered terrace.
Most prominent in the Deck Room was a large stuffed pelican hanging from the ceiling, which Hugh had caught accidentally in a fishing net off the coast of Florida several years earlier. Because it had drowned in his net, Hugh felt so bad about it he had it mounted and hung facing the water. There was also a large mounted pheasant on a bookshelf; the poor bird had accidentally flown into a window and broken its neck. Hugh maintained that if any living thing wanted to come into the house that badly, it should be not only be allowed in, it should be allowed to stay. However, Janet, at least according to Sylvia Whitehouse Blake, “found the dead pelican and pheasant ghastly, just ghastly.”
“Jack loved daiquiris and my father loved daiquiris, too,” Yusha recalled. “So I made a special daiquiri for the President: lemon juice, lime juice, a little bit of sugar. I said, instead of two different kinds of rum why don’t we have a medium rum, a light rum, and a dark rum? Jack called it a ‘New Frontier.’”
Holding court, as always, Janet stood in the middle of the room and offered a toast. “To all of us,” she said, raising her daiquiri. “We are family,” she said. “We are friends. And we love you, Jack and Jackie. Happy Anniversary.” Everyone clinked glasses. Jackie, sitting next to Jack on one of the large purple couches, kissed him on the cheek. About thirty minutes later, the telephone rang. When the butler said it was “the princess,” Jackie jumped up to talk to her sister. She was gone for about a half hour, catching up with her sister by long distance.
“At one point, little John, who was about to turn three [in November], ran down the stairs in his pajamas to say good night to us,” recalled Jamie Auchincloss, “and he stood at the entrance to the dining room and he yelled into the room, ‘Poo-poo head!’ And Jack showed his shock and said, ‘I don’t think I have ever heard anybody call the President of the United States a poo-poo head before!’ We all laughed. And then John turned around and raced back up the stairs so nobody could catch him. Jack and Jackie looked at one another and you could just see the pure joy on their faces.”
“It was a lovely evening,” Sylvia Whitehouse Blake recalled. “Everyone was so charming, they all had such beautiful manners, were so happy to be in each other’s company, full of jokes. I just thought it was a wonderful celebration for Jack and Jackie, personal and homey.”
“I felt that they were closer,” Janet would later recall of this evening in her oral history for the Kennedy Library. “I can’t think of two people who had packed more into ten years of marriage than they had. And I felt that all their strains and stresses, which any sensitive people have in a marriage, had eased to a point where they were terribly close to each other. I almost can’t think of any married couple I’ve ever known that had greater understanding of each other, in spite of Jackie’s introvertness [sic], stiffness—I mean that it’s difficult for her to show her feelings. I think one felt in those rare moments when one could be alone with them on a quiet evening when there weren’t a million pressures pending—that they were very, very, very close to each other and understood each other wonderfully.”
Lee’s Offer to Jackie
By the end of September, more than a month had passed since baby Patrick’s death. Jackie was no better. If anything, her psychological state had only deteriorated. There were a few happy moments, such as the one at Hammersmith in celebration of the Kennedys’ anniversary, but when she returned to the White House from Hammersmith on September 23, Jackie was still in a dark place. Lee wanted to help her in some way and made the extremely bold suggestion that Jackie cruise with her and Aristotle Onassis on the Christina. While it seemed like the perfect getaway, most people in Lee’s life were astounded that she would even make the suggestion to her sister, given what was going on between her and Onassis. It made no sense. It was as if Lee wasn’t thinking straight. She knew Jackie wouldn’t approve of anything she saw between her sister and Ari. Was she just really trying to find a way to help Jackie? Only Lee would know the answer to that question. All we know for sure is that she extended the invitation.
Because of Onassis’s notorious reputation, Jackie realized that any vacation involving him would lead to problems between her and Jack. Onassis had recently been sued by the government for removing oil tanker
s from United States territories, which he had purchased with the promise of keeping them there. It ended up costing him about $10 million in fines. Like most people, the Kennedys viewed him as a criminal. Jackie didn’t have the energy to deal with any contention about him, though. “Lee told me that Jackie was adamant that she wanted to stay with her children,” said Lee’s Swiss friend, Mari Kumlin. “But Lee felt it was really about her not wanting to upset Jack. ‘He has lived his life his own way for as long as you’ve been married,’ Lee told her. ‘Trust me, Jacks,’ she said. ‘You don’t know the half of it. He should let you have this one goddamn thing. And if he doesn’t, you should take it for yourself and screw him! He doesn’t run your life. You run your life!’”
Finally, Jackie agreed that she would at least ask Jack. The last time she went to Greece, which was back in 1961, her husband had been clear with Clint Hill where Onassis was concerned. “Whatever you do in Greece,” he’d told Clint, “do not let Mrs. Kennedy cross paths with Aristotle Onassis.” (The two never did see each other during that trip.) However, Jack was now so worried about Jackie’s emotional state, he was willing to reconsider his position on Onassis. Clint Hill recalled, “I felt it was a testament to his love for Mrs. Kennedy that he was willing to put aside any reservations and allow her to take part in what we all couldn’t help but think was a strange idea for a vacation. When the President agreed to let her go, she was grateful.”
Jackie decided to tell Janet about her plans rather than have her hear about them from someone else. Because she suspected her mother wouldn’t approve, she wanted to give her the respect of at least allowing her to weigh in, though her mind was made up about it. As expected, Janet was unhappy. “Remember who you are,” she told her daughter. “You are the First Lady,” she reminded Jackie. She said that consorting with a known criminal like Onassis was likely to be viewed in a negative light by the American public. “But I am also a woman,” Jackie told her mother, and she said she desperately needed the vacation.
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 19