This would be an important time in Jackie’s relationship with her mother. Who knows what they discussed in their many private moments together? However, Jackie would tell intimates that she would never forget the final year of Janet’s life, that it had “meant the world to me.” She told Yusha, “We were so busy being angry with each other, we forgot how to be mother and daughter. I’m trying to get back to that with her.”
One day, according to what Yusha would later remember, Jackie asked Janet, “Mummy, are you scared?” Janet smiled and asked, “Of what, dear?” She seemed just fine, lost in her own little world.
Once, Jackie walked into the kitchen and found Janet sitting alone humming the obscure Christmas song she and Lee used to sing to her during their Christmas plays when they were young, “One Night, When Stars Were Shining.” She had tears in her eyes, as she always did when the girls sang it for her. Jackie went over to her mother, sat next to her, and held her hand as they hummed the song together. Sometimes the two would sit in the living room and just watch television, no words necessary between them. Often they would enjoy Jeopardy! together and Yusha recalled, “Jackie would provide all the answers in her famous whisper so that her mother felt she was winning thousands of dollars.” Once, Yusha walked in on them while they were in the midst of gales of laughter. Jackie exclaimed, “My sides are starting to hurt, Mummy!” Yusha didn’t know what they were laughing about; it was private between mother and daughter. However, Jackie kept saying, “No, Mummy! You didn’t! That can’t be true!”
“Jackie was beyond extraordinary the last years of our mother’s life,” Lee Radziwill would say. “She really focused on her. She called her every single day. It was very difficult to deal with her a lot of the time and then, of course, it became most of the time. I don’t know too many children who would have behaved better and been more certain of her comfort, attention, and care.”
In fact, one of Jackie’s biggest disappointments during this time was that Lee couldn’t bring herself to spend much time with her mother at the Castle. “I don’t really have a memory of Lee during this time,” said Joyce Faria Brennan. “It’s not good or bad, I just draw a blank. She wasn’t around. We never thought about it, or wondered about it. It was always Mrs. O. or Jamie or Mr. Yusha, that’s all we knew.”
Today, when Jamie is asked if Lee helped out, his succinct answer is the same as everyone else’s: “No.”
Though Janet’s accelerating illness had definitely been hard on Lee for the last few years, she may have had specific reasons for her absence at Hammersmith that didn’t have to do with Janet. “There was a sense that Lee didn’t want to get sucked into another one of Jackie’s PTSD psychodramas,” said one person who knew them both well. “Lee had to agree with Dr. Selkoe that Booch wasn’t abusing her mother, and I think she wondered if Jackie had been imagining the whole thing. Was Jackie just being dramatic? She didn’t know. Look, she always thought Jackie was sort of over the top. I think it’s safe to say she believed the doctor, not her sister. Whatever was going on, she’d had enough of it and didn’t want to be a part of it.”
Making things even more complicated for Lee was that her son, Anthony, had recently been diagnosed with testicular cancer. Lee was coping with it all as best she could, but it was difficult. Anthony would be in and out of remission for the next twelve years. One of her friends recalls running into her in New York. Lee had just gotten back from Natchitoches, Louisiana, where she’d been with Herbert on the set of Steel Magnolias. After having an amiable conversation about her experiences on set, this friend—who also knew Janet—asked Lee, “Have you seen your mother?” Lee’s eyes filled with tears. She put her hand to her mouth, as if stifling a cry. She shook her head no. So overwhelmed was she, she couldn’t even speak. Finally, she said, “I’m sorry but I must go. If you do see Mummy, tell her I love her.” With that, she rushed off.
Jackie’s sympathy for Lee only went so far. Lee’s decision to absent herself from Janet’s caregiving was something Jackie couldn’t easily reconcile, according to people who knew her best back then. The fact that Lee had sided with Dr. Selkoe in believing that Janet was not being abused couldn’t have made Jackie feel any better about things.
Meanwhile, Jackie began to make arrangements to have Janet moved to a nursing home where she could be taken care of by a staff that specialized in late-stage Alzheimer’s. When she gently told Janet that she might have to leave the Castle soon, Janet became emotional. She didn’t want to go anywhere, she said. She was happy just where she was, at Hammersmith, where she’d lived for more than forty-five years. “Do you remember what I told you many years ago about Edie Beale?” she asked, according to one account. Jackie knew what she was talking about, though she was stunned that Janet had memory of it. “I said that when I become old I don’t want anyone to put me in a home,” Janet said, tearfully. “Please don’t do it, Jacqueline. I’m begging you.” What a burden this must have been for Jackie. In the end, she said she understood and she promised Janet that she would be able to stay at the Castle. However, she must have wondered for how much longer.
At the beginning of October 1988, just as Hammersmith Farm was being closed for the season and Janet was about to be relocated to Washington for the harsh winter, Jackie went to visit her mother. She found her sitting in a wooden Adirondack chair out on the expansive lawn in front of the Castle, all bundled up in a sweater under a blanket. She was crying. As the Hammersmith workers watched with heavy hearts, Jackie knelt down beside her on the grass and gently rested her head in her mother’s lap.
Lee and Herbert Marry
On the evening of September 23, 1988, a beaming Jackie stood in the library of her Fifth Avenue apartment holding both of Lee’s hands. “I’m so happy for you,” she said in front of a small group of friends. “Herbert is wonderful,” Jackie exclaimed. “He’s perfect for you, Pekes.” Though she had just met him a day earlier, Jackie had immediately approved of Herbert Ross. He was successful, worldly, and wealthy and he treated her sister well. He had just purchased a four-hundred-acre ranch in the Santa Ynez Valley, outside of Santa Barbara, California, where he planned to raise cattle. Lee was excited about moving in and spending as much time as possible on the “other” coast with him. Jackie could see no reason to be disapproving, even if there was a nagging question of Herbert’s sexuality. “Isn’t he homosexual?” Jackie had asked her and Lee’s friend Karen Lerner, the former wife of Alan Jay Lerner. With the greatest of social diplomacy, Karen answered, “Well, I never heard that he wasn’t.”
Though Karen’s response gave Jackie pause, she decided not to pursue it. After all, Lee was fifty-five years old, old enough to know what she was doing. Moreover, Jackie and Lee were more and more superficial with each other these days. They seemed to not be as personally involved in each other’s life choices. Given what was going on with their mother, they’d pretty much lost the will to keep their sisterly bond intact, as if each had unilaterally decided it wasn’t worth the effort, or maybe the drama. Jackie agreed to host a wedding reception for Lee, but people in their lives felt it was more out of duty than anything else.
Lee looked stunning in her two-piece blue silk Giorgio Armani outfit—she’d lately been employed by the designer, orchestrating special events for his company—her dark hair pulled back from her angular face. “Thank you for doing this for me,” Lee told Jackie. Jackie had cleared out her library and transformed it into a lovely dining area—round tables draped in canary-yellow silk with tall, tapered candles, delicate rose arrangements, and pink-and-gold Versace Byzantine china. “This is beautiful,” Lee exclaimed. As the two exchanged embraces, any observer could sense their holding back. “Frozen smiles and false interactions” is how one witness described their rapport.
Though it hadn’t even been a year since Lee met Herbert, marrying him was, as Lee would later put it, “probably the easiest decision I’d ever made.” She knew he was serious about her when, a month earlier, she’d taken her annual
vacation to Sardinia and he missed her so much he dispatched a private jet to bring her back home early. When he then asked her to be his wife, she eagerly accepted. There was practically no time to plan their wedding, but she didn’t care.
The civil ceremony took place in the living room of Lee’s new Upper East Side apartment, with Rudolf Nureyev, who’d flown in from Paris to be Lee’s witness. Her daughter, Tina, was present, though Anthony was in Korea on assignment for NBC News. Then it was off to Jackie’s for the reception, which was attended by about thirty people, including friends of Herbert’s such as Ray Stark, Bernadette Peters, Steve Martin, and Daryl Hannah (whom Ross had recently directed in Steel Magnolias and with whom John Kennedy Jr. would soon become romantically involved). Jackie’s daughter, Caroline, and her husband, Ed Schlossberg, were also present, but they had left their three-month-old infant—Jackie’s first grandchild, Rose—at home with the nanny.
“We’ll Be Just Fine…”
Saturday, July 22, 1989.
“Have you been able to find Lee?” Jackie asked her stepbrother Yusha Auchincloss. She was sitting next to a hospital bed that had been set up in the living room of the Castle. In it, her eighty-one-year-old mother, Janet, was comfortably laid on her back, her head turned to face her daughter. She gazed at Jackie with a serene expression, a soft smile, and sad eyes. “No” was the answer from Yusha. Jackie then wondered about Jamie’s whereabouts. Yusha said Jamie had just seen his mother about a week or so earlier. Now he was back in Washington, where he was working as a photographer. “I’m trying to reach him,” Yusha said. As the two spoke, they could hear loud music blaring from a bedroom upstairs. Exasperated, Jackie shook her head in disbelief. “Oh my God,” she exclaimed. Why was Booch in the Castle? He was supposed to be in the so-called Palace! She asked Yusha to go upstairs and tell him to turn down his music. No sooner had Jackie given the order than the music suddenly went off; Michael Dupree had already run upstairs to handle Booch.
Janet had actually been physically strong until the previous March, when she took a nasty fall at the Castle and broke her hip. That accident was the beginning of a steady decline. Following it, Janet wasn’t physically well enough to even be a candidate for the nursing home Jackie had been considering for her. Therefore, she would stay at the Castle, just as she’d always wanted.
For the last couple of weeks, Janet had been so medicated it was difficult to know, especially given her advanced Alzheimer’s, how much she was able to comprehend. “She knew Jackie, though,” recalled Michael Dupree. “I know for a fact that she knew her daughter.”
“She’s doing as well as can be expected,” Jackie wrote to one of Janet’s friends. “There’s no need to see her,” she added. “Just know that she is well, happy, and loved.”
Especially in the last year, Jackie had felt a great sense of injustice where Janet’s condition was concerned. It had been excruciatingly painful to watch her decline. The ordeal would leave her concerned for the rest of her life that, one day, the same thing might happen to her, especially since both of Janet’s sisters suffered from the same disease; Marion had died from it and Winifred was presently battling it. She said she could never put her children through it.
On this day, July 22, Jackie had been preparing to go to Hyannis Port to celebrate with the Kennedys the family matriarch Rose’s one hundredth birthday when Yusha called her to tell her that her mother had taken a turn for the worse. Jackie arrived within two hours to find Janet lying in her bed on a morphine drip. Even now, there was still something regal about her. Her makeup had been applied with great care by Yusha. Her gray short-cropped coif came to a striking widow’s peak above her elongated face with pronounced cheekbones. When she opened them, her brown eyes were still large and deep-set. Jackie told Yusha she looked beautiful, and thanked him. Most everyone had already been to her bedside: Mannie Faria, his wife, Louise, and their daughters, Joyce and Linda; Jonathan Tapper; Michael Dupree; Elisa Sullivan; Oatsie Charles; Adora Rule and her daughter, Janine. “I held her hand and told her how much I loved her,” Adora recalled. “We had known each other for thirty-six years. I went to work for her right before Jack married Jackie! It was difficult to fathom the passing of the years and how much Mrs. A. had seen in her lifetime.”
Exhausted from the emotion of the day, Yusha felt the need to take a nap. Jackie told him to go, saying she would wait with Janet just a while longer. “We’ll be just fine,” she said. Less than an hour later, while the sun began to set over Narragansett Bay, Jackie watched as her mother took her final breath. With her firstborn daughter at her side tenderly holding her hand, Janet then passed from this world to the next, finally at peace.
The Service for Janet
Jamie Auchincloss wasn’t sure how he would feel about his mother’s death. More precisely, he wasn’t sure how he should feel. After all, he had been raised in a family where loving emotions were usually suppressed. While combustible feelings were often at the fore, warm ones were pushed aside. Making matters more complex for him, his sexual identity was not known to any of his family members. “Therefore, I have never been an emotionally available person,” he confessed. However, he was also raised by Janet to place a premium on appearances. “How things looked mattered,” he recalled. “I was so afraid that I might appear cold and detached at my own mother’s funeral.”
Janet had died of a disease that had robbed her of all memory of Jamie and just about everyone else. Her death was a blessing, as far as he was concerned. He was relieved that her suffering was over, not devastated. He found good in her passing. Still, he knew he would be in sitting in a pew at the service between his two famous sisters, Jackie and Lee. The conundrum for him was that he felt an overwhelming sense of anxiety about how he would react during the service. He felt he needed a trigger, something that might help him elicit the deep emotion he’d need for appearance’s sake.
At this same time, Jamie’s fourteen-year-old Norwegian elkhound named Carioca would soon have to be put down because she wasn’t well. He knew that the dog would not survive the drive from Washington to Newport. Therefore, he decided to put her to sleep right before leaving for his mother’s funeral, thinking, “Maybe if I did, I could feel some sorrow in the church.” Though it was a sad, and arguably strange, way for him to generate what he felt he needed in terms of emotion for his mother’s funeral, his decision spoke volumes about the way he was raised, his disconnect from true feelings.
The service for Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss Morris took place at Trinity Church, the Episcopalian parish in which she had worshipped for so many years, on July 27, 1989, the day before Jackie’s sixtieth birthday. Though all of the family was present, of course, Jackie was the focus of attention. As she stepped from a silver limousine into the mass hysteria of paparazzi angling to get that one great shot of the daughter in mourning, she seemed resigned to just get through the day. More than a thousand onlookers, who had begun to gather three hours earlier, pressed forward to take a closer look at her in her simple, short-sleeved, knee-length black dress. Lee followed with her husband, Herbert, in their own limousine, a jet-black one. Then Jamie, Yusha, and all the rest arrived in town cars. Janet’s good friend Eileen Slocum held court with the press, telling the reporters that even though Janet had suffered from Alzheimer’s for so many years, “her memory failure was graceful, and even at the end she never became disoriented or inappropriate.”
There were Kennedys scattered throughout the church, most notably Ted Kennedy and his son Patrick, Ethel Kennedy and many of her children, as well as Sargent Shriver, all of whom obviously attended out of respect for Jackie. Of course, Jackie’s children, John and Caroline, and her son-in-law, Ed, were all present, as were Lee’s children, Anthony and Tina. (True to Jackie’s unique compartmentalization of things, Maurice Tempelsman was not at the funeral.) In the rear of the church was a grieving Bingham Morris, all alone. Everyone rose as a tearful Mannie Faria, so handsome and stately looking in a black suit, walked down the
center aisle of the church carrying in his hand an ornate box of Janet’s ashes. How fitting it was that Mannie was selected by the family for such an honor, considering how much he, his wife, and their children had meant to Janet. “Nothing will ever go wrong,” Janet always used to say, “because Mannie is here. And he’ll take care of it.”
As Mannie walked slowly toward the church’s triple-tiered pulpit, he approached the hand-painted stained-glass window depicting Cornelius Vanderbilt. Mannie’s wife, Louise, and their children, Joyce and Linda, sat watching in pews in the front on the right side of the altar. What an interesting study in contrasts: a hardworking, middle-class estate manager carrying the ashes of his wealthy high-society employer in a church that featured in one of its stained-glass windows one of the richest Americans in history, Commodore Vanderbilt.
It would be just a thirty-minute service, during which some of the letters written by loved ones and included in the scrapbook given to Janet on her eightieth birthday were read from the pulpit. There were also familiar psalms and hymns as well as a bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
In a wedged box in the front of the church by the lectern—pews in which President George Washington, Queen Elizabeth of England, and South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu had all once worshipped—were seated Janet’s three biological children, Jackie, Jamie, and Lee. “It was a triangular box,” Jamie recalled, “with its own little, waist-high door. I was a large man. Jackie was tall. Lee was more normal-sized. So we were squeezed in there tightly, the three of us, and it was extremely uncomfortable.” As Jamie feared, many of the mourners were fixated on him and his sisters. The siblings would have more on their minds, though, than just appearances. Sadly, it would seem that old grudges and bitter resentments could not be set aside, even on this mournful day. It was as if the mere presence of a sibling could conjure up bad feelings; each had an ax to grind with the other. The three of them weren’t even speaking to one another.
Jackie, Janet & Lee Page 47