This went on three, four more times before John finally fell to the ground—and stayed there.
“Come on,” an exasperated Uncle Bobby said. “A Kennedy never gives up.”
Refusing to budge, John looked up and said, “Hmmph, here’s one that does.”
That St. Patrick’s Day afternoon, Sister Joanne Frey, the children’s catechism teacher, was driving by Washington’s Rock Creek Park when she spotted a familiar figure. “It was Mrs. Kennedy,” recalled Sister Joanne, who rolled down the car window and called out to her. “I was wearing my habit,” the nun said, “so she recognized me immediately and came over to the car. I looked around for a Secret Service agent, but didn’t see anybody. She seemed to be just wandering through the park alone, lost in her thoughts.”
As Jackie came closer, it appeared she was wearing “a sort of babushka over her head,” Sister Joanne said, “and no makeup—her eyes were red, her face was swollen, it was obvious she had been crying.” At home that night, the nun opened her afternoon paper to see a photo of Jackie on the front page, placing a shamrock on the president’s grave earlier that day. “She was wearing a mink coat and looked beautiful in the photograph. Then it hit me: This is the face the public sees. I just saw the real Mrs. Kennedy—alone, sad, completely devastated.”
There were more onerous tasks ahead. Not one to leave such important matters to others, Jackie had quietly approached John Stevens Stone Masons in Newport, Rhode Island, and asked them to pick out six black slate slabs—one of which she would personally select to be the permanent marker for her husband’s grave at Arlington. The slabs, each weighing hundreds of pounds, were transported to Hammersmith Farm and arranged in a semicircle in the Auchinclosses’ formal garden.
Jamie Auchincloss was there when Jackie arrived at Hammersmith Farm in late March to make the final selection. Jackie’s half brother felt there was “a sad symmetry to Jackie choosing the president’s grave marker at Hammersmith. It was where she and Jack were married, where Jackie had come of age.” Although Jamie remembered his sister going about “the whole process in a very businesslike way”—walking from stone to stone, methodically running her hand over each as she looked for flaws and imperfections—everybody watching “was fighting back tears, including the stonemasons.”
At the end of the month, Jackie took John and Caroline along on a ski holiday in Stowe, Vermont. There they were joined on the slopes by their uncles Bobby and Teddy and their families. This time the press was in hot pursuit. At one point, John watched as his big sister was knocked to the ground by photographers trying to get a picture of their grieving mom. “How,” Jackie later asked her friend Arthur Schlesinger incredulously, “do you explain that to a child?”
From Stowe, Jackie and Bobby left—sans children and sans Ethel—to spend a week with Chuck Spalding and Lee and Stas Radziwill at heiress Bunny Mellon’s hilltop villa in Antigua. For several days, they water-skied, sailed, and explored some of the remote, uninhabited islands in the area. At night, they drank and joked and played Jack’s favorite songs as loudly as they could—all, Spalding said, in an effort to “drown out the bad memories any way they could.”
To the other members of their party, it was clear that Jackie and Bobby were becoming something more than just in-laws. They paired off from the others, holding hands as they huddled together in corners, lost in conversation and whispered confidences. Spalding described them as “definitely a unit—a twosome. She relied on him for everything, and he adored her. There was definitely an intimacy there.”
In Jackie’s case, there was the added desire to provide Jack’s children—particularly John—with a father figure who mirrored all the qualities of her late husband. Clearly, no one came closer to accomplishing that than Bobby. “Jackie wanted Bobby to continue indefinitely as Jack’s substitute in the children’s lives,” Spalding said. “She felt particularly strongly that John needed a strong male figure—preferably a Kennedy—to shape Jack’s only son.”
Jackie was not the only Bouvier falling for Jack’s younger brother. Lee threw two parties for RFK in London early in 1964, sparking rumors that theirs might be more than just the standard in-law relationship. “Lee wanted to sleep with Bobby,” said her close friend Truman Capote, “and Bobby, like all those Kennedy men, was not one to pass up the opportunity.”
Not that Jackie was operating under the illusion that she somehow had exclusive claim on Bobby’s affections. Still emotionally unmoored some five months after Dallas, Jackie reverted to her old habit of seeking out solace and reassurance from attractive, invariably married, men.
One night during this period, Jackie showed up at Billy Martin’s, a popular Georgetown restaurant, with Robert McNamara. She often told Jack she thought his secretary of defense was the most attractive man in the cabinet. According to one patron, Jackie, clearly intoxicated by the end of the evening, was “hugging and kissing” McNamara. When she got up to go to the ladies’ room, she was, said another witness, “weaving and terribly unsteady on her feet. Everyone probably assumed she had good reason to drink.” Out of sympathy for JFK’s widow, the incident was never reported in the press.
Just a few weeks later, Jackie lunched at Washington’s Jockey Club with Lee, Hollywood business manager George Englund, and Englund’s client Marlon Brando. Beguiled by the smoldering, brutishly handsome Brando, Jackie listened intently as he shared behind-the-scenes details of filming Mutiny on the Bounty in the South Pacific. She was equally intrigued by the fact that Brando, a passionate civil rights activist who had been one of Jack’s most ardent Hollywood supporters, was now protesting on behalf of Native Americans and India’s oppressed class of “untouchables.” When the lunch was over, Jackie had to wade through a sea of reporters and photographers—yet another reminder that she would have no peace as long as she lived in Washington.
“Like half the other women on the planet at the time,” Chuck Spalding said, “Jackie found Marlon Brando completely irresistible.” She later rhapsodized to her friend Franklin Roosevelt Jr. that the “Stella!”-bellowing star of A Streetcar Named Desire was no real-life Stanley Kowalski. He was, she reported, well read, articulate, serious, and of course “extremely attractive.”
After the mob scene at the Jockey Club, Lee was more concerned than ever that the circus atmosphere surrounding Jackie’s life in Washington was beginning to take its toll. The crowd outside 3017 N Street now seemed larger than ever, and grew more unruly with each passing day. “I worry so much about John,” she told her friend Roswell Gilpatric, who had served as Jack’s deputy defense secretary. “The crazy women focus on him even more than they do Caroline, and I think it’s really starting to frighten him.”
Lee urged her sister to move to Manhattan and leave Washington behind—boorish gawkers, pushy photographers, painful memories and all. It would be a homecoming of sorts—the Kennedys and Bouviers had roots in New York, and Jackie and Jack had spent some of their happiest times there. Besides, Jackie knew from personal experience that the studied nonchalance of New Yorkers made them far less likely to accost a celebrity; as counterintuitive as it seemed, she and the children would be permitted to live their lives there in comparative peace.
To make the transition for her sister even easier, Lee persuaded her husband to purchase an eleven-room apartment for the Radziwills at 969 Fifth Avenue—just a few blocks from Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford, Steven and Jean Kennedy, and an assortment of Bouvier and Auchincloss relatives.
In the short run, Jackie seized every opportunity to get out of Washington. Not wanting to abandon the family’s tradition of spending Easter with the rest of the Kennedy clan, she and the children flew to Palm Beach. This time Jackie hosted an Easter egg hunt for forty local children that included special prizes supplied by FAO Schwarz, the famous Fifth Avenue toy store.
Things seemed to be going smoothly until John and a four-year-old named Richard began fighting over what was then one of the hottest toys for boys—a GI Joe action figure. Ja
ckie jumped into the middle of the fray and managed to pull the battling tots apart, but not before a wrought-iron end table was overturned. Mortified, Jackie handed the GI Joe in question to the other little boy and eventually fetched another one for her son—but not before carrying John inside, bending him over her knee, and spanking him. The sound of the little boy’s wailing brought an abrupt end to the merriment outside. “My mother was very strict with me,” John later said. “Caroline could do just about anything, but if I stepped out of line, I got a swat.”
In truth, Jackie knew that John would inevitably be more closely linked with JFK in the public mind. “Jackie hated bratty behavior, really hated it—and in the Kennedy family you didn’t have to look far to see kids who were just spoiled rotten,” her friend Cleveland Amory said. Jackie spent more time disciplining her son for the simple reason that, Amory observed, “Caroline was always so well behaved, so eager to please. John, in a word, wasn’t. As a small child, John was what you would call a handful.”
It was a side of the boy the public did not often see. At public ceremonies honoring his father, John could be counted on to follow his mother’s stage direction with meticulous precision—just as he had done when he saluted Daddy’s passing coffin. On May 29, 1964—what would have been President Kennedy’s forty-seventh birthday—Jackie and the children attended what turned out to be a tear-filled Mass at St. Matthew’s Cathedral, the site of JFK’s funeral just six months earlier.
From there, the family drove to Arlington, where they knelt and prayed at Jack’s grave while a mob of more than one thousand onlookers held back by police barricades snapped photos and shouted their names. While Caroline placed flowers on her father’s final resting place, John was assigned the task of leaving behind something special—a tie clasp in the shape of PT-109, the legendary patrol boat Jack had skippered in the Solomon Islands during World War II. Carefully following his mother’s instructions, John removed the clasp from the lapel of his white linen coat, leaned over, and placed the pin on the boughs that covered Daddy’s grave.
This visit to Arlington was the beginning of what would become an annual ritual—for the nation as well as Jack’s widow and children. “She would take the children to the grave on the anniversary of the president’s birthday,” Tish Baldrige said. “His birthday, not his death. She believed in celebrating life, not death.”
From Washington, John flew with his mother and sister to Hyannis Port. While they played outside with their boisterous Kennedy cousins, Jackie, still worried that Jack’s time in the White House was too short for him to be remembered, made a televised pitch on behalf of the John F. Kennedy Library. “His office will be there,” she said, describing the Oval Office replica she had envisioned as the library’s centerpiece. “You can hear every speech he made, you can see all the manuscripts of his speeches and how he changed them.”
Once the cameras were gone, Jackie went upstairs to her room and looked out the window at John and Caroline cavorting on the lawn with a dozen other tousle-haired Kennedy children. Just nine months earlier, Jackie had watched as John, Caroline, and nine of their cousins greeted JFK as he climbed out of his presidential helicopter and got behind the wheel of a golf cart. Squealing with delight, the children piled onto the cart, then held on for dear life as the president took off at breakneck speed across this same stretch of emerald-green lawn.
The memories that came flooding back weren’t all happy ones. It had also been only nine months since Jackie was rushed from Hyannis Port to Otis Air Force Base Hospital, where her son Patrick was delivered five and a half weeks prematurely by caesarean section. “I never thought that any pain could cut more deeply than what I felt then for little Patrick,” she told Pierre Salinger. “But I was wrong.”
Heeding her sister’s advice, Jackie went apartment hunting in New York in June 1964. To throw off the press, her best friend and assistant, Nancy Tuckerman, played the role of prospective buyer while Jackie went along disguised as the Tuckerman family’s nanny. Jackie made several apartment-hunting trips to Manhattan before paying $200,000 for a five-bedroom, five-bath, fifteenth-floor apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue. The co-op was owned by Mrs. Lowell Weicker, whose husband would later serve as Connecticut’s Republican senator and as the state’s governor. It was steps from one of Jackie’s favorite haunts—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—and boasted sweeping views of Central Park and the reservoir.
By way of making a complete break from her life in Washington, Jackie sold the weekend house in Wexford for $130,000 and replaced it with a rental not far from Bobby’s summer home in Glen Cove, Long Island. Angered by LBJ’s decision not to pick him as his 1964 presidential running mate (Johnson chose Minnesota senator Hubert H. Humphrey instead), Bobby now planned to become a permanent resident of New York and run for the U.S. Senate.
While John and Caroline remained in the care of Maud Shaw back in Georgetown, Jackie would spend the next few months and more than $125,000 renovating her new apartment. Headquarters for this operation was the Carlyle, the same hotel where Jack had maintained a sprawling suite for years. He considered the Carlyle to be his home away from the White House, and took full advantage of the hotel’s labyrinth of underground tunnels that allowed him to walk undetected to those Upper East Side town houses occupied by some of New York’s most beautiful socialites.
John was with his sister and mother in Georgetown when tragedy struck the family again. On June 19, 1964, Bobby called Jackie to tell her that his brother Teddy had insisted on flying through a storm to Springfield, Massachusetts, to accept his party’s nomination for a second term in the U.S. Senate. Ted’s small plane crashed, killing the pilot and Ted’s aide and breaking the senator’s back. “Somebody up there,” Bobby joked when he and Jackie visited Ted at the hospital, “doesn’t like us.”
Just days after Uncle Teddy’s plane crash, John and Caroline joined Uncle Bobby as he posed for the cover of Life. On the eve of launching his own career in politics, Bobby was more than willing to use his fallen brother’s children to advance his own interests. Part paterfamilias, part pied piper, RFK was photographed with six of his extended brood climbing all over him. In sharp contrast to the other children, all of whom were captured in a moment of gleeful hysteria, freckle-faced Caroline sat in her uncle’s lap looking pensive, perhaps a little sad. In the foreground, eager-to-please John obliged the photographer with a broad, gap-toothed grin worthy of Norman Rockwell.
Operating out of her suite at the Carlyle that summer in Washington, Jackie oversaw the small army of workmen who were transforming the somewhat shabby apartment at 1040 Fifth into a showplace. No longer surrounded by the painful memories of her days as first lady, she was beginning to feel like a human being again. “New York gave her the one thing she so desperately needed,” said Nancy Dickerson, the pioneering TV journalist who was also a friend of JFK’s. “It gave her room to breathe.”
It was more than that. “I think she saw her return to the city,” Nancy Tuckerman said of her friend, “as coming home. And more than anything she hoped—perhaps even expected—that in a city of such size and diversity, she’d be able to find the anonymity she longed for. But this was unrealistic, and intellectually she probably knew it.”
Thrilled at the prospect of being able to live life on her terms, Jackie now felt free to spend time with a number of handsome escorts, including McNamara and Ros Gilpatric. She even invited the lethally seductive Brando, who was so promiscuous he later confessed to keeping two abortionists on retainer, to her Carlyle suite.
The couple met on several occasions before the inevitable happened: After one too many drinks, Jackie and Brando fell into bed together. Brando wrote about his brief, steamy affair with Jackie in an original draft of his 1994 memoirs, but his Random House editor, Joe Fox, convinced him to take it out. Fox, as it happened, was a friend of Jackie’s. The affair ended quickly, which was the norm for Brando. “I have always been lucky with women,” he said, “though I hardly ever spent more t
han a couple of minutes with any of them.”
(Told of Jackie’s fling with Brando after his mother’s death, John seemed intrigued by what he viewed as simply more evidence of her adventurous spirit—and by the fact that Brando had known his father well enough to needle the president about his weight. When JFK chided the then-svelte Brando for being “too fat” for his next part, Marlon shot back: “Have you looked in a mirror lately? Your jowls won’t even fit in the frame of the television screen!” John, who as an adult completely accepted that his father was a compulsive womanizer, also appeared fascinated by the fact that both JFK and Brando—not to mention Uncle Bobby—had had torrid affairs with Marilyn Monroe.)
Although they were still months from actually moving into their new apartment, Jackie was eager for John and Caroline to start their new lives in New York. On September 15, 1964, Caroline joined her cousins Sydney and Victoria Lawford at the Convent of the Sacred Heart, just a few blocks up from 1040 Fifth. This was the exclusive Catholic girls’ school that their grandmother Rose had attended more than a half century earlier.
Since John would not be enrolling at New York’s prestigious St. David’s School until February 1965, Jackie made sure his Secret Service detail kept him well occupied with trips to the Central Park Zoo, marathon sessions on the swings at the park’s Eighty-fifth Street playground, and plenty of tricycle time. Whenever she could, Jackie broke away from meetings with decorators to spend time with the kids; at one point the former first lady was photographed rowing John and Caroline around the Central Park lake dressed in a double-breasted white wool Chanel suit and pearls.
Such interludes were fewer and farther between as Jackie was enlisted in Bobby’s campaign to unseat New York’s incumbent Republican senator Kenneth Keating. That August, she had appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City and all but eclipsed the party’s nominee for president, Lyndon Johnson.
The Good Son_JFK Jr. and the Mother He Loved Page 8