Following the ceremony, more shouts from the fishing boats punctuated the festivities on the Christina until Onassis finally invited some of the excluded press people aboard. At moments, Jackie seemed terrified of all the clicking cameras. Still, the consensus among press and public, then and later, was that she had brought the media onslaught upon herself by callously, calculatedly marrying a man old enough to be her father. Five years after she had epitomized human vulnerability and terror as she crawled along the rear of the speeding Lincoln in the iconic images seen by all the world, her unlikely marriage made it possible to conceive her completely anew: as the adventuress who, far from being helpless, had helped herself very nicely to Onassis’s fortune.
Two days after the wedding, Jackie’s children were flown back to New York, where, still in school, they would be looked after by a governess and the Secret Service detail that continued to be assigned to them. Their mother, on the contrary, automatically forfeited her Secret Service protection when she remarried. Within forty-eight hours of the children’s departure, Jackie found herself alone on the Christina when Onassis traveled to Athens to resume his business talks with the junta’s top dog, George Papadopoulos. Henceforward, she was to be guarded by her husband’s private security force, but no number of armed men would be sufficient to protect her against the incubi that had slipped through Onassis’s and the dictators’ bulwarks combined when the bride-elect arrived on the island the week before.
Thus the strangely lighted scene that Billy Baldwin observed one evening soon after Jackie was wed. She and the decorator, whom she had summoned from Manhattan, were on the Christina when they heard the roar of a seaplane’s engine. At first, Jackie remained motionless, scanning the sky for the aircraft on which her husband was due to return from Athens. When she saw the plane at last, she waved happily. But then her body froze, rigid with tension and dread. So long as his client remained like that, Baldwin dared not utter a word. Only when, at length, she heard the splash of the landing did she finally appear to relax. “Thank God he’s safe,” Jackie declared. Though Onassis had landed without incident many times in the past, Jackie’s experience of the two Kennedy assassinations had upended fundamental assumptions about safety and predictability, as well as burdened her with the expectation of imminent danger and doom.
Disconnected from the present, she was constantly, helplessly looking forward in time—or backward. Also during the “honeymoon” period that fall of 1968 when Onassis was frequently off to dicker with Papadopoulos, Jackie spoke to her husband’s sister, Artemis Garoufalidis, of the memories of Dallas that continued to vex her. On one such occasion, Artemis had noticed that Jackie seemed sad and uncommunicative. Asked if anything was wrong, Jackie began to weep. “I know I should be happy now,” she said after the tears had ceased, “but all I can think about today is my first husband and what happened to him in Texas.” The difficulty proved to be a good deal more complicated than the intrusive recollections themselves. “Sometimes I think I will never be able to be truly happy again,” Jackie went on. “I try but I cannot forget the pain. And when I am feeling happy, I am just waiting for it to return.”
That last sentence was key. Though the memory might not actually be before her at a given moment, Jackie, by her own account, was ever anticipating its reappearance. The here and now, to the extent that she was able to experience it, was ceaselessly, insidiously eroded by the trauma. The sense of apprehension disclosed to Artemis was not a matter of anticipating an encounter with some new external trigger, as when the very thought of seeing the Bishop or Manchester books, or references to them in the media, had proven so distressing. In this case the dreaded event was strictly internal. Jackie had come to Skorpios in search of protection from the dangers that loomed in the outer world. But, as her words to her new sister-in-law suggest, her inner world was no less of a danger zone than the violence and chaos she had fled. Sometimes her deeply etched memories took the form of physical sensations, such as the intermittent, at moments unbearable throbbing in her neck that, she explained to Artemis, was the result of nerve damage suffered as she held President Kennedy’s head in both arms after the shooting.
On November 1, 1968, Onassis called a news conference in Athens to report that the government had indeed designated him to build the complex of industries—an oil refinery, an aluminum plant, a thermoelectric power plant, an air terminal, and myriad other entities as yet unspecified—that he touted as the largest individual investment ever made in Greece, as well as proof of the stability of the Papadopoulos regime. In closing the deal, Onassis had outmaneuvered his longtime personal and business rival, Stavros Niarchos, who also had been keen to establish himself as the commercial partner of a dictatorship that routinely imprisoned and tortured anyone who dissented from its policies. But no less important to Onassis’s self-image as a man at the apex of his powers—“the sun king,” as an associate characterized him in this period—was his having single-handedly overcome the monumental opposition of the Kennedys, the Vatican, and world opinion combined when he married Jackie. For Onassis, the outraged and bewildered international headlines had merely underscored the magnitude of his accomplishment in having persuaded Beauty to marry the Beast. In the wake of his press conference, he hosted a celebratory dinner party in honor of Papadopoulos. Jackie, attired in a snug black gown and a diamond necklace, was later reported to have been the evening’s “pièce de résistance.”
Afterward, the newlyweds embarked on a weeklong cruise of the Sporades Islands in the northwest Aegean Sea, at the conclusion of which a stopover in England to visit the Radziwills was marred when a jewel thief entered a second-floor-bedroom window of the house where the Onassises were staying and removed various gems. Jackie, escorted by one of her husband’s senior executives, flew to New York on November 18 in order to be with John and Caroline on their respective birthdays, his on the twenty-fifth and hers two days later. As always, Jackie spent the anniversary of the JFK assassination in seclusion, this time at Wind Wood, her rented country house in Peapack, New Jersey. Onassis, who had arranged for the property to be surrounded by guards, flew in from Paris to join her there that night. Two days later, Jackie was walking alone on her property, as she liked to do, when a French photographer suddenly leapt out and pursued her across a field as he attempted to take her picture.
The jewel thief, the photographer-trespasser, not to mention the grenade- and pistol-wielding hijackers who commandeered an Onassis-owned Olympic Airways jetliner on November 8 in protest against the Papadopoulos regime: As early as the second month of the Onassis marriage, these episodes already suggested that no location, however carefully guarded, was impregnable. So it was a measure of Jackie’s need to idealize her new husband that, at this point, she asked the Secret Service to reduce considerably the government protection afforded to her children, both in New York and on their visits to Europe. Part of this, to be sure, was the old privacy issue that had long been so dear to her, as well as the sense, expressed soon after Dallas, that it was essential to give the children as normal a life as possible. But Jackie struck a new note in a December 11, 1968, letter to Secret Service director James Rowley, when she insisted that the security measures Onassis had previously put in place for his own purposes would amply serve her and the children’s needs as well. At a moment when Jackie had been much excoriated for betraying the memory of President Kennedy, she maintained that, with regard to John and Caroline, she was only doing what JFK would have wanted: “The children will never be safer than they will be on Skorpios or the Christina.… As the person in the world who is most interested in their security, and who recognizes most what threats there are in the outside world, I promise you that I have considered and tried every way, and that what I ask you for is what I know is best for the children of President Kennedy and what he would wish for them.”
At a glance, Jackie’s request seems paradoxical in view of recent incidents. But the very sense of helplessness and terror that had led her to
put herself under Onassis’s protection after the second Kennedy assassination persisted in fueling her need go on believing in this particular tutelary deity. She clung to the illusion of mastery—the notion that Onassis could foresee and forestall any potential dangers—that had drawn her to Skorpios in the first place. Rowley for his part urged her to take a more realistic view. Alluding to the episode the year before in Ireland, shortly after the death of Lady Harlech, when Jackie’s strange blindness to certain forms of danger had nearly caused her to be drowned, Rowley proposed that she reflect on what might have happened had the agent on duty not disregarded her wish to be left alone. The director suggested that security was a less clear-cut affair than Jackie imagined, and that not every danger was capable of being anticipated and averted if only the right thought processes were applied. As far as Rowley was concerned, it was the function of security “to guard against more than only the obvious and the foreseeable threat.” Implicit in all of this was that Onassis must inevitably fail to live up to her idealized expectations. In the end the Secret Service prevailed with regard to specifics, even if the director did not succeed in actually changing Jackie’s mind.
For the moment anyway, her illusions, threadbare though they might be, did often seem to sustain her. At such times, she appeared “serene and happy.” Or so Joe Alsop judged her to be when, in New York in the spring of 1969, he saw Jackie again—scrutinizing her, it may be imagined, over his large round horn-rimmed spectacles—for the first time since her controversial second marriage. Alsop, who made a point of assuring her that he had “always” liked “Ari,” was no longer the arbiter he had once been. His raving advocacy of the Vietnam War, not only in print but also at table, had led him to be regarded in certain circles as the thing he most detested—a bore. In dread of Alsop’s tirades about Vietnam, a good many people made a point of declining all invitations to the deep-red-lacquered dining room that had once been an important gathering place of the Washington tribe. Such was the dizzying degree to which the political world of JFK, and even of RFK, had already vanished that Alsop, once the high priest of the religion of Kennedy, had found himself uncomfortably welcoming the November 1968 election of Richard Nixon.
Despite Alsop’s fall, to Jackie he remained the adored preceptor, the man who had gripped her hand as she spoke of Dallas, the rare friend who had not abandoned her when she sought to start anew in Georgetown early on. As she fondly acknowledged, he had loved both Jack and Bobby, though in the end he had assailed RFK for having betrayed what Alsop believed had been President Kennedy’s unambiguously hawkish position on Vietnam. Writing to Alsop in the weeks before she remarried, Jackie had made it clear that she would never be able to love or care about anyone again, and that whatever she may once have hoped, she knew now that grief was an element she would always live in—“like sea or sky or earth.” So, less than a year after she had expressed those sentiments, Alsop had been pleased and no doubt relieved to find her apparently so contented and so well. He compared the happiness she radiated in Onassis’s company to “a good fire” in a cold English room.
Strange to say, at this juncture the prototype for the newlyweds’ relationship was perhaps less Onassis’s fiery liaisons with Maria Callas (whom, it later turned out, he was still seeing on the side) and other inamoratas as it was his role as devoted caregiver to the aged Winston Churchill. Far from ignoring or minimizing the injuries that had propelled Jackie into this marriage, Onassis made it his mission to rescue her from what he liked to call her “years of sorrow.” Early on, he communicated to his staff and intimate circle that his emotionally fragile bride was going to require special care. “It was as if Mr. Onassis had married an injured creature,” his longtime private secretary Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos recalled, “and we were all responsible for helping her wounds to heal.” The doting husband whispered to Jackie, laughed with her, told her stories, sang to her, and otherwise danced attendance. These days, she was ever bedizened with the jewelry he lavished upon her, such as the heart-shaped ruby earrings and matching raspberry-sized ring that obscured the entirety of her rather large knuckle and had to be removed whenever she made a telephone call. Though some observers were put off by the extent to which Onassis flaunted his sex life with his younger, taller wife (pawing at her in ways that seemed at odds with his insistence on her fragility), not all of his gestures were as desperate and self-serving. The man who mobilized planes and police on her behalf was also capable of more intimate demonstrations of concern and affection. A heavy smoker himself, he tried to make Jackie smoke less by snatching at her cigarette pack whenever she reached for it. He rarely succeeded in preventing her from lighting up, but his attempts, often accompanied by a display of mock exasperation, were among the couple’s fond private jokes, as well as a sign to others of what looked to be his sincere solicitude.
Crucially, Onassis took marvelous care not just of Jackie, but also of John and Caroline. When the children came to spend their first summer in Greece, he toured them about his scorpion-shaped island, which included an untamed, heavily forested area, where he pointed out the unique animals and plants that thrived there. He escorted the boy and girl on motorboat rides and fishing expeditions and, in a voice said to resemble “soft gravel,” regaled them with tales of his own childhood. Though John and Caroline were accompanied by Secret Service agents, Onassis insisted that his private security men be responsible for the children.
Jackie, who turned forty that summer, spent her days swimming, water-skiing, walking, painting, reading, and studying. In flight from a previous identity that she regarded as dangerous, she sought to reinvent herself. She learned Greek. She studied the history and culture of her new home. She elicited the guidance and advice of various experts and connoisseurs. She accompanied her husband on long, leisurely walks about his island kingdom, during which Onassis, between puffs on his cigar, declaimed poetry to her in Greek. She arrayed the old house that he had had painted pink for his new bride with carefully chosen Greek furnishings and art. To explain her obsession with redoing the edifice and its environs, she declared that there were many things in the world that she could not change, but that when it came to such matters as furniture and draperies and flowers, it was quite within her capacity to make all the changes she desired. And that, she emphasized, was very satisfying to her.
Despite everyone’s efforts, not least of them her own, this relatively tranquil first phase of the marriage proved to be short-lived. Jackie had considered enrolling one or both children in school in Switzerland after the summer, but at length she decided that New York was still best. Accordingly, she was back in Manhattan with John and Caroline in the early autumn as they began the new academic year. Though Jackie certainly did not recognize it then, the afternoon of September 24, 1969, was the start of something very important. No sooner had mother and son exited through the cast-iron front door at 1040 Fifth Avenue, en route to ride their bicycles together in the park, than a photographer leaped out from behind the canopied limestone building’s sidewalk plantings. Six years after the first Kennedy assassination, Jackie continued to be easily startled, and she later remembered feeling terrified when the lone cameraman began shooting.
Still, the encounter, however unpleasant, was in itself nothing unusual. The marriage to Onassis seemed to have obliterated any respect for her widowhood that the press had retained following the Manchester controversy. Ironically, the union that was supposed to have shielded Jackie’s privacy had done much to further erode the belief that she was entitled to any such thing. Eleven months previously in Greece, Billy Baldwin had been stunned and not a little frightened by “the bedlam of professional Jackie-watchers and photographers” who crowded furiously in on her whenever she was in public. When Baldwin went so far as to admit that he feared for her life, she assured him that the best possible response to all those aggressive press people was simply to smile at them. In the course of the September 24, 1969, incident, however, when the lensman who had just alarmed her outsid
e her New York residence reemerged, jack-in-the-box-like, from some shrubbery in Central Park, causing John to swerve his bicycle, Jackie was no longer inclined to smile.
Nor would a staged response have been likely to satisfy the thirty-eight-year-old Bronx-based freelancer Ron Galella. He defined himself as an artist, had studied art photography, and considered the type of camerawork he practiced to be unique. He wanted something more than just contrived expressions from the famous people he stalked. Aiming to capture, in his phrase, “the full range of human emotions,” he depended on the element of surprise. He frequently camouflaged himself, but when at last he did pop out of hiding, rather than look through a viewfinder, he preferred to lock eyes with his prey. Far from posing a problem, a subject’s discomfiture, involving as it did the revelation of authentic emotions oozing through the carefully composed celebrity veneer, was hugely desirable. Galella prided himself on his intrepidity. So when, at Jackie’s instigation, John’s Secret Service guards had the photographer charged with harassment, the result was far from what she seemed to have intended. Hardly had the charges been dismissed in Manhattan Criminal Court in October 1969 when a defiant Galella returned for more of the pictures he passionately believed he had every right to go on taking. Thereafter, he maintained a vigil in front of Jackie’s building and otherwise pursued her on foot and by automobile and aircraft. To be sure, other paparazzi hunted and haunted her in these years, but none perhaps with Galella’s Manchester-like doggedness and sense of personal mission.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 28