The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters

by Sam Kashner

  When it was finally over—when Nikita Khrushchev backed down and withdrew his missiles from Cuba—Bundy told Jackie that if the crisis had continued for even just a day or two longer, “Everybody would have cracked, because all those men had been awake night and day . . . everyone had worked to the peak of human endurance.”

  To commemorate those perilous days, Kennedy presented to Jackie and those who had weathered the crisis along with him a silver engraved Tiffany calendar for October 1962 with the fateful thirteen days highlighted in bold. It would remain on Jackie’s desk in the family quarters of the White House for the rest of her husband’s presidency.

  * * *

  THE CUBAN MISSILE Crisis brought Jackie and Jack Kennedy closer together. But what Jackie didn’t know at the time was that Lee’s marriage to Stas was unraveling. They remained a couple, but any pretense of monogamy was a casualty of Lee’s sexual rejection of her once adored husband. Though Stas took up with other women, there was no doubt that he still loved Lee, even to the point of expressing a kind of admiring exasperation over how profligate with money Lee could be, especially when it came to her wardrobe. He once sighed to a friend, “You have no idea what that tiny little body cost me.”

  As she had in her marriage to Canfield, Lee looked elsewhere for romantic and sexual fulfillment. First it had been Nureyev, but the impossibility of that relationship soon became clear to her, though she would always count him as a close friend.

  The press got wind of the couple’s troubles. In September of 1962, Time magazine ran an unflattering article about Stas and Lee with the title “Unhitching Post.” (Jack Kennedy was so incensed by the piece that he complained to Time Life founder Henry Luce, summoning him to the Oval Office for a personal rebuke.) Ironically, Lee’s annulment of the Canfield marriage was finally granted on November 24, 1962, allowing Lee and Stas to have their Catholic wedding the following July, but by then it was too late to save their marriage.

  What both sisters discovered over the course of their marriages was that they could abide infidelities—but not insolvency. Lee and Jackie both knew that the style to which they were bred needed constant infusions of cash—and those infusions invariably came from the men in their lives. So when Lee met a swarthy, black-haired shipping magnate reputed to be one of the richest men in the world, she was utterly entranced. Lee would soon find a way to, if not trump Jackie, at least match her with a consort as worldly, influential, and charming to women as John Kennedy, but far, far richer: the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis.

  Onassis was born in Smyrna, in 1906, to a prosperous Anatolian Greek family. His father, Socrates Onassis, had been a successful tobacco merchant, but there were tragedies in Ari’s early life. His mother died when he was six. As Greek Orthodox Christians living in Islamic Turkey, the family suffered extreme prejudice. The 1922 genocide of Greek and Armenian citizens at the hands of the Turkish state was intensely brutal: women were raped and murdered; men were rounded up into city squares and their throats were slit. As a boy, Ari witnessed terrible things: the hanging deaths of three uncles, the crucifixion of the priest who had married his parents. By the time he was a teenager, the Turkish government had burned down the family’s warehouse, and the military had confiscated their villa. His father was dragged off to prison. Eventually, Ari escaped to Argentina on an ocean steamer and spent his youth in a hardscrabble existence, working as a dishwasher and peddling cigarettes. Throughout it all, he taught himself business and learned several languages, investing his money and immigrating to New York during the Second World War. Though born to wealth, he was clearly a self-made man, amassing millions in the shipping industry and marrying into a wealthy family when he wed Tina Livanos. By the time he met Lee Radziwill, his marriage had ended in divorce, caused by his affair with the great opera star Maria Callas.

  Lee, like Jackie, had already fallen in love with Greece during her and her sister’s brief hiatus there after her daughter’s christening. And she found Onassis “magnetic. He walked like a potentate, noticing and wanting to be noticed . . . an habitual cigar in his hand. His hair was thick with brilliantine and his olive skin was smooth. His voice sounded like soft gravel—raspy, but low.” His estimated worth was $300 million, equivalent to $2.1 billion today.

  Onassis completely thrilled Lee, and not just because of his immense wealth and power. He was warm with an earthy charm and a strong sexual presence. (Lee later confided that she liked his “primitive vitality,” and she described his “sexual prowess, his Oriental tastes in that area.”) Onassis was twenty-seven years older than Lee; as had been the case with Stas, Lee was attracted to a man who reminded her of her father.

  The “Golden Greek,” as he was known, was still very much involved with Maria Callas when he met and wooed Lee, though Callas was married and their open affair created a scandal in Europe. Callas later said about her rival, “I never disliked Jackie, but I hate Lee. I hate her. I have a dream all the time. I dream about Onassis. I want to help him but I can’t.” With world-weary acceptance of his wife’s affair, Stas was mollified by being made a director of Olympic Airlines, owned by Onassis.

  Many speculated that Onassis’s interest in Lee had indeed been enhanced by her connection to the White House. John and Bobby Kennedy actively disliked and mistrusted Onassis, considering him “a pirate . . . a crook.” He had been indicted by the US government for illegally operating a fleet of ships he had bought from the US, and had ended up paying a $7 million fine. By the spring of 1963, the affair was being noticed: Drew Pearson wrote in the Washington Post, “Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law to the President?”

  There has been speculation that it was Onassis himself who leaked his affair with Lee—or, possibly, Maria Callas’s husband, Giovanni Meneghini. Lee, still in an amicable marriage with Stas, was certainly discreet, even to the point of dissembling about her affair with Onassis. It was most likely the men who gave her away—either Onassis, who employed a press agent to keep his name in the news, or Meneghini, perhaps to force Callas’s hand.

  Onassis nursed a lifelong hatred of the Kennedys, especially Bobby. The fact that he now had the president’s sister-in-law on his arm, spending nights with him on the Christina, moored off the Amalfi Coast in the shimmering Mediterranean, must have made the affair all the more satisfying for him. Onassis loved women, he loved money, he loved power—but he also loved revenge.

  * * *

  RUMORS OF LEE’S affair with Onassis continued to surface. Bobby Kennedy, who regarded the affair as “a betrayal of the whole family,” hit upon the idea of luring Lee away from a cruise down the Amalfi Coast on Onassis’s 325-foot yacht by asking her to accompany Jack on a state trip to Berlin and Ireland. Jackie was seven months pregnant at the time and, having already suffered one miscarriage, did not want to risk traveling.

  The June 1963 trip featuring Lee in a leading role was another triumph, with adoring crowds and a prominent place at the Berlin Wall when Kennedy made the now historic remark “Ich bin ein Berliner.” “It was the most thrilling experience of my life,” Lee recalled. It was followed by a deeply personal trip to Ireland, where Kennedy visited his sister Kathleen’s grave; soon after becoming Lady Hartington, Kathleen had died in a plane crash.

  If Jackie resented Lee taking her place on the triumphant trip to Berlin, adding to the growing rivalry between the two sisters, it remained unspoken. Afterward, Lee returned to London and to Greece, where she resumed her relationship with Onassis.

  * * *

  ON AUGUST 9, 1963, Jackie gave birth to Patrick, who died a few hours after being born. He was the second baby Jackie had lost—her first child, given the sweet name of Arabella, had been stillborn. Lee received the news while on board the Christina on an Aegean cruise with Onassis. She immediately flew to Boston to attend Patrick’s funeral and to comfort her sister, who was plunged deeply into grief and postpartum depression. Terribly concerned about her sister, Lee urged Onassis to invite Jackie a
board the Christina. Kennedy didn’t want her to go, but Jackie couldn’t face returning to Washington so soon after the loss of their baby. Jack worried that Lee wanted Jackie along to act as her beard in her affair with Onassis, so he and Bobby turned to Franklin Roosevelt Jr., the son of FDR and a good friend of the Kennedys, and his wife, Suzanne, to accompany Jackie on the cruise to add an “air of respect” to the trip. Still concerned about bad publicity as the next presidential election loomed, Jack actually went down on one knee, his Washington friend Martha Bartlett recalled, to beg Jackie not to make the trip. But she was determined to go.

  What many didn’t know was that Jackie was allowed to go on the cruise to take the opportunity to persuade Lee not to marry Onassis, for the sake of the Kennedys.

  So on October 2, 1963, Jackie flew to Athens. Two days later, the Christina departed from Piraeus on its way to Istanbul and the farthermost Greek island of Mytilene. Once aboard the sumptuous yacht, Ari left Lee and Jackie alone for much of the cruise, where once again they became the whispering sisters, exchanging confidences in the yacht’s luxurious cabins (Jackie’s state room was replete with solid-gold fixtures in the shape of dolphins). Onassis had even offered to stay away for the cruise, aware of the Kennedys’ disapproval, but Jackie wasn’t going to take advantage of his hospitality only to banish him. By many accounts, he stayed in his state room for the first three days of the cruise, making business calls and dining on lobster thermidor, while his guests sunbathed, read, and swam in the mosaic pool on the aft deck. Like in the classic fairy tale “The Beauty and the Beast,” Onassis at first hid himself from the prized beauty until he suddenly appeared, offering Jackie all the hospitality his wealth and generosity afforded.

  Debarking at Istanbul, they continued on a guided tour of Smyrna, in Turkey, where Onassis had been born. Photographs began appearing in the States of Onassis and Jackie threading their way through the winding streets of the ancient city—photographs that Maria Callas and President Kennedy both saw, and were alarmed by.

  Back on board the Christina, it was difficult for Jackie to remain in close contact with Jack. Despite the modern conveniences of the yacht, the communication system was frustrating, and the time difference added another difficulty. She would place a call to the White House but would often have to wait three hours before it went through—and the local switchboard often lost the connection. She took to writing Jack long letters (“punctuated with dashes like everything she wrote,” observed one presidential historian), describing how much she missed him and how she regretted that he could not be with her to share the calming pleasures of the Mediterranean.

  However, once Jack saw newspaper photos of Jackie strolling with Onassis, her hand in his, he managed to get through to her on the Christina to ask that she cut her trip short. Jackie refused. She had always been deeply interested in Greek culture and myth, and to be given a tour of classical sites with Onassis as her guide was a true pleasure.

  What neither Lee nor the Kennedys had counted on was the special attention paid to the First Lady once Onassis joined his guests, especially evidenced by the gifts he gave them at the end of the cruise. Suzanne Roosevelt was given a gold evening clutch (a minaudière), Lee received three diamond-studded bracelets, but he gifted Jackie with a dazzling diamond-and-ruby necklace, estimated at $50,000.

  Lee was miffed, and she perhaps sensed that hers was a farewell gift. She wrote to her brother-in-law that she felt Jackie’s rubies outshined her “dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party.” But she had become used to that—gifts to ladies-in-waiting were always less magnificent than gifts given to queens.

  Jackie left the cruise genuinely rested and restored to better spirits, but she wasn’t prepared for the negative press her trip had inspired. Joe Alsop wrote in his column, “How terrible it was of Jackie Kennedy to go off on the Onassis yacht. Everyone knew that Lee Radziwill was having an affair with Onassis, and that Jackie was along as cover . . .” Schlesinger feared that “Jackie’s rest” appeared to the American public as “La Dolce Vita in the Greek Isles.” It was the second time Jackie received chiding press, a surprising reversal since the media had just praised her dignity and extended sympathy on the loss of her infant son. She worried that Jack now saw her as a political liability.

  Chagrined by her husband’s disapproval, Jackie agreed to help Jack campaign. She was a reluctant campaigner at best, but Kennedy knew she added glamour to the ticket. Jackie even considered accompanying him to the historic Army-Navy football game—though she loathed football.

  “I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want,” she told him.

  Kennedy asked whether that might include his upcoming trip to Fort Worth and Dallas with Lyndon Johnson. She took out her red leather appointment book and showed Kennedy the page where she’d scribbled “Texas” across the dates for November 21, 22, and 23.

  * * *

  NO LESS THAN the evangelical preacher Billy Graham had advised Jack Kennedy not to visit Dallas in his attempt to shore up Southern support for the Democratic Party in the upcoming 1964 presidential election. Right-wing conspiracy groups flourished there—the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, the Patrick Henry Society—and the ultraconservative oil billionaire H. L. Hunt exerted his anti-Democratic influence. As William Manchester, who would write the first and most detailed account of the assassination in his powerful book Death of a President, observed:

  In that third year of the Kennedy presidency, a kind of fever lay over Dallas country. Mad things happened. Huge billboards screamed, “Impeach Earl Warren.” Jewish stores were smeared with crude swastikas . . . Radical right polemics were distributed in public schools; Kennedy’s name was booed in classrooms; junior executives were required to attend radical seminars.

  A “Wanted” poster was circulated in Dallas the day of Kennedy’s visit, accusing him of “turning the sovereignty of the U.S. over to the Communist controlled United Nations” and “appointing Anti-Christians to federal office.” Dallas was also a city awash in gun violence: 110 murders in 1963, three out of four by gunfire. “Texas led the United States in homicide, and Big D [Dallas] led Texas,” Manchester wrote, in describing the city’s “dark streak of violence.” When Kennedy’s assassination was announced to a fourth grade class in a wealthy Dallas suburb, the fourth graders burst into applause.

  The night before the assassination, in their hotel room in Fort Worth, Jack asked Jackie what she was going to wear for the events planned in Dallas. “There are going to be all these rich, Republican women at that lunch, wearing mink coats and diamond bracelets,” he said. “And you’ve got to look as marvelous as any of them. Be simple—show these Texans what good taste really is.” Jackie held out several dresses in front of her—“beige and white dresses, blue and yellow suits, and, for Dallas, a pink suit with a navy blue collar and matching pink pillbox hat.”

  Jackie vividly remembered other details of that night and the following day: She recalled how Jack had asked her not to stay the night with him because he had to rise early the next morning to make a breakfast speech. She recalled how his aides had removed the hotel’s mattress and replaced it with a special mattress he always traveled with to ease his chronic back pain. She recalled looking into the mirror and fussing over finding a new wrinkle. She recalled their long good-night embrace, not knowing it would be their last night together.

  The next day, she remembered that Jack asked her to remove her oversized sunglasses so the crowd could see her face. “You’re the one they’ve come to see,” he told her. She did so.

  She also remembered that after the first shot rang out, Kennedy slumped at her side. He’d been shot in the soft tissue of the shoulder, and the bullet exited through his trachea. Later, Dr. Kenneth Salyer, who treated Kennedy at Dallas’s Parkland Hospital, speculated that had Kennedy not been wearing the back brace he usually wore to ameliorate his back pain, he might not have remained upright and thus a vulnerable target for Lee Harvey Oswal
d’s second, fatal gunshot to the head. Part of his skull shattered in a pink mist.

  She did not remember crawling to the rear of the open car in her blood-spattered pink Chanel suit, to seek aid from Agent Hill, who was following directly behind the black limousine. Hill gave Jackie his suit jacket, which she used to desperately wrap her husband’s head wound.

  She did remember struggling with Agent Hill to place Kennedy’s body on a stretcher outside of Parkland Hospital. “I’m not going to let him go, Mr. Hill,” she remembered saying. “You know he’s dead. Let me alone.”

  She remembered that the back seat of the SS-100-X six-passenger Lincoln was soaked in her husband’s blood.

  She remembered asking Dr. Kemp Clark, one of the surgeons who tried desperately to save the president, if she could see her husband in his coffin before it was closed.

  When he said no, she remembered saying, “Do you think seeing the coffin can upset me, Doctor? . . . His blood is all over me. How can I see anything worse than I’ve seen?”

  She remembered trying to remove her left glove so she could place her wedding ring in the coffin alongside Kennedy’s body, but fumbled with the glove. She remembered holding out her wrist to police sergeant Bob Dugger, who undid the glove and peeled it from her hand.

  She remembered Vice President Lyndon Johnson—now suddenly made president—and Kennedy aides asking her to change out of her bloodied suit for the swearing-in of Johnson on board Air Force One, and that she refused.

  “Let them see what they’ve done,” she said.

  A dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder caught the life-shattering event on 8 mm Kodachrome II safety film. He’d planned to head out of Dealey Plaza that day to join the throng of well-wishers along the path of the presidential motorcade, but he was going to leave his camera at home. It was an overcast day, but when the sun came out, his secretary said, “Mr. Z., you march right back there. How many times will you have a crack at color movies of the President?”