by Sam Kashner
Jackie also confided in Pierre Salinger, “There’s only one thing I can do in life now—save my children. They’ve got to grow up without thinking back at their father’s murder.”
Theodore White ultimately turned down her request to write the official account of the assassination, as he was already deep into another work and he might also have been wary of the pitfalls of a family-commissioned book. Bobby Kennedy, working with Jackie in finding a suitable writer, assured her that they would have final approval over any manuscript written on the subject.
Salinger suggested William Manchester, a prolific writer of novels and biographies, a World War II veteran, an ex-marine, and a former foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. He had already met with Kennedy and published Portrait of a President, and both men had enjoyed the encounters. Manchester later wrote about the experience:
I’d see Jack at the end of his last appointment for the day. We’d have a daiquiri and sit on the Truman Balcony. He’d smoke a cigar and I’d have a Heineken. He’d let loose—things he couldn’t discuss with anyone else.
Jackie agreed with Bobby that a writer who already admired Kennedy, whose family was also from Massachusetts, and whose World War II experience was similar to Kennedy’s (both had been awarded Purple Hearts, and Manchester had fought in Guadalcanal when Kennedy was commanding PT-109 a few miles away, near the island of Tulagi in the Pacific Theater) was the right choice. Here was someone the Kennedys felt they could trust. More important for Jackie, perhaps, was that she was impressed by Manchester’s rich, lyrical writing style. She knew a superb writer when she saw one.
Bobby worked out a deal with Manchester and Harper & Row, the house that had published Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage and was considered the official publisher of the Kennedy family. Jackie agreed to meet with the thirty-nine-year-old, angular ex-marine with the poetic prose style for an agreed-upon ten hours of interviews. Bobby had persuaded Jackie that she would only have to go over the ghastly events once with Manchester, not “again and again and again.”
On April 7, 1964, roughly four and a half months after the assassination, Jackie greeted the writer at her town house in Georgetown for the first of two five-hour sessions. Jackie, then thirty-four years old, was dressed in yellow capri pants and a black jersey when they first met, and Manchester was fascinated by her “camellia beauty.” He later wrote:
My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great, tragic actress. I mean that in the finest sense of the word. There was a weekend in American history when we need to be united in our sadness. [Jacqueline Kennedy] provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s heroine.
The only way a still grieving Jackie could get through the lengthy interviews was with plentiful daiquiris. Manchester could hear the clinking of ice cubes when he played back his Wollensak tape recorder, as well as the sound of countless matches being struck, as both Jackie and Manchester smoked throughout the sessions. Manchester later wrote that “half the people I interviewed displayed deep emotional distress while trying to answer my questions. None of the other sessions were as affecting as those with Jackie.” Because the assassination had occurred in broad daylight, she couldn’t bear to talk about it during daylight hours, so they met as the sun was going down—what the French call “l’heure bleu.” Manchester was struck not only by her dark-haired beauty but by how vividly and accurately she remembered everything that had happened. “She had a great visual eye and great recall,” he wrote. “She remembers every god-damn thing about that assassination . . . It was like expunging herself—the wound was still pretty raw.”
Five months after the assassination, with the country still in grief and shock, Jackie was invited to spend Easter with her friend Bunny Mellon at her home in Antigua. Lee and Stas were invited, as were Bobby Kennedy and Chuck Spalding. In an attempt to escape the gloom and pity that surrounded her, Jackie accepted the invitation, and she and Lee were again closer than ever. The sisters water-skied and swam and sunbathed. They planned picnics on nearby islands, and in the evenings in Bunny’s splendid villa, they played pop music at top volume to help drown out their sorrows—popular hits of the day such as Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme’s “Blame It on the Bossa Nova,” the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine,” and Kennedy friend Andy Williams’s “Can’t Get Used to Losing You.” Bobby Kennedy would have none of that, so he secluded himself in a corner of the villa, where he devoured The Greek Way.
Manchester moved with his family to Washington, DC, from his home in Middletown, Connecticut, where he had been working as an editor at Wesleyan University Press, and immersed himself in his research, working twenty hours a day on occasion. He became obsessed with the book, spending time in Dallas retracing every detail of the ill-fated day. Jim Bishop had decided to go ahead with his own unauthorized book about Kennedy’s death, and Manchester realized the family wanted him to beat Bishop to market. He worked so intensely and relentlessly that he ended up hospitalized for exhaustion. And then Jackie and Bobby decided they didn’t want the book published, once it was finished, because Jackie had found it too much a violation of her privacy.
When Jackie learned that The Death of a President would be serialized in Look magazine, she panicked, believing it would be “tasteless” to publicly expose her private memories of that terrible event. She had expected the book to be “bound in black and put away on dark library shelves,” she would later say. Bobby went along with Jackie’s wishes, reneging on his promise to Manchester to not interfere with publication. Their efforts to suppress The Death of a President brought Jackie truly negative publicity; for the first time, her popularity declined in national polls.
Manchester was devastated. He had put his heart and soul into the book and it had nearly wrecked his health. The fight over its publication was such a public scandal that Bayer Aspirin offered the writer $35,000 to endorse their headache remedy (he turned them down). Jackie filed an injunction to stop publication, finally settling out of court. Manchester agreed to cut 1600 words from the Look serialization and seven pages from the book’s 654-page text. The Death of a President was serialized—and published—to great acclaim. Six hundred thousand copies were sold within two months and more than a million copies by the summer of l967. Tom Wicker, reviewing the book for the New York Times, wrote, finally, that “it was worth the effort; it may even have been worth the pain.”
But now, with John F. Kennedy gone and Jackie out of the White House, it was Lee’s time to shine. She had always hated what had been written about her during the Kennedy years. “It seemed so empty, so jet set,” she said about that era in her life. She had never liked living in a fishbowl, feeling that her attempts to soar were being tamped down by the Kennedys. “After the death of my brother-in-law,” Lee admitted years later, “I was finally free.”
7
Swan Dive
I’d love to act. Do you think it’s too late?
—JACKIE
Truman fell in love with me. He thought there was nothing I couldn’t do, and that I must go into the theater.
—LEE
In 1964, Lee convinced Stas that it was time to leave London and move back to the States to be nearer to Jackie in Georgetown and make it possible for Anthony and Tina to spend more time with Caroline and John Jr. Stas bought a duplex at 969 Park Avenue in New York. The return ushered in a happier time for both sisters. “Life was more gentle,” Lee later wrote. “Everyone had more time to relax, appreciate looking at things, and visit museums. It was normal to lunch at people’s apartments rather than in a restaurant.”
Lee again turned to Renzo Mongiardino to transform the somewhat faded Park Avenue duplex into what many considered the most beautiful showplace in New York. She chose a dramatic cherry-red velvet for the living room. In the hall library she hung Francis Bacon’s Figure Turning, which Stas had acquired when he’d covered the painter’s gambling debts. The dining room walls were covered in a dark orange moi
re, surrounding one of her favorite works of art: a whimsical eighteenth-century “nursery” painting of a monkey shaking hands with a dog. Ferns and Anglo-Indian botanical watercolors transformed her bedroom into a greenhouse-like refuge. “When I woke up, I felt like I was in the country,” was how she described it.
“A woman’s home is her self-portrait,” Lee believes, and though Jackie would receive world attention for redecorating the White House, Lee put her heart and soul into transforming her homes into places of exquisite color and design. She began spending more time in her duplex apartment, which overlooked Central Park and “the pale green leaded roof” of what is now the New York University Institute of Fine Arts, as she later wrote.
Jackie followed Lee’s move to New York City to escape the fishbowl that Washington, DC, had become and the countless reminders of the thousand days she had lived in the White House with Jack. New York is known for its anonymity, though even there, Jackie would often be followed and stared at by the public, still fascinated by her mythic image.
It was Lee who had first suggested that Jackie go apartment hunting in Manhattan to break out of her shell of grief. Jackie, like Lee, had “always loved New York and everything about it—the museums, the parks, the people. She was always drawn back to New York,” recalled Nancy Tuckerman. The two women went apartment hunting together, but to preserve her privacy (and no doubt keep the price reasonable), Tuckerman pretended to be the potential buyer and Jackie came disguised as the children’s nanny. Nothing they saw, however, pleased her until Jayne Wrightsman told her about the five-bedroom, five-bath co-op suddenly available at 1040 Fifth Avenue.
The fifteenth-floor apartment was owned by Mrs. Lowell Weicker (her husband would serve as senator and governor of Connecticut and distinguish himself as a member of the Senate select committee on the Watergate investigation). It was not far from where the sisters had grown up, before Janet had married Hugh Auchincloss. Jackie could easily walk to favorite boutiques that she and Lee had once strolled through when Jackie was redecorating the White House—all pleasant memories of a happier time. It was seven blocks north of Lee’s duplex apartment and walking distance to Caroline’s school, the Convent of the Sacred Heart at 91st and Fifth Avenue (which had taught three generations of Bouviers, including the sisters’ twin aunts, Maude Bouvier Davis and Michelle Bouvier Putnam).
“Ten Forty,” as Jackie would come to call the building, was close to Lee’s apartment, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Carlyle Hotel, where the Kennedys had long maintained a duplex apartment on the top floor. Just as important to Jackie in her fragile state, her brother- and sister-in-law Peter and Pat Lawford lived nearby at 990 Fifth Avenue. Her in-laws Stephen and Jean Kennedy Smith resided at 950 Fifth Avenue, and her stepbrother Yusha Auchincloss was the outlier at 111 Park Avenue, still close enough for comfort. In many ways, she had come home.
Jackie bought the sprawling apartment for $250,000 ($1.75 million in today’s dollars). She also maintained a separate four-room office at 400 Park Avenue, where she installed her two devoted secretaries, Tuckerman and Turnure.
From the Kennedy family suite at the Carlyle Hotel, Jackie and Lee supervised the transformation of the somewhat fusty Weicker apartment into a showplace reminiscent of the breezy Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port in Massachusetts and Lasata in the Hamptons, full of light and flowers. Typically, Jackie filled her apartment with books. With suggestions by the much-in-demand interior designer Mark Hampton, who wanted to reflect Jackie’s classic style, Jackie kept the Louis XVI bureau on which John Kennedy had signed the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. She displayed her collection of seventeenth-century animal drawings and miniature paintings from India, and the Empire desk that had belonged to her father and that Lee had generously given to her, knowing how much their father had doted on Jackie.
New York would give Jackie room to breathe, a place to be herself. In New York, she could perhaps escape from her immense fame, just as Greta Garbo had moved to Manhattan at the end of her film career, saying, “I can live in New York or I can live in hell.”
* * *
WITH JACKIE NOW the nation’s widowed queen, no longer squarely in the limelight, Lee’s life began to take center stage. She began writing articles on fashion and décor for McCall’s and Ladies’ Home Journal. The brilliant, diminutive writer Truman Capote completely flipped for Lee Radziwill, “the Principessa,” and their friendship flourished.
Truman was one of Gore Vidal’s rivals for the role of America’s most famous living writer. His breakout novella, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, was turned into a stylish film starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. The serialization in the New Yorker and subsequent publication of In Cold Blood, his “nonfiction novel” about the murder of a Kansas farm family, catapulted Capote to stratospheric heights. A conflicted, transplanted Southerner making his way through New York’s shark-infested society, Capote was known for his catty wit and brilliant portraiture of the women he admired and cultivated, known as his “swans.” For a time, Lee was preeminent among them.
Capote admired Lee’s “first-class intelligence,” as well as her femininity: “I can’t think of any woman more feminine than Lee Radziwill, not even Audrey Hepburn . . .” Lee began having regular lunches with the irrepressible Truman at fashionable restaurants like Quo Vadis and the Colony in New York, so much so that Capote’s other swans—the society doyennes Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Pamela Harriman, and Gloria Guinness—were trumpeting their disapproval, their noses out of joint because their favorite writer, gossip, and escort-around-town was spending so much time at Lee’s side. They missed his company, and they missed his flattery. One of them wrote to Capote, “I don’t want to see another picture of you holding Lee Radziwill’s hand. I want you to hold my hand.” Suzy Knickerbocker groused in her society gossip column, “Somebody has got to tell Truman that Lee Radziwill can’t have him ALL THE TIME. There’s only one Truman and we saw him first.”
Calling her “Princess Dear,” Truman wrote in a Vogue appreciation of Lee, “I love everything about her. I love the way she looks, the way she moves, the way she thinks . . . Ah, the Princess! Well, she’s easily described. She’s a beauty. Inside. Outside.” This is where he described her eyes as “gold-brown, like a glass of brandy resting on a table in front of firelight.” As Truman’s biographer Gerald Clarke observed, Truman imagined Lee as a character in a novel—a modern-day Becky Sharp from William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, making her way through society yet aware that she was playing an impossible role. Whereas Jackie seemed to have been born into a fairy tale, wife of a dashing young president, the most admired woman in the world, Lee had married a prince with a dubious title, had money but not a fortune, and seemed to be eclipsed by her sister in everything she did. It just wasn’t fair. Truman seemed poised to balance the equation, hoping to mold her into someone who could outshine Jackie.
“She doesn’t just want to be somebody’s sister,” he later explained. “She wants to have a life and an identity of her own. She’s a very, very extraordinary girl. She has a really good first-class mind. It just has to get released.”
The admiration was, at first, mutual. Lee told Gerald Clarke:
He’s my closest friend. More than with anyone else, I can discuss the most serious things about life . . . I miss him terribly when I am away from him. I trust him implicitly. He’s the most loyal friend I ever had, and the best company I’ve ever known. We’ve always been so close that it’s like an echo. We never have to finish sentences. We just know what the other one means or wants to say. I feel as if he’s my brother, except that brothers and sisters are rarely as close as we are.
Some were baffled by Truman’s idolatry of Lee. Though lovely, slender, and stylish, she wasn’t as charismatic as Babe Paley, as impossibly chic as Gloria Guinness, nor did she possess Pamela Harriman’s persuasive charm and political influence. In fact, Lee seemed rather lost and uncertain compared to the confidence exuded by his other swans. Perhaps Lee an
d Truman recognized in each other their own gilded outsider status—they seemed to have everything (fame, popularity, taste), but somehow, it was never enough. Truman saw in Lee the desperation to make a name for herself. Truman knew that feeling, and he knew how she could do it.
He also saw how insecure Lee could be, sensing the way she felt about her sister. He wrote to Cecil Beaton from Switzerland as early as 1962, “Had lunch one day with a new friend, Princess Lee (My God, how jealous she is of Jackie: I never knew); I understand her marriage is all but finito.”
Truman had actually met Jackie first, most likely at a party in New York in the summer of 1960 when Jackie was just the Georgetown wife of a relatively unknown senator from Massachusetts. The young couple kept an apartment in Manhattan, which Truman characterized as “this awful old apartment on Park Avenue.” Truman would visit Jackie in the New York apartment, or they would go out to dinner or the theater when Jack was not in town.
After the election of 1960, Truman had sent a congratulatory telegram to the Kennedys, receiving a reply from Jackie, explaining that at first they thought the cable was from Harry Truman, until they realized “a) Harry wasn’t in Switzerland, and b) wouldn’t have signed it ‘love and hugs.’ Hah!” Truman found Jackie “sweet, eager, intelligent, not quite sure of herself, and hurt—hurt because she knew [Jack] was banging all these broads. She never said that, but I know about it, rather vaguely.”
Truman was actually dismissive of Jack Kennedy’s appeal as a ladies’ man. His own taste in men tended toward the rumpled and the middle-aged, possibly as a way to recapture the love of the father who abandoned him in childhood. “What I don’t understand,” he told Clarke, “is why everybody said the Kennedys were so sexy.”
But Jackie and Truman remained friendly for several years. Jackie always admired writers, and she was especially touched by the seven-line letter of condolence Truman had sent to her after Patrick’s death. Jackie wrote to Truman her appreciation of his kind words: