“We had an interesting relationship because even though it was personal, we tried to keep it professional,” he said of himself and Jackie. “It was always ‘Mrs. Kennedy.’ It was always ‘Mr. Hill.’ Always.
“One memory that sticks out in my mind,” he adds, “was when I drove Bobby and Mrs. Kennedy to JFK’s grave three days after he was buried. Bobby had said something like, ‘Let’s go see our friend,’ and I drove the two of them out there. I just remember standing back to give them their privacy as Mrs. Kennedy and Bobby approached the grave and then knelt before it and prayed. Then Mrs. Kennedy placed lilies of the valley on the grave. Afterward, we drove back to the White House in total silence. What could anyone say?”
Clint Hill didn’t go to New York with Jackie when she moved there, his place having been taken by Jack Walsh. If it had been just Walsh guarding the children, Jackie would have been quite happy. However, the government had so many agents in the little family’s midst that it became a true annoyance for her. Jackie’s own protection ended shortly before her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, but as children of the president, her offspring would continue to have guards on duty around them for many more years. Therefore, there was constant communication—and miscommunication—over the years between Jackie and the government as she attempted, usually in vain, to have the protection of her children minimized.* The letters she would send outlining her concerns were usually long and very detailed, such as one she wrote on December 11, 1968, to James J. Rowley, director of the Secret Service—six typed pages, single-spaced! At the time, Jackie was very upset that three more agents had been added to the roster in October after new legislation was passed (a consequence of RFK’s assassination). This made a total of eight agents guarding two children! It seemed preposterous to her.
“The trouble with the children’s Secret Service detail now is the same as when we moved to New York in 1964,” she wrote. “There are too many agents, and the new ones are not ones who are sensitive to the needs of little children.”
At this point—the end of 1968—Caroline was eleven and John was eight. Jackie felt strongly that so many agents on duty were throwing their lives into “turmoil” and that they “do not care about them or understand their problems.” She wanted “three young men whom they know and trust,” and that was it—Jack Walsh being one of the agents she wanted on duty. She wrote that she could live with the security measures taken in New York and Hyannis Port if need be, but that what was going on in Far Hills, New Jersey, where she had a country home, was totally unacceptable.
“It’s harmful rather than helpful,” Jackie wrote. “Agents tramp outside the children’s windows all night, talking into their walkie-talkie. Cars of each agent pile up in the driveway so that our little country house looks like a used car lot! And with all this,” Jackie complained, “the agents supply the children with no protection.”
Citing an example, Jackie wrote that agents on duty lost track of her children for two full hours because “they followed a wrong car out of the driveway!” She wrote that one of her neighbors, “a mother of nine,” had to leave her children “and bring mine home.” She detailed another example of an agent who “forcibly dragged my children home for supper” even though she “had told them they could stay at a neighbor’s for the meal.” She also objected to all of the security in Greece, saying that Ari had seventy-five men to enforce security “and that is quite enough.” She wrote, “The children are growing up. They must see new things and travel as their father would have wished them to do. They must be as free as possible, not encumbered by a group of men who will be lost in foreign countries, so that one ends up protecting them rather than vice versa.” She concluded by writing, “As the [one] person in the world who is most interested in their security, and who realizes 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.” She signed it, “Most sincerely, Jacqueline.”
The response? It took almost three months, but when James Rowley finally did respond, he denied pretty much all of Jackie’s requests. In explaining his reasons, he said that the government still received “communications from mentally ill persons who represent a potential threat to your children.” He noted that “a curious and unwitting public” is still very interested in the activities of the Kennedy children. He also wrote of “the ever present threat of the kidnapper,” and, he added, “the incidences of aircraft hijacking” were “a great concern.” He did allow, though, that the agents wouldn’t park on her property in New Jersey, that they would park on the road instead. He also promised to have the agents ease up on walkie-talkie communication outside the children’s rooms. Small consolation for her, doubtless, considering the breadth of her complaints. Then, in what Jackie later said she considered “hard ball,” Rowley pointed out that when she was in Ireland a year earlier, she had asked that Jack Walsh not accompany her to the beach. He refused. She wasn’t happy about it but decided to go swimming anyway. She then went out into the churning ocean, got pulled in by an undertow, and very nearly drowned. Luckily, Walsh jumped in and was able to rescue her. Jackie lay on the beach for almost thirty minutes coughing up all the saltwater. She was very grateful, especially since earlier on that same vacation, John had been at a hot dog roast and somehow stumbled and tripped into the hot coals. Walsh pulled him out and saved him from more frightful burns than the second-degree ones he suffered on his arm. Jackie was very happy that Jack Walsh had been with her and the children on that particular trip, but not too happy about the fact that his heroic efforts were now being used as a weapon to deny her requests for less protection.
“It’s a constant frustration,” Jackie wrote to Lady Bird Johnson of the Secret Service detail protecting her children. “Truly, I am at my wit’s end with it. They will not let the children lead normal lives, or as normal as possible considering. I guess one could say I am losing faith in this system.”
Lady Bird wrote back, “I sympathize with you, my dear. We have gone through the same thing with our children. It’s not the agents, I’m afraid, it’s the reason for their presence. How sad that we as a nation have to go to such lengths. But after what has happened in recent years, I’m afraid we have no choice, do we?”
Considering what she herself had been through, Jackie likely agreed.
Lady Bird closed her letter with these wise words: “Put your faith in love, and it will carry you through life, no matter what happens and no matter when.”
A Problem Like Maria
There was one major problem in Jackie’s marriage to Aristotle Onassis, and it was significant enough to cause her many years of extreme anguish. It was Maria Callas. Onassis simply would not stop seeing the famed opera star, and Callas couldn’t seem to keep herself away from him either. The affair between the two had begun in 1957 when Ari was married to his first wife, Tina. Throughout the entire time he was seeing Callas, however, Onassis was also seeing other women. “He couldn’t even be faithful to the woman with whom he was being unfaithful to his wife,” observed Enrique Fonteyn, who worked as one of Onassis’s assistants from 1966 through the end of 1969. “However, that was the Greek way back then, at least amongst powerful, rich men. I believe the affair with Maria was on hold in 1968, but not really over, when Onassis married Jackie,” he said. “However, within months of the wedding—at around Christmastime, actually—Ari and Maria started seeing each other again.”
Ari did try to defend his carrying on an affair even after he’d wed Jackie: His pride had been hurt in February 1970 when letters from Jackie to Roswell Gilpatric somehow fell into the hands of an autograph dealer and were made public. One was sent from the Christina during Jackie’s honeymoon with Onassis, which was more than he could handle. “Dearest Ros,” it began, “I would have told you before I left—but then everything happened so much more quickly than I’d planned. I saw somewhere what
you had said and I was very touched—dear Ros. I hope you know all you were and are and will ever be to me. With my love, Jackie.” The day after the letter ended up in the press, Gilpatric’s wife filed for a legal separation. And Onassis cited his “hurt pride” as a reason—weak though it may have been—for his ongoing affair behind Jackie’s back.
“Once Jackie knew about Onassis and Callas, she had to make a choice,” said her cousin John Davis. “Do I give him up because he is doing this to me? Because he is never going to stop, and he has made that clear to me. Or do I find a way to live with it?’ I think, then, the reason he had given her so many millions when they married began to make more sense. It gave him power. It gave him license to say he was taking very good care of her and that she should, in turn, just let him do what he pleases. She had gotten herself into a pickle, so to speak. She needed him more than he needed her, and he loved that, and she knew it. So, what to do… what to do? In the end, she decided to accept it. And once she had made up her mind about it, that was the end of it for her.”
Indeed, for the most part, after May 1970, Jackie didn’t want to know any more about Ari’s relationship with Maria Callas than absolutely necessary. Rogers and Hammerstein posed the question in The Sound of Music: “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” Apparently, for Jackie, the solution was to ignore the problem as best she could. Though she realized that Maria was quite beautiful, she also knew that Maria was tortured by the fact that she had aged and had lost her operatic voice in the process. Her life was hell by the mid-1970s. “Jackie felt that, by comparison, she was lucky—and since she was the one who really had Onassis, she likely didn’t see any reason to spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about Maria Callas” is how one of her friends at the time put it. Rather than dwell on the problem of Maria, Jackie chose to focus on the complete remodeling and renovation of a cottage on Skorpios called the Pink House—which, ironically enough, was where Callas stayed when she was on the island. Jackie also busied herself with the landscaping of certain pivotal gardens on Skorpios, trying to restore the estate to its original natural state. It bothered her, for instance, that there were snapdragons on the island. They didn’t belong there—someone along the way had decided to plant them, probably Maria Callas, Jackie had decided, and she wanted them gone. Roses, too. “There shouldn’t be roses on a Greek island,” Jackie said. She ordered that they be replaced by wild orchids, poppies, lavender, and other Mediterranean plants. She had literally hundreds of full-grown trees brought in as well, and placed them where she thought they would look best.
“Because she had looked the other way when Jack Kennedy was unfaithful during her marriage to him, Jackie was certainly accustomed to the notion of the unfaithful husband,” noted Gore Vidal. “Therefore, it could be said that her coping mechanisms were already in place for such ordeals.” Her friend singer Carly Simon adds that Jackie once “told me how deeply hurt she had been” by the affairs of her husband. In a rare moment of candor about such things, Jackie told Carly, “After a while, one does turn off.” (“Whenever she told you something personal, she would slip into third-person language,” Carly recalled.) While in Washington with Kennedy, Jackie immersed herself in the restoration of the White House to take her mind off her troubles, and she did the same while on Skorpios with Onassis. She dealt with both husbands the same way; as long as they were there for her when she needed them to be, Jackie would be satisfied—or at least she seemed satisfied.
Enrique Fonteyn recalls witnessing a telling scene between his boss and Jackie on the Christina in September 1970. Jackie was at the well-stocked circular bar, sitting alone at one of the half-dozen barstools and having a drink. “I had been in the bar stocking liquor when she came in, sat down, ordered a drink, and just sat there looking quite miserable,” recalls Fonteyn. “Though I wasn’t the bartender, I made her a martini and left her alone.” He said that Jackie—who was wearing pink capri pants, a white short-sleeved silk blouse, and her famous Jackie O sunglasses, though indoors, seemed mesmerized by the parade of magnetic miniature ships, from Phoenician to Mississippi steamboat, as they glided under the glass top of the bar. Eventually, Onassis walked into the bar. “I hate to see you drink alone, my dear,” he said, sitting next to her. He asked for his own martini. Fonteyn made it for him and placed it in front of him, and then tried to look busy with his work.
“I am just so tired of fighting with you, Aristo,” Jackie said. She said that the two of them had been having the same fights every day and that she found it “exhausting.” “We are surrounded by beauty everywhere we go,” she said. “How lucky we are, yet we don’t seem to appreciate it, do we? Instead, we argue.”
“I agree,” Aristotle said. As he stroked Jackie’s brunette hair, Onassis further added that, in his opinion, the two of them should begin to live their lives more “unapologetically.” Jackie shrugged. “I suppose,” she said halfheartedly. “Then it’s settled,” he said. “I love you, Jackie. Let’s put all of this behind us now.” She smiled and said she would like to do just that. He then raised his glass for a toast. “Here’s to us never fighting again,” Onassis said. “And to making only love,” he added with a wink, clinking her glass.
Ari then asked Fonteyn to call the kitchen to have an order of marinated artichokes and petits fours sent to the bar as a snack for him and Jackie. “I have a surprise for you tonight,” he then told his wife. “I think you will be very happy.”
That night, Aristotle Onassis arranged a candlelit meal for himself and his wife under the stars on the deck of the Christina. Since he and Jackie were the only two people aboard—along with forty-five of his employees at their service, of course—it was sure to be a memorable and romantic evening. During the meal, Onassis surprised Jackie with an old friend of his named Scarola, a Neapolitan guitarist who was at the time an international jet-set personality. Jackie had so enjoyed his playing during a recent vacation in Capri that Onassis had him flown in by plane and then brought onto the Christina for this special evening. “We were joined on the cruise by Maestro Garibaldi, another great guitarist and friend of mine,” Scarola recalled years later. “Together, we proceeded to serenade Mr. and Mrs. Onassis as they ate their meal on a large round table with white tablecloth on the deck, under a soft moonlight. Servants kept coming out with more food, more drinks, and Ari kept saying, ‘More! More! More! The night must never end. More! More! More!’ Mrs. Onassis was glowing with happiness and she looked more beautiful than ever behind the glow of candles on the table.
“She loved nostalgic, romantic Neapolitan songs,” he continued, “and the moment I started strumming my guitar, she stopped eating and leaned forward on the table, her eyes shining. After listening to several songs, she asked me to sing her favorite, ‘Sciummo’ [‘river’ in dialect], which is a very old, sad, and romantic love song. When I sang it, she moved closer to Ari and they looked deep into each other’s eyes and held hands under the table.
“The dinner lasted several hours, with many more Neapolitan songs, and was topped off by champagne and a dessert of baked Alaska—I know because Mrs. Onassis made me eat hers, saying that she was trying to keep her figure. At the end of the night, Mrs. Onassis was in tears when she came over to me and Garibaldi and thanked us for what she called ‘one of the most romantic evenings of my life.’ ”
Pat and Peter Lawford
Patricia Kennedy Lawford—“Pat,” who was forty-six in 1970—was an outgoing, colorful person with a great thirst for the good life who also happened to be one of Jackie’s closest friends. Though the two women were different in many ways, they seemed to have a deep understanding and empathy for each other, which, according to those who knew them best, stemmed at least in part from the fact that both had dealt with infidelity in their marriages—Pat in hers with actor Peter Lawford and Jackie, of course, with President Kennedy and later with Aristotle Onassis. “Pat was a different kind of Kennedy woman,” said her longtime friend Patricia Brennan, “in the sense that she di
dn’t sit back and accept unfaithful behavior from her husband, like Jackie, Joan, Rose, and Ethel, for instance. Instead, she divorced the guy. It was really unheard of in the family, the idea of a woman divorcing her husband. In fact, it hadn’t happened before. As Catholics, another level was added to the dilemma because divorce was considered such a sin. Even though the decks were definitely stacked against Pat’s freedom, she went for it anyway. If you knew Pat, though, you’d know that of all the women in the family, she was most likely the one to break new ground where this kind of thing is concerned.”
Given Peter Lawford’s nature, most people who knew him well were not surprised that his marriage to Pat turned out to be so tumultuous. “He was well-intentioned, the nicest guy in the world, but his biggest concern during the Pat years was himself, not her,” said his manager and business partner Milt Ebbins in an interview in 2000. “There was also this constant emphasis on fitting in with the Rat Pack mentality—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis—and he never really fit in with those guys. I think the philandering was perhaps his way of fitting in. ‘I’ve had more women than Frank,’ he once told me, ‘but no one will accept that.’ I told him, ‘Peter, you’re married to a Kennedy now, at least try to be discreet.’ He couldn’t do it, though. He had to be a show-off. The controversy his unfaithfulness caused didn’t matter to him. In fact, I think he welcomed it. On some level, he wanted to be notorious. But then there was this other side of Peter, a sensitive, warmhearted side. He could be the greatest friend in the world. He loved his kids, though he didn’t really know how to express it. And, yes, he loved Pat very much, though, again, he didn’t know how to express it.”
After Camelot: A Personal History of the Kennedy Family--1968 to the Present Page 19