Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot

by J. Randy Taraborrelli

  When Ted finally arrived in Hyannis Port, he went to Joseph’s room to tell him that an accident had resulted in a woman’s death, even though he had tried to save her. Joseph couldn’t do much but squeeze his distraught son’s hand. Then Ted patiently explained the situation to Rose. As usual, she was composed.

  Rose knew of Mary Jo, even admired her, and was deeply troubled and saddened by her death. However, looking at a bigger, practical picture, she could predict serious trouble in the offing, and summoned her family to the compound to deal with it. Pat flew in from California, and Jean and Eunice both arrived from Europe, all three with their husbands. Jean’s husband, Steve Smith—who had taken over much of the Kennedy business in the wake of Joseph’s stroke—began to make logical decisions about strategy.

  Once he got to his home on Squaw Island, some might be surprised to know, Ted’s first call was to Greece in search of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. In fact, Ted had demonstrated a great degree of caring and generosity not only to Jackie and her two children but also to Ethel and her eleven in the wake of the family’s twin tragedies. “No one outside the family can ever know how much his efforts have meant to the shaping of their [Jack’s and Bobby’s children’s] lives,” Rose wrote in her memoirs. Jackie was so impressed with his sense of responsibility that she had even suggested he become Caroline’s godfather by proxy.

  Upon hearing from Ted, Jackie said that she would join the family in Hyannis Port as soon as possible.

  Ted’s next call was to a woman he had dated sporadically over the years and was involved with at this time, the Austrian-born, blonde Helga Wagner. Alarmed by Ted’s predicament, Helga asked if she should come to Hyannis Port to be with him. Since her presence would only cause more turmoil, he wisely advised her to keep her distance.

  After he called Jackie and Helga, Ted called Joan.

  “Don’t worry. I believe you when you say it was an accident,” Joan promised her husband, according to what she later recalled.

  “I knew you would,” he said, relieved. “I could always count on you.”

  After they hung up, Joan Kennedy sat on her bed, stunned by the news and overwhelmed by a deepening sense of dread. Just six weeks pregnant, Joan realized that she shouldn’t take on any stress, but that would now be impossible. She packed a small bag and left for Hyannis Port to be with the rest of the family.

  Two hours after Joan’s arrival at the compound, Ethel arrived directly from Storrs where she had made an appearance at the opening of the first Connecticut Special Olympics at the University of Connecticut. She was upset, angry, and confused, as were most of the family members.

  When Ethel saw Joan, she must have immediately noticed that the young Kennedy wife seemed to be in a trance, as if on heavy medication, walking about aimlessly, biting her lip, and wringing her hands. Ethel took Joan into her arms, and the two embraced warmly. “We’ve had our problems in the past, but now is the time to pull together,” Ethel told Joan.

  “Tell me what really happened,” Ethel said to Joan as they walked arm in arm into Rose’s living room.

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea,” Joan answered, and she wasn’t lying. “Do you know if Jackie is coming, or not? I heard that she was.”

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea,” Ethel answered, echoing Joan’s response.

  Jackie Tells Ari: “I Have to Be There”

  By 1969, Jackie Kennedy Onassis was living a life far removed from the concerns of the Kennedys. She sometimes seemed determined to reinvent herself as a woman who had never been Queen of Camelot. During a vacation to Italy’s Isle of Capri in the Gulf of Naples, she ignored any autograph-seekers who referred to her as “Mrs. Kennedy,” and would indulge only those who referred to her as “Mrs. Onassis.” She also had her checks changed to read “Jacqueline Bouvier Onassis,” eliminating “Kennedy.” However, Jackie and Ari actually led separate lives from the start of their union. He told his biographer, Will Frischauer, “I was with Jacqueline for only thirty days during the first ninety days of our marriage.”

  As soon as he married Jackie, Ari reignited his obsessive affair with Maria Callas. He went to be with Callas as soon as he returned to Paris, right after his honeymoon with Jackie. Jackie didn’t seem to mind.

  “In his own way, Onassis was good to her,” observes Jackie’s cousin John Davis. “Who can say what kind of marriage that was? His two children, Christina and Alexander, hated her. But she seemed unaffected by their bitterness. Of course, it never much mattered to Jackie whether you liked her or not. Onassis got her away from the Kennedy tragedies, the publicity, the hellishness… and the next time I saw her after she married him, she seemed a completely new woman. Just lighter, better…. She had gotten on with things.”

  Despite her new life, Jackie’s sisterly bond with Joan and, to a lesser extent, Ethel, still existed. Jackie had also stayed in touch with Rose, and had even arranged for the Kennedy matriarch to join her, Aristotle, and the children for a two-week cruise in the Caribbean in March of 1969 for the Easter holiday.

  Rose couldn’t help but marvel at the jet-set lifestyle Jackie now enjoyed. The Onassises maintained fully staffed homes in Monte Carlo; Glyfada, Greece; two in New York; London; Skorpios; Montevideo in Uruguay; Paris; and aboard the Christina. Each residence was kept in complete readiness should the wealthy couple decide on a moment’s notice to hop off to South America and their Montevideo hacienda, or fly to Paris for an art exhibit or to take a peek at “the collections,” where the latest fashions were shown.

  Rose once described the opulence she found on the Christina as “overwhelming.” While some of the interior of the luxury craft, such as the bar, represented masculine tastes, the nine staterooms were now decorated in pink satins and silks, refurbished to represent Jackie’s style (even though Ari would have preferred her not to redecorate). A rare, jade Buddha sat on display in the main salon. Expensive oriental vases were securely strapped to the walls in case of turbulent high seas. El Greco, Pissarro, and Gauguin paintings decorated the passageways. At night, the base of the Olympic-size, mosaic-tiled swimming pool was hydraulically lifted level with the deck, forming a dance floor under multicolored lights.

  The Onassis’s French household staff—accustomed to serving such personalities as Winston Churchill, Greta Garbo, and Cary Grant—served breakfast on trays in the staterooms on the lowest of the three decks used as living quarters by the family. At lunchtime, John and Caroline would eat with their mother on the shaded top deck while the ship was anchored, or by the saltwater pool near the game room when at sea. Onassis continued to make the final decision as to what food would be served in the oval dining room for dinner, selecting one main course from the three suggested by the French chef. Jackie ordered only for the children, usually beef and poultry dishes, which they would eat not in the main dining room but rather in the “officers’ mess”—a warm, intimate, wood-paneled breakfast room—with their nurse.

  Ellen Deiner, who worked as a publicist for the Greek National Theater, was aboard the Christina as a guest of Aristotle Onassis on that particular cruise with Rose and Jackie. She recalled, “Rose reminded me of a typical tourist, with the big floppy hats and sunglasses, and cheap, cheap, cheap clothing. She and Jackie got along well, but they did have an ongoing discussion having to do with the children’s schooling.”

  As the only offspring of her son, John Fitzgerald, Caroline and John Jr. were dear to Rose Kennedy. It was her wish that they be brought up to understand Kennedy values, a sense of family being chief among them. Rose feared that as they went through their impressionable adolescent years with Onassis as their stepfather, the children would grow away from the Kennedy tradition of serving country and family. Because she also wanted them to be available for frequent family visits to Hyannis Port and Palm Beach, she was upset when Ted told her Jackie was thinking of sending the children to Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school attended by the children of the wealthiest of European society.

  Recalled Ellen Deine
r, “While the two were sunning, Rose and Jackie talked about the fact that if the children went to the Swiss school, they would be away from their mother for long stretches of time. She said that Joan and Ethel were so adamant about being with their children that they were known to fly back from political rallies just to make breakfast for them. I was sitting two chairs over, but could clearly hear Jackie protesting, ‘Well, I am not Ethel, and I am not Joan. I’ll raise my children my way.’ I had the feeling that the two bickered like any mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, but that at the core of it was a deep, abiding love and respect for one another.”

  Rose seemed to crave information about her former daughter-in-law. To her, Jackie was almost a stranger these days, living a life of privilege away from Hyannis Port and away from her watchful eye. In an attempt to learn about Jackie’s life, she tried to ferret out some tidbits from Ellen Deiner, who, she knew, was close to Onassis. “Rose asked me if it was true that Ari wanted to change the children’s names to Onassis by adoption,” recalls Deiner. “There had been news reports to that effect. In fact, I did once overhear Ari complain about seeing references to ‘John Kennedy, Jr.’ and ‘Caroline Kennedy’ in the papers. He wanted the children to have his name, since they were now his responsibility. But Mrs. Onassis said, ‘They are not your responsibility, they are my responsibility.’ ”

  “An adoption will never occur,” Rose told Ellen Deiner as she rubbed suntan lotion on her pale but still remarkably taut thighs. “Never! Once a Kennedy, always a Kennedy.” She put on her sunglasses and turned to Deiner. “The blood of the Kennedys runs through those children’s veins,” she insisted. “They are Americans, not Greeks. We will fight an adoption in court, believe me. They will be Kennedys, those children, and they will live in America. Even in death, my son has a right to expect his son to carry on his name.”

  “But I don’t know how you will be able to stop an adoption,” Ellen Deiner said, hesitatingly.

  “We’ll just see about that, now won’t we?” Rose said confidently. “I am certain we could at the very least get a decision that the adoption and name change would not be recognized in America.”

  Deiner was surprised by Rose’s observation. It sounded as if she had already begun to look into the legalities of the matter.

  “This kind of discussion went on and on throughout the two-week cruise,” said Deiner. “As we went to Nassau, then the Virgin Islands, the children were the subject of ongoing discussions between Rose and I [sic]. I am sure that she brought up all of these points to Jackie as well, which is what I suggested she do.”

  On the last day of the cruise, Rose told Ellen Deiner that, as a result of her discussions with her former daughter-in-law, Jackie not only had agreed to let the children continue their educations in New York, she also would not allow Onassis to adopt the Kennedy children. She would not remove the children from either their national or family heritage.

  “My daughter-in-law is not a foolish woman. I can’t imagine why you ever thought she would have allowed an adoption,” Rose said, pointing an accusatory finger at Ellen Deiner.

  “But I never said that,” Deiner countered in her defense, her face by now reddened. “You asked me if…”

  Rose placed her finger on her lips for silence, cutting off the mortified Deiner. “Well, I believe you did say just that, and I have told Jacqueline as much,” Rose countered. Then, before taking her leave, she concluded, “Jacqueline told me to tell you that some people should learn to mind their own business.”

  At the time when Jackie got the telephone call from Ted about the Chappaquiddick tragedy, she was on the Isle of Scorpios with her husband, her children, their cousin Victoria Lawford, and a playmate of John’s, Eric von Huguley. She immediately decided that she wanted to be in Hyannis Port to support the family, but she didn’t want the media to know of her presence there.

  “But why must you go?” Aristotle asked. “That is their problem, not ours.”

  “You’re right. It’s not our problem,” Jackie agreed, “it’s my problem,” she added, underscoring the separate nature of their lives. “I have to be there. I have to know what is going on.”

  Nicholas Stamosis, who worked in the travel department of Olympic Airways, which was owned by Ari, also knew Jackie well. He recalls, “Ted’s call came at a convenient time because Mrs. Onassis already had business in New York—meetings to arrange for the children’s schooling. So she was planning to go to America anyway. We just scheduled her trip a week early when she got the call.”

  “I don’t want anyone to even know I’m in Hyannis Port,” Jackie told Stamosis. “This trip has to be done very carefully. No photographers. Is that understood?” Presumably, Jackie didn’t want it to appear that Ted was using her and the memory of her husband in a bid for sympathy.

  “I can guarantee you that I will at least try, Mrs. Onassis,” Stamosis said.

  “Well, you will have to do better than that,” Jackie snapped. “Just do it.”

  “I will, Mrs. Onassis,” he said, finally.

  “We got her out of Greece and into Hyannis, and nobody was the wiser,” recalls Stamosis, “at least as far as I know.”

  A couple of days later Nicholas Stamosis ran into Jackie’s disgruntled husband in Athens at the Architectoniki Bar. “He was drunk and talking about how angry he was that Jackie went to be with the Kennedys,” he recalls of Onassis.

  “Those damn Kennedys, they have some kind of dirty hold on her,” Onassis said, exasperated. “Just look at what has happened. Ted Kennedy drives a girl off a bridge, she drowns, then my wife flies around the world just to pat him on the back and tell him it’s all right.”

  “Well, she is a very caring woman,” said Stamosis in Jackie’s defense.

  Onassis slammed his fist down on the bar, his mouth turned down at the corners. “She just wants to make sure the Kennedy kingdom doesn’t come tumbling down, for if it does, what will that do to her children’s inheritances and trust funds?” As he tossed back another vodka and soda, Onassis concluded, “That’s what she cares about.”

  Joan Accuses: “All You Care about Is How It Looks?”

  In the days after the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, the Kennedy family closed ranks as it always had in times of trouble. Maria Shriver, Eunice’s daughter and Ted’s niece, speaks of the Kennedy credo that was at work at that time and which, she says, still exists today. “My grandparents [Rose and Joseph] emphasized family loyalty, which my parents then emphasized in turn,” she explains. “ ‘This is your family and you stand by it no matter what,’ they told their children, and their children then instilled it in us, and I have handed it down to mine. ‘If you have something negative to say, you say it in the house. You don’t say it out there. These people are family. You may not like them sometimes, but they are the most important people in your life, and don’t you forget it.’ ”

  Soon the Hyannis Port home was filled with concerned Kennedys, many of whom, perhaps, didn’t have particularly fond feelings for Ted at this time but who would stand by him just the same. “There was rage, horror, and anger,” recalled Joseph’s nurse, Rita Dallas, “a lot of anger. Not at any particular person, not at Teddy, but I really think at fate.”

  When Jackie Onassis arrived, she greeted all of the family members, and then quickly departed for her own home next door to Joseph and Rose’s. Something had changed, and it was painfully clear to everyone. “She didn’t really belong there,” said John Davis. “Things were different now. She wasn’t really a Kennedy anymore, and they knew it, and they treated her like it.”

  The last time Jackie was at Rose and Joseph’s was during Bobby’s campaign. She had run off in tears after Ethel reminded her that “we” would never again be in the White House. Since that time, Bobby had been killed and she had married Onassis, much to Ethel’s dismay and, it would seem, many other people’s as well.

  “The sisters—Jean, Eunice, and Pat—never treated Jackie the same after she married Onassis,” said another
relative of Jackie’s. “No one really knew how to deal with her. There were those who felt she was so far above them, they couldn’t relate. And there were those who felt she was just an outsider now. She could feel it in the air, and didn’t want to be around it. Even Joan seemed as though she couldn’t relate to Jackie anymore. So Jackie retreated to her own home and stayed there, almost in a ‘wait and see’ position.”

  Ted’s explanation of what had occurred on the tiny island was relayed to Jackie by others. In fact, she and Ted had no discussion about the events in question, or about anything at all, at least not in anyone’s memory.

  “Her emotions were mixed, I believe,” said the late author Leo Damore, who wrote a book about the Chappaquiddick tragedy titled Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up. “She was there because she had a stake in what happened to the family, because of her children. My research indicated that she was reluctant even to be there, that she wanted her presence to be a secret, and didn’t want a public show of support. I believe she felt that Ted was guilty of something, even if she didn’t know what it was.”

  Her friend Roswell Gilpatric once said that he believed that Jackie was “probably very angry at Ted, and perhaps even feeling guilty because of her very human reaction to his obvious lack of judgment. I’m sure she was confused, trying to sort it all out. One thing she did say sticks out in my mind as being amazingly perceptive. ‘I believe Ted has an unconscious drive to self-destruct,’ she told me. ‘I think it comes from the fact that he knows he’ll never live up to what people expect of him. He’s not Jack. He’s not Bobby. And he believes that what he is, is just not enough.’ ”