John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Robert Kennedy murdered in June 1968, and Jackie married Aristotle Onassis in October of that year. When she married him, she took John-John and Caroline to a huge private jet to fly off to the wedding. Bunny accompanied her to the airport. She told me that when they got on the giant empty plane sent by Onassis, the kids ran up and down the aisles. Jackie said, “Your seats are 6D and 6B. Keep them during the trip.”
“She understood discipline and boundaries,” Bunny said. “She was a wonderful mother. ‘Why are you doing this,’ I asked her.”
“I have no choice,” Jackie said. “They’re playing Ten Little Indians. I don’t want to be next.”
Clearly Onassis was going to be the bodyguard, but it was Jackie who would be put on salary.
I never asked Bunny to reveal any more about her friend than she wanted to tell me, and I never asked Jackie any questions about her husbands. It would have been pointless. She was a woman extremely skilled in the art of mystery and allure. Never unguarded, never tears. One night, years after her death, a male friend and I were talking about her and he told me that after the night they’d been together she sent her driver with a small brown paper package tied with string. It was the nightgown she’d worn.
“What did she expect me to do with it?” he said.
In private she was good company, but in public she was a genius. Everywhere we went she was mobbed. One afternoon we flew on a puddle-jumper to Martinique to shop and have lunch at a small restaurant. Bunny made certain Jackie and I were never photographed sitting next to each other. When we came out of the restaurant, the little square was jammed and the local police had to muscle her to the car. Her radiant smile intact, she moved through the crowd slowly, eyes unfocused and enigmatic. Once back on the plane, she settled into a quiet sleep.
When we swam in the sea in the day, she never got up too near. We’d tread water and talk from several feet away and if I swam close she gently drifted away, not wanting a long lens to capture us in the water.
The second stupid thing I did to Jackie was unforgivable. A lot of wine had been consumed and I fell asleep in the small pool house. I woke up to the sound of the birds chirping. The French doors were wide open and little banana twits were landing and picking up bits of food from our late-night snack. When I looked out, Jackie was lying on a chaise in the early morning sunlight, her eyes closed. I crept up slowly and stared at her face. In repose her features were hard and strong, but still lovely. No makeup, hair damp.
I leaned in close and, like an idiot, said, “Boo!”
She leapt up so fast and let out a shout so loud I was completely caught off balance; and what should have disabled us in laughter became a quiet standoff, neither of us speaking. She looked down at the patio floor for a long time and seemed to be waiting for her heart to stop beating so quickly.
“Jackie, I’m so sorry,” I said.
She didn’t answer me or look up at me. She was in a private place, calling on her enormous will to calm the terror that I had stupidly provoked. Then she reached down, picked up her things, and passed me with just the faintest smile. I didn’t see her for the rest of the morning, but at lunch she warmly touched my arm before we sat down as if nothing had happened.
My favorite memory of Jackie was actually a public one. One afternoon at lunch in Antigua, one of the many wonderful local women who worked and lived on the property came out and whispered to Bunny that the cook was feeling poorly and she was worried about her.
Bunny said, “You must tell her to go and lie down.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” she said.
This particular lunch was just Bunny, Jackie, and me and we all got up and went into the kitchen to see how she was. The moment we looked at her, we knew she had what the natives called “the color.” She was quite jaundiced.
“You go right away to bed, Cora,” Bunny said.
We returned to the dining table and Jackie said:
“We all better get a shot,” as calm as could be.
I drove us into town in an open Jeep to the small clinic Bunny had helped organize for the locals. We stood in line on the steps leading to the porch as one by one the doctor gave us a shot of gamma globulin. When I came out of the clinic, Jackie was sitting on the steps with a beautiful local child on her lap; she had removed her scarf and was tying and untying it around the little girl’s head, as the child’s mother sat on the ground nearby. The child scampered off her lap and went back to her mother to show off her present. Jackie sat smiling, holding her knees. Even with the possible threat of jaundice hanging over her, she seemed utterly relaxed and content.
Back in the car we were laughing about who was going to turn yellow first and should we coordinate our clothes at dinner to whatever shade we turned. The cook and the rest of the staff were all given shots. She recovered fully and thankfully the rest of us were spared.
It was only in Antigua and the Cape that I spent private time with Jackie. I almost never saw her in New York except occasionally at a small restaurant in the East ’90s called Sarabeth’s. Ari was dead. It was 1985 or so. I was now married with two small kids and she’d settled into her New York life as an editor and lived with financier Maurice Tempelsman. One wintry afternoon I ran into her on 86th Street, just around the corner from her Fifth Avenue apartment. We stood in the nearby doorway of the service entrance; her tucked inside, my back to the street, arms folded in front of me to keep warm. She rested her hands on them.
“You’ve made a great success,” she said. “I’ve seen you in your plays.”
“Why don’t you ever come backstage?” I asked.
“Oh, you’re too famous for me now,” she said.
When I got home to our new apartment on 83rd and Madison, my wife told me that Bunny Mellon had just called. It had been a while since I talked to her. I called back.
“What a coincidence,” I said. “I just ran into Jackie.”
“Oh really?” she said. “Why don’t we go to her Christmas party together. I’m sure she’d love to have you.”
“Can I bring my new wife?”
“Was that your wife I spoke to?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Oh, there’s my private line. I’ll call you back.”
She never did. And I never saw Jackie again.
During the time I spent with her, Jackie was arguably the most famous woman in the world and in complete charge of both her public and private personas. There was nothing of the victim about her. Nothing remotely fragile or tentative. My feeling was always that she relished her fame, her power, and her mystery, and knew exactly how to market and exploit it. Fate had intervened in what might have been the normal privileged life of an attractive, well-mannered, educated young woman and catapulted her to the center of the world stage. And she was going to rule her place on that stage whether as First Lady, the wife of a tycoon, or a book editor at a publishing house. She possessed an enormous inner strength and steely surety that had little to do with, it seems to me, where fate had brought her. Jackie, as I knew her, would have done just fine no matter where she landed. Like the small-town magician whose balloon took him off course and drifted down into the Land of Oz, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis enthusiastically embraced the role of Wizard bestowed upon her by the populace and made the most of it.
Unlike him, though, Jackie was equally adept both in front of and behind the curtain. Her face could go from that famous radiant smile to solemn and blank in a second. Nobody was better at playing dumb than Jackie when she wanted to.
One afternoon, shortly before she married Ari, she, Bunny, Liza, and I were having lunch at a tiny restaurant in Hyannis. Jackie was without makeup or jewelry and dressed unobtrusively in a simple top and slacks. We had come in unannounced and all the proprietor could provide was a table in the back next to the kitchen. She was perfectly happy to sit there o
ut of sight of most of the patrons.
We were in happy, animated conversation when a man passed by on his way to the restroom. He stopped, turned around, and came back to the table. “Aren’t you Jackie Kennedy?” he said.
“Am I?” she answered.
“You are! I know you are!”
“Well then, you didn’t have to ask, did you?”
She was not impolite, rude, or dismissive. Her face, however, was dark and impassive. The man grew uncomfortable but seemed frozen in his place, staring at her. Jackie offered nothing. He then made to leave, saying: “Oh, I’m sure it’s you. I’d bet anything.”
“Well,” she said, “when you find out, let me know.”
After she died, I rummaged around in my memorabilia for a small item she’d given me on the Mellon plane coming back from one of those idyllic trips, but never found it. She was walking up the aisle back from the john and plopped down next to me.
“You know, I don’t have any way of getting in touch with you other than through Bunny,” I said. She reached into her bag, pulled out a small white matchbook, and wrote on it “J,” and a phone number, stuck it in my shirt pocket, then started to leave.
“Don’t you want mine?” I asked.
She took out a small leather book, wrote it down, dropped the book in the bag, and said:
“There. Now I’ve got everybody’s number!”
HUME CRONYN and JESSICA TANDY
Married couples, it seems to me, have enough trouble surviving the institution without the extra burden of their names being publicly attached to each other like frozen Popsicle sticks. Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Anne Bancroft and Mel Brooks—all un-divorced long-term marriages that somehow thrived and survived the two-for-one sales. Hume and Jessie had a number of advantages. They were wealthy, aristocratic, and equally matched as actors—neither a great, but both highly skilled and intelligent.
In their case, I was fairly certain it was Hume who was the diva and Jessie the go-along. The impression began when I was in college. Sometime in the late 1950s they came touring through Syracuse, New York, where I was attending the university. I don’t remember the play. But I do remember getting myself backstage quickly even before their curtain calls had finished and being able from the wings to watch them take their final bows. With my pen and program ready, as the curtain hit the stage, poised to ask for an autograph, the stars were quickly wiped from my eyes as Hume whirled on Jessie and said:
“That cannot happen again. Not again!” and made a beeline directly toward me. His face was purple with rage as he flew past, unaware of my presence. Marching down a long, wide hallway, his voice echoing behind him: “No, no, no. Disgraceful.”
Jessie, dashing not far behind, was calling out, “Hume, please, please, let me explain.” He went in and slammed the door as she was coming toward it. Up she came, knocked, entered, and the battle raged on.
I left bereft, but at nineteen years old, certain I wanted to be wherever something was that passionately important to someone. I thought they had been wonderful in the play, but magnificent in the hallway.
In the 1977–78 season, the first I Love NY commercial was shot and premiered at the now defunct Tavern on the Green restaurant. I closed out the spot as Dracula with the line, “I Love New York! Especially in the evening!” When the lights came up to wild applause, Hume shouted out to the crowd:
“Well, if we’d known we were all going to be supporting Mr. Langella . . .” and then came over and kissed me.
That was the beginning of a lifelong friendship mostly with New York visits. Once you’re inside the New York theatre community, you are a forever member, no matter the exigencies of your career.
One night Hume called and said, “Pick us up after your show and I’ll take you to dinner.” They were appearing in a big hit, The Gin Game, at the John Golden Theatre and I was enjoying playing the Count at the Martin Beck Theatre.
Hume and my former wife were deep in conversation across the table, while Jessie and I started talking about sex in the dressing room. We both agreed it was right up there with a standing ovation.
“What are you two laughing about?” Hume called out.
“Nothing, dear. Just sex in the dressing room.”
“Sex in the dressing room? Never heard of such a thing.”
“Well, you haven’t been listening,” Jessie said.
That season the four nominees for a Best Actor Tony Award were Hume, Jason Robards, Barnard Hughes, and me. At the ceremony picking up our nomination certificates and taking photos, Hume said, “Well this is a waste of time. We three have all got one. It’s Barnie’s.”
And it was!
I sent Jessie some flowers as a thank-you for handing me an award one afternoon, and she sent this note:
“When are we going to play Hamlet and Gertrude?”
I wrote back: “I’m too old and you’re too young.” It was only one of dozens of opportunities missed by me over the years.
Late in Jessie’s career she became a film star with Driving Miss Daisy and won an Oscar. Hume also had a success in the film Cocoon, but edgily regarded Don Ameche’s winning a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for that film as typical Hollywood Bullshit.
“Imagine,” he said, “if I had done that backflip.”
He was referring to a moment in the film when, having taken a magic potion, all the old men become young again. Don’s character, feeling a new energy, gets on the dance floor with Gwen Verdon and performs a stunning backflip. It was, of course, done by a stunt man, with Mr. Ameche afterward in a big close-up, beaming broadly. “That’s what did it,” said Hume. “The least popular guy on the set wins a fucking Oscar.”
But despite his displeasure, never during Jessie’s renaissance did he seem anything but delighted for her. Nor do I think he ever took Ameche’s win seriously to heart.
A year or so before Jessie’s death, she sat in front of me as we watched a terrible performance from one of her contemporaries long past her more youthful skills and desperately trying to recapture them. At intermission, she turned around and I leaned forward on the back of her seat. She had a fan in her hand and tapped my arm with it.
“You would tell me, darling, wouldn’t you?” is all she said. She was age appropriate to the end.
Hume became ill and then reclusive in his final years and all entreaties to come visit him were rebuffed. We had one phone call toward the end. I had sent him a script in which he would play just one lovely scene in a film. He called:
“Frank, darling. How kind of you to think of me. But I’m afraid I could not live up to your expectations.”
Not possible. From that night, at nineteen years of age, when I first stood in awe of them backstage in Syracuse, New York (an incident not recalled by either), in my eyes, neither one had ever disappointed.
RAUL JULIA
“Great.”
“Oh my God, that’s great.”
“Isn’t that great?”
“That’s just great!”
It’s incalculable the number of times Raul Julia used that word to describe an event, a person, a feeling, or a thing. And he said it each time with genuine gusto and total commitment. Everything to Raul, it seemed, was great.
I may as well confess at the start that I was in love with him. If he were a Puerto Rican woman, he would have been called a spitfire. As a Puerto Rican man he was close to a bonfire and the heat he generated could have comfortably warmed a small country town.
Which, in fact, is where we met for the first time. It was the early 1960s at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, during its halcyon days under the leadership of an irrepressible Greek tyrant named Nikos Psacharopoulos. If you were welcomed into that family, you looked forward to the time in late June when you would throw
some scripts, jeans, and a few packs of condoms into a bag and head north on the Taconic Parkway to tackle great roles in whirlwind productions and wrestle as many apprentices as you could into bed: male, female, or both, depending on your proclivities. To an apprentice, sex with an Equity actor was indeed, splendor in the grass. And most of us did as much mowing as the fresh pastures would allow. It was a glorious time to be in your twenties. For the next two decades carousing through the halls of the Adams Memorial Theater were, among others, Christopher Walken, Sam Waterston, Richard Dreyfuss, Christopher Reeve, Raul, myself, and an equal number of our female contemporaries. Life in Williamstown for actors was idyllic. Serious work and serial sex.
Raul was a stunning young man. Indisputably masculine, with a strong, natural physique that never saw the inside of a gym. He had a massive head with a forest of luxurious, dark hair; his delicious accent, ready laugh, wide-open face with gigantic eyes, made him catnip to the girls. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, surrounded almost completely by women, he accepted their adoration as his birthright.
When he entered charmingly and sinuously into a room or onto a stage, temperatures rose. In this era when young male stars seem a sexless set of store-bought muscles set below interchangeable screw-top heads with faces of epic blandness—sheep trying to look like bulls—Raul defined real masculinity. His unself-conscious beauty was without compare and it was virtually impossible for him to be mistaken for any other man. If an errant seed of his had managed to fly to Spain on its own and find its way into a local woman, it would have impregnated the mother of today’s only candidate for his crown, Javier Bardem.
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