Jackie After O

by Tina Cassidy

  Once they were all on the ground in Skorpios, Christina tried her best to be courteous, kissing Jackie on each cheek and asking her how she was doing. Artemis was pleased to see the two had put their differences aside for the day, even issuing a joint statement that said, “It is the desire of Miss Christina Onassis, and she understands it to also be the desire of Mrs. Jacqueline Onassis, that they both be left at peace and all detrimental and harmful speculations cease.”

  In the chapel, a village priest swung an incense-filled censer while Jackie, Christina, and a handful of close friends and relatives offered prayers. Mourners completed the rite by eating a bread loaf that weighed forty-four pounds, a symbolic act meant to launch his soul.6 During the ceremony, Jackie accepted the holy water from the priest and held Artemis’s hand. The women whispered to each other. Christina, sitting to the right of Jackie, was averting her eyes. Jackie could not help but look at Christina.7

  When the ceremony was over, most of the forty guests left the island.8 Jackie walked to the pink house to gather her belongings, passing through the lush and private gardens before entering the first floor. There, she took in each room with its unique view of the Ionian Sea. On the first floor, she stood in the spacious bedroom, where she and Onassis had slept in a large bed with mosquito netting. There was a big bathroom, a kitchen filled with blue stemware and local pottery, and a living room with a fireplace surrounded by decorative tiles. The sofa, covered in a small floral print, was positioned in front of the fireplace at Onassis’s request so he could nap. There were plants in every room, lavish paintings and antiques from expensive stores in London and Athens, vases with orchids and wildflowers, everything kept in perfect order by the Christina’s staff. On the second floor, reached by a small staircase, she swept through the guest bedroom and bathroom one last time. The cool terracotta tiles throughout the house were covered with thick traditional Greek flokati rugs, their shaggy wool fibers in shades of cream and beige.

  Decorating the space—as Jackie had done with the White House—had become an almost curatorial obsession as she tried to adhere to the traditions of a typical Mykonos house. And when she completed the interior, she turned her attention outside, tearing down a high solid wall around the garden in exchange for a more delicate one that hemmed in the tulips, orchids, and roses she grew. She also replaced the path leading to the sea with more natural-looking stones that she handpicked, directing staff—irritated that steps Churchill had walked on did not even seem to be good enough for her—to plant grass between them to soften the way.9

  Once, Kiki Moutsatsos, Onassis’s assistant, asked her why she constantly tried to improve on her surroundings. “Are you that way in your New York home, too?” she asked.

  “I suppose I am,” Jackie replied. “But the truth is I love to decorate and change things. I want my houses to express my personality in everything I use there. There are so many things in this world that I cannot change, but when it comes to furniture and draperies and flowers …”10

  On this day, Jackie couldn’t help but think that all of the comfort and safety that Onassis, his island, and his money had provided were gone. Feeling overwhelmed, she had asked Moutsatsos to help.

  “There is so much to do, Kiki,” Jackie said resting in a chair. “I had not realized how much I had left to do until now.”

  “You don’t have to do everything today,” Moutstatsos told her. “After all you will come back often. All the people in Skorpios like you so much. They will be sad if you do not return often.”

  But Jackie knew that was not true. She knew that Christina did not want her there. So she stood up and got back to work. For hours she went through the house, tagging items that she wanted, remembering the shops where she bought an antique vase or candlestick, the moment she was surprised by a gift from Onassis, the conversations with her sisters-in-law about where to find the perfect rug.

  Jackie and Moutstatsos walked to the yacht. The last item she tagged on board was a jade Buddha decorated with rubies. It was one of Onassis’s prized possessions and although Christina initially objected to her taking it, she had relented. Jackie walked to the deck of the boat, looked out to the sea, and wept. Moutstatsos began to walk away, to give her privacy, when Jackie caught her.

  “Would you mind, Kiki, if I told you this one little story?” she asked, choking back tears. “One day Aristo and I were sitting together outside the pink house and he was feeling very tender. ‘Honey,’ he said to me, ‘the woman, you know, is like the world.’”

  “Oh, really, Ari?” Jackie had answered him, bracing for a crude joke. “And how is that true?”

  “‘At twenty years, she is like Africa. Semi-explored. At thirty years, she is like India. Warm, mature, and mysterious. At forty, she is like America. Technically perfect. At fifty years, she is like Europe. All in ruins. At sixty years, she is like Siberia. Everyone knows where she is, but no one wants to go to her’ … When he finished this little tale, I laughed and touched his mouth and said he was a philosopher. ‘You must promise to tell me that tale every ten years,’ I told him. And he agreed. Then I kissed him and I could tell that he felt very pleased with himself. His life. And with me. And now I cannot stop thinking about that day.”11

  Jackie returned to New York, where the newspaper headlines were agonizing for her. Stories about the attempted divorce lingered, forcing her to respond with a statement that went out over the wire: “I’ll answer with something my husband [Onassis] often told me: ‘Throughout the world people love fairy tales and especially those related to the lives of the rich. You must learn to understand this and accept it.”12 On top of that, gossips were sniping that she had been spending like mad as Onassis became more ill, forcing Nancy Tuckerman to say that Jackie had to buy many items for her new home in New Jersey. “Life must go on,” Tuckerman said.13 But the final indignity was a new book by Benjamin Bradlee—now, no longer a friend because of his disclosures—who had essentially transcribed his diary, including evenings with his wife at the White House with Jack and Jackie, for Conversations with Kennedy. The book’s excerpts were splashed across Newsweek, Playboy, Good Housekeeping, and the Washington Post, where Bradlee has been executive editor since 1965.

  We served as insulation tonight for a family squabble over finances at the White House. Jackie had just learned (remarkably enough) that her husband was giving his salary to charity and had told him earlier that day that she sure could use the money herself. A series of questions had evidently ensued, which led to a request for information from the President about the state of the family finances. He had the information in a letter which he had with him and which had him boiling … not so much mad, as amazed and indignant. The item that had him really bugged was “Department Stores—$40,000.” No one had an explanation, much less Jackie. No furnishings for the White House, and as Jackie pointed out, “no sable coat, or anything.” Kennedy announced that he had called in Carmine Bellino, an accounting expert for various Senate committees on deciphering the financial records of Mafiosi and a longtime Kennedy friend, to straighten out the family’s finances. He said Bobby had recently called in Bellino to straighten out Ethel’s finances … Kennedy said he could understand why running for the presidency was expensive. He had spent and spent, he said—all of it capital. But “once you’re in here, this is a place where a fellow should at least break even, with all the services provided.”14

  It took more than a decade, but the myth of Camelot was crumbling, like so much else around Jackie.

  With Onassis’s death behind her and spring in bloom, Jackie was grateful to have another rite of passage to focus on: Caroline’s high school graduation. Jackie dressed in understated fashion with a spread-collar blouse beneath a double-breasted trench with wide lapels, a couple of long thick chains weighing around her neck. She settled into her folding chair on the lawn, thirteen rows back from the stage. Seated beside her were Ted and his mother, Rose Kennedy, wearing pearls and a wide-brimmed hat on this sunny day, June 5, 19
75. Lee was there, too, with their mother, Janet. And so was John Jr., whose boarding school adventures Jackie had decided to delay so she could keep an eye on him a little longer. The extended family was there to celebrate Caroline’s graduation and to support Jackie.

  The strangers around them buzzed with constrained excitement of seeing their famous faces, checking out their clothes and those unmistakable teeth, and noting sadly that one Kennedy was even more conspicuous in his absence. They tried hard not to stare. This was Massachusetts after all, and Ted was their senator. But some did search for clues on Jackie’s face about whether she was upset by the latest news: half of Onassis’s fortune would be allocated to a charity set up in his son’s name. Christina had chosen this day to make the news public.

  Caroline never enjoyed the spotlight that had surrounded her most of her seventeen years. And out of respect for her and her classmates, the school had set up a barricade to keep the media penned in. They remained there, two photographers scuffling with a local police officer, as Caroline approached the stage to receive her diploma. But she was embarrassed to be in front of so many, the star of the day, and she rolled her eyes as she accepted her scroll.

  June 5, 1975. Nancy Tuckerman blocks a UPI photographer at Caroline’s graduation from Concord Academy. Senator Edward M. Kennedy is on the left. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  June 5, 1975. Caroline’s graduation, with her mother, grandmothers, brother, and uncle Ted. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Jackie beamed from her seat. She also saw that despite the setting’s traditional backdrop, with ancient trees and white clapboard buildings, change was all around her. The school, which had been strict and all girls, had recently loosened the rules and allowed boys to enroll. Caroline, chewing gum and wearing a white lace dress with peasant sleeves and a hem that skimmed the grass, seemed to be commencing into a world very different from the one Jackie had faced when she graduated from Miss Porter’s.

  During the recessional, the graduates strolled down the center aisle in twos. Jackie leaned out, whispering to Caroline, words no one else heard. When the ceremony was over, the family posed for a few snapshots, which the news photographers also caught. And Jackie presented her daughter with a poignant gift—a tool to see life in new ways, a tool that had enabled Jackie’s first job. It was a camera.15

  Two days later, reality again crashed the celebration. One of Onassis’s aides, Stelios Papadimitriou, released to the press his boss’s eighteen-page handwritten will, drafted on the millionaire’s private jet as it flew from Acapulco to New York in January 1974. The details were on the front page of the Washington Post, and spread beneath a splashy headline in the Los Angeles Times. The stories explained that Onassis had left the bulk of his estate to his daughter, Christina, and that Jackie would receive $250,000 a year, including $25,000 for each of her children.16 Christina would also own 75 percent of his yacht and Skorpios, with Jackie owning the other 25 percent of each.

  “If the two women do not want Skorpios,” he wrote, “it should first be offered as a resort for the head of the state. If again turned down, it should be given to Olympic Airways as a holiday resort for the company’s employees.”

  Onassis signed his will, “With my last kiss, Daddy.”17

  CHAPTER SIX

  The Seeker

  If 1963 was a horrific year, then 1975 was a close second. After months of sadness, anger, uncertainty, backbiting, and press scrutiny, Jackie sought comfort in her old friend Tish Baldrige. After her stint as White House social secretary in the Kennedy administration, Baldrige had stayed in Washington, started a family, and launched an eponymous public relations firm with clients such as Cartier, Tiffany, and Elizabeth Arden. Baldrige had spoken with Jackie on a few occasions since Onassis had died about three months earlier and had heard the sadness in Jackie’s voice. She had also read the headlines about Grand Central, the divorce threat, the estate battle. They needed to catch up in person. As always, Baldrige executed the plan.

  Naturally, Baldrige knew just the place to have an important lunch with Jackie—the Sulgrave Club, in Dupont Circle. And there she waited, at a corner table, where they would meet in quiet and safety in a city full of journalists and power lunchers. And while it was not Baldrige’s intent, the restaurant, a women’s club, was also a poetic choice for the conversation the two were about to have. The club was part of what had once been a grand home on Massachusetts Avenue owned in the early 1900s by a wealthy couple, Herbert and Martha Wadsworth. Martha Wadsworth, like an earlier version of Jackie, had been an exceptional horsewoman, a prolific photographer, a presence on the social scene, and had more than an eye for architecture, designing, and furnishing her Beaux-Arts style house, built of light-yellow Roman brick and cream-colored, molded terra-cotta.1

  Sitting there alone before her famous friend arrived, Baldrige remembered the various aspects of Jackie’s life—many of them lived in public—that had shaped her, and led her to this crucible of middle age, with no husband, no career, no real agenda beyond her newfound preservation work. Jackie had decided to keep John in school in New York, at Collegiate, before releasing him to boarding school. Come September, Caroline would be gone, studying in London, and Jackie would be much more alone. And then what? What was she going to do with the rest of her life? The point of the lunch was clear, at least to Baldrige. Jackie needed to find meaningful employment, both to engage and distract her.

  Although the two of them had precisely the same education—Miss Porter’s and Vassar, followed by time in Paris, the outcomes so far had been different. Baldrige, tall, forthright, and tireless, had delayed starting a family during her around-the-clock White House career, despite what she was taught at Miss Porter’s. Jackie, even without a career, was always hungry for knowledge and found it instead in her social interactions, soaking up history at the opening of the races at Longchamps, sitting in the Bibliotheque National, walking the ruins on an island. Jackie never wanted to be trapped in that life—but she wasn’t going to be trapped at work, either. And in reality, she never really needed to be.

  Jackie had been astounded after graduation when Baldrige had chosen a career, something Tish believed was necessary for happiness. Jackie had respected her friend’s decision—but then lured her away from a position as a public relations executive in Milan by asking her to work in the White House, where Baldrige enjoyed having lunch in the mess hall so she could argue with men. Jackie respected her friend, but was “exhausted” by her.2 When Baldrige left her White House job in 1963, JFK told her she was the most “emotional” woman he had ever met.3 Fine if Tish wanted a job, but “working” was not for Jackie.

  By 1975, the world had changed significantly. Burning bras was no longer new. The Mary Tyler Moore Show, one of the first on TV to portray an independent career woman (Mary was a producer at a television news station), was already in its fifth season, and had just won an Emmy for Best Comedy Series a few weeks before Jackie and Tish met for lunch. But Jackie still belonged to a different generation and social class in which ladies of good families apologized for being at work—if they worked at all. Jackie had always been protected by men. But now she had a daughter about to launch on her own trajectory. Perhaps Jackie thought that Caroline would have to be the one trying to figure out this strange new world, this thing called feminism, where women, even those who did not have to, pursued a career—and not just for the money, but for their own self-worth.

  Baldrige, her napkin in her lap as she waited for Jackie to arrive at the Sulgrave Club, continued an internal dialogue to hash through her friend’s options.4 The corporate world was definitely not for her. Jackie was not the kind of person who would punch a clock at a specific hour every day. But maybe Jackie would like a job in the nonprofit sector? Something where you could keep your own hours? At the time, Jackie was being deluged with requests from people asking to lend her name to committees, especially ones involved in preservation, as well as from endorsements, particularly in fashion. To Jackie, most of those reques
ts were about what a cause could get out of her, rather than what she could get out of it.

  Years before, in 1964, Dorothy Schiff, the longtime owner and publisher of the New York Post, had met with Jackie in Manhattan. It was one week after the release of the Warren Report, which declared that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in the assassination. Jackie was very emotional with Schiff, her eyes brimming with tears when she explained that she had forgotten to cancel her newspaper and magazine subscriptions that week and had been forced to see the coverage of the report when the shooting was still so fresh.

  “There is only one thing to do,” Schiff told her. “And that is to find a substitute in work that is all-absorbing. It will never be the same thing, but you can lose yourself that way.”

  Jackie told her that she knew that was true and would like to do it.

  “I don’t want to be Ambassador to France or Mexico,” she told Schiff. “President Johnson said I could have anything I wanted. I would like to work for somebody, but the list is … One is expecting someone to come home every weekend, but no one …”

  Schiff was sympathetic and admitted that a job was a poor replacement for the void in her life.

  “You know, you are the most famous and admired woman in the world,” Schiff said. “It is quite a responsibility.”

  Being a political wife, that had been her job, a job that left her tired and hoarse at the end of the day. After a pause in her conversation with Schiff, her mind wandered back to the White House.

  “All that furniture …”

  Before she left, Schiff offered Jackie a job as a columnist.

  “You could just write about things you go to and anything you like,” said Schiff, who had been a columnist herself.

  “Oh, I can’t write,” Jackie said, reflexively reverting to her old-fashioned demure ways. But she also huffed that she had received lots of requests from magazines to write about what one might expect—gracious living or fashion—not about the space race or civil rights or global affairs. After all, she said, her voice growing indignant, “I am interested in the same things Jack was interested in!”5