by Gill Paul
On opening night, Maria managed all the high notes and cadenzas, but without the power she used to bring to the role of the Druid priestess. She knew the critics realized this, but their reviews were kind, commenting on her “sublime” acting and the “subtlety” of her musical phrasing. The second and third nights followed the same pattern, but she awoke on the morning of the fourth feeling nervous about Ari’s high expectations. Her throat was a little constricted, perhaps because of nerves, so she spent the day doing relaxation exercises and focusing on the music, before going through her preperformance rituals.
The applause was thunderous when she stepped onstage, but from the opening notes she knew she was going to struggle. The vocal cords were not responding cleanly. She had no choice but to skip some high notes and give a softer, toned-down performance. All that would have been acceptable—just—but in the final scene she reached for C5 and her voice cracked on the note. There was no disguising it, even for those who were not opera fans; her failure was clear.
A few audience members hissed their disapproval, and the hisses were soon accompanied by a scattering of boos. Maria raised her arm to the conductor, indicating that she wanted to try again. There was a pause, the orchestra returned to the start of the aria, and Maria summoned all her vocal training to sing a perfectly placed, sustained C5. Most of the crowd applauded, but there was still some grumbling, and she felt humiliated. Why tonight, of all nights?
At the end, she took a few cursory curtain calls, then rushed to her dressing room, where she slammed the door, wishing she could be invisible. She felt terrible for letting Ari down. He had been dying for the evening to be a success.
The dressing-room door opened and he burst in with a bottle of champagne.
“Magnifico!” he cried. “I have never been prouder of you than I was when you sang that high note the second time. That’s my Maria! That’s what I love about you: you never accept defeat.”
She shook her head. “I was terrible. Of all nights for my top C to desert me!”
“Your friends are singing your praises. They’re in the restaurant now. Come and join us. Shall I open this bottle to get you in the mood?”
“I can’t face anyone.” She shook her head firmly. “I couldn’t bear to listen to their tactfully worded congratulations. You go if you like, but I’m heading home.”
“You were splendid and everyone loved you,” he said. “But if you want to go home, then I will accompany you.”
His Rolls-Royce whisked them back to the Avenue Foch apartment, where his chef prepared a light supper, but Maria couldn’t eat. She sipped a glass of Dom Pérignon, still overcome with humiliation.
“I can’t sing onstage anymore,” she announced. “That’s it. It’s not fair to risk letting down my fellow musicians and my audiences.” Thank goodness Ari’s attempts to make her the figurehead of a Monte Carlo opera company had foundered. She wasn’t worthy of the honor.
“I don’t think you let anyone down,” Ari insisted. “But if you don’t want the pressure of performing, perhaps you could concentrate on films and recordings.”
“Perhaps . . .”
She couldn’t think about that tonight. There were only four more performances in Paris, and then they would fly to Athens to board the Christina for a long summer cruise. They’d go to Milan for the fourth anniversary of Omero’s birth in June, then the rest of the summer would be about swimming, sunbathing, and resting, trying to scrub the memory of tonight’s performance from her mind.
So much for showing Ari that she was a more glittering prize than Lee. That plan had backfired spectacularly.
Chapter 46
New York City
Fall 1964
Protecting Jack’s legacy became a full-time job for Jackie in the first year after his death. There had been an early, ill-judged interview with a Life magazine journalist just a week after the shooting, when she was still so traumatized she scarcely knew what she was saying. She hadn’t been altogether happy with the article, which in retrospect sounded too sentimental, but at least she had managed to introduce the idea of Jack’s presidency being like the Camelot of Arthurian legend, a time of exceptional brilliance that would be remembered through the ages.
In January she had been interviewed by the Warren Commission, set up to investigate Jack’s death, and that was harrowing. How many shots had there been? She thought she recalled two, but everything was a blur. When, much later, she saw a home movie of the shooting made by a Dallas resident named Abraham Zapruder, she was stunned to see herself clambering onto the back of the car. She had no recollection of doing so—but there she was, in her pink suit and pillbox hat. It felt as if it had happened to someone else, as if that hadn’t been her sitting there cradling Jack’s bloodied head in her lap, trying to keep his brains inside his skull.
She had spent hours talking with author and historian Arthur Schlesinger, sessions that would serve as a record for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and, once he had finished, William Manchester, the man she had chosen to be Jack’s official biographer, began his interviews. There were also lengthy meetings with John Warnecke, the architect designing Jack’s gravestone, and she was overseeing a memorial edition of Look magazine that would come out on the first anniversary of his death. She had a desperate need to control every detail, every single word written about him, so that the world would understand what a great president Jack had been, and how much he achieved in just two years, ten months, and two days.
By day she held herself together, her mother’s training coming to the fore. Think before you speak; if you don’t have anything useful to say, don’t say anything at all. Most women tended to gabble, to fill silences, but Jackie found that remaining silent could be more powerful, forcing your interlocutor to speak instead.
To all but a tiny handful of observers, she must have appeared to be coping well. Only a few saw the reality—Bobby, more than anyone else. Maybe it wasn’t fair to unload her grief on him. He was gray and stooped, forever marked by the tragedy. Like her, he was throwing himself into work to get through the days, but he always made time if she called his office to ask his opinion, or to discuss what was on her mind. She leaned on Bobby, mentally, emotionally, and physically too, often wrapping her arms around his neck and pressing her body against his. He was only a little shorter than Jack, with the same wavy Kennedy hair, but his build was slighter, less solid, and he smelled less earthy. Hugging him helped at the time, but it left her feeling lonelier afterward because it emphasized the absence.
In the evenings, after the children went to bed, was when Jackie let her guard down. The first vodka took the edge off; the second gave her a mellow fuzziness; the third made her weep. There was often a fourth and a fifth, and sometimes they provoked ugly moments that she remembered in snatches the following morning: screaming at the children’s nanny, sobbing uncontrollably on her private secretary’s shoulder, hurling an ashtray across the room.
But vodka plus sleeping pills was a nightly ritual through which she sought the oblivion that would help her drop off to sleep. Otherwise, gunshots and blood and horror kept her eyes wide open, staring into the darkness, as she relived the moments in Dallas over and over again.
“I CAN’T TALK to women,” Jackie told Father Richard McSorley, a Jesuit priest with whom she had begun playing tennis. “They say inane things, like ‘Time is a great healer.’” She mimicked her mother’s voice—for it was she who had come out with that phrase only the day before, after chiding Jackie that she must be a role model for widows everywhere. “Frankly, from where I’m sitting, grief only gets worse over time.”
He looked up from lacing his tennis shoes, his hazel eyes full of kindness. “Yet, I’m sure you can see that ten years from now the pain will not be so acute and overwhelming. Everyone around you means well.”
“This morning, when I woke up, for a moment I couldn’t remember Jack’s face. Can you imagine? That was one of the lowest points yet.” She fingered the s
trings of her racquet, biting back tears. “I can’t bear it that other people are moving on and he is becoming history.”
Father McSorley stood up. He was several inches taller than she, with white hair and a slim physique. “Don’t forget that Jack is part of the future too. His influence is all around, with his civil rights reforms and the other great work he did. He will live on, not just in you and the children but worldwide.”
“So why did it happen?” she cried, hitting the ground with her racquet in a burst of fury. “Why did God take him away if he was doing so much good? It will never make sense to me.”
“I’ve brought you some books,” he said, nodding at a bag he had left at the side of the court. “I’ll give them to you later. There are insights into the beliefs of different cultures regarding tragedy and death: Buddhism, atheism, Islam. I thought you might find them interesting.”
“If you want me to believe that Jack will be reincarnated as a beetle or a frog, I warn you in advance, I don’t buy it.”
He laughed. “Jack would be a lion or a golden eagle, at the very least. Come, let’s play. We can talk after.”
He was a good tennis player, who had been coaching Ethel and Bobby’s children. Sometimes Jackie won, sometimes he did, but for an hour or so she could focus on the simple task of hitting a ball across a net. It helped.
Talking to Father McSorley helped in many ways. She told him about her recurring guilt that she hadn’t been able to save Jack, her suicidal urges, and the vivid dreams that made her wake abruptly, soaked in sweat and trembling in terror.
Late in the summer, Father McSorley helped her make the decision to leave Washington and return to New York’s Upper East Side, where she had spent her childhood. She hoped she could be anonymous there, away from political circles. They could get an apartment on an upper floor where no sightseers could peer in the windows and a doorman would prevent intruders from gaining entry. She loved the cultural richness of New York, the unparalleled shopping, and the fact that it was a cosmopolitan city, where folk would scarcely bat an eye when they passed a celebrity in the street. Most of all, the city reminded her of her daddy, Black Jack, and the happy times they had spent there.
She viewed a few properties before making an offer for a fifteen-room penthouse apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park, just seven blocks north of a place Lee and Stas had bought. It was a relief to get away from Georgetown, where it was permanently “zoo time,” but the first evening they spent there, she sobbed on the telephone to Bobby for over an hour.
“It feels as though I am leaving him,” she cried. “People will say I’m moving on, but you know I’m not, don’t you?”
“Of course you’re not,” Bobby replied. In the background she could hear Ethel shouting at their kids to get to bed. “Trust me. Jack would think you’d done the right thing.”
AMONG THE BOOKS Father McSorley had lent her was one called The Greek Way, in which a classicist named Edith Hamilton described the thinking of fifth-century Athenians as they tried to make sense of the universe. Jackie was struck in particular by a chapter in which the author explained the Greek belief that tragedy could be caused by sins committed by one’s forebears, which they had to expiate, or because of a family curse, or hubris. The Kennedy family certainly seemed cursed, she mused. Jack’s eldest brother, Joe, had died in the war, and his sister Kick had been killed in a plane crash in 1948. Another sister, Rosemary, was said to be mentally incapacitated and had spent her adult life in an institution. And now Jack. To lose four out of eight children before they reached middle age seemed more than bad luck. Joe Kennedy Sr. had been no angel in his younger years and must have made some enemies.
When Lee mentioned that Aristotle Onassis was in New York on a business trip, Jackie decided to invite him to a brunch she was planning so she could quiz him about Greek beliefs. She called and left an invitation with his personal secretary, which was relayed to him.
The secretary called back to confirm that Mr. Onassis would be delighted to attend, then added, “He is in town with Maria Callas and wondered if you might consider including her in the group?”
Jackie hesitated. She was a fan of Maria Callas’s singing but it might be awkward to meet her because of Lee’s affair with Onassis. She wasn’t sure if it was still going on, because Lee clammed up whenever his name was mentioned; nor was she sure whether Maria knew about it. The situation was complicated, and she couldn’t face a scene. Besides, she was not in the right frame of mind for meeting new people. “Please tell Mr. Onassis that unfortunately I only have one spare place at my table,” she replied.
In fact, she had designed the guest list carefully to comprise some of the most intelligent men of her acquaintance: among them were Father McSorley; David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the United States; and Kenneth Galbraith, the economist. Nine men altogether, and herself. Women would bring emotion to the table, and she wanted a discussion that was entirely unsentimental.
She served ham and eggs accompanied by Bloody Marys and, as they ate, she questioned them all about their belief systems, stimulating discussion of some of the themes she had been reading about in Father McSorley’s books. It was a meeting of the minds that she felt privileged to witness.
“Do you believe in curses, Mr. Onassis?” she asked, turning to him. “They say one was placed on the Grimaldi royal family of Monaco back in the Middle Ages, and it accounts for all the unhappy marriages and premature deaths suffered by that dynasty.”
“Any large family has its share of misfortune,” he replied. “As Mr. Galbraith would no doubt explain, it is statistical. Besides, dying young was commonplace before the advent of modern medicine, and the children of unhappy marriages do not have a good example set them in youth, so may be more likely to enter an unhappy marriage themselves. This seems a more likely explanation than any superstition.”
Jackie regarded him. “My parents had an unhappy marriage. Does that mean I am doomed to repeat their example?”
“I would argue that intelligence also plays a part in our relationship choices, so you have a higher chance of success than most.” He smiled.
She accepted the compliment with a nod. It was interesting to watch Mr. Onassis in the midst of these men. They were better read and more educated, but he was not intimidated by the conversation. She caught a glimpse of why Lee was so obsessed with him. He was the type of man who would rescue you from a burning building, not with brute strength but by using his cool rationality to figure the best way out.
Chapter 47
New York City
Fall 1964
By October 1964, Maria and Ari had been lovers for five years, so she was stunned when Mrs. Kennedy invited him to brunch without including her. Was Lee going to be present? She urged him to refuse the invitation but he insisted on going, leaving Maria to stew in jealous anxiety all afternoon.
When Ari returned to their hotel suite in the early evening, he told her it had just been a bunch of men talking philosophy while Mrs. Kennedy presided regally at the head of the table.
“It was a very odd occasion,” he said. “And I’m not sure why I was included. She is trying to find a rational explanation for her husband’s death, but it is unlikely we will ever learn why it happened since Lee Harvey Oswald did not explain his motives.”
“That must be hard for her,” Maria sympathized, her mood lightening with the realization that the brunch hadn’t been a pretext for Ari and Lee to get together. She was wary where any Kennedys or Radziwills were concerned.
THAT FALL MARIA made a recording of Tosca, which was so successful that it made her reconsider her decision to give up performing. She missed the stage, the buzz of knowing that you were holding an audience’s attention, the applause, the drama of it all. If she was careful about the roles she chose, surely there could be more years of performing ahead of her?
Tosca suited her new, lower range and she had always loved Puccini’s music, so she decided to undertake a l
imited tour of the production. After a few months of intensive work with voice coaches, she sang it at the Paris Opéra in February 1965, and the reviews were ecstatic. It boosted her confidence and she agreed the production could transfer to the New York Met, her first performance there in seven years.
The prospect of singing for a New York audience again was daunting. She wasn’t sure what reception to expect, but as her limousine approached the building on the first day of rehearsals, she saw a huge banner across the front that read WELCOME HOME MARIA. A line of people huddled in sleeping bags snaked around the block.
“What are they queuing for?” she asked her driver.
“For you, of course.” He grinned. “The first fifty-odd on line camped out overnight.”
She shook her head in amazement. Not bad for a middle-aged has-been! In her hotel that evening, she switched on the television news and was touched to hear some fans being interviewed: “It would have been a crime to miss Maria Callas,” one young man said. “She is undoubtedly the greatest singer of this century.”
Another, who had been camping out since the previous afternoon, told the interviewer, “Only for Maria would I do this. Nobody else.”
Ari had not accompanied her because of business back in Athens. She had a niggling worry that he might be seeing Lee but pushed it out of her mind to focus on her performance. The voice had to be top-notch for opening night.
When she stepped out onto the Met’s stage, right foot first, she was greeted by a full six minutes of applause. She clasped her hands to her face, overcome by the rapturous reception. Who would have thought it? She felt humbled by their warmth and it took awhile before she could compose herself sufficiently to smile and gesture her thanks by applauding the audience in return.