Jackie After O (14 page)

The audience cheered again and then fell silent, except for some clinking of dishes and silverware in the kitchen, as Jackie began to speak.

“If we don't care about our past we can't have very much hope for our future,” she said into a bank of microphones and over the din of flashbulbs popping. “We've all heard that it's too late, or that it has to happen, that it's inevitable. But I don't think that's true. Because I think if there is a great effort, even if it's the eleventh hour, then you can succeed and I know that's what we'll do.”
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January 30, 1975. Architect Philip Johnson (at left with glasses), Jackie, Bess Myerson, and Ed Koch, leaving the Oyster Bar press conference, with Grand Central Terminal in the backdrop.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

Her words, which she had written herself, were sparse. She knew from her political experiences that if she delivered a forty-five-minute speech it would lose its effectiveness and she would have a greater chance of being misquoted. Deliver a sound bite just right and the press had to use it. They had nothing else.

Before Jackie left, Beckelman brought her over to meet the waiters and chefs. She shook hands with all of them, one of whom had taken JFK's order there years before.

“He ordered two glasses of milk and a cup of custard,” the waiter fondly recalled on the spot. “He gave me a dollar but I lost the dollar.”
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She smiled at him and turned to walk back up to the daylight of the city with Koch, Johnson, and Myerson. Outside, photographers ran past the group, turned on them, and walked backward as they focused their lenses on Jackie's face in front of Grand Central: one icon playing off of the other.

The next day, the papers everywhere were filled with pictures of Jackie, Myerson, Koch, and Johnson walking south on Park Avenue, with Grand Central behind—the perfect photo op. Jackie had generated so much coverage that the committee's volunteer public relations agency, J. Walter Thompson, pinned up clips in its conference room covering all four walls with articles from small-town papers and large-scale dailies around the globe, including those from Europe.

No doubt, Onassis saw the papers and read what Jackie had been doing. With his glasses on, if he looked closely, he could see in the photo's background the giant carved mythical figures that topped the terminal—Mercury (the god of travel), Hercules (labor), and Minerva (knowledge). He called Jackie on Sunday from his villa in the Athens suburb of Glyfada—directly beneath the flight path of many of his own airplanes landing in Athens—and complained of being alone.
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While Onassis's health continued to deteriorate, the Municipal Art Society stepped up its efforts to succeed, asking the
Times
to cover the story in greater detail, enlisting Ed Koch to complain to the US secretary of transportation, and forming a quiet alliance with the sympathetic Metropolitan Transit Authority, which leased space at the terminal.
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But MAS remained very worried about what Beame might do—or more precisely, not do. They needed him to appeal the case.

And so once again, Jackie threw herself into the cause, knowing the battle was at a critical stage. MAS could not lose the momentum coming off of the Oyster Bar press conference, an event that was so successful in making ordinary people suddenly care about preservation that it had instigated a campaign in the Midwest with donors sending in $5 bills to save the station.

Jackie was not afraid to take on people seemingly more powerful than she. And she knew when a fight was worth fighting. After Robert Kennedy's assassination, his wife, Ethel, wanted nuns from her old school to sing at the funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. Female voices were not allowed and Leonard Bernstein, who was in charge of the music for the Mass, was told no by the monsignor. Jackie went straight to Archbishop Terence Cooke and said, “This is the way it is going to be.” His reply: “Of course.”
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In addition to being the consummate strategist, she had little patience for process, knowing it could subsume purpose. She was also impatient with the bureaucracy and sluggish pace of committees. She—because of Onassis's grave illness—was running out of time to help Grand Central. She hatched a plan on her own to write to the mayor herself.
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Surely Beame would be too embarrassed to ignore her pleas and compliments. She did not underestimate the power of her own pen and knew the value of her letters. Those she had written on behalf of the White House restoration had moved people to part with priceless objects. Other notes had helped save Lafayette Square. Her letters sent to friends and strangers alike after JFK's assassination had touched them deeply. Even seemingly inconsequential letters of hers set the world atwitter. A 1964 auction fetched $3,000 for a note she sent in 1955 in response to a man in England suggesting that there were better ways for the Kennedys to spend money than on a $20,000 party. “True, my husband and I are well off,” she wrote to the Englishman. “But after taxes household and business expenses and charity, there is not just a great pile of money lying around.”
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The sales price for her letter was nearly double the amount a Martha Washington letter had sold for at that time.

This letter to Beame, though, would be more thought through than the note to the Brit, and would show her now-significant political instincts. She liked strategizing about how to tell the story. In this case, Jackie understood that Beame, in desperate straits politically, needed to be a hero.

She pulled out a sheaf of her trademark blue stationery with the simple 1040 Fifth Avenue engraved at the top. Dated February 24, she wrote the letter longhand, her loopy print leaning slightly to the left. Knowing what she had just been through in Athens and Paris, the anger, passion, and indeed much of her language in the letter could have reflected how she was feeling about her marriage and Onassis—as well as his decision to divorce her.

With my admiration and respect

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Beame, a steady man of simple tastes, could have read the letter seated on a wooden chair with black leather seat pads in his city hall office, with its flags and fireplace and rich red drapes, a setting that seemed to exacerbate his stature—just five foot two. Since his election the year before as the city's first Jewish mayor, Beame had been mired in New York's calamitous budget, proving impossible for even a numbers whiz like himself. Beneath his silver hair and furrowed brow, his dark, bushy eyebrows set off his eyes, focused on this letter, presenting yet another difficult choice for a leader prone to indecisiveness. This one was about a building, in the heart of the city, a cause involving powerful people who could make or break him. The more he considered it, the less choice he seemed to have.

Within a week, Beame announced that his administration would appeal Judge Saypol's decision.

“This case has great significance to the future of preservation in New York City and in the entire United States,” Beame said in a press release his office issued. “Grand Central Station was designated a landmark because it is a landmark in every sense of the word; it is a symbol of life in the City of New York … Grand Central, like all our landmarks, helps define the greatness of the City. We must work hard to preserve it as part of the integrity of the City of New York.”
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It was a victory. But for how long? If the case did go to the Supreme Court—a first for a historic preservation issue—every press release, every rally, every call for supporters that MAS would organize would be done to influence public opinion and perhaps those of the judges. Back at 1040 Fifth, smiling at what she had helped achieve, Jackie was already thinking about the composition of the Supreme Court and who might be swayed.

T
he day after her phone call from Onassis, Jackie was jolted by another overseas call—from her stepdaughter, Christina. She told Jackie that she had cut short an early February ski trip in Gstaad with her boyfriend because Onassis had collapsed with severe stomach pains. She was keeping vigil with her aunts outside her father's bedroom in Greece, an uncluttered room with few furnishings. He was struggling with the flu and a gallstone attack. Dr. Jacques Caroli, Onassis's personal physician based in Paris, was on his way. Christina said Jackie should come, too.

Jackie jumped on an Olympic Learjet that day, flying with Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, a New York cardiologist who had treated Onassis the previous November. Rosenfeld was worried that Onassis's heart was too weak to survive the removal of his gallbladder, which Caroli was recommending doing in Paris. As it was, Onassis could barely chew or hold up his head.

When Jackie arrived the next day, she was stunned to see him lying in bed forty pounds lighter and ashen. Outside, the media had been clamoring for hours to know if this was the end for Onassis.

Onassis's sister Merope sent her husband outside to address the reporters.

“He is suffering from influenza with complications but he is resting comfortably now and you can go home,” he told them. The reporters, however, knew it was more serious than that, and United Press International (UPI) reported the next day that the myasthenia gravis was threatening his vital organs and endangering his life.
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The doctors continued to assert their divergent opinions, as did the family. Christina, who wanted her father to go to Paris to receive what she believed would be the best care, was sobbing over his condition and the stress of having to decide what to do.
²
Onassis, seemingly resigned to die, did not want to go anywhere. But Jackie felt strongly he at least go to Paris.