Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (41 page)

Jackie’s comments at an October 28, 1980, dinner party in New York City suggest how the woman herself perceived the arc of her life. Her dinner partner that evening, the British poet Stephen Spender, who had last encountered her before JFK became president, asked what she considered her greatest achievement to have been. Notably, it was not her fabled tenure as first lady, not the conquest of Paris or the myriad other triumphs of the White House years, not her demeanor at President Kennedy’s funeral and what it had meant to so many Americans, that Jackie spoke of when she replied without hesitation: “I think it is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I am proud of that.”

Sixteen

By the time of the book party for Louis Auchincloss’s new nonfiction work,
Maverick in Mauve,
which Doubleday was bringing out that fall season of 1983, more than thirty years had passed since the champagne-stoked evening when Auchincloss, then aged thirty-four, and Jackie Bouvier, aged twenty-two, had both been in crisis over how they intended to spend the rest of their lives. Auchincloss, who had wanted to write rather than pursue the traditional law career his parents envisioned for him, had just published a novel,
Sybil,
whose female protagonist reminded Jackie of her own dilemma as the bride-to-be of a nice but bland New York stockbroker named John Husted. “That’s it. That’s my future. I’ll be a Sybil Husted,” Jackie had proclaimed, not long before she decided to return her sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring in favor of chasing a less predictable and therefore more alluring relationship with Jack Kennedy.

In the intervening decades, Auchincloss, who had successfully pursued careers both as an author and an attorney, had published more than thirty works of fiction, history, and biography—including the novel regarded in some quarters as his finest book,
The Rector of Justin
. After Jackie went to Doubleday, she commissioned him to contribute learned pieces to a volume about the privileged French of the waning eighteenth century, and to the Deborah Turbeville book about the “ghosts and memories” that haunted Versailles. At length, Jackie had acquired the publication rights to
Maverick in Mauve,
an edition of the diary of his wife’s grandmother, the society figure Florence Adele Sloane, which Auchincloss had supplemented with his own piquant commentary and analysis. Strange to say, yet again he had produced a volume with which Jackie identified passionately and profoundly. By Jackie’s own account, it was not the choice details of mauve-decade (1890s) opulence and social intercourse that spoke to her so much as the diarist’s status as a survivor whose existence had been transformed by a jolt of sudden tragedy that snatched away well-nigh everything she had possessed but a moment before. Jackie was especially interested in the process that had allowed Adele, as she was known, to survive and thrive afterward. In the course of the book party at the Museum of the City of New York on upper Fifth Avenue where Auchincloss served as president, Jackie detailed her response to Adele’s story in conversation with the writer Marie Brenner: “What was so moving to me was the spirit of this woman … That her life would seem to be ideal, and then tragedy would strike her … but somehow her spirit and her character would carry her through.” Jackie might almost have been speaking of herself in the years of trial since Dallas.

Set alongside each other, the particular pair of Louis Auchincloss works with which Jackie identified across a span of three decades points to a crucial difference between her twenty-two- and fifty-four-year-old selves. Jackie Bouvier had scorned predictability, whether in life or in the man whose role it would be to provide her with that life. By contrast, an abiding sense that the earth beneath one’s feet could crumble at any moment had led the Jackie Onassis of these later years, like Adele a survivor, to crave and cultivate predictability. After she had dated a number of Manhattan men, the writer Pete Hamill and the filmmaker Peter Davis prominent among them, she had finally entered into a loving and lasting relationship with a partner who was quite unlike any of the potential husbands that would have most appealed to her in her restive post-deb years. Plump, pouchy-eyed, and still officially married to the mother of his three children, Maurice Tempelsman, international diamond trader and financier, was conspicuously devoid of the personal panache that Jackie’s two husbands, for all of their dramatic differences, had shared. Also unlike Kennedy and Onassis, Tempelsman was steady, reliable, and absolutely devoted to Jackie.

Born in Belgium in 1929 one month after Jackie, Tempelsman had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish, Yiddish-speaking family that escaped to the United States in 1940 as Hitler was conquering Europe. Living in a Jewish-émigré community on New York’s Upper West Side, Tempelsman when he was still a teenager went to work for his father in the diamond trade. Early on, he became associated with the DeBeers diamond cartel in South Africa. Jackie had first encountered Tempelsman in the 1950s when he introduced Jack Kennedy, then a U.S. senator and presidential aspirant, to leading figures in the South African diamond business. During the White House years, Tempelsman, a supporter of Democratic political causes, had been a guest, along with his wife, Lilly, at the 1961 state dinner in honor of President Ayub Khan of Pakistan, at which Jackie had displayed her new personal confidence and clout in the aftermath of Paris and Vienna. Early in her second widowhood, Tempelsman had taken over as her financial adviser upon the death of her previous money manager, the financier André Meyer. As he set to work adroitly multiplying Jackie’s settlement from the Onassis estate, he emerged by degrees as a discreet presence in her social life, squiring her at dinner parties and cultural events.

“MT,” as Jackie liked to refer to him, had a cast of mind that was similar to hers in important respects. Art and antiquity, ballet, theater, reading, scholarship—these and other shared interests they delighted in speaking of to each other, often in melodious French. That they were so often observed about New York conversing in a language other than English suggests the manner in which, when they were alone together in public, a kind of mist hung about them that excluded anyone else. Above all, Jackie’s new companion proved to be wonderfully protective. When, as they loved to do, she and he took long walks in Central Park near her home, he shielded her from photographers and others who threatened her serenity. Jackie once compared life with JFK to “living in a whirlwind.” By contrast, with Tempelsman, everything seemed somehow to proceed at a stately pace.

At length, Tempelsman moved to a hotel not far from where Jackie lived, then at last into her Fifth Avenue apartment, where he resided for the rest of her life. Jackie, when she married Jack Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, had become part of their personal and professional universes, emphatically so. She would have been expected to do the same had she become John Husted’s bride. Significantly, Jackie’s last love, when he assumed what was to become his regular place at one end of the candlelit, rustic plank pine dining room table at Red Gate Farm, as her Martha’s Vineyard estate was known, joined her in a life she had created for herself—a life painstakingly constructed to fit her own needs.

No setting more fully embodied the spirit of that life than the oasis where Jackie spent the better part of every summer, between Memorial Day and Labor Day. At a glance, the decor at Red Gate Farm seemed nothing if not cozy and comfortable. Rough-hewn benches, baskets, and other countrified pieces mingled with inviting, unostentatious chairs and sofas. Flowers in a variety of receptacles were scattered throughout the house. But the prevailing air of casualness and happenstance was deceptive. As in the homes of her friend and preceptress Bunny Mellon, on close inspection every visual element was calculated and perfect—perhaps, to certain tastes at least, a bit too perfect. Jackie’s dominion extended to the tiniest details. She wrote out her copious instructions to staff on index cards, such as the one affixed to a kitchen cabinet interior, which specified exactly which flowers were to be placed in which vessels in which areas of the house. Even in such minor matters, she wanted there to be no surprises. Though officially on holiday, Jackie lived by rigid rules. She rose unvaryingly at seven and ate breakfast—a half bowl of bran cereal with skim milk, fruit, and coffee—served on a tray in bed, before the wood fire she insisted be laid no matter the weather. Religiously, she massaged her face with cold cream in anticipation of donning a bathing suit, cap, and rubber fins for a strenuous two-hour swim in Squibnocket Pond, which bordered her property.

What may have been the most sustaining ritual of all took place in the interval between lunch and dinnertime. Of a summer’s afternoon, Jackie would sit barefoot on a padded chaise in the brick patio behind the house, laboring in solitude on manuscript pages, which she festooned with penciled corrections and comments. To understand the signal role that editing came to play in her life, it is worth revisiting the scene witnessed by Theodore White a week after President Kennedy’s assassination. The
Life
magazine writer, in the course of his interview with Jackie, was confronted with a fascinating dichotomy. First, the widow’s exceptionally vivid and visceral memories of Dallas asserted themselves, to the journalist’s perception, “as if controlling her.” Then, in turn, it was she who seized control, burying his typed pages beneath an avalanche of scribbled revisions. What White seems to have observed that strange stormy night in 1963 were the manifestations of two distinctly different parts of her brain at work. Jackie’s spoken evocations of “the blood scene” issued ineluctably from the limbic system, the brain’s survival center, where such images and sensations are stored. Her emphatic pencil marks on White’s first draft were the product of the cerebral cortex, where rational thinking takes place. The latter appears to have been her instinctive way of regaining control after the absolute loss of mastery in the just-completed episode of remembering and re-experiencing. On a personal level, the editing process seems to have performed a similar function in the course of Jackie’s last years. When she worked with single-minded intensity on a manuscript, she was in control and, to whatever extent remained possible, at peace. That peace was hard-won, and tenuous at best.

Thus her son’s fury when his girlfriend, Christina Haag, innocently violated the cardinal rule that Jackie’s precisely delineated private time at Red Gate Farm must not be intruded upon. “What were you doing there? You never, never go there between lunch and dinner,” John angrily challenged Christina, after she mentioned having happened upon Jackie at work in the patio. Even as a tiny tousle-haired boy, John had been unfailingly protective of a mother who, much as she strove to give him and his sister the semblance of a normal life, could hardly conceal the loss of control that intermittently afflicted her. When, in 1965, Jackie sadly referred to how much both children bore upon their shoulders, was she referring to their having to cope not just with the loss of a father, but with her terrifying troubles as well? Once, as little John perused a children’s book about JFK, he was heard to exclaim with alarm: “Close your eyes, Mummy!” Whereupon he ripped out a photo illustration of the presidential limousine in Dallas, before offering the volume to Jackie. Long afterward, John’s outburst at the girlfriend who had walked in on his mother spoke to his perception of the fragility of the arrangements Jackie had made and the atmosphere of safety and serenity thereby attained.

Whatever control she had managed to retrieve over time could be fractured in an instant. The precipitating event might take the form of an obvious reminder, as when at a 1983 private screening of a new film featuring her friend Rudolf Nureyev, she reacted to images of his fictional character’s being shot by suddenly crying out, obscuring her face with both hands and refusing to remove them until the movie was at an end. But it might just as well be any surprise that Jackie interpreted as threateningly intrusive, whether it be a publisher’s first mention of the Archer book or a president’s violation of her zealously guarded personal space. As it happened, Jackie had not been at all ruffled by the sight of her son’s girlfriend in the rear patio at an hour when only Jackie was supposed to be there. On the contrary, the women had proceeded to enjoy a relaxed, friendly conversation. John’s overwrought reaction to word of the chance encounter is suggestive of the acute anxiety with which his young life had long been charged, living as he did with an injured parent for whom the process of recovery was necessarily unending, resolution of the trauma never complete.

Might it have been otherwise? Was there some other, more effective arrangement Jackie could have made for herself and her children after the deaths of JFK and RFK? She appears to have contemplated the road not taken when, in 1985, she traveled with Teddy and other Kennedy family members to the village of Talsarnau in North Wales to attend the funeral of David Harlech. Like his adored first wife, Sissie, and his worshipped older brother, Gerard, before him, David had been killed in an automobile accident. The strange coincidence led to talk that the Harlechs, like their great friends the Kennedys, were cursed. Jackie’s presence at David’s funeral drew a great many press people who would hardly have come otherwise. On February 1, as she entered the twelfth-century parish church at Llanfihangel-y-traethau, she remained silent while Teddy, beside her, spoke to reporters of David’s having been like a brother to the Kennedys, of Rose’s having long regarded him as another son, and of JFK’s opinion of him as the smartest man he had ever known. After the service, attended by some ninety mourners who crowded into the tiny church, and by another hundred outside, David was buried in an adjoining walled graveyard. As Teddy looked on with mounting distress, Jackie’s composure began to evaporate. She shut her eyes tightly, her face contorted. Teddy did not pursue her, indeed no one did, when she suddenly rushed off—propelled, it would seem, by the familiar urgent wish to escape. At length, the rest of the party repaired to David’s seventeenth-century stone-manor house, which was set on some 4,200 acres of lawns, gardens, waterfalls, farmland, and wild woodland. His second wife was to preside over a family luncheon, attended by people whom Jackie would naturally have associated with the tales she had first heard in 1952 from John White, and two years later from David himself, of the young London set that had embraced Jack and Kick before the war.