Just Jackie (15 page)

J
ackie had enrolled Caroline as a student at the Convent of the Sacred Heart on Ninety-first Street and Fifth Avenue. The school was housed in a large Italian Renaissance-style mansion that once served as the home of millionaire Otto Kahn. One day in the fall of 1965, Jackie came by, along with the other mothers, to pick up her daughter.

“This is Teresa Gorman from Great Britain,” the mother superior told Jackie, who was dressed in a cream-colored Chanel suit. “She’s a gift from God. We were all praying for a science teacher, and here she is.”

As a biology teacher, Teresa made good use of Central Park.

“Almost every day I took a group of pupils there,” she recalled. “When Caroline came, her two Secret Service agents came, too…. Jackie joined in as we turned over stones to find wood lice and earwigs. As our little group of schoolgirls laughed and skipped their way along, she would talk about her childhood in the country. She loved horses.”

The frogs, lizards, and white mice in biology class fascinated the children, and they begged to be allowed to take them home for the holidays. Shortly before Christmas vacation, Caroline turned up with a note from Jackie written on a piece of yellow-lined paper that had been torn from a notebook.

“Dear Mrs. Gorman,” it said, “Caroline has my permission to bring home a mouse.”

Teresa phoned Jackie and asked, “Are you sure you really want this mouse? It could escape.”

“Caroline’s in love with the idea,” Jackie said. “She absolutely insists.”

A few days later, Caroline, Teresa, Bobby Kennedy, and two Secret Service agents all went shopping for a mouse cage at Bloomingdale’s. Bobby, who had just been elected senator in a landslide, moved down the crowded aisle with both arms extended, allowing people to stretch out and shake his hands. It was a scene of utter pandemonium.

“I don’t mind for myself,” Jackie told Teresa, “but I’m nerve-wracked about the safety of the children. There are so many nutcases out there.”

Caroline chose a cage that looked like a Chinese lantern.

“You’ll need some wood chippings, and something for the mouse to nibble,” Teresa said.

“I’m beginning to think it would have been simpler to send the children away to camp for the holiday,” said Jackie.

A couple of days after the school closed for Christmas, Teresa received a phone call from the mother superior.

“Mrs. Kennedy would like a word with you,” she said.

Teresa called Jackie.

“You must come and take this mouse away,” she said. “It’s stinking up the apartment.”

“But won’t Caroline be heartbroken?” Teresa asked.

“Yes, she will,” said Jackie, “but the mouse is killing my social life.”

Teresa smelled the problem as soon as she stepped off the elevator into Jackie’s apartment. The mouse had turned out to be a male, and the combination of wet wood
chippings and central heating was producing an over-powering effect.

“Ah, the dominance of the male,” said a man’s voice, which came from the depths of a sofa in the living room.

“This is Andy Warhol,” said Jackie, introducing a pale-faced man with large round spectacles and a platinum wig.

At first blush, the pop artist seemed like a strange choice as a friend for Jackie. Andy had won worldwide acclaim by painting portraits of Coke bottles and Campbell soup cans, as well as of celebrities, and he was as starstruck as Jackie was publicity shy.

However, people often misunderstood Jackie’s relationship with her public. Her true goal never was to avoid publicity as much as it was to control it. One of her greatest strengths was her own unerring sense of stardom. In this she resembled other strong personalities—Greta Garbo, Charles de Gaulle, Cary Grant—who had the connoisseur’s appreciation of their own persona.

Moreover, it was not true that Jackie hated being photographed. In fact, she loved to be photographed—if it was done under her control. She had her own camera, and she was forever asking Jimmy Mason, who was in charge of her horses at her weekend house in Peapack, New Jersey, to take pictures of her mounted on Frank, her jumper. She collected these photographs in bulging scrapbooks, along with the clippings about herself from newspapers and magazines.

On the other hand, she was ambivalent about photography because of the paparazzi who stalked her.

“I remember going out with her,” said Karl Katz, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “and at the end of the evening, there was always this mess, this barrage of people. We went to the opening of a film once, on Broadway, and got separated. Photographers just got in the center, and I was pushed away. It was violent, and truly frightening for her.”

“I understand you’re introducing Caroline to the facts of life,” Andy Warhol said to Teresa Gorman, “including some we don’t talk about in polite society.”

Teresa could not think of what to say. She collected the mouse, and Jackie and Andy walked her to the foyer, where she rang for the elevator.

“We’re going skiing next week,” Jackie said. “With a bit of luck, Caroline’ll have forgotten about the mouse by the time we come home. I’ll tell her you’ve taken it to the vet.”

Teresa got into the elevator, and as the door began to slide shut, she caught a glimpse of Andy Warhol and Jackie—the artist and his icon—waving good-bye to the mouse in the Chinese cage.

THE OTHER
JACK

October 1965–July 1966

“R
ight after Dallas, Jackie called and asked if I would help her design a permanent memorial grave for the President,” said John Carl Warnecke, an architect who had gained considerable fame a few years before the assassination for his design of the American Embassy in Thailand. “The burial site had been put together in haste by Bill Walton, the painter, who was chairman of the Fine Arts Commission and the Kennedys’ expert on all things aesthetic. Walton told Jackie that in his view the final design for a monument would be a landscape problem, and so Jackie naturally turned to her friend Bunny Mellon, who was a brilliant landscape gardener.

“Jackie and Bunny agreed that the Eternal Flame should remain the primary symbol at the grave,” Warnecke went on, “and that everything else should be kept simple and dignified. They did not want statues or buildings, just some slate tablets engraved with passages from Jack’s Inaugural Address. Bunny had in mind the kind of gray slate that was used for tombstones in Colonial New England.

“A couple of days after Jackie called me, she and Bobby picked me up at a barbershop in Georgetown, where I was getting my hair cut, and we drove to Arlington National Cemetery. There must have been at least fifty reporters and photographers waiting for us when we got there. Jackie and Bobby got down on their knees and crossed themselves.

“We walked up the hill to the Lee Mansion. Jackie was
quiet. But then all of a sudden she came to life when she saw the view—the axis looking from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, and then to the dome of the Capitol. It was a thrilling moment, truly electrifying.”

Jackie had chosen Warnecke for this important assignment because, like Teddy White and William Manchester, he was a Kennedy family favorite. Back in 1940, while Jack Kennedy was recuperating from one of his many serious illnesses, he had spent a few months in California auditing writing courses at Stanford University. That same year, the strapping Warnecke—six foot three inches tall and 215 pounds—played left tackle on the famous undefeated and untied Stanford football team that went to the Rose Bowl. The sickly Kennedy worshipped Warnecke from afar as a hero.

The two Jacks did not actually meet face to face until 1956, when Kennedy returned to California to campaign on behalf of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic presidential candidate. For the occasion, Red Fay, Jack’s buddy from his PT-boat days in the Pacific, lined up an attractive young woman for the married junior Senator from Massachusetts. Coincidentally, Red had been Warnecke’s fraternity brother at Stanford, and he asked the architect to be the beard for the evening and pretend he was the young woman’s date. Kennedy was delighted to meet his old football hero, and before he disappeared with the woman, he dubbed him “Rosebowl” and made him promise that they would stay in touch.

By this time, Warnecke was something of an architectural renegade. As the architecture critic Benjamin Forgey noted in
The Washington Post
, “Warnecke was … a Californian who didn’t altogether take to the rigid principles of modern architecture advanced by his teachers (the famed Walter Gropius among them) at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. At the University of California campus at Berkeley, and elsewhere in his native state,
he had taken great pains to design buildings that fit the historical context, a quality not high on the usual modernist list.”

After he became President, Kennedy asked Rose-bowl to help Jackie with one of her pet projects—the crusade to save Lafayette Square, the quadrangle of splendid nineteenth-century town houses directly across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The houses had been targeted for demolition by the Eisenhower Administration.

“I applied my theory of contextual design and proposed new buildings that would fit behind and work with the historical structures,” Warnecke explained years later. “But my design was bitterly opposed by members of the Fine Arts Commission and the architectural community. All of the President’s advisers gave up on saving the historic buildings, but Jack gave Jackie permission to make one last-ditch effort. She wrote a letter to the people in charge of the demolition, telling them that she would not permit the wrecker’s ball to touch one of those old buildings.

“The night before I was to present my plan for Lafayette Square, I went to a party at the British Embassy, and met Jackie for the first time. I danced with her, and we talked, and of course I fell instantly in love with her. She was full of spirit and play. She was delightful to be with. Inquisitive as hell. She said she wanted to see the design and models I had done.

“So I met her the next morning. She was wearing the same pink suit she would wear in Dallas, or one that looked very much like it. She was thrilled with my plan. She took over the reins of the project for the President, and attended the follow-up meetings. From then on, we got to see a hell of a lot of each other.”

Warnecke was a bachelor; he and his wealthy socialite wife Grace Cushing had been divorced in 1960. It was said that he was worth several million dollars. He kept
homes in a number of places—on Russian Hill overlooking San Francisco Bay, in the exclusive Georgetown section of Washington, and in Hawaii. He had his own three-hundred-acre ranch on the Russian River, forty miles north of San Francisco, where he went trail riding on his horses.

“Jack Warnecke was very self-assured,” said Robin Duke, the wife of JFK’s chief of protocol. “Like most great big men, he looked down on people physically, which sometimes gave the impression that he was pompous. But he was not pompous. He understood what the French call
placement
, and knew where he wanted to be. I thought him attractive, and I’m sure that Jackie thought him attractive, too.”