Just Jackie (46 page)

Spring 1989–Fall 1993

O
ne day in the spring of 1989, John Loring, who was working on yet another Tiffany lifestyle book for Jackie, called her and said, “Where do you want to meet? Your office floor or my office floor?”

“Oh, could we just go to a restaurant?” Jackie said. “Couldn’t we just go out?”

“You’re joking,” Loring said. “You don’t really want to do that.”

“Yes, I really want to do that,” Jackie said. “Could we just go out and have lunch?”

“Where are we going to go?” Loring said. “I’ve got an idea. How about Le Cirque? It’s the only safe place to go.”

“Yes,” she said. “Sirio [Maccioni, the owner of Le Cirque] knows how to handle these things. This is perfect! That’s exactly where we are going to go. You get there well ahead of time, and get it all organized so I know when I come in where to go.”

“I already know where you’re going,” Loring said. “You’re going to a table in the corner by the door, so you don’t even have to walk more than three paces into the restaurant before you’re sitting down.”

“Great,” said Jackie. “I’ll be there.”

Just as they planned, Loring was waiting when Jackie came through the door of Le Cirque, the fashionable eatery in the East Sixties. Three waiters rushed forward
to create a human shield and escort Jackie to a chair facing Loring, who was seated on the banquette at the corner table. Before anyone in the restaurant had noticed, Jackie was leaning toward Loring, her hand slightly up to her face.

“It wasn’t because she didn’t want to be seen by the people in the room,” Loring explained, “It was so she didn’t have to see the people in the room staring at her.”

After a while, Sirio Maccioni came over to their table. He had known Jackie since the 1950s, when he was the maitre d’ at the Colony Club, and she dropped in with Senator John Kennedy. Sirio asked if he could bring his three sons over to meet her.

“Oh, yes, please send the boys over,” Jackie said.

By a great coincidence, the columnist Liz Smith happened to be having lunch at Le Cirque that day. She devoted half her column the next day to the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had lunched at Le Cirque, and had paid rapt attention to the man she was having lunch with.

“Well, Jackie’s rapt attention to the person she was having lunch with,” explained Loring, “was to avoid seeing everyone else in the room whispering to each other and doing things that would make her uncomfortable. But once she decided to eat lunch out, she loved going to Le Cirque for what she began calling her festive lunches.”

Loring always arrived well in advance. One time, before Jackie made her appearance, Ivana Trump came over to ask Loring if he would introduce her to Jackie after she was seated.

“Let me ask her first,” Loring said.

During lunch, Loring turned to Jackie and said, “Ivana would really like to meet you. She’s a very sweet person.”

“Okay,” said Jackie, “tell her it’s fine.”

Loring got up and went over to Ivana’s table, and brought her back.

“Oh, I’ve always wanted to meet you,” Ivana gushed.

They chatted for a while, and Ivana left.

“She’s really very sweet,” Jackie said.

“Yes, Jackie, she is,” said Loring. “She is nothing like what the press says about her. I think we all know a thing or two about that, don’t we?”

“She changed a great deal over the years,” said Loring. “In the beginning, she still seemed very haunted by things. She still seemed to be pursued by her own demons. And if anyone in the world had a right to be, she did. On occasion, she seemed very upset and troubled. But all that changed as the years went on, and one can suspect a lot had to do with Maurice Tempelsman, and finally having a very satisfying and good relationship with someone who was a very strong and very brilliant and quiet and charming and companionable person to be with. That undoubtedly was a tremendous influence on bringing her back to the happy person again.

“And the great change that was wonderful to me was that she became a very happy camper. She was very happy with everything. I think also she was delighted with her children, that as they grew up she was beginning to be so proud of them and so happy with them, and everything to do with them made her happy. And her enthusiasm was boundless all the time.

“And so all those haunted looks completely disappeared. It was like a scene change from one period, when we were hiding in her office, sitting on the floor, eating junk out of a paper bag, to, ‘No, I’m a perfectly normal person and I can get all dressed up and go to Le Cirque for lunch and have a good time.’

“And it was astonishing. I mean that change just came like that. Bingo! At one point she was very much into trench coats and a scarf over her head and large sunglasses and things. Then suddenly, there she was, no trench coat, no scarf, just herself, walking straight down
Fifth Avenue, leaving me at Tiffany and walking on down to Doubleday.

“It was amazing watching the passersby’s faces. There was this look of astonishment, and then there was a look of total denial, and you could see them saying to themselves, ‘Oh, it couldn’t possibly be….’ And so, the best disguise in the world was to walk straight through the crowds on Fifth Avenue, because nobody believed it. They would sort of get a jolt, and then they would think, ‘Oh, I’m crazy, that can’t possibly be Jackie Onassis walking down the street.’ So they’d pay no attention, and she learned that a disguise was not necessary, and that she could do whatever she wanted to.”

T
he sun was rising over Martha’s Vineyard, burning off the fog that had blanketed the island during the night. As Jackie pedaled her bike through Gay Head, a damp chill clung to the morning air. The town had three ramshackle buildings—the town hall, the library, and the fire station—and none of the understated glitz of neighboring Chilmark, where barefoot New Yorkers in selfconsciously aging Volvos lunched on designer pizza at the country store owned by James Taylor’s brother Hugh.

Jackie had spent her adolescence in the tony resort of Newport just a few miles away across Massachusetts Bay. But in its simplicity and unpretentiousness, Gay Head was about as far from Newport as she could get.

On this particular summer morning, she was dressed in
her usual Gay Head getup—a pair of jeans, a windbreaker, and a scarf over her ponytail. She rode west on South Road, passing tumbledown fieldstone walls and wild, low-lying bayberry bushes, scrub oak, beach plum, roses, and poison ivy. Beyond these knotty masses, she could glimpse moors, beach grass, and the Atlantic Ocean. On the right in some places were small, sheltered inlets, and at one scenic turnout, a spectacular view of Menemsha Harbor, where Maurice Templesman kept his thirty-seven-foot schooner, the
Relemar
.

Moshup Trail was the last turn before the Gay Head cliffs and the end of the island. The first driveway on the left was Red Gate Farm, which belonged to Jackie. The rustic wooden gate was open, but her caretaker, Albert Fischer, had posted a
NO TRESPASSING
sign to keep out intruders. If anyone happened to wander in, Tempelsman usually took care of them himself, without bothering to tell Jackie.

She pedaled up a long, meandering gravel road, which passed over a creek, and came to a large forecourt in front of a cluster of three gray-shingled, white-trimmed buildings. Off to the side, there was a tall osprey pole for nesting that had been erected by Gus Ben David, director of the Audubon sanctuary at nearby Felix Neck. On the path leading to the main house, one of Jackie’s grandchildren had abandoned an old red wagon.

The breathtaking wetlands site had once belonged to the Hornblower family of the Hornblower & Weeks stock exchange firm. In the late 1970s, Robert McNamara and a group of friends, including
Washington Post
publisher Katharine Graham, put together a syndicate to buy the property, but before they could close on it, some local Wampanoag Indians complained that part of the land was the sacred burial ground of Chief Moshup and his wife Squant. McNamara tried to settle the legal dispute, but while he dithered with the Indians, Jackie came along in
the person of her attorney Alexander Forger and stole the land from under McNamara’s nose.

Jackie took the Indians to court and eventually won the legal battle. However, her well-publicized victory inflicted some damage to her reputation as a dedicated preservationist. The property, which was assembled by Forger piece by piece over a period of years for about $3.5 million, constituted 464 acres, one third of the entire town of Gay Head. By the early 1990s, it was estimated to be worth more than $25 million.

“I worked with Jackie for two years on the purchase,” said David Flanders, the real-estate broker who sold her the land. “The first time she flew into the airport on Martha’s Vineyard, she came on Bunny Mellon’s private plane. Bunny Mellon was her chief adviser, and she and Jackie came frequently together, walking the property, looking at it from different angles. Jackie was very impressed by what Mrs. Mellon had to say.”

Bunny not only was involved in the purchase of the land itself, she also helped Jackie select the architect, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, who designed the traditional salt-box house. Bunny showed up on weekends with Jackie to check on the progress of the construction, and to plan the landscaping. Bunny influenced the interior decor, and she lent Jackie her private jet to fly in the furniture that Jackie selected to fill the house’s nineteen rooms. And, finally, Bunny designed an apple orchard on the property. She left intentional gaps between some of the trees, explaining that she wanted it to look “as if a few old trees had died.”

Jackie leaned her bike on its kickstand and went inside the house. Even with the door closed, she could hear the ocean roaring. She entered the living room, whose large picture window afforded a spectacular view of Squibnocket Pond and the Atlantic. Toys were strewn all over the bleached oak floor. Grandjackie, as she was called,
was a permissive grandmother, and she let Caroline’s three children—Rose, Tatiana, and the baby, Jack—have free rein in the house.

Jackie took justifiable pride in the way Caroline had turned out. Considering the snares and pitfalls of growing up a Kennedy, Caroline was amazingly well adjusted. She was thirty-six years old, and married to Edwin Schlossberg, a teddy-bearish man thirteen years her senior. Schlossberg, the scion of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, was a former acolyte of Buckminster Fuller’s and an avant-garde artist in his own right.

“Exactly what Ed Schlossberg does,” the writer George Plimpton once confessed, “is obscure.”

Apparently what Schlossberg did best was to look after Caroline, who had put her career as a lawyer on hold in order to take care of her children. Jackie never really warmed up to the humorless Schlossberg, who guarded Caroline as though he were her Secret Service agent, rather than her husband. But Jackie knew that Schlossberg functioned as a kind of protective screen around Caroline, who harbored a suspicious attitude toward strangers, and assumed that most people were trying to exploit her.

“Ed has taken Caroline out of the world of publicity and made her feel as though he has saved her,” said one of Jackie’s friends.

“When they were in the city, Caroline and Jackie saw each other a couple of times a week,” said one of Caroline’s best friends. “Being the daughter of a famous mother made it hard for Caroline to understand that her problems with her mother were the average person’s problems with their mother. On the other hand, I think that Jackie was a woman who knew that she was thin and attractive, and it may not always have been easy for her to relinquish the spotlight to her daughter. Mother-daughter relationships are always
complicated, and that could really be the case when it was carried to the grandeur of this particular family.”

Caroline’s close friend Alexandra Styron, daughter of writers William and Rose Styron, added:

“Caroline seemed to have come into her own in the last few years. I’d never seen her happier than she was now. She looked beautiful. She was stick-thin. Her skin was glowing. She and Ed were as much in love as any married people I had ever seen. They had a very quiet social life. They went out to an occasional dinner party given by a friend. They faithfully went to see friends who were actors in plays. They stuck pretty close to home. Caroline was really an extremely unassuming, down-to-earth person.”