Just Jackie (9 page)

There were other friends in Jackie’s life. During the Kennedy Administration, an informal group consisting of the President, his cabinet officers, and some close advisers had met once a month for lively policy debates at Hickory Hill, Bobby Kennedy’s estate in McLean, Virginia. Now, members of the so-called Hickory Hill Seminar—Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., Charles Bartlett, McGeorge Bundy—made it a point to stop by for late afternoon tea at Jackie’s new house to buoy up her spirits.

One day, Robert McNamara came calling. As he stepped from his chauffeured car, the bespectacled Secretary of Defense was greeted by an astonishing sight: a vast throng of shivering people had gathered in the snow in front of Jackie’s house. They filled both sidewalks and spilled onto the street for as far as the eye could see. Some of them carried binoculars. Others had brought boxes and ladders to stand on. They were silent and sad-faced, watching reverently. A couple of photographers, perched on tree limbs, snapped McNamara’s picture as he crossed the street carrying a large package in brown-paper wrapping.

He was almost run down by one of the smoke-belching diesel buses that plied N Street day and night with tourists eager for a glimpse of the former First Lady and her children. The front door was raised high off the street by several flights of stairs, and McNamara had to push his way past a group of tourists who were taking each other’s pictures on Jackie’s front stoop. He rang the doorbell, and was ushered inside by Secret Service agent Clint Hill.

“I’m a freak now,” Jackie told McNamara as she escorted
him into the living room. “I’ll always be a freak. I can’t take it anymore. They’re like locusts, they’re everywhere. Women are always breaking through the police lines trying to grab and hug and kiss the children as they go in and out. I can’t even change my clothes in private because they can look into my bedroom window.”

Jackie had not counted on becoming a national institution as a result of her televised performance after Dallas. She walked over to the living-room windows and drew the curtains, then turned back to McNamara. Her eyes were rimmed in red. Her uncombed hair looked dry and brittle.

McNamara felt pity for her. She had been elevated to the position of a mythical folk heroine, and yet she was a virtual prisoner in her own home. In the first few weeks after the assassination, she was inundated by several hundred thousand letters of condolence. Congress voted to give her office space for one year, and secretarial expenses of $50,000 to handle the bales of letters that arrived daily. She was assigned ten Secret Service agents—the first time the widow of a president had been given round-the-clock protection.

Jackie was the widow of the wealthiest man ever to occupy the White House, and people assumed that she was rich. But in fact she had been left with relatively little money. In his will, President Kennedy had given her a lump-sum payment of $70,000 in cash, plus all of his personal effects—furniture, silverware, dishes, china, glass ware, and linens. In addition, there was the interest income from two trusts, valued at $10 million, which he had established for his wife and children. Jackie’s annual income came to less than $200,000—a handsome sum by most people’s standards, but an inadequate amount for a woman who was now expected to play the role of Her American Majesty.

Like most of the men who came to visit Jackie, McNamara was a little bit in love with her. Eager to please, he
wasted no time in unwrapping his present. As the brown paper fell to the floor, an unfinished oil portrait of John Kennedy was revealed. The painter had completed the President’s face and shoulders, but had left a large part of the canvas blank.

“This artist came to me, and said that he had been working on this portrait from life,” McNamara told her. “He had a few more sittings to go when the President died. He said he didn’t intend to complete it, and that he knew of my love for the President, and thought I’d find the painting appealing, and that I could buy it. So I did. If you want it, Jackie, it’s yours.”

Jackie was extremely fond of McNamara. He had played a key role in picking out the site of Jack Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, a spot just below the Curtis-Lee Mansion that was in a direct line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It was the perfect place. But as Jackie examined the gift that McNamara had brought her today, she realized he had been the victim of a hoax. Jack had never sat for an oil portrait. The painting was copied from a photograph. And it was not a very good copy at that.

“Oh, Bob,” she said, smiling through her tears, “it’s lovely. Thank you so much.”

After McNamara arrived home, however, there was a phone message waiting for him from Jackie.

“Bob,” she said when he returned her call, “I can’t keep the portrait. You must take it back.”

“For heaven’s sake, why?” he asked.

“Because I had it on the floor in the dining room, leaning against the wall where I was going to hang it,” she said. “And Caroline and John came in and saw it. They kissed it. It’s more than I can stand.”

A
s hard as she tried, Jackie could not escape the morbid pull of the past. The crowds in front of her home on N Street thickened by the day. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John McCormack, insisted on presenting her with no fewer than six flags that had flown over the capitol during the weekend of her husband’s funeral. Lyndon Johnson considered appointing her ambassador to France or Mexico, which, if she had accepted, would have made the new President wildly popular with the legions of Jackie admirers. It would also have had the added benefit of getting Jackie out of Johnson’s way.

Johnson feared a kind of Kennedy government-in-exile, with Bobby as the heir presumptive and Jackie as the dowager queen. But Jackie did not want a public life. She wanted a private life, and the companionship of men on whom she could lean for support. The trouble was, if she ventured outside her house with a man who was considered a possible suitor, people began to talk.

That was what happened one night when her sister Lee Radziwill suggested that she and Jackie have dinner with Marlon Brando and his best friend, George Englund, with whom Lee was involved. The four of them went to the Jockey Club, Washington’s most exclusive restaurant, where they drank martinis and got uproariously drunk.

Jackie and Lee sat together on the banquette, whispering conspiratorially into each other’s ear. The sisters had
almost identical voices—rough, whispery vibratos—and the same gestures. They were having a splendid time until someone tipped off the press, and a group of photographers suddenly appeared in the restaurant.

Jackie, Lee, Marlon, and George fled through the kitchen exit and went back to Jackie’s house. There they mixed a fresh batch of martinis, and Jackie turned down the lights and put a song on the record player so they could dance. She chose Wayne Newton’s rendition of “Danke Schoen.” Lee and Englund started dancing and necking. Jackie and Brando got up to dance, too.

No one in America was as famous as Jackie, but Brando came pretty close. He still had the perfectly chiseled forehead and jaw line from his
Streetcar Named Desire
days, but at age forty, he was beginning to lose his hair and put on some weight. His latest movie,
The Ugly American
, which Englund had directed, had been a big disappointment at the box office. Still, when he chose to, Marlon Brando could be a sexual tidal wave, on or off the screen.

Many of Jackie’s acquaintances thought that she was a prude, the kind of repressed Catholic girl who ran the faucet when she went to the bathroom, but as Brando later told a friend, this was not the way she behaved with him. As they danced, she pressed her thighs against his and did everything she could to arouse him. When the music stopped, she went over to the record player and dragged the needle back to the beginning of the record. The room was filled again with the sound of Wayne Newton singing “Danke Schoen.”

Jackie slipped back into Brando’s arms. They talked about going away on a skiing vacation together, just the two of them. Brando could feel Jackie’s breath on his ear.
He felt that Jackie expected him to make a move, try to take her to bed.

However, Brando was not a big drinker, and liquor had more of an impact on him than it did on most people. A friend of Brando’s speculated that the actor was concerned that if he got Jackie into bed, he might not be able to perform sexually. The fear of impotence might not have inhibited another man, but it was enough to stop Brando, who worried about his reputation as a great lover.

At the next break in the music, Brando abruptly excused himself and bid the sisters good night. With Englund at his side, Brando staggered drunkenly out of Jackie’s house, slipped, and almost fell. The Secret Service men stationed in front of the house rushed forward to catch him, but Brando caught himself at the last moment and managed to walk stiffly down the stairs to the street, then climb into a waiting car.

At the open door, a totally bewildered Jackie watched Brando disappear into the night.

M
ore and more, Jackie was thrown back on the company of the one man in Washington who did not seem to excite any prurient gossip, her Secret Service man, Clint Hill. Tall, handsome, and as laconic as a movie cowboy, Hill had all the attributes of an American hero. He had been a football star at Concordia College in his native North Dakota, and married his high school
sweetheart, Gwen Brown, who still sang in her church choir.

Among his Secret Service colleagues, Hill was considered to be an agent’s agent. One time, Jackie asked him if he would like to bring his children, who were about the same ages as Caroline and John, to the White House to play. Hill gently explained to her why he thought that would not be the professional thing to do.

In Dallas, Hill had hurled himself onto the trunk of the presidential limousine as Jackie was reaching for a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. Hill grabbed her and pushed her into the backseat, then crawled on top of her and lay there protecting her.

Since then, Jackie’s feelings toward Hill had passed beyond the realm of gratitude to a kind of deep and dependent affection. She had asked President Johnson to give Hill the Treasury Department’s highest award for the exceptional bravery he displayed in Dallas.

Hill did not believe that he deserved the medal. On the night before the assassination, he and eight other Secret Service agents had stayed up into the small hours of the morning drinking at the Fort Worth Press Club. They claimed later, rather implausibly, that they had not drunk a lot. In any case, Hill got only four hours’ sleep, and was not at the top of his form the next day in Dallas. He was convinced that if he had reacted only five tenths of a second or perhaps a second faster, he would have taken the third shot, the one that killed the President. It was Hill’s job to take that bullet, and he had failed.

His closeness to Jackie only intensified his feelings of guilt. Over the past couple of years, he had traveled with Jackie to India, chauffeured her from appointment to appointment in Washington, and become involved in the daily routine of her life. After their withering experience in Dallas, they had developed an even closer bond, the kind that exists between people who escape together
from a brush with death. They were like two soldiers returning from the front. No one else could understand what they had been through.

Like Jackie, Hill wandered around in a shell-shocked state, often unaware that people were talking to him. He was teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and should have asked for a medical leave. But he was too loyal to Jackie to abandon her to their dark memories.

One evening, about two months after the assassination, Jackie and Hill drove to the Embassy Row section of Washington and parked in a dark and deserted lot. They slipped through a back entrance of the Fairfax Hotel, an unpretentious, family-style establishment that housed such permanent tenants as Senator and Mrs. Prescott Bush, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the family of a future politician by the name of Al Gore.