Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time (15 page)

jackie blue

FEBRUARY 1998

O
n the plane to New York,
where I was to interview some bands for
Rolling Stone
, I heard the two middle-aged women behind me getting acquainted. One was traveling to her son-in-law’s wedding. Her daughter had died of cancer six months earlier. The other woman asked, “Don’t you feel strange that he’s remarrying?” The mother-in-law said, “No, Manny is the kind of person who needs to be married. When she was sick, my daughter said, ‘Manny will be married again before dinner.’”

While I was in the city, I found an album at a record store in the East Village. It was a Jackie Kennedy documentary LP called
Portrait of a Valiant Lady
, rushed out right after the assassination. According to the back cover, this was “an inspiring documentary record specially written and produced for the listening pleasure of all Americans,” put together by something called the Research Craft Corporation, in association with the Bureau of Auditory Education. Both sides of the album are devoted to a biography of Jackie, “tragic heroine and First Lady of the World.” It has spoken-word tributes, a poem written especially for this record, cheesy re-created versions of news sound bites, and the voice of Jackie herself, from a TV address she gave around Christmas 1963, saying thank you to the world for their condolences.

I couldn’t stop staring at Jackie’s face on the front of the album. The whole album cover is just one big photo of Jackie, with no text or decoration. I don’t know when this picture was taken, before or after November 22. She sits pensively on a white couch, facing the camera with a sad little smile. She’s wearing white. Her outfit is casual, maybe the top half of a dress seen from the waist up, maybe a sweater, with a discreet collar. She wears no jewelry. She’s in a living room—hers? somebody else’s? the White House?—with a lamp turned on behind her, on a coffee table laden with photos (too blurred to tell who’s in them) and an ashtray. She’s turned to the camera, as if we just interrupted her while she was staring out the window. The curtains are billowy and white. She rests her chin on her right hand, her elbow propped on the couch. Her left arm is casually draped over the top of the couch, and her left hand is hidden in the curtains.

You can’t see whether she’s wearing her wedding ring or not.

After I found this record I played it constantly. The Jackie bio follows her life story, as the narrator harps on the theme of her nobility with purple prose like, “She keeps a loyal, lonely vigil with his world.” Her “Thank You” message on side two is really strange. The words are articulate, but her voice sounds shell-shocked. She seems to wander from the script, at one point pausing mid-sentence to say, “All his bright light gone from the world.” It’s a little scary to hear. Jackie apologizes for not answering condolence letters. For some reason, that’s the main theme of the minute or so she speaks. She explains that she’s gotten 800,000 letters. “Whenever I can bear to, I read them,” she says. “It is my greatest wish that all these letters be acknowledged. They will be. But it will take time.”

I wonder if all widows are obsessed with Jacqueline Kennedy. Probably. Renée and I were always obsessed with her, long before we knew either of us would be a widow. We were Jackies-ploitation junkies, poring over every biography, no matter how trashy. Renée, of course, already had a fetish for 1960s fashion (she even owned a vintage pink pillbox hat, which smelled bad enough to trigger her asthma), and I’m sure the obsession just got worse after she married into an Irish Catholic family. We looked down on people who called her Jackie O—they did not understand Jackie Kennedy, the Profile in Cleavage, the most bouviesscent of all American Catholic girls. We watched Jaclyn Smith (the Charliest Angel) in
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
, but we preferred Jacqueline Bisset in
The Greek Tycoon
. Once, when we were driving up to Boston, Renée made me drive hours out of our way down Route 3 to Hyannis, just because she was determined to buy some Jackie shades and a Jackie scarf to tie around her head. I assured her that Hyannis was literally the last place on earth Jacqueline Kennedy would have considered buying clothes, as it’s a skanky little burnout beach town. But there was no way to talk her out of it. We got to Hyannis and hit the 99-cent stores. I don’t know how, but Renée found exactly the shades and scarf she had imagined. The sunglasses were pointy at the edges; the scarf was multicolored and mod. She wore them the whole drive back to Boston, all three hours, tying the scarf around her head and making tragic faces out the window.

Jackie’s the most famous widow ever, young or old. She’s our Elvis, our Muhammed Ali. I was obsessive about her before, but now I was over the edge. I kept playing the first Pogues album,
Red Roses for Me
, just because of the album title—Jackie once said that those were the last words to cross her mind in Dallas before the shots, looking out at people in the crowd holding roses and thinking, “How funny, red roses for me.”

People remember her—well, let’s stop right there. Most of us weren’t born then. We don’t “remember” her, and we aren’t even picking up secondhand memories from older folks who
were
there. We invent our own memories of her based on tokens like the Air Force One photo with the bloody dress, the funeral salute, and so on, including the documentary record I found. For lots of people, Jackie is a symbol of poise in the middle of grief, and since she was thirty-four at the time, she’s also a symbol of youth. It’s weird how you sometimes hear divorced people complain that they’d rather be widowed. It’s not fun to hear people say this, if you’re a widow, but I don’t want to be judgmental about that—love dies in many different ways, and it’s natural for the grass to seem greener on the other side. But it’s not a competition; there’s plenty of pain to go around. These people just don’t know—and why should they?—that widowhood is not dignified, but degrading enough to strip away every bit of dignity you ever kidded yourself you had, and that in her time Jacqueline Kennedy made a fool of herself in public over and over. People project all sorts of strength and dignity onto her, but she was a mess, which is part of why I worship her.

Jackie wouldn’t move out of the White House for two weeks after the assassination. It’s an incident that’s totally forgotten now, but it was a national scandal at the time. The Johnsons were trying to assume control of the White House, taking on their roles as President and First Lady, but they had to deal with the widow refusing to move out of her old room. They couldn’t very well kick her out, even when Harry Truman was on the phone to LBJ, telling him he needed to get rid of her and claim his own goddamn White House. Lady Bird was a champ about it, saying, “I wish to God I could serve Mrs. Kennedy’s comfort; I can at least serve her convenience.” But Jackie wouldn’t go. Two weeks! Not very “together” of her, now was it? Perhaps she knew she was being rude; she wasn’t born in a barn. But she did it anyway. She overstepped the boundaries of manners, dignity, taste, and basic human kindness, because what else could she do? Where was she going to go? How would she get there? Where would she take her kids? How would she find a new place to live? How could she pay for it? She had so many decisions to make and no time to make them. This one she blew. History has forgotten, but it’s one of my most cherished Jackie moments.

Jackie blew lots of other decisions, too, depending on which shady bios you believe. Did she sleep with her Secret Service agent? Did she sleep with Bobby, Sinatra, Brando, or the architect designing the JFK library? If she didn’t, why the hell not? Wouldn’t you? Did Ethel invite Angie Dickinson to sit in the front row at RFK’s funeral just to get back at Jackie for holding hands with Bobby at JFK’s funeral, since JFK slept with Angie on the night of his inauguration? Apparently, during the first few months, Jackie drank herself to sleep. Which means . . . what? She got to sleep? Fair play to her. I tried drinking myself to sleep, too, but it didn’t work. All it did was make me drunk, listening to the
clink, clink
of my ice cubes as they melted. Being drunk was a drag, but I liked the
clink, clink
and hoped enough bourbon would get the job done, so I drank a lot. Bourbon made me miss Renée bad, though, so I switched to Bushmills, but I still missed drinking with Renée and I still stayed awake.

The Jackie documentary record begins with the narrator announcing, “On Friday, November 22, 1963, at 12:25
P.M
., Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy began an ordeal unparalleled in human history!” It’s a low-budget quickie for sure, with the same actor doing the same accents for the Indian and African ambassadors. A French voice proclaims her “charmante!,” with accordion in the background. Somebody recites a poem (“The awful scream of the assassin’s gun / Widowed her for life”) in which “prayer” rhymes with “Bouvier.” The LP covers the eighty-hour rush from Friday afternoon, when the assassination happened, to Monday afternoon, when the funeral was over and the story ends. In this version of the story, the funeral is the happy ending: “Never before has such a grueling ordeal been faced with such grace and poise as Jackie Kennedy displayed throughout the tragic circumstances so abruptly and atrociously thrust upon her.”

I came to cherish this as a rock-and-roll record, as Jackie Kennedy’s debut album, the greatest hit of a spectacularly fucked up sixties pop star. I realize she did not “release” this album. She did not authorize it, produce it, endorse it, or anything like that. Yet I hear it as a Jackie record, perfect 1960s diva pop that’s up there with Dusty Springfield or Ann-Margret. It’s a bootleg authored by her against her will, stolen from her like her husband, beyond her control, in the grand girl-group tradition of starlets who get trapped and manipulated by the Svengali producer, sort of like Ronnie and Phil Spector.

I put my Jackie record up on the kitchen stove so I could look at it all day. I left it in its protective plastic sleeve so food wouldn’t get splattered on it. Since I never cooked anything but pasta on the stove, with tomato sauce out of jars, there were little red splotches all over the plastic sleeve. I liked the red splotches, yet felt guilty about not washing them away. When I had friends coming over I’d slip off the sleeve, and then Jackie was pure and pristine, on her white couch with the white curtains. When my friends left, I’d slip the cover back on, and she’d be spattered with blood all over again, corrupted by death, corrupted by being alive when her husband is dead, corrupted by knowing more than she’s supposed to know about death.

I also have my grandmother’s old copy of a quickie tribute mag,
Jacqueline Kennedy: Woman of Valor
. It reports, “Mrs. Kennedy’s appetite, never robust, has returned.” There was a lot of widow gossip in that mag that made me wonder, especially concerning the whereabouts of her ring. She put it on her dead husband’s hand in the hospital? Then how did she get it back? Did she get photographed without her ring on? What did his family think about that? After she put it back on, when did she stop wearing it? I studied this and the other magazines in my Jackie shrine:

Screen Stories
, April 1965: “Jackie Pleads, If You Love Me, Please Leave Me Alone!” The article notes, “Many people have wondered why she was not at his grave at Christmastime.”

TV and Screenworld
, March 1970: “Exclusive: Liz and Jackie’s Spending War!” The story has this scoop: “The two richest and most glamorous women in the world are having the most expensive cat fight ever known in history.” Liz bought the $1.05 million Krupp diamond, which Jackie wanted for her fortieth birthday; Jackie had to settle for $40,000 “Apollo 11” gold earrings from Aristotle Onassis, in the shape of the moon and the spaceship. According to the story, “Jackie, ever ready with the
bon mot
, chortled to actress Katina Paxinou, ‘Ari was actually apologetic about them. But he promised me that if I’m good next year he’ll give me the moon itself!’”

I immersed myself in Jackie trash like I was studying with a kung fu master. Did I learn anything? No way. But all the things you
want
to learn from grief turn out to be the total opposite of what you actually learn. There are no revelations, no wisdoms as a trade-off for the things you have lost. You just get stupider, more selfish. Colder and grimmer. You forget your keys. You leave the house and panic that you won’t remember where you live. You know less than you ever did. You keep crossing thresholds of grief and you think, Maybe this one will unveil some sublime truth about life and death and pain. But on the other side, there’s just more grief.

On the eleventh of every month, my friend Elizabeth would say, “Well, we made it through another month. So do we get her back now?” We always giggled, but we really did expect to get her back. It’s not human to let go of love, even when it’s dead. We expected one of these monthly anniversaries to be the Final Goodbye. We figured that we’d said all our goodbyes, and given up all the tears we had to give. We’d passed the test and would get back what we’d lost. But instead, every anniversary it hurt more, and every anniversary it felt like she was further away from coming back. The idea that there wouldn’t be a final goodbye—that was a hard goodbye to say in itself and, at that point, still an impossible goodbye. No private eye has to tell you it’s a long goodbye.