Jackie: Her Transformation from First Lady to Jackie O

A POST HILL PRESS BOOK

Jackie:

Her Transformation from First Lady to Jackie O

© 2020 by Paul Brandus

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 978-1-64293-345-1

ISBN (eBook): 978-1-64293-346-8

Cover art by Cody Corcoran

Interior design and composition by Greg Johnson, Textbook Perfect

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author and publisher.

Post Hill Press

New York • Nashville

posthillpress.com

Published in the United States of America

To Kathryn, Julia, Rosemary, and Eugene.

Love always and forever.

Prologue

Chapter One

November 1963 to June 1964: The Long, Dark Winter

Chapter Two

July 1964 to December 1964: Farewell to All That

Chapter Three

January to June 1965: Keeper of the Flame

Chapter Four

July to December 1965: Phoenix

Chapter Five

January to June 1966: Jet-Setter

Chapter Six

July 1966 to December 1966: Steel Beneath Velvet

Chapter Seven

January to June 1967: The Secret Burial

Chapter Eight

July to December 1967: Marriage Proposal

Chapter Nine

January to June 1968: Again

Chapter Ten

July to October 1968: Skorpios

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Endnotes

Prologue

When Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis on Skor-pios, his tiny island retreat in the Ionian Sea off the western coast of Greece, the world was stunned. The headlines were vicious and full of betrayal:

The Reaction Here Is Anger, Shock and Dismay, said the New York Times.

Jackie Sells Out! cried the Los Angeles Times.

Jackie, How Could You? asked a Stockholm paper.

Jackie Weds Blank Check, sneered a Fleet Street tabloid.

And, perhaps worst of all, Rome’s Il Messaggero: JFK Dies a Second Time.

It was October 1968. Not five years since the assassination of her first husband, President John F. Kennedy, and barely four months since her brother-in-law Robert F. Kennedy was himself gunned down in Los Angeles, moments after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary.

Both murders shocked America and devastated Jackie to the core. The first robbed her of one husband; the second drove her into the arms of another. This book examines Jackie’s life during the five-year period in between, bookended by her marriages to two of the richest and most powerful men in the world.

To the casual observer, John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis were polar opposites. The former was tall, sophisticated, and charming. His movie star looks and quick wit made women swoon. The latter was short and squat, had the face of a gangster,¹ and sometimes came off as greedy and abrasive. Such generalizations were not without merit, yet beneath the surface both men were, in key respects, more similar than different. They were wealthy, hypercompetitive, power-hungry womanizers who stopped at nothing to get whatever—and whomever—they desired. Kennedy, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author who delivered some of the twentieth century’s most soaring speeches, could be—and often was—crude and vulgar in private. Onassis was often seen as having almost thuggish characteristics, as a selfish and narcissistic interloper who didn’t belong. Yet the Greek tycoon was also—and critically, was seen by Jackie as—charming and gregarious, and not just in his native Greek and English, but in French and Spanish, languages in which she was also fluent. And friends, particularly women, considered him the perfect listener. Thus, where some saw a rough, unpolished, and physically unattractive man, Jackie saw a man of culture, a lover of music and poetry. Aristotle Onassis may have been a sharp-elbowed, corner-cutting wheeler-dealer, but Jackie—whose father and father-in-law had harbored similar traits—was used to, and tolerant of, such behavior. Onassis also afforded her something she desperately sought in the wake of Robert Kennedy’s murder: security.

Despite all this, the news that Jackie would wed Ari was still a great shock. In retrospect, it should not have been. After all, she had known him almost as long as she had known John F. Kennedy himself. They first met not in the 1960s, as is often believed, but at a Georgetown neighborhood dinner party in the 1950s, when JFK was merely the junior senator from Massachusetts. They spoke briefly and casually, but it was enough, and a year later, when the Kennedys were visiting Jack’s parents on the French Riviera, Onassis—who by then owned much of Monaco—learned of their presence and invited them aboard the Christina, his ostentatious 325-foot yacht that he kept docked at Monte Carlo.²

JFK was thrilled to meet another Onassis guest that day: Winston Churchill, a personal hero. As the two of them reminisced—JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been ambassador to the Court of Saint James from 1937 to 1941, as World War II was beginning and Churchill became prime minister—Ari gave Jackie a private tour of his ship. Jackie found parts of it, such as the murals of naked women that had been painted on the walls of the dining salon, to be gaudy, even vulgar. Yet wanting to be diplomatic to her host, she held back. Mr. Onassis, I have fallen in love with your ship, she gushed. As for any personal attraction, she gave no outward signs of it at the time,³ though it seems hardly unreasonable to surmise that the Christina’s sheer opulence, the world-famous company onboard, and the glittery port they were in gave Jackie a warm impression of her host. What is undeniable, however, is that beyond conversing in French, Jackie, clad in a simple yet elegant above-the-knee white A-line dress, made a very good impression upon Ari. There’s something damned willful about her, he later told his friend and aide Costa Gratsos. There’s something provocative about that lady. She’s got a carnal soul.⁴

Ari was also there for Jackie when it counted most: in her annus horribilis (horrible year), 1963, when she lost, in the space of three and a half months, a son and her husband—the father of her two surviving children.

The son who died, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, was born on August 7, five weeks early, with what today is known as respiratory distress syndrome. The infant lived just thirty-nine hours. His death—the second child the Kennedys had lost in their decade-long marriage—shattered JFK and Jackie, drawing them closer, observers said, than they had been in years. Terribly depressed, Jackie retreated from public view, recuperating at Hyannis (on Massachusetts’s Cape Cod) and nearby Squaw Island, where she was joined by her sister Lee Radziwill.

It was Lee who opened the door to a renewed, and deeper, connection between Jackie and Ari. Here, the story grows tangled and somewhat soap opera-ish.

Nearly four years younger than Jackie, Lee was living a scandalous life. Married to a Polish prince, Stanislaw (Stas) Albrecht Radziwill, she nevertheless began dating Onassis after they met at a London party in 1961. Onassis, meanwhile, was involved with the famed opera singer Maria Callas. Naturally, Lee and Ari’s gallivanting about town, and cruises on the Christina, were fodder for the Fleet Street gossip columnists.

Two years later, they were still an item, and when Lee joined Jackie on Squaw Island she passed along an invitation from Onassis: Why not come to Greece? A pleasure cruise would, the tycoon suggested, help Jackie recover from the loss of her son. He said the Christina and its crew would be at her full disposal, and that he and Lee would keep her company.⁵

Jackie was intrigued. She had visited Greece for the first time in June 1961, at the end of President Kennedy’s trip to Paris, Vienna, and London. She’d spent eight days there, sailing, shopping, and sightseeing; she fell in love with Greece—its history, architecture, and lively culture—and vowed to return.

But an invitation from Onassis? That might be problematic. Not because of Jackie, but because of her husband. Just before the Kennedys were to leave on their 1961 trip, the president had called Clint Hill, Jackie’s principal Secret Service agent, into the Oval Office. Hill had never been summoned to the Oval before, and when he entered, found Attorney General Robert Kennedy there as well.

It was a short conversation. Kennedy said he had learned that Hill would be doing the advance work for his wife’s trip. He looked at his brother and then back at Hill.

The attorney general and I want to make one thing clear…and that is, whatever you do in Greece, do not let Mrs. Kennedy cross paths with Aristotle Onassis.

Yes, sir, Mr. President.

Okay then, JFK replied. Have a great trip.⁶

The Kennedys were leery of Onassis, who had been on the federal government’s radar for years. In the 1950s, he was indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges in connection with the purchase of surplus ships from World War II. The charges were eventually dropped, but Onassis was fined seven million dollars.⁷ Hill knew none of this at the time, but he and Jackie’s other agents on the Greek trip made sure that Onassis didn’t come anywhere near the First Lady.

Now, in the fall of 1963, Onassis’s invitation presented President Kennedy with a dilemma. He was concerned about Jackie’s health, and wanted her to get some rest. But his antipathy toward the shadowy Onassis had hardly dissipated, and with what he expected would be a tough reelection fight coming up in 1964, he fretted about the political imagery of his wife’s taking a ritzy European cruise with Onassis. Robert Kennedy and the president’s top political lieutenant, Kenny O’Donnell, warned it might become an election issue. In the end, the president decided to allow it, saying it would be good for her.⁸ Any political consequences, should they arise, could be dealt with later.

Jackie was certainly aware of her husband’s reservations. I don’t want a lot of publicity, she told Hill, but I suppose everyone will find out.

Yes, Hill replied, I’m sure the word will get out and there will be a great deal of interest.⁹ On October 1, skipping a state dinner for Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, Jackie quietly departed.

Remembering President Kennedy’s 1961 admonition about Onassis, Hill cringed as the oily Greek tycoon welcomed Jackie aboard the Christina with a kiss on each cheek. This is the man President Kennedy had told me—in no uncertain terms—to make sure Mrs. Kennedy did not meet in 1961, he thought. Now, here she is being greeted by him on his yacht as his guest. Did I misunderstand something?¹⁰

Just like everyone whom Onassis invited onto his floating palace—an antisubmarine frigate bought for scrap at a 1952 auction—Jackie was dazzled by the ship, which had been painstakingly turned into a glittering reflection of its new owner’s self-indulgence. The actor Richard Burton, who on another occasion stayed on the ship with Elizabeth Taylor, summarized the experience in one sentence: I don’t think there is a man or woman on earth, he said, who would not be seduced by the pure narcissism shamelessly flaunted on this boat.¹¹

Fears the Kennedy brothers and O’Donnell had were quickly justified. Even though the First Lady was recuperating from a terrible blow, criticism of her Greek jaunt was intense. Newspapers played up the brilliantly lighted luxury yacht, gay with guests, good food and drinks, lavish shipboard dinners, dancing music, a crew of sixty, two coiffeurs and a dance band. Photos of Jackie strolling down the streets of Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkey, with a solicitous Onassis weren’t helpful either. President Kennedy had sent undersecretary of commerce Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. and his wife, Suzanne, along as escorts, but this only led to further attacks about Onassis’s trying to influence Roosevelt to smooth out legal problems the shipping magnate was having with the U.S. Marine Commission and Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department.¹² One Republican congressman from Ohio, Oliver Bolton, even took to the House floor to attack the First Lady, saying the trip reflected poorly on the judgment of the president. President Kennedy was so concerned that he telephoned Jackie on a number of occasions in an attempt to persuade her to cut the trip short. Jackie, having a marvelous time, declined.¹³

Much has been written over the years about a rivalry between Lee and her older sister for Onassis’s attention, including allegations that the tycoon and the First Lady slept together on the trip, but Suzanne Roosevelt insists they did not. He [Onassis] wasn’t especially paying attention [to Jackie]. He was a very good host, he wasn’t courting her. She adds that, to her knowledge, the two had never gone off together privately: The only time that Ari went off with anybody that I knew was with me and Franklin.¹⁴

Even so, it seems clear that Onassis and Jackie, seeing each other for the first time in years, began to develop feelings for each other. Their initial formality melted away under the Greek sun, as they began conversing in English, Spanish, and French, sometimes sitting on the deck of the ship talking until dawn. Jackie was fascinated by Onassis’s gregariousness and zest for life, his energy, his charisma in a ruthless pursuit of her, his earthiness, his intelligent attention to detail and most of all, his ostentatious romancing.¹⁵ As for Onassis, this was certainly not the Jackie he remembered from the 1950s, when she was the mere wife of a boyish politician. The influence she now possessed and her fame—which exceeded his own—were powerful lures. She seemed even more striking, more mature, possessing a regal bearing. She was engaging yet enigmatic, interested yet ever so imperious. And the fact that she was ostensibly unavailable only added to her allure. For a man used to having anything and anyone he wanted, Onassis felt an attraction to her that was, at its most basic level, quite carnal. I’m going to get her, he was overheard saying. At the end of the weeklong trip, all of the women on the trip were given gifts, with Jackie getting the most extravagant present: a ruby choker.¹⁶ Jackie would later send Onassis an engraved silver cigarette box from Tiffany’s.¹⁷

By the time Jackie returned to the White House on October 17 (after a stop in Morocco to visit King Hassan), President Kennedy had paid a political price in acquiescing to her lavish vacation. His journalist friend and former Georgetown neighbor Ben Bradlee wrote in 1975’s Conversations with Kennedy (a book that severed his friendship with Jackie) that the president had decided that Onassis should not visit the United States until after the 1964 election.¹⁸

In fact, the president now felt emboldened to ask his wife for a favor: would she accompany him on a campaign swing through Texas in late November? Even with Texan Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, Kennedy had barely carried the Lone Star State in 1960—the winning margin was a mere 46,257 votes—and its twenty-five electoral votes would be crucial in 1964. Jackie’s presence, JFK judged, would be helpful.

I’ll campaign with you anywhere you want, Jackie said. She opened her red leather appointment book and scribbled Texas across November 21, 22, and 23.¹⁹

The announcement that Jackie would make the trip was big news. Jackie had never been to Texas before; in fact, she hadn’t ventured west of the Kennedys’ Middleburg, Virginia, home since the 1960 election. Now, for the first time, she would make a whirlwind trip through San Antonio, Houston, and—on Friday, November 22—Fort Worth, Dallas, and Austin.

And so, the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy was beside her husband in Dallas, on Elm Street, in the back of that Lincoln Continental on November 22 when he was assassinated can be linked to her vacation, the month before, with Aristotle Onassis. She was there because of what the president called Jackie’s guilt feelings, and the fact that he could occasionally work them to his advantage.²⁰

Yet even as Kennedy pressed his wife to join him in Texas, he was jittery about it, and feared that she would later regret going.²¹ The one leg of the trip that concerned him most was Dallas, a city that disliked him intensely. He had lost Big D by sixty thousand votes in 1960; Dallas just murdered us, Texas governor John Connally told him in a November 7, 1962, call, a year before both of them were shot there. Kennedy’s reply: I don’t know why we do anything for Dallas.²²

When Kennedy was killed, Onassis was in Hamburg, Germany, overseeing construction of a new tanker for his shipping fleet. Deeply shaken, he called Lee Radziwiłł, who asked him to accompany her and Prince Radziwiłł to Washington for the funeral. He soon got a call from Angier Biddle Duke, the State Department’s chief of protocol, inviting him to stay at the White House.²³

Thus Aristotle Onassis, who so worried John F. Kennedy that Kennedy wanted him barred from the United States until after the 1964 election, slept in the president’s own home during the weekend of his murder—the special guest of the widow. It instantly elevated Onassis, making it abundantly clear that the ruthless tycoon had succeeded in positioning himself right where he wanted to be—close to Jackie. He indulged her that weekend as he had the month before on the Christina, listening to her, empathizing in her hour of maximum need. And he made sure to get along with the rest of the Kennedy family. This excerpt is from William Manchester’s book The Death of a President:

Rose Kennedy dined upstairs with Stas Radziwill; Jacqueline Kennedy, her sister, and Robert Kennedy were served in their sitting room. The rest of the Kennedys ate in the family dining room with their house guests, McNamara, Phyllis Dillon, David Powers and Aristotle Socrates Onassis, the shipowner who provided comic relief, of sorts. They badgered him mercilessly about his yacht and his Man of Mystery aura. During coffee, the Attorney General (Bobby) came down and drew up a formal document stipulating that Onassis give half his wealth to help the poor in Latin America. It was preposterous (and obviously unenforceable) and the Greek millionaire signed it in Greek.²⁴

Onassis’s presence in the White House, in that darkest of moments, can be seen as a foreshadowing of what was to come. Over the next five years, there would be numerous other men in Jackie’s life. Most were mere social escorts. However, there would be romances, some more serious than others. But always lurking in the shadows was Aristotle Onassis. He kept such a low profile as he bided his time that he referred to himself as the invisible man.²⁵ But to Jackie, he was anything but. Years before they wed, she defined him perfectly: A strange man, she observed. Such a rogue, but also so understanding. I was fascinated by him from the beginning.

Chapter One

November 1963 to June 1964:

The Long, Dark Winter

Barely one hundred hours a widow, and twenty-four since she had buried her husband before the eyes of a disbelieving world. Yet here she was, smiling and gracious, serving tea to her successor. And Jacqueline Kennedy, said the new First Lady of the United States, Lady Bird Johnson, was orderly, composed, and radiating her particular sort of aliveness and warmth. But Lady Bird also got a close-up view of what the world had just seen: an element of steel and stamina somewhere within her to keep her going on as she is. ¹

As they sat in the West Sitting Hall, beneath the elegant half-moon window that overlooks the West Wing, Jackie asked a favor. Would it be alright, she asked in her soft voice, if Caroline’s kindergarten and first-grade schoolmates could continue to hold class on the third floor? Just until Christmas, she quickly added. In 1964 she would make other plans, but disrupting everyone during the holidays might be too unsettling. The way she asked this, Lady Bird says, if it had been a request to chop off one’s right hand one would have said ‘Sure,’ just that minute. It was an easy, most delightful thing to say ‘Yes’ to.²

Occasionally, there were small signs that Jackie hadn’t quite come to grips with the cruel reality that her husband was gone. Jack never likes those rich things that René does, she said—using the present tense as she described the creations of White House chef René Verdon.³

Lady Bird didn’t know if Jackie’s use of the wrong tense was just a slip of the tongue or, perhaps, some sort of defense mechanism. She did know, as Jackie escorted her into the Yellow Room, that the widow was more than cognizant of the past. There, on a table, stood two glaring reminders of it: the black boots that had been placed in the riderless horse’s stirrups during the prior day’s funeral procession, and the neatly folded flag that had covered the slain president’s coffin.⁴

Thanksgiving, Jackie’s first holiday as a widow, was two days later. It was also the first time since Friday’s horror that she was without her rock—Robert—to lean on. He had taken his family to Florida instead, deciding that Hyannis and all its memories were too much to bear.

Jackie had intended to fly to the Cape on the Caroline, the family plane, with in-laws Edward Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, Jean Kennedy Smith, and Patricia Kennedy Lawford, and their spouses and children. But she decided to visit Arlington again, and flew up later, accompanied by sister Lee and brother-in-law Stas Radziwiłł.

Arriving at the family compound, she went to the famous beachfront home on Marchant Avenue where her in-laws lived. Rose Kennedy had traveled to Washington for her son’s funeral, but Joseph P. Kennedy, the seventy-five-year old family patriarch, had suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1961 and was unable to attend. Jackie went upstairs to his bedroom. Perched on a low stool beside his bed and caressing his wrinkled hand, she quietly told him the entire story of the assassination. Jack was the third of old Joe Kennedy’s children to die violently; there would be a fourth, and nearly a fifth.

Up until this point, Jackie’s telling and retelling of her grisly story had been for a small audience of family and friends. But on Friday, one week to the day after Dallas, she decided that the nation had to hear as well. She summoned Life magazine’s Theodore White, chosen not so much because of his immense journalistic talent but because he was a friendly, a trusted scribe who had gotten along well with—and, more important, had written well of—the Kennedys in the past. In a monstrous storm—either an old fashioned northeaster or a full-fledged hurricane—that made flying impossible, White hired a car and driver and raced from New York to the Cape. He went to Jackie despite the fact that his mother had just suffered a heart attack.

As White shook off the cold rain upon entering, his first observation of Jackie echoed Lady Bird Johnson’s earlier in the week. He was struck by her remarkable demeanor: …composure…beautiful…dressed in black trim slacks, beige pullover sweater…eyes wider than pools…calm voice. Family and friends who had been with Jackie left the room at her request so she and White could be alone.⁵

On the chaotic afternoon of the killing, White had dashed down from New York, eventually making his way that evening to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where he saw Jackie for a moment, still bloodstained, and so numb of expression I could not bring myself to speak to her.⁶ Now, as