Just Jackie by Edward Klein (trending books to read TXT) 📕

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.”

“DANKE SCHOEN”

As 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.”

Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen,

Thank you for all the joy and pain….

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.

BIZARRE BEHAVIOR

More 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