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

“I don’t mind for myself,” Jackie told Teresa, “but I’m nerve-wracked about the safety of the children. There are so many nutcases out there.”

Caroline chose a cage that looked like a Chinese lantern.

“You’ll need some wood chippings, and something for the mouse to nibble,” Teresa said.

“I’m beginning to think it would have been simpler to send the children away to camp for the holiday,” said Jackie.

A couple of days after the school closed for Christmas, Teresa received a phone call from the mother superior.

“Mrs. Kennedy would like a word with you,” she said.

Teresa called Jackie.

“You must come and take this mouse away,” she said. “It’s stinking up the apartment.”

“But won’t Caroline be heartbroken?” Teresa asked.

“Yes, she will,” said Jackie, “but the mouse is killing my social life.”

Teresa smelled the problem as soon as she stepped off the elevator into Jackie’s apartment. The mouse had turned out to be a male, and the combination of wet wood chippings and central heating was producing an over-powering effect.

“Ah, the dominance of the male,” said a man’s voice, which came from the depths of a sofa in the living room.

“This is Andy Warhol,” said Jackie, introducing a pale-faced man with large round spectacles and a platinum wig.

At first blush, the pop artist seemed like a strange choice as a friend for Jackie. Andy had won worldwide acclaim by painting portraits of Coke bottles and Campbell soup cans, as well as of celebrities, and he was as starstruck as Jackie was publicity shy.

However, people often misunderstood Jackie’s relationship with her public. Her true goal never was to avoid publicity as much as it was to control it. One of her greatest strengths was her own unerring sense of stardom. In this she resembled other strong personalities—Greta Garbo, Charles de Gaulle, Cary Grant—who had the connoisseur’s appreciation of their own persona.

Moreover, it was not true that Jackie hated being photographed. In fact, she loved to be photographed—if it was done under her control. She had her own camera, and she was forever asking Jimmy Mason, who was in charge of her horses at her weekend house in Peapack, New Jersey, to take pictures of her mounted on Frank, her jumper. She collected these photographs in bulging scrapbooks, along with the clippings about herself from newspapers and magazines.

On the other hand, she was ambivalent about photography because of the paparazzi who stalked her.

“I remember going out with her,” said Karl Katz, a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “and at the end of the evening, there was always this mess, this barrage of people. We went to the opening of a film once, on Broadway, and got separated. Photographers just got in the center, and I was pushed away. It was violent, and truly frightening for her.”

“I understand you’re introducing Caroline to the facts of life,” Andy Warhol said to Teresa Gorman, “including some we don’t talk about in polite society.”

Teresa could not think of what to say. She collected the mouse, and Jackie and Andy walked her to the foyer, where she rang for the elevator.

“We’re going skiing next week,” Jackie said. “With a bit of luck, Caroline’ll have forgotten about the mouse by the time we come home. I’ll tell her you’ve taken it to the vet.”

Teresa got into the elevator, and as the door began to slide shut, she caught a glimpse of Andy Warhol and Jackie—the artist and his icon—waving good-bye to the mouse in the Chinese cage.

SEVEN

THE OTHER

JACK

October 1965–July 1966

ROSEBOWL

“Right after Dallas, Jackie called and asked if I would help her design a permanent memorial grave for the President,” said John Carl Warnecke, an architect who had gained considerable fame a few years before the assassination for his design of the American Embassy in Thailand. “The burial site had been put together in haste by Bill Walton, the painter, who was chairman of the Fine Arts Commission and the Kennedys’ expert on all things aesthetic. Walton told Jackie that in his view the final design for a monument would be a landscape problem, and so Jackie naturally turned to her friend Bunny Mellon, who was a brilliant landscape gardener.

“Jackie and Bunny agreed that the Eternal Flame should remain the primary symbol at the grave,” Warnecke went on, “and that everything else should be kept simple and dignified. They did not want statues or buildings, just some slate tablets engraved with passages from Jack’s Inaugural Address. Bunny had in mind the kind of gray slate that was used for tombstones in Colonial New England.

“A couple of days after Jackie called me, she and Bobby picked me up at a barbershop in Georgetown, where I was getting my hair cut, and we drove to Arlington National Cemetery. There must have been at least fifty reporters and photographers waiting for us when we got there. Jackie and Bobby got down on their knees and crossed themselves.

“We walked up the hill to the Lee Mansion. Jackie was quiet. But then all of a sudden she came to life when she saw the view—the axis looking from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, and then to the dome of the Capitol. It was a thrilling moment, truly electrifying.”

Jackie had chosen Warnecke for this important assignment because, like Teddy White and William Manchester, he was a Kennedy family favorite. Back in 1940, while Jack Kennedy was recuperating from one of his many serious illnesses, he had spent a few months in California auditing writing courses at Stanford University. That same year, the strapping Warnecke—six foot three inches tall and 215 pounds—played left tackle on the famous undefeated and untied Stanford football team that went to the Rose Bowl. The sickly Kennedy worshipped Warnecke from afar as a hero.

The two Jacks did not actually meet face to face until 1956, when Kennedy returned to California to campaign on behalf of Adlai Stevenson, the