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

of the assassination. It put a closure to Jackie’s year of mourning.”

When they got back to Hammersmith Farm, Jackie announced that she planned to return to Hyannis Port the next day.

“Why don’t you dump the Secret Service and let me drive you back?” Warnecke said.

“That would be great, Jack,” Jackie said.

“I had learned early on how to handle the Secret Service,” Warnecke said. “Those guys liked and trusted me, because I was a football player, a jock, and one of them.”

The next day, Jackie and Warnecke got into her black Mercury convertible, put down the top, and headed off for the Cape. The Secret Service followed at a discreet distance.

It was a fine autumn day, as crisp as a Granny Smith apple, and Jackie and Warnecke felt exhilarated as they sailed along with the wind in their hair. When they arrived at Jackie’s house in Hyannis Port an hour and a half later, they found that Jackie’s Italian housekeeper Marta Sgubin had arranged for Caroline and John to spend the night at another house in the Kennedy compound.

“We were all alone,” Warnecke said.

Jackie showed Warnecke her collection of landscape paintings by Andre Dunoyer de Segonzac. Warnecke admired the seascapes that she had done herself. They had dinner, then Jackie gave him a tour of the rooms upstairs.

Warnecke’s head almost hit the sharply slanted ceiling in Jackie’s bedroom. He stood with Jackie for a few moments at the window, looking out at the choppy waters of Nantucket Sound. Then, wordlessly, he led her over to the bed that she had once shared with Jack Kennedy, and they began to make love.

“After a year of pent-up feelings,” said Warnecke, “it was like an explosion. I remember saying to myself, What am I doing here? What’s happening?

“A lot has been written about Jackie’s being cold,” he went on. “That image is all wrong. There was nothing inhibited or cold about her. All those aspects that made Jackie so delightful—her sense of fun and joy—were also part of her lovemaking.”

Afterward, Warnecke told Jackie that he loved her.

“I fell in love with you the first moment I saw you at the British Embassy,” he said.

“I love you, too, Jack,” she said.

“She was so excited by what had happened between us that she wanted to tell Bobby at once,” Warnecke said. “But I told her that I thought she should wait. I was sure Bobby would think that such a commitment was premature.”

A COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

A few weeks later, Jackie suggested to Warnecke that they spend a night in a cottage on Bunny Mel-Ion’s property on the Cape, about twenty minutes away from Hyannis Port. Warnecke hesitated to accept Bunny’s invitation.

“I was getting a bit fed up with Bunny,” he said. “She had become a problem on the design of the memorial. Jackie had found it too painful to deal with the grave design herself, and she had delegated a lot of authority to Bunny.

“Bunny thought she was in charge,” he continued. “Once I entered the picture, and became romantically involved with Jackie, Bunny felt that Jackie had been taken away from her. She had lost her control over Jackie. Bunny was very possessive.

“In any case, Jackie talked me into going to Bunny’s place. And when we got to this little cottage deep in the woods, we found that Bunny had decorated it for Halloween with pumpkins and candles and flowers. It was fixed up as only Bunny Mellon could do it. It was perfect, completely romantic. And it was a total surprise to both of us.”

HAWAIIAN WAR CHANT

When school let out in the summer of 1966, Jackie and her children boarded a plane at the newly renamed John F. Kennedy International Airport and flew off to the West Coast with a nanny and two Secret Service agents in tow. In San Francisco, they were joined by Jackie’s brother-in-law, the actor Peter Lawford, his children Christopher and Sydney, and his longtime friend John Spierling. Then the entire party got on the United Airlines mainliner Hilo and headed across the Pacific for Hawaii.

In the first-class compartment, John played in his stocking feet, while the older children watched an in-flight movie, Harper, starring Paul Newman. Jackie relaxed with a drink and chatted with Buck Buchwach, the managing editor of The Honolulu Advertiser.

“I hope to get a real rest in Hawaii, almost out of the twentieth century for a little while,” she told Buchwach.

But it was not the twentieth century that Jackie was escaping from. It was the black-tie dinners with doddering elder statesmen and their dreary little wives. It was the boring charity events. It was the dreadful committees that supported all those noble causes.

Jackie would have none of it. She liked dressing up in miniskirts. Shopping. Eating out at restaurants. She liked going to nightclubs. Dancing. Smoking. Drinking. Gossiping. Staying up late. She liked having fun. The only trouble was, whenever she had fun, she seemed to inflame the passions of the media.

“It was the year she discovered that, like the huge idol in Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, she had feet of clay,” wrote Liz Smith. “Or rather, she discovered that a large segment of her ordinarily adoring public now seemed to feel this way…. She began to behave like a private person again, like a human being with feelings, passions, desires, opinions, and a penchant for action, rather than a semi-deity to be worshipped from afar.”

The first inkling the public had that Jackie had grown weary of playing the saint came when she and attorney William vanden Heuvel gave a midnight dinner-dance in honor of their friend, former ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, at the Sign of the Dove restaurant, which had just opened in New York. Jackie’s guests were a curious mixture—the crème de la crème of old New York-Newport-Palm Beach society, a melange of jet-setters like Gianni Agnelli and Count and Countess Rudi Crespi, and such denizens of the demimonde as Andy Warhol and underground movie