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

Ari was deliberately drawing an equation between money and peace of mind. He was offering Jackie the chance to recapture the life she had with Jack Kennedy, a life with all the power and the glory.

“Jackie, like many Bouviers, especially her father and grandfather, [was] highly susceptible to beauty, luxury, and great wealth,” wrote her first cousin John H. Davis. “Who could put more beauty, luxury, and wealth into her life than Aristotle Onassis? A Greek island of her own. Apartments in all the capitals of Europe. One of the most luxurious yachts in the world. A fortune that made the money President Kennedy had left her seem modest in comparison.”

Jackie knew that any woman who married Aristotle Onassis, the notorious Golden Greek, would be accused of doing it solely for the money. Even she would not escape the sting of that criticism. Some people would call her venal; others would accuse her of surrendering her integrity.

But Jackie believed she could handle it. Let them carp. She knew the truth. And the truth was that Ari’s money was only part of the overall picture.

“She didn’t need just money,” said Jackie’s friend Vivian Crespi. “She needed to escape for sanity. I went out to a Martha Graham performance with her one night. Some strange woman came up to her and said Jackie killed her husband. It was ghastly, really a horrible way to live, putting up with this every day.”

“She told me in the late spring, before she married, that she felt she could really count on Onassis to be there for her children,” said Roswell Gilpatric. “That he was extremely protective of her, that he truly worried about her well-being. He could afford to build the buffers she then needed to ensure some degree of privacy from the public eye.”

For Jackie, feelings of attraction, affection, and sexual desire were roused when her emotional needs were fulfilled. This was probably more true of Jackie than it was of most women. After Dallas, she had an urgent need to feel safe.

“Onassis roamed the seas of the earth, a lord unto himself,” said Pamela Harriman, who knew a thing or two about why women were attracted to men. “Imagine being able to slip into that, away from the real world after so much sadness.”

But did Jackie love Ari?

The answer to that question depended in large part on whether Ari fulfilled another of Jackie’s needs. Though no one could explain it, including Jackie herself, she had a compelling need to surrender herself to a man. William Manchester had noted this when he visited her in Hyannis Port, and Jackie had automatically handed him the keys to her convertible. Men drive; women are driven. That was the logic of things to her.

No man since Jack had made as much sense to Jackie as Ari. Other people, including her own mother, might find Ari’s features coarse and gangsterish, and wonder how Jackie could possibly sleep with such a hideous man. But Jackie saw Ari through her own prism. He appeared to her as a strong and masterful man. She had been searching since Jack’s death for a man who could rescue her from her feelings of helplessness. In Ari, she had finally found the man. By affiliating herself with Ari, she would regain all her lost power.

If that was love, then Jacqueline Kennedy loved Aristotle Onassis.

“A FAMILY WEAKNESS”

Jackie could hardly wait to call Bobby on the Christina’s ship-to-shore radio the next morning and tell him about Ari’s proposal of marriage.

“You’re not serious,” Bobby said.

For a stunning moment, Jackie did not know what to say.

“I’ve agreed to marry Ari,” she said at last. Then she added: “In principle.”

“You must be joking,” Bobby said.

“We’ll discuss it when I get back,” Jackie said.

On the long flight back to New York, Jackie had time to consider the consequences of her decision. If she married Ari, a divorced man, she ran the risk of being excommunicated from the Catholic Church. She would tarnish the Kennedy image and damage Bobby’s chances for the presidential nomination. And she would be asking an awful lot of Caroline and John, who were now eleven and eight years old.

“During the few times they met, Caroline was at best sullen and reserved toward Onassis, and on some occasions overtly hostile,” wrote Frank Brady. “John was more open and friendly toward Onassis, but the question of whether he could ever consider this sixty-two-year-old man his father was one that disturbed Jackie. Each time Onassis met the children, he brought gifts and toys for them, but the role he seemed to be developing with them was less paternal than that of a rich uncle or kindly grandfather.”

Once back in her apartment on Fifth Avenue, Jackie started to hear from all the people who had heard from Bobby. It was obvious that Ethel, Joan, and Ted had compared notes, because they used the same words in their effort to argue her out of marrying Ari:

“You’ll destroy everything that Jack worked for before he was murdered.”

Her financial guru, Andre Meyer, got into the act. Meyer had done business with Ari, and he knew the man’s fundamental character.

“He’s not good enough for you, Jackie,” Meyer said. “If you marry Onassis, you will topple from your position at the pinnacle of society.”

Then it was Robert McNamara on the phone. He believed that Onassis was beneath contempt. His message: “Don’t marry him!”

Truman Capote filled her in on Lee’s reaction.

“How could she do this to me!” Lee had screamed at Truman over the phone. “How COULD she! How could this HAPPEN!”

By the time Bobby arrived at Jackie’s apartment, her resolve had begun to crumble. There was something about her relationship with Ari that always seemed to bring out the guilt in Jackie. This had happened when she came back from her first extended trip on the Christina in 1963. Jack had sensed her guilt, and got her to agree to accompany