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

told his henchman Johnny Meyer, “because the only place she’ll find sympathy from now on is in the dictionary between shit and syphilis.”

A defense of Jackie came from a most unexpected source.

“Americans can’t understand a man like Onassis,” said Lee Radziwill. “If my sister’s new husband had been blonde, young, rich, and Anglo-Saxon, most Americans would have been much happier…. He’s an outstanding man. Not only as a financier, but also as a person … active, great vitality, very brilliant, up-to-date … amusing … a fascinating way with women. He surrounds them with attention. He makes sure that they feel admired and desired. He takes note of their slightest whim. He interests himself in them—exclusively and profoundly….

“My sister needs a man … who can protect her from the curiosity of the world,” Lee continued. “She’s tired of having to exercise such enormous control over herself, not to be able to move without all of her gestures being judged and all her steps being traced…. Onassis is rich enough to offer her a good life and powerful enough to protect her privacy.”

However, no one seemed ready to buy Lee’s argument. This was especially true of the defenders of the faith in the Vatican, who considered excommunicating Jackie because she had married a divorced man. While they pondered that extreme step, a spokesman for the Vatican declared that Jackie was no longer eligible to receive the sacraments of the Holy Church. The whole thing struck Jackie as a supreme irony. She had tried so hard not to repeat her mother’s mistakes, and yet she had ended up in the same predicament. Like her mother, Jackie felt herself to be a Catholic, but in the eyes of her church, she had lapsed irrevocably.

In the eyes of most ordinary Americans, Jackie was more than a lapsed Catholic. She was the Queen of Camelot, who had betrayed her martyred husband by prostituting herself with a swarthy, lascivious foreigner. Her marriage to Onassis was another jolt in the wild ride of the 1960s. As a shocking cultural phenomenon, it ranked up there with urban riots, campus rebellion, bra burning, and black separatism. Theodore White was right. America was passing through an invisible membrane that separated an era of hope and idealism from an era of disillusionment. This time, however, Jackie was on the dark side of the great divide.

TEN

THE PEONIES

OF GREECE

Spring–Summer 1970

THE PINK HOUSE

While Ari was away on business, the summit of Skorpios became Jackie’s widow’s walk. She spent long hours there, walking, meditating, reading, and painting watercolors of the sea. In the purplish, slate-colored water, the Ionian islands sprawled like green stepping stones along the west coast of Greece. On a clear day Jackie could see the silhouette of Ithaca, the legendary home of Odysseus, far off on the horizon.

By the spring of 1970, Jackie’s life on Skorpios had settled into a comfortable routine. Each morning, she distributed a written schedule to Captain Anastassiadis, whose job it was to take Caroline and John fishing, water-skiing, and on day trips to neighboring islands.

John in particular needed looking after. As he grew older, his impulsive behavior, which had first become noticeable after the assassination, developed into a serious problem. He was restless, had a low threshold for boredom, and could not sit still for any length of time. He was disruptive in school and did poorly academically.

Jackie suffered a great deal of anguish over John. She tried to figure out how to help him do better in school. She passed up the more fashionable private schools in New York, Buckley and St. Bernard’s, and enrolled John in the Collegiate School, which had a less pressured atmosphere. Though Jackie never spoke of it directly, she conveyed the impression to friends, including to this author, that she was concerned her son might have been born with a low IQ.

John was an exhibitionist like his stepfather, and he and Ari formed a special bond. Ari often took the boy to Athens in his Piaggio seaplane. While the tycoon conducted business, John, accompanied by his bodyguards, went off to the movies. Ari gave John and Caroline a twenty-eight-foot red sailboat, and when Caroline christened it the Caroline, Ari was concerned that John’s feelings would be hurt. So he gave him his own red speedboat with JOHN stenciled on the stern.

From her vantage point at the very top of the island, Jackie peered out to sea. Off in the distance, so far away that it looked at first like another island, she could spot Ari’s helicopter coming from the direction of Athens. It flew in low, stirring whirlpools in the calm surface of the water. When it got closer, it made such a racket that it scared away the flocks of imported finches that inhabited the island.

Jackie put away her brushes and paints, and waved to the helicopter. To a remarkable degree, she and Ari lived separate lives. Ari was constantly flitting from Athens to Paris to London. For her part, Jackie spent a good deal of time in New York, where her children went to school. During the first year of their marriage, the couple spent a total of 225 days together and 140 days apart. Their record of togetherness in the second year was even more dismal.

Yet if the truth be told, Jackie enjoyed her solitary life. She had always been more comfortable alone or in crowds than in one-to-one relationships, and she found it hard to be with anyone for a sustained period of time. All through her childhood, she had spent hours alone with books, spinning fantasies in which she was the heroine of her own romantic stories. Now she was living out one of those stories on Skorpios. In Ari she had found a man after her own heart; he was so absorbed in himself and his work that he left her mostly alone.

“Jackie is a little bird that needs its freedom as well as