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

her pull this cottage together,” Leonard said. “One day, we were sitting there, and she looked out the window and said, ‘Look at all those snapdragons. They shouldn’t be on this island. It looks like a Burpee’s catalogue.’

“She sounded just like Mrs. Mellon,” Leonard continued. “I recalled that Mrs. Mellon had once written, Too much should not be explained about a garden. Its greatest reality is not a reality, for a garden, hovering always in a state of becoming, sums up its own past and its future.’ Jackie had the same taste as Mrs. Mellon, so I knew exactly what she wanted. Nothing should be noticed.”

Jackie intended to bring unity and order to Skorpios. She tackled the Pink House and the landscaping with the same zeal that she had brought to the restoration of the White House and Lafayette Square.

“Onassis had made Skorpios a garden of showy tropical plants,” Niki Goulandris said. “The head gardener on Skorpios had planted cultivated roses at Ari’s request. He had to be dealt with discreetly, so as not to hurt his feelings. Jackie and I were trying to repair and restore Skorpios to its original, natural state. Ari was not thrilled, but he didn’t interfere.

“Jackie and I drew up plans,” Niki continued. “She dedicated much of her time during the first couple of years of her marriage to this project. We visited nurseries specializing in Greek plants and trees. We had hundreds of plants and shrubs, and thousands of fully grown trees hauled by trailer truck to Nydri, the small town across the bay, then shipped on barges to Skorpios. We landscaped the Pink House, the Hill House, and up the hill from the harbor. Jackie wanted to make it a Greek island again.”

THE JOURNEY TO ITHACA

In the early summer, Niki Goulandris fell ill, and had to go to the hospital. While she was recuperating, she received a letter from Jackie about her life on Skorpios. Written on the stationery of the Christina, the letter provided a unique glimpse of Jackie’s state of almost child-like contentment in the second year of her marriage to Ari. She wrote of the delight she took in planning her garden and watching it slowly mature.

“I can’t wait to talk to you about everything. I won’t drag you around and tire you out—but how wonderful to have started a garden—and now to watch it develop each year like a child….”

After Niki recovered from her illness, she and her husband joined Alexis Miotis, the director of the Greek National Theater, for a cruise of the Greek islands on board the Christina. Niki and Alexis took great pleasure in introducing Jackie to Greece. This was not the modern Greece of pollution and tourists, but the ancient Greece of poetry, and philosophy, and art.

They visited Delphi, the temple of the legendary oracle. They went to mass at Corfu’s St. Francis Church. They searched for antiques and old books on Greek art. And they attended plays at Epidaurus, with its ancient Greek stage dating back to the fourth century B.C.

In Jackie’s mind, Greece acquired some of the mythic attributes of Camelot. It had more to do with legend, saga, and story than with politics and history. In many ways, Jackie admired a past that had never existed. But it did not seem to matter.

“In the beginning,” recalled Miotis, “Jackie and Ari seemed harmonious. Jackie is a sweet person, very noble. Her behavior sets a standard for those around her. Obviously many people thought the marriage a sham, but I saw nothing wrong with it.

“Ari had a sense of glory about everything,” Miotis continued. “He paid a good deal of attention to the ‘glorious’ people. He admired Jackie because she was First Lady, not only in the White House but First Lady of the land. Ari wanted to be Emperor of the Seas, and wanted a Cleopatra to sit by his side.

“For Jackie, it was his charm combined with his money. He had money, yes, but he also had charisma. He was a domineering personality. He was the one man she could marry who would never become Mr. Jackie Kennedy.”

For her part, Niki was impressed by how well Ari got along with ten-year-old John.

“Ari took him on his knee and explained the Greek myths to him,” Niki said. “Especially the myth of Daedalus. He told John how Daedalus was a fabulously cunning artisan, and made a pair of wings of wax and feathers for himself and his son Icarus. And Icarus disobeyed his father’s instructions, and flew too close to the sun, and his wings melted, and he fell to his death in the sea. And Ari told John, ‘Never go beyond the prudent mean, or the gods will destroy you.’ ”

Jackie listened to Ari’s stories of the Greek myths, and he became mixed up in her mind with her mythological view of John Kennedy, a man who had paid with his life for defying fate.

She wrote about all this in a letter to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who had served in the Kennedy White House as the unofficial historian of the New Frontier.

There is a conflict in the hearts and minds of the Greeks. Greeks have esteem and respect for the gods; yet the Greek was the first to write and proclaim that Man was the measure of all things. This conflict with the gods is the essence of the Greek tragedy, and a key to the Greek character.

On the piano in the salon of the Christina, there was a huge red leather-bound book that Jackie had given to Ari as a present.

“In her own handwriting, Jackie had filled the book with English translations from Homer’s Odyssey, and she had illustrated it in the margins with her own photos of Ari,” Niki Goulandris said. “Part of Jackie’s fascination with Ari was her search for a contemporary Greek hero, and this can be seen in her photos, particularly one of Ari on the bow of the boat with wind