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

was not easily impressed. He knew that it was going to be difficult to check out Gratsos’s story and unravel his truths from his half truths and outright lies.

While Anderson asked probing questions, Les Whitten took down Gratsos’s answers. Later, Whitten typed up his notes, using only lowercase letters to save himself time. His five-page summary of Anderson’s interview amounted to a sweeping indictment of Jackie as an acquisitive monster who shamelessly exploited her husband. It formed the basis for Anderson’s bombshell columns, as well as for each new Jackie biography that appeared at the rate of one a year for the next twenty years of her life.

Whitten wrote:

gratsos … says at first [Jackie] got $30,000 a month tax free. It was onassis’ personal money and could be given tax free because onassis is a foreigner. (I suspect this oversimplifies it)….

from time to time, nancy tuckerman [Jackie’s old school friend and personal secretary] would complain to creon broun [Onassis’s money manager in New York] that they (she and Jackie) had run out of money. the kindly creon advanced it to them, even though they had run short in the first 10 days and the money was sometimes given in mid-month instead of at the end.

gratsos ended this practice, about two years after the marriage, the payments were [reduced to $20,000 a month] and commenced from onassis hq. in monte carlo….

the advice of andre meyer, the senior partner of lazard freres brokers, cost jackie about $300,000. ari had wanted the money to stay in tax frees, but jackie heeded meyer’s advice and put it into the market….

john John’s pet rabbit was put in the care of an Olympic pilot in the cockpit so it could be delivered safely to its destination….

And that was just for starters. Whitten continued:

it was not just the extravagance but the total incompatibility of jackie and ari. and Jackie’s faggoty friends….

gradually, ari came to really resent her spending, not only did he pay her the allowance, but many of the bills were paid from monte carlo in addition to the $20,000-$30,000….

ari resolved to divorce her. he had lawyers working on it in greece and in the u.s. but he confided only in his friends, it had been informally determined that the greek orthodox would allow him to break it off on grounds of simply, but definite incompatibility….

ari by that time was “very unhappy” over the marriage, “they weren’t getting along at all.” a major factor, [Gratsos] repeated, was the “odd people” around her.

The most damaging revelations, however, concerned Jackie’s spending on her wardrobe. According to Gratsos, after Jackie wore a costly garment once or twice, or sometimes not at all, she would resell it, and then squirrel away the cash. Her favorite resale house, Encore on Madison Avenue at Eighty-fourth Street, did a steady business in Jackie’s slightly used and sometimes new clothes.

She peddled everything from coats, suits, and gowns to pocketbooks, blouses, and slacks. The labels were the best: Yves Saint Laurent, Valentino of Rome, Halston. Generally she would demand a fixed price; other times she would accept whatever the market would bear. Once, it took Encore six months to sell a white coat with a Valentino label at the price Jackie demanded.

“When it comes to Jackie’s spending habits, you can believe anything, anything,” Gratsos said. “She went on wild spending sprees. She was clocked at $3,000 a minute. Often, she didn’t bother with cash. Her face was her charge plate. She was virtually laundering money by charging couture clothes to Onassis’s account, and then reselling them to consignment stores in New York. She was embezzling money from Onassis. She was defrauding her own husband.”

To check out the charges against Jackie of money laundering, embezzlement, and fraud, Anderson sent Whitten to interview the manager of Encore, as well as those of the other resale stores in Manhattan. Whitten reported back to Anderson that Jackie had started taking her clothes to Encore long before she met Onassis. In fact, she had been dealing with Encore ever since she was the wife of Senator John Kennedy.

encore, a busy fascinating place with clothes filling racks and women in minks or cloth seeking bargains even as their sisters lug stuff in in suitcases for appraisal. the store made an exception for jackie and sent over for the clothes to her flat, generally it was a maid who gave up the clothes, and tuckerman who talks the business….

some women were, of course, attracted to Jackie’s old clothes, some refused to buy them because they disliked the kennedys. encore and the other second hand … shops patronized by jackie are in the fashionable east 60s and 80s.

Whitten had stumbled upon a little-known sideshow to the main three-ring circus that made up New York society in the 1970s. Many wealthy men gave their wives hefty allowances to buy couture clothes and expensive accessories like hats, belts, handbags, and shoes. But once a woman was seen in a $5,000 Yves Saint Laurent dress or a $10,000 Givenchy gown, it had served its purpose, which was to define her husband as a rich man, and her as an avatar of current fashion. To appear in society in the same garment more than once or twice would have been, in a manner of speaking, counterproductive.

But what was a society woman to do with her used garments after she was done with them? She could have donated them to charity, and taken a substantial tax deduction. But since few of these women filed individual tax returns, the savings would have accrued to their husbands, and the women did not find that an appealing notion.

Instead, virtually all rich women sold their slightly used clothes to stores like Encore. Sometimes this was done with the knowledge and consent of their husbands; sometimes, what their husbands did not know did not hurt them. In any case, it was a practical way for women to stretch the dollars in their clothing allowance. At the same time, they received a