Jackie

Chapter 22

We move into the house on N Street. I hire a housekeeper and a nanny for Caroline. It’s a simple, informal life we begin to build. When Jack is home, we go to the movies with our friends Ben and Tony Bradlee. We host small dinner parties, games of charades, and cutthroat Monopoly tournaments. Charley Bartlett will invariably complain, “Pull no punches, Jack. You play like those little hotels are real.” Every other month, I drag Jack to the Dancing Class at the Sulgrave Club. He doesn’t love it, but he goes. He’ll dance a bit, stay near me for a while, then peel off in search of some like-minded political soul to hash over the current state of affairs. If he doesn’t find anyone, he’ll drift back to ask how long I want to stay. I send him on another lap around the room—glorious and bored, a tiger in a cage.

“A drink, Mrs. Auchincloss?” Jack asks one afternoon that spring. My mother’s come to visit.

“I came for a baby,” she says.

“Caroline’s sleeping.”

“Then I’ll wait.” Her smile is tight and cool. She’s liked Jack less since we lost Arabella—the fact that he wasn’t there, that we couldn’t reach him, and that he didn’t rush home when we did. “You’ve made some lovely changes to this room, Jackie,” my mother says.

Jack smiles. “Bunny’s helping.”

“Adele Astaire introduced me to Bunny Mellon,” I tell my mother.

“The Listerine family?”

“She’s become a friend,” I say. “Her own house is gorgeous. I’ve told her I even love the stale candy in the antique jars.”

“Speaking of antiques,” says Jack, “Mrs. Auchincloss, I’d like your opinion on Jackie’s new chairs. Louis XVI chairs, she explained when I got the bill. I’ve told her a chair is a chair. You just need to sit in it.”

I laugh. “All those men working on your campaign, Jack, need comfortable chairs to sit in. They’re hostage for hours in those meetings.”

Jack rolls his eyes. “What do you think, Mrs. Auchincloss?”

“Please call me Janet.” Her smile softens a bit.

“Janet, take a look at this,” he says, picking up a copy of the April 21 Life magazine. On the cover, Caroline is on Jack’s lap, a pink dress, her bare plump legs poking out, one hand gripping his suit sleeve.

I take the magazine and flip through to find the article.

“Where are we, Jack?” I keep flipping the pages. “Oh, here. Way back. Page 132, right after a piece about learning to surf in Australia.”

“It’s the cover that matters,” says Jack, a little defensive, which makes me smile.

“I’d like to surf in Australia.” I hand the open magazine back to my mother.

“I’d like a baby,” says my mother.

“I’ll get her for you,” Jack says, heading toward the stairs.

“He loves a reason to wake her up,” I say.

My mother starts to say something, then doesn’t. She looks around. “I like the chairs.”

“You don’t think it’s too much?”

She glances at me. “It’s like anything else, Jackie. Live with it for a while, see how you feel.”

Jack asks me to go on a short campaign trip with him through Massachusetts. An out-and-back in May. Three stops in the morning, a break for lunch, more stops in the afternoon. In the car heading west, I sit in the backseat with Kenny O’Donnell. Kenny was Bobby’s roommate in college and worked on Jack’s first campaign. Jack calls him “our play-only-hardball gatekeeper.”

“How long is lunch, Kenny?” I ask.

“Two hours.”

“That’s a long lunch.”

“It’s the deal we made with the ambassador to make sure Jack doesn’t run out of gas.”

I smile. “Nothing like making deals with the ambassador.”

“They told me you were fragile,” Kenny says.

“Fragile?”

We walk through the restaurant to a back room. There are plenty of open tables up front, but it’s clear this has been prearranged.

“No menus?” I ask Kenny.

“Steak and potatoes are already ordered.”

“You eat the same thing every day?”

“Pretty much. And everyone gets a glass of milk.”

I laugh. “Might one order something in addition to a glass of milk?” The whole thing feels weirdly clandestine—the gangster back room, lunch all planned. I ask the server for a glass of wine and get out a cigarette. Jack shakes his head at me and mouths, No. I put the pack away.

“Now, let’s get this straight,” says Jack. “Kenny, where’s your pencil? Start getting this down.” He works through a list: who to call first, who to call after, what needs to be prepped. A litany of directives. Kenny’s at his shorthand list; the others talk among themselves. Once, before we were married, when I went up to see Jack in Boston, he introduced me to someone nicknamed “Onions” Burke and someone else called “Juicy” Grenara. Then we all went for dinner at the Ritz.

The food arrives. Jack talks and gestures, his pale eyes cool as Kenny takes notes on the back of an envelope. The pencil tip breaks.

“All set, then,” says Jack. “Let’s eat.”

“I have a question, Kenny,” I say. “What exactly do you do with all those things Jack tells you? You write them down. Then what? Go down the list and check them off one by one?”

The table falls silent.

“Funny you should ask,” Kenny says. “You know what I do? I wait until he calms down, then I do the things that need to get done and throw the envelope out.”

“You son of a bitch,” Jack says. “I bet that is what you do.”

I laugh. “Oh, Jack, I’m sure Kenny would never not do every single task you ask him to do, right, Kenny?”

Jack relaxes then, the easy smile that’s hard to read. “Just like my wife, aren’t you, Kenny? I say one thing, and you go and do exactly what you want.” But he is laughing too.

I recount this for our friend Joe Alsop a few weeks later—an abridged version of my first political trip and the steak-and-potatoes routine.

Joe Alsop has called me “Darling Jackie” ever since he reneged on his offer to rent us his house in Georgetown. But I like him, and I love his incisive political column, Matter of Fact, and his salon-style dinner parties on Dumbarton Ave. Alsop has a sprawling library, Savile Row waistcoats, and exquisite taste in food. He has a cagey wit and a knack for bringing together the right group of people. “An evening is like a room,” he told me once, an elegant wave of his cigarette. “You can construct a room so guests feel at once a sense of ease and excitement: formal dress, then toss in a martini and a topic of hard conversation, some thorny national issue launched as a query. Watch the room ignite. Alliances are forged. Deals get made. Everyone thinks it’s just a dinner party.” He glanced at me to be sure I was following, then added, “Never discount the bore factor. No bores allowed with eight or fewer people. Only half a bore with ten.”

Joe Alsop hasn’t always liked Jack, I learned recently. Apparently Jack did some crass thing once and got himself crossed off the soirée list, until he married me.

That particular spring evening, Alsop introduces us to Kay and Phil Graham, loyal supporters of Lyndon Johnson. In his introduction, he calls Jack “the antidote to the sclerotic Eisenhower administration we’re all so tired of.”

Low music in the background—Ella Fitzgerald.

Phil Graham looks at Jack. “You’re after the presidency?”

“That’s right,” Jack says.

“You’re young. Why not wait another four?”

“Well, Phil, first, I think I’m as qualified to run as anybody, except for Lyndon. Second, if I don’t run, whoever wins will be there for eight years and that will influence his successor. Third, if I don’t run, I’ll be in the Senate for eight more years, and as a potential future candidate, I’ll have to vote politically, which means I’ll end up a mediocre senator and a lousy candidate.”

Silence, then Graham says, “That makes sense.”

Alsop takes my arm. “Jackie, come with me. You must try the terrapin soup.”

“That wasn’t politics,” I say once we’re out of earshot, “what you just orchestrated. That was art.”

August. I travel with Jack to Europe for a Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip. It’s Gianni Agnelli who tells us that Churchill is a guest on Aristotle Onassis’s yacht. It’s also Agnelli who procures an invitation for us. Not to dinner. That point is underscored. But for drinks an hour before.

The mind is water.

That’s the thought that strikes me as I step onto the deck of the Christina. He is there, Onassis, a man I’ve heard so much about—shipping magnate; Don Juan of the rich; notorious lover of La Divina, the famed opera singer Maria Callas. Their sex and fights are legendary. He’s a man whose pockets are lined with ruthless wealth and luck and stars.

Onassis, Jack told me, has no fondness for Bobby, who scuppered a deal Onassis was trying to make in Saudi Arabia. That evening, though, he greets us warmly.

“A tour?” he asks. Jack takes my arm as Onassis leads us through the converted warship, deck to deck, stem to stern, through the famous bar and bathrooms of white marble sourced from the same quarry as the Parthenon. There are painted fish and mosaics, lapis-crusted fireplaces—all of it opulent, lavish, shameless.

“What do you think, Mrs. Kennedy?” Onassis asks.

“It’s beautiful.”

“Many things are beautiful.”

“It reminds me of a line in a poem. ‘La Vie Antérieure.’? ”

“The life past.”

“A kind of Xanadu.”

“Ah. You will tell me the rest sometime.”

Jack is a few feet away, studying a nautical oil painting. He’s heard our exchange. Such a curious man Onassis is. His stumpy height, rugged face, hair greased with brilliantine.

“Shall we go on?” he asks.

We come into the salon, where the others, including Churchill, are gathered. The master of history slumps in a chair, white cuffs, handkerchief, black suit, and bow tie, the broad famous jowls of that face. Onassis brings Jack over to introduce them. I follow partway, then hang back. Jack sits down beside Churchill, looking awkward, as he tries to engage the old statesman. Churchill’s shoulders curl forward. He’s already into his cups.

What kind of memory lives in a man like that? A man who has passed through trials and turns of history. Who has failed and risked, lost and achieved, risen and fallen and risen again. What remains?

Churchill turns in his chair toward a dark-haired man on his left and says, in a booming voice, “I knew your father. Hated him. Isolationist and defeatist. He knew nothing of diplomacy. They tell me you’re different. How are you different?”

The man’s face is blank as Jack leans across to say that he is the one, son of the reviled ambassador. Churchill turns back to Jack. A snap of recognition, putting the face to the story. But it’s hard going. Jack stumbles through the titles of Churchill’s oeuvre: “I’ve read every one,” I hear him say, and I remember that day in his childhood room in Hyannis Port on the Fourth of July. I remember what I saw in his face as he read aloud to me—the want, the dream, the reach.

It’s why I stayed.

Jack keeps talking to Churchill, trying to light the grim silence, and he is again that boy from the little bedroom—this is his childhood hero. The writer, the statesman, the soldier who failed at the battle of Gallipoli, then led the fight against Hitler, no compromise, no appeasement. The old prime minister is at best a shrunken nodding version of his former self, but Jack speaks to him, his face animated, like these are better days. Churchill just looks bored. He drains his glass, pushes it toward Jack, nodding to the bar. Jack stands, wincing slightly—his back. He takes the empty glass and starts across the room. It’s then that I notice Onassis standing alone by the wall, a painting behind him that looks like a Goya, watching me with a curious unwavering intensity, watching this tableau play out. The smile on his face jackal-like, his eyes with their rude desire. Jack pauses on his way to me with Churchill’s glass. The rest of the room continues to bustle and mill, the tinkling sound of glasses, plates, passed hors d’oeuvres. Lamps and candles flicker as a warm breeze blows the dusk through the open doors, the night like a tide sweeping in. The sunset colors are fragile, and Onassis is still looking at me—he doesn’t seem to care that Jack has noticed, or maybe he does, in a way that turns the night into a sport I didn’t realize we’d been invited on board to play.

It was a Greek, Heraclitus, who insisted that change is the fundamental impulse of the universe. Our souls are like the stars and moon, turning bowls of fire.

Later that evening, in the car on our way to dinner, Jack asks me, “Well, how did I do?” It takes me a moment to realize he’s referring to Churchill.

“I think he thought you were the waiter,” I say.

He sighs. I slip my fingers through his.

“It’s just too late, Jack,” I say. “You met him too late. That’s all.”

But I remember that night. Even after we are home, back in the blustery chaos of Jack’s Senate reelection campaign, I remember the exotic otherworldliness of the Christina. The heady sensation I felt watching that evening play out. The contradiction of Onassis. Not attractive. To me, something almost repulsive about him, the base sense of humor, gargoylish features. At the same time, I felt galvanized by him and his world. Not the blatant wealth; it was more than that—something inexorable, visceral, so alive that everyone else, even Churchill, even Jack, seemed colorless. Only he was real.

Years later, when I see Onassis again, he’ll allude to that night.

“It was ten years ago this month, the first time I saw you,” he says.

“Yes.”

“You were aloof. Why aloof?”

“I wasn’t sure I liked you.”

“You wanted to stay for dinner.”

“I was curious.”

“You liked the Christina.”

“It was a little bright.”

“You mean gaudy.”

“I said bright.”

“You liked the story I told.”

“I’ve always loved stories.”

“That night we met, I noticed the unusual way you have of making men look at you.”

I smile.

“And I noticed that Kennedy had no idea.”

Something snaps between us.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

But the moment is severed, and I don’t answer.