Just Jackie by Edward Klein (web based ebook reader txt) 📗

if he would like to bring his children, who were about the same ages as Caroline and John, to the White House to play. Hill gently explained to her why he thought that would not be the professional thing to do.

In Dallas, Hill had hurled himself onto the trunk of the presidential limousine as Jackie was reaching for a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. Hill grabbed her and pushed her into the backseat, then crawled on top of her and lay there protecting her.

Since then, Jackie’s feelings toward Hill had passed beyond the realm of gratitude to a kind of deep and dependent affection. She had asked President Johnson to give Hill the Treasury Department’s highest award for the exceptional bravery he displayed in Dallas.

Hill did not believe that he deserved the medal. On the night before the assassination, he and eight other Secret Service agents had stayed up into the small hours of the morning drinking at the Fort Worth Press Club. They claimed later, rather implausibly, that they had not drunk a lot. In any case, Hill got only four hours’ sleep, and was not at the top of his form the next day in Dallas. He was convinced that if he had reacted only five tenths of a second or perhaps a second faster, he would have taken the third shot, the one that killed the President. It was Hill’s job to take that bullet, and he had failed.

His closeness to Jackie only intensified his feelings of guilt. Over the past couple of years, he had traveled with Jackie to India, chauffeured her from appointment to appointment in Washington, and become involved in the daily routine of her life. After their withering experience in Dallas, they had developed an even closer bond, the kind that exists between people who escape together from a brush with death. They were like two soldiers returning from the front. No one else could understand what they had been through.

Like Jackie, Hill wandered around in a shell-shocked state, often unaware that people were talking to him. He was teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and should have asked for a medical leave. But he was too loyal to Jackie to abandon her to their dark memories.

One evening, about two months after the assassination, Jackie and Hill drove to the Embassy Row section of Washington and parked in a dark and deserted lot. They slipped through a back entrance of the Fairfax Hotel, an unpretentious, family-style establishment that housed such permanent tenants as Senator and Mrs. Prescott Bush, Admiral Chester Nimitz, and the family of a future politician by the name of Al Gore.

Jackie and Hill were greeted by Jack Scarella, the maitre d’ of the hotel’s famous restaurant, the Jockey Club, where she had dined recently with Marlon Brando. Scarella escorted them through the bustling kitchen to the dimly lit dining room. It had beamed ceilings, dark paneling, and equestrian paintings. The restaurant was crowded with customers. Five captains in tuxedos and ten waiters in black pants and red bolero jackets hovered over the tables, serving the Jockey Club’s renowned crab cakes, and its piece de resistance, a half-vanilla, half-chocolate souffle.

With Scarella leading the way, Jackie and Hill walked through the front section, known as the Royale, where celebrities normally liked to sit so they could see and be seen. Jackie had telephoned Scarella in advance and asked him to reserve an area in the back room, which customers called “Siberia.”

After they were seated, Jackie ordered a vodka martini. As the evening wore on, she drank two or three more. At one point during dinner, she got up from the table and staggered to the powder room. She did not look any steadier when she came back.

“Then something really crazy happened,” said a diner who was sitting with a friend in the Royale section, and had a clear view of Jackie and Hill from his table. “Jackie and Clint began engaging in what appeared to be a lot of heavy necking and petting. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Maybe Jackie was just crying on Clint’s shoulder. Maybe he was just comforting her.

“After a bit, they slumped down in their red-leather banquette and disappeared from sight,” the diner continued. “Every once in a while, they would appear, then disappear again. This went on from eight-thirty to ten-thirty. Jackie’s hair was all messed up, and she looked like a mental wreck. But she didn’t seem to care who saw her.

“In those days, people treated Jackie like a national institution, and newspapers bent over backward never to take a picture of her doing anything undignified, not even smoking a cigarette. So, for her to indulge in this kind of display at the Jockey Club in front of the crème de la crème of Washington society was totally bizarre behavior.”

FIVE

“A GATHERING

OF THE

WRECKAGE”

March 1964

BUNNY

“I remember kneeling at the foot of the President’s coffin in the East Room of the White House, and feeling utterly drained,” Bunny Mellon was saying. “The tears would not stop. It was like the fall of all the hopes of youth. As though youth had tried and been thwarted. It seemed to me that the country had symbolically killed something.”

“It had,” said Jackie.

It was early one evening during Easter week, four months after the assassination, and a group of friends were having cocktails on Bunny Mellon’s terrace on the grounds of the exclusive Mill Reef Club in Antigua.

Jackie’s sister Lee was there with her husband Prince Stanislas Radziwill. Stas (whose name was pronounced “Stash”) was the son of a Polish nobleman, and he was a favorite of Jackie’s and the other ladies’ because of his impeccable old-world manners.

Then there was Jack’s old college chum, Chuck Spalding, a well-born advertising executive. He was at the bar, fixing another daiquiri for Lee.

Bobby Kennedy was slumped in his chair.