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

He appeared to be listening to the conversation. But nowadays, Bobby was often lost in his own world, deep in grief over the loss of his brother.

And finally, there was a tall figure standing in the shadows. This was Clint Hill, who was keeping an eye on “Mrs. Smith,” the code name the Secret Service had given Jackie during her stay in Antigua.

The Mellon house was made of native white limestone, and was surrounded by a mortared wall, six feet tall and three feet thick, that dripped with bougainvillea and hibiscus. Bunny had transformed the grounds into a lush tropical paradise. To irrigate her extraordinary gardens, her husband, the millionaire horse breeder and art patron Paul Mellon, had built a private water supply system that was larger than all of the public reservoirs that serviced the arid island.

A bright Caribbean moon was reflected in the water of Half Moon Bay one hundred feet below the terrace. A recording of “The Days of Wine and Roses” was playing somewhere inside the house.

“We were a gathering of the wreckage,” recalled Chuck Spalding. “Jack’s assassination was still very much on everybody’s mind. Everybody was trying as hard as they could to shake the blues.”

After Dallas, Jackie had turned for comfort to her closest friend, Rachel Lambert Mellon. “Bunny,” as she was known to everyone except her servants, had helped Jackie design the grand visual spectacle of John Kennedy’s state funeral, and she personally took charge of the flowers at the President’s grave site.

Jackie’s other female mainstay was Lee, who had hardly left her side since the assassination. Though the Bouvier sisters were known for their competitive relationship, their dealings had actually become much more complex in recent years, as sibling rivalry mixed with mutual admiration, emulation, and camaraderie.

Jackie’s tragedy happened to coincide with a crisis in Lee’s own private life. Lee was involved with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon, and had petitioned the Vatican to annul her marriage to Stas.

“Lee and Ari had plans to marry, while Stas Radziwill was supposed to get hitched to Charlotte Ford,” recalled the gossip columnist Taki. “It was all very cozy, and things would have gone as planned except that JFK asked Lee not to divorce Stas until after the 1964 election. Dallas and November 22, 1963, changed all that.”

Like her mother Janet Auchincloss, Lee was interested in high society and money—and not necessarily in that order. She had conducted a number of famous love affairs with rich and powerful men, and in recent years had begun to compete with the aging opera singer Maria Callas for Aristotle Onassis’s attention.

Lee and Ari were seen dining alone at Onassis’s table at Maxim’s in Paris. She was a frequent guest on his yacht, the Christina. And when in Greece, she stayed at his sister Artemis’s spacious seaside villa in Glyfada, near the airport in Athens. Lee and Ari became the object of international gossip. Shortly before the assassination, their names had been linked in a widely syndicated Washington Post column written by Drew Pearson.

“Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?” Pearson asked.

Now in Antigua, Bunny’s guests whiled away the cocktail hour by peppering Lee with questions about Onassis. A third daiquiri had loosened Lee’s tongue, and she was going on about the superabundance of wealth and luxury that she hoped awaited her as the future wife of the Golden Greek.

“People talk about Ari’s airline, his ships, and his private island,” said Lee, “but what they don’t know is that he controls Monte Carlo through his interest in the Société des Bains de Mer et Cercle et Étrangers. He controls his own kingdom.”

“Perhaps one should start calling him Prince Onassis,” said Stas, who insisted on using his own royal rank, even though Communist Poland had long since abolished its hereditary nobility.

Lee ignored her husband’s sarcasm.

“Ari has homes in so many countries that he maintains duplicate wardrobes all over the world,” she went on. “He never has to bother with luggage when he travels.”

“They say the barstools on his yacht are covered with the scrotums of whales,” Chuck Spalding said.

“The skin of the scrotums of mature whales,” said Lee, as if the age of the whales somehow made a difference. “The sunken bath in his master stateroom is an exact replica of the one in a palace in ancient Crete. The temperature of the seawater in his swimming pool is regulated so that it’s maintained a few degrees below air temperature. Ari’s business is no longer a means for him to make money; it’s a vehicle for his personal pleasure. He’s rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Nothing I’ve ever experienced compares to the luxe of his life.”

“Nothing,” Jackie corrected her, “with the exception of Bunny’s life here on Antigua.”

Everyone laughed—including Bobby—because what Jackie said was true.

“Oh, Bunny,” Jackie said, “tell us how you picked out the color in your living room. It’s such a good story.”

“Well,” said Bunny, happy to oblige, “I was trying to describe to my interior decorator the salmon-pink color that I had in mind. And I simply told him, ‘You know how it is when you get up at five o’clock in the morning, and go into your garden, and the sun is just coming up? Well, it’s not the color of the light on the first petal of the rose. And it’s not the color when you pull off the second petal. It’s the color on the third petal. That’s what I’m trying to achieve!’ ”

Bunny was eccentric, even a bit nutty, but to Jackie she was the beau ideal of all that was romantic, exquisite, and fine. Jackie held her friend in such high esteem that she had even called Jack by her nickname, Bunny.

Jackie admired her friend’s taste in French fashion (Bunny spent tens of thousands of dollars each season buying Hubert de Givenchy’s entire couture line). Jackie respected Bunny’s opinion on how things should look in a home (“nothing should be noticed,” she said).