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

large scale, with large appetites and large loves. He projected an image of potency: powerful in bed, and in the larger world. It was his way of impressing his bankers and customers, and making himself a brand name.

But Onassis was a narcissist, and his interest in women was essentially a reflection of his interest in himself. As he told friends, he loved women—plural—but found it hard to love any one of them in particular. And that included Lee. He had never broached the subject of marriage to Lee.

“There is an affinity between us,” he said of his relationship with Lee. “No more than a friendship.”

SIX

AN UNERRING

SENSE OF

STARDOM

April 1964–October 1965

MISTER MANCHESTER

At a few minutes before noon on April 7, 1964, the day after Jackie returned from Antigua, she slid open the mahogany doors in the living room of her Georgetown house, and made a grand, sweeping entrance.

“Mr. Manchester!” she exclaimed.

William Manchester, the tall, pipe-smoking Wesleyan University history professor, whom she had chosen to write the authorized version of Jack’s assassination, bolted from his seat. He stared at Jackie as though he could not believe his eyes. She was dressed in a black jersey top and yellow stretch pants.

“She was beaming at me,” Manchester recalled years later, “and I thought how, at thirty-four, with her camellia beauty, she might have been taken for a woman in her mid-twenties. My first impression—and it never changed—was that I was in the presence of a very great tragic actress.

“I mean that in the finest sense of the word,” he continued. “There was a weekend in American history when we needed to be united in our sadness by the superb example of a bereaved First Lady, and Jacqueline Kennedy—unlike Eleanor Roosevelt, a more extraordinary woman in other ways—provided us with an unforgettable performance as the nation’s heroine.

“One reason for this triumph was that her instincts were completely feminine. If she met your plane at the Hyannis airport, she automatically handed you the keys to her convertible. Men drive, women are driven: that was the logic of things to her, and it is impossible to think of her burning a bra or denouncing romantic love as counterrevolutionary.”

Jackie motioned for Manchester to sit down, then asked, “Are you just going to put down all the facts, who ate what for breakfast and all that, or are you going to put yourself in the book, too?”

“I can’t very well keep myself out of the book,” Manchester replied.

“Good,” said Jackie.

She offered to pour him a daiquiri from an icy pitcher, then took a nearby chair.

“Future historians may be puzzled by odd clunking noises on the tapes,” Manchester noted. “They were ice cubes. The only way we could get through those long evenings was with the aid of great containers of daiquiris.”

Over the next several hours, Jackie got quite drunk, and proceeded to pour out her heart.

She described how in Fort Worth, on the eve of the assassination, she had slipped into her husband’s bed, and aroused him from his fatigue, and made love to him for the last time….

She described sitting at a dressing table, looking for lines in her face, and musing about the tall Dallas blondes who had caught her husband’s eye….

She told Manchester all the “gruesome stuff”—about Jack’s brains, and the way he looked on the table in Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas….

She told him how she had spent the night of her husband’s death alone in bed at the White House, writhing and tossing while under sedation from large doses of the tranquilizer Amytal….

She described for him the sounds of Caroline crying when she heard the news of her father’s death….

She reconstructed a scene in the limousine on the way to Arlington National Cemetery, when Bobby looked down at young John and said, “You’ve got those sissy white gloves on—take them off,” but Jackie made her son keep them on….

“I had carefully put the Wollensak recorder where I would see it and she wouldn’t,” Manchester wrote. “I didn’t want her to worry about the machine. Also, I had to be sure that the little light on it was winking, that the reels were turning, and all this wasn’t being lost.

“It was a good plan,” he went on. “Its defect was revealed to me when she took the wrong chair. Then the only way I could check the light was by hunching up. It was an odd movement; I needed an excuse for it. A cigarette box on a low table provided one. Before that evening, I hadn’t smoked for two years. At the end of it I was puffing away, and eight more years would pass before I would quit again.”

Manchester was deeply moved by Jackie’s candor. Like Teddy White five months earlier, he realized that he was hearing more than he had bargained for. And he, too, felt an obligation to protect her. He worked out a hand signal that she could use when she wanted him to turn off his Wollensak recorder. But she seldom resorted to using the signal.

“It is true that she … withheld nothing during our interviews,” he wrote. “It is also true that none of that sensitive material found its way into any draft of the book.”

Manchester protected Jackie out of a tender regard for her feelings, as well as out of his deep respect for her dead husband.

“I couldn’t disdain Kennedy,” he said. “He was brighter than I was, braver, better-read, handsomer, wittier, and more incisive. The only thing I could do better was write. I never dreamed that one day I would write his obituary—the longest presidential obituary in history, and, in the end, the most controversial.”

DISGUISES AND SMILES

One fine fall day in September, Bobby entered the lobby of 1040 Fifth Avenue, Jackie’s new home in New York City. Her building was one of those massive limestone palaces that had been designed by Rosario Candela, the leading apartment architect of