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

queen Edie Sedgwick. Vogue called them “the Beautiful People,” and said that Jackie had invented a new kind of society.

“Somehow, word got out that Jackie was having the party,” said vanden Heuvel, “and it seemed like there were fifteen thousand people in the street, trying to get a peek at her.”

Jackie had hired Killer Joe Piro and his rock ‘n’ roll band, and she danced the frug and the jerk until one-thirty in the morning. On her way out of the restaurant, someone stopped her at the door, and she introduced her escort for the evening.

“This is my very, very special friend,” she said, glancing up at John Carl Warnecke.

A few months later, Jackie took off for Spain to attend the annual fair in Seville, a six-day post-Lenten fiesta of glamorous parties and superb bullfighting that had been made famous by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises. The Duke and Duchess of Alba installed her in their Palacio de las Duefias in a bedroom once used by France’s Empress Eugenie, the great-grandaunt of the present duchess.

Newspapers back in America ran headlines like JACKTE AND THE JET SET IN SPAIN. She was shown in photos astride a white horse, wearing a dashing Andalusian traje corto riding habit—black-trimmed red jacket, flowing chaps, and flat broad-brimmed hat.

“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Jackie said as she made a leisurely paseo of the fair, “but it’s all very exciting.”

Some people thought it was a little too exciting for the widow of the slain President. When she attended a bullfight featuring Manuel Benitez, who was known to his devoted fans as “El Cordobes,” she was criticized for encouraging the barbarism of bullfighting. When Jackie stayed until three in the morning at a charity ball, Princess Grace of Monaco was said to be piqued at finding herself upstaged. And when Jackie was seen being escorted around town by Spain’s ambassador to the Vatican, Antonio Garrigues, a sixty-two-year-old widower with eight children, Spanish newspapers ran stories that she was about to get married.

Angier Biddle Duke, America’s ambassador to Spain, issued an official statement quashing the absurd rumors.

“I really felt that you were a knight in armor and I don’t know how to thank you,” Jackie wrote Angie Duke when she returned home.

Spain had not provided Jackie with the escape she wanted. So now she was on her way to an even more distant destination—Hawaii. The trip took many hours in the four-engine prop plane, and it gave Jackie the opportunity to think about her future.

Jack Kennedy had been dead for almost three years, and Jackie’s mother was urging her to make a decision about marriage. However, Bobby had other ideas. He was against marriage for Jackie altogether. If she got married now, Bobby said, she would undermine his chances for winning the White House. Why not wait for the right man to come along?

Jackie herself was torn. John Warnecke reminded her of her father, or at least one side of her father, his aesthetic side. With Warnecke as a husband, Jackie could pursue refined artistic sensations and celebrate the pleasurable effects of art. Warnecke had impeccable taste. He offered a life of private pleasures, as well as a respite from the world’s spotlight.

“Jack was highly romantic and very sexy in those days,” recalls a woman who knew him well. “He was very creative. He had this artistic vision and saw things in an artistic way. There was also an element of danger about him. He was the kind of person, when he walked into a room, everyone knew he was there. And he was always a notorious womanizer. These were all things that would appeal to Jackie.”

Just before the plane landed at Honolulu Airport, Jackie changed into an ivory-colored faille coat and an A-line skirt. She stepped down the ramp into the bright sunshine, bareheaded and wearing a pair of wraparound sunglasses. A crowd of five thousand people was on hand to greet her, and she smiled broadly, holding her hair, which blew in the brisk trade winds.

Mrs. Pat Lam of the Hawaii State Department of Transportation hung two leis around Jackie’s neck. A band struck up “Hawaiian War Chant,” and a hula troupe began swinging and swaying to the music. Embarrassed by the corny ceremony, Jackie stood stiffly on the tarmac, flashing her patented smile. Then she thanked everybody and ducked into a waiting Lincoln Continental.

She was whisked off to her $3,000-a-month rented house on fashionable Kahala Beach, about a mile from Diamond Head. The four-bedroom redwood-frame house was set back only about forty feet from busy Kahala Avenue, but it had a tall hedge and tropical trees that shielded it from view. Six burly members of the Metro Squad were standing guard as Jackie got out of the car and went inside.

There, waiting for her in the living room, was John Warnecke.

TINY BUBBLES IN THE WINE

“We had spent a year and a half together before she came out to Hawaii,” said Warnecke. “I was with her every weekend. We were together in her apartment in New York, at her place in New Jersey, at Hammersmith Farm, at Hyannis Port. We went to the movies, and to football games. We did everything together. Then I invited her to spend the summer with me in Hawaii.”

Warnecke had won a huge commission to design the capitol of the newly admitted state of Hawaii. He knew the governor, the mayor, and the editors of the Honolulu newspapers. He promised Jackie that if she came to visit him, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star-Bulletin would leave her alone, and that she would be treated like a private citizen. This was quite a promise to make to a woman who had received more publicity in the years following her husband’s death than she did in the years when she shared the spotlight with the President.

“I had to prepare the groundwork for Jackie’s Hawaiian trip very carefully so as not to arouse suspicion,” Warnecke said. “I