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

“Ari began courting Jackie with all his resources, wooing her with his vast wealth, his vast power, and his earthy charm,” recalled Aileen Mehle, who wrote a society gossip column under the name Suzy. “Vulnerable, despairing, and at a total loss after Jack’s death, she was overwhelmed by the attention. Here was someone, she thought, who loved her truly, coming to her rescue. He, amazed at his luck at winning the world’s most famous and sought-after woman, could not stop crowing over his prize.”

Little by little, he gained Jackie’s confidence and assumed a many-sided role—father confessor, financial adviser, and potential lover. He made no secret of his desire to replace Bobby Kennedy as Jackie’s chief male protector, but he felt that an invisible barrier stood in his way.

One fall day in 1967, they were sitting in the library of Jackie’s apartment, and Ari turned to her and said:

“Jackie, you have no right to isolate yourself like this.”

Just then, Marta, Jackie’s housekeeper, came in with a tray of tea and madeleines, Jackie’s favorite sweet. Ari waited until Marta had left, then continued:

“It is not good for you, and not good for the children. You have done all the mourning that anyone can humanly expect of you. The dead are dead. You are the living.”

For a long time, Ari attributed Jackie’s standoffish behavior to Bobby Kennedy’s influence. Bobby simply did not like him. Ari had heard about Jackie’s relationships with other men: Roswell Gilpatric, the former undersecretary of defense; David Ormsby-Gore, who was now Lord Harlech; and John Warnecke. But Ari told himself that these men were just friends, and meant nothing to Jackie.

He was right—at least when it came to Lord Harlech and Ros Gilpatric.

“There was a lot of nasty stuff going around town about Jackie and Ros Gilpatric,” one of Jackie’s closest friends told the author. “Ros’s wife, Pam, was an old friend of mine, as was Jackie, so I knew the truth. That story was absolute rubbish. Jackie never had an affair with Ros, who had lots of affairs with other women, but never one with her.”

Ari considered himself Jackie’s most serious suitor. And yet, Ari had a sixth sense about things, and he must have noticed the change that came over Jackie at about this time of her life. Although Ari did not know it, Jackie had recently stopped sleeping with Jack Warnecke, and she seemed more receptive to Ari’s overtures. In turn, he stepped up his campaign to win her over. Shrewdly, he began paying more attention to Caroline and John.

Ari had two children of his own, Alexander and Christina, but he had never bothered to be a real father to them. As they were growing up, they had no home life. Ari hardly ever saw them, and rarely mentioned them to Jackie. He made her feel as if she and her children were the only ones he cared about.

LITTLE DADDY

As Jackie and Ari drank their tea and ate the made-leines, they talked about her problems with the press. Reporters and cameramen were camped outside her Fifth Avenue apartment. Each time Jackie made an exit under the long green canopy, the slavering media beast was there waiting to devour her. So were women with their hair in rollers, tourists with Instamatics, and strollers with their dogs. Her public ordeal brought back tormenting memories of the day they shot Jack.

In the shadows cast by the library fire, Ari reminded Jackie of her father in his latter years. If Jack Warnecke had represented one side of Black Jack Bouvier’s character, Ari represented the other. He was a bad boy who held out the promise of raw adventure. He danced and romanced like a real-life Zorba the Greek. He knew how to break through Jackie’s introverted personality, and make her feel like a bit of a she-devil.

Ari and Black Jack were both men of the world, men who enjoyed the drama of the mating game. Like Black Jack, Ari had an endless supply of anecdotes about his sexual escapades, and Jackie enjoyed listening to them.

There was, for instance, the story of his brief affair with Eva Perón, the wife of the president of Argentina. This had taken place a very long time before, in 1947, to be exact, when Eva was touring Europe, and staying at a villa on the Italian Riviera. After she and Ari made love, Eva cooked him an omelette, and he wrote out a check for $10,000 as a donation to one of her favorite charities.

“It was the most expensive omelette I have ever had,” he told Jackie.

Then there was Ingeborg Dedichen, the beautiful blonde daughter of one of Norway’s leading shipowners. Ari called her by the Italian nickname Mamita, “Little Mother,” and she called him Mamico, “Little Daddy.”

Ari described for Jackie in the most graphic detail his love life with Mamita—how he licked her between each of her toes, embraced every part of her body, covered her with kisses, then devoted himself again to her feet, which he adored. He had a thing about feet, he admitted, and he found Mamita’s feet as soft as a baby’s bottom.

Despite such candor, he chose to omit some of the less flattering details of his relationship with Mamita. For one thing, he did not tell Jackie that he enjoyed putting on Mamita’s clothes now and then and parading around their apartment dressed like a woman. For another, it was not only her feet that fascinated Ari. He was also into bottoms, the anus, and anal humor.

He once told Mamita that he had piles, and would have to see a doctor the first thing the following morning. He then asked her to examine his anus, and when she did so, he let out a loud fart in her face. He found the joke very amusing.

Mamita was older than Ari, and when they met, she was far more sophisticated than he. They lived together for more than ten years, and she taught