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

Jackie waterskiing; she never even stopped to say hello. Later, when she was finished, we all had lunch. In those days, she was extremely friendly, extremely nice to me, and she spoke to Gianni in that whispery voice: ‘Oh, Gianni.’ Typical Jackie.

“Onassis drove us around in his car; he was just building Skorpios then, and I remember that once he backed up and we nearly went off a cliff. He was sweating, and he wore a lot of cologne. I remember it well: it was August 1967. Jackie, not married, spent the summer on Skorpios, the colonels were in power in Greece, my wife was trying to leave me, and I got back together with her, and we had a good time—it was a magical summer.

“Christina [Onassis] was insignificant in the scheme of things; in the presence of her father, she was often silent. In those days, in a Greek household, a talkative child was not tolerated, and she was—what?—sixteen then.

“I’m ninety-nine percent certain that there was another Kennedy on Skorpios that summer as well, either Bobby or Teddy, although I would assume it was Teddy; Bobby was always pulling Onassis’s leg, trying to get money out of him. Onassis didn’t like the Kennedys, but he was a businessman; he got along with them fine. He would have gone to bed with the devil if it meant getting close to power.”

NINE

FALLEN IDOL

Spring–Fall 1968

“THE CAT AMONG THE PIGEONS”

Aristotle Onassis was in Paris in the spring of 1968 when he heard the good news: Robert Kennedy, the man who stood in the way of his marrying Jackie, had taken the plunge back into national politics. Bobby had decided to challenge President Johnson and Eugene McCarthy, the leading anti-Vietnam War candidate, for his party’s presidential nomination.

“Now the kid’s got other fish to fry,” said Ari.

America was convulsed by its greatest crisis since the Civil War. The Viet Cong had just launched their Tet offensive, invading the United States Embassy in Saigon, and the streets and campuses of America were exploding in demonstrations.

Other traumas followed in quick succession: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, setting off massive rioting by blacks in more than one hundred cities. Students took over the president’s office at Columbia University, leaving their own feces as a calling card on his desk. The Poor People’s Campaign, led by the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, set up Resurrection City in Washington, D.C., a fifteen-acre campsite between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And on the nightly news, LBJ announced that he was not a candidate for reelection.

While Bobby huddled with his advisers at Hickory Hill, Ari made his move in Paris. At a cocktail reception in the swank George V Hotel, he launched into a flowery monologue about his lifelong search for the ideal woman. Someone asked him for his opinion of Jacqueline Kennedy.

Ari’s face lit up. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

“She is a totally misunderstood woman,” he said. “Perhaps she even misunderstands herself. She’s being held up as a model of propriety, constancy, and so many of those boring American female virtues. She’s now utterly devoid of mystery. She needs a small scandal to bring her alive. A peccadillo, an indiscretion. Something should happen to her to win our fresh compassion. The world loves to pity fallen grandeur.”

The words struck his listeners as indiscreet. But, as usual, Ari knew what he was doing. He believed that Jackie wanted to marry him as much as he wanted to marry her, but that she was still in bondage to Bobby. Bobby was the sole remaining obstacle to the conclusion of the biggest deal of Ari’s life—marrying Jackie.

“He needed to make deals,” wrote Peter Evans, another Onassis biographer. “Deals had always been essential to him, in some psychic way he needed them; a deal meant an opponent, an opponent meant confrontation, and confrontation was the source of his strength. He could not live without adversaries, no more than a tree can live without soil.”

Bobby was the enemy, but he was an enemy Ari did not understand. Why wasn’t Bobby upset when Jackie flew off to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico and strolled through the moonlit Mayan ruins with Roswell Gilpatric? Why didn’t it faze Bobby when Jackie invited Lord Harlech for an intimate weekend at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port?

Ari had not slept with Jackie yet, and being Greek, he could not be sure of her until he did. He was seized by feelings of resentment and jealousy. Were Jackie and Lord Harlech lovers? How about Ros Gilpatric? Was there more to that friendship than met the eye? Who else was Jackie seeing on the sly? What about those rumors of John Warnecke?

“He was fascinated by scandal,” said Joan Thring, who was Rudolf Nureyev’s personal assistant and was up on all the latest gossip. “I knew that whatever I said was important to him. Winning Jackie meant everything to him. It was the only time I ever sensed vulnerability in the man.”

It galled Ari that nobody took him seriously as Jackie’s suitor. People could not conceive that the dewy queen of Camelot would want to make love to the toadlike Onassis. Her kisses would never turn him into a prince. The same gossip columnists who wrote about Ros Gilpatric and Lord Harlech hardly noticed when Ari slipped into Jackie’s Fifth Avenue apartment for a quiet tête-à-tête, or when he dined with her and Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn at Mikonos, one of his favorite Greek restaurants in New York.

At one of those dinners, Nureyev leaned over to Jackie, and said in his heavily accented English:

“Every fact in world must have been printed about you now. To be this public is not good for soul.”

“Oh, they’re still on the fanciful embellishments,” Jackie said. “The essence is still untouched.”

Ari intended to change all that. He was feeling quite smug as he left the cocktail reception at the George