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

“For Christ’s sake,” he snarled, “we need some sleep here.”

Forty-five minutes later, White was finished. He returned to the living room and handed the manuscript to Jackie.

She wrote across the top of the first page: “A Conversation with Jacqueline Kennedy.” Then she crossed out the first two paragraphs, including the pretentious literary reference to the French poet Paul Verlaine. Soon she was slashing out lines, adding words, changing tenses, sharpening phrases. On the last page, she found that White had ended his story with the line:

But she did not want them to forget John F. Kennedy or read of him only in dusty or bitter histories.

This did not satisfy Jackie at all. And so she added a new kicker in her own handwriting:

For one brief shining moment there was Camelot.

From a wall phone in the kitchen, White placed a call to David Maness, Life’s articles editor, who was standing by in the Time-Life Building on Fiftieth Street in New York City. Maness immediately patched the call through to the magazine’s fastest stenographer-typist, who was stationed on a different floor, and to Ralph Graves, the assistant managing editor, who was in his own office.

As White began to dictate the piece, Jackie leaned against the kitchen wall, smoking a cigarette. When White was finished, he asked his Life colleagues:

“As a friend of the Kennedys, is there anything you think is in bad taste, or will give a bad impression?”

He held the phone away from his ear so that Jackie could hear the response from New York.

“Yes,” said Graves, “I think the gesture of kissing his foot is too intimate for good taste.”

White must have found Graves’s objection ludicrous, given the fact that he had left out Jackie’s far more shocking gesture with an intimate part of the President’s anatomy.

“Just a minute,” he said.

He put his hand over the mouthpiece, and discussed the editorial request with Jackie.

“Right,” he said when he came back on the line. “Take out the foot kissing.”

“Hey,” said Maness, “is she listening to this now with you?”

White ignored the question.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“Yes.” It was the voice of assistant managing editor Ralph Graves again. “I think Camelot is mentioned too many times in such a short story—at least one time too many. I suggest that you delete the last reference in the last paragraph.”

White muffled the phone again, and conferred with Jackie. Did she want to soften the focus on Camelot?

She shook her head violently.

“No,” White told his editor, “that last Camelot stays in.”

TWO

BEYOND HER

WILDEST DREAMS

November 1963

“HE’S DEAD, ISN’T HE?”

Early the next morning, after Teddy White had departed, Jackie stood at her bedroom window, gazing across the lawns that sloped gently down to the beach. Huge white clouds scudded across a putty-colored sky. The Honey Fitz, the presidential yacht, and the Martin, the Kennedy family power launch, rode high on the angry waves that roiled Nantucket Sound.

Off in the distance, Jackie could see that someone had ventured out onto the dunes. It was several moments before she realized that the figure was her daughter, who was sitting by herself at the edge of the beach, staring out to sea. Caroline’s arms were locked around her legs, and her chin rested on her knees. Her blonde hair, cut in a pageboy, was lashed by the harsh wind. She made a bleak picture, lonely and despairing.

Jackie slipped into wool slacks and a cable-knit turtle-neck, and went downstairs. The smells of freshly brewed coffee and frying bacon filled the house. Louella Hennessy, the Kennedy family nurse who had been called back into service after the assassination, could be heard arguing in the kitchen with George Thomas, the President’s valet. Everything was just as it had been in the past, except for one thing. Providencia Paredes, Jackie’s Dominican maid, had set the breakfast table for only three people. The fourth was dead.

Jackie’s home on the Cape was called Bambletyde. A shingled house on Squaw Island, not far from the Kennedy family compound, it was furnished very simply. There were a few upholstered chairs, and some woven rugs scattered on the bare wood floors. The dominant color was yellow—one of Jackie’s favorites—and the walls were covered with landscapes by André Dunoyer de Segonzac and with several seascapes that had been painted by Jackie herself.

She pulled on a pair of knee-high Wellingtons and went outside. As she strode down the long sweep of lawn toward Caroline, her soles sank into the wet grass and made sucking noises. When she reached the dunes, she stood behind Caroline for a moment, hesitating to interrupt the girl’s thoughts. Then she sat down beside her daughter, and they remained side by side, not touching, only looking out toward the colorless rim of the horizon.

Caroline had been her daddy’s girl. The first words of more than one syllable that she had spoken were “New Hampshire,” “Wisconsin,” and “West Virginia”—names of the key presidential primary states responsible for her father’s long absences. Whenever he returned home from his political travels, Caroline would ask him to tell her a story. He had invented a fictitious character, a white shark that ate people’s socks. “Where’s the white shark, Daddy?” Caroline would ask, and he would say, “Well, I think he is over there, and he’s waiting for some socks to eat.”

She had just turned six, and unlike her brother John, who was only three, she was old enough to understand what had happened to her father in Dallas.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” she kept on saying. “A man shot him.”

After a while, Jackie could feel Caroline begin to shiver. She gave her a gentle nudge, and the little girl struggled to her feet and offered a hand to her mother. They stood silhouetted against the gray sky, and the wind struck against their bodies. Caroline leaned hard against her mother, and Jackie wrapped both her arms around her and pressed her close.

METAMORPHOSIS

When Jackie returned from the dunes