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

Mostert reported that the first million-ton tanker, a ship so big that a cathedral could be lost in its bowels, would soon become a reality,” wrote the London Daily Mail columnist Nigel Dempster. “Ari sat with the book unopened on his lap for most of the flight; memories of the Ariston, the 15,000-ton ‘monster’ they said was impossible when he built her in the 1930s, must have been in his mind.”

In Paris, a whole clutch of journalists had assembled outside Onassis’s apartment at 88 Avenue Foch. There were five television crews, and photographers from Paris-Match, Stern, Oggi, and many other magazines and newspapers.

“I want to walk from this car under my own steam,” Onassis told Jackie and his daughter. “I don’t want those sons of bitches to see me being held up by a couple of women.”

Jackie and Christina watched him make his way through the gauntlet of shouting paparazzi.

“How do you feel, Ari?”

“This way, Ari!”

“Ari, over here!”

“Ari, are reports that you’re dying true?”

He walked slowly, looking neither left nor right, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his blue overcoat. Once inside, he went straight to bed.

“When he awoke, shortly after 10 P.M.,” wrote Nigel Dempster, “he took a Pyridostigmine slow-release capsule to get him through the night; the capsule [which was prescribed for myasthenia gravis and increased muscle strength] released one-third (sixty milligrams) of its dosage immediately, and gave him a surge of energy into which he crammed as much business as he could manage, and saw the people he wanted to see.

“One of the people he sent for on this night was [his old henchman] Johnny Meyer. They talked about the past, swapped familiar anecdotes. After one long silence when Meyer thought he had fallen asleep, Ari said:

“ ‘Soon I shall be on Skorpios with Alexander.’

“ ‘You’re crazy, Ari,’ Meyer replied. ‘Who ever heard of anybody dying from droopy eyelids.’ ”

“He was operated on on Sunday,” Johnny Meyer told a press conference two days later in the American Hospital in Paris. “It was a small operation, and now he is feeling much better. He can stand up. That’s all I can say.”

In fact, Onassis was being kept alive by a respirator in room 217 of the Eisenhower wing of the hospital. He suffered from jaundice, heart problems, pneumonia, and complications from his myasthenia gravis. Just as Dr. Rosenfeld had predicted, the cortisone lowered his resistance to infection and made his pneumonia hard to control.

At times he was delirious, and rambled on incoherently about Skorpios, and his problems with the government in Athens over the sale of his beloved Olympic Airways. He spoke mainly in Greek, which, of course, excluded Jackie.

She knew that Ari had told Christina and his sisters of his plans to divorce her. She felt mortified and chagrined by her situation. In the eyes of these Greek women, Jackie had scant claim to the title of Onassis’s wife. When she and Christina found themselves alone in Onassis’s hospital room, they did not exchange a word.

“I was in Paris with Jackie at the time,” said Niki Goulandris. “She visited him in the hospital daily, although her time with him was restricted because he was in the intensive care station. We went to Notre Dame together, and she got down on her knees and prayed for Ari, even though she knew his condition was hopeless. She knew it was the end.

“But the doctors advised her that Ari could hang on like that for weeks, perhaps even months,” Niki continued. “Jackie felt that she could be of more use in New York to her children than she could in Paris to Ari. So she left.”

As soon as Jackie arrived at her apartment on Fifth Avenue, she called her sister-in-law Artemis in Paris, who told her that Ari was doing as well as could be expected. Four days later, Artemis again assured her that Ari was fine. However, late that night, he took a turn for the worse, and Artemis woke Jackie and urged her to return to Paris immediately.

Jackie was packing to leave the next morning, when the phone rang again.

“He’s dead,” said Artemis. “Christina was with him when he left us.”

“HE MEANT A LOT TO ME”

A fusillade of flashbulbs greeted Jackie as she stepped off the Olympic Airways plane at Orly Airport. When the photographs of the frenzied crowds were printed the next day, they reminded people of the scene of pandemonium created by Charles Lindbergh’s historic landing nearly fifty years before.

The crowds wanted to see for themselves how Jackie was bearing up under her loss. In their eyes, she had changed since her marriage to Onassis. She was no longer the same Jackie whose flawless performance at President Kennedy’s funeral had transformed her into a paragon of virtue. But if Jackie was not that person, it was not clear who she was now.

Perhaps more than any other people on earth, the French adored Jackie. But they needed to hear from Jackie herself why she had not been at Onassis’s side when he died. It was the behavior of a wife who did not love her husband, and it made them wonder if Jackie had become like the woman in John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci”: a beautiful woman who was incapable of feeling love.

Dressed in black, Jackie approached the bank of microphones and took out a piece of paper that contained a single paragraph. The prepared statement was notable for its clarity and lack of sentimentality.

“Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed with shadows,” she said, as the salvo of flashbulbs began again. “He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love. We lived through many beautiful experiences together which cannot be forgotten, and for which I will be eternally grateful.”

“TIME TO TAKE CARE OF JACKIE”

Even The New York Times sent a reporter to cover