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

As the time for Lee’s wedding approached, the sisters began speaking again, and Jackie gave a dinner party in honor of the couple at her apartment.

“Why the hell are you so afraid of your sister?” Newton asked Lee as they walked back to her apartment after the party.

“I told her I sat there all night at dinner and I saw it,” Newton said. “Her reaction every time Jackie spoke was like her mother was about to spank her. It was as if Jackie controlled her. I could feel the tension, the vibes going between them—it was Lee, not Jackie. It was quite obvious that Jackie intimidated her. It’s too bad Lee couldn’t get away from that sister of hers. Being just a few blocks away, it was like an unhealthy bond she couldn’t escape from—like Devil’s Island or something. When she was out in California, she seemed to be happy. Back in New York, she tightened up.”

Before Newton left New York for his wedding in California, he received a call from Alexander Forger, Jackie’s attorney.

“He told me that Jackie had asked him to look in on her sister because Lee did not have an attorney, and he asked me if I would sign a prenuptial agreement,” said Newton. “I said, ‘Absolutely.’ But when he came over to my hotel, he asked me what kind of deal I was going to make for Lee.

“I told him, ‘I am not making any deal.’

“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how much are you going to give her each month?’

“I told him, ‘That’s none of your business.’

“ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think we should have something in writing of how much maintenance a month. What would happen if you die?’

“I said, ‘I’ll put it in my will that she gets a million bucks, how’s that?’

“ ‘Well, I think we should have it in writing how much Lee gets a month.’

“I told him, ‘I am not buying a cow or a celebrity the way Onassis did! I am in love with this woman!’

“And then he started apologizing. ‘Now don’t be upset,’ he said, ‘because I don’t want to interfere in your love life, but why don’t you just put it in writing that Lee will get $15,000 a month?’

“I said to him, ‘Would you sign something like that?’

“He said, ‘No.’

“Finally, I told him, ‘Sorry, no deal,’ and we parted company.”

On the day of the wedding, Newton received a call from Lee, who was staying at the San Francisco hotel where they were to get married.

“I just got a call from Alexander Forger, and he said that you didn’t sign anything,” Lee said to Newton. “What’s this all about?”

“Tell him to call my lawyer,” said Newton.

But the lawyers could not reach agreement, and with less than an hour to go before the ceremony, Newton phoned Stanley Bass, the Supreme Court justice who planned to marry them, and called off the wedding. It was a devastating blow to Lee, who blamed Jackie for having once again meddled ruinously in her life. The breach between the sisters was now so great that it never completely healed.

LIFE IN THE CITY

“Jackie’s relationship with the Municipal Art Society began when we were trying to save Grand Central Station from having the Marcel Breuer building put on top of it,” said the writer Brendan Gill. “I was president of the Municipal Art Society at the time, and Jackie phoned us. She was exercised by what she had read in the paper: Grand Central was in jeopardy, and was going to be altered.

“Jackie said she would do anything she could to help us in the fight. So she became our great symbol of the struggle, and by far the most powerful person. She was joined on the ramparts by Philip Johnson, who was also very important, because he was a modernist architect, who nevertheless wanted to save the past, which is what we were dealing with. We had everybody with us.

“But Jackie was ‘It.’ And she went down with us to Washington on a chartered train called the Landmark Express to lobby the Supreme Court to uphold the landmarks preservation law. Hundreds of people got on the train, and Jackie went through the cars and shook hands with every single person.”

“This kind of thing kept coming up over and over,” Brendan Gill continued. “Take, for example, the question of St. Bartholomew’s Church. The idea that just because the church had the good fortune to have a garden on Park Avenue, which it wanted to sell for $50 million tax free so some developer could build a skyscraper on it—that was a scandal. So Jackie was out there on the vigil. And the rector of the church, the Reverend Thomas Bowers, denounced Jackie and me from his pulpit as ‘architectural idolaters.’

“In our fight against St. Bartholomew’s, if we were able to tell the media that Jackie was going to come at eight o’clock in the morning or whatever hour, the media would gush, and a couple of local politicians would even dare to kiss her for the cameras. She subjected herself to that kind of soiling and abuse for our sake.”

“Within a year of her involvement, I invited Jackie to join the board of the Municipal Art Society,” Gill went on. “I told her, ‘If you miss more than two consecutive meetings, it will be taken as a resignation, and you will automatically have resigned.’ Well, of course, that was the most idle threat that was ever made in history. Jackie was not going to go to every meeting of the Municipal Art Society. She had her own life out in the world. She wasn’t going to keep any regular hours for anybody.

“But she was desperately important to us, and she did come to meetings, and she did make friends, and she did gain a total understanding of what it was that the landmarks preservation law meant in terms of the emotional quality