Jackie After O Read online

  Jackie After O

  One Remarkable Year When

  Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied

  Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams

  TINA CASSIDY

  DEDICATION

  For my father

  And my grandmother Genevieve Damaschi,

  whose own third act still inspires

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: The Wife

  Chapter Two: The Writer

  Chapter Three: The Preservationist

  Chapter Four: The Widow

  Chapter Five: The Target

  Chapter Six: The Seeker

  Chapter Seven: The Hot Prospect

  Chapter Eight: The Working Woman

  Chapter Nine: The Empty Nester

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Footnotes

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  America. 1975. The Watergate trials ended, finding the defendants guilty and creating a generation of cynics. The United States was laboring to recover from a crippling oil crisis but had finally withdrawn from Vietnam. Tammy Wynette had a new hit song called “Stand By Your Man,” while women still campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment as they entered the workforce in record numbers and divorced in record numbers.1

  It was a year when Americans were drained by politics, war, and a bad economy. Yet they were hopeful, as if they knew things could not get any worse. Two young men launched a company called Microsoft. From coast to coast, people flocked to discos to do the Hustle. In England, a band named the Sex Pistols gave birth to punk and the British Conservative Party had chosen its first female leader, Margaret Thatcher, as Parliament passed the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Act.

  Jacqueline Onassis was forty-five, living in New York, and going through her own confusing metamorphosis. The health of her much older husband, the millionaire Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, was rapidly declining, as was the diseased state of what was a second marriage for both of them. Her daughter, Caroline, was in her last year of high school. Jackie’s younger child, John Jr., was a high school freshman, busy with his own friends and interests. Much of her day-to-day work as a parent was done, and aside from dabbling in charities and being the almost-estranged wife of a man who lived abroad, she had few other responsibilities outside of her very regular hair appointments, which happened to be once a week at Kenneth.

  Like so many parents of grown children who find themselves suddenly single—or just unhappy at midlife—Jackie had begun to think more about herself and how, despite having such a full closet, she felt empty. She had enough money to continue living a life of leisure, albeit one where she was always trying to escape the haunting assassination of her first husband, President John F. Kennedy. But what ambitions and talents had she tucked away two decades earlier, to become—in succession—a wife, the First Lady, an international fashion icon, a grieving widow, a single parent, and later, a stepmother and jet-setter?

  The world knew she was beautiful, stoic, and rich, with impeccable taste and a soft, little-girl voice that turned out marvelous French. It did not know, or perhaps did not care, that she was interested in history and architecture, that she was a talented writer, a voracious reader, and a person of ambitions of her own. Now, on the precipice of 1975, when society all around her was changing, Jackie was beginning to wonder how she should spend the rest of her life. What would make her truly happy? These were especially difficult questions for a woman whose pre–World War II generation and social stratum had bred her for nothing more than marriage and motherhood and the attendant accessory decorating and volunteering opportunities.

  The simple title she had earned—truly earned—twice, was wife. Now, she was about to become something else.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Wife

  In 1953, Jack Kennedy was a freshman senator from Massachusetts with a bothersome back and enormous aspirations. He had just married a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, whom he had met at the home of mutual friends in Washington, DC, the city where Jackie, with wavy, short brown hair, had been working as a newspaper photographer, taking headshots for a brief question-and-answer column she wrote about her subjects.

  Jack wasn’t the only Kennedy busy in the capital. His younger brother Robert was assistant counsel to Roy Cohn, the chief investigator working for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. Bobby had begun digging through records in an attempt to uncover those who might have been trading with Communist China, and he suspected a mysterious Greek, Aristotle Onassis, was among them. Bobby could not find proof of any red links, but he instead found that using a front corporation in America five years earlier Onassis had illegally bought ten US surplus tankers that were forbidden for purchase by foreigners. Bobby had a win; soon a federal grand jury handed down an indictment of Onassis, who was ordered to pay a $7 million fine.

  “This Irish fuck wants to bury me,” Onassis complained to a friend.1

  But instead of avoiding the Kennedys, Onassis pulled them into his orbit.

  A few years after the indictment, Jack and his bride were on vacation in Cannes visiting Jack’s father—Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to the United Kingdom—and doing what fine young things did in the Riviera then: they basked on the beach and went out to dinner with the head of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, and his wife, Marella. But one of the nights was even more special. Winston Churchill was aboard Onassis’s ship, anchored off Monaco, where the Greek also based his family and business. Churchill sprung the idea to invite the Kennedys, to see if JFK was indeed presidential material, as he had been hearing.

  Jack was eager to meet Churchill, a hero of his since the war. He had devoured the former prime minister’s books, even giving a nod to a 1938 Churchill title, While England Slept, when he published his Harvard thesis, Why England Slept, two years later. But Churchill, by the time Jack met him, was a round and confused octogenarian who had no idea which guest Jack was when he arrived for cocktails aboard the lavish Christina with Jackie and the Agnellis.

  “I knew your father so well,” Churchill said, leaning in to the wrong person on the boat. Jackie realized that the old man was “gaga” and felt sorry her husband was meeting him “too late.”2 While Jack struggled to make conversation with the old man, Onassis absorbed Jackie with his eyes, noting her expensive but simple white suit as he gave her a tour of his 315-foot yacht. The ship was a former Canadian frigate on which he had spent more than $4 million to install forty-two extension telephones, a surgical operating room, Siena marble baths, a mosaic dance floor that could open to a pool, and bar stools covered in whale scrotum.3 (He used to ask women if they enjoyed “sitting on the largest balls in the world.”4)

  But the aesthetic matched Onassis’s swaggering personality. With his smooth olive skin, habitual Cuban cigar, dousing of cologne, and hair thick with Brilliantine, he could be magnetic. He had a capacity to listen, observe, and collect beautiful women. But his charms did not appear to work on Jackie that night. He noticed that she was pleasant but aloof during the tour, making mindless small talk with him “in her little voice.”

  “I must ask you to leave by 7:30,” Onassis told the group. “Sir Winston dines sharp at 8:15.”5

  After the group left, Costa Gratsos, a close friend of Onassis, guessed what was on his boss’s mind.

  “Don’t fuck up her life just to get even with Bobby,” Gratsos said.6

  Jackie’s next fateful
meeting with Onassis came during the presidency after her infant son Patrick, born prematurely, died when he was just two days old in August 1963. The Kennedys were devastated, and Jackie, on Cape Cod, summoned the strength to call her younger sister, Lee Radziwill, to tell her the horrible news. Although Lee was married for the second time to Stanislas “Stas” Radziwill, a Polish prince, and they were living in London with their two young children, Anthony and Tina, Lee had developed a relationship with Onassis in the intervening years and was with him in Greece when the First Lady phoned her.

  Invite her over for a rest, Onassis suggested to Lee.

  Jackie left for her two-week trip to Greece in October, and, still weak from her wrenching cesarean, needed oxygen on the flight over. The president, facing a tough reelection campaign, stayed behind with his mother, Rose, by his side to greet foreign dignitaries at the White House.7

  The media seized on the question of why Jackie would sail with a man who had been indicted and fined by the US government. Indeed, his FBI file was as thick as two telephone books, full of memos about potential un-American activities during World War II and, later, Cuba.8

  They also wanted to know why Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr., then undersecretary of commerce who was serving as a kind of old-fashioned chaperone on the trip, would stay on a yacht owned by a man whose nautical empire the US government partly regulated.9 And it was no ordinary boat.

  Floating in the Mediterranean, the Christina’s passengers—indulged with fresh figs and strawberries, caviar, ten extra servants, two hairdressers, and a band—were initially unaware that Jackie’s recuperative cruise had turned into a scandal in America. They passed the days floating between Istanbul, Marrakesh, and islands in the Aegean, with Onassis impressing Jackie with his knowledge about art and history, bringing alive the ruins in Crete and those at the Oracle at Delphi, where, when she stumbled in a hole, he was there to help her up. Between the sightseeing and Onassis’s history lessons in highly remote locations, she, in turn, confided in him about her life lived in public with an imperfect spouse. He listened intently, tried to be supportive. He also encouraged her to stick by her husband’s side and campaign with him that fall. She took his advice.10

  A month later, on November 23, 1963, Dallas was her first official reelection campaign trip. And, sadly, it was also her last, as bullets shattered the president’s windpipe and skull, sending a chunk of his brain in an arc through the air, spilling his blood into the lap of Jackie’s pink Chanel skirt in an open-top limousine.

  Onassis was one of the few outsiders to visit Jackie at the White House on the day of Kennedy’s funeral.11 And they slowly became closer. He brought gifts to her kids and visited them on Cape Cod, where they playfully buried him in the sand. He could still charm an aging Churchill as well as a string of remarkable women, from his first wife, Tina—the daughter of an even richer Greek tanker tycoon—to his longtime mistress, the opera soprano Maria Callas, and, eventually, Jacqueline Kennedy. He was a buccaneer of a businessman, able to pull off such complex deals that his tanker Tina Onassis “was built in Germany, mortgaged in the United States, insured in London, financially controlled from Monaco and manned by Greeks. It flew the flag of Liberia.”12

  Onassis fit a pattern for Jackie, who had relied on a series of men with means and strong personalities throughout her life. First, there was her father, “Black Jack,” the stockbroker who lost more money than he made, who drank and cheated but still indulged his daughters Jackie and Lee after their mother divorced him; her stepfather, Hugh D. Auchincloss, whose inherited Standard Oil wealth enabled the family to live among high society, even though they eventually ran low on cash; JFK, whose family money was built on stocks, the movie business, real estate, and a touch of bootlegging; and then Bobby Kennedy, whose fighting spirit and near-constant presence—to the annoyance of his wife, Ethel—protected Jackie in her darkest days.

  For several years after the assassination, Jackie struggled to bring equilibrium back to her life, moving to New York, making her children feel secure, establishing new routines, and settling back into Manhattan society. It was not until after Robert Kennedy’s murder in June 1968 that a devastated and terrified Jackie thought she and her children were also homicide targets and, shaken to her core, was prepared to turn her back on America. Not surprisingly, Onassis was there to rescue her in her grief with his boat—and give her shelter on his own private island, Skorpios.

  Skorpios, in the Ionian Sea between the west coast of Greece and the heel of Italy, was aptly named for being shaped like a scorpion, with land like a curled tail at one end and two pincers at the other. It was a place of unsurpassed freedom and luxury, a place Onassis, one of the richest men in the world, had bought for about $100,000 a dozen years earlier in 1963.13 He then spent another $10 million to domesticate its rugged beauty, to raise farm animals, and to plant vineyards, fig trees, olive groves, and flowers. It was a place where the scent of eucalyptus and jasmine mixed with briny air, where bathing suits seemed superfluous, and waiters in white gloves served beluga caviar and Dom Pérignon.

  It was there, on October 20, 1968, that Jacqueline Kennedy stunned so many by marrying Onassis. With a prenuptial agreement in place that had been negotiated by her former brother-in-law US senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy and her financial adviser, André Meyer, the contract made it clear that the $200,000 in yearly support from the Kennedys and the $10,000 annual widow’s pension from the US government would cease as a result of the wedding. Onassis agreed to give her spending money and $3 million up front, as well as annual interest on million-dollar trusts for John and Caroline. Although tabloids later widely reported that the prenuptial agreement had 170 clauses covering every detail of how their life together should be—including their frequency of sex—the author of that claim later admitted to inventing those details.14

  Clearly, money was not an issue—in the beginning. But it did become one of several obstacles in their marriage. Onassis was the opposite of her first husband in appearance, age, and approach to many aspects of life. He was mercurial, could be crude, and was old-fashioned about many things, especially his treatment of women. He flaunted his affair with Maria Callas, before and after he married Jackie, and was even photographed in May 1970 with her at Maxim’s in Paris.15

  Indeed, Onassis was an incongruous mate for America’s queen: twenty-nine years older than Jackie, he was more than two inches shorter at just five foot five, and heavier and rougher than the horsy-artsy-intellectual crowd with which she was embedded. He was a divorcee and a world-class womanizer. She was the good Catholic who had learned to turn the other cheek in her first marriage. He loved bouzouki music and smashed pottery in Greek tavernas, one night running up a bill as high as $1,000 for all the dishware he threw.16 She loved the theater. He didn’t. He was a night person, typically waking when she was eating lunch. Onassis often wore a dark suit and tie, even in the summer. Jackie, by contrast, was always impeccably dressed according to season and occasion, and a regular at Valentino—who had made the ivory skirt and lace sweater17 she wore for their Greek wedding.

  October 20, 1968. Jackie, wearing Valentino, and Aristotle Onassis, at their wedding on his private island, Skorpios. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

  Whatever reasons she may have had for marrying Onassis—love, money, security—even her admirers were perplexed by her choice.

  When her friend Truman Capote asked her why, she said, “I can’t very well marry a dentist from New Jersey!”18

  Other friends told her she was going to fall off her pedestal if she married Onassis.

  “That’s better than freezing there,” she scoffed.19

  Caroline and John “would have been happy to stay around the penny candy store in Hyannis” rather than go to Greece, but it wasn’t up to them.20

  Onassis had lived a large life. Born in Turkey to an overbearing father and a mother who died when he was twelve, his formative years were tumultuous and oppressive. Although his father remarried, producing two mor
e of his three sisters, the family was forced into exile in Athens during the political upheaval caused by Atatürk, the revolutionary who transformed Turkey from a caliphate to a republic. But Onassis did not stay in Athens for long, leaving for Argentina to seek his fortune with as little as $60 in his pocket.

  In Buenos Aires, he bunked in a cheap boardinghouse above a dance hall (which instilled his lifelong love of tango) and worked as a telephone operator, where he polished his international language and business skills through eavesdropping on calls. Eventually, he bought tobacco from Greek sailors, and peddled it on a cart. By 1930, as smoking became ever more popular, Onassis had built the tobacco business into a million-dollar company, motivating him to expand his enterprises. He bought an abandoned wooden ship, frozen in ice in Nova Scotia, sight unseen for $35,000 during the Great Depression. The ship would be his first of many.21

  At his peak, the man nicknamed the “Golden Greek” was controlling some one hundred companies in a dozen countries, including hotels, banks, piers, real estate, and an enormous fleet of seafaring vessels, separate from his yacht, which cost $500,000 a year to run.22 Onassis, never one to sit still for long, had moved from Monaco to Skorpios as his home base, where he had a helipad, airstrip, marina, and the Christina, on which he preferred to sleep and spend his time.23

  For a handful of summers and school vacations, the 350-acre cypress-covered island was a safe retreat for Jackie, her children, sister, and New York–society friends. There, they could lounge on the yacht or at his stucco, hill-perched villa, which had been white until he painted it pink for his wife, as if trying to erase memories of another exotic white house she had lived in. Jackie relished her time on the island, meticulously decorating the villa with Greek antiques, books, and flokati rugs to soften the terra-cotta floors. When she was not shopping in Athens or reading on the beach, she had a six-horse barn to visit and miles of riding paths that were hers alone.