Just Jackie (10 page)

Jackie and Hill were greeted by Jack Scarella, the maitre d’ of the hotel’s famous restaurant, the Jockey Club, where she had dined recently with Marlon Brando. Scarella escorted them through the bustling kitchen to the dimly lit dining room. It had beamed ceilings, dark paneling, and equestrian paintings. The restaurant was crowded with customers. Five captains in tuxedos and ten waiters in black pants and red bolero jackets hovered over the tables, serving the Jockey Club’s renowned crab cakes, and its piece de resistance, a half-vanilla, half-chocolate souffle.

With Scarella leading the way, Jackie and Hill walked through the front section, known as the Royale, where celebrities normally liked to sit so they could see and be seen. Jackie had telephoned Scarella in advance and asked him to reserve an area in the back room, which customers called “Siberia.”

After they were seated, Jackie ordered a vodka martini. As the evening wore on, she drank two or three more. At one point during dinner, she got up from the table and
staggered to the powder room. She did not look any steadier when she came back.

“Then something really crazy happened,” said a diner who was sitting with a friend in the Royale section, and had a clear view of Jackie and Hill from his table. “Jackie and Clint began engaging in what appeared to be a lot of heavy necking and petting. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Maybe Jackie was just crying on Clint’s shoulder. Maybe he was just comforting her.

“After a bit, they slumped down in their red-leather banquette and disappeared from sight,” the diner continued. “Every once in a while, they would appear, then disappear again. This went on from eight-thirty to ten-thirty. Jackie’s hair was all messed up, and she looked like a mental wreck. But she didn’t seem to care who saw her.

“In those days, people treated Jackie like a national institution, and newspapers bent over backward never to take a picture of her doing anything undignified, not even smoking a cigarette. So, for her to indulge in this kind of display at the Jockey Club in front of the crème de la crème of Washington society was totally bizarre behavior.”

“A GATHERING
OF THE
WRECKAGE”

March 1964

“I
remember kneeling at the foot of the President’s coffin in the East Room of the White House, and feeling utterly drained,” Bunny Mellon was saying. “The tears would not stop. It was like the fall of all the hopes of youth. As though youth had tried and been thwarted. It seemed to me that the country had symbolically killed something.”

“It had,” said Jackie.

It was early one evening during Easter week, four months after the assassination, and a group of friends were having cocktails on Bunny Mellon’s terrace on the grounds of the exclusive Mill Reef Club in Antigua.

Jackie’s sister Lee was there with her husband Prince Stanislas Radziwill. Stas (whose name was pronounced “Stash”) was the son of a Polish nobleman, and he was a favorite of Jackie’s and the other ladies’ because of his impeccable old-world manners.

Then there was Jack’s old college chum, Chuck Spalding, a well-born advertising executive. He was at the bar, fixing another daiquiri for Lee.

Bobby Kennedy was slumped in his chair. He appeared to be listening to the conversation. But nowadays, Bobby was often lost in his own world, deep in grief over the loss of his brother.

And finally, there was a tall figure standing in the shadows. This was Clint Hill, who was keeping an eye on
“Mrs. Smith,” the code name the Secret Service had given Jackie during her stay in Antigua.

The Mellon house was made of native white limestone, and was surrounded by a mortared wall, six feet tall and three feet thick, that dripped with bougainvillea and hibiscus. Bunny had transformed the grounds into a lush tropical paradise. To irrigate her extraordinary gardens, her husband, the millionaire horse breeder and art patron Paul Mellon, had built a private water supply system that was larger than all of the public reservoirs that serviced the arid island.

A bright Caribbean moon was reflected in the water of Half Moon Bay one hundred feet below the terrace. A recording of “The Days of Wine and Roses” was playing somewhere inside the house.

“We were a gathering of the wreckage,” recalled Chuck Spalding. “Jack’s assassination was still very much on everybody’s mind. Everybody was trying as hard as they could to shake the blues.”

After Dallas, Jackie had turned for comfort to her closest friend, Rachel Lambert Mellon. “Bunny,” as she was known to everyone except her servants, had helped Jackie design the grand visual spectacle of John Kennedy’s state funeral, and she personally took charge of the flowers at the President’s grave site.

Jackie’s other female mainstay was Lee, who had hardly left her side since the assassination. Though the Bouvier sisters were known for their competitive relationship, their dealings had actually become much more complex in recent years, as sibling rivalry mixed with mutual admiration, emulation, and camaraderie.

Jackie’s tragedy happened to coincide with a crisis in Lee’s own private life. Lee was involved with Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping tycoon, and had petitioned the Vatican to annul her marriage to Stas.

“Lee and Ari had plans to marry, while Stas Radziwill was supposed to get hitched to Charlotte Ford,” recalled
the gossip columnist Taki. “It was all very cozy, and things would have gone as planned except that JFK asked Lee not to divorce Stas until after the 1964 election. Dallas and November 22, 1963, changed all that.”

Like her mother Janet Auchincloss, Lee was interested in high society and money—and not necessarily in that order. She had conducted a number of famous love affairs with rich and powerful men, and in recent years had begun to compete with the aging opera singer Maria Callas for Aristotle Onassis’s attention.

Lee and Ari were seen dining alone at Onassis’s table at Maxim’s in Paris. She was a frequent guest on his yacht, the
Christina
. And when in Greece, she stayed at his sister Artemis’s spacious seaside villa in Glyfada, near the airport in Athens. Lee and Ari became the object of international gossip. Shortly before the assassination, their names had been linked in a widely syndicated
Washington Post
column written by Drew Pearson.

“Does the ambitious Greek tycoon hope to become the brother-in-law of the American President?” Pearson asked.

Now in Antigua, Bunny’s guests whiled away the cocktail hour by peppering Lee with questions about Onassis. A third daiquiri had loosened Lee’s tongue, and she was going on about the superabundance of wealth and luxury that she hoped awaited her as the future wife of the Golden Greek.

“People talk about Ari’s airline, his ships, and his private island,” said Lee, “but what they don’t know is that he controls Monte Carlo through his interest in the Société des Bains de Mer et Cercle et Étrangers. He controls his own kingdom.”

“Perhaps one should start calling him Prince Onassis,” said Stas, who insisted on using his own royal rank, even though Communist Poland had long since abolished its hereditary nobility.

Lee ignored her husband’s sarcasm.

“Ari has homes in so many countries that he maintains duplicate wardrobes all over the world,” she went on. “He never has to bother with luggage when he travels.”

“They say the barstools on his yacht are covered with the scrotums of whales,” Chuck Spalding said.

“The skin of the scrotums of
mature
whales,” said Lee, as if the age of the whales somehow made a difference. “The sunken bath in his master stateroom is an exact replica of the one in a palace in ancient Crete. The temperature of the seawater in his swimming pool is regulated so that it’s maintained a few degrees below air temperature. Ari’s business is no longer a means for him to make money; it’s a vehicle for his personal pleasure. He’s rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Nothing I’ve ever experienced compares to the luxe of his life.”

“Nothing,” Jackie corrected her, “with the exception of Bunny’s life here on Antigua.”

Everyone laughed—including Bobby—because what Jackie said was true.

“Oh, Bunny,” Jackie said, “tell us how you picked out the color in your living room. It’s such a good story.”

“Well,” said Bunny, happy to oblige, “I was trying to describe to my interior decorator the salmon-pink color that I had in mind. And I simply told him, ‘You know how it is when you get up at five o’clock in the morning, and go into your garden, and the sun is just coming up? Well, it’s not the color of the light on the first petal of the rose. And it’s not the color when you pull off the second petal. It’s the color on the
third
petal.
That’s
what I’m trying to achieve!’ ”

Bunny was eccentric, even a bit nutty, but to Jackie she was the beau ideal of all that was romantic, exquisite, and fine. Jackie held her friend in such high esteem that she had even called Jack by her nickname, Bunny.

Jackie admired her friend’s taste in French fashion (Bunny spent tens of thousands of dollars each season
buying Hubert de Givenchy’s entire couture line). Jackie respected Bunny’s opinion on how things should look in a home (“nothing should be noticed,” she said). Jackie subscribed to her friend’s definition of what was boring and vulgar and a nuisance, and to her determination to keep the world at bay. And Jackie appreciated how Bunny dealt with the fact that her husband had had the same mistress for as long as anyone could remember (Bunny lived her own life, apart from Paul Mellon, and even kept her financial assets separate from his).

Most of all, Jackie admired the fact that Bunny was unbelievably rich. Bunny showered Jackie with presents, everything from the finest handmade stationery to a $5,000 Schlumberger bracelet from Tiffany’s. This generosity may have been Bunny’s special way of overcoming her feelings of timidity. As a young girl, she could not bear for anyone to look at her. She had such low self-esteem that her parents took her to a psychotherapist, who gave her a special exercise to overcome her problem. Bunny was told to stand in front of a mirror and repeat over and over that she was the most glamorous child, the most wonderful child, the prettiest child on earth.

Bunny never talked about the things that she collected. For instance, Jackie never heard Bunny say, “Oh, isn’t that silver tureen beautiful,” or “Isn’t that a great painting,” or “Aren’t those chairs wonderful.” Bunny did not focus on things as such. She was interested in what people
did
with those things.

She took being rich for granted, as her due. Her father, Gerard Barnes Lambert, had built the family fortune on Listerine mouthwash and Gillette Blue Blades, and he instilled in his daughter a view of money that Jackie found captivating.

“[W]ith the acquisition of almost unlimited funds, all the joy of getting new things disappears…., ” Gerard Lambert wrote in his memoirs,
All Out of Step
, “You are
completely bored with the things for which those less comfortably off would give their souls. In desperation you seek new thrills through material purchases, but find them disappointing when you get them. It is like a Pyrrhic victory, better not achieved…. Wealth has a sort of Siamese twin, satiety, of which it cannot rid itself.”

To stimulate the jaded appetites of her guests in Antigua, Bunny flew in her chefs and butlers from the mainland to help her local staff with the cooking and serving. Her servants’ uniforms were designed by Hubert de Givenchy, and were of different colors and patterns for each day of the week. When she noticed that the potato chips in the pantry weren’t perfectly round, she dispatched her private Gulfstream jet to fetch ones that were.

No one could match Bunny’s talent for creating an atmosphere of rarified luxury without a hint of vulgarity. Adjoining her dining room in Antigua was a little slat house, where she grew orchids and seedlings and kept three tree toads that serenaded Jackie and the other guests all evening long.

Much of what Jackie had accomplished as first lady was done with Bunny’s artistic guidance and financial support. Bunny had donated $485,000 (several million dollars in today’s money) to the United States Park Service to restore Lafayette Square. It was Bunny’s loose, mixed Flemish-style flower arrangements that Jackie had used in the White House. For the state dinner that Jack and Jackie gave for Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan at Mount Vernon, Bunny provided the gold vermeil cachepots on the tables, and the chairs, which she had recovered in fabric that cost $24 a yard. The White House Rose Garden was designed and executed entirely by Bunny.