Just Jackie (26 page)

Less
than a month after the assassination of John Kennedy, Jackie stands in the doorway of the Harriman house, her temporary residence in Georgetown, and bids goodbye to visitors Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel. The relationship between Jackie and Bobby was passionate but chaste. (UPI/Corbis/Bettmann)

Lee with Prince Stanislas Radziwill, the husband she planned to divorce so she could marry Aristotle Onassis. Jackie suspected her sister was living in a dreamworld when it came to Onassis, whose well-publicized love affairs were part of his publicity machine. (AP/Wide World Photos)

Author William Manchester in his Middletown, Connecticut, house with some of the foreign magazines that serialized his controversial book
The Death of a President. “
My first impression [of Jackie], and it never changed,” said Manchester, “was that I was in the presence of a very great tragic actress
.”
(Mondadori/Archive Photos)

Journalist Theodore H. White in his Manhattan town house. White collaborated with Jackie in creating the Camelot myth, but he left the riddle of her true identity to future biographers. (Courtesy of David White)

Jackie whispers to John Carl Warnecke at the seventh annual Robert Kennedy Pro-Celebrity Tennis Tournament in 1978, more than a decade after their love affair ended. The need for discretion added a further dimension to their romance
—
the delicious aura of secrecy. (Ron Galella/Ron Galella Ltd.)

Despite a tabloid’s prediction, wedding bells were not in the cards for Jackie and Jack Warnecke. He came to realize that he would never be able to provide Jackie with what she really needed: total security from the outside world. (Courtesy of John Carl Warnecke)

Jackie tours the ruins of Ankgor Watt with Lord Harlech, former British Ambassador to the United States. Onassis wondered whether there was more to Jackie’
s
friendships with other men than met the eye. (Archive Photos)

New Frontiersman Roswell Gilpatric accompanies Jackie on a trip to Los Angeles, where Bobby Kennedy was fatally wounded by an assassin in June 1968. Jackie’s purloined “Dear Ros” letter was used by her enemies to poison her relationship with Onassis. (UPI/Corbis/Bettmann)

Onassis, with his bride by his side, waves to newsmen from his yacht, the
Christina,
shortly after their wedding on Skorpios. Onassis fulfilled Jackie’s deep need for a man who could rescue her from feelings of helplessness. If that was a definition of love, then she loved Onassis. (UPI/Corbis/Bettmann)

Sailing aboard the
Christina.
For Jackie, Greece acquired some of the mythic attributes of Camelot, and in her mind Onassis became mixed up with her mythological view of John Kennedy, a man who paid with his life for defying fate. (Courtesy of Niki Goulandris)

Jackie pins a flower behind Onassis’s ear. When they were together, Jackie doted on her Greek husband, sketching his portrait, buying him modish neckties, and presenting him with a cigar cutter for his long Havanas. She filled a book with translations from Homer’s
Odyssey
and illustrated it in the margins with photos she took of Onassis, depicting him as Ulysses. (Peter Beard/The Time Is Always Now Inc.)