Just Jackie (43 page)

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.

“J
ackie’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 of life in the city. It was, in a way, the coming-out of Jacqueline Onassis in New York.

“She had some understanding of this, of course, from her days of refurbishing the White House. Moreover, way back, one of the greatest influences on her life was her grandfather, her mother’s father, who was a builder here in New York, and who actually was a partner of Raol Fleischmann, the owner of
The New Yorker
magazine.

“His name was Lee, but he was thought to have changed his name, and to be Jewish. There was a very nice painting of him at 25 West Forty-third Street, in the lunette over the Forty-first Street door, until they remodeled the building a few years ago. In the painting, Mr. Lee was portrayed as a white-haired, nice-looking man, with all the blueprints spread out on his desk. He was quite a good builder, and he was a very important influence on Jackie’s life. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she imbibed some notion of this idea of building, what it meant, even as an adolescent.”

“At almost all our Municipal Art Society benefits, we would be in the reception line,” Gill recalled. “She was our star, and I was the old cannon they brought forward for that purpose. And of course the reception line was always entertaining to me from a novelistic point of view. I enjoyed watching all the people getting ready to come up there just to shake hands with Jackie.

“I would have to say, over and over, This is Mrs. Onassis,’ to somebody who had been waiting an hour in line for this woman, who had no need to be identified by me. But that was the protocol. But, boy, could she pass them on! Again, I think this was her White House training. The Trumps and people like that would come, and she would get them through the line.

“We had an entertaining time at those things, in part because she had a perfectly lively sense of the degree to
which she was being used. And she was prepared to consent to be made use of.”

“The only time Jackie was ever angry with me was when I did an expose of Joseph Campbell [author of
The Power of Myth]
in
The New York Review of Books”
Gill said. “This man was like a monster, whom Jackie had admired very much.

“Campbell was a guru for a lot of people of Jackie’s generation, but his book was very bad scholarship. He was not a great scholar. He was radically anti-Semitic … and in that respect he was like Jackie’s father-in-law Joseph Kennedy.

“Did Jackie see through these people? She may have, but it remains an intriguing question how much she saw through people like Campbell and Onassis and Joe Kennedy. In fact, it is the central question of her life: How does one live publicly in a world where one has to lie?

“Jackie was pitched headlong into the midst of such a world. And all her life, she had to make decisions to lie, or not to lie, and to go on living.”

O
ne evening in March 1980, Jackie stepped off a freight elevator into a crowded Soho loft, where an Academy Awards party was in full swing. Two men followed her off the elevator into the noisy, smoke-filled room. One was her escort for the evening, Pete Hamill, the ruggedly handsome, Brooklyn-born columnist for the
New York
Daily News
. The other was a slightly built young man who was wrapped in the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk and carried a photo of the Sri Rajneesh on a leather thong around his neck.

“Hi, Pete,” said Julienne Scanlon, a Broadway musical star and the wife of the party’s host, public-relations man John Scanlon. “What would you like to drink?”

“I’ll just have a Coke,” said Hamill, who had lived the life of a sober alcoholic for the past eight years. “Oh, by the way,” he added nonchalantly, “this is Jackie.”

Julienne stared in disbelief at Hamill’s date, who was dressed in a floral blouse, black trousers, and patent-leather pumps.

“And what would
you
like to drink, Jackie?” Julienne managed to stammer.

“I’ll have what Pete’s having,” Jackie said.

The bartender, a young woman, took one look at Jackie, and dropped the glass she was holding in her hand. It smashed on the floor, and when she bent to pick it up, she cut herself so badly that her hand would not stop bleeding.

In all the confusion, Julienne had barely had time to deal with the young man in the saffron robes.

“And who are
you?”
she finally asked the follower of Sri Rajneesh, who had wandered in from the little Neeshie ashram located on Franklin Street across from the Scanlon loft.

“I’m with Jackie,” he said.

“Jackie, do you know him?” Julienne asked her.

Jackie looked at the monk, and shook her head.

“Pete!” Julienne called after Hamill, who had begun to disappear into the crowd. “This fellow says he’s with Jackie.”

Hamill ran back to the entrance, grabbed the confused Neeshie by his homespun robe, and hustled him into the freight elevator.

“I’m with Jackie!” the young man yelled as he disappeared. “This is a sign! We were meant to be together!”

“I think I should go to the hospital to get some stitches,” said the bartender.

Jackie followed Hamill into the jam-packed loft, which consisted of one large living area with windows all around, and a big bedroom, where three or four television sets were blaring at the same time. Edward Koch, the mayor of New York, and a bevy of journalists and writers were watching Jane Fonda hand Dustin Hoffman an Oscar for his performance as a beleaguered father in
Kramer vs. Kramer
.

Hamill knew a thing or two about the problems of fatherhood. He was still trying to repair some of the damage he had inflicted on his daughters Adrienne and Deirdre when they were growing up and he was drunk a lot of the time. After he stopped drinking, Hamill lived for a number of years with Shirley MacLaine, but she had always made it clear that she did not want to have anything to do with his daughters. Faced with a choice, Hamill dumped his kids, rather than Shirley, which made him feel doubly guilty.

Jackie did not know what to make of Hamill’s struggles with his conscience and his rebellious daughters, who were now eighteen and sixteen, and were showing signs of being troubled kids. Jackie was touched by Hamill’s confessions of guilt, but parenthood meant a great deal to her, and she found it hard to forgive Hamill for having been such a bad father. His candor did not evoke her sympathy; it only made her realize how angry she must have been at her own father for letting her down as a child.

For his part, Hamill was a writer who had fashioned himself as a voice of the workingman. He had once written a scathing denunciation of Jackie for selling herself to Onassis for a few pieces of gold. He eventually thought
better of publishing his intemperate words, and had put the column away in a drawer. But when he started dating Jackie, the column resurfaced and was printed by his rivals at the New York
Post
as a way of embarrassing him.