Just Jackie (48 page)

That same weekend, Jackie fell off Clown, her show jumper. She had taken many spills before, but this was a particularly nasty one, and she lay on the ground unconscious for thirty minutes.

“Oh my God, she must have broken her neck!” screamed a spectator.

“I’m perfectly fine,” Jackie said when she finally came to.

But the emergency medics who responded to the call for help insisted on taking Jackie by ambulance to nearby Loudon Hospital Center. There, she was examined by Bunny Mellon’s personal physician, who noticed that Jackie had a slight swelling in her right groin. The doctor diagnosed it as a swollen lymph node. He suspected that she had an infection, and administered antibiotics. The next morning, the swelling in her groin had diminished, and she was released from the hospital.

“She was in some pain,” said Jerry Embrey, captain of the Middleburg Rescue Squad, “but I think she was in shock more than anything else. For a lady of her years to have taken such a fall and come through pretty much unscathed is almost a miracle.”

A couple of weeks later, Jackie felt well enough to spend Christmas with Maurice Tempelsman and her family at her country retreat in Peapack, New Jersey. As she drove along in her BMW, she slipped a CD into the player and listened to her friend Carly Simon accompany Frank Sinatra in a selection from his latest album,
Duets
. As Sinatra crooned “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” Simon joined in on some of the verses of that song, then interwove part of the song “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”

Jackie sang along.

Over the holidays, while sailing in the Caribbean with Tempelsman, Jackie developed a persistent cough. She
thought she had the flu, and asked a local doctor to prescribe antibiotics. But then she developed painful swelling in the lymph nodes in her neck, and she began to feel stabbing pains in her stomach. She cut the vacation short and flew back to New York.

There, she consulted Dr. Carolyn Agresti, a head and neck surgeon at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, who found enlarged lymph nodes in her neck and her armpit. A computerized axial tomography examination, commonly known as a CAT scan, showed that there were swollen lymph nodes in Jackie’s chest and in an area deep in her abdomen known as the retroperitoneal area.

Dr. Agresti ordered a biopsy of one of the neck nodes. It revealed that Jackie had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A pathologist told Lawrence Altman, a medical expert who wrote for
The New York Times
, that the cells were anaplastic—that is, they were undeveloped, what doctors call “embryonic” or “primitive,” indicating that the disease was highly malignant, and could spread to other parts of Jackie’s body.

Maurice Tempelsman was at Jackie’s side in the living room of her apartment when she broke the news to Caroline and John. Her children were devastated. They hugged her, and then they and their mother wept.

“She said, ‘I feel it is a kind of hubris,’ ” Arthur Schlesinger recalled of his conversation with Jackie shortly after she learned of her cancer. “I have always been proud of keeping fit. I swim, and I jog, and I do my push-ups, and walk around the reservoir—and now this suddenly happens.”

“She was laughing when she said it,” Schlesinger continued. “She seemed cheery and hopeful, perhaps to keep up the spirits of her friends, and her own. Chemotherapy, she added, was not too bad; she could read a book while it was administered. The doctors said that in fifty percent of cases lymphoma could be stabilized. Maybe she knew
it was fatal. Maybe she didn’t know at all, but even if she did, she still had hope for some other future.”

Jackie may have been laughing when she spoke with Schlesinger. But she also must have been thinking of the tragic trail of destruction that had followed her for so much of her life. She had once demanded that a clergyman explain her husband’s assassination. “Why, why? How could God do something like that?” she had asked. No one had an answer then. And no one had one now.

“S
he came in early in January under an assumed name, and swore us to secrecy,” said one of her doctors at the New York Hospital, where Jackie began receiving the first course in chemotherapy and steroid drugs. “It was a cloak-and-dagger operation. She wanted anonymity.”

The same secrecy was employed when Jackie went to the Stich Radiation Therapy Center for periodic CAT scans. She arrived at seven o’clock in the morning wearing a hooded cape. While she waited outside in the car, Maurice made sure that no one was in the waiting room. When all was clear, he brought her in on his arm.

Maurice carried a small bag containing Jackie’s breakfast, which she ate after the CAT scan. However, one morning she could barely wait.

“I’m really hungry,” she told one of the doctor’s assistants. “Would you bring Mr. Tempelsman here?”

“Gee, I hope he hasn’t eaten your breakfast,” the
aide teased. “But I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s a special person.”

“Oh, yes,” said Jackie, “he is.”

Jackie was soon displaying the side effects of her chemo-and-drug treatment—hair loss, blotchy skin, and bloating. She was forced to wear a wig, and people noticed that there was something wrong with her. She knew that it would not be possible to hide the nature of her illness much longer, and so she instructed her old friend Nancy Tuckerman to release the news to
The New York Times
. In the story, which appeared on February 11, 1994, Nancy confirmed that Jackie was being treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but pointed out that her doctors were very optimistic.

“She’s fine,” Nancy said. “She goes in for routine visits, routine treatment. That’s what it is.”

This was no exaggeration. As Jackie’s treatment progressed through four standard courses of chemotherapy, her doctors gave her consistently optimistic reports. The cancer, they said, appeared to be in remission. She was greatly encouraged by their outlook, and continued to go to her office at Doubleday three days a week.

“She enjoyed doing these books,” said John Loring. “We’d laugh about it, and talk about all these titles of books we were going to do, and what the next one was.

“And one day she said, ‘Oh, yes, isn’t that wonderful. When we’re eighty we can write
Tiffany Mushrooms
. We can just do this forever.’

“And this may sound naive, but I honestly did not believe she was going to die. She seemed invincible. And if you knew her well, you just couldn’t believe that this was a hopeless case. You believed that she would get over this, too. That she’d gotten over everything else, and she’d get over this. That this was not going to do her in.”

In February, Jackie had lunch in her apartment with her friend Peter Duchin, who had just begun to write his memoirs. Duchin asked Jackie what she remembered about his father, bandleader Eddy Duchin, and his mother, Marjorie, who had died in childbirth. His question elicited a poignant recollection from Jackie, whose illness had obviously stirred some deep feelings from the past.

“I remember your parents only indirectly,” Jackie told Peter Duchin. “But I’ll never forget the night my mother and father both came into my bedroom all dressed up to go out. I can still smell the scent my mother wore and feel the softness of her fur coat as she leaned over to kiss me good night. In such an excited voice she said, ‘Darling, your father and I are going dancing tonight at the Central Park Casino to hear Eddy Duchin.’ I don’t know why the moment has stayed with me all these years. Perhaps because it was one of the few times I remember seeing my parents together. It was so romantic. So hopeful.”

B
ut the cure proved almost as bad as the disease, and Jackie aged considerably in a matter of a few weeks. Her face grew sallow, and more hair fell out. She wore a beret to cover her wig. Throughout the harsh, stormy winter of 1994, she was too weak to continue her yoga sessions with Tillie Weitzner. Instead, she took strolls in Central Park with Maurice. She was familiar with the park’s paths from years of jogging, but now she was unable
to venture very far before she became utterly exhausted. She leaned on Maurice’s arm for support. When she got back to her apartment, she went to bed and took a nap.

She was puzzled. If the cancer was in remission, why didn’t she feel better? She refused to think about her own mortality. She could not believe she was going to die. Not yet, anyway. She was only sixty-four years old. As her favorite Greek poet, Cavafy, wrote in “Ithaca,”

She encouraged Nancy Tuckerman to feed the press optimistic assessments of her progress.

“She’s doing so well,” said Nancy. “She was coming in to a focus group meeting today [at Doubleday], but it was called off because of the snow. She had her grandchildren come over to see her yesterday.”

Jackie was the one who did the most to promote the image of herself as a woman on the mend. She wrote dozens of sunny letters to friends, like this one to Brooke Astor:

One day in March, she experienced an alarming spell of mental confusion. She went to see an eminent neurologist at the New York Hospital, who told her that the
cerebellum portion of her brain had been affected. Another type of scan, an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging), showed that the lymphoma had disappeared from her neck, chest, and abdomen, but that it had spread to the membranes that cover the brain and spinal cord.

“I can’t believe this has happened,” Dr. Anne Moore, Jackie’s cancer specialist, said.

“Of all her doctors, no one saw this coming,” said someone who was close to the case. “Her doctors were all totally shocked. They thought they had beaten the disease. The whole team was stunned when they got the results of the CAT.”

A specialist in neurological diseases informed her that once cancer got into the brain it was very difficult to kill with chemotherapy. The brain had a natural barrier that kept out most chemotherapy drugs.

“Your best hope of survival is a very sophisticated procedure,” the specialist told her. “We drill a hole in the skull, open a shunt, and insert a tube for feeding an anticancer drug directly into the brain. We combine that with radiation therapy to the brain and to the lower spinal cord for about a month.”

It sounded horrific. But Jackie told the doctor that she was ready to try anything.

As a result of this radical treatment, she began to lose weight. Her speech slowed. And she was less alert.

“The moment I realized there was really something wrong with her was the last time we ate lunch at Le Cirque,” said John Loring. “Sirio loved to send over a sampling of desserts after lunch. Jackie would never touch them. She might stick her fork in and eat two crumbs and say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful,’ and that was the end of that.