Jackie, Ethel, Joan: Women of Camelot (47 page)

With nothing further to talk about, an awkwardness that had never been a part of their relationship began to set in. The two women just sat and stared over each other’s shoul- ders, according to the agent. After one more drink, they kissed each other good-bye and parted company.

Recalls the agent, “As she was leaving, I heard Joan call after Jackie, ‘Give me a ring, will you?’ Jackie didn’t re- spond.”

Even when trying to be social, Jackie couldn’t help but talk about the grisly murder. “My God, his brains were all over me,” Jackie would say, as if she still could not believe the carnage she had witnessed. “All over my dress. Just brains. And blood. So much blood.”

Those close to Jackie, such as Ethel, called Jackie’s night- marish tale of the assassination the “story from hell.” When- ever Jackie would tell it, Ethel would shake her head vigorously, put her hands to her ears, and run from the room. Ethel, who feared that Jackie was becoming an alcoholic (yet didn’t notice that Joan was becoming one), told Joan Braden, “My poor sister-in-law is losing it, I’m afraid. And there’s nothing anyone can do. Maybe time will take care of this.”

Among the sisters-in-law, Jackie had always been the “strong one,” and as much as Ethel had quarreled with her, she still had grudging admiration for her strength and her determination to live her life in a strong, powerful way. “You can count on Jackie,” she once said to a reporter. “She’s dependable. You may not know what she’s thinking, but she has a certain resolve. She loves being First Lady, that’s for sure.”

It’s true that Jackie’s personality—imperious at times, usually fair (though she could be unreasonable if the mood struck her), often a voice of reason among the women in the family—had been a constant in the lives of her family mem- bers over the years. To see her in such a weakened state was frightening to all. “We lost Jack,” Joan told Ted, according to what he later told friends. “We don’t want to lose Jackie, too. What can we do?”

Moreover, because she was one of their own, a Kennedy, her family had great affection for her. Ethel, Joan, and all the Kennedys had known the private Jackie for many years and had watched—with mixed emotions, at least for Ethel—not only her public glory as First Lady but also her moments of great despair, such as the deaths of her babies. All of her ex- periences, personal and professional—her wedding, the birth of her children, her campaigning for Jack, her White House transformation, her dealing with the Marilyn Monroe drama—had meshed with their own lives’ events to com- pose a family history of memories and emotions that only those in the inner circle could or should fully understand. “I couldn’t bear to watch what she was going through because it was
Jackie,
” Joan once said of this black period in her sister-in-law’s life. “It broke my heart in a million pieces.”

Jackie may have wanted to tell her terrible story repeat-

edly, but she really didn’t want others to discuss what had happened or ruminate over the sensational details. One topic of discussion in which Jackie steadfastly refused to en- gage—and it often came up after she told her “story from hell”—had to do with whom to hold responsible for her hus- band’s murder. Was it a conspiracy? Or had Lee Harvey Os- wald acted alone? To this day the question remains a source of fascination. Throughout her life, though, Jackie never wanted any answers. In fact, none of the Kennedys did.

“I think she was afraid of what she would learn, and also what the country would learn, in terms of Jack’s personal behavior and the Kennedys’ connection to the mob, the CIA . . . all of it,” says Jackie’s cousin John Davis. “She had enough to deal with. She knew that any further investigation over the years could open up all sorts of possibilities about affairs, both governmental and romantic. She didn’t want to know.” Doubtless, she didn’t want the world to know, either. Davis says that the only time he ever spoke to his cousin about a further investigation into Jack’s murder was more

than ten years later, in 1974.

“Do you think more should be known about it?” he asked her.

She looked at him blankly, and then said, “So, what have you been up to, John? Are you well?”

“She completely changed the subject, which is what she would do if you tried to discuss the assassination with her,” said John Davis. “I don’t know if she got over it . . . I sup- pose, maybe, she found a way to move on. But she wasn’t about to dredge it all up. Finding out the truth meant nothing to her. It wouldn’t bring back Jack so, in her mind, what good would it serve?”

Rita Dallas recalled, “I once overheard Jackie tell Rose,

‘You know, I don’t think that I care how Jack was killed. Does it matter? Will it bring him back?’ ” Jackie did not give her mother-in-law a chance to answer. “No. No. No!” she exclaimed.

“She couldn’t have cared less about the myriad of theo- ries,” Ted White, who interviewed Jackie for
Life
magazine after the assassination, once said. “What difference did it make whether he was killed by the CIA, the FBI, or the Mafia, or some half-crazed misanthrope? He was gone, and what counted for her was that his death be placed in some kind of social context.”

The only Kennedy who seemed interested in what really may have occurred in Dallas was Ethel, who felt strongly that the family should get to the bottom of what happened to her brother-in-law. “They took him away from us,” she told one family member, “and I want to know why. I’m sorry,
but I want to know.”
It was interesting that Ethel referred to “they” when speaking of responsibility for her brother-in- law’s death.

“She tried to have conversations with Jackie about it,” said Lem Billings, “but Jackie wouldn’t have it.”

One afternoon after the Warren Commission, which in- vestigated the assassination, released its report, which con- cluded that Oswald acted alone, Ethel and Eunice visited Jackie at her home (she was living in New York by this time). “I think you owe it to the country to lead the way and demand more of an investigation. Do you believe this re- port?”

Jackie was very clear. “Ethel, I don’t want to know,” she said, her temper rising. “It won’t bring back Jack, will it? I was in that car,” she reminded her. “Do you think I’m over it? Do you think I can bear another second of it? Why would

you think I would want to open further investigation into it?”

Perhaps Ethel’s curiosity about what had really occurred in Dallas had to do with the fact that her husband, Bobby, believed there was more to the story than what was presently known. He told Arthur Schlesinger that while he believed that Oswald was guilty of the crime, there was question in his mind as to whether Oswald acted alone or had been a part of a larger plot organized by either Castro or the mob, or, as he put it, “who knows who.” Bobby realized, though, that to probe too deeply in matters having to do with these possibilities would open the Kennedys to heavy scrutiny and, as he might have put it, “who knows what” might have come to light. “Bobby asked some questions and did some follow-up,” says George Smathers, “but I think he was unhappy with what he was learning—whatever that was—because he backed off.”

“He asked me to stay on top of the investigation, and I did,” recalls his press secretary from 1965 to 1968, Frank Mankiewicz. “I would relay information to him from time to time. But, really, it wasn’t a primary concern. Jack was gone. No one needed more, I suppose, than that.”

“As Attorney General, Bobby had all sorts of information about what had happened that no one else knew,” adds John Davis. “But in the end, he agreed with Jackie to just take the simpleminded Warren Commission report at its word: Os- wald acted alone. He was just a nut, and that was that. . . .”

For the most part, Bobby eventually put the question of who killed his brother out of his mind. On April 4, 1968, after Martin Luther King was murdered and Bobby spoke to a crowd of a thousand, mostly black, in Indianapolis, he went back to his room, slumped into a chair, and said to his

speechwriters Jeff Greenfield and Adam Walinsky, “You know, that fellow Harvey Lee Oswald—or whatever his name was—set something loose in this country.”

“That was the only time I ever heard him mention his name,” recalls Greenfield. “When the news of John Kennedy’s death first came out, the news reports had the name backward and that’s the way he always remembered it, because he never took a look at it again.”

Jackie and Brando—The Rumors

A
fter her husband’s death there were whisperings of an af- fair between Jackie and the handsome, forty-year-old Acad- emy Award–winning actor Marlon Brando.

It was in January 1964 when Jackie first met Brando over dinner with her sister Lee and Brando’s friend George En- glund at the Jockey Club in Washington. Brando couldn’t have been more charming; he and Jackie seemed to have an instant rapport, as he regaled her with stories about things she usually didn’t care about, such as the celebrities with whom he made movies and had friendships. “Tell me about Frank Sinatra,” Jackie said, teasingly. “Isn’t he just an awful man?” Brando agreed. After making
Guys and Dolls
with Sinatra almost a decade earlier, he believed the singer to be a self-absorbed lout.

As the night wore on, all were having a good time. How- ever, the press had been tipped off, and when reporters showed up at the restaurant, Jackie became completely en-

Jackie and Brando—The Rumors
383

raged. “How is it that they always, always,
always
know where I am,” she cried. “Let’s get the hell out of here. Those goddamn parasites!”

The quartet vanished through a kitchen exit. Once back at Jackie’s house, the four of them had more martinis, listened to a Wayne Newton record, and danced—Lee with George, Jackie with Marlon. As he danced with Jackie, according to what he later told a friend, he decided to kiss her. His lips touched hers, and Jackie froze in his arms. The look in her eyes said it all: The dance was over and he should leave.

Embarrassed, Brando said his good-byes and staggered out to a waiting car. As he drove off, Clint Hill noticed Jackie Kennedy standing in the doorway with a sad expres- sion on her face.

“It’s too soon,” she said later. “Much, much too soon. I doubt I’ll ever be ready to be a woman again.”

The next day Marlon Brando sent Jackie a dozen yellow roses with an accompanying card. While the specifics of what he had written on the card remain unknown, Jackie was touched. Lee suggested that her sister telephone Marlon to apologize, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so. “I just hope he forgets all about it, and all about me, and never, ever says a word to anybody about any of it, ever,” a mortified Jackie said. She and Brando never saw one another again— at least not that anyone close to them can remember.

P A R T E I G H T

Ted’s Plane Crash

I
t was one o’clock in the morning on Saturday, June 20, 1964. Twenty-seven-year-old Joan Kennedy was sound asleep when a persistent knocking on the bedroom door jarred her to consciousness. After the assassination, she rarely slept deeply. So distraught had she been that, just two weeks earlier, she had suffered a miscarriage, her second. She went to the door, wearing only her slip. When she opened it, she found her chauffeur, Jack Crimmins. The con- cerned look on his face told her that something was very wrong.

“Joan, I don’t know how to say this to you,” Crimmins re- membered telling her. “Maybe you should sit down.”

Joan stood, frozen. No, she would not sit down, she said. “Please just tell me. Tell me now.”

“There’s been an accident.”

Joan gasped and leaned against the door frame. “Oh no.

Who?”

“Ted.”

“Oh, my God,” she exclaimed, tears immediately coming to her eyes. “Not Ted, too.”

“I’m sorry, Joan,” Crimmins apologized. “Ted’s plane went down, somewhere near Springfield.”

“Not another nightmare,” she said. “Please, God.”

The scene between Joan and Jack Crimmins was played out at the home of Alan and Ann Biardi, friends of Kennedy campaign worker Don Dowd and his wife, state Committee- woman Phoebe Dowd. Joan had gone to West Springfield to watch Ted accept the nomination at the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention for a second term as senator. It seemed clear that he was headed to victory in that he had done so well filling the two unexpired years of his brother Jack’s term. With the usual preconvention festivities—re- ceptions, parties, dinners—it promised to be a good time.