Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (37 page)

By early 1972, Jackie publicly described herself as a wife and mother who spent the school year in America and summers and school vacations in Greece. The occasion for this statement was her testimony in federal court in lower Manhattan, where she was seeking legal protection against what she painted as Ron Galella’s relentless persecution of her and her family, both in the United States and abroad. Galella, for his part, was suing her for interfering with his livelihood. In what amounted to Jackie’s first extended public testimony since she addressed the Warren Commission in 1964, she spoke of being terrified anew. On the witness stand in the fifteenth-floor courtroom, which overflowed with people who lined up in the morning to see her and left en masse as soon as she was done, she portrayed the deleterious effect on her of knowing that Galella was ever following her about. “He lunged at me,” she recalled one encounter, “and he was grunting and he was saying, ‘Glad to see me back, Jackie, aren’t you, baby?’ And then he took his camera strap and was flicking me on the shoulder.”

Had Jackie not been desperate to stop Galella, she would never have exposed herself day after day to intense public scrutiny, as she did in the course of the February–March 1972 legal proceedings. Still, the tone of the copious and colorful press coverage ranged from mirthful to disparaging.
The New York Times
dubbed the trial “the best off-Broadway show in town” and
Life
magazine dismissed it all as a case of “staggering pettiness.” Public sympathy certainly seemed to favor Galella, who portrayed himself as merely doing his job when he photographed “the number one cover girl in the world,” a woman he characterized, again à la Manchester, as “snobbish and cool.”

Given popular attitudes toward her after she became Mrs. Aristotle Onassis, Jackie’s claims against Galella would likely have elicited a good deal of skepticism and derision in any case. But she had the misfortune to have gone to law at a cultural moment when Americans were especially anxious to distance themselves from the nation’s recent violent past as a new presidential election drew near. Jackie had been an inconvenient symbol in 1968. And so, four years later, she proved to be again. In 1972, politicians such as Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Edmund Muskie, and George Wallace, as well as President Nixon himself, would make a point of risking exposure to large crowds in an effort to establish that the violence of the 1960s was over and thereby to restore national confidence and pride. The presidential primaries were already in progress when the most prominent survivor of the carnage in Dallas struck a dissonant note by insisting upon her dread of a new tormentor, who threatened to emerge from the shadows at any time.

Jackie could not exactly be rendered invisible, as many injured people are when they attempt to speak out. Like others with posttraumatic conditions, however, she did find herself subjected to myriad questions and suspicions about the authenticity of her suffering: Was she really as terrified as she claimed to be? Or as Galella’s attorney, Alfred Julien, maintained in his opening statement, had she “grossly exaggerated” when she catalogued her fears? In court, Julien displayed a photograph his client had taken at the airport in New York. “Does it show a frightened or alarmed Mrs. Onassis?” he demanded of her. “I can’t say, sir,” she responded. Seeking to establish the former first lady’s “anguish threshold,” as he curiously called it, Julien inquired whether books or other writings about herself and her family published during the past few years had distressed her. Federal judge Irving Cooper upheld an objection from her lawyer, Martin London. But even in the absence of Jackie’s reply, the suggestion lingered that given her well-known complaints about Manchester and other authors, this was a woman who had cried wolf before.

Meanwhile, as Jackie’s court battle dragged on, pressure was building on Teddy Kennedy to join the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. After the Chappaquiddick episode of 1969, when Teddy drove a car off a bridge, leaving a young female companion to die in the submerged vehicle, he had pledged not to seek the presidency in 1972. But, as the historian James MacGregor Burns wrote in
The New York Times
in April 1972, the senator might yet end up in the grip of forces and events beyond his control, such as a deadlocked convention and the inability of the party’s left wing to produce a strong candidate. No sooner was the prospect of a new Kennedy candidacy openly discussed than the specter of assassination was spoken of as well. Burns quoted a school friend of Kennedy’s on the effect that the slaying of another Kennedy brother would have on national morale. Still, the dissatisfaction in certain quarters with the field of Democratic candidates made it seem possible that Kennedy might yet be tempted to come in.

Until, that is, a May 1972 assassination attempt on Governor George Wallace scrambled everyone’s calculations. The dreaded thing had occurred. Another shooter had sprung forth. The madness and anarchy that Americans had been frantic to leave behind was still demonstrably a factor in public life. No one seemed surprised when President Nixon, upon learning of the nearly fatal attack on Wallace, who was left paralyzed for life, immediately directed that Secret Service protection be assigned to Teddy Kennedy, though the senator was not a candidate. Two months later, Teddy, citing “personal family responsibilities” both to his own family and to those of JFK and RFK, declined the number two spot on a presidential ticket headed by Senator George McGovern.

On November 7, 1972, Nixon won reelection by a huge margin, bringing to an end a campaign season that had been shadowed by apprehensions of further bloodshed. Five days later, Jackie sat in her Fifth Avenue home watching William Buckley’s television interview with Harold Macmillan, who was promoting a new volume of his memoirs. To her, the world was again characterized by chaos and looming disaster. Thus, when she wrote to Macmillan immediately after the program, she evoked a society in which, paraphrasing William Butler Yeats, “the center does not hold.” Those words, as the bookish Macmillan would surely recognize, were an allusion to Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” Studded with images of blood and anarchy, the 1919 poem depicts a world in the process of splitting asunder.

In the end, the federal court had relieved Jackie of at least one of her anxieties, when, public sympathy with Galella notwithstanding, Judge Cooper directed her nemesis to always remain at least fifty yards from her and seventy-five yards from John and Caroline. But hardly had Jackie prevailed in this respect when she was confronted with the fresh terror that was to grip her for years to come. She adored Teddy Kennedy, the very idea of whose presidential candidacy she had ardently opposed in 1968. Now again, the notion, increasingly in play in high Democratic circles, that Teddy, who had amply confirmed his popular appeal when he campaigned for McGovern, should be the front-runner next time, was anathema to her. Also as in 1968, she was again no longer alone in discerning a pattern in the violence that had afflicted America since Dallas. Henceforward, the possibility of a third Kennedy assassination would be routinely broached whenever political commentators assessed the surviving brother’s prospects in 1976. Besides Chappaquiddick, fears for Teddy’s physical safety emerged as among the senator’s principal liabilities as a potential candidate.

Importantly, on November 12, 1972, Jackie had not viewed the Buckley broadcast alone. As she told Macmillan, she had watched it in the company of Onassis and eleven-year-old John. She and Ari had recently celebrated their fourth wedding anniversary with a party at El Morocco, attended by, among others, most of the Kennedys, with the exception of Teddy, who had been in Newark that evening, chasing votes for McGovern. The Callas affair and other trials notwithstanding, Jackie persisted in her considerable affection for the second husband who, as she later said, had “rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed in shadows.” She particularly appreciated his many ongoing kindnesses to her children, especially John, who had grown immensely fond of his stepfather. Onassis’s relationship with his own beloved son was fraught, not least because of Alexander’s abiding resentment of Jackie. At the same time, Ari seemed to enjoy and certainly excelled at being the formidable figure JFK’s son needed in the absence of his real father. The quiet commonplace scene of Jackie, Ari, and John watching Macmillan speak of President Kennedy in tender phrases, which, she rejoiced, the boy was old enough to understand, offers a telling snapshot of the frayed yet still oddly viable Onassis marriage two months before the sudden tragic event that was to forever destroy it.

On January 21, 1973, a plane carrying Alexander Onassis went down in Athens, critically injuring Ari’s son. In the wake of Alexander’s demise twenty-seven hours later there began to be nervous whispers among the Greek populace about “the curse.” Jackie had been accused of many things since the first Kennedy assassination, but nothing of the magnitude of what began to be said about her now. The death of Alexander Onassis took Jackie’s experience of the second injury to a whole new level, as the woman who had fled the United States in hopes of escaping annihilation found herself accused of transporting the very seeds of annihilation to Greece. While it is true that Christina Onassis, like her brother, had long resented Jackie, at this point Christina was merely reflecting the suspicions of many of her countrymen when she pointed out that prior to Jackie’s arrival, the Onassis family had been strong and well. “Before she came to us, she was by her American husband’s side when he died,” Christina railed. “My unlucky father had to go find her and bring her to our shores. Now, the curse is part of our family and before long she will kill us all.”

Jackie later reflected that when his son was killed, it had seemed as though Ari suddenly became old. Along similar lines, his secretary judged that the ordeal aged him by twenty years. In the end, this man who had amassed such great wealth and power had been powerless to protect his boy. Night after night on Skorpios, he would haunt Alexander’s burial place, bringing with him a bottle of ouzo and two glasses, one glass for the father and the other for the son. Addressing the grave as though the deceased were yet capable of hearing his laments, Onassis would ask, over and over again, if it were possible that such an accident should ever have occurred. Refusing to regard Alexander, let alone himself, as a mere victim of the world’s randomness, Onassis insisted that the fatal crash had to be the result of sabotage. Endlessly, obsessively, and not a little guiltily, he reviewed the precise circumstances of his son’s demise in hopes of determining who among his many many personal and professional enemies could be responsible.

When two major formal inquiries, one conducted by the Greek courts and the other by a respected British accident investigator in Onassis’s private employ, concluded that the crash had been accidental, Onassis indignantly rejected their findings. Frantic to wrest back control, or at least the sustaining illusion thereof, he offered a $20 million reward for information about the cause of the tragedy. He alternated between fighting to keep the inquiry open and insisting that he wanted to die. Such was Onassis’s demeanor that when Anthony Montague Browne, formerly Churchill’s private secretary, encountered Onassis again in this period, he feared for the unfortunate man’s reason.

In the meantime, Jackie and her husband seemed to have eerily exchanged positions. Now it was he who was the injured creature and she who strove to help his wounds to heal. She arranged a cruise from Dakar to the Antilles, a holiday in Mexico. When, in the course of the latter trip, Ari, as was his wont, suddenly began to sob, “Jackie put her arms around him, just like the Pieta, and held him,” remembered the fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert, who witnessed the scene at Loel and Gloria Guinness’s in Acapulco. “She let him cling to her for what seemed like ten minutes.” Still, nothing appeared to work. Hardly would Onassis return to Skorpios when his raging nocturnal soliloquies at Alexander’s grave would resume.

To make matters worse, though initially inclined to silence his daughter when she criticized Jackie in his presence, more and more the deeply superstitious Onassis found himself resignedly listening to Christina’s theory that it was Jackie—the “Black Widow,” as she called her—who was responsible for the ill fortune that had lately befallen the House of Onassis. Nor did the family’s afflictions cease with Alexander’s demise. Tina, the mother of Onassis’s children, died. The Onassis organization lost control of Olympic Airways. Several impending business deals soured. Onassis’s health decayed markedly due to the neuromuscular disease myasthenia gravis, lending credence to the view of Jackie as a contaminated carrier of catastrophe.

On the flight home from Mexico, Onassis rewrote his will in his daughter’s favor, leaving his widow a yearly income of $200,000 plus $25,000 a year for each of her children until they reached the age of twenty-one. And, three months before his death, he contacted the American lawyer Roy Cohn about his intention to divorce Jackie. When it became evident that Onassis did not have long to live, however, the divorce plans were abandoned. Jackie, Christina, Artemis, and other family members maintained a vigil at his bedside in the Paris hospital where he lay for weeks. Finally, assured that her husband’s condition was stable, Jackie went off to see the children in New York, where, on March 15, 1975, she learned that Onassis had died in her absence.

A smile wreathed Jackie’s face when the paparazzi greeted her at Orly Airport in Paris. Was her facial expression a conscious contrivance? A reflex action? A bit of both? In any case, coming on top of the fact that Jackie had not been with her second husband as he lay near death, that smile, a version of which she had often used to cover over her emotions, was now widely taken to suggest that she was oddly devoid of emotion—though not so oddly, perhaps, were she indeed the cold-blooded adventuress she had been portrayed as in 1968.

Again, when Jackie left the hospital after viewing her late husband’s corpse, she smiled fixedly as she passed through a gauntlet of jostling press. And again, at Lefkada Airport, near Skorpios, the widow’s countenance contrasted markedly with the unrestrained torment of Christina Onassis, who (rumored to have attempted suicide immediately after her father’s death) stood beside her as the body was removed from the aircraft in anticipation of a burial service at the same chapel where Jackie had been wed.