Jackie After O: One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams

202 Pages·2011·2.98 MB·English

by  Cassidy Tina

Jackie After O
One Remarkable Year When
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied
Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams
TINA CASSIDY
DEDICATION
For my father
And my grandmother Genevieve Damaschi,
whose own third act still inspires
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter One: The Wife
Chapter Two: The Writer
Chapter Three: The Preservationist
Chapter Four: The Widow
Chapter Five: The Target
Chapter Six: The Seeker
Chapter Seven: The Hot Prospect
Chapter Eight: The Working Woman
Chapter Nine: The Empty Nester
Epilogue
Bibliography
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Notes
Footnotes
Other Works
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
A
merica. 1975. The Watergate trials ended, finding the defendants guilty and
creating a generation of cynics. The United States was laboring to recover from a
crippling oil crisis but had finally withdrawn from Vietnam. Tammy Wynette
had a new hit song called “Stand By Your Man,” while women still campaigned
for the Equal Rights Amendment as they entered the workforce in record
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numbers and divorced in record numbers.
It was a year when Americans were drained by politics, war, and a bad
economy. Yet they were hopeful, as if they knew things could not get any worse.
Two young men launched a company called Microsoft. From coast to coast,
people flocked to discos to do the Hustle. In England, a band named the Sex
Pistols gave birth to punk and the British Conservative Party had chosen its first
female leader, Margaret Thatcher, as Parliament passed the Sex Discrimination
and Equal Pay Act.
Jacqueline Onassis was forty-five, living in New York, and going through
her own confusing metamorphosis. The health of her much older husband, the
millionaire Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, was rapidly declining, as
was the diseased state of what was a second marriage for both of them. Her
daughter, Caroline, was in her last year of high school. Jackie’s younger child,
John Jr., was a high school freshman, busy with his own friends and interests.
Much of her day-to-day work as a parent was done, and aside from dabbling in
charities and being the almost-estranged wife of a man who lived abroad, she
had few other responsibilities outside of her very regular hair appointments,
which happened to be once a week at Kenneth.
Like so many parents of grown children who find themselves suddenly
single—or just unhappy at midlife—Jackie had begun to think more about
herself and how, despite having such a full closet, she felt empty. She had
enough money to continue living a life of leisure, albeit one where she was
always trying to escape the haunting assassination of her first husband, President
John F. Kennedy. But what ambitions and talents had she tucked away two
decades earlier, to become—in succession—a wife, the First Lady, an
international fashion icon, a grieving widow, a single parent, and later, a
stepmother and jet-setter?
The world knew she was beautiful, stoic, and rich, with impeccable taste and
a soft, little-girl voice that turned out marvelous French. It did not know, or
perhaps did not care, that she was interested in history and architecture, that she
was a talented writer, a voracious reader, and a person of ambitions of her own.
Now, on the precipice of 1975, when society all around her was changing, Jackie
was beginning to wonder how she should spend the rest of her life. What would
make her truly happy? These were especially difficult questions for a woman
whose pre–World War II generation and social stratum had bred her for nothing
more than marriage and motherhood and the attendant accessory decorating and
volunteering opportunities.
The simple title she had earned—truly earned—twice, was wife. Now, she
was about to become something else.
CHAPTER ONE
The Wife
I
n 1953, Jack Kennedy was a freshman senator from Massachusetts with a
bothersome back and enormous aspirations. He had just married a young woman
named Jacqueline Bouvier, whom he had met at the home of mutual friends in
Washington, DC, the city where Jackie, with wavy, short brown hair, had been
working as a newspaper photographer, taking headshots for a brief question-and-
answer column she wrote about her subjects.
Jack wasn’t the only Kennedy busy in the capital. His younger brother
Robert was assistant counsel to Roy Cohn, the chief investigator working for
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade. Bobby had begun digging
through records in an attempt to uncover those who might have been trading
with Communist China, and he suspected a mysterious Greek, Aristotle Onassis,
was among them. Bobby could not find proof of any red links, but he instead
found that using a front corporation in America five years earlier Onassis had
illegally bought ten US surplus tankers that were forbidden for purchase by
foreigners. Bobby had a win; soon a federal grand jury handed down an
indictment of Onassis, who was ordered to pay a $7 million fine.
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“This Irish fuck wants to bury me,” Onassis complained to a friend.
But instead of avoiding the Kennedys, Onassis pulled them into his orbit.
A few years after the indictment, Jack and his bride were on vacation in
Cannes visiting Jack’s father—Joseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to the
United Kingdom—and doing what fine young things did in the Riviera then:
they basked on the beach and went out to dinner with the head of Fiat, Gianni
Agnelli, and his wife, Marella. But one of the nights was even more special.
Winston Churchill was aboard Onassis’s ship, anchored off Monaco, where the
Greek also based his family and business. Churchill sprung the idea to invite the
Kennedys, to see if JFK was indeed presidential material, as he had been
hearing.
Jack was eager to meet Churchill, a hero of his since the war. He had
devoured the former prime minister’s books, even giving a nod to a 1938
Churchill title, While England Slept, when he published his Harvard thesis, Why
England Slept, two years later. But Churchill, by the time Jack met him, was a
round and confused octogenarian who had no idea which guest Jack was when
he arrived for cocktails aboard the lavish Christina with Jackie and the Agnellis.
“I knew your father so well,” Churchill said, leaning in to the wrong person
on the boat. Jackie realized that the old man was “gaga” and felt sorry her
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husband was meeting him “too late.” While Jack struggled to make
conversation with the old man, Onassis absorbed Jackie with his eyes, noting her
expensive but simple white suit as he gave her a tour of his 315-foot yacht. The
ship was a former Canadian frigate on which he had spent more than $4 million
to install forty-two extension telephones, a surgical operating room, Siena
marble baths, a mosaic dance floor that could open to a pool, and bar stools
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covered in whale scrotum. (He used to ask women if they enjoyed “sitting on
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the largest balls in the world.” )
But the aesthetic matched Onassis’s swaggering personality. With his
smooth olive skin, habitual Cuban cigar, dousing of cologne, and hair thick with
Brilliantine, he could be magnetic. He had a capacity to listen, observe, and
collect beautiful women. But his charms did not appear to work on Jackie that
night. He noticed that she was pleasant but aloof during the tour, making
mindless small talk with him “in her little voice.”
“I must ask you to leave by 7:30,” Onassis told the group. “Sir Winston dines
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sharp at 8:15.”
After the group left, Costa Gratsos, a close friend of Onassis, guessed what
was on his boss’s mind.
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“Don’t fuck up her life just to get even with Bobby,” Gratsos said.
Jackie’s next fateful meeting with Onassis came during the presidency after her
infant son Patrick, born prematurely, died when he was just two days old in
August 1963. The Kennedys were devastated, and Jackie, on Cape Cod,