Jackie After O (15 page)

“He's my husband, and I believe this switch is necessary,” said Jackie. “Let's not argue.”
³

Jackie took Onassis, bundled in a heavy overcoat and scarf, to the Athens airport Thursday, where they boarded an Olympic Learjet specially equipped with a bed and medical equipment that had been on the runway on standby for three days.
⁴
Doctors and his entourage boarded a Boeing 707.
⁵

In France, before checking into the hospital, Onassis wanted to spend one last night at his apartment at 88 Avenue Foch, near the Bois de Boulogne. He arrived there by limousine, slumped between Jackie and Christina. Set on one of the city's most prestigious streets, lined with chestnut trees and grand palaces, and occupied by super-rich families such as the Rothschilds, the fifteen-room apartment had romantic views of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.
⁶
And on this day, the entrance was swarming with shouting paparazzi when he arrived. Onassis looked gaunt, his silver hair greased back, black-as-night arching eyebrows framing his bugged-out eyes, his large nose further exaggerated by weight loss. Still fiercely proud, he insisted on walking in unaided.
⁷

February 6, 1975. Jackie and Christina arriving at Onassis's apartment in France, after a flight from Athens, the night before he entered the hospital.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

“I don't want those sons of bitches to see me being held up by a couple of women,” he snarled.
⁸

Jackie stayed at the apartment that night while Christina—who knew of her father's plans to divorce—took a room at the Plaza Athénée.
⁹
Onassis settled in to his large bedroom on the fifth floor. The room had a stone fireplace, an antique brass bed, and family photographs. There were red velvet drapes, a gilt dressing screen, and fake Watteau paintings on gray silk walls. On his nightstand were a crucifix and a calculator. He put on blue silk pajamas and a robe custom-made by Lanvin.
¹⁰
But he moaned through the night, struggling to get comfortable enough to sleep.
¹¹

The next day guards drove him in a Peugeot from the apartment's underground garage to the hospital, and he settled in a spacious room in the more modern wing named after Eisenhower, the thought of whom would have reminded Jackie of her painful preinaugural tour of the White House, as well as the threat to Lafayette Square.
¹²

On February 9, surgeons removed his gallbladder.

“It was a small operation and now he is feeling much better,” Onassis's right-hand man, Johnny Meyer, told a press conference at the hospital. “He can stand up. That's all I can say.”
¹³

February 7, 1975. Onassis arrives at American Hospital in Paris.
(Richard Melloul/Sygma/CORBIS)

In truth, there were complications. Onassis developed hepatitis and pneumonia. He was on massive doses of antibiotics and staff fed him intravenously while he was on a respirator in the intensive care unit.
¹⁴
Over the next week, the hospital issued a statement downgrading his status to “guarded.”
¹⁵
The Onassis women held vigil, with Jackie avoiding the hospital room when Christina was there, and vice versa. When Onassis was awake for brief moments, he spoke mostly Greek.
¹⁶

Jackie visited him daily, but the intensive care unit restricted visiting hours. In her free time, she went to Notre Dame, lit a candle, and said a prayer for her husband. She also visited the Louvre, the Orangerie, the hairdresser, and shopped, with the retail therapy going especially deep at Ungaro.
¹⁷

Ten days after the surgery, Onassis remained unconscious but his condition had stabilized. Doctors told Jackie—away from her kids for nearly three weeks—that it was safe to fly home. But before she left by Olympic Learjet on February 19, she consulted with a trusted physician in New York who told her she should stay. Onassis's condition was grave, and the whole world was watching, he said. She ignored his advice. John, always a rascal, was fourteen, and in New York alone with only secret service agents and their longtime governess and cook, Marta Sgubin, watching over him. It was also the season for him to visit boarding schools he might attend the following year. Caroline, reserved and mature for her age, was a senior at Concord Academy, a boarding school outside of Boston. On top of Jackie needing to be with John, a documentary that Caroline had worked on about Tennessee coal miners was airing on NBC.
¹⁸
Caroline had traveled in the summer of 1973 to the Appalachian community with a high school friend after learning about it through the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation, which was funding an oral history project led by a New York nun. Jackie didn't want to miss the documentary's debut and she planned to host a party in her daughter's honor.
¹⁹

Back at her apartment in New York, Jackie immediately called the hospital to check on Onassis. Artemis, the sister-in-law with whom Jackie was closest, said his condition was unchanged.

Jackie's apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue had the classic look inside and out of a prewar building: large windows, detailed moldings, nickel fixtures, arched doorways. After deciding she could no longer live in Washington after the assassination because tourists were so aggressive that they picnicked outside the home where she and the kids stayed, this home felt pleasantly familiar to her. It was designed in the 1920s by Rosario Candela, the same man who did 740 Park, her grandfather's apartment building where she had lived as a girl. The apartment at 1040 Fifth, part of a stately limestone building, had cost her $200,000, an enormous sum in 1964.
²⁰
It had five bathrooms and five bedrooms,
²¹
and black-and-white marble flooring greeted guests as they stepped off the private elevator directly into her fifteenth-floor home. The large, square, paneled living room with parquet floors and tall French windows, dressed by the famous drapery master John Fowler, could have felt stiff with art by John Singer Sargent, velvet Louis XVI chairs, and Roman sculptures of Hercules and a boy's head, both of which JFK had bought in Italy for his wife. But John's drum kit kept it real, along with a world map covered with pins that showed where Jack had traveled during his presidency. From the living room, she enjoyed the view of the Central Park Reservoir and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, watching the people below through a telescope.
²²

February 13, 1975. Jackie leaving the hospital in Paris.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

She was there, in her home, on Saturday, March 15, 1975. When the phone rang just after 7:30
AM
, she heard the news from Artemis: Onassis had taken a turn for the worse. Jackie made immediate plans to leave. Before she could get to the airport, Artemis called again.

“He's dead,” she said. “Christina was with him when he left us.”
²³

The loftily named Aristotle Socrates Onassis, short and square with black eyes and a shock of silver hair, was consumed by pneumonia and took his last breath in American Hospital in Paris.

Although many reported him to be six years younger because he had lied about his age for so long, he was seventy-five, Jackie just forty-five. She was not there to cradle his head, to watch his final breath, or to hear his last words. She did not call the priest to administer last rites. In more ways than one, there was an ocean between them, more awkward than ever, and Jackie knew that she must cross it one last time, in spectacular fashion, for his funeral.

She hung up the phone, called her sister Lee, and told her not to come to the funeral. Funerals were one thing whose stagecraft Jackie was an expert in and the last thing anyone wanted was the media bringing up the old story about her sister's relationship with Onassis, which had happened before Jackie's engagement to him.

The next call went to her brother-in-law Ted Kennedy, who had assumed a paternalistic role after Bobby's assassination and remained a close confidant to Jackie. Ted would meet her in Paris. She also phoned Nancy Tuckerman, who agreed to meet her at the airport for the next Air France flight out.
²⁴
Finally, she called her mother, and arranged for her to bring her kids on a separate flight.

But Jackie had one other person to tell—a guest in her house. The documentary film that Caroline had been working on was under the watch of producer Karen Lerner, the ex-wife of Alan Jay Lerner, who had written the musical
Camelot
. Indeed, this was the same Camelot that had been the inspiration for the Kennedy presidential myth, a concept that Jackie herself had applied in an interview a week after her husband's assassination. Karen Lerner had slept at Jackie's the previous night in preparation for the film's debut and the party Jackie had planned to host the next night. Lerner was still there, in the room where Onassis had typically stayed, when Jackie came in and said, “Ari's dead. I'm going to Paris, so you stay here and be the hostess … I don't want anything to disturb this—it's for Caroline and I just want it to go ahead.”
²⁵

Then Jackie dressed for mourning, again, this time in a black turtleneck sweater, skirt, stockings, and shoes, topped with a black leather trench coat cinched at the waist, looking more like a chic urbanite than a devastated widow. It was a long day, stuck in her apartment, with a throng of media outside, waiting for her to leave for the overnight flight to Paris.

March 15, 1975. Jackie, barely visible in the scrum and wearing sunglasses, leaves her New York apartment for Paris, where Onassis had died earlier that day.
(Ron Galella)