Jackie After O (16 page)

March 15, 1975. Jackie leaves 1040 Fifth Avenue for the airport on the day Onassis died.
(Ron Galella/WireImage)

When it was finally time to go in the early evening, she stepped onto the elevator. To brace herself for a crush of cameras, she slid on her oversize sunglasses, despite the day's last light at just past 6:00
PM
. While the glasses covered much of her face, they could not hide everything. Some of the hundred gawkers and journalists on the sidewalk clustered around the canopy at 1040 saw a faint, odd smirk on her face. For a woman whose stoicism and perfect manners defined the most public and analyzed funeral of the twentieth century—that of John F. Kennedy—people wondered if her smile was the mask of shock, a reflexive, almost embarrassed pose, or a signal to the world that she had finally been liberated.

Escorted by four uniformed New York City policemen and four secret service agents, the brisk wind tussled her center-part hair. The sidewalk was so packed that she could not have noticed Ron Galella, the stalking paparazzo she had sued in 1972; he was maintaining his court-ordered twenty-five-foot distance from her.

Galella focused his lens on her, noting what a “madhouse” it was, and watching as she pushed her way through the crowd before she disappeared.
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The chauffeur drove away to the airport named after Jackie's first husband.
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The grin did not fade as she left. When she arrived at the airport, she was escorted directly to the gate and boarded the plane.

There is nothing quite like the darkness over the Atlantic Ocean in the middle of the night. And as Jackie hurtled through it on Air France flight 070, she had to prepare for what she would say to the world about the loss of another husband. Thankfully, she was good at conjuring quotes for speeches or finding the right words about death. She had given many suggestions to JFK and RFK over the years, including the Shakespeare quote that Bobby read at Jack's funeral:

Her words for Ari would surely be a lot less poetic.

France is a country that loved her as much as she loved it. After her junior year abroad studying at the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne, and her special summer with Lee, Jackie's next trip to Paris happened a decade later when she returned with President Kennedy on his first state trip to the continent. For the presidential gala there, she wore a simple sheaf gown adorned with pink-and-white lace creatively made of raffia. She lit up the room. Or, as one writer said about that evening, “Truly la vie was very much en rose.”
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The next night, at a state dinner at Versailles, she wore a Givenchy gown with a cream robe, prompting Charles de Gaulle to say she belonged in a Watteau painting.
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With her command of the language and knowledge of French culture, she interpreted de Gaulle for her husband, who acknowledged his wife's popularity there by saying, “I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself to this audience. I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.”

That was then.

Now, Jackie knew that the French, like the rest of the world, were wondering why she was not at Onassis's side when he died.

Her plane landed in Paris at 7:00
AM
. She made no statement, waited in the VIP lounge while customs handled passport formalities, and then a chauffeur drove her to 88 Avenue Foch. There, she shut herself in from the media horde and let most of the day pass. At 5:15 she emerged, accompanied by Onassis's private nurse, Monique Clouthier, an imposing bodyguard, and her sisters-in-law Artemis and Kalliroi.
³⁰
The group left for American Hospital, where her husband's body was laid out on a bier in a hospital chapel, surrounded by white flowers.

Christina had been at her father's side since Friday and into Saturday, when he died. But she was not at the hospital when Jackie arrived Sunday evening. The two were not friendly, not from the very beginning. In fact, Christina and her brother had cried during the reception on the yacht after their father's wedding to Jackie, the siblings clinging to the childish fantasy that their divorced parents would reunite. But Christina was not just avoiding her stepmother at the hospital. She was devastated. Indeed her life was a Greek tragedy. In 1946, Onassis had married Athina (Tina) Livanos, the teenage daughter of shipping magnate Stavros Livanos—Onassis's industrial rival. Tina divorced him in 1960 after catching him having sex with Callas in the saloon of the yacht. Tina then married Stavros Niarchos—another shipping rival—whose previous wife, Eugenia, was Tina's sister. Eugenia had recently died of a suspicious overdose. With her mother married to her uncle, Christina—who battled weight problems, dressed sloppily, and was woefully insecure about her relationships and appearance—now had to endure an international fashion icon for a stepmother, leaving the young woman to feel even worse about herself (despite constant dieting and a nose job). Christina, of course, also had assumed that Jackie was a gold digger. Then, in the last two years, another string of tragedies pushed her to the brink. Her mother and brother dead, she had married California real estate broker Joseph Bolker and divorced him within a nine-month period after her father threatened to cut her out of his will over the relationship. But Christina had reconciled with Onassis.
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Now both men in her life were gone.

Jackie, in her leather trench, looked like a very different widow this time. She wore no hat or veil as she pushed through the heavy bronze doors of the hospital's chilly chapel where Onassis's body laid with a Greek Orthodox icon on his chest and flowers, including the orchid she had sent. She spent fifteen minutes with the body.
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The last time she had knelt before a husband's bier, it was in the East Room of the White House, at 4:00
AM
, immediately after Jack's body had been transferred from the naval hospital. A priest had said a few words and there were white candles around the casket, along with Kennedy's closest associates. Jackie approached the casket, buried her head in the flag, and then left after a few moments.
³³
Jackie had begun visualizing JFK's funeral on the Air Force One flight back from Dallas, directing even the smallest details that would be meaningful, such as having military cadets, with whom the president had been impressed on a trip to Ireland, lay a wreath. She told Bobby to check a guidebook on Lincoln's funeral for answers about the lying-in-state process. And she had the White House upholsterer use the black cambric fabric he would typically apply as a finishing touch on the bottom of a chair to drape over the windows, mantels, and chandeliers. There was plenty of it to hang and the upholsterer and his wife worked through the night to get it done before Jackie and the president's body arrived.
³⁴

For RFK's funeral, besides ensuring that Ethel had the nuns she had requested singing at the Mass, Jackie noticed that Bobby's casket was only inches off the floor of the funeral train car as it traveled between New York and Washington. With so many people coming to the tracks along the route to pay their respects, she asked for help in raising the casket. “It should be elevated so that the crowds of people watching the train might have the chance to see it,” she implored one man on the train.
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But Jackie did not need to bother herself with the funeral details of her now late husband; those were being handled by the Onassis clan and his loyal associates. As she left the hospital chapel, escorted again by the nurse and the bodyguard, she put her glasses back on and knew that this time she would not be stage crafting the event. She simply needed to show up at the same chapel on Skorpios where they had been married not quite seven years before.

While Jackie and Onassis had pulled away from each other toward the end, Christina's relationship with her father had become closer. They had nothing left but each other. Having been there when he died, Christina, twenty-four, refused to leave his body on the flight from Paris to Aktion, near Skorpios, where he would be buried. Jackie, Ted Kennedy, and the three Onassis sisters had flown ahead and were waiting on the tarmac to greet the casket and a heavily sedated Christina. As Christina descended the plane steps, Jackie approached her and gently held her hand. Fragile under the best of circumstances, Christina was weeping, her black hair flying in the wind, her skin a yellow hue.
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March 18, 1975. Jackie walks with Christina, followed by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, as they leave an Olympic Airlines plane carrying Onassis's body.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

“Why are all these people around us? Get them away,” she demanded.

“Take it easy now,” Jackie told her. “It will soon be over.”
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Separately, the Kennedy children and their grandmother Janet had arrived in Aktion, and from there everyone drove in limos to Nydri, a tiny fishing village, before transferring by boat to Skorpios. It was a cool, wet day—March 18, 1975.

John, fourteen, and Caroline, seventeen, in jeans and sweaters, drove a golf cart around Skorpios, reminiscing about happier times there: his speedboat, her white pony, fishing trips, long days under the sun with their cousins. But they could hear the hum and chop of boats and helicopters bringing mourners and the unwelcomed media to the private island. Now it was time for them to head to their guesthouse to change into more appropriate funeral attire—a blue blazer and tie for him and a blue sweater and gray skirt for her—and head for the dock. There was nothing left to do but wait there with their grandmother for the cabin cruiser containing the casket that held Onassis. Among those waiting were Onassis's little dog, Vana, a stray that had attached herself to the magnate and always had a sixth sense about his arrival on Skorpios.
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In the distance was the
Christina
, with its anchor down. Its flag was at half-mast. The crew wore black. The Skorpios chapel's bell tolled.

March 18, 1975. Jackie's mother, Janet Auchincloss (left), with John Jr., Caroline, and several others, awaiting the arrival of Onassis's body on Skorpios.
(Bettmann/CORBIS)

In the months leading up to this day, Onassis's zest and sturdy body had been slowly diminished by his disease, which forced him to clip tape or the adhesive strips from Band-Aids and tack them onto his eyelids to hold them open. He had also been suddenly ravaged by the right-left-right punches of flu, pneumonia, and gallbladder surgery, from which he never recovered.