Jackie After O (25 page)

J
ackie was settling into her new routine at work and just getting to know the weekend house in northern New Jersey that she had bought almost twelve months earlier—a place that would have been completed sooner if it weren't for the past year's tribulations. She had hoped the house would be a new kind of island sanctuary—a place hidden by trees of the Great Eastern Forest with a private web of trails for her to ride on. The decorators had done a nice job filling the converted barn with big sofas in happy prints of orange, lemon, lime, peach, apricot and plum.
¹
The place was comfortable and welcoming, beckoning her over the George Washington Bridge as she drove her “jellybean green” BMW.

On top of the new house and the new job, she was also now dealing with the new reality that Caroline had just moved to London.
²

The tight threesome of Jackie, John, and Caroline was loosening and it was difficult for Jackie, as it is for many parents, to let go. But it was even more difficult for her. As a single mother with children whose last name was Kennedy, she had always tried to overcompensate for the parent who was gone while pushing her kids to achieve great things. When they were young, Jackie instructed their nannies to speak to them in their native foreign languages. She wanted her children to play musical instruments, to try sports—be it tennis or ballet. She also made sure they had a “normal” life, ensuring they were invited to parties thrown by friends who may have been too intimidated to ask for their company.

Caroline had been at Concord Academy, a boarding school that was only a few hours away by car. Now, she was on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, in a world that Jackie still knew was dangerous. Caroline was a lot like Jackie—sharp-witted, soft-spoken, and stubborn—with similar interests in art and literature. For Caroline's eighth birthday, Jackie asked her what she wanted. The girl requested the writer George Plimpton—thirty-eight years old at the time—to come to her party at Hammersmith Farm. She got him.

Caroline had spent much of her youth in controlled environments: gated in the White House, tracked by Secret Service agents, cloistered behind layers of security at 1040 Fifth, and attending school in Massachusetts as a
Kennedy
, which in a sense made her everyone's child. She was supposed to have started at Radcliffe for her freshman year of college but had changed her mind—finally ready to experience life far away from her mother's understandably watchful eye. She wanted freedom, even if just for a year, from following the family's well-worn path. She wanted freedom from the Kennedy name, and from the Kennedy geography, which was especially centered in Boston and Cambridge, cities that were, at that very moment, squabbling over which one should become the home of the JFK presidential library. She wanted freedom from the expectation that if she went abroad to study, it would be at the Sorbonne.

And so Jackie was left in New York with John, who was still attending the exclusive and highly competitive boys-only Collegiate School, a mere crosstown bus ride away, behind its club-like red doors. There, students referred to one another by their often-famous last names and assumed many of their classmates would go to Harvard—just like them. Unlike Caroline, John was a mystery to his mother, especially at this stage of life. A rebellious teenager with bushy hair and a goofy nature who could be disruptive in class, Jackie found it difficult to relate to him one-on-one. She was exasperated trying to have a conversation with him. Singleton, who had a sister close in age to John, told Jackie about a minor craze for a young-adult book by Peter Beagle that Viking had published called
The Last Unicorn
.

“Ask him about it,” she suggested, after Jackie had confessed to being at her wit's end with the boy.

That night, Jackie brought up the topic at the dinner table and John knew all about it. She thanked Singleton for helping her connect with her son.

With or without conversation, Jackie and John spent many quiet nights at home. She helped him with his homework and she did her own, poring over manuscripts, drafting memos. She rarely attended social events, despite the many tempting invitations she had. And when she did, they were intellectual forums, fund-raising committee meetings, or publishing gatherings. In her spare time, she jogged in Central Park, practiced yoga, and went for weekly psychotherapy sessions.

In London, Jackie had made arrangements for Caroline to stay at the Kensington home of Sir Hugh Fraser while the girl looked for a more permanent apartment. Fraser, a Tory member of Parliament who had known JFK since Joe Kennedy's days as ambassador to London, was married to Antonia Fraser, an author friend of Jackie's. The Frasers had five teenage children of their own, and were happy to host Caroline, with Fraser personally driving her to class on his way to work each day. But on October 23, Fraser's usual 8:30
AM
departure time was delayed by a phone call with another MP. Caroline, waiting in the drawing room, was looking idly out the window at Fraser's red Jaguar and saw a neighbor walking his two poodles, pausing to look at a package in the gutter, when an explosion threw Caroline on her back. Fraser, who was still in his pajamas, was propelled from his chair by the percussion that crashed the windows. Outside was a horrible scene. Fraser's car was shredded, in flames, and upended on its roof. The neighbor's torso had landed in the garden while his legs had been blasted to the other side of the road. The wrought iron fence was blown in, and the blast felt a half mile away. Adding to the chaos was the sound of sirens blaring that awful high-pitched wale of European ambulances and police cars.

Scotland Yard believed the bomb had been planted by the Irish Republican Army and was meant for Fraser, who frequently spoke out against terrorism. No one thought the target was the now-dead neighbor—a renowned cancer specialist—and certainly not for Caroline, who, deeply shaken, was whisked to a nearby house for safekeeping by police.

“There is no doubt it was meant for me,” Fraser said. “Somebody obviously wants to blow me up. I am not surprised. I can think of a lot of people who would want to blow me up.”
³

Jackie, roused from sleep at 1040 Fifth by yet another heart-thumping transatlantic phone call at an hour that would cause an adrenaline rush for anyone, could hardly believe the words she was hearing. More violence. More death. Was anyone safe anywhere? Since the assassination, Jackie was so shell-shocked that she couldn't even watch anything remotely disturbing on television. Now here she was listening to her daughter explain that if Sir Fraser had just gotten dressed and out the door on time, she would have been blown to bits.

Jackie wanted her home immediately. Caroline didn't want to leave just as the school year was beginning, though. And besides, she was not the target. Jackie pleaded with Scotland Yard to provide protection for the girl, who was a month shy of her eighteenth birthday, but they refused.
⁴
Jackie was being forced to let go. If Caroline was going to stay, she at least had to agree to one demand: she could not live in her own apartment. Instead, she moved in with her uncle Stash Radziwill, and tried to put the incident behind her.

Caroline was saddened by the neighbor's death and the continually unnerving acts by the IRA, but she seemed to personify the British mantra: keep calm and carry on. There seemed to be lots of fun things and interesting people in swinging London, where she spent her days wearing blue corduroys, a turtleneck, and scuffed suede shoes to study at the National Gallery or at Sotheby's on New Bond Street. At night London gave New York some stiff competition. Queen was singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” at the Hammersmith Odeon, with Freddie Mercury in a white satin jumpsuit. Led Zeppelin was at Earl's Court. There were supper clubs like Tramp, packed with Bright Young Things, and at Annabels, people were doing a new dance called the Hustle. There were plays and movies, and dinners at Claridge's. Caroline had invitations from the rich, famous, and noble, with the Fraser kids adding to the introductions around the city. There were trips to country estates. There were boys. And there were big plans percolating for her eighteenth birthday in November. As always, there were paparazzi trailing her most mundane acts, like having a sandwich with friends after class. On one of these occasions, annoyed by the photographers on the other side of the café window, she carried a glass of water outside and threw it in the face of one of the cameramen, elevating the situation to a news story that her mother scolded her about.
⁵
In fact, Jackie was increasingly alarmed by Caroline's behavior and partying. Scale back the birthday party, she told her. Buckle down. You may be in London, but you're still a Kennedy.

Caroline walking on a rain-soaked street on her way to a course at Sotheby's after house hunting with her mother, London, England.
(Express/Getty Images)

Meanwhile, in New York, the Committee to Save Grand Central was still in a public relations battle. Having opened a storefront near the terminal in August, the group was selling $6 polyester neckties with red or golden bitten apples on them, representing the slogan, “No More Bites Out of the Big Apple.” They were hoping to build more support for the city when it made its case on October 21, arguing that the terminal's landmark status should be upheld.
⁶
In the weeks that it would take the court to decide the case, Jackie kept busy outside of work. She toured the city room of the
New York Post
with her old friend Dorothy Schiff, who was now encouraging her to run for the Senate. She attended an affair to honor the writer Lillian Hellman. She was on the town with novelist Philip Roth. She hosted a first-anniversary fund-raiser for the International Center for Photography, arriving with Karl Katz, her “intellectual boyfriend.” In keeping with the more subdued look she had recently adopted, Jackie wore a black Ungaro tunic and pants to the event, stocked with people such as Doris Duke and Marella Agnelli. The focus of the night was an exhibit by Ernst Haas, a pioneer in color photography. After dinner, she raised her glass to thank a few people, went downstairs to listen to a bit of Japanese music, and left in low-key fashion.
⁷

Even her lunch venues were quieter, which was not surprising after what Truman Capote had just written in the November issue of
Esquire
, a roman à clef called “La Côte Basque 1965” about high society, how vacuous it was, how obsessed it was with where they sat, with whom, and who else was there. Capote's piece centered on having lunch with the fictitious Lady Ina Coolbirth at the famous restaurant while famous people trickled in. The subtitle of the piece was “Where the
plat du jour
is seated somewhere in sight.” Of course, his words stabbed and sliced like cutlery. In one scene, Jackie and Lee—their real names published—arrive and take their seats.

Capote's voice in the article then goes on to recall a night at a drag queen contest in Harlem.