Jackie After O (26 page)

The story ends with Lady Coolbirth disclosing that she is getting a divorce. “But I can't live without a man,” she says half-drunk on Cristal. “Women like me have no other focus, no other way of scheduling our lives. Even if we hate him, even if he's an iron head with a cotton heart, it's better than this footloose routine.”
¹⁰

What Capote was suggesting in his piece was that some women—even in 1975—would never be happy alone, without a rich husband. It was as if he was needling not only Jackie but Lee, who had left Sarah Lawrence College in her sophomore year to marry Michael Canfield, moved to London, got divorced, married a prince, had two kids, decorated a couple of fabulous homes, and tried acting, playing Laura in
The Philadelphia Story
onstage in Chicago.
Time's
review of her performance said she was “only slightly less animated than the portrait of herself that hung over the mantel.” By 1972 Lee decided it was time to move back to New York, without her husband, and they split themselves and the kids: Anthony stayed in England and Tina came back with Lee, settling in an apartment overlooking Central Park three blocks from Jackie.

Lee and Jackie did not look much alike, but they were close in other ways—talking on the phone most every day, having lunch regularly, and sharing vacations. Now they were geographically connected, with their lives taking on an odd parallel. Their kids were similar ages. Their second marriages were over, with Lee's divorce final in July 1974. Both sisters, so accustomed to being defined by men, had to find their own way to make it. Lee landed a gig with CBS doing interviews with famous people, most of whom happened to be her friends. In one episode, she asked Rudolph Nureyev, an openly gay ballet dancer, if he ever planned to get married. “One doesn't expect close friends to ask such silly questions,” he said, blushing. Of Halston, another guest on her show, she asked what clothes women could buy for $25. “Nothing,” he said. The network canceled the program after six episodes.

Lee also considered going into newspaper journalism, the profession her sister had loved, but instead she set about writing memoirs of her childhood. The manuscript was due to Delacorte Press in October 1975. That project had prompted an attic expedition that unearthed the old scrapbook,
One Special Summer
, which Delacorte had recently published. The new memoir, which she was plotting out in longhand in a spiral notebook, seemed a lot harder to write than the travelogue. Delacorte had given her a reported $250,000 advance, and Lee was granting interviews so that people knew she was working on it.

“People always write about me as the girl who has everything,” Lee huffed to
McCall's
. “They always ask this silly question, ‘Why should the girl who has everything do anything?' It's so unfair. Gloria Steinem says they do that only 'cause you're a woman. They'd never do that to a man, and to a large extent, I think that's true.”

Still, what would Lee do? What
could
Lee do?

“I've painted but I am not a painter. Nor an actress. Nor a writer,” she told
McCall's.
“I was reading Thomas Wolfe, and he said he was not a writer. I understand that. I know people who have written books, but they aren't writers either. It would be presumptuous to say I could direct, but I certainly could do producing. I have the ability to put something together. If something interested me enough and I thought I could do it, I'd make a stab at it. I've never been sorry about anything I've done in my field and I'll do it all again. I'll never find myself just staring out the window.”
¹¹

Unlike Lee, Jackie had always been more purposeful, more sure of herself, more able to recover.

Reading Capote's fiction, Jackie might have remembered an interview she granted in 1972 with a newspaper in Tehran, where Onassis was trying to work out an oil deal. A reporter had asked her what differences there were in her two husbands. “People often forget,” she said, avoiding a more direct answer, “that I was Jacqueline Lee Bouvier before being Mrs. Kennedy or Mrs. Onassis.”
¹²

Capote was not the only one writing nasty things about Jackie in the fall of 1975. Sally Quinn, Ben Bradlee's third wife and a feature writer at the
Washington Post
, had practically made a beat out of her, following her around to events that fall and summing up the post-Onassis era by responding to Capote's piece of fiction.

“This is the kind of thing that people used to say about Jackie Onassis,” Quinn wrote. “It is the kind of thing that would be hard to say about her now. She is acting like a person who is interested for the first time in making herself feel important. Not important as Mrs. Kennedy or Mrs. Onassis, but as someone in her own right.” But then Quinn used the journalistic disguise of her own thoughts by inserting what “skeptics” thought. And skeptics, she wrote, believed Jackie “is only following a trend, that she is going literary-journalistic because since Watergate that's where the glamour is, and the action. They say that the jet set frivolity is out and serious thinking, books and newspapers are in. In a few years they say, she will be following whatever
nouvelle vague
there is. They say she is only doing something now because it is currently fashionable for women to do something.”
¹³

As hard as Jackie tried to lead a life that was quieter and more intellectual, one that had a vibe of self-sufficiency and self-assuredness as a single working mother, her past kept interrupting.

When Lee began working on her memoir—ultimately never completed—exploring what her childhood on Long Island had been like, she spent some time with her aunt and cousin, both named Edith Beale, living in East Hampton at their waterfront home called Grey Gardens. But “Big Edie” and “Little Edie,” like the house itself, were falling apart, in spectacular fashion.

Big Edie was a Bouvier, the sister of Jackie and Lee's father. She had married Phelan Beale and they had two sons and a daughter before he divorced her, leaving her with the house and no money. Like Jackie, little Edie had grown up privileged, and had been a Farmington debutante who lived in New York City for a while in her twenties. But her mother had insisted she return to Grey Gardens to keep her company in the big house. From that point on, the Edies spiraled away from their privileged life, passing eccentricity, and slamming into a wall of mental instability. By 1975, Little Edie was fifty-six years old (her mother seventy-nine). She wore her skirts upside down, pinning the hem so it stayed at her waist, and she wrapped sweaters on her head like a hijab, covering up the fact that she had alopecia, which caused her hair to fall out. Meanwhile, Big Edie didn't get out of her twin bed much. Propped up by pillows, occasionally only partially dressed, she ate ice cream from a tub with a plastic knife, sang like a proud Broadway star, and barked orders at her daughter. Each of these women appeared as abandoned as the shingled house, which time—and raccoons, encouraged by Little Edie's offerings of Wonder bread and Cat Chow—had extensively infiltrated. The cats, of which there were many, pissed shamelessly behind an oil portrait of Big Edie in her stunning youth, now seemingly forgotten in a corner on the floor.

Lee and Peter Beard had thought the Beales' story would make a good film. But they couldn't finance the project. Instead they turned it over to the Maysles brothers, David and Albert, who understood immediately how sensational the setting and the characters could be on film. That they were Jackie's relatives made it all the more bizarre and delicious. In order to tolerate the flea infestation in the house, the documentarians wore flea collars around their ankles as they followed the women using a handheld camera, a style of filmmaking called direct cinema, a precursor to reality TV. The Maysleses produced a film that for ninety-four painful minutes seemed to express the anxiety of a generation of women who were bred to believe their lives would be meaningless without a husband to support them in every possible way. There, in Technicolor, the story line played out: this is what became of old maids. They filled the emptiness with trash and they filled the silence with rants and old records. The cats, of course, were like an icon in a Renaissance painting, always there in the background, symbolizing the subject's state of spinster hell.

“Mother sees me as a baby. I see myself as a little girl. The Maysleses see me as a woman,” little Edie deluded to the camera.
¹⁴
The film debuted at the New York Film Festival before spreading to general theaters in the fall of 1975. There was no footage of Jackie in the movie, but it was nearly impossible for anyone to watch and not wonder how two branches of the same of the family could live such different lives. Jackie and Lee had not ignored the Beales. In 1972 they and some other relatives had spent $4,000 cleaning the house and another $30,000 repairing the mansion as local health officials threatened to condemn it.
¹⁵
But this was one of those instances where money could not solve the problems, could not repair every hole in the Beales' lives.

If Jackie saw the movie debut, she didn't let on. But she had plenty of things happening to distract her from going to the cinema. Caroline had just arrived home for the holidays and there seemed to be a lot to be grateful for at that year's Thanksgiving feast. Jackie was thrilled to have her children there with her at the dinner table, safe and sound. Her daughter would be turning eighteen the next week, on November 29, and it seemed fitting that Caroline was also preparing for her first photography exhibit, at the Lexington Labs Gallery in New York. On the night of the opening, Jackie thought about her daughter's talent and the bittersweet memories she had captured, each fleeting. On one wall was a picture of John, jumping off the
Christina
. On another was a self-portrait: Caroline dressed like a gypsy with a cigarette and a ring through her nose.
¹⁶

Caroline's photography offered a glimpse into the past, a private world that few had seen. Jackie, meanwhile, was eager to share a glimpse of the future, inviting Caroline to come for a tour of her office at Viking. Caroline breezed in and breezed out, trailing her teasing comments behind.

“Oh you just missed Caroline,” Jackie said when Singleton turned up at her desk. “She said I had an assistant who knows more than I do.” Singleton knew self-deprecation was one of Jackie's ways of leveling the playing field. But she also knew that Caroline was irreverent because Jackie talked a lot about her kids, and frequently related how they joked about their mother's job.

Singleton could see how hard Jackie was trying to fit in. And she began to think about what kind of meaningful Christmas present she could give to Jackie—a woman who seemingly had everything—to thank her for being such a great boss.

On December 16, Jackie received an unexpected gift—not from Singleton but from the Appellate Division of the State Supreme Court, which ruled 3 to 2 to overturn Judge Saypol's decision. By reinstating the landmark status of Grand Central, the court denied Penn Central's plan to build an office tower on the site, saying the station was “a major part of the cultural and architectural heritage of New York City.” It was a victory, but Penn Central immediately said it was considering an appeal yet again.

Jackie would have only one day of enjoying the headlines. Over the years, she had learned how to cope with her husband's assassination. She had moved away from Washington, where the mere sight of the White House would send her reeling. But this year she was caught off guard as disturbing claims began to seep into the national conversation. First was a book called
Post Mortem: JFK Assassination Cover-Up Smashed!
by Harold Weisberg that attempted to prove that the Warren Commission was wrong in its conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone.
¹⁷
In fact, Weisberg claimed that Oswald was not even the killer; there had been a conspiracy and a cover-up.

Into this thick atmosphere dropped another explosive revelation—one that the newly cynical media, hardened by the recent sins of Watergate and Vietnam—were happy to cover. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence had released a report in mid-November claiming that the CIA had plotted to have the mafia kill Fidel Castro between 1960 and 1962. The report obliquely mentioned a “close friend” of the president—someone who also knew Sam Giancana, the capo of the Chicago mob, and his associate John Rosselli. The report did not provide the name or sex of this close personal friend. But the media, suspecting a partisan suppression of important facts, did. Her name was Judith Campbell Exner, a dark-haired California girl. Frank Sinatra had met her at a party and then introduced her to Kennedy in Las Vegas during the 1960 campaign, a meeting that launched a sexual relationship that lasted for two years and was chronicled with a phone log that showed seventy calls from then Judith Campbell to the White House between March of 1961 and March of 1962.

After the report was made public, Exner was so upset by what she called “wild-eyed speculation” that she had passed information from the mob to JFK that she called a press conference on December 17, 1975—the day after the court reinstated Grand Central as a landmark—at the Westgate Hotel in San Diego. Her face tan and her eyes hidden behind glasses big enough to prompt comments about her being a Jackie look alike, Exner sat with her attorney in front of a bank of cameras and a crowd of reporters, who scribbled every word of her prepared statement. She disclosed that her relationship with JFK was entirely “of a personal nature.” And she said she was upset that her involvement with the president would be mischaracterized. The relationship was about intimacy—not business.