Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story (38 page)

Fifteen

Even before Aristotle Onassis died, David Harlech had judged that Jackie, aged forty-five, seemed somehow to have, in his phrase, “turned a corner.” The acute tensions in her marriage following the death of Alexander Onassis, when the second husband who was supposed to have been her rescuer and protector became, however unthinkably, her accuser, had finally led her to conclude that she needed to do something to help herself. But what?

After the funeral, during which various mourners’ bitter remarks about “the curse” had wafted through the tiny chapel on Skorpios, Jackie struck Letitia Baldrige, her former White House social secretary, now the head of her own public relations firm, as “depressed and lethargic.” Back in New York full-time, she again confronted the task of trying to begin “a new life,” whatever exactly that might mean after so many futile attempts in the dozen years since Dallas. Baldrige proposed that Jackie, who had previously looked to powerful men as protectors, try a different approach this time. “Who me, work?” Jackie exclaimed when Baldrige suggested that her particular interests and abilities well suited her for employment as an editor at a New York publishing house. Baldrige urged her to talk to Thomas Guinzburg, the head of Viking Press, whom Jackie had known for years.

Baldrige’s advice about Jackie’s career prospects seemed to have a distinctly feminist cast. And so she meant her comments to be taken, though by her own account she sensed that Jackie was personally no feminist. Jackie, who had come of age in a milieu where a woman of her caste was expected above all to marry well and thereafter to be an asset to her husband, had lived to see the emergence of the women’s movement and all that flowed from it. By the time Baldrige prodded her to find a job, more than a decade had passed since the landmark publication of Betty Friedan’s manifesto
The Feminine Mystique,
which argued that women ought to pursue meaningful employment outside the home that makes full use of their intellectual powers. Not at all inappropriately, many authors have sought to tell the story of Jackie’s entry into the world of work in terms of the dramatic changes that were taking place in the mid-1970s in attitudes toward women’s roles in society.

But there is another, very different prism through which to usefully examine the career that Jackie built for herself in the latter part of her life, a prism that did not really become available until the late-twentieth-and early-twenty-first-century proliferation of knowledge about trauma and trauma survivors, notably the understanding that a principal objective of any course of trauma recovery must be the retrieval of a sense of control. In this perspective, it is not that Jackie’s work failed to be empowering, but rather that that empowerment had less to do perhaps with any generic feminist narrative than with her experience as an individual still struggling with the legacy of trauma.

Concurrently with the women’s movement, another massive upheaval was then taking place in American life. In April 1975, the U.S. military presence in Vietnam concluded when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces, and all remaining American military and civilian personnel had to be evacuated. Jackie’s latest effort to start afresh was occurring at a moment when Americans were struggling to resolve the wrenching historical episode she had once described to Bob McNamara as “more complex than any dark hell that Shakespeare ever looked into.” As it happened, part of that national ferment involved the campaign launched by Vietnam veterans and a small group of sympathetic psychiatrists to secure formal recognition of PTSD as a psychiatric diagnosis. To be sure, previous generations of warriors had been known to manifest postwar problems designated by such names as shell shock and combat fatigue. But the impact of Vietnam, specifically the incidence of PTSD, estimated in 1990 to have afflicted more than a quarter of returnees, did seem extraordinary in its magnitude. Upon their homecoming the vets were urged, much as Jackie had been after Dallas, to get over their anguish and thereby permit the nation to move on. Some vets were retraumatized when they faced public reproach and rejection for their involvement in a discredited war that had lacked popular support from 1968 on. Suspected of exaggerating or altogether faking their claims, returnees were routinely informed that drugs and alcohol, not the war, were really to blame for their problems. Significantly, it was not the civilian population alone that endeavored to draw a curtain of forgetfulness on the vets’ suffering. The House Committee on Veterans Affairs and the Veterans Administration were dominated at the time by Second World War veterans, who, on the principle that the Vietnam generation should not require benefits and services its predecessors had failed to enjoy, were reluctant to acknowledge the existence of a condition described by turns as war neurosis, post-Vietnam syndrome, and PTSD.

Meanwhile, Tom Guinzburg’s announcement that Viking had signed Jackie to begin work that fall of 1975 as a consulting editor, her first ordinary job since she toiled at the Washington
Times-Herald,
was met with a good deal of incredulity from press and public. For many people, Jackie’s strange smiles in the aftermath of Onassis’s death had served as ocular proof that, precisely as had been suspected in the first place, the marriage was a sham. Was her new job also not quite what it was purported to be? Was it a publicity stunt on Viking’s part? A whim on Jackie’s? Obviously, she did not need the $200 weekly salary; her representatives were then in hard-driving negotiations with the Onassis estate to substantially augment her financial settlement. Viking’s other consulting editor, the novelist, poet, and critic Malcolm Cowley, had been responsible through his various endeavors at the house for significantly revising the reputations of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Sherwood Anderson, and for the breakthrough publication of Jack Kerouac’s
On the Road
. What could it mean, then, for a woman known in recent years more as a shopper than a litterateur to suddenly hold the identical title as that distinguished book man? There was speculation that Jackie had been brought in principally to lure other celebrities to pen their autobiographies, even that she might be about to produce a memoir of her own.

So, when Jackie reported for her first day at the publisher’s Madison Avenue offices on September 22, 1975, she encountered the same skepticism that had faced her twenty-three years before at the
Times-Herald
. Now she insisted that she meant “to work, not to play.” She planned to devote her first months at Viking, as she said, to “learning the ropes” of the business. There had been a time when it had fallen to her to show America that she was the good, ordinary wife, ever doting on and deferring to JFK. Now she confronted the rather different task of proving herself an independent working woman. As Onassis’s wife, she had known the advantages of vast wealth. As his widow, she waited on line at the office copying machine like other Viking employees, prepared her own coffee, placed her own telephone calls, and did much of her own typing. She came to the office four days a week and religiously phoned in to collect her messages on Mondays, her days off.

As she adjusted to the altered habits of her life, she had the benefit of regular sessions with Marilyn Monroe’s former psychoanalyst, Dr. Marianne Kris, whom Jackie had quietly begun to see. Though in important respects Jackie was substantially better than she had been seven years before when, beset by visions of annihilation in the aftermath of Bobby Kennedy’s murder, she fled to Skorpios in quest of security, she continued to be vexed by premonitions of some terrible thing waiting to occur, of the plane crash that would end her life or the New York City taxicab poised to mow her down. The old invasive memories, nightmares, and “difficult times” persisted, as did those strange moments when, exclusive of any act of will on her part, intimations of danger and doom became manifest in her body, which “remembered” what had happened in 1963 and 1968, and therefore remained in a permanent state of alert for the next attack in whatever form it threatened to take. Jackie’s decision to seek psychiatric treatment was a huge step, an important acknowledgement that she needed help.

The motherly, empathetic seventy-five-year-old Kris had had a prior connection with the Kennedy family. During the Second World War she and her husband, the psychoanalyst and art connoisseur Ernst Kris, had been among the beneficiaries when Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy made it possible for various members of the London circle of Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter, Anna Freud, the founder of child analysis, to emigrate to the United States. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Monroe, recommended by her then-husband Arthur Miller’s former psychoanalyst Rudolph Loewenstein, had been Marianne Kris’s patient, often going directly from her analyst’s office to the quarters of her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, in the same Beaux Arts pile on Central Park West at Seventy-third Street. After Monroe’s death in 1962, the bulk of the actress’s estate went to Kris and Strasberg jointly, with the stipulation that the analyst use the legacy to further her own work.

When, concurrently with the start of Jackie’s Viking job, Caroline Kennedy went to London to pursue a full-time, ten-month visual and decorative arts course at the international auction house Sotheby’s, Kris asked Anna Freud to make herself available should the seventeen-year-old need someone to talk to at any point. Clearly, the New York psychoanalyst reached out to her London counterpart as much for Jackie’s sake as for her daughter’s. Kris’s gesture was nothing so dramatic as what Onassis and the Greek colonels had undertaken when they sent in the police and coast guard to guarantee Jackie’s safety. In the present instance, the idea was simply to reassure her that were the need to materialize, there would be a professional in place for her daughter. Additionally conducive to the parent’s serenity of mind was that Caroline was to be housed in the Kensington residence of JFK’s friend Hugh Fraser. The Conservative member of Parliament lived in the same neighborhood as David Harlech, now remarried, who also could be counted on to take an interest in Caroline’s well-being. But all this was merely to provide the illusion of control, not the thing itself, which, however much human beings plan and prepare (and confer with their therapists), remains ever elusive.

On the morning of October 23, 1975, Fraser, who made it his habit to drop Caroline off at the building near Oxford Street where her school was located, paused to speak on the telephone to another MP before leaving his home at the regular hour. He asked Caroline to wait in another room until the call was finished. He was still on the line when a passerby’s dog sniffed the wheel of Fraser’s red Jaguar automobile, which was parked outside on steep, tree-lined Campden Hill Square. Whereupon an IRA bomb exploded, killing both the dog walker, a noted physician and cancer researcher who resided in the area, and his pet. Debris from the vehicle shattered windows and pocked the facades of nearby Victorian houses. The blast was the latest in a series of terrorist attacks to rock London at the time, including a September 5 explosion at the London Hilton, which had left two people dead and another sixty-three injured. Scotland Yard theorized that, though the London terrorists tended to strike at random because that approach proved to be the most frightening and disruptive, Hugh Fraser had been the target of the October 23 explosion due to his prior public statements against terrorism. Apparently, there had been no intent to harm Caroline. Still, had Fraser not hesitated at the precise moment he did, both she and he almost certainly would have died.

Although the episode would have been a severe trial for any parent, it was all the more so for Jackie, who needed to rebuild precisely the sense of safety and predictability that this new sudden act of violence had done so much to subvert. In the aftermath, she was often on the phone to the Harlech residence, where Caroline had been transported after the incident, as well as to other members of London’s aristocratic cousinhood from whom she sought reassurance about her daughter. Adding to Jackie’s pressures, her first six months at Viking also coincided with a fresh burst of press revelations about President Kennedy’s womanizing, specifically his liaisons with two of his many mistresses, Judith Campbell and Mary Meyer. That JFK had been a philanderer was scarcely news to Jackie, but public disclosure was always very grievous to her, not least in a period when she was oppressed by an unusual amount of close daily, at times moment-by-moment, scrutiny in conjunction with her new employment. She was monitored not just by the photographers and sundry other gawkers who always seemed to be lurking in the vicinity of the publisher’s midtown offices, but also by Viking coworkers, who, love her or loathe her, could hardly help wonder about, in Guinzburg’s phrase, “this giant celebrity” in their midst. Jackie bore it all beautifully, determined, Tish Baldrige perceived, to finally be in a position “to rely on herself rather than a man.” When in the autumn Bob McNamara, who by this time had led the World Bank for seven years and seven months—six months longer than he had served as secretary of defense under Johnson and Kennedy—seemed eager to resume the role he had played in her life after the death of JFK, Jackie, devoted to McNamara though she remained, showed no inclination to revert to the old arrangement.

In the Russian Style,
scheduled to be published in conjunction with a Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition focusing on Russian costumes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was touted as “Mrs. Onassis’s first major assignment” at Viking. And, though Jackie’s name would be prominently displayed on the book, from first to last there was wide speculation about how much work she actually had done on the project. The honest answer was: a huge amount. She undertook prodigious research. She hunted down obscure volumes. She interviewed experts. And, when Diana Vreeland, who was organizing the Met exhibition, returned from a trip to Moscow without certain of the prized objects that she and Jackie both desperately wanted for the show and the book, Jackie volunteered to approach the Communist authorities herself.