These Few Precious Days (38 page)

After class, Jackie went up to Sister Joanne. “If I had had religion taught to me in that way,” she said, “it would have been a much happier experience for me. Would you mind if I take the drawing home to show to the President?”

Another time, Sister Joanne asked her pupils to tell a story using pictures cut out of magazines. Caroline proudly showed Frey a picture of a woman cradling an infant and a child of five or six. “This is Mommy, this is me,” she said, “and this would have been Patrick, my baby brother. He’s in heaven.”

These moments of innocence “really kind of took your breath away,” Sister Joanne said. “Everyone had gone through the tragedy of Patrick’s death. The experience was still fresh in people’s minds. What could you say?”

IN THE END, JACKIE MADE
frequent trips to Caroline’s catechism class, the existence of which remained unknown to the public for the full eight months she attended them. Sometimes she brought John along as well. One day in October 1963 John marched noisily into class with his make-believe rifle—a stick—over his shoulder. “He thinks he’s a soldier,” Caroline sighed, “and he doesn’t even know how to salute.” She had no way of knowing that, within a matter of weeks, little John would snap off the most famous salute in history.

I should have guessed that it would be too much to grow old with him and see our children grow up together. So now he is a legend, when he would have preferred to be a man.

—
JACKIE

11

“They Had Been Through So Much Together”

O
n October 1, Jackie was scheduled to depart from New York’s Idlewild Airport aboard a TWA flight bound for Rome. Before she did, however, she wanted to join her husband in welcoming Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie at Washington’s Union Station. It would be her first public appearance since Patrick’s death.

The diminutive seventy-one-year-old monarch had been a revered figure on the world stage for more than forty years, and while Jackie would not be hosting the state dinner for him that night, she wanted to meet the man she had admired since childhood.

Met with a royal fanfare, Selassie stepped off the train and bowed his head when Jackie, wearing a trim-fitting black wool suit and clutching two dozen red roses, extended her gloved hand. The two hit it off instantly, later chatting away in French over tea in the West Sitting Room. There were presents for his hosts: a carved ivory soldier for John, a doll and a gold medallion on a chain for Caroline, and—the pièce de résistance—a full-length leopard coat for Jackie. “Je suis comblée!” (“I am overcome”), she said, wasting no time jettisoning her wool jacket and trying the coat on. She wore the coat as they strolled into the Rose Garden. “See, Jack,” she said. “He brought it to me! He brought it to me!”

On October 4, Jackie and her entourage boarded the
Christina
bound for Istanbul. A great believer in keeping up appearances (“You do not stand a chance of becoming rich unless you
look
rich in the first place”), Onassis splurged on penthouses, limousines, helicopters, even his own airline—Olympic Airways. None of his other toys could compare, however, to the converted 325-foot frigate he had christened after his adored only daughter in 1954. The
Christina
featured an Olympic-size saltwater swimming pool, several bars, a ballroom, Baccarat crystal chandeliers, lapis lazuli balustrades, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, allegorical friezes of nude nymphs representing the four seasons in the dining room, a grand piano in the glass-walled sitting room, a private screening room, an El Greco hanging in the formal study (next to crossed swords in gold scabbards that were a gift from Saudi King Ibn Saud), and mosaic floors throughout depicting scenes from Greek mythology.

A jewel-encrusted Buddha that Ari bought in 1960 for $300,000 ($2.4 million today) sat on a bureau in his four-room master suite. Ari’s bathtub was of blue Sienna marble with mosaic dolphins and flying fish inspired by King Minos’s palace at Knossos. The children’s playroom was decorated by Jackie’s old friend (and
Madeline
creator) Ludwig Bemelmans, and the canopied beds were piled with dolls dressed by Dior.

For excursions off the ship, the
Christina
carried on board four motorboats (including two mahogany-hulled Hacker speedboats), two kayaks, a small sailboat, three dinghies, a glass-bottom boat, a small car, a helicopter, and a five-passenger Piaggio seaplane.

Ari (friends stopped calling him “Aristo” when he turned forty) took special pride in one of the yacht’s more curious features. Located on the main deck was a circular bar made from the timbers of a sunken Spanish galleon. But what made the bar unique were the stools with seats covered in the foreskins of white whales. “Madame,” he announced to the reclusive screen legend Greta Garbo, “you are sitting on the biggest penis in the world!” Garbo became a regular aboard the
Christina
—along with the likes of Cary Grant, John Wayne, Princess Grace, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra, and of course his prize catch—Winston Churchill.

Not exactly Jackie’s style, to be sure. But then, even the first lady had not been pampered to quite this extent. As a blacksweatered crew of sixty (not counting the dance band) catered to the passengers’ every need, the Dom Perignon flowed freely and no fewer than eight varieties of caviar were served. When Jackie wasn’t exploring the cobblestone streets of Crete, Ithaca, and Lesbos, she and her fellow guests were dining on lobster and foie gras or cutting loose to bouzouki music on the yacht’s mosaic-tiled dance floor.

As they island-hopped across the Aegean, Jackie kept in touch with JFK by ship-to-shore phone, and more than once dashed off a flowery letter saying how much she wished he could have come along. Yet she clearly seemed happier than she had been in months. With Lee giggling in the background, Jackie called to report that the
Christina
was now in the hands of pirates. “I told you so,” Jack deadpanned.

Stateside, newspapers were soon filled with pictures of Jackie sunbathing on board the
Christina
in a bikini. When the yacht docked in Istanbul so that Jackie could visit the Blue Mosque and see the magnificent jewels housed in the Topkapi Palace, tourists pressed in to catch a glimpse of her. To Jack, it was all beginning to look like a replay of Jackie’s
la dolce vita
romp with Gianni Agnelli.

Jack, meanwhile, was planning a trip of his own, although he doubted Jackie would be willing to tag along. Texas Governor John Connally invited JFK to visit Texas at the end of November. An ongoing feud between liberal Senator Ralph Yarborough and conservative Connally, an LBJ ally, threatened to cleave the state’s party right down the middle. If JFK wanted to hold on to the Lone Star State in 1964—not to mention bolster his flagging popularity with white voters in the South—then some serious fence-mending was in order, Connally warned.

The two-day swing through Texas was to include fund-raising events in San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas. Then the Kennedys were invited to spend the weekend at Lyndon Johnson’s ranch on the Pedernales River. Jackie hadn’t campaigned for her husband since the 1960 primaries, and she wasn’t scheduled to resume her duties as first lady until January 1964. It seemed unlikely that she’d be willing to visit Texas, but Connally was adamant. “Well,” JFK told the governor, “we’ll just have to wait to see what she says when she gets back.” With Salinger, he felt free to say what he really thought. “There’s no way in hell,” he told his press secretary, “that Jackie is going to agree to go to Texas.”

As the Aegean cruise progressed, Onassis started to lavish more and more attention on Jackie. By the time they reached Ari’s private island of Skorpios, Lee was seething. When Onassis gave Jackie a spectacular ruby-and-diamond necklace, Lee wrote to Jack in mock indignation, “All I’ve got is three dinky little bracelets that Caroline wouldn’t wear to her own birthday party!”

Inevitably, tongues began to wag about the nature of Jackie’s relationship with the swarthy Greek tycoon. Their shipmates, however, insisted nothing inappropriate was going on between Onassis and the first lady at the time. There was “definitely a relationship between Lee and Ari,” FDR Jr. said. But Jackie “was there simply for the rest.” Moreover, Onassis was “very conscious of his image. He didn’t want to do anything to embarrass the President’s wife.”

No one back home dared suggest that the first lady was cheating on her husband. But once again stories about high-living Jackie and her jet-set pals filled the papers, providing Jack’s critics with plenty of ammunition. “Does this sort of behavior,” asked the
Boston Globe,
“seem fitting for a woman in mourning?”

Jackie may have had a “twinge” or two of guilt, Roosevelt conceded, but certainly not enough to make her suddenly turn around and fly home. Indeed, instead of cutting her trip short, Jackie extended it so she could visit Morocco. Earlier, she had teased Jack that if given a choice between Morocco and Ireland, she’d much rather spend time in Morocco. Besides, King Hassan II was eager to repay the Kennedys for the hospitality they had shown him seven months earlier.

Desert tribeswomen greeted Jackie with their shrill, warbling call as she and Lee were driven to Hassan’s Bahia Palace overlooking the Atlas Mountains. Coincidentally, King Hassan II’s firstborn son, Prince Mohammed, had been born on August 21. In keeping with Muslim tradition, the entire country was celebrating his first forty days of life. Everyone was concerned that this might bring back painful memories for Jackie, but her attitude remained upbeat. She told Clint Hill that she felt it was “wonderful” that they could celebrate their infant son’s future. “The President and I,” she said, “had similar hopes and dreams for Patrick.”

As part of the national celebration, Berber warriors put on a dazzling display of their prowess on horseback, firing rifles into the air and whooping as they galloped across a field. Jackie covered her eyes with both hands to avoid seeing Secret Service agent Paul Landis, who was on the field taking snapshots, narrowly escape from being trampled to death.