Tina Cassidy - Jackie After O: One Remarkable Year When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams

One Remarkable Year When

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Defied

Expectations and Rediscovered Her Dreams

TINA CASSIDY

For my father

And my grandmother Genevieve Damaschi,

whose own third act still inspires

A merica. 1975. The Watergate trials ended, finding the defendants guilty and creating a generation of cynics. The United States was laboring to recover from a crippling oil crisis but had finally withdrawn from Vietnam. Tammy Wynette had a new hit song called Stand By Your Man, while women still campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment as they entered the workforce in record numbers and divorced in record numbers.

It was a year when Americans were drained by politics, war, and a bad economy. Yet they were hopeful, as if they knew things could not get any worse. Two young men launched a company called Microsoft. From coast to coast, people flocked to discos to do the Hustle. In England, a band named the Sex Pistols gave birth to punk and the British Conservative Party had chosen its first female leader, Margaret Thatcher, as Parliament passed the Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Act.

Jacqueline Onassis was forty-five, living in New York, and going through her own confusing metamorphosis. The health of her much older husband, the millionaire Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, was rapidly declining, as was the diseased state of what was a second marriage for both of them. Her daughter, Caroline, was in her last year of high school. Jackies younger child, John Jr., was a high school freshman, busy with his own friends and interests. Much of her day-to-day work as a parent was done, and aside from dabbling in charities and being the almost-estranged wife of a man who lived abroad, she had few other responsibilities outside of her very regular hair appointments, which happened to be once a week at Kenneth.

Like so many parents of grown children who find themselves suddenly singleor just unhappy at midlifeJackie had begun to think more about herself and how, despite having such a full closet, she felt empty. She had enough money to continue living a life of leisure, albeit one where she was always trying to escape the haunting assassination of her first husband, President John F. Kennedy. But what ambitions and talents had she tucked away two decades earlier, to becomein successiona wife, the First Lady, an international fashion icon, a grieving widow, a single parent, and later, a stepmother and jet-setter?

The world knew she was beautiful, stoic, and rich, with impeccable taste and a soft, little-girl voice that turned out marvelous French. It did not know, or perhaps did not care, that she was interested in history and architecture, that she was a talented writer, a voracious reader, and a person of ambitions of her own. Now, on the precipice of 1975, when society all around her was changing, Jackie was beginning to wonder how she should spend the rest of her life. What would make her truly happy? These were especially difficult questions for a woman whose preWorld War II generation and social stratum had bred her for nothing more than marriage and motherhood and the attendant accessory decorating and volunteering opportunities.

The simple title she had earnedtruly earnedtwice, was wife. Now, she was about to become something else.

I n 1953, Jack Kennedy was a freshman senator from Massachusetts with a bothersome back and enormous aspirations. He had just married a young woman named Jacqueline Bouvier, whom he had met at the home of mutual friends in Washington, DC, the city where Jackie, with wavy, short brown hair, had been working as a newspaper photographer, taking headshots for a brief question-and-answer column she wrote about her subjects.

Jack wasnt the only Kennedy busy in the capital. His younger brother Robert was assistant counsel to Roy Cohn, the chief investigator working for Senator Joseph McCarthys anti-Communist crusade. Bobby had begun digging through records in an attempt to uncover those who might have been trading with Communist China, and he suspected a mysterious Greek, Aristotle Onassis, was among them. Bobby could not find proof of any red links, but he instead found that using a front corporation in America five years earlier Onassis had illegally bought ten US surplus tankers that were forbidden for purchase by foreigners. Bobby had a win; soon a federal grand jury handed down an indictment of Onassis, who was ordered to pay a $7 million fine.

This Irish fuck wants to bury me, Onassis complained to a friend.

But instead of avoiding the Kennedys, Onassis pulled them into his orbit.

A few years after the indictment, Jack and his bride were on vacation in Cannes visiting Jacks fatherJoseph P. Kennedy, the former ambassador to the United Kingdomand doing what fine young things did in the Riviera then: they basked on the beach and went out to dinner with the head of Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, and his wife, Marella. But one of the nights was even more special. Winston Churchill was aboard Onassiss ship, anchored off Monaco, where the Greek also based his family and business. Churchill sprung the idea to invite the Kennedys, to see if JFK was indeed presidential material, as he had been hearing.

Jack was eager to meet Churchill, a hero of his since the war. He had devoured the former prime ministers books, even giving a nod to a 1938 Churchill title, While England Slept, when he published his Harvard thesis, Why England Slept, two years later. But Churchill, by the time Jack met him, was a round and confused octogenarian who had no idea which guest Jack was when he arrived for cocktails aboard the lavish Christina with Jackie and the Agnellis.

I knew your father so well, Churchill said, leaning in to the wrong person on the boat. Jackie realized that the old man was gaga and felt sorry her husband was meeting him too late.)

But the aesthetic matched Onassiss swaggering personality. With his smooth olive skin, habitual Cuban cigar, dousing of cologne, and hair thick with Brilliantine, he could be magnetic. He had a capacity to listen, observe, and collect beautiful women. But his charms did not appear to work on Jackie that night. He noticed that she was pleasant but aloof during the tour, making mindless small talk with him in her little voice.

I must ask you to leave by 7:30, Onassis told the group. Sir Winston dines sharp at 8:15.

After the group left, Costa Gratsos, a close friend of Onassis, guessed what was on his bosss mind.

Dont fuck up her life just to get even with Bobby, Gratsos said.

Jackies next fateful meeting with Onassis came during the presidency after her infant son Patrick, born prematurely, died when he was just two days old in August 1963. The Kennedys were devastated, and Jackie, on Cape Cod, summoned the strength to call her younger sister, Lee Radziwill, to tell her the horrible news. Although Lee was married for the second time to Stanislas Stas Radziwill, a Polish prince, and they were living in London with their two young children, Anthony and Tina, Lee had developed a relationship with Onassis in the intervening years and was with him in Greece when the First Lady phoned her.