Sex and scheming that put the O! into Jackie
Her cynical manipulation of JFK’s legacy. Rumoured affairs with his brothers – and comic Peter Cook. As a new blockbuster brings her back to life, truth about the . . .
‘People like to believe in fairytales’
Was there a fling with Marlon Brando?
DO YOU want to know the sound the bullet made when it collided with my husband’s skull, she asks provocatively. It’s November 1963 and in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, a journalist has been summoned to the door of the world’s most iconic woman — just a week after her husband has been brutally shot dead.
Like the rest of the world, the last time he saw Jacqueline Kennedy she was wearing a pink Chanel suit still spattered with the blood of John F. Kennedy, cradling his head as the presidential motorcade sped through the streets of Dallas.
Immaculate, even in grief, the First Lady checks over his notes and bluntly tells him what he can and cannot quote her on.
Gone is the fashion-obsessed style goddess and subservient presidential wife. In her place is an imperious, prickly, insincere manipulator, hell-bent on ensuring the mythical status of her husband’s presidency.
So begins Jackie, a new feature film starring Natalie Portman as the most feted First Lady in U.S. history.
Everyone is supposed to remember where they were when they heard JFK had been killed, but we all know where Jackie was: right by his side. Her dignity in shouldering a nation’s grief, as well as her own, earned her immense respect — even as scandals over JFK’s compulsive womanising and huge consumption of amphetamines and steroids ate away at his once-revered reputation.
Mrs Kennedy — later Jackie O after she married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis — died in 1994. Her famous ‘look’ is still copied by women such as Kate Middleton and George Clooney’s wife Amal, not to mention the new First Lady, Melania Trump, who so obviously chanelled Jackie O at last week’s inauguration.
Now, Hollywood has taken the plunge and re-examined the character of Mrs Kennedy. And, while Jackie certainly doesn’t provide the sort of idolisation that will satisfy her devotees, its portrayal of her takes one thing for granted: that she was devoted to JFK.
But, in recent days, rumours that have been rumbling for years have resurfaced that she had a string of celebrity affairs, including one with British comedian Peter Cook.
Portman, who won an Oscar for playing a deranged ballerina in Black Swan, is almost certain to get a nomination for her uncannily accurate incarnation of the babyvoiced, breathy Mrs Kennedy.
Portman admits that even she initially dismissed Jackie Kennedy as little more than a glorified clothes horse but, after researching her ‘obsessively’, discovered a far more complicated woman.
Just 31 when she moved to the White House, and 34 when she became ‘First Widow’, Mrs Kennedy first appeared content to remain in her husband’s shadow, playing the loyal wife who worried about decor and clothes, rather than political life.
But the new film portrays a far more complex state of affairs.
The idea of a writer coming to interview Jackie, as in the film’s opening scene, is based on fact. Theodore H. White, a Kennedy biographer, took lengthy notes during a four-hour interview with Mrs Kennedy a few days after her husband’s assassination.
He might have thought he had got her at her most vulnerable, but Jackie had an unspoken agenda: to enshrine her husband’s short (and, as we now know, rather tawdry) presidency as the mythical Camelot, the saintly court and castle of King Arthur.
She casually revealed to White that she and her husband had regularly enjoyed listening before bed to the cast recording of the Broadway musical Camelot.
They particularly enjoyed a song, sung by Richard Burton as Arthur, in which he intones: ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief, shining moment, that was known as Camelot.’
Just in case he hadn’t picked up on her heavy hint, she told White: ‘There’ll be great presidents again, but there will never be another Camelot.’ It worked, as the media latched on to the word and the name stuck.
Did she believe it herself? After all, it’s difficult to believe she didn’t know about her husband’s infidelity or heavy drug-taking.
‘People like to believe in fairytales,’ she told White.
He later claimed that he had unwittingly become ‘her instrument in labelling the myth’.
Just days before, Jackie had taken centre stage at her husband’s state funeral. Her emotions hidden behind a veil of Swiss black lace, she famously led the cortege through the streets of Washington on foot.
In all that time, she kept her emotions in check — publicly, at least. The new film argues that those hidden emotions were principally absorbed in fretting about the future and whether her beloved husband would be remembered with a respect she felt not only she but the American people demanded.
Looking permanently stricken, Portman’s Jackie displays a fierce determination and wily intelligence as she battles officials who try to tone down her epic plans for his funeral and temper her sense of loss.
She might have a reputation for being permanently serene, but in Jackie, she is often almost hysterical.
‘Let them see what they’ve done,’ she bitterly tells aides who suggest she might like to get out of that blood-stained Chanel suit on the flight back to DC. (Black and white photos at the time masked the colour of those stains and so, too, the significance of her refusing to take it off.)
When President Lyndon B. Johnson’s aides fret that a full funeral procession could prompt another assassination, she blackmails them by insisting that she will walk to St Matthew’s Cathedral alone.
Even her two young children — Caroline and John Jr — are suborned to ensuring their father’s legacy. When an assistant suggests they should be spared the photographers and allowed to join the funeral procession through a back door, their mother insists the press must capture two heart-broken, fatherless children.
The film is by no means the first challenge to Jackie’s virtual sainthood. In 2011, the British writer Christopher Hitchens pulled her apart in Vanity Fair magazine, dismissing her ‘winsome innocence’ as just a cover for ‘knowingness and calculation’.
While she had long been credited with ‘raising the tone’ of the Kennedy presidency, she had actually done the opposite, he said.
His attack was prompted by the publication that year of tapes from interviews Jackie gave to a historian, Arthur Schlesinger, just months after JFK’s death.
They revealed a bitter and twisted woman, who dismissed the civil rights leader Martin Luther King as ‘phoney’, ‘terrible’ and ‘tricky’.
Contrary to assumptions that she was innocent of the darker side of her husband’s administration, she clearly knew all about its dirty tricks operation on Dr King, eavesdropping on his hotel assignations with women.
She was catty about other First Ladies and, far from being the sweet one in her own marriage, she admitted JFK repeatedly used to tell her off for being vitriolic about people — whether it was devoted members of his White House staff or the governor of Texas (who was in the car with them when the president was shot).
The Indian leader Indira Gandhi, she said, was ‘a real
prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman’.
Feminists were aggrieved to learn Mrs Kennedy’s dinosaur views on marriage, as she boasted how JFK insisted on ‘a relationship between a man and a woman where a man would be the leader and a woman be his wife and look up to him as a man’.
Anyone who posed the slightest challenge to her dear husband — including a senior aide who was widely believed to have written an impressive book that was instead attributed to JFK, and his older brother Joseph Jr, who might have stood for the presidency if he hadn’t been killed in World War II — was brutally put down by the sharp-tongued Jackie.
Since then, historians have revealed other details about Mrs Kennedy that have punctured her perfect image. She wasn’t exactly the most dutiful First Lady, often leaving the White House on Thursday nights to go off and ride her horses in Virginia and not returning until Tuesday.
Jackie had little time for the duller daily duties of being First Lady. She couldn’t be bothered to meet a delegation of Girl Guides, for instance.
And who knows if the rumours of dalliances with a string of wellknown men are true. She is said to have had affairs with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and Warren Beatty, as well as JFK’s brothers Bobby and Edward.
In a 1996 book on the Kennedys’ marriage by biographer Christopher Andersen, it was claimed she’d had a brief affair with Hollywood star William Holden in 1955 — two years into her marriage with JFK — to get back at her unfaithful husband. Andersen identified the writer Gore Vidal as his source.
Andersen, who claimed Mrs Kennedy was so upset by her husband’s blatant womanising that she contemplated divorce, said she also had an affair as First Lady with Roswell Gilpatric, a Pentagon official.
It was also suggested in a 2014 book that, while married to JFK, she succumbed to the flirtatious advances of ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev, a man for whose attentions she competed fiercely with her sister, Lee Radziwill.
The Peter Cook romance also was said to have taken place while she was married to Kennedy. It was alleged by Alan Bennett, a comic collaborator of Cook from their Cambridge University days, who believes it happened after they took their satirical revue to New York.
‘I have an image of her standing next to Peter, stroking his arm, and the dressing room, and he certainly went to parties with her,’ said Bennett.
Even if she didn’t betray her husband (and he certainly deserved it), Jackie Kennedy didn’t spend too much time as a grieving widow, it’s been claimed.
According to a 2009 biography of the Kennedys’ marriage by C. David Heymann, Marlon Brando had a brief affair with Jackie just months after JFK’s death.
In a passage that was allegedly excised from the actor’s memoirs after her friends put pressure on the publisher, Brando described a drunken post-dinner entanglement at her home during which she ‘pressed her thighs’ suggestively against him.
‘She kept waiting for me to try to get her into bed. When I failed to make a move, she took matters into her own hands and popped the magic question: “Would you like to spend the night?” I told her: “I thought you’d never ask,” ’ he reportedly wrote in the book’s first draft.
Jackie Kennedy’s most notorious alleged affair — with Bobby Kennedy — was also outlined by Heymann, who said it began after JFK died.
So, it could be argued that Jackie Kennedy gets off fairly lightly in the new film, which may not be surprising given that the movie is a product of liberal Hollywood — and liberals continue to have a place in their heart for the Kennedys. ‘Jackie reminds us of a time when there was class in the White House,’ said its producer, Darren Aronofsky, in what was obviously a jibe aimed at the incoming Trump clan rather than the Kennedys.
As for Jackie’s blood-stained Chanel suit, that has lain perfectly preserved in a special acid-free box in the U.S. National Archives in Maryland for more than 40 years.
It is now owned by her daughter, Caroline, who has given instructions that it must lie undisturbed for another century so as not to upset any members of her family.
They surely aren’t the only ones who don’t want anything to shake up their memories of a flawless First Lady.