Clothes encounters
KATHY McKeon was 19 — an Irish farm girl newly arrived in New York — when she found herself tending royalty. Or, at least, its American counterpart: Jacqueline Kennedy.
It was 1964, and John F. Kennedy’s assassination the year before was still fresh in everyone’s mind, especially his daughter’s. One of the first questions McKeon had to answer when she came to work at the family home at 1040 Fifth Ave. was 7-year-old Caroline’s “Where were you when it happened, Kath?”
So begins “Jackie’s Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family” (Simon & Schuster), a warm account of the 12 years McKeon spent in service to the woman she calls “Madam” and her two children. The confidentiality agreement she signed 53 years ago no longer applies, the Florida resident told The Post in her soft Irish brogue: Now 72, she wanted to write her experience down for her grandchildren before she forgets.
It was Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, who called her “Jackie’s Girl.” With legions of Irish men and women toiling at the clan’s Cape Cod compound, McKeon writes, “keeping names straight would have been vexing for sure.”
Whatever the moniker, she was proud to be Jackie’s girl, even if her duties seemed more like that of a maid and occasional nanny than “personal assistant.” Unlike the cussing, chainsmoking young widow Natalie Portman portrayed in the 2016 film “Jackie,” McKeon’s Madam was “a perfect lady,” albeit one with borderline OCD: Her sheets had to be changed daily, her peignoirs ironed just so, her every ensemble accessorized, down to the slippers and robes that matched her nightgowns. One of McKeon’s more unusual duties was slashing an Xinto the soles of Jackie’s size 10 pumps, so she wouldn’t slip on the apartment’s marble floors.
While the former first lady enjoyed an occasional cigarette (Newport!), she didn’t smoke in public, McKeon says. She also had the wellheeled habit of carrying next to no cash.
Yet she was generous, both with gifts and advice. When Kathy found herself 30 pounds heavier than when she’d left Ireland, Jackie shared the diet (hard-boiled egg for breakfast, cottage cheese for lunch, fish for dinner) she followed herself.
When it comes to Jackie’s love life, McKeon is more circumspect. She writes of the close- ness between the young widowidow andand herher broth-brother-in-law Bobby Kennedy but insists that the only thing between them was friendship.
There seemed even less romance between Jackie and Aristotle Onassis, the swarthy shipping tycoon she married in 1968. They were “good companions,” who shared evening cocktails if not the same bedroom. Just before the wedding, McKeon was asked to comfort Caroline, distraught about leaving for her stepfather’s native Greece: “‘Could you please do mea favor and go talk to [her]?’ Madam asked. ‘I just told her the news, and she’s very, very upset.’ ”
That bit of delegating aside, Jackie was devoted to her children, especially John. He’s the most vivid character in the book: a sweet if hyperactive boy who freed his sister’s parakeets from their cages and, ever curious, once lodged an aspirin in his ear.
While his cousins rushed for the sea, McKeon writes, he yearned for the sky, spending many happy hours in Hyannisport inside an old Air Force plane.
In 1999, his own plane went down. The last time McKeon saw his sister Caroline was at his funeral.
McKeon says she sent the former first daughter a signed copy of “Jackie’s Girl” with a note. She’s yet to hear back.