and thought I’d find the painting appealing, and that I could buy it. So I did. If you want it, Jackie, it’s yours.”
Jackie was extremely fond of McNamara. He had played a key role in picking out the site of Jack Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, a spot just below the Curtis-Lee Mansion that was in a direct line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It was the perfect place. But as Jackie examined the gift that McNamara had brought her today, she realized he had been the victim of a hoax. Jack had never sat for an oil portrait. The painting was copied from a photograph. And it was not a very good copy at that.
“Oh, Bob,” she said, smiling through her tears, “it’s lovely. Thank you so much.”
After McNamara arrived home, however, there was a phone message waiting for him from Jackie.
“Bob,” she said when he returned her call, “I can’t keep the portrait. You must take it back.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?” he asked.
“Because I had it on the floor in the dining room, leaning against the wall where I was going to hang it,” she said. “And Caroline and John came in and saw it. They kissed it. It’s more than I can stand.”
“DANKE SCHOEN”
A s hard as she tried, Jackie could not escape the morbid pull of the past. The crowds in front of her home on N Street thickened by the day. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John McCormack, insisted on presenting her with no fewer than six flags that had flown over the capitol during the weekend of her husband’s funeral. Lyndon Johnson considered appointing her ambassador to France or Mexico, which, if she had accepted, would have made the new President wildly popular with the legions of Jackie admirers. It would also have had the added benefit of getting Jackie out of Johnson’s way.
Johnson feared a kind of Kennedy government-in-exile, with Bobby as the heir presumptive and Jackie as the dowager queen. But Jackie did not want a public life. She wanted a private life, and the companionship of men on whom she could lean for support. The trouble was, if she ventured outside her house with a man who was considered a possible suitor, people began to talk.
That was what happened one night when her sister Lee Radziwill suggested that she and Jackie have dinner with Marlon Brando and his best friend, George Englund, with whom Lee was involved. The four of them went to the Jockey Club, Washington’s most exclusive restaurant, where they drank martinis and got uproariously drunk.
Jackie and Lee sat together on the banquette, whispering conspiratorially into each other’s ear. The sisters hadalmost identical voices—rough, whispery vibratos—and the same gestures. They were having a splendid time until someone tipped off the press, and a group of photographers suddenly appeared in the restaurant.
Jackie, Lee, Marlon, and George fled through the kitchen exit and went back to Jackie’s house. There they mixed a fresh batch of martinis, and Jackie turned down the lights and put a song on the record player so they could dance. She chose Wayne Newton’s rendition of “Danke Schoen.” Lee and Englund started dancing and necking. Jackie and Brando got up to dance, too.
No one in America was as famous as Jackie, but Brando came pretty close. He still had the perfectly chiseled forehead and jaw line from his
Streetcar Named Desire
days, but at age forty, he was beginning to lose his hair and put on some weight. His latest movie,
The Ugly American
, which Englund had directed, had been a big disappointment at the box office. Still, when he chose to, Marlon Brando could be a sexual tidal wave, on or off the screen.
Many of Jackie’s acquaintances thought that she was a prude, the kind of repressed Catholic girl who ran the faucet when she went to the bathroom, but as Brando later told a friend, this was not the way she behaved with him. As they danced, she pressed her thighs against his and did
Jackie was extremely fond of McNamara. He had played a key role in picking out the site of Jack Kennedy’s grave in Arlington National Cemetery, a spot just below the Curtis-Lee Mansion that was in a direct line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. It was the perfect place. But as Jackie examined the gift that McNamara had brought her today, she realized he had been the victim of a hoax. Jack had never sat for an oil portrait. The painting was copied from a photograph. And it was not a very good copy at that.
“Oh, Bob,” she said, smiling through her tears, “it’s lovely. Thank you so much.”
After McNamara arrived home, however, there was a phone message waiting for him from Jackie.
“Bob,” she said when he returned her call, “I can’t keep the portrait. You must take it back.”
“For heaven’s sake, why?” he asked.
“Because I had it on the floor in the dining room, leaning against the wall where I was going to hang it,” she said. “And Caroline and John came in and saw it. They kissed it. It’s more than I can stand.”
“DANKE SCHOEN”
A s hard as she tried, Jackie could not escape the morbid pull of the past. The crowds in front of her home on N Street thickened by the day. The Speaker of the House of Representatives, John McCormack, insisted on presenting her with no fewer than six flags that had flown over the capitol during the weekend of her husband’s funeral. Lyndon Johnson considered appointing her ambassador to France or Mexico, which, if she had accepted, would have made the new President wildly popular with the legions of Jackie admirers. It would also have had the added benefit of getting Jackie out of Johnson’s way.
Johnson feared a kind of Kennedy government-in-exile, with Bobby as the heir presumptive and Jackie as the dowager queen. But Jackie did not want a public life. She wanted a private life, and the companionship of men on whom she could lean for support. The trouble was, if she ventured outside her house with a man who was considered a possible suitor, people began to talk.
That was what happened one night when her sister Lee Radziwill suggested that she and Jackie have dinner with Marlon Brando and his best friend, George Englund, with whom Lee was involved. The four of them went to the Jockey Club, Washington’s most exclusive restaurant, where they drank martinis and got uproariously drunk.
Jackie and Lee sat together on the banquette, whispering conspiratorially into each other’s ear. The sisters hadalmost identical voices—rough, whispery vibratos—and the same gestures. They were having a splendid time until someone tipped off the press, and a group of photographers suddenly appeared in the restaurant.
Jackie, Lee, Marlon, and George fled through the kitchen exit and went back to Jackie’s house. There they mixed a fresh batch of martinis, and Jackie turned down the lights and put a song on the record player so they could dance. She chose Wayne Newton’s rendition of “Danke Schoen.” Lee and Englund started dancing and necking. Jackie and Brando got up to dance, too.
No one in America was as famous as Jackie, but Brando came pretty close. He still had the perfectly chiseled forehead and jaw line from his
Streetcar Named Desire
days, but at age forty, he was beginning to lose his hair and put on some weight. His latest movie,
The Ugly American
, which Englund had directed, had been a big disappointment at the box office. Still, when he chose to, Marlon Brando could be a sexual tidal wave, on or off the screen.
Many of Jackie’s acquaintances thought that she was a prude, the kind of repressed Catholic girl who ran the faucet when she went to the bathroom, but as Brando later told a friend, this was not the way she behaved with him. As they danced, she pressed her thighs against his and did
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