Jack's Widow (5 page)

Foiling irritants like the newly named paparazzi and persuading Jack that it was not just the rhetoric of political speeches that swayed opinion—his style mattered, how he looked was important—was interesting to her. She persuaded him to memorize parts of his speeches so he could look the audience in the eye and learn foreign phrases that would please the crowd.

Soon this ploy had become something more. Looking immaculate was the beginning, but the hours of preparation acted as a shield. Having intimate knowledge of exactly what the day held for her gave her some feeling of control, that she would never be caught looking flustered or nervous.

And now that she had to attend the great occasions of state alone she added a further layer to safeguard herself.

She went into what she called “dream mode.”

She had discovered this by accident. It was the way she had coped with his funeral.

Exhausted but finding sleeping pills gave no rest but simply clogged up her veins, she found that she needed all her concentra
tion to keep a tight hold on the children or to follow the steady pace behind the coffin. She was determined not to cry in public so she made herself block out the noise, the crowds, and the military music. Because she had planned every detail of the day she knew where to stand, when to turn.

In front of the world she appeared calm.

After this technique had helped her endure that terrible day she made a habit of using it whenever she was “on parade.”

Over the last year the dream mode had been severely tested.

Utilizing it at the launch of a destroyer named for him, she had been able to keep her emotions in check when presented with his old navy dog tag that he had left on his last naval voyage.

It worked really well at the dedication of a new airport when she was presented with a gift of a previously unseen photograph. It was of the two of them looking carefree lolling in a gondola. It had been taken by the in-house photographer at the Cipriani Hotel in Venice. Although all those years ago they had waved him away, he thought that they were such an attractive young couple that he put the picture in his shop window to brighten it up.

There it had sat, in a quiet passageway off the Grand Canal, until the Italian-American community had unearthed it.

The dream mode would come into its own tomorrow.

She had wanted to spend the anniversary of Jack’s death alone with the children, on Cape Cod or somewhere they had all been happy together, but her husband’s successor had persuaded her that because the assassination had been such a shock, the country needed a day of mourning to heal its soul.

Even though she was not keen about attending, she knew that the hundreds who had worked with him, academics, speechwriters, economic advisors, many of them now stuck in nowhereland—having been thrust into outer darkness and ejected from the center of power—would agree.

To survive the day she began to compartmentalize her emotions. As she left her apartment she began to propel herself into dream mode by putting all her critical faculties on hold.

“Do not question anything,” she told herself as she entered
Air Force One,
sent especially to New York to collect her. As she entered the cabin she couldn’t help but recall earlier times on this plane, the children’s excitement when taking off, the navy leather she had selected for the seats, the makeshift lift, kept out of the public eye, for when Jack’s back was so bad he couldn’t walk up the stairs. Anything but that last trip back from Dallas with his body in a casket.

“Do not worry about anything,” she repeated to herself as the president’s plane landed.

She had been advised of all the plans weeks before.

As far as she could tell nothing overtly tacky was about to occur.

The technique saw her through the eulogies at Arlington Cemetery, but she lapsed into it fully when once again she was sitting in her old spot, the left-hand back of the presidential limousine. For a few moments she couldn’t stop herself pretending that if she turned from waving to the crowds lining the streets she would be able to look to her right and he would still be there.

As they pulled into the drive of the White House, she almost could make believe it was just over twelve months ago and they were going home. She looked up at the columns of this beautiful building. At least they had really, truly enjoyed their time here. She knew every corner of the place. Her mind filled with the sound of her husband summoning the children into the Oval Office, the memories of Caroline doing handstands on the lawn.

She immediately made herself stop thinking like this. These were dangerously emotional thoughts.

I wonder how they have changed things? Focus on that, focus on that,
she told herself angrily.

She knew that she appeared withdrawn and quiet but that was a benefit. Cutting herself off in this way meant that no one dared intrude on her silence. She didn’t have to make small talk.

She remained in dream mode when she was shown up to her suite. She had redecorated this room in elegant white-on-white stripes. Simply replacing the blowsy mismatched chintz had made the sitting room and bedroom look so much larger and lighter.

She started to remember a laughter-filled moment that had taken place in the corridor outside when Jack had started to tease her about some aspect of the White House make over, and for a moment she tried to remember what it was.

“I have to forget about that now. I can afford to have feelings when I go back home. Not before,” she said under her breath.

It was only when ten minutes had passed and no one had come up to escort her downstairs to meet the visiting dignitaries that she wondered if her cool exterior hadn’t been rather too successful. Perhaps the president and his wife thought she wasn’t up to facing all the guests.

Down there were her friends, her allies. It was rude to keep them waiting for her like this. She found the phone and tried to remember how the White House switchboard worked.

When she got an answer, from a new operator, she was quite surprised that when she asked to be put through to the First Lady she was informed that the president was on his way up to see her.

“No, no, really. I don’t want any fuss,” she said.

“Tell him I’ll come right down. I do, of course, know my way and—”

Surprisingly the switchboard operator interjected.

“Please, ma’am. Please stay where you are. I have just been informed by his secretary that he’ll be right up. She says it is important that you wait for him.”

She smiled. Like many powerful men, he had deliberately chosen a tough disciplinarian as his personal secretary to keep everyone in line, himself included.

She had heard that unlike the more relaxed behavior of her predecessor, this secretary insisted upon knowing exactly where the president was at all times.

So she sat and waited.

When she had redecorated the White House she had installed bookshelves in all the bedrooms. She idly started to look through a book full of Michelangelo’s drawings.

It took nearly six more minutes for the president to appear.

Surprisingly, he was with the attorney general. They looked gray and extremely nervous.

As they entered neither of them smiled.

She looked at them. For a second no one spoke.

Not another tragedy on this day, she thought.

“Not something else bad?” she whispered.

She had left the children with their nanny at her sister’s house in London.

“The children?” she blurted out.

“No, no, no,” said the president. “They’re fine. But I am afraid Nicholas here does have what might be some”—he hesitated—“very unwelcome news.”

“Well,” Nicholas said. “It seems that this morning…”

He paused as the door opened and the First Lady slipped into the suite. The president looked daggers at her for the interruption.

First Lady and ex–First Lady nodded to one another.

“Well,” Nicholas started again. More slowly this time. He looked back at the door.

The president, without looking around behind him at the door, barked: “Shut the door and let no one else in.”

A hand emerged and closed the door.

He nodded at his subordinate to continue.

“Well”—he looked straight at her—“the facts are, Marilyn Monroe died this morning.”

Wishing to look away from two shocked brown eyes, he withdrew a piece of paper from his pocket.

Good God! she thought. The blond bombshell has finally exploded.

Instantly, a well-known picture of her husband and the sexy film star filled her mind.

It had been taken at a Democratic fund-raiser. She was in the lineup and he was shaking her hand looking down, seemingly equally attentive to her upturned eyes, nose, and breasts. To be fair
there had been nowhere else for him to look. They were being served up on a platter.

Everyone here in this room had been in the audience of that fund-raiser when later, wrapped in a tiny scarlet dress, with a long side slit that had been dipped in diamonds, she had breathed out a song. She had been part of a cavalcade of stars saluting the new chief. Some columnists wrote that although the curvy Monroe could hardly have worn less, the movie star’s appearance had been largely overlooked because the new First Lady had looked like royalty. But a few months later the actress starred in a new movie about politics and the White House.

Billboards across America had featured advertisements for the film. The poster consisted of a full-length picture of M.M., as she was known, wearing a swimsuit made of nude-colored chiffon strategically splattered with gossamer sequins. She was emerging from a cake painted with the Stars and Stripes. Behind this scene were cartoon drawings of famous presidents, the most prominent of which looked a lot like the current holder of that office.

This started a round of rumor and innuendo in which her concert appearance was reprised in light of the poster.

At the time Jackie had dismissed it all, explaining that the filmmakers were obviously encouraging this publicity. Anything that could be used to link the supposedly sexiest woman in the world with the powerful U.S. president, especially as he was so attractive, would mean money for the box office.

Some of the published articles were highly annoying to the White House, not least because they had a germ of truth in them.

The one given most credence was that the president liked the movie so much that he had moved his bed into the White House cinema. The truth was that he had installed a new hard, single daybed in the room so that he could rest his bad back while watching movies. Since he had always kept his various medical conditions as secret as possible, there was nothing the White House could do to refute these stories.

Some of the sleaziest gossip columns would from time to time inform their readers that red, white, and blue bouquets delivered daily to the star on her latest film set were from the president.

Jackie knew that this was rubbish. She might have worried if the pieces quoted that the actress had been receiving books.

Books he sent, flowers, never.

Occasionally the gossip columnists would record sightings of the pair. But she didn’t worry. On the dates in question her husband had been with family members. Although she knew that he was not monogamous before becoming president, she expected that as nowadays he was surrounded by the whole retinue of White House staff, often including Cabinet members, there was safety in numbers.

So it was not until two slightly fuzzy pictures of just the outline of that famous M.M. shape appeared in one of the supermarket weeklies that she began to worry.

Apparently the photographer had positioned himself across the road from the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles where the president and his retinue were staying. Aiming for what he presumed was the presidential suite, even though he couldn’t see much through the half-drawn curtains, he thought he would run off a roll of film using his new long lens.

There were two photographs of the actress. In each the straps of her evening gown had been pulled down so that it was clinging to the tips of her nipples. She was being held by a man whose face was out of focus but who had his naked arm around her waist.

In one of them her head was tipped back, eyes closed in rapture. In the other she was mischievously putting her tongue out and smiling up at her unknown partner.

Upset and suspicious, Jackie challenged her husband with this. He denied everything.

He also tried to reassure her by adding that, nowadays, there was no way that he “could cat around and not get found out.”

For hours she had raged at him and his ability to hurt her.

The president swore that the photographer had picked the wrong suite.

“Look at the pictures,” he snapped. “Note there are no pieces of paper, empty coffee cups, or dirty ashtrays visible. You of all people know what it is like. The speechwriters, Phil, Dave, and even Deck, come in and out of the bedroom. You know that even the bathroom gets a trashing.

“Just to remind you, the weather was bad and we got to L.A. late. We had a quick meeting and a final discussion on the speech I was going to make at breakfast the next morning. I can get you minutes of those, by the way. Then we headed out for the dinner but we were late so we just had the hors d’oeuvres and went straight into the speech. California, as you know, is really important to us so we hung around, pressed the flesh, had a few chats. Artie reminded us that when they give in that state they give big-time, so he introduced us to some of the guys he thinks will do so. By that time we were absolutely starving, so we went to the Crosby place to eat. Lots of people, but she wasn’t even there, and I was with my
sister,
who is sticking to me like glue, my other sister who has just bought a house in La Jolla, two speechwriters, and Deck, Paul, Steve, and Jim, not to mention the Secret Service guys and so on and so on.”

The minutes of the meeting were delivered the next day. He sent them to her in an envelope covered with his kisses and hearts drawn by their daughter. By then not only had he been very loving toward her, he promised that before the next election they would return to Venice. She loved him and wanted to believe him. And she knew that unless she assumed that most of his staff, not to mention his family, were conspiring in his adultery, there was absolutely no way of discovering the truth.