Jack's Widow (8 page)

He didn’t want any more questions. This whole thing had been a setup. On the one hand he felt he had let down his old pal, and on the other, as he sat here with her, it all sounded so shabby, so tawdry.

She was looking out of the window, her face turned away.

He stopped worrying about the dead and for the first time gave proper thought to the living.

Jack and he used to think sex was their right. Hell, what was the point of having good looks and money unless you put them to good use.

Fidelity was for women and men not lucky enough to have their advantages in life. He had never given it a second thought, until now.

Angrily he said, “Today, the ceremony, it was a mistake. Lyndon had no right to ask you to do it. Just upsets us all over again.”

Bitterly she answered, “Oh, Deck, don’t do what they all do and knock Lyndon. Trust me, today won’t have been half as bad as tomorrow is going to be.”

There was silence as they both imagined how the suicide would be covered in the newspapers, the radio, and the television.

“Maybe she says nothing in her note,” said Deck, ever the optimist.

“There will definitely be questions about why she especially chose today to die, and those pictures will be shown all round the world again and there will be endless innuendo about Jack.

“If she has written something about Jack, who knows what else will come out,” she muttered to herself.

She turned to look at him, her face awash with hurt and anger.

“Except you know what else, don’t you, Deck? You know everything.”

She turned away and looked out of the window.

When no answer was forthcoming she said, “Oh, don’t bother to answer. I suppose your male—sorry,
boys’
—code won’t allow you to.”

There was a wedge of silence in the car. He put his foot on the accelerator. Wherever they were going, the sooner they arrived the better, as far as he was concerned.

He remembered so much. Even if he hadn’t actually been with Jack, should some sexual dimension have been breached, anything from a girl playing footsie under the table to full-on mating in a Washington apartment, his friend would always keep him in the loop.

Her breathing was labored. “From now on it’s
me
you can watch out for.

“Just make sure you point out any other woman Jack knew who might try the same publicity stunt as Marilyn. Don’t forget to remind me of who is getting old and poor and just might have to sell her story, or which Hollywood star so badly needs to haul the public out of their easy chairs into the movie theater that she’ll tell how Jack Kennedy kissed her lips and whispered love words into her ear.

“Perhaps you can tell me exactly
how
you helped Marilyn get through security and how her little messages reached him? I seem to remember in the early days, with one or two notable exceptions, that you were always very keen to have his castoffs. Perhaps you even nudged him toward Marilyn because you wanted her yourself?” She was shouting.

By now she was semikneeling on her seat, flailing at him and obliterating his view. She began to hit him, anything to make him speak.

He put his arm up so as to fend her off. The car shook from side to side as he tried to see where he was going.

He braked and slowed down but didn’t speak and didn’t stop.

“Jackie! Stop hitting me. Who will look after your children if you kill us in this car?” he asked her.

“Don’t you dare try and be so high-and-mighty and responsible with me,” she yelled.

Then she fell back into her seat. How pointless. It wasn’t Deck she wanted to kill. The man she wanted to murder was already dead.

“Maybe if you tell me exactly what happened I can learn something. After all, aren’t you supposed to be the greatest storyteller of all time? Aren’t
you
the one who can remember all the important little details? The who, when, where, and how, and how damn often. Why don’t we”—she opened the other glove compartment—“find some paper and a pen and do a list.”

As she scrabbled for a pen he could see that she was crying.

For him this was the most upsetting. This was the woman who had not shed a public tear, ever. Now she was shaking, sobbing, her whole body retching in misery.

Deck knew that nothing he could say would make it better, only worse. That she had never, ever, had an agreement with Jack about his private life was clear. Even worse, she obviously had no inkling that there were so many more women than she knew about who had played their part in Jack’s secret world. Not only had her husband taken the decision that as president he was not going to give up sex on the side, he had not hesitated to turn virtually everyone around him into coconspirators.

In his parallel universe many on his staff had not just helped him run the country but had colluded in his deception. Some knew more than others but their aid had enabled him to entertain other women behind her back anywhere he wanted. For the first time he was forced to acknowledge that it wasn’t just Jack who had betrayed her.

He pulled over and scrambled out of the car. The night was bitter.

He leaned back in and spoke to her shivering back. “I’ll go up ahead into that diner. I’ll see if I can get us some coffee while you calm yourself.

“Then I’ll take you home.”

She didn’t even acknowledge him through her tears.

“Jackie,” he started, wanting to say that all this had nothing to do with her. That whoever Jack had married it was inevitable that the good-looking, all-powerful multimillionaire son of a multimillionaire adulterer was never going to be a saint, and that the way he had behaved was as much a part of his genetic makeup as his eyes, or his nose. But he could see that this was not the time.

She had every right to be furious. Her pain was not just about sexual jealousy or infidelity.

Once she had been forced to accept that Jack would make no effort to be faithful, he should have gratefully acknowledged his debt to her. From the moment that he ran for office she could have divorced and destroyed him at any time. Deck tried to put himself in her shoes. She had every right to feel angry and bitter. To be reelected, Jack would have needed her. She had been an outstanding First Lady. At the very least she deserved to be treated with respect and entitled to the truth.

The terrible aftertaste of her marriage, the one that she would always be left with, was that Jack had not only taken her love for granted, he had taken her for a fool.

As he entered the diner he was aware of a large sports car moving toward him in the empty street behind him.

Turning, he saw the former First Lady at the wheel, tears flowing unchecked down her cheeks.

When she saw him she didn’t stop, but sped past.

She was obviously going to drive more than a hundred miles home to New York without him.

It was eight
P.M.
The TV programs on today’s memorial service were about to start.

If the nation knew that the calm and collected former First Lady was speeding down the highway alone, sobbing her heart out, they would never believe it.

He was worried about her safety but realized that if he raised the alarm he would never be trusted by her or the family again. The
police always tipped off the press. If the newshounds picked up this information it would end up as part of a juicy amalgamation with the Monroe suicide.

Her guardianship of Jack’s legacy would have been a complete waste of time. It would give those who disliked Camelot, and all it stood for, more ammunition.

He had to find a local cab that would drive him along in her wake. He could say that he was too drunk to drive. It was his duty to ensure that she got back safe. He would check with her doorman that she had arrived. Over the next day or so he would somehow retrieve the keys to his car. It would not be easy; after to night he did know too much. He had seen her with her defenses destroyed.

He doubted that she would ever want to see him again.

M
arilyn’s suicide made the front pages of all the newspapers the next day, but since the press was concentrating on the graveside service for the dead president, despite the extraordinary coincidence in the dates of their deaths, her name was not linked with his in the eulogies and obituaries.

Jackie knew that this was the calm before the storm. Tomorrow, free of their pious mask of mourning, the tabloids would take full opportunity to chew over the state of Marilyn’s mind before she elected to die on the anniversary of the slaying of the late president.

The former First Lady knew that if they had just a sniff of the existence of a suicide note, even if it was only marginally more interesting than a shopping list, the story could bubble for weeks. Unlike yesterday’s events, which signified the end of something, the subject of the actress’s untimely suicide had legs.

President Johnson had called this morning to assure her that he was still hopeful that Consuelo James would give up the letter.

He hadn’t talked for long because he was in a quandary. He didn’t
feel it was right to assure her that the suicide note contained nothing for her to worry about without revealing what was in the photograph, which he still had not seen himself. As he was still confident that he could use his power to stop the image from ever becoming public, it seemed equally worth trying to ensure that the widow would never find out what it showed.

He had come to this decision for several reasons. Overriding all considerations was his admiration for Jackie. He thought that she had been through enough. Secondly, he thought that Jack Kennedy’s sexual shenanigans denigrated the status of the presidency, especially as they seemed to include using the White House itself for his louche behavior. Lyndon was no angel but he still thought there was a certain way that a man should behave. As a poor boy who had done well he had always had huge contempt for the playboy Kennedys.

He was also jealous. He had just won a landslide victory and yet the dead man could still reach out from the grave and grab what Lyndon felt should be his headlines. When he felt proud of an accomplishment, his efforts were often trounced by a front-page story about the Warren Report, the official inquiry into the death of JFK (everyone seemed to have forgotten that he, LBJ, had set it up), or vying for space against an article about yet another place being named in JFK’s honor. And if it wasn’t the dead president getting ink, his brother Bobby, the new senator for New York, was in the news.

Lyndon Johnson was fed up with being in their shadow. Now he was caught up in another Kennedy mess. His attorney general warned him that there were legal difficulties in suppressing Marilyn’s suicide note and the photograph because, as both of them had been addressed to her maid (the actress had even written Consuelo’s name on the back of the photo), when the coroner released them, Miss James could do as she wished with them. At this very moment a government lawyer was on his way to L.A. to see if a deal could be done.

“Perhaps the maid has someone she wants to bring over from
Cuba, Italy, who knows from where?” was his first instruction. “Maybe this and some money can shut her up.”

Jackie knew none of this. nervous of what more she would discover, she was nonetheless proud of herself for having been brave enough to challenge Deck. Having grown up in a house of arguments, she usually did anything to shy away from scenes.

But it was all too much for her.

Maybe the note would die with the blonde but there was always someone who talked. She wondered just how far the ripple of betrayal had spread among her family and friends. Several times she went to the phone, tempted to call her in-laws, especially the ones who had been in L.A. with him on that trip. The Kennedy tribe had long been trained to circle the wagons and go into defensive mode if any one of them was under attack. As a relation she might be able to breach their defenses, but she needed to be sure that she selected the right person. After all, it was quite possible that her sisters-in-law were equally in the dark about Jack and Marilyn.

Glued to their spot on top of a pedestal, they could not bend, or even sway in the breeze of freedom, a situation and state enjoyed by their husbands. They remained protected, almost imprisoned, often completely unaware of what any of their men were up to.

Because of this Jackie knew that from a practical point of view, it was highly unlikely that her sisters-in-law would have placed Jack under the close scrutiny that she had been forced to do from the earliest days of her marriage. It had been a complex game that the pair of them had played. He was furious if he ever caught her prying, but over the years she hadn’t been able to resist keeping a watchful eye on him at parties, dinners, and any other places where he might meet new women. Right away she could mark out which type he went for. She prided herself on her ability to abort an introduction or to swiftly separate him from his target by attracting her husband’s interest in something or someone else.

His sisters wouldn’t know anything. More importantly, she doubted they would have the imagination to suspect their brother
had—as Jackie had convinced herself he did over the last twenty-four hours—unnatural sexual needs.

When they were first married they had had countless arguments when Jack had refused to be bound by their wedding vows.

At first he would try to brush off her worries by lying about where he had been, but as time went on he tried to persuade her that his infidelities meant absolutely nothing and that they would never threaten their marriage. Religion and a sense of family would never let any of his “girling” impose on their life together. He felt that the United States was puritanical and tried to persuade her that in Europe things were different. After all, the more devout Italians and the French, who prized family and heritage above all else, rarely remained faithful but seldom divorced. Relying in equal measure on her low self-esteem and her abiding love for him, he attempted to persuade her that coming home in the early hours after vanishing with a girl at a party meant absolutely nothing. He claimed that his inability to resist the occasional one-night stand was the result of being a longtime bachelor; he had been thirty-six when they wed. His way of jousting with illness and pain was to find sexual release.

“It means no more to me than having a cool drink on a hot day,” were his exact words. “Just a little palliative for the old ache in the groin,” was another description. “No more important than an aspirin.”

However much he tried to reassure Jackie, there were many times when she felt the situation was unendurable, although once Caroline was born in 1957, both Jackie and her husband knew that she would never let her daughter suffer the same miserable childhood she had. She could never subject Caroline to divorce.

That Marilyn had been seeing Jack for so long was a big shock. All night she had tried to piece the thing together. Marilyn had not been a casual fling, she had been Jack’s mistress.

How often did he see her? How often did he talk to her on the phone? Why did he fancy her so much? What did she do for Jack
that made her so special to him? What did they say about her behind her back?

Jackie was no prude. Jack had persuaded her to view some pornographic movies; they had been to see one or two raunchy films. If only she could convince herself that the affair with Marilyn was because of some strange sexual kink.

She alternated between anger and tears. She felt so helpless, her fate in the hands of Lyndon Johnson and some film star’s maid.

Despite her ambivalence toward her in-laws she took comfort from their phone calls. All morning they had been phoning to praise her for handling the memorial service with her usual aplomb, citing this or that from last night’s TV programs or this morning’s newspapers. Admittedly it was the female side that called. To try and find out what they knew she gently prodded them all, including her mother-in-law, to discuss what they expected the press would say about Jack and the dead actress. All believed that this would be a one-day wonder, that the date was just a coincidence.

As the morning passed, with no further word from the White House, it was a desperate Jackie who called the eldest surviving Kennedy brother. She could think of no better person than Bobby to advise her. He had, after all, relinquished the post of attorney general quite recently and he could tell her what influence Lyndon could bring to bear on Consuelo James. Equally important, if she decided to tell him what she knew, she was sure that he would keep this shocking piece of information to himself.

By lunchtime she had left two messages. It was dark outside before he returned her call.

He began by apologizing for leaving the White House reception early. “I just couldn’t handle it, seeing him there when it should have been Jack…I’m not surprised you got out of Washington so fast. You’re better off in New York.”

He spent time complimenting her for the way her children were growing up so well and how brilliantly she had dealt with everything at Arlington. Then he said that his contacts in the newspapers had told him that tomorrow they were going to go heavy on the fact
that Marilyn had chosen to kill herself on the anniversary of Jack’s death.

“I’m glad to have this chance of warning you. I don’t imagine the story will amount to much, there’ll be the picture of them at the concert and that stupid film poster, but Jackie, don’t weaken now, try to just ignore it. Do what you always do. Don’t acknowledge any filth that those scum write,” Bobby told her.

“The papers are probably angry at something that Lyndon’s done, or that he hasn’t done, so they want to get at the Party and this will give them a useful excuse. And of course, it’s a way of getting at the family, or at me, sabotaging my political chances.”

When she quietly asked if he knew why the star had chosen the anniversary to kill herself, Bobby reacted angrily.

“Of course I don’t. The stupid woman was probably drugged up to the eyeballs.”

Jackie asked him again if he knew anything, anything at all, that connected Marilyn and his murdered brother.

The slight twang in her brother-in-law’s voice got more noticeable.

“Look, Jackie, I knew her too. They could say something about her and me, but they don’t dare because I’m alive to answer back.”

Jackie interrupted, her voice low and serious. “You sound worried, Bobby. Surely they won’t be able to write much if they only have the picture of her shaking Jack’s hand, the film poster, and the coincidence of her death yesterday?”

“Well, I wasn’t always with him.” He was more hesitant now. “Especially not in L.A. Marilyn was fun, a good-time girl who loved to party.”

There was silence.

She refused to break it.

“Supposing, just supposing, he got out of line.” He sounded less angry now.

“What exactly are you saying?”

“Absolutely nothing…but supposing…you know, she meant nothing to him, she was just a, ah, convenience to him.”

“Oh, that again, so you all say it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just something Jack used to tell me.”

“Jackie, I admit he was no saint but he loved you.”

“So you did know about it.” She spat the words out.

Why had she even spent a second worrying that he didn’t know and that she would have to tell him all about his precious brother and his mistress?

“Jackie, calm down. It meant nothing. Remember that. He was always asking you to go on the road with him. Getting upset just plays into their hands. As you’ve said, the papers have got nothing…and she meant nothing, zilch, to him.”

Jackie decided not to bother to tell him that Deck had spilled the facts.

“I’ll call you tomorrow. When you get down here for Thanksgiving, come over? We’ll arrange to go out somewhere, all of us.”

So whatever the papers say, we’ll all be seen together and everything will look hunky-dory, which will be good for your career, thought Jackie. This family!

“We’ll tip off someone we know, some reporter we can trust, get some pictures taken,” added Bobby.

Unbelievable! More lying pictures. The whole Kennedy edifice was built on photogenic falsehood.

“I don’t think so,” said Jackie firmly. Why not put him under the same pressure that she was coping with?

“Bobby, Deck has told me everything. He had no option. The woman has left a suicide note.”

She wasn’t sure but she thought she heard a gasp from the other end of the phone line.

“Lyndon says that he is trying to deal with it…What do you think he will be able to do?”

She said this in such a matter-of-fact tone that it was some seconds before he responded. She interrupted his spluttering avowal of apology.

“Bobby, we haven’t got time. Is there anything that Lyndon can do, without making it more of a story?”

“Well, he is hardly going to ruin his reputation for the Kennedys, is he?”

Although Bobby believed that the president must be taking some delight in this situation, he said nothing more.

“Let me think about everything, look up some law books, and call you back within the hour.”

Jackie hoped he would call Lyndon and help stop the story from getting out, but during the next hour all her sisters-in-law called her again and told her yet again how Jack loved her and how he had confided to them how much he admired her.

Poppycock!

Now not only did she know that he had continued to be a habitual womanizer, Jackie realized that she alone would have to deal with it.

Should she put out a statement? Saying what? Should she call up the newspaper owners, speak to them off the record? In the old days they had been very helpful. She could ask that they watch what was written for the sake of her children.

No, they would be as sweet as peaches on the phone and then the word would get out that she was groveling.

Never.

Should she ask to meet Consuelo James and try and beg or bargain directly with her?

Too risky; it was bound to get out.

Later, Bobby called her again. Both he and the family lawyer felt that if the government legal team could not coax the maid or frighten her into releasing the letter and picture, no one could.