“She had some understanding of this, of course, from her days of refurbishing the White House. Moreover, way back, one of the greatest influences on her life was her grandfather, her mother’s father, who was a builder here in New York, and who actually was a partner of Raol Fleischmann, the owner of The New Yorker magazine.
“His name was Lee, but he was thought to have changed his name, and to be Jewish. There was a very nice painting of him at 25 West Forty-third Street, in the lunette over the Forty-first Street door, until they remodeled the building a few years ago. In the painting, Mr. Lee was portrayed as a white-haired, nice-looking man, with all the blueprints spread out on his desk. He was quite a good builder, and he was a very important influence on Jackie’s life. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she imbibed some notion of this idea of building, what it meant, even as an adolescent.”
“At almost all our Municipal Art Society benefits, we would be in the reception line,” Gill recalled. “She was our star, and I was the old cannon they brought forward for that purpose. And of course the reception line was always entertaining to me from a novelistic point of view. I enjoyed watching all the people getting ready to come up there just to shake hands with Jackie.
“I would have to say, over and over, This is Mrs. Onassis,’ to somebody who had been waiting an hour in line for this woman, who had no need to be identified by me. But that was the protocol. But, boy, could she pass them on! Again, I think this was her White House training. The Trumps and people like that would come, and she would get them through the line.
“We had an entertaining time at those things, in part because she had a perfectly lively sense of the degree to which she was being used. And she was prepared to consent to be made use of.”
“The only time Jackie was ever angry with me was when I did an expose of Joseph Campbell [author of The Power of Myth] in The New York Review of Books” Gill said. “This man was like a monster, whom Jackie had admired very much.
“Campbell was a guru for a lot of people of Jackie’s generation, but his book was very bad scholarship. He was not a great scholar. He was radically anti-Semitic … and in that respect he was like Jackie’s father-in-law Joseph Kennedy.
“Did Jackie see through these people? She may have, but it remains an intriguing question how much she saw through people like Campbell and Onassis and Joe Kennedy. In fact, it is the central question of her life: How does one live publicly in a world where one has to lie?
“Jackie was pitched headlong into the midst of such a world. And all her life, she had to make decisions to lie, or not to lie, and to go on living.”
“THAT’S JACKIE…. THAT’S JACKIE….”
One evening in March 1980, Jackie stepped off a freight elevator into a crowded Soho loft, where an Academy Awards party was in full swing. Two men followed her off the elevator into the noisy, smoke-filled room. One was her escort for the evening, Pete Hamill, the ruggedly handsome, Brooklyn-born columnist for the New York Daily News. The other was a slightly built young man who was wrapped in the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk and carried a photo of the Sri Rajneesh on a leather thong around his neck.
“Hi, Pete,” said Julienne Scanlon, a Broadway musical star and the wife of the party’s host, public-relations man John Scanlon. “What would you like to drink?”
“I’ll just have a Coke,” said Hamill, who had lived the life of a sober alcoholic for the past eight years. “Oh, by the way,” he added nonchalantly, “this is Jackie.”
Julienne stared in disbelief at Hamill’s date, who was dressed in a floral blouse, black trousers, and patent-leather pumps.
“And what would you like to drink, Jackie?” Julienne managed to stammer.
“I’ll have what Pete’s having,” Jackie said.
The bartender, a young woman, took one look at Jackie, and dropped the glass she was holding in her hand. It smashed on the floor, and when she bent to pick it up, she cut herself so badly that her hand would not stop bleeding.
In all the confusion, Julienne had barely had time to deal with the young man in the saffron robes.
“And who are you?” she finally asked the follower of Sri Rajneesh, who had wandered in from the little Neeshie ashram located on Franklin Street across from the Scanlon loft.
“I’m with Jackie,” he said.
“Jackie, do you know him?” Julienne asked her.
Jackie looked at the monk, and shook her head.
“Pete!” Julienne called after Hamill, who had begun to disappear into the crowd. “This fellow says he’s with Jackie.”
Hamill ran back to the entrance, grabbed the confused Neeshie by his homespun robe, and hustled him into the freight elevator.
“I’m with Jackie!” the young man yelled as he disappeared. “This is a sign! We were meant to be together!”
“I think I should go to the hospital to get some stitches,” said the bartender.
Jackie followed Hamill into the jam-packed loft, which consisted of one large living area with windows all around, and a big bedroom, where three or four television sets were blaring at the same time. Edward Koch, the mayor of New York, and a bevy of journalists and writers were watching Jane Fonda hand Dustin Hoffman an Oscar for his performance as a beleaguered father in Kramer vs. Kramer.
Hamill knew a thing or two about the problems of fatherhood. He was still trying to repair some of the damage he had inflicted on his daughters Adrienne and Deirdre when they were growing up and he was drunk a lot of the time. After he stopped drinking, Hamill lived for
