“There was, of course, some special circumstance in her relationship with her father that made her have relationships with various powerful men,” Appelbaum continued. “But leaving it at that would be selling her short, and be one-dimensional. She had an independent, managerial, controlling streak. Her sibling position—she was the firstborn and the older of two sisters—made her by nature controlling, a person who took the initiative.
“She was the kind of person who would say to me when I was discussing a manuscript, ‘Use my house as a drop,’ as though she was a gun moll. I detected a certain tensile strength there. So it would be a disservice to call her overall a dependent person. She wasn’t. She was no clinging vine. If a woman has, as women do, something missing in the sense of power, they can get it by affiliating themselves with powerful men. They are adopting for themselves the power they are close to. It’s a method of being strong and independent. You can live through men, like Jackie, and have a lot of iron.”
She had always lived through men—her father, JFK, Bobby, Onassis. Now she was trying to break the habit of a lifetime, and define herself. She was not certain where she was going, or how she was going to get there, but she was determined not to travel in the old grooves of the past.
After Dallas, she had tried to recapture a life of power and glory, but her marriage to Onassis had turned into a disaster. Now she was beginning to wonder if the key to her happiness might lie somewhere else—in the simple pleasures of family, friendship, and work.
“What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families,” she said. “There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the window-pane? Leave their fine minds unexercised?
“Of course women should work if they want to,” she went on. “You have to do something you enjoy. That is the definition of happiness: ‘complete use of one’s faculties along the lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope.’ ”
Since her days in the White House, Jackie had always had a great influence on the way women looked at themselves. Because she was such a private person, and allowed the public to know so little about her, she acted as a kind of tabula rasa on which women could project their fantasies.
In the 1980s, not many women were sure that they wanted to emulate Gloria Steinem and other politicized feminists, who were often portrayed by the media as man-hating, childless fanatics. By contrast, Jackie seemed to have it all. Not only was she lovely, stylish, and clearly attractive to men; she was also smart, capable, and a very good mother. Women who wanted to have a measure of independence and a profession of their own, without sacrificing the benefits of womanhood, looked to Jackie’s example. They thought to themselves: If Jackie can do it, so can I.
“Jackie was tradition and modernity, the old femininity and the new womanhood, seemingly sustained in a perfect suspension,” wrote the feminist author Susan J. Douglas. “Jackie had these traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities—she was smart and loved intellectual pursuits, she was knowledgeable about history and the arts, she wore pants, and she had big feet—yet she was still completely feminine, a princess, a queen.”
“When she was alone again after Onassis’s death,” said Gloria Steinem, “the speculation about her future plans only seemed to split in two. Would she become a Kennedy again (that is, more political, American, and serious) or remain an Onassis (more social, international, and simply rich)? What no one predicted was her return to the publishing world she had entered briefly after college—to the kind of job she could have had years ago, completely on her own. And that’s exactly what she did….
“Her example poses interesting questions for each of us,” Steinem continued. “Given the options of using Kennedy power or living the international lifestyle of an Onassis, how many of us would have chosen to return to our own talents, and less spectacular careers? In the long run, her insistence on work that was her own [was] more helpful to other women than any use of the conventional power she declined.”
THE POWER BEHIND THE THRONE
One day in the fall of 1985, Jackie was in her office, employing her irresistible powers of persuasion on some helpless celebrity, when the Doubleday operator interrupted the phone call. Maurice Tempelsman’s doctor was holding on the other line.
“Yes, Doctor, what is it?” Jackie asked.
“I’ve just admitted Maurice to the coronary care unit of Lenox Hill Hospital,” the doctor said. “He’s complaining of chest pains.”
As Jackie later told friends, the instant she heard the word “hospital,” everything went blank. It was the same old nightmare: Jack and Parkland Memorial Hospital, Ari and the American Hospital in Paris. Now it was Maurice and Lenox Hill Hospital. The most important man in her life was seriously hurt, and had been rushed to the hospital.
She ran out into the street in front of the Doubleday building, hailed a taxi, and told the driver to step on it. As the cab sped off in the direction of the hospital on the Upper East Side, Jackie recalled that she was filled with a sense of dread. Was Maurice dying? Would she get there in time? Was she about to lose a third husband, which Maurice had become in all but name?
For the first few years after he left Lilly, Tempelsman had maintained his suite at the
