“I worked with Jackie for two years on the purchase,” said David Flanders, the real-estate broker who sold her the land. “The first time she flew into the airport on Martha’s Vineyard, she came on Bunny Mellon’s private plane. Bunny Mellon was her chief adviser, and she and Jackie came frequently together, walking the property, looking at it from different angles. Jackie was very impressed by what Mrs. Mellon had to say.”
Bunny not only was involved in the purchase of the land itself, she also helped Jackie select the architect, Hugh Newell Jacobsen, who designed the traditional salt-box house. Bunny showed up on weekends with Jackie to check on the progress of the construction, and to plan the landscaping. Bunny influenced the interior decor, and she lent Jackie her private jet to fly in the furniture that Jackie selected to fill the house’s nineteen rooms. And, finally, Bunny designed an apple orchard on the property. She left intentional gaps between some of the trees, explaining that she wanted it to look “as if a few old trees had died.”
Jackie leaned her bike on its kickstand and went inside the house. Even with the door closed, she could hear the ocean roaring. She entered the living room, whose large picture window afforded a spectacular view of Squibnocket Pond and the Atlantic. Toys were strewn all over the bleached oak floor. Grandjackie, as she was called, was a permissive grandmother, and she let Caroline’s three children—Rose, Tatiana, and the baby, Jack—have free rein in the house.
Jackie took justifiable pride in the way Caroline had turned out. Considering the snares and pitfalls of growing up a Kennedy, Caroline was amazingly well adjusted. She was thirty-six years old, and married to Edwin Schlossberg, a teddy-bearish man thirteen years her senior. Schlossberg, the scion of a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, was a former acolyte of Buckminster Fuller’s and an avant-garde artist in his own right.
“Exactly what Ed Schlossberg does,” the writer George Plimpton once confessed, “is obscure.”
Apparently what Schlossberg did best was to look after Caroline, who had put her career as a lawyer on hold in order to take care of her children. Jackie never really warmed up to the humorless Schlossberg, who guarded Caroline as though he were her Secret Service agent, rather than her husband. But Jackie knew that Schlossberg functioned as a kind of protective screen around Caroline, who harbored a suspicious attitude toward strangers, and assumed that most people were trying to exploit her.
“Ed has taken Caroline out of the world of publicity and made her feel as though he has saved her,” said one of Jackie’s friends.
“When they were in the city, Caroline and Jackie saw each other a couple of times a week,” said one of Caroline’s best friends. “Being the daughter of a famous mother made it hard for Caroline to understand that her problems with her mother were the average person’s problems with their mother. On the other hand, I think that Jackie was a woman who knew that she was thin and attractive, and it may not always have been easy for her to relinquish the spotlight to her daughter. Mother-daughter relationships are always complicated, and that could really be the case when it was carried to the grandeur of this particular family.”
Caroline’s close friend Alexandra Styron, daughter of writers William and Rose Styron, added:
“Caroline seemed to have come into her own in the last few years. I’d never seen her happier than she was now. She looked beautiful. She was stick-thin. Her skin was glowing. She and Ed were as much in love as any married people I had ever seen. They had a very quiet social life. They went out to an occasional dinner party given by a friend. They faithfully went to see friends who were actors in plays. They stuck pretty close to home. Caroline was really an extremely unassuming, down-to-earth person.”
The same could not be said of John Jr., who at age thirty-three had movie-star looks that were a devastating blend of the Bouviers and the Kennedys. Like his sister, John struggled to be as normal as possible, but he had to contend with the invidious comparisons that people often made between him and his famous namesake. It was not easy being the son of a man who was associated with so much power—sexual as well as political—and who still came out on top in the polls of Americans’ favorite presidents.
When John was growing up, Jackie sent him to see Dr. Ted Becker, a well-known adolescent psychiatrist. And when it was time for him to go away to college, Jackie passed up Harvard, JFK’s alma mater, and enrolled John in Brown University, an Ivy League school that had no core requirements for graduation (John had flunked math at Andover), and where each student was allowed to design his own learning program. Brown was an innovative school. For example, the year after John arrived at Brown, Harriet Sheridan, the dean of the college, created a special program for learning-disabled students.
After graduating from New York University Law School, John embarrassed himself (and his family) by twice failing the New York State bar exam. In the presence of friends, Jackie sought to make light of John’s failure, pointing out that he had not prepared adequately for the tough exams. In private, however, she was furious, and demanded that John hire a tutor, which he did. He passed on the third try. John also had to pay $2,300 in parking tickets to clear himself of all outstanding legal judgments in order to qualify for a job as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan.
“Compared to his sister, John had a more open personality,” said one of Jackie’s friends. “He was more open to stimulation and to being led in wrong directions. In that regard, John was more a person after Jackie’s own heart, more a loose cannon, unpredictable. John was always leaving crazy
