Jackie summed up the difference between her children this way: “Caroline is focused and dedicated. John is spread out.”
Once, while Jackie was away on a Memorial Day weekend, John threw a wild party for sixteen friends, including actress Daryl Hannah, at his mother’s Martha’s Vineyard house. When the maid later discovered marijuana in the mess left behind by the guests, Jackie banished John to the silo section of the detached guest cottage, which was two hundred feet away from the main house.
Jackie was less than thrilled about John’s relationship with Daryl Hannah, a spacey five-foot-ten blonde from a broken home.
“Jackie called me one time, and asked me to look at that week’s TV section of the Sunday New York Times,” said a friend. “There was a photo of Daryl Hannah in her role as a twenty-foot-tall woman in some kind of silly science-fiction movie. It made her look like a giant amazon, or a cavewoman, and Jackie was appalled.
“Jackie told me that she would often stay in her bedroom and have dinner on a tray while John and Daryl were eating in the dining room,” the friend continued. “There was a lot of tension between John and Jackie. There was something in him where he just resisted any authority. He liked to play with fire. He was a pretty explosive guy. He went out and slammed doors. It was a very volatile relationship between mother and son in the last few years. She’d tell him, ‘You can’t be in acting.’ She wanted him to do something of substance, something worthwhile. She worried about him, what he would do. He had never had a job except in the district attorney’s office, and Jackie sure didn’t get his magazine idea.”
THE MAN WHO WON ART BUCHWALD
On Martha’s Vineyard, Jackie took care of her grandchildren one afternoon a week. She liked to play with them on the beach, tossing a Frisbee back and forth. Sometimes she would let the children play by themselves while she did her yoga exercises.
She spent most of her evenings alone with Maurice Tempelsman and her family. Every so often, she would invite a special friend to come and visit her on the Vineyard. Joe Armstrong, the magazine publisher, spent a whole week with her one summer. Occasionally she dined with her son and friends at the Ocean Club. It was there that she met the singer-songwriter Carly Simon, who became one of her closest friends, and who wrote a series of four children’s books for Jackie at Doubleday.
Once, when Jackie was still new to the Vineyard, and had not become quite such a loner, she agreed to go to lunch at Katharine Graham’s house. Kay felt the need to gather some interesting people to entertain Jackie, so she invited the playwright Lillian Hellman; the novelist William Styron and his wife, the poet Rose Styron; and humorist Art Buchwald.
“Art called Kay back and asked her if she planned to organize a tennis game before lunch,” said someone who attended the lunch. “Kay inquired why Art wanted to know. Well, it just so happened that a tennis game with Art Buchwald had been auctioned off as a prize at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Boston, and Art wanted to bring along the guy who had won.
“Naturally, Kay was cool to the idea, and said, ‘You know, Art, I’ve invited Jackie to lunch.’
“And Art said, ‘Oh, she’ll like this guy who won me.’
“On the morning of the lunch, Art called Kay again, and told her that the guy wanted to bring his daughter, too. The idea of Jackie facing this situation folded Kay up, but there was nothing to do but proceed. She called Jackie and told her.
“Jackie showed up alone in her car. And at lunch, the guy who had won the tennis game with Art turned out to be atrocious. He kept bellowing at his daughter. Worse, he sat down with this dazzling array of people and acted as if it was only his just due.
“At one point, Jackie turned to the guy and said, ‘Now tell me again. How did you win Art?’
“And he said, ‘I won him in an auction.’
“And you know what? Jackie thought it was funny. She was very equal to this kind of thing. She was equal to just about anything.”
A REAL TROOPER
“Tillie’s here!” Jackie called to Maurice as she passed his room on her way to answer the doorbell of her apartment. It was five in the afternoon, and she was wearing a pair of old black tights with holes in them. She swung open the door and greeted Tillie Weitzner, her tall, stately yoga teacher.
They went into Caroline’s old room, whose dominant color was orange. It had been left exactly as it was when Caroline lived there before she got married. The walls were hung with fading black-and-white photos of Caroline as a young girl. Her schoolwork still filled the bookcases.
Tillie took off her jacket and began leading Jackie through a series of yoga postures. Jackie had just maneuvered a leg around her neck when Maurice suddenly poked his head in the room, said something to Tillie in her native Dutch, then disappeared.
“The yoga was quite intensive,” Tillie said, “and Jackie was very good. She was incredibly disciplined, and eager to do it well. We had been working out together twice a week for sixteen years, since 1977, and I used to say, ‘It’s boring—always the same.’ And she said, ‘Oh, no, Tillie, it’s never boring.’
“We worked straight for an hour, and sometimes we would talk,” Tillie continued. “Once, Jackie mentioned Onassis, and said, ‘We had a good time together. My kids had a good time. It was fun.’ She never made any negative reference to Onassis. But she felt that she had to please Jack Kennedy
