“The purpose of our yoga was to work out the spine and keep it flexible. Jackie was incredibly limber. She had youthful movements, and was hardly ever sick. She was stoic, not a sissy. We did yoga at times when there was no air conditioning in the room and it was one hundred degrees, and it was unbelievably uncomfortable, and she was a real trooper.
“She was a horsewoman, which gave her strong legs. She had made several falls over the years. They could have been deadly, but she was so limber she didn’t hurt herself. We talked about old-ladyhood, and she said that the only thing she wanted to be able to continue to do was ride.”
SIXTEEN
TOUCHED BY
THE SUN
November 1993–May 1994
A DUET WITH DEATH
The nation was about to commemorate another anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination, an event still filled with trauma for Jackie. She had once sent John Jr. out of the country to India for the occasion, then followed close behind. This November marked the thirtieth anniversary, and Jackie decided to avoid the dreaded klieg lights of attention and escape to the horse country of Middleburg, Virginia.
“We teased each other about being fit,” said Charles Whitehouse, one of her oldest friends and a man with whom she rode in Middleburg.
“I said to her, ‘I get fairly out of breath, going around this course.’
“And she said, ‘Well, I never get out of breath. I jog around the reservoir, as you know.’
“But when we finished, there she was at the finish line, her tongue hanging out.
“And I joked, ‘Jackie, I don’t think you’re doing as much jogging as you pretend!’
“During one of our team point-to-point races, I entered our group for the ‘best older team.’ She pretended to be outraged. And I said, ‘But, Jackie, we weren’t born yesterday, you know.’
“In fact, she didn’t think of herself as ‘older,’ and it was hard to believe that she had been First Lady thirty years before.”
That same weekend, Jackie fell off Clown, her show jumper. She had taken many spills before, but this was a particularly nasty one, and she lay on the ground unconscious for thirty minutes.
“Oh my God, she must have broken her neck!” screamed a spectator.
“I’m perfectly fine,” Jackie said when she finally came to.
But the emergency medics who responded to the call for help insisted on taking Jackie by ambulance to nearby Loudon Hospital Center. There, she was examined by Bunny Mellon’s personal physician, who noticed that Jackie had a slight swelling in her right groin. The doctor diagnosed it as a swollen lymph node. He suspected that she had an infection, and administered antibiotics. The next morning, the swelling in her groin had diminished, and she was released from the hospital.
“She was in some pain,” said Jerry Embrey, captain of the Middleburg Rescue Squad, “but I think she was in shock more than anything else. For a lady of her years to have taken such a fall and come through pretty much unscathed is almost a miracle.”
A couple of weeks later, Jackie felt well enough to spend Christmas with Maurice Tempelsman and her family at her country retreat in Peapack, New Jersey. As she drove along in her BMW, she slipped a CD into the player and listened to her friend Carly Simon accompany Frank Sinatra in a selection from his latest album, Duets. As Sinatra crooned “Guess I’ll Hang My Tears Out to Dry,” Simon joined in on some of the verses of that song, then interwove part of the song “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning.”
Jackie sang along.
Over the holidays, while sailing in the Caribbean with Tempelsman, Jackie developed a persistent cough. She thought she had the flu, and asked a local doctor to prescribe antibiotics. But then she developed painful swelling in the lymph nodes in her neck, and she began to feel stabbing pains in her stomach. She cut the vacation short and flew back to New York.
There, she consulted Dr. Carolyn Agresti, a head and neck surgeon at the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, who found enlarged lymph nodes in her neck and her armpit. A computerized axial tomography examination, commonly known as a CAT scan, showed that there were swollen lymph nodes in Jackie’s chest and in an area deep in her abdomen known as the retroperitoneal area.
Dr. Agresti ordered a biopsy of one of the neck nodes. It revealed that Jackie had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. A pathologist told Lawrence Altman, a medical expert who wrote for The New York Times, that the cells were anaplastic—that is, they were undeveloped, what doctors call “embryonic” or “primitive,” indicating that the disease was highly malignant, and could spread to other parts of Jackie’s body.
Maurice Tempelsman was at Jackie’s side in the living room of her apartment when she broke the news to Caroline and John. Her children were devastated. They hugged her, and then they and their mother wept.
“She said, ‘I feel it is a kind of hubris,’ ” Arthur Schlesinger recalled of his conversation with Jackie shortly after she learned of her cancer. “I have always been proud of keeping fit. I swim, and I jog, and I do my push-ups, and walk around the reservoir—and now this suddenly happens.”
“She was laughing when she said it,” Schlesinger continued. “She seemed cheery and hopeful, perhaps to keep up the spirits of her friends, and her own. Chemotherapy, she added, was not too bad; she could read a book while it was administered. The doctors said that in fifty percent of cases lymphoma could be stabilized. Maybe she knew it was fatal. Maybe she didn’t know at all, but even if she did, she still had hope for some other future.”
Jackie may have been laughing when she spoke with Schlesinger. But she also must have been thinking of
