HOPE
“She came in early in January under an assumed name, and swore us to secrecy,” said one of her doctors at the New York Hospital, where Jackie began receiving the first course in chemotherapy and steroid drugs. “It was a cloak-and-dagger operation. She wanted anonymity.”
The same secrecy was employed when Jackie went to the Stich Radiation Therapy Center for periodic CAT scans. She arrived at seven o’clock in the morning wearing a hooded cape. While she waited outside in the car, Maurice made sure that no one was in the waiting room. When all was clear, he brought her in on his arm.
Maurice carried a small bag containing Jackie’s breakfast, which she ate after the CAT scan. However, one morning she could barely wait.
“I’m really hungry,” she told one of the doctor’s assistants. “Would you bring Mr. Tempelsman here?”
“Gee, I hope he hasn’t eaten your breakfast,” the aide teased. “But I’m sure he wouldn’t. He’s a special person.”
“Oh, yes,” said Jackie, “he is.”
Jackie was soon displaying the side effects of her chemo-and-drug treatment—hair loss, blotchy skin, and bloating. She was forced to wear a wig, and people noticed that there was something wrong with her. She knew that it would not be possible to hide the nature of her illness much longer, and so she instructed her old friend Nancy Tuckerman to release the news to The New York Times. In the story, which appeared on February 11, 1994, Nancy confirmed that Jackie was being treated for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, but pointed out that her doctors were very optimistic.
“She’s fine,” Nancy said. “She goes in for routine visits, routine treatment. That’s what it is.”
This was no exaggeration. As Jackie’s treatment progressed through four standard courses of chemotherapy, her doctors gave her consistently optimistic reports. The cancer, they said, appeared to be in remission. She was greatly encouraged by their outlook, and continued to go to her office at Doubleday three days a week.
“She enjoyed doing these books,” said John Loring. “We’d laugh about it, and talk about all these titles of books we were going to do, and what the next one was.
“And one day she said, ‘Oh, yes, isn’t that wonderful. When we’re eighty we can write Tiffany Mushrooms. We can just do this forever.’
“And this may sound naive, but I honestly did not believe she was going to die. She seemed invincible. And if you knew her well, you just couldn’t believe that this was a hopeless case. You believed that she would get over this, too. That she’d gotten over everything else, and she’d get over this. That this was not going to do her in.”
In February, Jackie had lunch in her apartment with her friend Peter Duchin, who had just begun to write his memoirs. Duchin asked Jackie what she remembered about his father, bandleader Eddy Duchin, and his mother, Marjorie, who had died in childbirth. His question elicited a poignant recollection from Jackie, whose illness had obviously stirred some deep feelings from the past.
“I remember your parents only indirectly,” Jackie told Peter Duchin. “But I’ll never forget the night my mother and father both came into my bedroom all dressed up to go out. I can still smell the scent my mother wore and feel the softness of her fur coat as she leaned over to kiss me good night. In such an excited voice she said, ‘Darling, your father and I are going dancing tonight at the Central Park Casino to hear Eddy Duchin.’ I don’t know why the moment has stayed with me all these years. Perhaps because it was one of the few times I remember seeing my parents together. It was so romantic. So hopeful.”
PREPARING FOR THE WORST
But the cure proved almost as bad as the disease, and Jackie aged considerably in a matter of a few weeks. Her face grew sallow, and more hair fell out. She wore a beret to cover her wig. Throughout the harsh, stormy winter of 1994, she was too weak to continue her yoga sessions with Tillie Weitzner. Instead, she took strolls in Central Park with Maurice. She was familiar with the park’s paths from years of jogging, but now she was unable to venture very far before she became utterly exhausted. She leaned on Maurice’s arm for support. When she got back to her apartment, she went to bed and took a nap.
She was puzzled. If the cancer was in remission, why didn’t she feel better? She refused to think about her own mortality. She could not believe she was going to die. Not yet, anyway. She was only sixty-four years old. As her favorite Greek poet, Cavafy, wrote in “Ithaca,”
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for long years.
She encouraged Nancy Tuckerman to feed the press optimistic assessments of her progress.
“She’s doing so well,” said Nancy. “She was coming in to a focus group meeting today [at Doubleday], but it was called off because of the snow. She had her grandchildren come over to see her yesterday.”
Jackie was the one who did the most to promote the image of herself as a woman on the mend. She wrote dozens of sunny letters to friends, like this one to Brooke Astor:
… being with you would make me laugh. The greatest healer. This is your gift. … I shall look forward to our doing something together in a little while when all this first part is over….
And to John Loring:
… Everything is fine. Soon we can have another festive lunch….
One day in March, she experienced an alarming spell of mental confusion. She went to see an eminent
