“I can’t believe this has happened,” Dr. Anne Moore, Jackie’s cancer specialist, said.
“Of all her doctors, no one saw this coming,” said someone who was close to the case. “Her doctors were all totally shocked. They thought they had beaten the disease. The whole team was stunned when they got the results of the CAT.”
A specialist in neurological diseases informed her that once cancer got into the brain it was very difficult to kill with chemotherapy. The brain had a natural barrier that kept out most chemotherapy drugs.
“Your best hope of survival is a very sophisticated procedure,” the specialist told her. “We drill a hole in the skull, open a shunt, and insert a tube for feeding an anticancer drug directly into the brain. We combine that with radiation therapy to the brain and to the lower spinal cord for about a month.”
It sounded horrific. But Jackie told the doctor that she was ready to try anything.
As a result of this radical treatment, she began to lose weight. Her speech slowed. And she was less alert.
“The moment I realized there was really something wrong with her was the last time we ate lunch at Le Cirque,” said John Loring. “Sirio loved to send over a sampling of desserts after lunch. Jackie would never touch them. She might stick her fork in and eat two crumbs and say, ‘Isn’t that wonderful,’ and that was the end of that.
“She was obviously not looking terribly well, but she was in a wonderful mood, and we were having a good time. And at the end of lunch, the usual four or five desserts appeared, covering the whole table.
“And she said, ‘You start that one. I’m going to start this one.’
“And she actually started to eat this dessert. And I thought, Well, that’s remarkable.
“So I said, ’You’re not going to finish that, are you? I’m going to have the waiter take this away right this minute.”
“She said, If anyone tries to touch one of those, I’m going to stab them in the hand with my fork. I’m going to eat every single one of them.”
“And she did. We sat there and plowed through every single dessert on the table. It was astonishing, but it was also terrifying, because it was like she had decided that this was not going to work out, and so why not eat all the desserts on the table. She might as well eat everything if she wanted to.”
On April 13, Jackie had lunch at Carly Simon’s sprawling apartment on Central Park West. Carly invited three of Jackie’s friends: Joe Armstrong, the publisher; Peter Duchin, the band leader; and Duchin’s wife, Brooke Hayward. As an added attraction, she invited the talented documentary maker Ken Burns, who was in the process of editing his Public Broadcasting System series on the history of baseball. Carly was featured on Burns’s sound track singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”
Jackie was fascinated by Burns’s project, and she asked him a lot of questions. But he could only stay for a part of the lunch. After he left, someone asked Jackie how she was feeling.
“Only four more weeks and I’ll get my life back,” Jackie said, referring to what she expected to be the last course of radiation treatment. “But,” she added, reverting to the third person, “one does not look forward to a summer on the Vineyard with a bad wig.”
Someone else then asked Jackie about her sister Lee.
“She stopped by for tea,” Jackie said.
“Do you see her often?”
“We’ve only seen each other once this whole year,” Jackie said. “I guess she called me so she could say that she saw me. I never could understand why Lee is so full of animosity.”
On Jackie’s way out, Carly handed her a big folded piece of paper.
“I wanted to give this to you,” Carly said. “I wrote this for you.”
It was the lyrics to a new song called “Touched by the Sun.”
Often I want to walk
The safe side of the street
And lull myself to sleep
And dull my pain
But deep down inside I know
I’ve got to learn from the greats,
Earn my right to be living
Let my wings of desire
Soar over the night
I need to let them say
“she must’ve been mad”
And I, I want to get there
I, I want to be one
One who is touched by the sun, one who is
touched by the sun.
The next day, Jackie collapsed with a perforated ulcer in her stomach, a complication of the steroid therapy. She was rushed to the hospital, where surgeons sewed up the hole.
When she came out of the hospital, her whole mental outlook had changed. She now seemed prepared for the worst. She reviewed her living will, which stated that doctors were not to use aggressive medical treatment to keep her alive if her condition was hopeless. She had one final discussion with her attorney Alexander Forger about her last will and testament, in which she left the bulk of her estate to her two children, and asked that they help maintain in death the privacy that she so fiercely guarded while alive. She went through the books in her library, picking out a few as gifts for friends and her doctors. And she summoned Nancy Tuckerman to her apartment.
A roaring blaze was going in the fireplace when Nancy entered the library. Jackie was sitting before the fire, an astrakhan thrown over her lap. On the table beside her were bunches of letters, all neatly bound with ribbons. These were letters that Jackie had received from famous people over the years.
Jackie unbound the letters, and read some of them to
