PART OF HISTORY
“Caroline says you should come over now.”
The voice on the other end of the phone belonged to Marta Sgubin, the Italian housekeeper who had worked for Jackie for twenty-five years. Marta was calling Carly Simon, and she did not have to explain the reason for her urgent tone of voice.
Three days before, on Monday, May 16, Jackie had developed shaking chills, and had become disoriented. She was admitted to the New York Hospital, where she was diagnosed with pneumonia. The doctors told her that the cancer had spread to her liver and throughout the rest of her body.
“Let’s try more chemotherapy,” Dr. Anne Moore said.
“No,” Jackie said, “I want to go home to die.”
On Wednesday, she discharged herself from the hospital and returned to 1040 Fifth Avenue.
As soon as Carly Simon got the call on Thursday from Marta, she and Jackie’s other great friend, Joe Armstrong, headed over to Jackie’s building. There were thousands of people out on the street on Fifth Avenue, throngs, some hysterical, newsmen and ordinary people. The police were taken by surprise, and they did not have their barricades up, and people spilled off the sidewalks on both sides of Fifth Avenue into the street.
Traffic was brought to a virtual standstill. Rubberneckers were trying to see what was going on. TV was capturing the whole thing via huge satellite transmitters on the tops of trucks, and beaming it around the world.
Upstairs in Jackie’s apartment, John Kennedy Jr., dressed in an impeccably tailored navy-blue suit, greeted those who had been summoned to say a last farewell to his mother. In the front hall, Caroline was sitting on a bench and softly crying. Her husband Ed Schlossberg was by her side, consoling her. In the library and roaming around the apartment were family members—Lawfords, Kennedys, and Shrivers. The guests could hear a Gregorian chant dimly coming from Jackie’s bedroom.
Members of the family and a few close friends were led singly back to Jackie’s bedroom, which was done in coral and peach tones, and had a fabric canopy over the bed. Except for Maurice Tempelsman and John and some other male members of the family, only women were being allowed in the bedroom. One of Jackie’s last wishes had been that none but a few women friends outside the family be permitted to see her at her time of dying.
As Carly Simon entered the room, Bunny Mellon was sitting on a chair by the bed holding Jackie’s hand. No one in the room seemed to be as comfortable with what was going on as Bunny. She was in her spiritual element. She had a smile of acceptance and serenity.
“You sit with her now,” Bunny said to Carly.
Carly exchanged places with Bunny, and looked at Jackie.
Jackie was unconscious. She had a print scarf over her head. She was under the sheets. There was an intravenous needle in her arm, which may have been carrying morphine. There was an attempt to keep her comfortable, but there was no sense that she was taking her own life, that this was some kind of assisted suicide. There did not seem to be any rush. A visitor had the sense that Jackie was art-directing these last moments of her life in her own very dignified way.
In repose, her face was completely smooth and translucent. Her mouth was slightly open, and there was the sound of a delicate exhalation. As the Gregorian chants continued to play, various members of the family filtered in and out of the room. Everybody was talking in hushed tones.
Carly felt privileged that the family had allowed her to be in the room with Jackie. She spoke to Jackie in a low and comforting voice, telling her how much she loved her. Maurice stood at the end of the bed, observing. Bunny, not far away on a settee, was praying.
“During the time I was sitting with Jackie and holding her hand,” Carly later told a friend, “I felt as though I had a direct communication with her—an experience that was deep, personal, and untainted by self-consciousness. And as I opened the door and left the room, and walked through the halls, and said good-bye to the family members, I started crying.”
Outside on Fifth Avenue, Carly and Joe Armstrong were assaulted by the lights of a hundred cameras. The crowds had grown even larger on the street, and it was impossible not to feel the sudden shift from the personal to the public. It was a sensation that Jackie’s friends had experienced many times before—that whether she liked it or not, she was part of history. And as Carly and Joe disappeared into the throngs of Fifth Avenue, it seemed to them that once again Jackie was being taken over by the world.
NOTES
ONE: THE SUNDOWN OF CHIVALRY
The description of Theodore H. White’s trip to Hyannis Port, his heavy drinking, his telephone calls to his mother’s doctor, his thoughts upon seeing John F. Kennedy’s widow, and his “Camelot” interview with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy for Life magazine are drawn from a variety of primary sources, including the author’s own notes of a lengthy discussion that he had with White in 1985 about that famous interview.
In addition, Ralph Graves, assistant managing editor of Life in 1963, provided much corroborating material. In particular, Graves recounted for the author a discussion that he had with White many years after the “Camelot” interview about some of the unpublished details, including the fact that Jackie caressed the dead President’s penis in Trauma Room No. 1 at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. David Maness, Life’s articles editor, is the source for the description of the telephone call that White placed to Life from Hyannis Port.
Further documentation for the missing portions of the “Camelot” interview came from Joan Braden, who learned during her interview for the John
