The Real Jackie

Farewell, Jackie
by Edward Klein

A moving account of the final days of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

In November 1993 Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis took a tumble from her horse during a hunt in Virginia. A scarce six months later, on May 19, 1994, this fascinating woman of substance, style, and steely will passed away in her Park Avenue home. Farewell, Jackie by bestselling author Edward Klein, who knew Jackie for more than a dozen years, is the moving account of those last months and a celebration of the life of an American icon who faced death as she faced life - with all the bravery and grace of a woman who had long inspired the nation.

Chronicling the circumstances of Jackie's diagnosis of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the astonishing pace of the cancer's progress, the treatments she endured, and the ones she refused, Klein recounts her heart-wrenching story, celebrating Jackie's life. Farewell, Jackie is a regal tribute and an inspiring account of the last days of a woman whose legacy endures in post-Camelot America.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is still so much with us that it is hard to believe she has been gone for ten long years.

Perhaps that is because the blazing klieg lights of attention that pursued Jackie during her lifetime did not forsake her in death. Since May 1994, when she was laid to rest on a hillside in Arlington National Cemetery next to her first husband, President John F. Kennedy, Jackie has been the subject of numerous biographies, countless televised documentaries, two off-Broadway musicals, a made-for-television movie, a frenzied Sotheby's auction, and a traveling exhibition featuring the original gowns, dresses, suits, and accessories she wore during her White House years.

On the tenth anniversary of her death, our desire to know more about Jackie remains insatiable. Practically any morsel, it seems, will do. Recently, for instance, newspapers around the world carried a forty-year-old story reporting that Jackie once briefly considered suicide then quickly put the idea aside.

And yet, despite this intense and unrelenting scrutiny, there have been only the sketchiest accounts of Jackie's final illness and death. That story began on the day Jackie fell from her horse while foxhunting in Virginia, and reached its sad climax when she learned the shocking news that her cancer was incurable. Though her doctors told Jackie they could keep her alive awhile longer, she chose not to pursue any further aggressive medical treatment. All this happened with dizzying swiftness: in six short months Jackie plummeted from the height of personal contentment and professional fulfillment to the threshold of death. How she coped with this calamity is a tale both heart-wrenching and heartwarming.

I have written about Jackie before, both in magazines and in books. Although I did not number myself among Jackie's close friends, I knew her for the last dozen years of her life. We frequently chatted on the phone and lunched together. My wife and I were guests in her home. Like millions of others, I greatly admired Jackie for her lively, affectionate nature, her dignity and grace. And I deeply respected her decision to orchestrate her own death as masterfully as she once orchestrated the funeral of President Kennedy.

Here is the missing piece of Jackie's remarkable story.

November 1993

JBKO at the Piedmont Hunt

It was Saturday, November 20, just before daybreak in the hunt country of Virginia. A solemn darkness enveloped the rolling countryside between historic Llangollen Farm and Ayrshire, north of the village of Upperville. All at once, the gloom was pierced by the sound and lights of a caravan of trucks and SUVs towing big, six-horse vans and smaller two-horse tagalongs. The headlights made a circuit of the surrounding fields, then fell upon a barn, silhouetting it against the sapphire sky. There, a tall, slim woman leaned against the side of the barn, one booted leg casually crossed over the other. She was puffing on a cigarette and exhaling streams of thick smoke into the frigid morning air.

This was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. She was sixty-four years old, but the years had done nothing to extinguish her incandescent beauty. She was dressed in a handsomely cut black frock coat with a canary yellow collar denoting a member in full standing of the Piedmont Foxhounds. She wore buff-colored breeches with a mild flare at the thigh; a snowy-white stock tied at her throat (to be used as a sling or tourniquet in case of emergency); a black velvet hunt cap; and a pair of white gloves.

Waiting in the dark by the barn, Jackie lit a fresh Pall Mall from the glowing end of the one she had just finished. Few people knew that she chain-smoked when she thought no one was looking. Yet despite all the years of smoking, Jackie's teeth remained sparkling white and her face was radiant with color. Tendrils of thick, dark hair peeked out from her black hunt cap, clinging to her face and accentuating its ethereal, wide-eyed loveliness.

She looked like a woman who cared deeply about her appearance. And, in fact, she swam, rode horses, water-skied, jogged around New York's Central Park Reservoir, and practiced yoga. She kept herself Bouvier-thin on a strict low-calorie diet. Four and a half years before, in the spring of 1989, she had had a face-lift performed by Dr. Michael Hogan, a Park Avenue plastic surgeon.

In addition to smoking, Jackie had another habit of which few people were aware. When she was stressed out, she bit her nails. In the past few years, as she had grown more contented with her life, the compulsive bouts of finger-gnawing became rarer and rarer. But on the weekend before Thanksgiving - which usually coincided with the weekend before the anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination - Jackie bit her fingernails to the quick.

This year, her anxiety level seemed higher than ever, for 1993 marked a major milestone; it was the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination. The event filled Jackie with dread, not only because of the gruesome images that were engraved in her memory of that bloody Friday in Dallas, but also because all the media hoopla stirred up painful recollections of her difficult marriage to Jack Kennedy.

While others celebrated JFK's virtues, Jackie could not help but be reminded of the humiliations she endured at the hands of her philandering husband. Even worse, the anger and rage she had felt toward Jack Kennedy while he was still alive surfaced at assassination-anniversary time, threatening to overwhelm her.

Invariably, Jackie would experience terrible pangs of guilt because of these spiteful feelings toward her now-dead husband. And the guilt would sometimes become almost unbearable when she thought back, as she did every November, to the final months leading up to Jack's death, when their relationship was undergoing a profound change.

By the fall of 1963, a strong new bond had developed between Jack and Jackie as a result of their shared experiences in the White House and their grief over the death of their two-day-old son Patrick Bouvier. Jack was far more considerate of Jackie's feelings; for the first time anyone could remember, he held Jackie's hand in public when they disembarked from Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas. For her part, Jackie was more in love with Jack than at any time since he had become president.

This new tenderness explained why Jackie, who hated campaigning, agreed to go with Jack on a political fence-mending trip to Texas in November 1963. It also explained why, each year at this time, Jackie would have given anything to erase the crushing guilt she bore for having once harbored such hostile feelings toward Jack.

In the gathering dawn of the Virginia countryside, members of the Piedmont Foxhounds arrived at the meet site and greeted Jackie. (She was called JBKO by her hunt friends, but never to her face.) The women were dressed in black like Jackie, but the men were turned out in a more spectacular fashion. They wore scarlet frock coats, well-polished black boots with brown tops, loosely cut white breeches, white gloves, and black velvet helmets. Some had on spurs and carried long-thonged whips.

Jackie's friends in Virginia did not fawn over her the way people tended to do elsewhere. Here in the hunt country, she was not treated as a celebrity. Her fellow equestrians admired her for her horsemanship. That Jackie hunted with Piedmont - a club famous for its speed, big fences, tough hunters, and daring - was testimony to her personal devotion to the sport.

"She was a serious, serious rider," said one of Jackie's hunting friends, Barbara Graham, who was an heir to the Johnson & Johnson wax fortune. "Jackie was forever quizzing me on how I did things with my horses. She wanted to know everything. We'd talk for hours on my porch."

© 2005 Penguin, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Edward Klein is the author of The Kennedy Curse; Farewell, Jackie; and several other New York Times bestsellers. He is also the former foreign editor of Newsweek and former editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine. He is a frequent contributor to Vanity Fair and Parade.