Part 2

Farewell, Jackie
by Edward Klein

(Page 2 of 3)

Jackie's love of horses started at an early age. As a child of six, she began schooling in dressage - the art of controlling a horse with subtle movements of the hands, legs, and weight. She kept a horse at Miss Porter's, the boarding school she attended in Farmington, Connecticut. It was her Vassar classmate Gay Estin who encouraged her to get a hunt box - a weekend house with a small barn and paddock - in Virginia.

Recently, Jackie had written a foreword to James L. Young's A Field of Horses: The World of Marshall P. Hawkins, a coffee-table book about the equestrian photographer who had taken a famous picture of her in 1961 falling headfirst from her horse when it balked at a fence. Of hunting in the open country, Jackie wrote: "As we see them [horses and riders] move together across the exquisite landscapes, we are made aware of our own responsibilities to preserve and conserve the simple splendor of a vanishing America."

This weekend, Jackie was a guest at Rokeby Farm, the estate of her lifelong friends Paul Mellon, the renowned art collector, philanthropist, and horseman, and Rachel Lambert "Bunny" Mellon. There were no fewer than ten foxhunt clubs within an hour's drive of the Mellons' 4,200-acre farm. Jackie hunted with the two most exclusive - the Orange County Hunt and the Piedmont Foxhounds.

Rokeby was located in Piedmont territory, just to the west of Orange County territory. The Masters of the Foxhounds Association in nearby Leesburg controlled the hunts, and kept track of which land went with which hunt. Because there were so many hunt clubs, it was important to know where one ended and another began. In the case of the Piedmont Foxhounds and the Orange County Hunt, the line was known, tongue in cheek, as Segregation Lane. The only time a Piedmont hunt was allowed to go into Orange County territory was when the fox and hounds crossed Segregation Lane and the riders had no choice but to follow.

Because the area had more manicured grasslands than rough crop fields, it was considered ideal for hunting. To keep out the riffraff, the best clubs had a policy that members had to own at least one hundred acres of land. Guests of the members were allowed to hunt three times a year by paying a "capping" fee of two hundred dollars per hunt - a holdover term from English days when a rider placed his daily fee in a hunt servant's cap.

To its devotees like Jackie, foxhunting was more passion than sport. As the hunting expert Mason Houghland wrote in Gone Away: "It is a religion, a faith; in it are all the elements that form the framework upon which beliefs are built: the attempt to escape from life as it is to life as we would have it; an abiding love of beauty; and an unconscious search for the eternal verities of fair play, loyalty and sympathetic accord, which are so clouded in our mundane existence."

The sky over eastern Virginia began to lighten, and the horses were unloaded from the vans. Plumes of vapor issued from their nostrils. Jackie was not riding her favorite horse, Frank, with whom she had won the hunter trials at the Orange County Hunt three years before. Instead, she had chosen to ride a dark bay Thoroughbred gelding (a castrated male horse) who had once raced over hurdles, but who now, in his later years, was happy to follow the hounds.

It was not clear to Jackie's fellow riders why she had switched mounts. Was Frank disabled? Did Jackie seek the challenge provided by an unfamiliar horse? Whatever her reason, Jackie's decision to ride a strange horse (a fact that has never been reported until now) set off a rapid chain of events that began with her fall from the horse and ended six months later with her death. Piedmont's chief huntsman, Randy Waterman, nodded hello to Jackie. Waterman was responsible for the territory, the fences, the horses, and the hounds - for everything that went with providing sport to the paid subscribers. He was well known for his "surprise" method of foxhunting.

"There are basically two theories about foxhunting," explained Betsy Parker, who covered equestrian sports for a chain of papers in rural and northern Virginia. "In one method, you go out quietly, slowly, walking up to places where foxes might be found - little woodlands, low-lying grassy areas, anywhere the huntsman thinks he will find a fox - and the fox will eventually hear your approach and move away, sometimes at a trot, sometimes, depending on scenting conditions, at a mad dash - and the hunt is on.

"The other method," she continued, "is the gallop-up-to-the-covert and surprise the heck out of Mr. Reynard,* to get him on the move quickly. That was Randy Waterman's choice, which made for basically running and jumping from the get-go, all day, all the time."

One of the grooms, Leroy Moore, helped Jackie mount. Her horse had a freshly braided mane and tail, and gleamed with health and care. The frozen dew covering the ground squealed and crackled beneath the hooves of the horses. The smell of snow was in the air. It was going to be a perfectly horrible day - cold, damp, and dark. Ideal hunting weather for the scent-sniffing hounds. And a day made to order for Jackie.

© 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.