Jackie, Janet & Lee by J. Randy Taraborrelli

Author:J. Randy Taraborrelli
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

The Philadelphia Story

June 20, 1967.

“I am so nervous, I can’t stand it,” Lee was saying. She was in her makeup chair backstage at the Ivanhoe Theater in Chicago. It was opening night of The Philadelphia Story. She’d put everything she had into preparing for this moment—months of rehearsal along with intense acting lessons. “Who am I fooling?” she kept telling her friends. “I’m not an actress!” However, she still believed she had to try.

“I knew how lucky I was to have such an opportunity,” Lee said at the time, “but there was a price to be paid. I was walking into an incredible barrage of criticism—much more than most actresses onstage for the first time. I knew everybody would be out for blood. People were waiting to laugh. But it would have taken more than that to stop me.”

Lee fully expected Jackie to be present for this momentous occasion. “Talk to her,” she had said, handing her costar Jack DeMave the telephone a couple of days earlier. Jack was a little starstruck and reluctant. “Just talk to her,” Lee insisted, smiling. “She can be nice.” He got on the phone with Jackie. He said how much he was looking forward to seeing her at the show. “Oh, but I’m not coming,” Jackie said. She explained that she didn’t want to steal Lee’s spotlight, that it was her sister’s time to shine and that wherever she (Jackie) went, a circus was sure to follow. She asked him, as one of Lee’s leading men, to please take care of her. “I want her to be okay,” Jackie said. “Do you promise?” Jack told her he would do as she asked, and then handed the phone back to Lee. She took it to a corner and quietly finished her conversation with her sister.

At that time, Jackie was on her way to Ireland with her children. On the day of Lee’s opening, she planned to be greeted by Eamon de Valera, President of the Republic of Ireland, and his wife, Sinéad, at the house of Arus An Vactaria. That night, she was scheduled to attend a state banquet at Dublin Castle. She said she probably wouldn’t be able to fly back at all, not for any performance during Lee’s entire four-week run! This was strange. After all, Jackie had months of advance notice. For jet-setting women like the Bouvier sisters, Lee knew that jumping on a plane to the States for a day or so and then returning to Europe wasn’t that big a deal. So what was really going on?

Lee was not naïve. She and Jackie had the same friends; they ran in the same circles. She knew that Jackie had gone to Skorpios at Aristotle Onassis’s invitation. This was upsetting, especially since Jackie hadn’t told her about it. She heard it through the grapevine and then confirmed it with Onassis’s secretary. To make things a little more disconcerting, Ari was suddenly unavailable to her when she called him. He was always in a business meeting or in some other way indisposed.

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