Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis by Darwin Porter & DANFORTH PRINCE

Author:Darwin Porter & DANFORTH PRINCE
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781936003402
Publisher: Blood Moon Productions
Published: 2017-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

AN UNLIKELY SPITFIRE who aged with dignity: Lady Jeanne Campbell, legendary for having sustained affairs with JFK, Nikita Khrushchev, Henry Luce, Fidel Castro, and a turbulent marriage to literary bad boy, Norman Mailer.

Before taking up with JFK, Jeanne had been the lover of Henry Luce, the founder of Time/Life, Inc. In 1961, she’d ditched Luce for Mailer.

Jeanne and Mailer were frequently quarreling partners in one of the most turbulent “literary marriages” of the 20th Century. He was known to have dangled her by the ankles from a second-story window. When she read the unflattering portrait of herself in his novel, An American Dream, she publicly defined it as “the hate book of all time.”

In her own memoirs, she wrote: “Norman and I fought so much we could empty a room quicker than any couple in New York. Even the hosts would put on their hats and coats and leave.”]

Before leaving that cocktail party in Manhattan, a drunken Mailer crudely confronted Jackie with the threat, “Tell Kennedy that if he fucks my wife again, I’ll see to it that he’s singing soprano in the choir.”

In November of 1963, for The Evening Standard in London, Lady Jeanne, as a journalist, reported on JFK’s funeral.

[Lady Jeanne lives in legend, along with Marilyn Monroe, as the only woman—so far as it is known—who had sexual liaisons with John F. Kennedy, Fidel Castro, and Nikita Khrushchev. Marilyn was introduced to Nikita on his one-time visit to Hollywood, where he was hosted by 20th Century Fox. Later, Lady Jeanne interviewed Castro in Havana and Nikita in Moscow. “Powerful men were interested in my mother because she was intelligent,” Cusi Cram, Jeanne’s daughter, later claimed.]

***

In addition to her own frequently embarrassing relationship with Mailer, Jackie became almost obsessed with how he antagonized, and tangled with, Gore Vidal. Early in her relationship with Vidal, before she drifted away from him, he gave her firsthand information about his competitive and upsetting exchanges with the controversial Mailer.

Jackie found herself in a difficult role, as, for a while, at least, she functioned as a kind of sounding board for Mailer’s feuds with both Capote and Vidal.

Early in her relationship with Mailer, she accused him of “deliberate cruelty.” It was her response to Mailer’s observation, in print, of what he had defined as a “concealed cruelty” of her own. As she told Vidal, “Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire insisted that deliberate cruelty was the one thing she could not forgive.”

Jackie was referring to Mailer’s published (and highly unflattering) review of her famous guided tour of the White House, which had been broadcast on TV on Valentine’s day of 1962 to an audience of 46 million viewers.

In Esquire, Mailer wrote, “The voice was a quiet parody of the sort of voice one hears on the radio late at night, dropped softly into the ear by girls who sell soft mattresses, depilatories, or creams to brighten the skin. She moved like a wooden horse and looked like a starlet who will never learn to act.

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