New York City
February 1970
Jackie quickly realized that Ari was speaking to Maria Callas on the phone—often. She’d always had a facility for languages, and her Greek was progressing fast, but she didn’t really need to understand the words to guess when Maria was on the line. Ari had a particular tone he adopted with her: soft, tender, confiding.
Jackie could make out enough to know that he discussed his business interests with Maria, and that irked her; it was as if her opinion counted for nothing. It annoyed her that he thought he was fooling her by pretending he was talking to Costa Gratsos—but she did not confront him. She had her own male friends, so at first she was resigned to let him have a female one. Maria had been a big part of his life, after all.
But soon it became clear that they were doing more than just talking. She first began to suspect this when she called from New York late at night, Paris time, to be told he was not home. It should have been the perfect time for them to talk: six in the evening for her and bedtime for him.
“I went to a nightclub with friends,” he explained. Another time he claimed to have been at a restaurant; yet another, at a dinner party. Always a friend’s name rolled off his tongue with plausible ease. Yes, it made sense on the surface, but Jackie knew. She had been married to Jack Kennedy for ten years and had an instinct for detecting infidelity. As with Jack, she decided not to challenge him. What would it achieve? She didn’t want a divorce, and Ari was not the kind of man who would change his ways because she demanded it. As long as their affair was discreet, she would close her eyes to it. As she had done so many times before.
JACKIE’S LIFE IN New York continued to be marred by photographers, and Ron Galella in particular. She never knew when he might leap from behind a tree, or lurk in a doorway and then pounce when she passed by. Sometimes he disguised himself with a fake beard or a hat pulled low, so that he could surprise her and get a shot or two before she had a chance to shield her face with her handbag. Every time, her heart would hammer fit to burst and she would gasp for breath; every time, she feared she was about to be shot and killed. It made her reluctant to leave the apartment if she could avoid it. She would rather that friends visit her there than brave the sidewalks outside.
Ari was furious at Gallela’s persistence and hired lawyers to force the police to press charges against him. It took months to get to court, and the resulting press was almost unanimously in Gallela’s favor when he argued that he had the right to earn his living by taking photographs in public places. It came as no surprise when he got off scot-free.
“What kind of judge will let a man terrorize you like that?” Ari snapped. “I’ll have my security team scare him off.”
“No, please don’t!” Jackie begged. “It would end up in the papers. I need to learn to deal with it and not let him get to me.” She hesitated, before continuing. “One of the children’s protection officers told me I should see a psychiatrist.”
“What nonsense!” Ari scoffed. “Does he want you to lie on a couch and confess that you had erotic dreams about your daddy? Isn’t that what modern psychiatry is all about?”
She had guessed he wouldn’t be in favor of shrinks. “Not quite. It’s because a flashbulb going off in my face brings back memories of the moment Jack was shot. The officer is ex-military and he said that soldiers suffer similar symptoms after battle.”
“It’s hardly the same, is it? You need to stop dwelling in the past. Do you realize how often your conversation is about Jack and life in the White House and what happened in Dallas? I wish you would start living in the present. If a photographer is bothering you in New York, the answer is simple: spend more time in Europe.”
“But the children . . .” Her voice trailed off. This argument kept rearing its head as high school beckoned. She had made up her mind she wanted Caroline and John to continue their education in New York and was steeling herself to tell him, but this wasn’t the moment.
“Forget the shrink,” he reiterated. “I don’t want a docile wife popping happy pills and incapable of stringing a sentence together. We’ll find another way of dealing with Mr. Gallela.”
JACKIE WAS ALARMED when a gossip column reported that some letters she had written to Ros Gilpatric, the very suave attorney who had pursued her before she married Ari, were to be auctioned. She hadn’t seen him since March 1968, but she had heard that his latest marriage was on the skids. Jackie wracked her brain to try to remember what she had written him, praying that there was nothing incriminating.
When the letters were published in the press, it was a note written in late October 1968, in which she told Ros of her Skorpios wedding, that made Ari explode. “I hope you know all you are and ever will be to me,” she had written at the end. It had seemed an innocent-enough phrase at the time.
“On our fucking honeymoon!” he screamed at her over the phone. “You’ve made me look a fool! I will not tolerate you carrying on with other men behind my back.”
“I’m not carrying on with anyone,” she protested. “Anything with Ros ended before our marriage. I haven’t seen him since.”
“You spend my money, so you can start acting like my wife!” he yelled. “From now on, you must live within your allowance. I don’t want to see any more bills for clothes turning up in the Olympic Airways accounts.”
“What exactly am I being punished for, Telis? I’ve done nothing wrong.”
She couldn’t get him to listen. He ranted for ten minutes without pause, then hung up. She stared in disbelief. He had never raised his voice to her before they were married. She hadn’t realized he had a temper, and it came as an unwelcome surprise.
She had always been allergic to conflict. It reminded her of listening to her parents arguing when she was a child and feeling scared that the security of her young life might crumble. She and Jack had disagreed sometimes, like any couple, but they never yelled at each other. She hated being yelled at. It had the effect of making her retreat and pull up the drawbridge.
She decided she wouldn’t be the first to call after he’d behaved like that. Ari should call her and, if he were a gentleman, he should call with an apology.
Meanwhile, she decided to go behind his back and make inquiries about the type of professional she should talk to about her feelings of panic. Perhaps the Secret Service agent could point her in the right direction.