Craig Brown - One on One

BLANKS

1040 Fifth Avenue, New York

December 20th 1978

Somehow, Andy Warhol has no luck with Presidents or First Ladies. They never seem to hit it off. After a party for Newsweek in 1983, he observes, ‘It was a boring party. No stars. Just Nancy Reagan and President and Mrs Carter.’

But they have their uses. On November 22nd 1963, he was walking through Grand Central Station when the news came through that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Warhol paused to absorb this and then, in a matter-of-fact manner, said to his assistant, ‘Well, let’s get to work.’

Within months, he had produced any amount of pictures of Jackie Kennedy, some adapted from a photograph of her smiling just before her husband was shot, some from photographs of her at his funeral, others a combination of the two.

As the years roll by, the paths of America’s most famous widow and America’s most famous artist cross on a regular basis. He is mesmerised by her fame. Possibly as a result, she is often standoffish towards him. *This makes him touchy. In 1977, Warhol is invited to a fundraising dinner Jackie has organised. ‘The dinner was a horror. They put us at such a nothing nobody table,’ he records in his diary. ‘So here we were in this room where we didn’t even recognise anybody except each other and this girl comes over to me and says, “I know you have a camera, and you can take pictures of everyone here except Mrs Onassis.”’ A few minutes later, Warhol enters the main room and finds not only that ‘there was everybody we knew’, but ‘there were 4,000 photographers taking pictures of Jackie. And that horrible girl had come over to tell me I couldn’t!’

The following year, Warhol is irritated to be told that Diana Vreeland doesn’t think he is avant-garde any more, and Jackie doesn’t either. That November, he hears that Jackie has thrown a party without inviting him. ‘Robert Kennedy Jr told Fred that they had a big question about whether to invite us and decided not to. Jackie really is awful, I guess.’

A week later, things look up. He receives an invitation to Jackie’s Christmas party. Warhol invites his friend Bob Colacello. They arrive late. ‘Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton were there and Bob heard – overheard – Jackie saying that something Warren did in the hall was “disgusting”, but we were never able to find out what it was.’

Over dinner at Mortimer’s afterwards, someone says Beatty has had sex with Jackie. Bianca Jagger says Warren has probably just made it up, because he made up that he slept with her, and when she saw him in the Beverly Wilshire she embarrassed him by screaming, ‘Warren, I hear you say you’re fucking me. How can you say that when it’s not true?’

Then Bianca says that Warren has a big cock, and Steve asks how would she know, and she says that all her girlfriends have slept with him. Colacello is ‘in heaven’ because Jackie is so nice to him, even sharing her glass of Perrier with him when the butler forgot to bring his, and saying, ‘It’s ours.’

But the next day, Jackie has turned turtle. She calls Warhol three or four times at his office. ‘But I didn’t call back, because the messages were complicated – they were like, “Call me at this number after 5.30, or before 4.00 if it’s not raining.”’ Finally, she catches him at home. She is frosty. ‘She sounded so tough. She said, “Now Andy, when I invited you, I invited you – I didn’t invite Bob Colacello.”’ She complains that Colacello ‘writes things’. This leads Warhol to suspect that ‘something must have happened there that she doesn’t want written about. She was thinking about it all day, I guess.’ Could she be referring to the disgusting thing Warren Beatty did in her hall?

She punishes Warhol for his tardiness and his uninvited guest by asking her friends not to invite him to their parties. Warhol gets wind of his exclusion; their relationship deteriorates further. She never invites him to another Christmas party. It rankles. He records each fresh omission in his diary. ‘Shook hands with Jackie O.,’ he writes after attending a black-tie charity do at the Helmsley Palace. ‘She never invited me to her Christmas party again, so she’s a creep. And now I wouldn’t go if she did. I’d tell her to go mind her own business. I mean, I’m the same age, so I can tell her off. Although I do feel like she’s older than me. But then, I feel like everybody’s older than me.’

Warhol never quite gets over his exclusion from Jackie’s party list. In 1985, he is still fulminating. ‘I don’t understand why Jackie O. thinks she’s so grand that she doesn’t owe it to the public to have another great marriage to somebody big. You’d think she’d want to scheme and connive to get into history again.’

On Saturday, April 26th 1986, he attends the Cape Cod wedding of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, *and notes, ‘Jackie never smiled at anyone, she was a sourpuss.’ At the reception, he blanks her. ‘I didn’t look at Jackie, I felt too funny.’ The two of them never see each other again. Less than a year later, Andy Warhol dies unexpectedly, following an operation to remove his gall bladder.

Twenty-two years after his death, archivists are sifting through 610 cardboard boxes, filing cabinets and a shipping container full of the belongings of Andy Warhol. They find, among much else, a piece of old wedding cake, various empty tins of chicken soup and $17,000 in cash. They also come across a photograph of Jackie Kennedy swimming naked. It is signed by her, ‘For Andy, with enduring affection, Jackie Montauk’ – a reference to Warhol’s estate on Long Island. No one knows how on earth it came to be there, or the story behind it; but it undoubtedly dates from a time before their falling-out in 1978.

IS ILL-AT-EASE WITH

Buckingham Palace, London

June 5th 1961

It is barely four months since President Kennedy’s inauguration. Mrs Kennedy is still finding her feet.

Jackie is unsure of herself. In public, she smiles and waves. In private, she bites her nails and chain smokes. She is prone to self-pity. She is overheard saying, ‘Oh, Jack, I’m so sorry for you that I’m such a dud,’ to which Kennedy replies, ‘I love you as you are.’ Is each of them telling only half the truth?

Socially, she is an awkward mix of the gracious and the paranoid. ‘At one moment, she was misunderstood, frustrated and helpless. The next moment, without any warning, she was the royal, loyal First Lady to whom it was almost a duty to bow, to pay medieval obeisance,’ is the way her English friend Robin Douglas-Home puts it. ‘Then again, without any warning, she was deflating someone with devastating barbs for being such a spaniel as to treat her as the First Lady and deriding the pomp of politics, the snobbery of the social chamber.’

But now, on their whistle-stop tour of Europe, Jackie suddenly appears formidable. The French take to her as one of their own: born a Bouvier, she has French ancestry, and spent a year at the Sorbonne. She speaks fluent French and has arrived with a wardrobe of clothes specially designed for her by Givenchy. At a banquet at Versailles, President de Gaulle greets her by saying, ‘This evening, Madame, you are looking like a Watteau.’ *

The political editor of Time reports that, ‘Thanks in large part to Jackie Kennedy at her prettiest, Kennedy charmed the old soldier into unprecedented flattering toasts and warm gestures of friendship.’ At a press conference, President Kennedy says, ‘I do not think it altogether inappropriate to introduce myself … I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris, and I have enjoyed it.’