Clint Hill - Mrs. Kennedy and Me - An Intimate Memoir

As we walked through the cavernous living room, out to the veranda, it was like we were suspended one thousand feet above the crystal blue sea with a panoramic view of the entire area. Mrs. Kennedy turned to her sister and said, “Oh, Lee, it’s just magnificent.”

Lemon and orange trees grew all across the hillside, filling the air with their fragrant aroma, while red and fuchsia bougainvillea grew in long draping vines up and around the archways and gates. In all my travels, I had never seen a more beautiful setting.

While the villa had unmatched views, it was a long way from the water, so an additional house had been rented that had beach access. The Conca dei Marini beach was not an expansive strand like those in Cape Cod or Palm Beach, but a small spit of pebbly sand surrounded by high rocky cliffs. The beach house was actually more like a cliffside cottage, built into the rocks about one hundred and fifty feet above the beach, accessible by a narrow and very steep stone stairway. It was much smaller than the villa, but very comfortable, and its key purpose was to be used as a place to get out of the sun, for changing in and out of beach attire, bathroom facilities, and midday meals.

In order to get to and from the main villa and the beach house on the steep, windy roads, we had acquired the use of two open-air motorized beach buggies that held six or eight passengers. Made by Fiat, they were fun little vehicles—kind of like a cross between an oversized golf cart and a Volkswagen beetle. I’m not sure who enjoyed them more—the agents or the children.

All of the agents, meanwhile, had rooms at the Hotel Palumbo, which was conveniently located just a short walk down the street from the Villa Episcopio. Like most of the places in this elite area, the Hotel Palumbo was quite pricey, but the advance agents had arranged a deal with management that made it affordable for us. We were living with and among the rich and famous, but we had to do it on sixteen dollars a day.

Unlike the official state visits, there was no set schedule for this trip. Advances could only be conducted once Mrs. Kennedy told me what she wanted to do, and I knew often we would have no advance notice at all.

“Just come to the villa each morning, Mr. Hill,” Mrs. Kennedy told me, “and we’ll take each day as it comes.”

I was deeply concerned about the press—especially the overly aggressive Roman freelance photographers, the original paparazzi. Fortunately the Italian police were just as concerned, and they immediately laid down some ground rules for the overzealous photographers: no beach, water-skiing, or swimming pictures; no photographs at the entrance to the villa; photographers will be allowed to stand in the public garden forty meters from Mrs. Kennedy; they may photograph her from a distance in Ravello or boarding a speedboat in nearby Amalfi.

Clint Hill in working attire, Ravello, Italy

I had seen how these paparazzi operated, however, and I was not convinced they would follow the “rules.”

The morning after our arrival, I got up, had a quick breakfast of a biscotti and espresso, and packed a bag to bring along with me. There would be no need for a suit and tie, but I had to be ready for waterskiing, a cruise on a yacht, or anything else Mrs. Kennedy might want to do. There was no agenda. Once we left the area of the villa there was no opportunity to go back for something you forgot or to change clothes, so I had to be prepared for just about anything. I dressed in a black golf shirt with black trousers, and filled an airline flight bag with everything I might need: bathing suit, my Secret Service Commission book, diplomatic passport, and extra ammunition. I slipped my handgun into my holster and wore my shirt on the outside to cover it, but when I wore my swimsuit, the gun would have to go in the airline bag, too. The last thing to go in the bag was a bar of chocolate and a small package of nuts I’d stashed away from the flight. One of the first things you learn as an agent is to eat whenever you have the chance, and use the bathroom whenever the opportunity presents itself. There were plenty of days you’d go for ten or twelve hours without a chance to do either, and a bag of peanuts often became lunch or dinner.

When I arrived at the villa, Benno and Nicole Graziani were there, and everybody was sitting around drinking coffee, laughing, and telling stories. It was nice to see Mrs. Kennedy so relaxed, among friends and family with whom she didn’t have to put up any pretense. The group had decided to go to the beach that morning, so we called the police to let them know the plan. Police boats would patrol the coast, and both uniformed and plainclothes officers would be scattered around the area.

We piled everybody into the umbrella-topped beach cars and headed down the steep, curvy streets to the seaside town of Amalfi, where we would then take a boat to the Conca dei Marini. The children loved the miniature cars and everybody was laughing and kidding around.

We had arranged to have a boat available for waterskiing, sightseeing, and just getting from one point to another. This boat was not your average rental boat, however. It was a Riva—a sleek Italian-made Chris-Craft type boat about twenty-four feet in length that had a highly varnished mahogany hull and an extremely powerful engine. The boat was named Pretexte and came with its own operator, who was on standby for the duration of our stay. He spoke very little English, but we managed to communicate in a sort of charades-type system in which I tried to act out what it was we wanted to do, and he would respond by nodding his head and rattling off in Italian. Somehow it worked.

By the time we got the beach cars down to Amalfi, word had gotten out, and there was a line of photographers waiting on the pier. Their cameras were snapping away as they called out, “Jackie! Jackie! Look here! Over here! Smile Jackie!”

It felt like we were being surrounded by a swarm of locusts.

“Just ignore them,” Mrs. Kennedy whispered to Caroline. “They’ll tire of us soon enough.”

I knew better. Jacqueline Kennedy had become an international star—more popular than Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren, and Grace Kelly all put together—and these photographers knew that a picture of the First Lady of the United States of America in a bathing suit was worth big money. The question was, how to get them to stop? Obviously the “rules” set out by the police weren’t working.

When Mrs. Kennedy emerged from the beach house in a dark green one-piece bathing suit with a low-cut back, the photographers went crazy. Some were snapping pictures from balconies in villas perched above the bay, while others were hazardously zipping around in motorboats trying to get a different angle. Benno Graziani, Mrs. Kennedy, and Lee were wading in the water with the three young children trying their best to ignore the circus-like scene that was getting worse by the minute. Benno wasn’t taking any pictures, but his mere presence was creating a problem.

Agent Paul Rundle had been trying to resolve the situation with the police and the photographers, and he had learned that the other photographers felt that Graziani had exclusive access to Mrs. Kennedy, which was unfair to the rest of them. They refused to back off. So Rundle and I came up with an idea. What if we got Mrs. Kennedy to give them ten minutes of photos if they would agree to back off and leave her alone after that? The photographers thought that sounded reasonable. Now I had to get Mrs. Kennedy to go for the idea.

I waded into the water to Mrs. Kennedy, who was pushing Caroline and Tony around on a raft. Her hair was pinned up in the back, with her long bangs hanging wispily in front of her eyes.