ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, April 22, 1996 TAG: 9604230161
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM R. MACKLIN KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
It was old money - dusty, lush, scented with ambition, stained by blood, transfused now and again with fresh lucre. You could spend it like water and never tap the well-spring.
That didn't stop Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis from trying.
What can be learned from the auction in New York this week of hundreds of the elusive former first lady's personal possessions except, perhaps, that she loved expensive things? Gold-cuffed bracelets, light-catching and heavy; Greek terra cotta figurines, from the third century B.C.; diamond-encrusted necklaces dripping with bulbous emeralds; a 1992 BMW 325i, blue-green, loaded.
And on and on - an inscrutable fortune, like the warehoused treasures of ``Citizen Kane,'' an auction house crammed with pricey Rosebuds.
``The strange thing about [the auction] is that while it reveals the multifaceted personality of Jackie, it gives us no real clue who she was,'' said C. David Heymann, author of ``A Woman Named Jackie,'' a controversial 1989 biography. ``She just seemed to gather things with no real reason. Even here, she is a mystery.''
Nearly two years after her death from cancer, the mystique of Jackie O and the remoteness she cultivated is in full flower.
The four-day auction at Sotheby's, which will open Tuesday and is expected to pull down at least $5 million for the former first lady's estate, has only intensified the desire to touch what is hidden, to make contact with the dowager empress of New York's Upper East Side - in spirit, if not flesh.
Outside the Manhattan apartment building where Onassis lived for almost 30 years following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, Patricia Gamble blushed, flush with the sudden realization that the woman she calls her ``great example of womanhood'' may have stood on the same stretch of pavement.
``It's like walking in Jackie's footsteps,'' she said, suddenly looking skyward toward the 17-room apartment on the 17th floor of the plain-as-salt Fifth Avenue high-rise. ``I feel so close to her.''
The 58-year-old Michigan fruit farmer had traveled to New York to spend her birthday with her daughter, Michelle Gamble, 30. Her birthday surprise? A walking tour of Onassis' neighborhood.
``Jackie is her mentor,'' said Michelle. ``She's obsessed with her.''
And why not, responded Patricia: ``When Jackie was first lady, she stood for class. She set the standard. Women respected her.''
But did they know her?
Only about as well as any subject can know her liege, said Sam Stafford, whose company, Sidewalks of New York, conducts the Jackie Walking Tour.
``She is the closest thing we've ever had to royalty,'' said Stafford, 41. ``She is an icon, a part of our history. And even though the people in the neighborhood thought of her as just another New Yorker, they respected her space. If people did intrude on her privacy, she would express her displeasure and they probably wouldn't do it a second time.''
Before he moved to New York 10 years ago, Stafford, a Texan, led tours of the location where John F. Kennedy was gunned down while riding through the streets of Dallas in an open motorcade. The first lady sat next to the president. Her baby-pink suit was splattered with his blood.
Lois Cramer has a suit cut in the same style.
Cramer, who lives in Philadelphia, was just 8 years old when cameras caught the stolid image of a widowed first lady - still wearing her blood-soaked suit - watching in grim silence as Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in as president. For Cramer, it was a shattering moment.
``Before that, I had never really paid any attention to the Kennedys or politics,'' said Cramer, who has a steamer trunk filled with books and newspaper clippings about Onassis that date to the early 1960s. ``But this was someone who had two small children and withstood the horror of the occasion for the sake of the country. I thought she was magnificent.''
Cramer wasn't alone.
In those horrific November days following the assassination, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy, onetime photo-journalist, fashion-plate first lady and mother of two, became, through the mass medium of television, an essential American metaphor, said William D. Romanowsky, a professor of communications at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., and an expert on popular culture.
Dressed in black, her small children at her side, cameras everywhere, she epitomized the heroic head of a ``shattered family,'' said Romanowsky. And at a time when the divorce rate was edging skyward, crime and violence were escalating, and the leading edge of the baby boom was entering a rebellious post-adolescence, Jackie Kennedy seemed not only to be grieving over the death of her husband, but, in a larger sense, over the death of American innocence.
``Typically, heroes in America embody the dominate values, and that's what she was doing,'' said Romanowsky. ``The nation grew up when she was forced to grow up.''
But if Jackie Kennedy's loss seemed a bitter reflection of the decline of the traditional American family, the former first lady seemed determined to keep her own house in order.
``She became a single mother who made a concerted effort to protect her kids from the forces that threatened to undermine her family,'' said Romanowsky. ``I think it was fear that they would be killed. But I think she also wanted to protect them from the dangers of fame and exposure.''
Jackie Kennedy Onassis' fine, Georgian furnishings, her paintings by old masters, her intoxicating dowry of engagement jewelry from Greek shipping czar Aristotle Onassis, and the other baubles slated for the auction block may be wonderful to look at, said Judith McDermott, but Jackie O's real legacy is her children.
``She always said that her primary purpose was to be a good mother,'' said McDermott, 50-ish, and, like Onassis, a single mother who raised a son and daughter. ``You have to appreciate the attention she paid to her kids.''
McDermott, who took the Jackie Walking Tour with her daughter, Lisa, 30, calls Caroline Kennedy-Schlossberg and her brother, John Kennedy, ``great kids who haven't gotten into trouble.'' She noted Caroline's success as a writer and social activist and how, despite his reputation as a rake, John has managed to turn his Kennedy good looks and Bouvier charm into a workable proposition as publisher of George magazine.
Still, if doting, attentive parents are the cornerstone of personal happiness, Onassis had cause for much sadness.
Her parents, Janet Lee and John ``Black Jack'' Bouvier, had a faithless and unhappy marriage, and young Jacqueline found herself torn between her mother's demands for loyalty and her deep affection for her father, said biographer Heymann.
And even though both her parents came from fine New York families, from money so old you could smell it from a distance, neither had the kind of wealth to which Onassis became accustomed.
Even her staunchest defenders worry that her marriages reflected a longing for wealth more than a desire for love.
``She married Ari for money,'' speculated Lois Cramer. ``I think she just closed her eyes, gagged and got into bed with him.''
She may have saved her love for the last man in her life, financier Maurice Templesman, who is said to have parlayed the $20 million left to Onassis by her second husband into more than $200 million, said Heymann.
Regardless of how she got her money, wealth is as crucial to the Jackie O mystique as that babushka and sunglasses she wore during her regular walks in Central Park. It is the foundation of her glamour, the fuel that gave substance to her interest in art and culture, and, ultimately, the tool that built her solitude and detachment.
``She took a lot of her secrets to the grave, the things we wondered about: Why did she really marry Aristotle Onassis; why did she stay with Kennedy, in spite of all his womanizing, and did she know about it?'' said Heymann. ``She remained a person of constant intrigue to people.''
And what can be learned from what remains, from those glorious artifacts on Sotheby's auction block?
Will it be as much as Winn Redmond learned in a single passing moment when America's princess stopped to pet her dog?
``She kneeled down and patted him right on the head and said, `What a good dog,''' said Redmond, 45, who lives just a few blocks from Onassis' former apartment. ``It was just before she died, and I could see that she was very sick. She looked so tired, as if she had already left her body. And yet, she seemed so very nice.''
LENGTH: Long : 149 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. (headshot) Onassis. 2. Sotheby's\1996. A diamond andby CNBemerald drop necklace and ring by Van Cleef & Arpels were gifts from
Aristotle Onassis to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The necklace is
valued at a minimum of $150,000 and and the ring at $10,000 or more.
It will be on the block Tuesday along with many other pieces from
the late first lady's estate.