Close Encounters with Jackie Kennedy Onassis

In case you missed it Jackie Kennedy Onassis was back in the news recently. In his tell all memoir Jim Hart wrote that the widowed former first lady of assassinated President John F. Kennedy and widow of Aristotle Onassis asked him to arrange a date for her with Alec Baldwin, then a 33-year-old actor. Jackie was nearly 62.

On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week the now 59-year-old Baldwin recounted that for him it was a blind date, though he downplayed any suggestion it could be classified as a date. Hart had asked if he wanted to see the play Dancing at Lughnasa. They waited at Hart’s apartment (by the way, Hart was married to Carly Simon at the time) for Baldwin’s date to arrive when in flowed Jackie Kennedy Onassis. 

When it was time to go, Baldwin related, she said it would be more discreet if she left the building before them so the paparazzi would not photograph them together. At the theater Baldwin said she sat a row ahead of him. Baldwin provided no indication they went out socially again.

Several days after the broadcast I was swapping stories of encounters with famous people during lunch time at the Omaha Jewish Community Center on Deli Friday. I had joined Doug at his table. Shortly, Steve made up our threesome.

Doug recalled the time back in late 1973 or early 1974 he went with his brother Robert to see Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in Good Evening on Broadway. It was a series of comedy sketches by the incorrigibly satiric duo. The brothers scored great seats—fourth row center orchestra. Two rows, in fact, behind Jackie Kennedy Onassis and members of her family.

Throughout the first act few in the audience knew she was in the theater, but once intermission began her presence became well known.

Perhaps not as well known as it should have been.

The second act began with Cook placing a chair at center stage followed by Moore placing a chair slightly behind him to the left. From Cook’s movement the audience surmised he was driving a car.

Their dialogue, as Doug recalled, concerned Moore’s trepidation at his forthcoming initial speech in the House of Lords, to which Cook commented that he would like to be famous one day.

And then the bombshell exploded.

Cook said he knew how to become famous. He only had to emulate Lee Harvey Oswald and kill somebody famous.

Assuming you were as startled as I was to hear that dark comedy, imagine how the Kennedy family must have felt. Doug recalls no public reaction but to this day, some 44 years later, he wonders if Jackie knew in advance about the black humor Cook and Moore projected.

One of the perks of my being a field editor on Nation’s Restaurant News back in 1977, I told Doug and Steve, was being able to dine at some of the classier eating spots in Manhattan. One day, I found myself with co-workers Liz and Peggy having lunch in an expensive, over the top restaurant off Park Avenue in the mid-East 60s. The décor was gaudy—lots of mirrors and gold accents. 

As it had recently made its debut, the restaurant (long since closed) had yet to be discovered by the lunchtime crowd of power elites. It was, to be honest, rather thinly patronized that day. Aside from we three, only one other table was occupied. As I looked around I saw two people sitting at the table, a professorial-type man with unruly grey hair and a strikingly composed, thin, raven-haired woman with big glasses, eating a salad.

As Peggy’s back was to the other table, I whispered to her to glance in the mirror to see the reflection of what I thought was Jackie O. Instead, she twisted her body for a full frontal look and then, in no semblance of a stage whisper, blurted out, “It’s Jackie Kennedy!” 

I shrank in my seat, but Jackie didn’t bat an eyelash. A perfect example of being cool, calm and collected to what must have been a common occurrence in her lifetime.

A Moment to Remember

If ever there was a class and teacher high school sophomores at Yeshivah of Flatbush in Brooklyn chose to ignore and make fun of, it was the art class of Shirley Franzblau. No longer awed by being in secondary school, savvy in our knowledge of the ways and means of our private high school, we barely could contain our indifference to the silver-haired Miss Franzblau’s subject and tutelage.

But it is her class that stands out in memory more than any other. It was in her classroom, shortly after 2 on a Friday afternoon 47 years ago today, that the intercom speaker came to life to tell all about the death of a president.

November 22, 1963. I was 14. Like most of my contemporaries, I had finally achieved more than a modicum of political awareness. JFK’s inaugural address was the first I ever heard. His cabinet was the first whose members I could fully name. Similarly, I could identify the nine Supreme Court justices. A year after the Cuban Missile Crisis, images of ambassador Adlai Stevenson showing the United Nations, and through television, the world, photos of the Soviet deployments in Cuba were still fresh in my memory bank. So, too, were the press conferences John Kennedy held.

As I remember it, our class came to absolute silence. I don’t recall anyone weeping. Just stunned silence. Miss Franzblau told us there would be early dismissal. I went home to join, for the next three days, a nation watching history unfold and be changed forever.

I’ve visited the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas overlooking the grassy knoll. The sixth floor from where Lee Harvey Oswald fired those fateful shots has been turned into a museum. I choose to believe there was just one shooter, though I don’t discount Oswald may have been part of a more elaborate conspiracy.

I remember nothing else about Shirley Franzblau’s classes. Just one moment in an otherwise forgettable class.