Product Description

A New York Times Bestseller
A Featured Alternate of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Doubleday Book Club, and Literary Guild

In November 1993, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis took a tumble from her horse during a hunt in Virginia. A scarce six months later this revered, fascinating woman of substance, style, and steely will passed away in her Park Avenue home. Now bestselling author Edward Klein - who knew Jackie for more than a dozen years - pens a moving account of those last months and a celebration of the life of an American icon who faced death as she faced life.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4252582 in Books
• Published on: 2004-09-20
• Format: Large Print
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 285 pages

From Publishers Weekly
With so many books out there about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, one has to wonder what fresh insights might be found in this latest portrait. Klein's angle is to offer "a missing piece of Jackie's remarkable story"-her battle with cancer-on the 10th anniversary of her death. While he's billed as a personal friend of Jackie's (although admittedly not a close one), it's hard to see how his relationship with her lends nuance or depth to his writing. Klein has written a slew of books about the Kennedys (most recently the bestselling The Kennedy Curse), and this slim tome feels padded. While readers do get details about her last days, they often come from questionable sources, like her manicurist, who observes, "She liked to keep her nails and toenails natural and clean looking" and "I heard she was sick.... But I didn't know so many details." One also has to wonder why a former friend would need to resort to sources like this. Scenes of Jackie's last moments and actual death are moving by their nature. But the portrait we get-that she was strong, that she loved her family, that she died on her own terms-is nothing new. In fact, Klein stresses throughout Jackie's need for privacy, so his offering of such intimate physical detail-whatever the source-while not explicitly exploitative in tone, does come off as unseemly. What would Jackie think? B&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Edward Klein is the author of numerous books, including The New York Times bestseller The Kennedy Curse. He covered John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential campaign and was foreign editor of Newsweek and editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is still so much with us that it is hard to believe she has been gone for ten long years.

Perhaps that is because the blazing klieg lights of attention that pursued Jackie during her lifetime did not forsake her in death. Since May 1994, when she was laid to rest on a hillside in Arlington National Cemetery next to her first husband, President John F. Kennedy, Jackie has been the subject of numerous biographies, countless televised documentaries, two off-Broadway musicals, a made-for-television movie, a frenzied Sotheby’s auction, and a traveling exhibition featuring the original gowns, dresses, suits, and accessories she wore during her White House years.

On the tenth anniversary of her death, our desire to know more about Jackie remains insatiable. Practically any morsel, it seems, will do. Recently, for instance, newspapers around the world carried a forty-year-old story reporting that Jackie once briefly considered suicide then quickly put the idea aside.

And yet, despite this intense and unrelenting scrutiny, there have been only the sketchiest accounts of Jackie’s final illness and death. That story began on the day Jackie fell from her horse while foxhunting in Virginia, and reached its sad climax when she learned the shocking news that her cancer was incurable. Though her doctors told Jackie they could keep her alive awhile longer, she chose not to pursue any further aggressive medical treatment. All this happened with dizzying swiftness: in six short months Jackie plummeted from the height of personal contentment and professional fulfillment to the threshold of death. How she coped with this calamity is a tale both heart-wrenching and heartwarming.

I have written about Jackie before, both in magazines and in books. Although I did not number myself among Jackie’s close friends, I knew her for the last dozen years of her life. We frequently chatted on the phone and lunched together. My wife and I were guests in her home.

Like millions of others, I greatly admired Jackie for her lively, affectionate nature, her dignity and grace. And I deeply respected her decision to orchestrate her own death as masterfully as she once orchestrated the funeral of President Kennedy.

Here is the missing piece of Jackie’s remarkable story.

The Real Jackie

November 1993

JBKO at the Piedmont Hunt
It was Saturday, November 20, just before daybreak in the hunt country of Virginia. A solemn darkness enveloped the rolling countryside between historic Llangollen Farm and Ayrshire, north of the village of Upperville. All at once, the gloom was pierced by the sound and lights of a caravan of trucks and SUVs towing big, six-horse vans and smaller two-horse tagalongs. The headlights made a circuit of the surrounding fields, then fell upon a barn, silhouetting it against the sapphire sky. There, a tall, slim woman leaned against the side of the barn, one booted leg casually crossed over the other. She was puffing on a cigarette and exhaling streams of thick smoke into the frigid morning air.

This was Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. She was sixty-four years old, but the years had done nothing to extinguish her incandescent beauty. She was dressed in a handsomely cut black frock coat with a canary yellow collar denoting a member in full standing of the Piedmont Foxhounds. She wore buff-colored breeches with a mild flare at the thigh; a snowy-white stock tied at her throat (to be used as a sling or tourniquet in case of emergency); a black velvet hunt cap; and a pair of white gloves.

Waiting in the dark by the barn, Jackie lit a fresh Pall Mall from the glowing end of the one she had just finished. Few people knew that she chain-smoked when she thought no one was looking. Yet despite all the years of smoking, Jackie’s teeth remained sparkling white and her face was radiant with color. Tendrils of thick, dark hair peeked out from her black hunt cap, clinging to her face and accentuating its ethereal, wide-eyed loveliness.

She looked like a woman who cared deeply about her appearance. And, in fact, she swam, rode horses, water-skied, jogged around New York’s Central Park Reservoir, and practiced yoga. She kept herself Bouvier-thin on a strict low-calorie diet. Four and a half years before, in the spring of 1989, she had had a face-lift performed by Dr. Michael Hogan, a Park Avenue plastic surgeon.

In addition to smoking, Jackie had another habit of which few people were aware. When she was stressed out, she bit her nails. In the past few years, as she had grown more contented with her life, the compulsive bouts of finger-gnawing became rarer and rarer. But on the weekend before Thanksgiving—which usually coincided with the weekend before the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination—Jackie bit her fingernails to the quick.

This year, her anxiety level seemed higher than ever, for 1993 marked a major milestone; it was the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination. The event filled Jackie with dread, not only because of the gruesome images that were engraved in her memory of that bloody Friday in Dallas, but also because all the media hoopla stirred up painful recollections of her difficult marriage to Jack Kennedy.

While others celebrated JFK’s virtues, Jackie could not help but be reminded of the humiliations she endured at the hands of her philandering husband. Even worse, the anger and rage she had felt toward Jack Kennedy while he was still alive surfaced at assassination- anniversary time, threatening to overwhelm her.

Invariably, Jackie would experience terrible pangs of guilt because of these spiteful feelings toward her now-dead husband. And the guilt would sometimes become almost unbearable when she thought back, as she did every November, to the final months leading up to Jack’s death, when their relationship was undergoing a profound change.

By the fall of 1963, a strong new bond had developed between Jack and Jackie as a result of their shared experiences in the White House and their grief over the death of their two-day-old son Patrick Bouvier. Jack was far more considerate of Jackie’s feelings; for the first time anyone could remember, he held Jackie’s hand in public when they disembarked from Air Force One at Love Field in Dallas. For her part, Jackie was more in love with Jack than at any time since he had become president.

This new tenderness explained why Jackie, who hated campaigning, agreed to go with Jack on a political fence-mending trip to Texas in November 1963. It also explained why, each year at this time, Jackie would have given anything to erase the crushing guilt she bore for having once harbored such hostile feelings toward Jack.

______

In the gathering dawn of the Virginia countryside, members of the Piedmont Foxhounds arrived at the meet site and greeted Jackie. (She was called JBKO by her hunt friends, but never to her face.) The women were dressed in black like Jackie, but the men were turned out in a more spectacular fashion. They wore scarlet frock coats, well-polished black boots with brown tops, loosely cut white breeches, white gloves, and black velvet helmets. Some had on spurs and carried long-thonged whips.

Jackie’s friends in Virginia did not fawn over her the way people tended to do elsewhere. Here in the hunt country, she was not treated as a celebrity. Her fellow equestrians admired her for her horsemanship. That Jackie hunted with Piedmont—a club famous for its speed, big fences, tough hunters, and daring—was testimony to her personal devotion to the sport.

“She was a serious, serious rider,” said one of Jackie’s hunting friends, Barbara Graham, who was an heir to the Johnson & Johnson wax fortune. “Jackie was forever quizzing me on how I did things with my horses. She wanted to know everything. We’d talk for hours on my porch.”

Jackie’s love of horses started at an early age. As a child of six, she began schooling in dressage—the art of controlling a horse with subtle movements of the hands, legs, and weight. She kept a horse at Miss Porter’s, the boarding school she attended in Farmington, Connecticut. It was her Vassar classmate Gay Estin who encouraged her to get a hunt box—a weekend house with a small barn and paddock—in Virginia.

Recently, Jackie had written a foreword to James L. Young’s A Field of Horses: The World of Marshall P. Hawkins, a coffee-table book about the equestrian photographer who had taken a famous picture of her in 1961 falling headfirst from her horse when it balked at a fence. Of hunting in the open country, Jackie wrote: “As we see them [horses and riders] move together across the exquisite landscapes, we are made aware of our own responsibilities to preserve and conserve the simple splendor of a vanishing America.”

______

This weekend, Jackie was a guest at Rokeby Farm, the estate of her lifelong friends Paul Mellon, the renowned art collector, philanthropist, and horseman, and Rachel Lambert “Bunny” Mellon. There were no fewer than ten foxhunt clubs within an hour’s drive of the Mellons’ 4,200-acre farm. Jackie hunted with the two most exclusive—the Orange County Hunt and the Piedmont Foxhounds.

Rokeby was located in Piedmont territory, just to the west of Orange County territory. The Masters of the Foxhounds Association in nearby Leesburg controlled the hunts, and kept track of which land went with which hunt. Because there were so many hunt clubs, it was important to know where one ended and another began. In the case of the Piedmont Foxhounds and the Orange County Hunt, the line was known, tongue in cheek, as Segregation Lane. The only time a Piedmont hunt was allowed to go into Orange County territory was when the fox and hounds crossed Segregation Lane and the riders had no choice but to follow.

Because the area had more manicured grasslands than rough crop fields, it was considered ideal for hunting. To keep out the riffraff, the best clubs had a policy that members had to own at least one hundred acres of land. Guest...

Customer Reviews

"Farewell" not soon enough
Edward Klein needs to find a new family to write recycled books about. After peddling such ghastly books as "The Kennedy Curse" and "Just Jackie," Klein engages in literary graverobbing with the putrid "Farewell Jackie: A Portrait of Her Final Days."

His primary focus is the final illness and death of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, of non-lymphoma cancer that seemed easily treatable. By this time, Ms. Onassis had transcended her tabloid-speckled former lives and had a good job, a man she loved, and grandchildren she adored. But when her cancer spread, Onassis tried to die with the illusion of dignity she had maintained in her life.

Reading "Farewell Jackie" is a bit like watching someone break open a grave to frisk the bones of the dead. Padding the story of Jackie's illness and death are stories of her earlier life -- primarily her second marriage, and various love affairs she had (one of which has been denied by the man involved). Dirt-dishing, anyone?

Jackie Kennedy Onassis is portrayed as downright saintly in this book; Klein glosses over the hypocrises and flaws in her personality, such as being "religious" yet ignoring tenets of that religion. Even the volatile nature of her relationship with her second husband. Oddly enough, this adoration doesn't extend far enough, especially at the end. Any semblance of dignity is shredded when Klein goes into grotesque detail about Onassis's final mental and physical deterioration.

What's more, Klein's writing is deplorable. He transcribes private conversations and moments when Onassis was alone -- all obviously faked. Not to mention that Klein is in desperate need of an editor for this book's many errors. On one page, Klein informs us, "Jackie a wreck." Verbs? We don't need no stinkin' verbs.

Farewell, Jackie. Too bad Klein had to write this book and peddle it as a memorial volume for you. "Farewell Jackie," thankfully, is clearly destined to sink into the mire of obsequious, poorly-written Kennedy books.

I can't believe I sprung for this in hardcover!
I agree with the other reviewers who say there is nothing new here. Not only is this all rehash,it's not even good rehash.
Save your money, but if you must own it...buy it used...I am sure you'll have no trouble finding them.

Poorly done work
While I understand that author's sentiment in wanting to detail a very important and courageous aspect of Jacqueline's life, I am disappointed with his attempt to do so. I was expceting to be enthralled and engaged from the moment I picked up the book until I put it down. That was clearly not the case. I found the book to be dull and to only repeat details that have been mentioned previously in other novels. The flashbacks were often distracting and served no real purpose.I learned nothing new from this novel. All details of her sickness that were found between the pages of this book were merely repeats and could be found in any Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis book worth its salt. As a collector of Kennedy books, I feel confident enough in my discerning taste to recommend that all interested parties refrain from buying this book. Go sit and read it at your local bookstore. (Trust me, it certainly won't take long!)