This has been revealed by the singer Carly Simon, a friend of Jackie Kennedy Onassis for eleven years, in a book that she has just published.
Carly Simon (New York, 1945) is one of those strange forces of nature that pop music rarely produces: a singer who composed almost all of her hits alone and managed to get some of them into the society pages for sparking a stir. mystery that continues to interest today. The clearest example is You're So Vain, which went to number one in the United States in 1972.
It has backing vocals by Mick Jagger, has aged incredibly well and for years made the world wonder who it was dedicated to. this song. Simon revealed in 2015 that she was to actor Warren Beatty. This great composer not only showed how to put the notes of a song in her place, but also the ladies on the red carpet.
“Her husband was on a yacht with his lover in the Mediterranean Sea, reluctant to return home to be with his devastated wife. With cold distance, she saw no reason to return quickly: the baby was already dead,” published the 'Washington Post'.
The latest reincarnation of Simon, who has published 23 albums and sold four million copies of her greatest hits compilation, is that of a writer. She confronts him with the definitive ladies' man of the 20th century: John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Brookline, Massachusetts, 1917-Dallas, Texas, 1963). Touched by the sun: my friendship with Jackie is actually a review of his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, but his relationship with JFK and his infidelities are the focus of much of the promotion.
That JFK was unfaithful is nothing new. In the sixties, in the era of free love, exposed gray hair could be something as acceptable as consuming LSD in free time. The assassinated president has been accused of having affairs with, among others, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich and a White House intern – when Clinton said that JFK had been his inspiration, he took it to its ultimate consequences. But Carly goes beyond those romances and tells the episode of infidelity that really marked the marriage between Kennedy and Onassis.
It was John John Kennedy, who died in 1999 at age 39 (only one of JFK and Jackie's four children survives today: Caroline Kennedy) who introduced Carly and Jackie in 1983. Their friendship lasted until 1994, when the Kennedy matriarch died. , and Carly dedicated a song to him that same year, Touched by the sun. They were separated by 16 years of age, but according to Simon they fit together perfectly. “I could be neurotic, bohemian and disastrous, and she was always so correct. I was just what she couldn't be. I think that’s what she liked,” Simon says.
In her memoir, Carly describes a woman who didn't seem too bothered by her husband's infidelities. “In a happy but resigned way she told me that of course she knew all that. She just didn't care that much because she knew that Kennedy loved her, more than any of her other adventures."
But in an interview with journalist Cynthia McFadden on the American network NBC, Simon brought up an episode that did have a big impact on Jacqueline and the relationship she had with JFK: it occurred when she gave birth to what would have been the first daughter of the couple, Arabella, who in 1956, four years before Kennedy was elected 35th president of the United States, was stillborn.
“I think she saw in me something that she wanted in herself. "She saw a spirit that had the right to be free like a bird."
“He was not there during the birth of his daughter. She was on a trip with a lover while Jackie was in the hospital,” Carly has revealed. This is a story that the Washington Post had already reported in 2013: “Her husband was on a yacht with his mistress in the Mediterranean, reluctant to return home to be with his devastated wife. With cold distance, he saw no reason to return quickly: the baby was already dead.”
Despite everything, Jackie remained (literally) by her husband's side until her death, as shown in the images of the assassination that ended her life in 1963 and that today are the history of the 20th century. And, after her, true to her character as her discreet and formal first lady, she never spoke publicly (and almost not even privately) about those infidelities. “I think she saw in me something that she wanted in herself,” Carly concludes in the interview. “She saw a spirit that had the right to be free like a bird.”
