Second Assassination: A WOMAN NAMED JACKIE. By C. David Heymann. $21.95. Lyle Stuart. 631 pages.
TOM SIEBERT
Staff Writer
SUN-SENTINEL
The biggest-selling book of 1989 is a malicious melange of unsubstantiated gossip and mean-spirited rumors -- all apparently aimed at snuffing out forever the flame of America's Camelot and any glamorous notions of its fairy- tale first lady.
The author, C. David Heymann, bills his massive book as an "intimate biography" of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.
But what "A Woman Named Jackie" really represents is the latest -- and most salacious -- literary assassination of the nation's 35th president.
Granted, Jack Kennedy was no Jack Kennedy -- at least not in the misty-eyed mythical sense. And the late president, who was a master of self-mockery, probably would be the first one to dismiss his legendary status in American politics.
But are we really to believe Heymann when he informs us that just minutes before his critical first debate with then-Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960, JFK was cavorting with a call girl at Chicago's Palmer House hotel?
Or, as Heymann alleges, that on the night of his inauguration, JFK sent his wife upstairs to bed alone so that he could engage in a celebratory menage a trois with two unnamed starlets?
Or, in the book's most serious charge, that just before his 1961 meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, JFK was shot up with amphetamines by a mysterious "Dr. Feelgood" who routinely administered drugs to the first couple so they could keep up their hectic White House schedule?
It should be pointed out that virtually all of the explosive, headline-making material in this disturbing book comes from sources who are conveniently dead.
Thus, we have the president's brother-in-law, the late Peter Lawford, relating how the late Marilyn Monroe got Jackie to agree to give up JFK on the condition that the actress take over her role as first lady.
And in a particularly ghoulish scene in the book, Jackie describes for the late historian Theodore White how she held her husband's head together "so more brains wouldn't spill out" as he lay dying in the blood-splattered presidential limousine.
Then there is the late author Truman Capote telling us about Jackie's "shop 'til you drop" spending sprees during which she "seemed in a daze, hypnotized."
Later on, Jackie's late second husband, Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, confesses to the late celebrity attorney Roy Cohn that it was he who hired the scuba-diving paparazzi who snapped the famous photos of Jackie skinny-dipping off the island of Skorpios.
When he is not quoting Sources From The Grave, Heymann is liberally appropriating entire passages from other books about the Kennedys, including such discredited works as Kitty Kelley's "Jackie Oh!" and Ralph G. Martin's "A Hero for Our Times."
It also should be noted that some of Heymann's living sources -- such as one- time JFK aide Lawrence O'Brien, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson and New York literary agent Sarah Lazin -- have publicly stated that they were misquoted in the book.
And finally, at the end of his exhausting "biography," Heymann concedes in a bizarre bit of candor that "we may never truly know" what Jackie is really like.
Perhaps not, but we sure have learned an awful lot about the man who stands to make millions off her fame and misfortune.
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