And They Called It Camelot: A Novel of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis

by Stephanie Marie Thornton

With a daiquiri in hand, I leaned against an onyx pillar to watch Jack approach the eighty-year-old leviathan that was Winston Churchill, whom I’d briefly met almost a decade before at a Buckingham Palace garden party during my debutante’s tour of the Continent. This Churchill, with his bulbous, pink-veined eyes, looked even more exhausted than the war-weary politician of 1947, although he’d recently retired as Britain’s prime minister. Jack might have been mistaken for Apollo that night in his white tuxedo and crisp summer tan, but I could smell his tang of nerves as he neared Churchill. “Good evening, sir.” Jack’s head was bowed in reverence to this titan among men, one of Aristotle Onassis’s antique leather-bound volumes open on the elder statesman’s lap as he sat before the lapis lazuli fireplace. That very titan glanced up with a pinched scowl as he puffed away on a ubiquitous cigar, several more jammed into his pocket. “It’s about time you got here,” he chewed out, and I watched as tension melted from Jack’s shoulders. Until Churchill picked up his empty Scotch glass and shook it at Jack. “Get me another one of these, will you?” If I hadn’t been so angry at my husband, I’d have gone to soothe Jack’s crestfallen expression at being mistaken for one of the tuxedoed waiters. Instead, the despondent and broken part of me wanted to laugh that Jack wasn’t the golden immortal he thought he was, especially when he slunk away, dejected by his idol. “Bonsoir, Madame Kennedy.” ...