Few people knew Jackie Kennedy Onassis as well as Nancy Tuckerman did. When Nancy died last summer, at the age of 89, much that she knew about her friend died with her. Jackie relied on Nancy her whole life. Few people were more discreet or more loyal than Nancy, but discretion and loyalty also had their costs.
Nancy was Jackie’s personal assistant and her friend for more than five decades. They met as schoolgirls in New York in the 1930s and roomed together in high school at Miss Porter’s in Connecticut in the ’40s. Nancy was among Jackie’s bridesmaids in 1953 when she married John F. Kennedy, and was serving as White House social secretary at the time of JFK's assassination 10 years later. She worked at Olympic Airways during Jackie’s marriage to Onassis, and later in an office next to Jackie’s at Doubleday in the ’80s and ’90s.
I met Nancy in 2008, when she helped me with a book on Jackie’s publishing career,Reading Jackie. We continued to see each other for lunch and dinner after the book was done. Our relationship began with hesitation on both sides. I was a little afraid of her. She was legendary for keeping outsiders at bay. There’s a famous photograph of Nancy losing her cool with a photographer who got too close at Caroline Kennedy’s high school graduation. Nancy telephoned Nan Talese, my editor, in New York to upbraid her for one of my draft chapters she disliked. We got beyond that. The last time I saw her, after she’d been diagnosed with an incurable lung condition, she gave me a goodbye as tender and unafraid as I’d like one day to be myself.
Before she became ill, we went on short trips together. We visited the dorm room she’d slept in with Jackie at Miss Porter’s and she posed for pictures. She took questions, often awkward ones, from the audience at several of my book events. She drove over to visit when I had summer rentals in Western Massachusetts.
Nancy’s first official role with Jackie began in 1963. When she became exasperated with her first social secretary, Tish Baldrige, Jackie called Nancy to Washington at short notice. Nancy relied on the White House usher, J. B. West, to help her learn the job. The president sometimes had women invited to the pool for post-lunch recreation. When Nancy found the pool blocked off by security one afternoon, she asked West why. “Nancy,” he said, “you ask too many questions.”
Years later Jackie also asked Nancy to drop her plans and join her in Greece at the last minute. Nancy adored JFK. She was less thrilled with Onassis. She had an old-fashioned Henry Jamesian disapproval of customs on the yacht, which included glasses of pink champagne by the pool at 11 a.m. Dinner often wasn’t before midnight. When Nancy objected, Jackie offered, “Well, Nancy, you could eat with the children.”
Nancy called the Onassis marriage “a mistake.” Five years after the assassination, Jackie was still depressed. “It takes a long time to recover from what she went through. She wasn’t well. She wanted to shock people. She didn’t want to be the president’s widow anymore.”
Nor was Nancy a fan of Lee Radziwill, Jackie’s sister. Lee demanded that the White House telephone operators refer to her as Princess Radziwill. Jackie’s sister also had a sly put-down for Nancy, whom she once addressed before assembled guests at a fancy party as “the fastest typist in New York.”
At Doubleday, where Jackie began work as an associate editor in 1978, Nancy had to run interference for Jackie. When a new CEO gave Jackie a corner office and a glass desk, Jackie was unhappy. “It doesn’t have drawers. Where’ll I keep my paper clips, Nancy? I want a desk like yours.” Nancy arranged for a less conspicuous office and an ordinary desk.
Nancy also fielded Jackie’s questions about how ordinary people lived. When Jackie was working on a Tiffany cookbook, she wandered into Nancy’s office one afternoon. “Will middle-class people know where to find morels?” she wanted to know.
Jackie preferred lunching in her office. Once, the two of them went down to Doubleday’s cafeteria together. Jackie loaded up her tray, walked by the cash registers, and found a table for them. Nancy came over and said, “Did you pay, Jackie?” “What, Nancy? You have to pay?”
When Jackie died in 1994, hospital officials accused Nancy of underrating the gravity of Jackie’s condition in her statements to the press. Jackie’s family abruptly terminated Nancy’s position, though she still had useful work to do in helping wind up Jackie’s affairs. Jackie’s files, which she’d kept for decades, disappeared overnight.
The two friends were an odd couple. One was always chic and smiling for the camera. Nancy liked a soft-collared golf shirt and trousers. She never smiled for the camera and in pictures frequently looked distressed or sad, though in person she could be droll, and loved to laugh. While Jackie had her own special effortlessness, Nancy could be painfully wary about contact with other people. She had a nervous condition examined by Dr. Spock when she was a child and she had to be kept back a year in school. She never quite lost that shyness, which was surprising in a former White House social secretary. Jackie liked curling up on a velvet sofa with a book. Nancy wasn’t much of a reader. She liked a glass of bourbon and ice, accompanied by some harmless gossip.
Nancy liked to hear the stories other people were telling me as I was writing. For example, waspish Louis Auchincloss remembered that Jackie’s father caused a stir at a wedding reception. He had a permanent sun tan, like George Hamilton’s, which was why they called him Black Jack Bouvier. His first wife and Jackie's mother, Janet, was reluctant to have anything to do with him by the time of the wedding in 1953, but Black Jack danced Janet all around the floor at the reception: “We thought she’d run away with him again.” Nancy clapped her hands and said, “That has to be in the book!”
She added that Jackie’s father had been a liability at Miss Porter’s. He’d once arrived to take Jackie and several of her friends out for lunch. He put his hand on a girl’s knee under the table. The other girls decided to keep this a secret from Jackie to save her from embarrassment.
When Greta Gerwig played Nancy opposite Natalie Portman’s Jackie in a 2016 film, the two actresses suggested in their body language some of the intimacy between the two women that might’ve survived from a long-ago girlhood romance.
The real story was that unglamorous Nancy gave up much of her life to be with Jackie. She did inherit $250,000 from Jackie’s will, and this was the largest cash amount named, aside from the sums noted for Jackie’s children. Nevertheless, Nancy sometimes had mixed feelings about her old friend. She had several elegant images by Léon Bakst for the Ballets Russes hanging on the wall of her condominium in Western Connecticut. Jackie had given them to her saying, “There Nancy. If you ever need money, you can sell these.” Nancy remarked, “She meant if you ever need money, don’t come to me.” Despite all the time they spent together, it was clear from Nancy’s stories that their intimacy rested on much that could not be discussed. Their friendship was genuine and long-lasting, but it was also laced with some of the typical resentments of employer and employee.
Though born to an old Massachusetts family, more upper-crust than the Bouviers or the Kennedys, Nancy had to undergo the usual humiliations of old age. After a series of minor accidents, she lost her car. She went reluctantly to one nursing home, then another.
She was often still clear-headed and able to go out sometimes for lunch. She was not vain or stuffy. We went to the tavern of an old Connecticut inn for our last lunch. We carried her walker and oxygen tank. She wore her breathing tube. She taped video shout-outs to mutual friends, including Eric Ort, the theatre director formerly at Miss Porter’s. On the curb afterwards, as I sent her back inside the nursing home, she said, “Don’t let’s say goodbye. We’ve had wonderful times together, haven’t we?” She kissed me, pressed my hand, and turned to go.
William Kuhn is the author of Reading Jackie: Her Autobiography in Books (Nan A. Talese, 2010)
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