Jackie Kennedy Had a Secret Romance With the Architect of JFK’s Gravesite “That Never Really Ended”
Jackie Kennedy on March 17, 1962.Credit: GettyThe Gist
Jackie Kennedy, then the first lady of the United States, met architect Jack Warnecke in 1962.
After President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, Warnecke was tasked with designing the president’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery.
Eventually, Jackie and Warnecke fell in love, a secret romance “that never really ended,” Warnecke wrote in a new posthumous memoir, out on November 10.
The world is aware of some of Jackie Kennedy’s romances—obviously her marriage to President John F. Kennedy, which ended with his 1963 assassination, and her later marriage to Aristotle Onassis, whom she was married to from 1968 until his death in 1975. Less public but not totally private was Jackie’s long-standing relationship with Maurice Tempelsman, who was the former first lady’s companion up until the end of her life in 1994.
But a secret relationship—one between Jackie and architect Jack Warnecke—is the subject of a new posthumous book written by Warnecke called Camelot’s Architect. In it, he described a romance “that never really ended,” he wrote in the book.
Jackie Kennedy on October 22, 1969.Credit: Getty
Warnecke died at age 91 in 2010, but he left behind an unpublished memoir upon his death that is now seeing the light of day. In an excerpt published by People, he gives insight into their love story, which began after JFK’s assassination and ended—kind of—when Jackie married Onassis. As Jackie put it, according to Warnecke, though she was married to someone else, “The love we had then was never broken or damaged,” she told him. “Nothing had ever changed it.”
Interestingly, it was Warnecke who designed JFK’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, and from this he and Jackie began a two-year love affair. “It was ours alone and no one else’s,” Warnecke wrote, adding that, for a brief moment, “we were truly in a beautiful world we had created for each other.”
Jackie Kennedy and Jack Warnecke.Credit: Getty
Soon after the Kennedy assassination, Jackie and JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy asked him “if I would undertake the design of the grave.” In the next year, “as much as I was attracted to her, I held back,” he wrote. “We would meet in my office to work on the design of the grave, but that was all. But it all built a kind of tension—a personal and caring tension between us.”
In the fall of 1964, roughly a year after the assassination, the two “first opened up our feelings toward each other—a weekend beyond our imagination,” Warnecke explained. “We both secretly knew we were in love with each other.”
“By the end of the year, our thoughts of a future together had advanced to the point where the subject of marriage came up,” he added. “The question was when?”
Jackie Kennedy on December 16, 1967.Credit: Getty
In the summer of 1966, Jackie rented a house in Honolulu, Hawaii, where Warnecke was designing the State Capitol. Warnecke went to see Jackie’s house, writing, “As I approached from the beach, I spotted Jackie,” he wrote. “There she was, lying face down on a large beach towel with an enormous straw hat covering her head. But, to my amazement, not a single piece of clothing covered the rest of her body. She was completely nude. I took her by surprise and she gasped, but she could see I liked what I saw. She looked beautiful and, of course, relieved that it was me and not a stranger who had discovered her basking in the tropical sunshine.”
This wasn’t the only time Jackie surprised Warnecke in this way, he wrote. As they were preparing to go out to dinner, he found Jackie “already in the car, sitting in the back, smiling. What amazed me most was that she did not have a stitch of clothing on. I don’t know what possessed me, but off we went in my canvas-topped convertible. I turned around a couple of times to behold this extraordinary sight, but didn’t quite know what to make of it.”
“She kept saying, ‘I’m all yours. All of me,’” he continued. “‘I’m letting you know how much I love you.’” He happily noted that “My goal of bringing Jackie back to a normal life had been realized.”
Jackie Kennedy in New York City on October 10, 1968.Credit: Getty
After learning in 1966 that he was $1 million in debt, Jackie “was shocked and upset,” he wrote. “Our romance now had a harsh new reality hovering over it. Jackie needed special protection and privacy. I realized I would never be able to properly provide for her. I sincerely hoped that later, once things quieted down, we could think again about marriage. I was under the impression that Jackie felt the same.”
After RFK’s assassination in June 1968, Jackie’s security needs further increased. Meanwhile, Onassis “had been wooing her,” Warnecke wrote. “A private island in the Mediterranean with a fleet of ships and planes was the security she so desperately needed.” Jackie married Onassis on October 20 of that same year. Later, after running into Jackie in Paris, she “told me she believed that her marriage to Onassis was the biggest mistake she had ever made,” Warnecke wrote.
By the end of the 1970s, the two had renewed their friendship “and began to see each other again socially,” he wrote. “There was nothing physical going on between us, yet it felt as if we were in some ways still carrying on an exciting secret affair.”
Jackie Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis on their October 20, 1968 wedding day.Credit: Getty
In early 1994, Warnecke read on the front page of The New York Times that Jackie had been diagnosed with cancer. He wrote her a Valentine’s note, and the next day, Jackie called him. “You are right—the love we had then was never broken or damaged,” she said. “Nothing had ever changed it.” Three months later, she died on May 19 at just 64 years old.
“I turned the television on, and there was Jackie being interred in the gravesite I had designed for her next to Jack and the eternal flame,” Warnecke wrote.
The gravesite of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.Credit: Getty
Warnecke’s daughter Margo Warnecke Merck—who oversees the Warnecke Archives—told People of her father’s bond with the former first lady, “I think it was sort of unexpected that they would eventually fall in love at that time, and it was probably unexpected for both of them.”
Jackie’s biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli previously told the outlet that Jackie and Warnecke “were really very important to each other. And she really did love him, and he really was crazy about her.”
on InStyle
Source: Entertainment
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