Just Jackie by Edward Klein

ignored her husband’s sarcasm.
    “Ari has homes in so many countries that he maintains duplicate wardrobes all over the world,” she went on. “He never has to bother with luggage when he travels.”
    “They say the barstools on his yacht are covered with the scrotums of whales,” Chuck Spalding said.
    “The skin of the scrotums of
mature
whales,” said Lee, as if the age of the whales somehow made a difference. “The sunken bath in his master stateroom is an exact replica of the one in a palace in ancient Crete. The temperature of the seawater in his swimming pool is regulated so that it’s maintained a few degrees below air temperature. Ari’s business is no longer a means for him to make money; it’s a vehicle for his personal pleasure. He’s rich beyond the dreams of avarice. Nothing I’ve ever experienced compares to the luxe of his life.”
    “Nothing,” Jackie corrected her, “with the exception of Bunny’s life here on Antigua.”
    Everyone laughed—including Bobby—because what Jackie said was true.
    “Oh, Bunny,” Jackie said, “tell us how you picked out the color in your living room. It’s such a good story.”
    “Well,” said Bunny, happy to oblige, “I was trying to describe to my interior decorator the salmon-pink color that I had in mind. And I simply told him, ‘You know how it is when you get up at five o’clock in the morning, and go into your garden, and the sun is just coming up? Well, it’s not the color of the light on the first petal of the rose. And it’s not the color when you pull off the second petal. It’s the color on the
third
petal.
That’s
what I’m trying to achieve!’ ”
    Bunny was eccentric, even a bit nutty, but to Jackie she was the beau ideal of all that was romantic, exquisite, and fine. Jackie held her friend in such high esteem that she had even called Jack by her nickname, Bunny.
    Jackie admired her friend’s taste in French fashion (Bunny spent tens of thousands of dollars each seasonbuying Hubert de Givenchy’s entire couture line). Jackie respected Bunny’s opinion on how things should look in a home (“nothing should be noticed,” she said). Jackie subscribed to her friend’s definition of what was boring and vulgar and a nuisance, and to her determination to keep the world at bay. And Jackie appreciated how Bunny dealt with the fact that her husband had had the same mistress for as long as anyone could remember (Bunny lived her own life, apart from Paul Mellon, and even kept her financial assets separate from his).
    Most of all, Jackie admired the fact that Bunny was unbelievably rich. Bunny showered Jackie with presents, everything from the finest handmade stationery to a $5,000 Schlumberger bracelet from Tiffany’s. This generosity may have been Bunny’s special way of overcoming her feelings of timidity. As a young girl, she could not bear for anyone to look at her. She had such low self-esteem that her parents took her to a psychotherapist, who gave her a special exercise to overcome her problem. Bunny was told to stand in front of a mirror and repeat over and over that she was the most glamorous child, the most wonderful child, the prettiest child on earth.
    Bunny never talked about the things that she collected. For instance, Jackie never heard Bunny say, “Oh, isn’t that silver tureen beautiful,” or “Isn’t that a great painting,” or “Aren’t those chairs wonderful.” Bunny did not focus on things as such. She was interested in what people
did
with those things.
    She took being rich for granted, as her due. Her father, Gerard Barnes Lambert, had built the family fortune on Listerine mouthwash and Gillette Blue Blades, and he instilled in his daughter a view of money that Jackie found captivating.
    “[W]ith the acquisition of almost unlimited funds, all the joy of getting new things disappears…., ” Gerard Lambert wrote in his memoirs,
All Out of Step
, “You arecompletely bored with the things for which those