Portrait of a Friendship

By JOHN RUSSELL John Russell is the former chief art critic of the New York Times.

WHEN IT CAME TO HUMAN QUALITY, JACQUELINE ONASSIS HAD PERFECT pitch. After her son John had read aloud at the 1979 dedication of the Kennedy library in Boston the poem by Stephen Spender that begins with the words "I think continually of those who were truly great," she brought out one of her most delicate exhalations and said, "I'd really like to meet Mr. Spender, and I'd like Caroline to meet him too."

During the dinner my wife and I set up for that purpose, she made one of the quiet but definitive remarks at which she excelled. Spender had asked her what she regarded as her biggest achievement. "Well," she said without hesitation, "I think that my biggest achievement is that after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane. I'm proud of that."

At her home, with its views over Central Park, she was the very antithesis of the manipulative New York hostess. When she invited a lot of people, which did not happen often, a vast and equable good humor made its way throughout the company. She could make everyone among them feel that the evening was crowned by their arrival, and she also had a great flair for the unexpected guest.

Jacqueline Onassis never in any way compared herself with any of her successors in the White House, though she did once refer to one of them -- in sympathy, not in mischief -- as "a frightened little bunny who calls me almost every day." She was a willing but never gullible supporter of many a good cause. There was nothing she wouldn't do to move them along. (She drew the line at charity balls, though.)

Above all, she brought a minute attention to the affectionate reassurances that keep friendship alive. Though capable of a holy rage when it was called for -- for instance, when a famous figure of the day weaseled out of a book he had promised her for Doubleday -- it gave her enormous pleasure to keep friendships in repair.

She never pretended to be a great scholar, but on almost every topic of mutual interest that came up, she just happened to know the right thing to read. When my wife and I were leaving for India for the first time, she made no promises. But within a couple of hours a shopping bag was brought round to * our door. In it were more than 200 photocopied passages from rare 19th century books on India, each marked in her own hand.

It was a fantasy of hers that everybody else's life was much more interesting than her own. "Think of the plots that are being hatched down there!" she would say, looking down from the balcony of the Four Seasons restaurant, with her Schlumberger bracelets dangling over the edge. At lunchtime at Les Pleiades, the much missed art-world restaurant, she would say, "What do you suppose they're buying and selling over their cold sea bass?"

When it came to a book project, she was one of the all-time great bubble blowers. Never did those bubbles burst, either. Scheme after scheme was launched and christened. My ideas, no matter how fatuous, were buoyed up by her goodwill. It was, and is, one of my ambitions to write something that would last -- forever, no less -- as a thank-you letter to the U.S., where I have been so well treated. Months passed in this way, until the idea began to collapse under its own weight. She did not scold. But, she said, in her best down-feathered voice, "Don't let's talk anymore about that book you're never going to write."