Free Just Jackie by Edward Klein

everything she could to arouse him. When the music stopped, she went over to the record player and dragged the needle back to the beginning of the record. The room was filled again with the sound of Wayne Newton singing “Danke Schoen.”
    Danke schoen, darling, danke schoen,
Thank you for all the joy and pain….
    Jackie slipped back into Brando’s arms. They talked about going away on a skiing vacation together, just the two of them. Brando could feel Jackie’s breath on his ear.He felt that Jackie expected him to make a move, try to take her to bed.
    However, Brando was not a big drinker, and liquor had more of an impact on him than it did on most people. A friend of Brando’s speculated that the actor was concerned that if he got Jackie into bed, he might not be able to perform sexually. The fear of impotence might not have inhibited another man, but it was enough to stop Brando, who worried about his reputation as a great lover.
    At the next break in the music, Brando abruptly excused himself and bid the sisters good night. With Englund at his side, Brando staggered drunkenly out of Jackie’s house, slipped, and almost fell. The Secret Service men stationed in front of the house rushed forward to catch him, but Brando caught himself at the last moment and managed to walk stiffly down the stairs to the street, then climb into a waiting car.
    At the open door, a totally bewildered Jackie watched Brando disappear into the night.

BIZARRE BEHAVIOR

    M ore and more, Jackie was thrown back on the company of the one man in Washington who did not seem to excite any prurient gossip, her Secret Service man, Clint Hill. Tall, handsome, and as laconic as a movie cowboy, Hill had all the attributes of an American hero. He had been a football star at Concordia College in his native North Dakota, and married his high schoolsweetheart, Gwen Brown, who still sang in her church choir.
    Among his Secret Service colleagues, Hill was considered to be an agent’s agent. One time, Jackie asked him if he would like to bring his children, who were about the same ages as Caroline and John, to the White House to play. Hill gently explained to her why he thought that would not be the professional thing to do.
    In Dallas, Hill had hurled himself onto the trunk of the presidential limousine as Jackie was reaching for a piece of her husband’s skull that had been blown away by Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullet. Hill grabbed her and pushed her into the backseat, then crawled on top of her and lay there protecting her.
    Since then, Jackie’s feelings toward Hill had passed beyond the realm of gratitude to a kind of deep and dependent affection. She had asked President Johnson to give Hill the Treasury Department’s highest award for the exceptional bravery he displayed in Dallas.
    Hill did not believe that he deserved the medal. On the night before the assassination, he and eight other Secret Service agents had stayed up into the small hours of the morning drinking at the Fort Worth Press Club. They claimed later, rather implausibly, that they had not drunk a lot. In any case, Hill got only four hours’ sleep, and was not at the top of his form the next day in Dallas. He was convinced that if he had reacted only five tenths of a second or perhaps a second faster, he would have taken the third shot, the one that killed the President. It was Hill’s job to take that bullet, and he had failed.
    His closeness to Jackie only intensified his feelings of guilt. Over the past couple of years, he had traveled with Jackie to India, chauffeured her from appointment to appointment in Washington, and become involved in the daily routine of her life. After their withering experience in Dallas, they had developed an even closer bond, the kind that exists between people who escape togetherfrom a brush with death. They were like two soldiers returning from the front. No one else could understand what they had been through.
    Like Jackie, Hill wandered around in a