The architect who designed Rancho Cucamonga City Hall and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had it off in the time between President John Kennedy’s assassination and the former First Lady’s 1968 marriage to Aristotle Onassis, according to John Paul Warnecke’s recently published posthumous memoir.
When Rancho Cucamonga’s municipal officials in 1988 fully committed to constructing a City Hall from scratch rather than having its administration and various departments operate out of a business park on Baseline Road as had been the case over the previous 11 years since the city’s 1977 incorporation, it turned to architect John Carl “Jack” Warnecke.
As the designer of the Hawaii State Capital, the Joseph Mark Lauinger Library at Georgetown University, the Hannepin County Government Center in Minneapolis, the Nimitz Library, Chauvenet Hall and Michelson Hall at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, the AT&T Long Lines Building in New York City the South Terminal at Logan International Airport in Boston, the Ventura County Courthouse in Ventura, the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington D.C the Thomas & Mack Center at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the post office and bookstore as well as Stanford University, the Howard T. Markey National Courts Building at Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. and the John F. Kennedy Eternal Flame and gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery as well as the as the associate architect for the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C., Warnecke was considered well-suited for the assignment.
Known for Bauhaus and Modernist styles as well as advocating a contextual approach in the structures and monuments he designed, in delivering Rancho Cucamonga’s center of governance, he deviated somewhat from what had been expected. Situated little more than a stone’s throw from the intersection of Route 66 and Haven Ave is the Kremlinesque Rancho Cucamonga City Hall, a building that incorporates elements he wanted to include but did not in the Soviet Embassy in the nation’s capitol.
Warnecke had a storied life, which ranged from being the tackle on the undefeated 1940 Stanford Indians football team to someone who had hobnobbed and rubbed shoulders with the nation’s elite.
He had captured much of that in a series of accounts, a memoir as it were, but that compendium had not been edited or delivered to a publisher at the time of his death in 2010, shortly after he had eclipsed his 91st birthday. Rather, he had requested that his daughter Margo Warnecke Merck, who leads the Warnecke archives, put the manuscript in the right hands and see that it be published once it was polished. That book is now ready as Camelot’s Architect: The Untold Story of Jackie Kennedy, Lafayette Square and a Secret Romance. It is to become available through River Grove Books on November 12. The Sentinel was entrusted with an advance copy.
Warnecke’s narrative is filled with a host of interesting, indeed some historically significant facts and a few salacious details.
Jacqueline Kennedy had doubts about marrying Aristotle Onassis before their 1968 union and apparently regrets afterward, according to Warnecke, who was close to the presidential couple as an advising architect before President John Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 assassination and then grew intimate with the president’s widow in the years after his death.
Despite Warnecke’s substantial success in the field of architecture, financial issues that dogged him in the mid-1960s appear to have prevented him from marrying Jackie Kennedy, as the financial demands she was subjected after President Kennedy’s death as a consequence of her situation and lifestyle could not be met by what was being provided to her by the Kennedy Family or the modest inheritance she received from her father, John Vernou Bouvier III, a once-successful Wall Street stockbroker whose wealth had been squandered through gambling and poor financial decisions by the time of his 1957 death.
Jacqueline Bouvier and John Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, wed in 1953.
Three years later, Kennedy, then 39, made a major splash on the U.S. political scene with a speech at the Democratic National Convention when Adlai E. Stevenson was selected for the second straight time to go up against Republican Dwight Eisenhower. That same year, Senator made the acquaintance of Warnecke, who at that time was a rising light in the architectural world. Apparently, Jackie Kennedy was not present, as Camelot’s Architect spells out that :
Jackie and Warnecke first met in October 1962, when he was scheduled to meet with her to review plans for Lafayette Square, on which he was working at the time. The night before that meeing, Warnecke attended a dinner at the British embassy, at which the president and First Lady were also present. Warnecke approached her during the formal dinner.
”I decided the best way to meet her would be to ask her for a dance,” according to Camelot’s Architect. “She turned around and looked up at me somewhat astonished as I said, ‘Would you like to have the next dance with me?’ I paused and added, “I’m the architect you are supposed to meet tomorrow at 11 a.m.” Off we went to the dance floor.
According to Warnecke, “The next day, we were all assembled for our meeting. Jackie arrived, wearing a pink suit with a navy, velvet-trimmed collar. I could tell she liked the design immediately.”
Thereafter, according to Warnecke, President Kennedy and members of his family consulted with him on a multitude of questions relating to building construction.
It was during that time that Warnecke, who was recently divorced, learned that a younger woman he was dating was also engaged in a physical relationship with the president.
In early 1963, Warnecke had gone to Boston scouting locations for the future Kennedy presidential library. While they were aboard Air Force One, the president asked Warnecke about his personal life. Warnecke said he was about to embark on a vacation with the woman – whom he identified to the president but did not name in the memoir – to the Caribbean. That apparently triggered a phone call from President Kennedy to the woman.
“This was a trip we had both been looking forward to,” according to Warnecke. “When I reached her on the telephone, she told me something had happened while I was away and, as a result, she could no longer take the trip.”
Shortly after returning from Boston, Warnecke met the woman for dinner.
“About halfway through the meal, she felt she couldn’t put off any longer what she needed to tell me – why our trip had to be canceled,” Warnecke’s memori states. “The reason, she admitted, was the president had entered into her life. She was now romantically involved with Jack and felt she could no longer go on the trip with me. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, especially after my recent discussion with the president about her. I shrugged and said ‘Okay, I’ll cancel our vacation.’ After all, I told myself this is the leader of the free world. What could I do?”
According to Warnecke, President Kennedy had liaisons with the woman while Jackie and their children Caroline and John Jr. were on weekend sojourns to the Virginia countryside.
Like virtually everyone else at that time, Warnecke was thrown into a state of shock when John Kennedy was assassinated.
“I was particularly jolted by the sight of Jackie returning with Jack’s body to Washington,” he wrote. “Most poignant to me was that she was wearing the same pink suit she wore the day I first presented her with our design plans for Lafayette Square.”
The Kennedy family turned to Warnecke to prepare the gravesite memorial for the slain president. Jackie Kennedy and the president’s brother, Robert, requested that he go with them to survey the plot allotted for that purpose at the Arlington National Cemetery.
“Neither of them spoke a word,” Warnecke recollected. “As we slowly pushed through the media corps, suddenly we came upon the little white picket fence surrounding the temporary grave. Before us flickered the eternal flame, at the sight of which Bobby and Jackie dropped to their knees and crossed themselves.”
Warnecke’s nattative continues, “During the return trip, Jackie and Bobby asked me if I would undertake the design of the grave. The location of the cross, the name and dates on the stone marking the location of the president’s grave — they were also approved by Jackie.”
Warnecke said that over the ten or so months thereafter, “as much as I was attracted to her [Jacqueline], I held back. 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.”
It was during a weekend meeting with Jacqueline at the home of her parents, Janet and Hugh Auchincloss, Hammersmith Farm in Rhode Island, in the fall of 1964 to review a stonecutter’s work for the gravesite, Warnecke said, “when we first opened up our feelings toward each other – a weekend beyond our imagination. We both secretly knew we were in love with each other.
According to Warnecke, “one thing led to another,” and their relationship lasted for three years.
“I was invited by Janet and Hugh Auchincloss to come to Hammersmith Farm for Thanksgiving,” Warnecke wrote. “Jackie had suggested bringing everyone so we could all be together with both her children, Caroline and John John. I decided to have some fun with my children and not tell them where we were going. I’ll never forget ringing the doorbell and Jackie greeting us. By the end of the year, our thoughts of a future together had advanced to the point where the subject of marriage came up. The question was when?”
To members of the Kennedy family, it seemed that John’s widow was moving on too quickly in the aftermath of the president’s assassination. She brought Warnecke to the family compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in late 1964. That may have ushered a degree of sepoaration between Jacqueline and her in-laws.
Warnecke and Jacqueline Kennedy kept their romance under wraps, so they could avoid intense scrutiny that she was subject to after her husband’s assassination.
Over the next two years, the relationship intensified to the point where they were on the brink of marriage, according to Warnecke, who expressed the view that “We were truly in a beautiful world we had created for each other.”
In the summer of 1966, at his suggestion, Kennedy rented a house in Honolulu, where he was designing the State Capitol. They sought to throw the paparazzi off the track by Jacqueline claiming she was there at the invitation of a mutual friend.
“As soon as Jackie set foot in her Hawaiian house, which she had rented for a month, she phoned me,” Warnecke wrote. “She asked me to come and see her place on the beach, about a mile south of my house. As I approached from the beach, I spotted Jackie. 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.”
Jacqueline was capable of risque and provocative behavior when left to her own devices, according to Warnecke.
They were yet in Hawaii, Warnecke recollected, one night in 1966.
“We may have had a drink or two before planning to go out to dinner, so I went to get my jacket,” according to his memoir. “What I remember next is that the car was already out of the garage, pointing toward the road, when I slid behind the wheel and turned on the ignition. With my eyes fixed on the door, I waited for Jackie to come out of the house”
It tuned out, however, that she “was 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. I’m letting you know how much I love you.” Soon we arrived at a beautiful spot at the edge of the sea that was ours alone. At last, surrounded by moonlight and the sounds of the nearby ocean, we laughed, then fully enjoyed the moment. My goal of bringing Jackie back to a normal life had been realized.”
Ironically, because of his devotion to the president’s widow, he put himself into a situation in which he was unable to marry her.
A major consideration for her throughout her life was the wealth of her suitors. Prior to her marriage to John Kennedy, she was engaged in 1951 to marry stockbroker John G. W. Husted Jr. after having made his acquaintance at Vassar College. She broke off the engagement when she felt his income was too low.
In fall of 1966, Warnecke was shocked to learn that the substantial outlays his architectural firm had made in expanding his firm and taking on and pursuing projects that remained in various states of suspension or non-completion had resulted in him accumulating more than $1 million in debt.
“Because I had taken nearly the entire year of 1964 to personally oversee each and every step of the design of President Kennedy’s memorial grave, I had ignored generating new business during this incredibly emotional period of personal and national grieving,” he wrote. “All this and the economic situation of the time were finally catching up with me.”
He had been on the verge of proposing marriage to Jacqueline prior to that, and the relationship was headed in that direction. But because of his tenuous financial position, it was obvious to him, and ultimately recognized by Jacqueline that he could not maintain the lavish lifestyle to which she was accustomed nor provide the security she needed.
When he disclosed to Kennedy the financial challenges he was facing,”She was shocked and upset. 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.”
She dealt with him in much the same way she had with Husted.
By 1967, Jackie ceased taking Warnecke’s calls and told her son, JFK Jr., “We won’t be seeing Mr. Jack again.”
In October 1968, three months after her brother-in-law Robert’s assassination, s Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate who was then worth in excess of $400 million. The marriage was subject to a prenuptial arrangement in which she was given $3 million to replace her Kennedy trust fund, which she would lose because she was remarrying, as well as guaranteed to $150,000 each year for the rest of her life in the event of Onassis’s death or a divorce.
The marriage soon became, according to tabloid accounts at the time, troubled. Though the couple for a time and then later intermittently live at the Onassis home in Athens, Aristotle Onassis’s house on Skorpios, a private island in the Mediterranean and his yacht Christina O, Jackie continued to spend considerable time in New York City, where her children with President Kennedy attended school, while inhabiting with Onassis three residences, including her 15-room apartment at 1040 Fifth Avenue in New York City, her horse farm in New Jersey and his apartment in at 88 Avenue Foch in Paris.
Between late 1966 and 1969, Warnecke redevoted himself to his architectual business, whereupon he reestablished himself as a sought-after designer of buildings. He remarried in 1969.
Soon thereafter, he had a chance encounter with Jackie at the Ritz Paris. She asked him to her apartment for lunch.
“The rooms were large and dark and the windows were covered with heavy curtains,” he recalled of the apartment. “Then suddenly we arrived at a light and contemporary room by a garden where a table was set for our lunch. Ari had let Jackie free in this small area. She unhesitatingly expressed frustration that this one room was all she was allowed to decorate.”
It was at that point that Jacqueline confided that “she believed that her marriage to Onassis was the biggest mistake she had ever made,” Warnecke wrote.
With Onassis’s death in March 1975, Jackie inherited a sum variously estimated at $20 million to $26 million.
According to Warnecke, “Jackie and I renewed our friendship and began to see each other again socially. In these later years, it seemed to me she delighted in advising me in what she perceived to be my serious relationships with other women. Or possibly, she was testing me. Sometimes Jackie would come and visit me at my apartment on her way home from work. She casually would lounge at the foot of the bed, as I leaned my back against the tall headboard, talking away intimately and easily for hours and giving each other the kind of truthful advice only two people who are very close can. 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.”
On February 11, 1994, Warnecke learned form a front page headline in the New York Times that Kennedy had been diagnosed with cancer and then wrote her a Valentine’s note. It read,
“Dear Jackie,
I am not sure why I arrived in NY at this exact time except to find out after I got here it was about to be Valentine’s Day. I must have subconsciously believed, as in Sleepless in Seattle, that I would someday meet you again on top of the Empire State Building.
Our romance ended by conditions and events which appeared almost beyond control, but it never really ended. Under more normal conditions, in all probability our love might have developed, and this is why I still dream of meeting you on top of the Empire State Building. This is also why I have opened my heart to you on this special Valentine’s Day, in remembrance of my love to the most beautiful and wonderful woman in my life. —Jack”
According to Warnecke, “About 9 a.m. the following morning, Jackie was on the phone: ‘You made my Valentine’s Day.’ She went on to say that what I wrote was true. ‘You are right — the love we had then was never broken or damaged. Nothing had ever changed it.’”
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died on May 19, 1994.
Warnecke wrote, “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.”
According to Warnecke, “When I returned to Washington in the fall of 1994, I visited the grave and paid my last respects. From then on, it would be Jackie with Jack that I would see whenever I crossed Memorial Bridge in the evening and would spot the eternal flame.”