JACKIE, JESUS, and KING CHARLES

by Leslie Armstrong

My English “uncle” Vernon Churchill Simmonds was short, stocky, handsome and a bit smug. He had been a Battle of Britain pilot at the start of World War II, then made good money amassing a large farm within a chartered village in England’s New Forest (150 square miles of open moors, heath and pastureland in the south of England claimed by William the Conqueror as his personal hunting ground). Vernon’s opinions were stereotypically conservative. He was a member of Lloyd’s of London and of the Royal Yacht Squadron at Cowes on the Isle of Wight. In his final years, his mind went soft, and he convinced himself that his origins and his position in life were far more elevated than they were.

A few months before Vernon died, my husband, John, and I went to the New Forest to visit Uncle Vernon and his wife, my “Aunt” Shirley, who had been like a second mother to me throughout my late teenage years and thereafter. Vernon pulled me aside and told me, sotto voce, that the Queen had conveyed to him a peerage at last—a reward well deserved after a life of toil and service. The announcement was just about to be made, and we would all soon be celebrating his ascendancy to the British nobility. Shirley had warned me that this was his current delusion. I still was stunned. I had had little experience with older people and the divergent paths their minds could take as deterioration and dementia set in. As Vernon was still conversant, I asked him how this came about? How had he been notified? Was there some sort of decree hand lettered on parchment? Was it in recognition of his service during the Battle of Britain? Or something else he had accomplished in his later life? No, it seemed he was a rightful heir to Blenheim, the enormous estate in Oxfordshire gifted to John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, in 1705 by the British Parliament. Blenheim was also the birthplace of John Churchill’s direct descendent, Winston S. Churchill—to whom Vernon Churchill Simmonds was in no way related. And Vernon would soon be moving “home” to Blenheim Palace.

John, who served in our army’s occupation of Korea at the very end of World War II, remained fascinated by the war in general and by Winston Churchill in particular. He and I had just visited Blenheim Palace for the first time. The castle, a stellar example of English Baroque at its most impressive, sits in a 1200-acre park comprised of formal gardens originally laid out by André Le Nôtre, more pastoral gardens designed by Capability Brown, as well as lakes, waterfalls, and woodlands. But I noticed that the family of the present (twelfth) Duke of Marlborough had been relegated to small apartments at one end of the palace. so the rest of the building could remain open to the public. The admission fees paid by visitors such as John and myself were essential to finance the ongoing repairs and maintenance of the 300-year-old edifice, its gardens and grounds.

I found Vernon’s need to repeat the welcome news of his peerage and his anticipated move to Blenheim upsetting and sad. I couldn’t bear his wallowing in such self-aggrandizing make-believe. John, however, admired Vernon for his bravery as a pilot and was quite amused. As a sort of antidote, I tried to enter Vernon’s fantasy and asked him questions about Blenheim as though it had been his ancestral home. What had it been like growing up there? Where in the palace were his rooms? What were his favorite parts of the gardens? How did he feel about the public now having access to so much of the palace and his family having so little? When I asked these questions, he would pause as if to consider how to respond, then turn in on himself and finally go silent. Then, within the hour, he would begin it all again.

Twenty years later, when John entered his final years, his fantasy life also blossomed. He happily shared his wanderings, which he regarded as hard facts, with anyone who would listen. At first, I was shocked. The disconnect from reality was quite like Vernon’s, but John was never self-aggrandizing, rarely so repetitious, and his imagination was far richer. Had John been someone else’s husband, I might even have found his fantasies entertaining. Here are three.

Jackie

“Has the news been published yet?”

“What news?” I asked.

“The news about Jackie and LBJ.”

“What news about Jackie and LBJ?”

“The news about their affair!”

“What affair?”

“Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s affair.”

“They didn’t have an affair. If they’d had an affair, we would have known about it long ago.”

“They did have an affair. Not only that, but little John-John wasn’t JFK’s son, he was Johnson’s son.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I am serious.”

“How come you think you know this, when no one else does?  You‘ve read Robert Caro’s multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, He never even hinted of it! `       

“Has the fifth volume come out yet?”

“No, not yet, and it may not for some time because Caro’s editor, your buddy, Bob Gottlieb, died recently. Remember?

Silence.

“We went to see the film by Gottlieb’s daughter, Lizzie, about his and Caro’s symbiotic relationship. Don’t you remember?” John hated Robert Gottlieb because decades back when Gottlieb was still at Simon & Schuster, he had accepted John’s Los Angeles-based novel Crackers and promised John a hefty advance, whereupon John rented a summer house on Cape Cod for a family vacation. When John returned to New York, tanned, rested, and broke, Gottlieb told him he had accepted another novel called Crackers and wouldn’t be publishing John’s novel after all. Sorry, no advance. John never forgave him that one.

“What makes you think this salacious bit of information is going to come out in the final volume? If an affair between Jackie and LBJ had occurred, it would have started earlier in the narrative of LBJ’s life.”

More silence.

Then, finally, “I know it is so.”

“How do you know? You don’t know Caro personally,” I persisted.

“We’ve had lunch at the Long Table.”

The Long Table is in the members’ dining room at the Century Club, an association originally of men of arts and letters, and now of men and women of arts and letters in New York City. John and I were both members. That is where we met. At lunch, members show up and sit at the Long Table and have a convivial lunch and conversation with fellow members. Many devotees are employed by the New York Times, Time Life and Condé Nast, all of which have offices nearby. Others, like John and Caro, would come to the Long Table on their own, and still others are just old gents with little better to do midday.

“Are you telling me that Robert Caro has told his Long Table cronies that Jackie was LBJ’s lover and John Kennedy Jr. was Johnson’s son?” I was not amused by this fable, which John expounded upon repeatedly. I wanted him to admit it was just fantasy. It was a sign of John’s mental deterioration that I did not want to acknowledge. Each time John asked if the news was out, I would argue that it couldn’t have happened in hopes that John would give it up. “If indeed Caro did spill the beans about Jackie and LBJ at the Long Table, the news would be everywhere. You writers are incorrigible gossips. A secret like that would be out in the open in a second!”

Each time we arrived at this point, John would close his hooded eyes and withdraw into himself, much as Vernon had done. But under his breath I would hear him mutter, “It’s true. You’ll find out. Trust me.”

Jesus

On another of my daily visits to the Mary Manning Walsh Home on East 72nd Street, John asked for a book he claimed to be by his bedside.

“Could you bring me that book about the life of Jesus? You know, the one by the turn-of-the-century French historian, I forgot his name. It’s by my bed.”

“What? I’m sorry, I missed that. A book by your bed about the life of Jesus?”

“Yes.”

John may have been born in Tennessee and raised a Baptist (including full baptismal immersion at age thirteen), but he spent most of his young life getting away from Tennessee and the confines of that culture, including its religious insistence. As long as I had known John, which was close to twenty years, he had never expressed the slightest interest in the Almighty or his Son, apart from requiring us to attend church on Easter Sunday to remind his half-Jewish sons that they were also half Christian. Nonetheless, when I got home, I searched his many books for a biography of Jesus by anyone. The closest I found was On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer with Michael Lennon. If Mailer hadn’t been a friend of John’s, that book would not have been in John’s library.

I returned to John’s room at Mary Manning Walsh the next day with the news that I’d not found the book he had been sure was by his bed but agreed to look it up on Amazon and order it for him if he would like. While I was fiddling with my phone, John said, “You know Jesus had a very troubled relationship with his father.”

“His father? Joseph? I hadn’t really thought about it,” I answered.

“Yes, Joseph. He wanted Jesus to take his learning carpentry more seriously, but Jesus was always off with younger children and teenagers, impressing them with his magic tricks. He refused to concentrate on his work. Joseph got very angry with Jesus.”

“Really?” Then I added, “I can’t find any life of Jesus by a French turn-of-the-century historian on Amazon Books. But if you are interested in reading about the life of Jesus, there are several more contemporary books on this subject that aren’t too long and might interest you.” I read him their titles, and we settled on one. I doubted he would read it, but hoped that having it in hand would satisfy his need to learn more about the Son of God.

John pressed on. “Jesus got so sick of being berated by his father that he gathered up all his followers, kids and adults alike, and told them they were leaving Bethlehem—or was it Nazareth?” He paused for a moment, head tilted back, hooded eyes closed, then continued, “Jesus and his followers were going on a journey north to a new and different land. They would follow the North Star. And so they did, for days and nights on end. And when they got there, their feet were very cold because there was snow everywhere, and they were only wearing sandals.”

John paused. At first, I said nothing, then curiosity got the better of me. “Then what happened?”

“That’s why there’s so much confusion between Jesus and Santa Claus.”

How to respond?

Best not to.

John never opened the biography of Jesus that I had bought for him. By the time these fantasies took hold he was beyond reading anything longer than a few short sentences strung together. Yet he was part of a men’s reading group at Mary Manning Walsh led by a dedicated and learned volunteer, David Begley. Every week, three or four old men would be wheeled into the third-floor lounge by an attendant for an hour’s discussion of the writer of the week. These authors were not John Grisham or Stephen King or Dan Brown. They were Gogol, Dostoevsky, George Eliot, Flannery O’Connor, Mark Twain, and the like. For each author selected either by the group or by Begley, Begley would type up, in oversized type, and print out selections from the author’s writing, together with biographical and critical background material. He would then distribute this material in advance of the next session. Begley’s efforts on behalf of these old-timers were impressive and commendable. I kept Begley’s printouts in chronological order. There was quite a pile. Often, if John were dozing during one of my visits, I would scan the pile and pick one to read while he slept.

One afternoon, while John sat in his wheelchair, his head slumped to one side, eyes closed, and his breath whistling rhythmically through his teeth, I picked up the material for Thursday, February 6,2024. Proust was the subject, but not À la recherche du temps perdu, not even Swann’s Way. Begley had selected a letter Proust had written to a close friend, a young man who had recently died. Begley’s printout was titled, “‘My Friend Willie Heath Who Died in Paris on October 3, 1893.’ Marcel Proust.”

John loved Proust. He spoke about Proust as though he had read all seven volumes repeatedly and in depth, although I believe he had only read Swann’s Way as part of a one-semester literature course at the University of Tennessee. While I couldn’t imagine men in his mental and physical decline even beginning to discuss works by authors like Proust, I figured John must have really enjoyed this session. Then I noticed that the printout of the letter Proust had written was prefaced by the following quote: “From the bosom of God where you rest … reveal to me those truths that prevail over death, prevent us from fearing it, and almost make us love it.”

The quote was attributed to Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus.

Renan? The Life of Jesus?

Renan had to be French, and if quoted by Proust in a letter to a friend who died in 1893, Renan had to have been writing near the turn of the century. It was Renan’s The Life of Jesus that John’s fantasy had morphed into a book he had kept by his bedside. As soon as John awoke, I told him of my discovery. I found a used copy of Renan’s book on Amazon and ordered it at once. John was thrilled. He smiled knowingly and also smugly, rather like my Uncle Vernon did when thinking of his future at Blenheim. John was vindicated. Proust’s mention of Renan proved him right. He hadn’t made any of this up—most especially not the part about Jesus and his followers traveling north (in sandals) and ultimately becoming confused with Santa Claus.

King Charles

“They’ve come to take my blood away again. Just now!” John exclaimed in some distress as I came into his room bearing a mini cup of his favorite Häagen-Dazs Dulce de Leche ice cream.

“What’s the matter with that? They often take samples of your blood to be sure your body chemistry is in order, no urinary infections or the like.”

“No, no, that’s not what they are doing. They are taking my blood away and shipping it to the Windsors. It’s been going on for years!”

“Whaaaat?”

“The Windsor family has always been short of blood. They have their own blood type. If someone in the royal family needs a blood transfusion, it can’t be just anybody’s blood, it has to be their blood type. And I have their type of blood. My mother used to send them my blood when I was a child.”

I was dumbstruck. Uncle Vernon’s carrying on about his peerage didn’t hold a candle to this one! “How is it that you think you are sufficiently related to the Windsors to share the same kind of blood?”

John’s mother and her sister, Caroline, were both schoolteachers in Eastern Tennessee, where John was raised. John, his parents, his older brother, Howard, and Aunt Caroline and her son, John Miller, lived together in a modest house in Johnson City, just over the border from Bristol, Virginia. John’s mother and Caroline were ferocious readers. They accrued a substantial collection of books ranging from the works of Shakespeare, Trollope, and George Eliot to James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe, and Henry Miller (notwithstanding their commitment to the Baptist faith). Although no one in the family had been abroad, much less to England, the two sisters were committed Anglophiles and received the London Times and Literary Supplement weekly via steamship. But they had also gone to great pains to get themselves acknowledged as Daughters of the American Revolution, which had meant finding some proof that some one of their ancestors had come to America on the Mayflower.

“My mother and Aunt Caroline had relatives who came over on the Mayflower,”John continued. “There weren’t that many people around back then, so those on the Mayflower had to be related to the royal family.”

“Oh,” I responded, hoping that would be the end of this. Not so.

John looked affectionately at a framed and matted photograph of himself and his older brother, Howard, that hung on the wall opposite his bed among other family portraits. It had been taken at a photo studio back in Johnson City when John was six and his brother was eighteen. Little John was sporting what John referred to as an Eton collar over a pint-sized black academic robe—clearly a studio prop. Howard wore a jacket and tie.

“See that picture of me in the Eton collar? Boys from the royal family all went to Eton. My mother expected me to go to Eton. I figured Eton was just over the border in Virginia. I had no idea it was so far away.”

“How could your parents have even considered sending you to Eton? It was the height of the Depression. You always said they had next to no money.”

“No matter. That was where my mother and Aunt Caroline wanted me to go. Maybe because they kept coming for my blood, my mother thought I was entitled to go to Eton.”

“But you didn’t go to Eton, did you?”

“No, we couldn’t afford it. I went to Science Hill.”

“What about Howard? Didn’t they want his blood as well?”

“No, Howard didn’t have the same blood as the Windsors and I had.”

Fortunately, we didn’t have to go any further with this on that particular afternoon. These fantasies were a sad indication that John was losing it. But could they also mean something? As a child, John had been envious of his much older brother. Howard was a star athlete, catnip to girls, handsome and patriotic in his navy uniform as he set off to serve in the Pacific in World War II. John was also a good athlete and attractive, but he was just a kid, and skinny at that. And without money to afford a car, he claimed to have had no luck with girls. Maybe this fantasy gave John a basis for one-upping his memory of his otherwise superior brother.

A few weeks later, he started in again. “They came to take blood from me again this morning,” he announced.

“Who did?”

“The people who collect blood for King Charles and the royal family.” While he feigned distress, I wondered if he might have been secretly pleased by this occurrence.

“You are sure they didn’t take blood just to be certain that you were okay health-wise?”

“No, it was for the royal family. They come to take my blood regularly. They’ve been doing it for years, more often since I have been here at Mary Manning Walsh, because now King Charles needs my blood.”

“He does?”

“Yes, he’s having medical problems. Prostate cancer, poor guy. As soon as he gets to be king, he gets cancer! I saw it on TV.”

“And he needs your blood specifically?”

“Yes, because we are related.”

“You are related to King Charles?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain you are related to King Charles?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why are you certain that you are related to King Charles? On what basis?”

“We are both circumcised.”

“You are both … what?”

“We are both circumcised.”

No words. No point in pointing out that almost every male in the western world of his vintage had been circumcised. John was right up there with Uncle Vernon in his desire for membership in the upper echelons of the English aristocracy. Only Vernon’s and John’s justification for entitlement differed … substantially. John died knowing not only that he had been a successful writer and a much-loved husband and father, but also that he was kin to H.R.H King Charles.

BIO

Leslie Armstrong lives in New York City and is an architect and writer. She is the author of The Little House, (Macmillan, 1979), Space for Dance: An Architectural Design Guide, (New York Center for Cultural Resources, 1984) and a memoir, Girl Intrepid, a New York Story of Privilege and Perseverance, (Epigraph, 2020).