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Why Jackie Kennedy Quietly Burned Personal Letters and Photos Before She Died (Exclusive Book Excerpt)

A new biography, 'Jackie: Public, Private, Secret,' reveals that the former first lady ritualistically destroyed private material before her death — some pertaining to an under-the-radar romance

Bettmann Archive/Getty

In the final months of her life, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis received a Valentine’s note from a former lover, architect Jack Warnecke . The former first lady had rarely been out of his thoughts, he told her.

According to a new biography — Jackie: Public, Private, Secret by J. Randy Taraborrelli, which was exclusively excerpted in this week's issue of PEOPLE — the note led to a reunion at her apartment several months before her death on May 19, 1994, from non-Hodgkin lymphoma at age 64.

Three decades earlier, Jackie had fallen in love with the architect , who designed the memorial grave site for President John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.

Years later, Warnecke shared his memories with Taraborrelli — with one caveat. Out of loyalty to the famously private Jackie, Warnecke asked that everything remain under wraps until a decade after his death. He died in 2010, when he was 91.

Now those details are among the many revealing moments shared in Taraborrelli’s new biography. “So many of the books about Jackie are about the glamour and the celebrity," he tells PEOPLE. "I wanted to write about the human side."

Below, an excerpt from Taraborrelli's new book, Jackie: Public, Private, Secret .

It was nightfall as John Warnecke walked to 1040 Fifth Avenue to visit his former lover, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. The apartment was dark and quiet. John Warnecke—better known as “Jack”—noticed a telescope in the corner. Jackie had once told him she often gazed into it to see how the other half lived. He noticed a light from one of the rooms. Wearing a pink chenille sweater over white silk pajamas, she was seated close to the fireplace. Jackie asked Jack to not reveal to anyone what was about to happen, not while either of them was alive, any way.

In [our] 1998 interview, Jack said, “As I took my seat, Jackie handed me a stack of envelopes neatly tied together with yarn. My presence that evening was part of a ritual. Every night that week, she was inviting a trusted friend or family member to her home to take part in it.”

Jackie untied the yarn and took a letter from the stack. She read it before placing it into the fire. He recalled, “There were letters from Jackie’s children, John and Caroline ... There were also letters from Jack Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis , her father, Jack Bouvier and even a few from me.” She held one of the photographs and stared at it. It was her and Jack [Kennedy] on the day of his inauguration. “Keep this for me, will you?” she asked.

Jackie was by her husband’s side in the Dallas motorcade when he was assassinated on Nov. 22, 1963 . Some said it sounded like a crack. Jackie Kennedy thought it was the backfire of a motorcycle. Confused, she watched as Jack grabbed his throat and lurched to the left. Rifle shots, all. Three in the course of less than five seconds.

“Jack turned and I turned back,” she later recalled. “I could see a piece of his skull coming off. He was holding out his hand and I can see this perfectly clean piece detaching from his head. Then, he slumped in my lap.”

Less than a year after her husband’s death, architect Jack Warnecke approached Jackie—raising eyebrows among some in her inner circle.

It was in the middle of May 1964 when Jack Warnecke called to ask her out. “On a date?” she asked. “Because I don’t date, Jack, and I never will again,” she said. No, Jack told her, it wasn’t a date. It was just dinner. That night, he showed up at her door with flowers. “But, Jack, I didn’t say yes,” she told him, annoyed. “But you didn’t say no,” he said with a smile. “That’s when it started between us,” Jack Warnecke recalled.

After the president was assassinated, Jackie hired Jack [Warnecke] to design his gravesite at Arlington. Jackie told herself Jack deserved the job. Her friends had to wonder, though. Bobby Kennedy wondered, too. He believed Jack was moving in on Jackie too quickly.

“It’s too soon, Jackie,” Bobby told her. “For what?” she asked. “For this,” he exclaimed. She then leveled with him: “This is none of your business, Bobby.”

In November 1964, she brought Warnecke to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. “We had dinner—clam chowder—and talked until the sun went down, and then talked beyond that . . . Then, one thing led to another.”

Jackie walked him upstairs to her bedroom, the same one she’d once shared with Jack Kennedy. Much to Jack’s surprise, she wanted to make love, and so they did. The next morning, Jack awakened to find Jackie gone. He found her staring out at the beach. He tried to talk about what had happened the night before, but she didn’t want to. Instead, she asked him to leave. He realized it had been too soon for her.

It was an emotional seesaw: up one moment, down the next. She later told Jack Warnecke, “Everytime I think I’m having fun, I look down at myself from above and can see that it’s all performance art.” 

Gibson Moss / Alamy Stock Photo

They dated for three years. In 1966, he planned to propose in Hawaii.

They simply began talking about marriage as if it were a fait accompli, but it bothered Jack that no formal plans were being made, yet. Still, their intimacy didn’t suffer. Warnecke said they had sex not only in the privacy of their bedroom but also in cars and on beaches “and as often as possible. She was sexual . . . alive . . . exciting to be with.”

Soon after, he called to tell her that the expansion of his architectural firm—and their extravagant lifestyle—had left him one million dollars in debt.

After a long silence, her response was a vacant: “Oh?” Jack said he hoped it wouldn’t totally ruin things for them. Before he hung up, he told her he loved her. She didn’t respond. She stopped returning his calls. “Is Mr. Jack coming over today?” little John asked his mother one afternoon. “No, honey,” she said, scooping him up in her arms. “We won’t be seeing Mr. Jack again.”

Jackie married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis in 1968. It was a turbulent union that ended with his death at age 69 in 1975. Meanwhile, she entered therapy with a psychoanalyst, Dr. Marianne Kris.

“Dr. Kris would never discuss Mrs. Onassis, citing doctor-patient confidentiality,” said Patricia Atwood, Kris’ secretary from 1972 to 1974, in an email. “They addressed Mrs. Onassis’s ongoing PTSD over the assassination, as well as certain nagging issues about their marriage. He went out in a blaze of glory, Mrs. Onassis said, according to one of the notes I read. The way he died had completely robbed her of the right to hate him, she said. Next to that entry, Dr. Kris wrote that her grief was anything but, as she put it, ‘tidy.’”

She discovered Dr. Kris had once treated Marilyn Monroe—long believed to have had an affair with JFK—just one of his many infidelities.

When Jackie confronted her, [Dr.] Kris said she felt no responsibility to inform her about any former patients in the same way she’d never reveal that she’d ever treated Jackie. Marianne asked, “How is this relevant?” to which Jackie responded, “How is that not relevant?”

Ron Galella/Getty

In her later years, Jackie found companionship with diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman. Then in early 1994, she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Two months before her death, she called Warnecke.

It had been about a month since the ritual in her apartment, during which he and Jackie had burned letters in the fireplace. As they talked, Jackie told Jack that after four chemotherapy treatments, her tests had come back clean. She thought she’d beaten the disease.

Then, unbelievably, an MRI showed that it had metastasized to the membranes of her brain and spinal cord. Jack asked her if, in reviewing her life, she had any regrets. She said she wished she hadn’t let Nov. 22, 1963, poison the rest of her life.

“But that’s not what happened,” Jack said, surprised. He said she had gone on after Dallas and she had even thrived. “But I never got over it,” Jackie said, sadly. “I got past it maybe, but never over it.” “What a shame,“ she now told Jack, “to spend so much time tormented by a thing I could never change.” Then again, Jackie mused, maybe that’s what her husband deserved—for her to never really get over it.

Jack remembered, “I told her I never stopped loving her. I thought she was going to say the same to me. Instead, she said, ‘That’s such a lovely thing to say, Jack. Thank you. I’d like to just leave it there if I may.’” They promised to talk again soon. They never did.

Excerpted from Jackie: Public, Private, Secret . Copyright © 2023 by J. Randy Taraborrelli, with permission from St. Martin’s Press.

Related Articles

The Making of Jackie Kennedy

Less than a decade before she became the world’s most photographed woman, Jacqueline Bouvier regularly worked behind a camera for the Washington Times-Herald , soliciting opinions from the capital’s ordinary residents and taking their pictures. “ Camera Girl ,” Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s new biography of the young Jackie, illuminates this portion of her life; the chapter titled “Inauguration” does not take a reader to the snowy, ask-not-what, pillbox-hatted noontime of January 20, 1961, but to the day, eight years earlier, when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the Presidency. That afternoon, Jackie was on assignment for the paper, writing a feature about the people who had turned out for Ike’s parade. That night, she attended an inaugural ball as a guest of the new Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy .

The real business of her evening was conducted during a cocktail party at Kennedy’s house. The senator’s friend Lem Billings told Miss Bouvier that anyone who married Jack would “have to be very understanding” about how he “had been around an awful lot” and “known many, many girls.” However delicately put, the message was as clear as a declaration that the United States intended to remain in Berlin: Kennedy’s bride should expect him to continue cultivating and maintaining a vast array of female alliances.

Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.

“Camera Girl” (Gallery) makes plain that the young Jackie was clever and educable, a woman who preferred her own curricula—books, socializing, and travel—to anything imposed by the schools that she attended. Two years at Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, left her unimpressed. Anthony offers some shaky evidence that she may have been expelled for breaking curfew, but the likelier explanation for her departure was that she’d spent her junior year at the Sorbonne, through a Smith College study-abroad program, without Vassar’s permission.

It was in postwar Paris, Anthony writes, that Jackie perfected a knowledge of “how to be ‘on,’ to make an intentional impression, to invent herself into a character.” She acquired a small Leica camera and brought it on her travels throughout France, subordinating schooling to adventure, though she managed to do fine at both. On June 9, 1950, she wrote to her mother:

I’ve had three of my four exams already and all went quite well. My international relations one was on the opposing policies of Austria-Hungary and Russia in the Balkans from 1900-1914. The night before I got in from . . . the biggest ball of the season in Paris in this beautiful old 17th century house on the Ille-St.-Louis . . . I got in at 6 a.m. and had the exam from 8:30 a.m. till noon, then went out to lunch . . . quite a day, but I knew all about the Balkans!

No wonder she didn’t want to go back to Poughkeepsie. Her mother didn’t want her to, either, but only out of bitter opposition to Jackie’s father, who craved her return. Janet Norton Lee and John (Black Jack) Bouvier had been divorced for a decade, and Jackie was an asset that they continually contested. Janet, living outside New York, worried that Jackie would fall into Black Jack’s Manhattan orbit after graduating from Vassar; he had invited Jackie to live with him and promised her a job on Wall Street. When his daughter left the school, Bouvier was “crushed,” unaware that in this instance Jackie welcomed her mother’s manipulation. His relatives believed that the defeat accelerated his drinking and self-isolation, though he had been in decline, financially and otherwise, since the mid-nineteen-thirties, when his brand of venturesome stock-brokering was reined in by the man Franklin Roosevelt appointed to be the first S.E.C. chair, Joseph P. Kennedy.

Janet, however, was unyielding. Jackie, accustomed from an early age to her mother’s rages, once pronounced her to be scarier than Stalin. Janet never stopped phonying up her Irish ancestry into something more Waspish and aristocratic. (Jackie was never so flagrant, but when fame arrived she clearly didn’t mind the American public believing that she was more than one-eighth French.) Janet eventually found stability in her union to the quiet and very wealthy Hugh Auchincloss, and she urged each of her daughters to focus on making a prosperous marriage, even if it was as dull as her own. When Jack Kennedy came along, Janet did not like his line of work, preferring Jackie’s first fiancé, a young Wall Streeter named John Husted, until she found out how little money of his own Husted had to manage.

After coming home from France in the late summer of 1950, Jackie again fell under Janet’s control. She decided to complete her undergraduate degree as a French-literature major at George Washington University, then an unexceptional, racially segregated school, much overshadowed by Georgetown. Many G.W. students were commuters, but Jackie was the only one who made the daily trip from Merrywood, an estate across the Potomac which Hugh Auchincloss had purchased in 1930. G.W., now more residential, has a Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis dormitory on I Street, with a bas-relief of young Jackie on a plaque by the front entrance.

From 1950 to 1951, she was serious about her studies, but not enough absorbed by life at the school to have her yearbook picture taken; one finds no trace of her in the 1951 Cherry Tree . Two years after Jackie’s graduation, Joseph P. Kennedy’s publicist included the Sorbonne but not G.W. in a press release announcing Miss Bouvier’s engagement to his son. The desired effect was of a balanced marital ticket: an old Continental family, the Bouviers, soldering its quiet sort of glamour to the Kennedys’ arriviste kind.

During her year at G.W., Jackie set her heart on winning Vogue’s Prix de Paris contest, which promised six months of training in the magazine’s New York offices and a return to Paris, this time as a junior editor. Anthony gives a detailed account of the rigorous application process—round after round of writing essays and critiquing layouts—and he establishes the zealous flair of Jackie’s approach. “I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century,” she wrote to the judges, “watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” The biographer forgives his subject a bit of résumé finagling and a couple of small lies deployed in order to secure a deadline extension.

Jackie won the contest, went up to Manhattan, and was photographed for the magazine by Richard Routledge. (His picture is the basis for that G.W. bas-relief.) But, in the end, she turned down the prize. Janet, who wanted to prevent the proximity to Black Jack that would come with those six months in New York, insisted. Jackie sent her mother a dead snake inside a hatbox, but she knuckled under all the same.

In October, 1951, Jackie got a job at the Washington Times-Herald , after Auchincloss asked the columnist Arthur Krock to put in a good word for his stepdaughter. Krock had been instrumental, years before, in getting the paper to hire Jack Kennedy’s wartime girlfriend Inga Arvad, and also his favorite sister, Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy. Anthony goes so far as to say, not implausibly, that Jackie’s working at the Times-Herald “would inevitably evoke memories of the two women who had meant more to Kennedy than any others—a significant factor in Jack Kennedy’s early perception of her.” Again, Jackie’s commute began from Merrywood, which—Anthony doesn’t mention—was built, in 1919, for Newbold Noyes, Sr., a co-owner of the venerable Washington Evening Star , one of the Times-Herald’s competitors.

Frank Waldrop, the editor who hired Jackie, later recalled, “I’d seen her type. Little society girls with dreams of writing the great American novel, who drop it the minute they find the great American husband.” Yes and no. Though Anthony doesn’t depict it, mid-nineteen-fifties Washington was a lively place for aspiring newswomen eager to buck the prejudices and the odds. Selwa (Lucky) Roosevelt, who had been Jackie’s classmate at Vassar, was married to Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie, a C.I.A. agent, when she began writing a well-connected column for the Star called “Diplomatically Speaking.” In her memoirs, she writes, “Until then, society reporters simply described the food, flowers, decor, clothes, and entertainment, and gave a complete list of guests. They did not look for the political or international implications of who was there and who wasn’t, who spoke to whom and who didn’t.” Nancy Dickerson, a young CBS radio and television producer before she became a famous on-air correspondent, made both a notable career and—from the viewpoint of someone like Janet Auchincloss—a financially enviable marriage. In 1964, she and her husband, a businessman, bought Merrywood. When it came to literary talent and professional longevity, the most distinguished of the era’s women journalists was the resolutely single Mary McGrory, who—except for the composition of a few political profiles—spent years on the Star’s book-review desk before being allowed to write sharp, stylish commentary about the Senate during the Army-McCarthy hearings, in 1954.

Seeking the same sort of break during her early days at the Times-Herald , Jackie chased after Princess Elizabeth, hoping to produce a feature when the future monarch came to Washington. She was unsuccessful, but the princess’s visit brought an unexpected opportunity. Waldrop assigned Jackie to the rotating, uncredited “Inquiring Photographer” slot, and she decided to ask six of the paper’s photographers, “Is Princess Elizabeth as pretty as her picture?” The column was soon hers, with a byline, and renamed “Inquiring Camera Girl.” Her twenty-month run with it is the charming and surprisingly informative heart of Anthony’s book.

Jackie took thumbnail pictures of her subjects with a big, heavy Speed Graflex, which she learned to use at the Capitol School of Photography. “Published six days a week,” Anthony explains, “the column averaged 144 individual interviews monthly—a total of nearly 2,600 people by the time she left the job.” Jackie occasionally persuaded celebrities and personal acquaintances—even John Husted and “Mummy”—to take a crack at answering the queries she invented for the column. They ranged from the silly (“Why do you think so many people crack corny jokes in elevators?”) to the semi-profound (“What are people most living for?”) and the oddly prescient (“Are women’s clubs right in demanding Marilyn Monroe be less suggestive?”). She sought respondents across class and racial lines, and when she wasn’t asking about things in the news (Christine Jorgensen’s gender-transition surgery) she sometimes posed questions that were on her own mind.

Anthony does nice work, without fetching too far, when he ties the column’s subject matter to Jackie’s biographical time line. Around the time of Husted’s proposal, she asked interviewees, “Should a girl pass up sound matrimonial prospects to wait for her ideal man?” Later on, when things got more serious with Kennedy, her questions followed suit: “Can you give me any reason why a contented bachelor should get married?” and “The Irish author, Sean O’Faolain, claims that the Irish are deficient in the art of love. Do you agree?” As she experienced a bit of Kennedy’s 1952 Senate campaign, she asked, “Should a candidate’s wife campaign with her husband?” Her low moods and her frustrations with Waldrop were occasional subtexts; Anthony notes that the editor “threatened to fire her when she asked pedestrians what local newspaper they liked best and printed responses that chose the competition.”

There was wit to what she did, and it earned her the chance to write bigger pieces, illustrated with her own ink sketches, not only on Eisenhower’s inaugural but also on Princess Elizabeth’s coronation. In June, 1953, Kennedy sent a telegram to his fiancée in London—“ ARTICLES EXCELLENT—BUT YOU ARE MISSED” —his “second and final courtship ‘love letter,’ ” according to Anthony.

The political calculations that went into his family’s approach to the marriage can make the Windsors’ vetting of Lady Diana Spencer seem quick and humane. Anthony writes that Gore Vidal—another Auchincloss stepchild, from an earlier marriage—remembered Jackie saying that Jack and Joe and Bobby “spoke of me as if I weren’t a person, just a thing, just a sort of asset, like Rhode Island.” But Jackie wanted what she knew she was getting into. Anthony astutely conveys the couple’s “mutual ambition” and shared emotional reticence: “Jackie was similarly unwilling to fully express her feelings, making them a comfortable match.” Kennedy blamed his chilly mother for his own “inability to easily express emotion,” a deprivation to which his bride could relate. Both had also grown up with fierce but feeling fathers. Jackie liked Joe from the start, and she knew exactly how to relate to the old shark—“You ought to write a series of grandfather stories for children, like, The Duck with Moxie”—a skill that excited envy in her future sisters-in-law.

Anthony has made a career of First Ladies, with writings ranging from the anecdotal to the deeply researched; his lengthy, surprising biography of Florence Harding appeared in 1998. With Jackie, he tries to avoid hagiography, but, more than a bit smitten, he sometimes fails, as when he mistakes a little mastery of conventional wisdom for “a deep discernment about the creative process.” He displays a desire to make the most—which is to say, too much—of a research report that Jackie prepared for Kennedy in 1953 on the French war in Indochina, presenting it as the cornerstone of a great moral partnership, whereas Jackie herself remembered it mostly as a tedious exercise in translation. Nonetheless, Anthony likes to believe that, as she worked, “in her imagination . . . Jackie was in the streets of Saigon and the rice fields near Hanoi.”

The title “Camera Girl,” drawn from her column’s rubric, implies the importance of images to Anthony’s book. He starts with a chapter about how, in mid-1949, “employing their enmity to her advantage,” Jackie extracted from each of her parents more than the amount of money she needed to buy the camera she wanted to take to France. Though Anthony places a lot of emphasis on this “little Leica,” he includes, among the dozens of photographs in the book, very few images that Jackie might have taken with it.

It is reasonable for the author to resist lunging too frequently into the future, but readers will inevitably project themselves forward into the next phases of Jackie’s life, when she became almost subordinate to the representations made of her by others: the photographs of Jacques Lowe; the 8-mm. frames of Abraham Zapruder; the silk screens by Warhol ; the shots by the paparazzo Ron Galella , her tormentor on the streets of Manhattan. Galella died last year, but his Web site still carries an account of how he took “the most purchased, most recognized, most talked about, most significant photo [he] ever captured,” the one he called “Windblown Jackie,” in October, 1971. He was in a taxi at the corner of Madison and Ninetieth, and Jackie turned to face him in response to the driver’s honking. “It’s a superior picture,” Galella wrote, “like DaVinci’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa .” When Galella kept at it, a “furious Jackie” asked him, “Are you pleased with yourself?”

She can be forgiven for forgetting a time when she was the hunter and not the game. Frank Waldrop put her on probation for ambush-interviewing two of President-elect Eisenhower’s young nieces on their way home from school. That happened a few years after a museum guard chased her out of a gallery at the Louvre when he saw her taking pictures of “DaVinci’s most famous painting.” Jackie wished, Anthony says, “to disprove the popular myth that the eyes of the Mona Lisa were always gazing directly back at the person looking at her.” The angry guard asked, “Who do you think you are?” She didn’t yet know, but she was steadily moving toward an answer. ♦

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Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy Hardcover – May 2, 2023

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• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Gallery Books
• Publication date May 2, 2023
• Dimensions 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 1982141875
• ISBN-13 978-1982141875
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gallery Books (May 2, 2023)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1982141875
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1982141875
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.3 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.1 x 9 inches
• #1,208 in US Presidents
• #1,394 in Rich & Famous Biographies
• #4,921 in Women's Biographies

About the author

Carl sferrazza anthony.

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Customers find the book insightful, interesting, and incredibly researched. They say it's eye-opening and clearly establishes her incredible mind.

"...and stories written about Jackie, Camera Girl is the most accurate, profound and touching biography of one of the most mystical and transformative..." Read more

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Customers praise the author's quality. They say he writes an outstanding biography, touching, and well-written. Readers also mention the book tells many interesting stories about Jackie Kennedy.

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Customers find the book well-written and a treat to read. They say it's an easy read with insights for even avid readers. Readers also mention it's the best non-fiction book of 2023.

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New Jackie Kennedy biography details…

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New Jackie Kennedy biography details relationship with memorial architect 6 months after JFK assassination

Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty

Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Jack Warnecke are pictured together during 7th Annual RFK Pro-Celebrity Tennis Tournament at Forest Hills in New York City. (Photo by Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images)

Bettmann/Bettmann Archive

Architect John Carl Warnecke explains a model for the restoration and development of Lafayette Square to Jacqueline Kennedy in 1962.

In this May 11, 1963 photo, President John F. Kennedy, left, discusses drawings with Washington architect John Warnecke as they look over a possible site for a library to house his public papers near Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.

In an excerpt of “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” by J. Randy Taraborrelli in People magazine, the story of Kennedy’s romance with Warnecke is fleshed out — starting soon after JFK’s murder in Dallas in Nov. 1963.

Warnecke, who Kennedy hired to design the dead president’s gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery with its famous eternal flame, asked her out to dinner in May 1964 and arrived at her door later that day with flowers despite not getting an affirmative response.

“That’s when it started between us,” Warnecke said.

Despite friends and family telling her she was moving on too soon, and her own claims to never want to date anyone again, Kennedy brought the architect and former college football player to the family compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod in Nov. 1964 where “one thing led to another,” according to Warnecke.

The pair wound up dating for three years. Warnecke even planned to propose during a trip to Hawaii in 1966, before he told her that he was in debt because of the expansion of his firm and their expensive habits.

According to Warnecke’s recollection, she soon stopped taking his calls and told JFK Jr. that “We won’t be seeing Mr. Jack again.”

In 1968, Kennedy married Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis , who died in 1975.

Toward the end of her life , she had a relationship with diamond merchant Maurice Tempelsman, but it was Warnecke who she reconnected with after she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1994. He met her at her Manhattan apartment where she read some of her old letters aloud to Warnecke before burning them — a ritual she had been performing with close friends and family before her death/ However, she did ask him to keep a photo of her and JFK taken on the day of his inauguration.

Kennedy died May 19, 1994. Warnecke dished about their time together to Taraborrelli, who promised to sit on the information until ten years after Warnecke’s death. He died in 2010 at the age of 91.

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