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Afternoon modesty inevitably yielded to evening pomp. First came the semiofficial merrymaking, amid champagne toasts, flowers and bouzoukis, on the afterdeck of the Onassis yacht Christina. Later, reported the Washington Post's Maxine Cheshire, came the real show: Ari's wedding gift to Jackie. Already, a Chicago newsman had tendered a few suggestions for those who might not know what to give a couple who had everything: the Taj Mahal, the Boston Pops, the S.S. Queen Elizabeth II, the De Beers diamond mines, the New York Stock Exchange—or the Burtons. Onassis' actual gift to Jackie was nearly as awesome. When she came into the yacht's lounge for the wedding dinner, Jackie was wearing it: on her left hand, a ring with a huge ruby surrounded by large diamonds; on her ears, matching ruby-and-diamond earrings. Caroline broke the stunned silence: "Mummy, Mummy, Mummy! They're so pretty. You're so pretty." Laughing, Jackie removed the ring to let Caroline play with it. The jewels reportedly cost Onassis $1.2 million.
Not everything was so impressively heart-shaped for the newlyweds. The shrill criticism of their marriage finally provoked a response from Jackie's old friend and spiritual adviser, Richard Cardinal Gushing of Boston. In the anguished days of the assassination five years ago, it was Cushing's cracked, gravel-voiced prayer for "dear Jack" that suffused the austere ritual of J.F.K.'s re quiem with a warm humanity. Last week, sounding another note of humanity, the cardinal told a Boston audience that the only way to view Jackie's marriage was with charity. "I turn on the radio and all I hear are people knocking her head off," he said. He pleaded for "love, mutual respect and esteem." What he got in response was a mountain of mail so overwhelmingly critical that he decided to resign by the end of the year (see RELIGION). The Vatican's canon lawyers found themselves unable to share Cushing's generous view of the marriage. By marrying Onassis, they said, the woman who has met the Pope in at least five private audiences had cut herself off from Roman Catholic sac raments and had become, at least technically, a "public sinner."
While Cardinal Cushing's mail may have been malicious, her contemporaries' second thoughts about Jackie's wedding gradually became kinder—or at least more understanding. Columnist Doris Lilly, thinking aloud on CBS-TV, suggested that there might be practical reasons for the renewed charity among the jet set. "The beautiful people see the marriage more like an announcement of a marvelous new free airline, a free yacht and a string of dazzling houses suddenly put at their disposal," she explained. "Jackie isn't so bad after all, they say. Ari isn't bad either. I know Ari. He's the bee's knees."