PERSONALITY: What Now for Jackie Onassis?

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Relations between the two women are cordial but by no means warm.

While Ari was hospitalized, Jackie stayed at the Paris penthouse, but Christina opted for a hotel. Onassis' three sisters were incensed that Jackie was in New York when her husband died; she had been assured by doctors, friends say, that his condition was stable and had gone home to catch a TV program that Caroline had worked on. At the funeral, Christina and Jackie took separate launches to Skorpiós and walked apart to the chapel. Later, with Christina off to Switzerland, Jackie flew to Paris, no longer, it seemed, a member of the Onassis clan.

More Vulnerable. And what of the other clan, the Kennedys? Jackie's engagement to Onassis was at first greeted with conspicuous silence by the late President's family. Though John and Caroline are full members of the tribe of Kennedy cousins, the aunts and uncles, according to a family friend, "never know when they talk to Jackie whether it will be a week or a year before they hear from her again." Senator Edward Kennedy did make the trip to Skorpiós to lend the widow some support, but it is unlikely that his gesture signals Jackie's return to the fold.

Neither Greece nor Hyannis Port will be Jackie's stomping grounds now. Said her sister Lee Radziwill in Manhattan last week: "I expect she'll come back here and carry on life as it was. After all, her children are settled here, she has her life here." Some friends think that she may pursue her interest in landmarks preservation; Critic Brendan Gill of The New Yorker, for which Jackie has already written one small article, feels that she has promise as a writer. Yet richer than before, eligible once again, she is sure to be hounded and watched and speculated upon anew. And also more vulnerable: for the first time in 15 years she will be without the personal protection that the U.S. Secret Service and later Onassis' bodyguards automatically provided.