As Margaret Colin discovered the hard way, it’s not every actress who gets a second chance to play Jackie Kennedy Onassis.
Colin has just now opened on Broadway in that extraordinary role as the star of “Jackie: An American Life.”
But this should have been her second time at portraying America’s most fabulous first lady. Her first go at it was supposed to be the 1991 NBC miniseries “A Woman Named Jackie.” Casting came down to three finalists, and word was that she had the part.
“They’d started measuring me for wardrobe stuff,” she said “The director was in tears after the scene I did where Jackie has a baby. I said, `This is great, I’m going to do this!’ “
Then, at the last moment, Colin received the numbing news that there’d been a change and the juicy role would instead go to a little known Irish-born actress named Roma Downey, with whom she had worked Off-Broadway in “Aristocrats.”
“I said, `Roma, how did you get in there so fast, you little trickie?,’ ” said Colin. “But that’s the way it goes. They just loved her more, and good for them, because she did a great job.”
Downey was a smashing success and went on to star in the top-rated television series “Touched By An Angel.”
Colin, a New York cop’s daughter who’d been knocking around television and films a while, went on to star as president’s aide and Jeff Goldblum’s wife in the blockbuster hit “Independence Day,” and more recently with Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt in “The Devil’s Own.”
But what goes around does come around. Nearly seven years later, Margaret Colin is finally getting to be Jackie.
With a difference, though. Instead of playing Jackie for tears, Colin in this show is going for laughs. The work, by, Gip Hoppe, is what might be called a reverential satire.
“The operative word is zany,” Colin said.
Hoppe was inspired to write “Jackie” by a self-defining remark the celebrated former first lady once made: “I wish I could run away from this circus.”
A circus is what’s created on stage. Using Margaret and seven other actors, gigantic “rubber theatrical devices,” cardboard cutouts and inflatable puppets, Hoppe & Co. bring to life no fewer than 100 characters who figured in Mrs. Kennedy’s life–among them clan patriarch Joe Kennedy (a huge rubber likeness), Jackie step-father Hugh Auchincloss (a puppet) and President John F. Kennedy (played by the very serious live actor Victor Slezak, remembered as the son in “The Bridges of Madison County”).
Derek Smith plays Jackie’s reprobate father, Black Jack Bouvier, but he also plays brother-in-law Teddy Kennedy’s troubled ex-wife Joan.
“You run off stage as one character, and you turn around and run back on three seconds later,” Colin said.
Other characters who turn up are Bobby, Teddy, Eunice, Pat and Ethel Kennedy; Frank Sinatra, Jackie’s mother Janet Auchincloss, social moth and author Truman Capote; sister Lee Radziwell; Walter Cronkite; media mogul Rupert Murdoch; and, of course, Marilyn Monroe.
“There’s lots of stuff in it where you think, `Oh, how is that going to work?’ ” said Colin. “But it does work because we’re staying a step ahead of the audience, and every device that he’s (Hoppe) been using is a sort of comment on that character or that situation.”
Hoppe is artistic director of the rambunctious Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theatre on Cape Cod, one of the early venues for playwright Arthur Kopit’s “Road to Nirvana,” a satire that savaged Madonna and Chicago playwright David Mamet.
Colin said her initial reaction to the script was that it would cause too much outrage.
“I went, `You’re kidding me,’ ” Colin said. ” `We’re going to be killed by every liberal in New York.’ “
But at least one critic has faulted the show for treating Mrs. Kennedy too kindly.
Colin opens the show talking to the audience as Jackie, saying, as the real Mrs. Kennedy doubtless asked the world, “What do you want from me?”
She closes the show in like manner. The intervening two hours is devoted to a retelling of Mrs. Kennedy’s life, starting as a little girl of 5 (Colin hides behind a little girl cardboard cutout) and ending with Jackie’s widowhood after second husband Aristotle Onassis’ death.
The eerie resemblance between the two women is striking, especially when Colin appears in a copy of the pink suit that became famous on the day JFK was assassinated.
“That pink suit creates quite a reaction,” Colin said. “We don’t play the assassination for laughs. You can actually feel the audience’s relief that we’re not going to do a big routine or have a puppet come out on stage. It’s really quite beautiful–the Marines fold the flag, some real news announcements are played, I come out and talk to them.”
Colin worked hard at researching Mrs. Kennedy.
“The voice,” she said. “That voice. Fortunately, there was a lot of video tape available on her.”
From her girlhood, she has only vague memories of Jackie as first lady, mostly having to do with a favorite aunt who shocked the family by adopting Mrs. Kennedy’s then daring style of wearing a skirt above the knee.
Though Colin grew up in an Irish-Catholic family in Brooklyn and on Long Island, Jack Kennedy was not revered in the household.
“My father had lots of opinions and memories about being a New York police officer and knowing Kennedy was in the Carlyle (Hotel) foolin’ around with various people, so my family didn’t treat him as a saint. But as I got older and we started comparing him to other presidents, we were wildly impressed with his vision for the future.
“If he were running now I’d vote for him because he had a vision for the future and you could corner him on stuff. You admire his courage. He took a stand. I don’t see that a whole lot anymore.”
Colin says there really aren’t many similarities between her and Mrs. Kennedy.
“We’re both female and have various shades of brown hair,” said Colin. “We’re both Catholic and we have two children and big feet. That’s sort of where it ends, except for this huge passion for incredibly dedicated Irishmen–like my husband.”
Colin and her husband, actor Justin Deas, have two sons, Sam, 8, and Joe, 4.
The actress said that researching and portraying Mrs. Kennedy made her come to admire the woman enormously.
“Mostly the ladylike quality she maintained through her life,” Colin said. “The way she handled the press, the way she mourned. It’s a style of womanhood that’s almost gone. I was raised to be a lady, but I sort of dismissed it for the ways of the ’80s and ’90s. I certainly enjoy being one now. There’s a lot of power, and a lot of grace. You can always look at yourself in the mirror because you’ve behaved yourself.”
Colin said it helped her performance to learn that, on one of the Lyndon Johnson White House audio tapes just made public, Mrs. Kennedy is heard actually flirting with LBJ.
“That just gives me even more permission,” she said.
There’s been no comment from the Kennedy family or Jackie’s children.
“We move in different circles,” she said. “But, you know, the father is treated great, and JFK is treated great, and Jackie’s treated great.
“If we spent 25 years laughing at Richard Nixon, we can spend a few minutes laughing at the Kennedys.”
