When Kathy found herself 30 pounds heavier than when she’d left Ireland, Jackie shared the diet (hard-boiled egg for breakfast, cottage cheese for lunch, fish for dinner) she followed herself. Yet she was generous, both with gifts and advice. Jackie admiring Kathy’s ring at her wedding. She also had the well-heeled habit of carrying next to no cash. While the former first lady enjoyed an occasional cigarette (Newport!), she didn’t smoke in public, McKeon says. One of McKeon’s more unusual duties was slashing an X into the soles of Jackie’s size 10 pumps, so she wouldn’t slip on the apartment’s marble floors. Whatever the moniker, she was proud to be Jackie’s girl, even if her duties seemed more like that of a maid and occasional nanny than “personal assistant.” Unlike the cussing, chain-smoking young widow Natalie Portman portrayed in the 2016 film “Jackie,” McKeon’s Madam was “a perfect lady,” albeit one with borderline OCD: Her sheets had to be changed daily, her peignoirs ironed just so, her every ensemble accessorized, down to the slippers and robes that matched her nightgowns.
It was Rose Kennedy, JFK’s mother, who called her “Jackie’s Girl.” With legions of Irish men and women toiling at the clan’s Cape Cod compound, McKeon writes, “keeping names straight would have been vexing for sure.” The confidentiality agreement she signed 53 years ago no longer applies, the Florida resident told The Post in her soft Irish brogue: Now 72, she wanted to write her experience down for her grandchildren before she forgets.
So begins “Jackie’s Girl: My Life with the Kennedy Family” (Simon & Schuster), a warm account of the 12 years McKeon spent in service to the woman she calls “Madam” and her two children. was 7-year-old Caroline’s “Where were you when it happened, Kath?” One of the first questions McKeon had to answer when she came to work at the family home at 1040 Fifth Ave. Kennedy’s assassination the year before was still fresh in everyone’s mind, especially his daughter’s. Or, at least, its American counterpart: Jacqueline Kennedy. Kathy McKeon was 19 - an Irish farm girl newly arrived in New York - when she found herself tending royalty.
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