Larger Than Life

Now Cooke had all the breathing room a claustrophobe could want. He was completely alone.

How could Jackie Cooke know what his grandfather's divorce would mean to him? How could he know that his grandfather would force his sons to choose sides? How could an 11-year-old know about contest living? Jackie's dad, Ralph, sided with his mother, Jeannie, while Ralph's brother, John, sided with their father. Not only did Jack Kent Cooke rarely speak with Ralph over the next seven or eight years—in both the Redskins' media guide and in Who's Who, Ralph suddenly had never been born—but he saw much less of Ralph's kids too.

That, coupled with Carrie's divorce from Ralph, turned the prince into a pauper. Before, Jackie had sat in his grandfather's private section at Kings games; now he was in the rafters. Before, his school problems were just a hardship; now they were debilitating.

By the time Jackie was 17, his grandfather had sold the Kings. By 19, Jackie had flunked out of a very bad college. By 20, he was terrifically overweight, not taking care of himself, an alcoholic. He flopped from job to job. If you can't even copy down a phone number, you 're lucky to get past personnel.

He would call his grandfather now and again, but the relationship was not the same. "That hurt Jackie," remembers Carrie. "Of all the children, Jackie was hurt by that the most. He worshiped his grandfather."

Jackie blamed himself. He told friends he had "blown it" with his grandfather. Jack Kent Cooke II—how could he do such a dark thing to this shining name?

"I'm the goddamnedest romantic you'll ever meet," Jack Kent Cooke once said, and romantics do not let love beat them. Cooke fell in love and married twice more in the next seven years. First there was Jeanne Maxwell Williams, a Las Vegas sculptor and socialite. Having sold his Los Angeles holdings, he took her with him to Washington to look after his 86% share in the Redskins. They were married on Oct. 31, 1980—by Judge John Sirica. But Cooke wouldn't allow her to set up a small sculpting studio at Fallingbrook, his house in Upperville, Va. "It wouldn't be in character with the surroundings," he said. He was right, of course. Wherever Cooke lives, the surroundings must surround him. This is a man who had owned a circular house when he lived in Las Vegas and who would soon build a duplicate at Far Acres in Middleburg. If there is no circle, then there is no center, and if there is no center, then where is Cooke to stand? "He's charming and I admire him," Jeanne says, "but he was too authoritarian." The marriage lasted 10 months.

Next came 31-year-old Suzanne Martin, daughter of a wealthy Middleburg family. She and Cooke were wed on July 24, 1987, and the wedding was remarkable only in that it was contingent, she says, upon the bride agreeing to have an abortion the next day. After the vows, the happy couple had dinner with Siegel and then it was off to the hospital the next morning. Not exactly a wedding out of Bride's magazine. It would have been Suzanne's third abortion of a pregnancy caused by Cooke. She was ashamed of the first two, but she would do anything to be with Cooke. After a breakup with him in '86, she had been so despondent that she tried a stay at the Psychiatric Institute in Washington and a bottle of Valium to help solve her problems. She took almost the entire bottle of Valium at one sitting.

Cooke took her back on Valentine's Day 1987, and everybody knew who was in charge. Cooke told Suzanne what kind of clothes to wear, what books to read, how to speak at parties. He insisted that the fire be going, the wine be poured and his favorite music be playing when he walked through the door. And if they weren't? "He'd have a fit," says Suzanne. Pygmalion? Cooke doesn't wear that Rex Harrison hat for nothing. She became pregnant again in May, and again Cooke told her to abort. She refused. One night, according to Adrian Havill's new book on Cooke, The Last Mogul (St. Martin's Press), Suzanne began bleeding, and Cooke was sure it meant she was having a miscarriage. "[He] celebrated by giving Suzanne a four-strand pearl necklace with a large heart-shaped diamond clasp," writes Havill. I'm the goddamnedest romantic you'll ever meet.

The marriage proposal won her over. She agreed to go through with the "A," as Cooke referred to it in his handwritten agenda for that week. Yet when she arrived at the hospital after the wedding, she couldn't go through with it. When Cooke found out that he was still an expectant father, he flipped. On a drive to Far Acres from Washington, Suzanne says, he ordered her out of his limo on Route 713, four miles from home. Here it was the end of August, with Suzanne four months along and wearing new shoes. The walk home took over an hour. When she got to the house, feet blistered, Cooke wouldn't let her in, though he could see her through the bedroom window, pounding on the glass. She slept in a guest house.