JACKIE LIVES
EMERY, NOEMIE
Books & Arts JACKIE LIVES By Noemie Emery Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, first lady of the United States for two years and ten months some thirty-five years ago, has been the subject of more...
...They were world-famous beauties who could not keep their husbands faithful...
...No other first lady held her husband's brains in her hands, organized a stunning state funeral, upstaged Princess Grace at a spring fete in Seville, fought for a billionaire with a world-famous diva, racked up top marks in the fashion sweepstakes, and came home to work hard as a perfectly respectable professional woman (albeit a loaded one...
...At age forty-six, a widowed Alice Roosevelt Longworth left her husband's Ohio forever...
...If Jackie's big sister is "Princess" Alice (who died, ninety-six years old, in 1980), her younger sister is Diana, Princess of Wales, whose death in a car crash in 1997 at thirty-six set off an orgy of mourning...
...As an editor, she would have turned down a book that unlikely...
...The bride stayed with her children in America...
...The royal marriage first became rocky on foreign visits, when crowds clamored for Diana instead of the prince...
...Especially her men...
...When the wife of war secretary William Howard Taft became separated from the party, she was able to rejoin it only by identifying herself as "the woman whose husband is traveling with Miss Alice Roosevelt...
...A frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia...
...Her last beau, Maurice Templesman, was a millionaire, but a far more low-keyed one, who seemed to care more about her than her image...
...Each of these women was born rich, but none of them grew up in a happy home with both natural parents...
...And yet, when it mattered, Jackie was there...
...The first American example appeared early in this century with Alice Roosevelt, a blue-eyed blonde with a delicate face and an imperious manner...
...Jackie—starring in Peter Collier and David Horowitz's The Kennedys and Laurence Leamer's The Kennedy Women—is usually seen as part of the Kennedys' ongoing family drama...
...But Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos, a long-time employee and friend of that family, has written The Onassis Women, reminding us that Jackie also belongs to a different dynastic saga—of a clan much, much richer, just as star-crossed, and even more dysfunctional...
...No other royal provoked the hysteria that Diana did, but no other royal had her contradictions...
...They had to contend with unsympathetic, sometimes openly hostile in-laws...
...This drove her further back into her own orbit in America, and she was not with him when he died in Paris in March 1975...
...Her stepmother wrote to beg her "not to buy fifty hats at twenty dollars a piece and two dozen stockings at five dollars a piece and thirty veils and ten pairs of shoes...
...Tina, his neurotic first wife who died at forty-five under mysterious circumstances...
...A romantic who married two men for money and then wrapped them in myths so she could adore them, she is the stuff of which novels are made...
...Tell us a story," we ask of these women...
...Joined a religious order...
...The shock at the death of Diana stemmed in large part from a sense of frustration: The film snapped in two halfway through the movie...
...How would you like Archie [her half-brother] to give up college to pay your debts...
...They were feminine, with whims of iron...
...She took a job in publishing, reviving her old interests in art, words, and fashion, and trying to reclaim the person she had been before she married John Kennedy and entered a world filled with power and danger...
...Her type is actually quite rare, but it has its examples, an international cohort of sisters united by fame and misfortune, caught up in legends gone wrong...
...Jackie married Onassis to live in a bubble, safe from intrusion and violence and hysterical mobs...
...But the tabloids and cameras invaded her privacy, her new marriage exposed her to gossip and ridicule, and the ruin that came with her life as a Kennedy broke into her idyll in Greece...
...There are at least two novels by women about Jackie's effect on girls in the 1960s, and a study, Jackie Under My Skin, in which an English professor at Yale describes merely her image in his mind...
...These high-maintenance women all enjoyed the high life, associating with the kind of people Teddy Roosevelt called "the malefactors of great wealth...
...Nothing, except be herself...
...She was not a candidate for sainthood, as all her biographies make clear...
...Books & Arts JACKIE LIVES By Noemie Emery Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, first lady of the United States for two years and ten months some thirty-five years ago, has been the subject of more attention than all the other first ladies put together...
...In her later years, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had trouble believing that her life had really happened, or at any rate, had happened to her...
...This is life as a novel...
...Jackie is too much of an egotist," said Onassis's sister (who liked her...
...And yet, they often seemed unsettled and restless as well, with an aura of sorrow...
...The public had an unending fascination with her days and her nights, her clothes and her houses, her children and her men...
...Diana's mother bolted when the girl was six, and a wicked stepmother assumed the reins at home...
...Married a barrister...
...Longworth's funeral—like Francois Mitterrand's— was attended by his mistress, and in revenge Alice destroyed his most valued possession, an old and very precious violin...
...Christina, his suicidal and neurotic daughter who died under her own mysterious circumstances at thirty-eight...
...It offers vicarious thrills in the heroine's spending sprees, yachts, clothes, and jewels...
...If there was one person in the country who generated the kind of following rivaling his own, it was Alice," Peter Collier wrote of Teddy Roosevelt's daughter: Songs...
...Jacqueline Bouvier did the same...
...In the midst of the most unpredictable plot, it gives us the most satisfyingly predictable story...
...Christopher Anderson (author of Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage and Jackie After Jack: Portrait of the Lady) gives Jackie affairs with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, and her brothers-in-law Peter Lawford and Robert F. Kennedy...
...and the single working mother in New York...
...There have been books about her clothes, her sister and her in-laws, and a giant Sotheby's auction catalogue of her household effects...
...Alice married a man who, Collier says, was a "legend of debauchery in Congress...
...They didn't in the end because she cost too much to maintain...
...Each was an essentially private woman who became known through her relation to a public man...
...Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis showed the world four faces: the delicate girl turned first lady...
...Diana, at home in the world of Gianni Versace, visited the world of Mother Teresa and raised funds for her causes...
...Self-denial was not among their virtues, but they all had deeper, more serious sides...
...All these women have things in common: personality traits, overlapping experiences, the way they came to fame...
...Be beautiful and sad, be complex and resilient, be willful, be charming, be strong...
...She returned home to Washington to pursue her one true calling: her profession of being herself...
...They are fairy tales, cautionary tales, and morality tales rolled into one...
...Only real life can create such a saga...
...These contrasts merely cranked up public interest: Which of all these were the dominant aspects...
...willful, acquisitive, resilient, and canny...
...They also agree it was odd...
...the dark tragic queen of the Kennedy funeral...
...Those who think money was all that Jackie saw in Onassis miss the fact that her true soulmate in the Kennedy family had been her father-in-law, Joseph P. Kennedy—another self-made tycoon and financial predator whose reputation was at best semi-respectable...
...And each sustained that fame on her own...
...There was constant talk of making a match with a foreign monarch, and when Kaiser Wilhelm's brother Prince Henry had her christen his yacht The Meteor, the fact that he was already married did not stop the newspapers from speculating that he and Alice would have a royal wedding...
...Catty stories at the time said she had been spared a future of boy-toys and facelifts, but nothing is certain: Margaret Trudeau, the archetypal swinger of the late 1970s, was last sighted as a middle-class housewife in Ottawa...
...Because of her, more girls were called Alice than any other name...
...Interest in Robert Kennedy's wife Ethel faded quickly after her husband was murdered, but interest in Jackie—like that in Diana—only increased once the marriage was over...
...I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris," said John Kennedy in 1961...
...Having stunned the world twice—with the Kennedy funeral and the Onassis marriage—she now stunned it a third time by doing the one thing no one expected: trying to live a simple, normal life—or as simple and normal as possible, given a Fifth Avenue duplex, a $30 million spread on Martha's Vineyard, and a $25.5 million nest egg (from Onassis) that quickly hatched into the $200 million range...
...He was with her when she died in 1994, still very much an American princess...
...At much the same age, Jackie Onas-sis came back to Manhattan to do much the same thing...
...Two years later he reclaimed her when he wed Edith Carow, but Alice was always aware of the difference between herself and the children of her father's second marriage...
...Having failed to marry one man that she loved because he couldn't afford her, she then married the one man who could...
...All three were beautiful, photogenic, magnetic, stylish, and spoiled...
...At this level, one doesn't have to do, just be...
...Klein and Moutsatsos agree that the marriage with Onassis began with real affection...
...And what did she do to merit this furor...
...An ethereal fantasist, she was nonetheless at her best when things were rough, and she did not abandon people in trouble...
...As "Princess Alice," she was one of the first national figures of gossip, with reporters avidly writing about her whereabouts, her friends, clothes, and beaux...
...More like Grace Kelly than Mamie Eisenhower or Eleanor Roosevelt, she is famous not as a first lady, but as a type—the princess/adventuress/romantic heroine—whose progress through life is tracked closely by millions: a display of living theater...
...Was her playboy boyfriend, Dodi, a phase...
...But to put it this way is to mis-construe the whole matter...
...Stalin's daughter asked when, after fleeing Russia, she met Alice Roosevelt Long-worth...
...Settled down on a farm...
...And they do...
...No other first lady roused the frenzies that Jackie did, but no other first lady lived her life...
...Edward Klein (author of All Too Human: The Love Story of Jack and Jackie Kennedy and Just Jackie: Her Private Years) denies it— though he does unearth a two-year romance with John Carl Warnecke, architect of the Kennedy gravesite, that was so serious the two planned to marry...
...Just when the public was sure it had pegged her, another face emerged...
...the trophy wife of Onassis, dripping in rubies...
...Both Diana and Jackie, in her second marriage, wed men whose primary allegiance was to old lovers: Prince Charles to Camilla Parker-Bowles, Aristotle Onassis to opera star Maria Callas...
...They were self-centered and frequently generous...
...In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt included his daughter in an eighty-man delegation to the Far East...
...were written for her...
...Diana and Jackie raised their children well under difficult circumstances...
...And Alexander, his difficult son who died in a plane crash at twenty-four...
...And when they were together—in her New York apartment or his private island of Skorpios—they acted much more like guests of each other than like people sharing a home...
...Jackie's parents fought constantly and divorced when she was eleven...
...Would she have joined the jet set completely...
...For both women, the second matches were the keys to the kingdom of shopping...
...The groom immediately returned to his mistress...
...Each had a way of pre-empting the spotlight...
...Which, in the end, would win out...
...Alice's father objected to his daughter's spending time with the children of the robber barons he was supposed to be fighting...
...Maria Callas, his neurotic and heartbroken mistress who died at age fifty-three, perhaps of sorrow...
...After their first marriages ended, Diana and Jackie took up with men widely seen as unsuitable (perhaps seeking vengeance on their previous in-laws...
...Like Princess Diana and "Princess" Alice, she was front-page news around the world when she died—though she had been a public person for less than three of her sixty-four years...
...Alice's mother died giving birth to her, and her distraught father passed her on to his sister while he went off to rebuild his spirits in the American West...
...It shows us the power of money and beauty, and then—as surely as a biblical parable—tells us that one can be distraught on a cruise or in a castle, and that even the world's most beautiful women cannot keep their husbands...
...But what has she ever done...
...There is Onassis himself...
...Accounts of what Diana and Jackie spent soon surfaced in tabloids, but, as usual, Alice had gotten there first...
...Similarly, John Kennedy had been made uneasy by Jackie's cruise on the Onassis yacht, the Christina, in October 1963...
...Who can blame her...
...Dressing the gaping wound in John Kennedy's back after his 1954 spine operation, patiently wiping the drool from the mouth of her father-in-law after his stroke, forcing her sister into Alcoholics Anonymous and helping to bring up her daughter, tending her cancer-stricken half-sister, facing her own death without a whimper, she was as brave and self-absorbed as Scarlett O'Hara...
...Onassis, after the rain of tragic deaths that visited him, focused on Jackie as the source of his troubles...
...For the first time, she was free of money anxieties, of the many demands of her difficult in-laws, of ambitious and unfaithful men...
...In the four years since her death on May 19, 1994, there have appeared exposes and hagiographies, tributes and picture albums, most of them stunning...
...Each married young, to an older man, and their marriages soon faltered...
...Alice left the good works to her father and her cousin Eleanor, but she was a literate woman who earned the respect of a long line of presidents...
Vol. 4 • December 1998 • No. 14
