Lot number eight, now, the Andy Warhol red jacket. And we’re at 160,000, 170,000, 180, way back. April 23rd, 1996, at Sotheby’s in New York, a sale is underway. I have $700,000 now at the back. 5,000 items from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. 5,000 chances to buy a piece of a remarkable life. This is your last chance for a part of the mystique.
And I know that’s what you’ve been saving up for right over here, right? The official Sotheby’s estimate, $4 million. Four days later, four days later, when the last item is sold, the auction proceeds will total $35 million. Sold. Sold $2,350,000. Time has not dimmed the Jackie mystique. Millions of people are still captivated by the details of her life, and something more, by her impeccable sense of self.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis, American icon, independent spirit, survivor, a woman whose life defines the power of style. May 31st, 1961. President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline arrive in Paris for a state visit. The spotlight is on relations between America and France, but it is the first lady who steals the show.
In the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles, Jackie enchants President de Gaulle with her knowledge of French literature and language, her beauty, and elegance. Up until Jack Kennedy became president in 1960, all first wives had been frumps. Rather plain, fat, old frumps. Uh Jackie Kennedy was the first wife of a president to be beautiful, stylish, and young.
For the Europeans, the fact that she wasn’t wearing flowered house dresses and harlequin glasses meant that America was perhaps more sophisticated than they’d assumed. She was reassuring to the Europeans because she looked great. She obviously was a star of the whole performance. Uh whatever the president had to say or do with de Gaulle took a backseat in French eyes, obviously.
And indeed, I think it must have had something to do with a new friendship between uh France and the United States. From Versailles to America, Jackie takes the world by storm. That’s right. I rather love this ball. It’s all the colors one thinks of when thinks of the White House. Her celebrated tour of the White House in 1962 is a huge media event.
Viewed by 80 million people, it establishes her place as an American icon. We had such a great civilization. So many foreigners don’t realize it. America is really like an army of hicks. And her major role was changing that by setting an example. I think that Jackie will go down in history even more importantly than she is today because she is one of the woman of the century.
She’s like Cleopatra of the modern era. At the heart of Jackie’s influence is her sense of style. And that is always more about her character and values. About who she is as a person than it is about being well-dressed. Style comes from the inside. Fashion comes from the outside. And people who really have charisma, who have charisma like Jackie Kennedy, it’s where style meets fashion.
Throughout her life, Jackie keeps reinventing herself. Her looks, her circumstances keep changing. But her style remains a constant, the bedrock of her life, first formed in an extraordinary childhood. She’s born a Bouvier at Southampton Hospital on Rhode Island on a scorching summer afternoon in 1929. Jackie gets her dark Mediterranean looks and a fiery spirit from her father.
Black Jack Bouvier, also known as the Sheik, is a stockbroker who loves clothes, women, and fast cars. A man renowned for his highly dramatic sense of style. Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee, is the polar opposite of her flamboyant, reckless husband. The product of restrained good taste, Janet Lee grooms Jackie in her own image, an upper-class young lady, well-educated, well-dressed, feminine, and always in control.
She did not particularly love her mother. And she adored her father. It was almost an incestuous relationship. It wasn’t incestuous. But uh when you saw Jacqueline with her father, uh you beheld uh two lovers. And when you saw Jacqueline with her mother, uh she you you you you beheld a very argumentative, petulant child. Jackie’s real mentor is her grandfather Bouvier.
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He encourages her to explore the world of ideas, books, and art. He taught her literature. He gave her Shakespeare to read. He gave her Gibbons, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to read, to a little girl about 8 years of age. Grampy Jack’s summer estate, Lasata, is not only a showcase of European design with spacious rooms and a formal Italian garden, but an elegant stage where the Bouviers preserve the strict rules of old-world style.
At Lasata, the meals are exquisite, the conversation literate, and Jackie learns that everyday life must appear seamless, spotless, and cultured. I I mean, I think she just ge- generally picked up a sense from Hermelia that one needed to be cultured, but not too cultured, and that one needed to wear one’s culture uh kind of like armor.
A sense that one always showed one’s best face. Grampy Jack believes the Bouviers were originally titled aristocrats in the French court of Louis the 14th. Jackie’s cousin, John Davis, later writes a book that reveals the lofty origins of the Bouviers to be a fantasy. But her grandfather’s preoccupation with the ideals of aristocratic behavior leaves an indelible impression on Jackie.
She believed that she was an aristocrat. And that she was above the crowd. But she was never snobbish about it. She did not uh snub people. She was always very kind to to other people. But she had an air of superiority to her. Although Jackie never rebels against the demanding expectations of her class, her surface conformity disguises a complex personality.
Daredevil and princess, both sides of Jackie’s personality find expression in the world of the horse. I still remember acutely you would see this little girl on top of this gigantic stallion and uh assuming total mastery of the animal. Her mother, Janet Lee, a champion horse rider herself, gets Jackie on a horse as soon as she can walk.
By the time she’s five, she’s winning awards. From the very beginning, she was an incredible equestrian. And she did things that sissies like us would would never do. Jumping fences and and she used to spend a long time in in the stables currying the horses, you know, getting very close to them. Jackie’s dedication to riding and her fearless style as an equestrian remain unchanged throughout her life.
On horseback, she expresses the things that matter most to her, beauty, freedom, and control. On the surface, the Bouviers appear to be living a charmed existence, but Jack Bouvier is always short of money and is a compulsive womanizer. In 1940, Jackie’s parents divorce. It is the first traumatic moment of her life.
And characteristically, she copes with stoic composure. If she were in pain, no nobody would know it. She never She never complained. In fact, I’ve never I’ve never saw Jackie cry. When Jackie’s mother remarries, the lavish estates of the Auchincloss family become the backdrop to a stable new period in her life.
Hammersmith Farm, the family’s 75-acre summer home in Newport, with its lavish gardens and plush interiors, is a haven for Jackie. Her room is a luxurious retreat, where she spends hours reading, writing poetry, and making sketches of her surroundings. By 1944, Jackie is a student at Miss Porter’s Finishing School in Connecticut.
A far cry from the surroundings of Hammersmith Farm. But even in uniform, Jackie’s unique style shines through. As the playful intellectual, the popular loner. She was not only marvelous-looking, but she was smart and bright and with it. She was just ahead of everybody else. She knew how to tease, she knew how to laugh, she knew how to make other people laugh. She did little things.
She would make drawings of people, cartoons. She was really very creative and very thoughtful. She heard anybody was feeling down or sick, she would buy a special nosegay of flowers and send it to them. She did thoughtful little things all the time. And she did that all the way through the White House, too. When Jacqueline Bouvier graduates from Miss Porter’s School in 1947, she is an A student and a skilled equestrian.
She is known for her wit and her key ambition not to be a housewife. Jackie takes her ambition seriously. By 1949, at the age of 20, she is studying art, history, and French at the Sorbonne in Paris. She savors life as a young intellectual abroad. She hangs out at famous writers’ haunts like Les Deux Magots, mastering the French language, and learning more about art and dance.
But she never abandons her upper-crust roots. Once a week, she dons pearls and fur and joins the wealthy American expatriates at the bar of the Ritz Hotel. Later, Jackie would write about her year in Europe saying, “I loved it more than any year of my life. I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something that I had always tried to hide.
And I came home glad to start here again, but with a love of France that I’m afraid will never leave me.” Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee, advises her daughter to marry a rich man, but she is determined to earn her own way. She finds work as a reporter and photographer for the Washington Times-Herald. As the inquiring camera girl, she interviews John F.
Kennedy, the newly elected senator from Massachusetts. She makes him a face in her column. Soon after, she is the public woman in his life and a hit with the Kennedy clan. The Kennedy family was one that since the ’20s very much had um appreciated um and valued a certain degree of panache and style. John Kennedy’s mother, Rose, prefers to be dressed in French couture.
Her husband, Joseph, understands the importance of image. In Jacqueline Bouvier, Joe Kennedy sees an upper-class French Catholic who will elevate the social status of his son. Together, John and Jackie create a perfect picture. An attractive, vital young couple that America can look up to and vote for. The wedding of Senator John F.
Kennedy recalls Newport’s one-time social grandeur. Speaker of the House Martin On September 12th, 1953, the Kennedy-Bouvier wedding is the social event of the year. For the spectators outside the >> For the Kennedys, this is also a political showcase for a young senator with his eye on the White House. With a pretty wife and a politically rising star, the future seems bright for the junior senator from Massachusetts.
What no one suspects is that Jacqueline Kennedy will give America an exciting new image and a fresh way of thinking about culture, fashion, and history. 1953 is a buoyant year in America. The economy is booming. The country’s new president is Dwight D. Eisenhower, former supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe during World War II.
His wife, Mamie, is a popular first lady. Who describes herself as perfectly satisfied to be known as a housewife. Thankful for the privilege of tagging along by Ike’s side. As the wife of Senator John F. Kennedy, Jackie never rebels against the ’50s ideal. The little woman who puts her husband’s needs above all else.
She was going from being a columnist to starting to do more frequent feet full-length feature stories for the Washington Times-Herald and was essentially asked to give it up. By Jack Kennedy when he said to her, “Well, Jackie, there’s only room for one writer in this family and it’s not you.” Um, and she acquiesced.
Would you like to be the wife of the vice presidential nominee? If he wanted to be the vice presidential nominee, I’d like being his wife. When the young Kennedy couple moves to this modest house in Washington, Jackie is determined to be the perfect wife. But also determined to do it in her own way. By elevating American values with European flair.
She transforms daily life with her perfect upper-class taste. And hosts exquisitely planned dinner parties for Jack Kennedy and his political friends. She helps out her husband in office and learns about politics. And she transforms the casually dressed senator into an impeccably groomed politician. Spirits are high in in Angeles.
Highest of all perhaps among the supporters of the party’s fair-haired boy, Senator John Kennedy. The great senator from the state OF MASSACHUSETTS, JOHN F. KENNEDY. By 1960, Jack Kennedy has his eye on the presidency. As a Catholic and a Democrat, his chances of winning are slim. Although Jackie goes along on the campaign trail as the dutiful wife, the rough and tumble of politics is definitely not her style.
I just can see Jackie right now, just sort of standing alone in a crowd when no one was coming up to talk to her, and she hadn’t, you know, there was no one for her to talk to, and she just looked uh uh kind of lost, and uh but uh with that um really wonderful, warm smile pasted on her on her that she had obviously said, “I’m going to keep smiling through this.
” She was a very unusual and different political life. I mean, you know, instead of um going to these fried chicken dinners and and glad-handling everyone, she would, you know, sit in the back smoking a cigarette and reading de Gaulle’s memoirs. In French. There was a piece in Time magazine, I think, just before the election of Kennedy, that talked about how she liked to dance barefoot in orange slacks.
I was a tiny child when I read this, and I thought, “This lady’s hot.” This lady’s great. Against all odds, John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeats Richard Nixon and is elected president on November 9th, 1960. So, now my wife and I prepare for a new administration and for a new baby. Thank you. I was impressed immediately with Jackie Kennedy’s presence.
The the inaugural day itself, I was fortunate enough to be assigned a car immediately ahead of the Kennedy car in the procession from the capital to the White House. And I was I was looking right down at them as we formed up. And they both gave me such a wonderful smile and a wave and that that I I immediately felt that I was part of the Kennedy family.
And I think this is what happened to the public. There was a warmth there part of both of them that we hadn’t seen in the White House in our generation. When Jackie became First Lady, she gave me the impression that she had signed up for that. If she didn’t like the pursuit of the office, she liked the office a lot. She was interested in it, determined to do a good job, and to do the job her way, not anybody previous First Lady’s way.
And so, almost overnight, Jackie makes a remarkable transition from the slightly bored wife of a senator to the queenly role of First Lady. And in the process, she captures the imagination of the entire world. America’s fascination with Jackie Kennedy’s style is immediate and enduring. Jackie Kennedy was the first first wife to be young, beautiful, not fat, and have a good sense of fashion.
You know, to wear clothes that other women wanted to wear. She embodied something that was both American aristocracy and European sophistication. And also, she had, you know, white skin, black hair, a strong face. She was photogenic. So, she very quickly and easily became an icon. Jackie’s instincts for performance and the persona of the First Lady role are impeccable.
She chooses Oleg Cassini as her official designer. He has been trained in Europe and has worked in Hollywood. And with Jackie’s collaboration, Cassini creates a mythical look. She had a distinct like look in the face. Immediately, she looked like a a princess of Egypt. The shoulders were very broad, like you see in the hieroglyphics.
Uh you see all these Egyptians with very large shoulders, slim hips, long waist. So, once it was established that she was a princess of Egypt, then in the course of designing all her clothes, there was a story, a trend that I could follow, a theme. Jackie’s look is classic, but she dares to be different.
At a time when affluent American women are all wearing furs and dainty veils, the new First Lady stands out in a simple beige cloth coat and a very large pillbox hat. It is the beginning of a show of style that will captivate America and the world for the next 1,000 days. If American women were fascinated by Jackie’s clothing innovations, it was simply because they were starved for anyone with a sense of style.
I mean, I we cannot underestimate just how uniform and stylistically deprived the ’50s were for North America. Jackie is also in the right place at the right time. American women are now looking for advice on how to be happy homemakers for their increasingly affluent husbands. Jackie’s image, magnified and repeated by constant media coverage, leads the way.
On television, which now explodes from black and white into living color, and through the many women’s magazines that now crowd the market, around the world, Jackie’s image inspires a frenzy of imitation. Every item shown is examined in the light of the new first lady’s taste and preferences. And in the world of high style, an appointment made by Jacqueline Kennedy is bigger news than her husband’s cabinet designations.
Millions want to share and wear the Jackie look with its sleeveless A-line shifts, dressmaker suits, pillbox hats, and rows of pearls. When the first lady steps out in a leopard skin coat, the worldwide demand for leopard permanently puts the big cat on the endangered list. She never made a mistake in her clothes.
It used to just kill us on the staff because we would try to twist a scarf the way she did. She would put on a belt and a scarf and suddenly a very ordinary, inexpensive pair of pants and a shirt would jump to life and be absolutely chic perfection. What Jackie refused was bauble or in elegance or messiness.
So, that for me Jackie’s stylishness wasn’t a matter of having a good outfit, but of not making mistakes. Maintaining Jackie’s image is an expensive undertaking. In 1961, the First Lady’s expenditures, over a hundred thousand dollars, are more than the presidential salary. But Joe Kennedy understands the necessity of myth-making.
He foots the bill, and the Jackie look plays on to an adoring world. Even when she is the high priestess of style in America, the bedrock of Jackie’s life is her family. Caroline’s birth in 1957, followed by John Jr.’s arrival in 1960, is the beginning of her lifelong dedication to motherhood. Her husband and her children were a priority.
She had to make sure that everything was safe and happy and comfortable for them. And she guarded the children, kept them away from all the prying tourists who would shout and say, “Caroline, come over here. Here, John. Here, John.” as though they were calling a dog, you know. It was just She hated that, so she spirited them in and out of the house at odd moments when the crowds wouldn’t be going through.
Jackie’s experience as a wife is more complex than anyone will ever know. Although her husband’s many infidelities are kept from public view, privately, Jackie endures the humiliation of adultery. With her characteristic restraint, she never discusses the details of her private life, and ultimately declares her marriage a success.
Casting the perfect image as a wife and mother, Jackie becomes a source of inspiration for all of life’s little details. If you could have seen the letters that I got saying, “Everyone says I look exactly like you, Mrs. Kennedy. Exactly. My hair is exactly like yours. I would like to know how many rollers you put in it at night.
You put three down the middle and you put two on each side. And does the president mind the rollers? I mean, the questions were wonderful. But she was a movie star to the public. She could do no wrong. She becomes an ideal. She becomes the American princess. Um the young woman who for the first time uh sets an example of how to dress, how to entertain, how to raise your children, and how to decorate.
As first lady and a student of history, Jackie’s greatest passion is the White House. She resolves to turn it into a museum for the American people. It just seemed to me such a shame when we came here to find hardly anything of the past in the house. Hardly anything before 1902. The portraits were not original portraits.
The furnishings were sort of ersatz this and that from the early 19th century. There really wasn’t any great distinction to the house. In fact, the most recent inhabitants of the White House, the Trumans and the Eisenhowers, used department store furniture while authentic White House antiques are warehoused nearby.
She said we have to change this bourgeois look and it has to be beautiful. Uh Versailles had survived all this time and uh this the White House will have to survive a long time. Jackie had a tremendous conscience about doing it right and getting the best possible advice. The first thing she really accomplished was to get a full-time curator.
There’d never been one. Jackie Kennedy thinks the formal rooms of the White House should have a sense of state, arrival, and grandeur. She falls under the spell of Stéphane Boudin, an interior designer known for bringing French design to refined homes around the world. Detail by detail, sketch by sketch, choice by choice.
Under Boudin’s guidance, Jackie transforms the White House in an alchemy of American history and French design. Each room is filled with antiques and fine art from Europe and America. Jackie somehow heard that there was this group of Cézannes to which the White House was judicially entitled, which were on view down at the National Gallery.
So, she came down here, and Johnny Walker got them all in this room on easels, put the best ones back in the shadows, and of course, she goes like a homing pigeon right to the best ones, says, “I’ll have this, this, and this.” And up they go. Jackie orchestrates the White House renovation herself. When Congress needs persuading to pass legislation making the White House a museum, she moves the mountain with strategic charm.
Jackie manned the telephones, and that whispery little voice would call various congressmen who were important to her legislation. She did all of the um sort of maneuvering herself. Also, it was a fundraising opportunity. She had some very wealthy friends, and they were flattered and delighted to be involved.
She conned a a desk out of my father who it’s an antique Daniel Webster desk and it’s still in the White House dining room, the private dining room. Using the restored White House as a backdrop, Jackie turns the table on every aspect of presidential entertaining. The girl whose ambition was not to be a housewife becomes the ultimate homemaker and hostess in America.
And she said that all this has to to go, it’s ridiculous. From the food which is grotesque for heads of state to come in and eat hamburgers. She said, “I want a French chef.” Jackie gets one of the best French trained chefs, Rene Verdon. I think that she just sort of rolled up her sleeves, you know, pushed up her bracelet and said, “We need to work on beef bourguignon.
I mean, we need to we need to really show these benighted Americans a few things.” Jackie seats White House guests at round tables to encourage intimacy and conversation. Unlike in previous administrations, guests are allowed to smoke and drink and enjoy themselves in an atmosphere of casual elegance. So, the ambiance was absolutely delicious.
Soft music. It was so glamorous and so wonderful. The tables are decorated with candles, low floral arrangements, and covered in blue or yellow table linens. Impressed with a gilt bamboo chair she saw in Paris, Jackie brings the same style into the White House. Within a month, every trendy hostess in the United States is renting gilt bamboo chairs, round tables, and colored tablecloths, breaking with tradition to follow Jackie’s lead.
Unheard of to have color in the dining room, unheard of. The society scribes were scandalized and said, “What’s happening to the White House? It’s terrible.” Of course, it was wonderful. Good food, good wine, good company. If you had dreamed up a party when you were in your 20s or early 30s, you know, a just a real great fancy ball party when you’re going to have good time, that’s what it was like.
And and the White House had not seen that. During their stay at the White House, the Kennedys play host not only to a dazzling parade of world leaders, but the world’s best writers, dancers, and musicians as well. From an evening with Pablo Casals to a dinner with 49 Nobel Prize winners, the First Lady hosts dozens of cultural events at the White House.
The Mona Lisa comes to Washington thanks to Jackie’s connections with the French Ministry of Culture and to her belief that it is a government responsibility to support the arts. Jackie turns the White House into an American Versailles and gives culture a good name. An intellectual without apology, she gives America a new image of femininity.
The brainy brunette. The sexuality that Jackie brings is certainly not the big-breasted Niagara Falls kind of sex kitten sexuality of 50s blonde bimbo, you know, womanhood. For me, the the Jackie look has to do with importing a kind of French existential allure into a much more straight-laced American femininity.
French meaning not the fullness of couture, but the French of Jean Seberg or even Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face. For the first thousand days of the Kennedy administration, Jackie appears to be sailing along in control of her image and destiny itself. On November 22nd, 1963, on a political trip to Dallas, an assassin’s bullet changes everything.
Of course at first the the the horror of sitting there alongside her husband with his brains blown out practically in her lap, uh it’s it’s amazing that she could have recovered enough from that to have gone on at all for the immediately following days. How she pulled herself up for that, goodness only knows.
It shows again the exceeding class of of of the woman. Mrs. Kennedy begins the long hours of her public grief with the courageous dignity that has marked each moment of her ordeal. Jackie orchestrates a state funeral to honor her husband’s memory and takes charge of every detail. The sound of the muffled drums sweeps in melancholy waves over the hushed throng.
A hushed The riderless horse behind the casket is a respectful echo of President Lincoln’s funeral. But many of Jackie’s decisions are drawn from European history. Her own long dark veil is made up quickly in a style used by European royalty. And following the Mediterranean tradition, she chooses to walk behind the horse-drawn casket.
Erect and proud, Mrs. Kennedy walks the six long blocks with firm step, yet tearful eye. As the casket is returned to the caisson, there comes a family vignette that must take its place with those memories we hold warm and dear. A gentle reminder from his mother. It is Jackie who plans and prompts John Jr.’s final salute to his dead father.
And it is Jackie who lights the eternal flame at Arlington Cemetery. That too is her idea, inspired by the unknown soldier’s grave that she once saw in France. Jackie understood that the funeral would be a uniquely influential event digested by millions and that it needed to be presented as a spectacle. That it needed to have the dignity and austerity and coherence of any performance.
Which is not to say that she wasn’t upset and that it wasn’t grief that dominated this calculation, but that there was a sense that um appearances needed to be maintained and that this would be broadcast. This would be an effect. It would enter people’s homes. It would influence other people’s conduct. It’s another way of saying that style matters.
Style, which is how you behave under stress, how you behave in human circumstances matters and has an impact. It’s not just um a dead set of etiquette codes. I want to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the hundreds of thousands of messages, nearly 800,000 in all, which my children and I have received over the past few weeks.
The assassination in the days following established that there was something more to Jackie Kennedy than merely a fashion model and a and a dictator taste, if you please. Uh there was a strength there. There was an iron in that will that I don’t think we ever appreciated being there at all. Uh and in the subsequent days and years, she showed that by being her own person.
She by drove lived her own life. By 1967, images of violence in Vietnam inspired many Americans to oppose the war, and Jackie is one of them. She works with her brother-in-law, Bobby Kennedy, now a presidential candidate himself, in his campaign against the Vietnam War. But political activism is no substitute for her powerful, productive years as first lady.
And there is no escaping the public’s perception of her as the noble widow. I think that every act of hers is always seen against this template of keeper of the flame, and she’s going to always look like a betrayer of that Kennedy flame. There was speculation on who who might marry, who she was dating, how she was raising the children, and on top of that came the assassination of her brother-in-law, Robert Kennedy.
I think it just got so oppressive, she had to explode. In 1968, Jackie shocks the world with a dramatic decision to marry an old friend, the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Onassis bought her. She had to go away because after the assassination, but in regrouping and deciding to go to Europe, she began to think like a mother that has to take care of her children, the future, where is the money? All these mundane things, and this man, Onassis, was not put out great amount of charm, but wealthy, charming, powerful, and could be a
protector for her and her children. Photographer Peter Beard’s snapshots of Jackie and Aristotle in Greece record the beginning of a new chapter in her life. He was a great person from the point of view of an all-nighter, renegade, eccentric, very primitive in a very nice way. He thought the impressionists were trying to impress people.
In the glorious beauty of Greece, on the island of Skorpios, and on the Onassis yacht, Christina, Jackie sheds her grief. She was just full of funny and devilish ideas, and she always had a twinkle in her eye, and we always had a lot of fun. Lots and lots of things going on, visitors and guests being well taken care of, candid conversations, always good taste and sense of humor.
The tabloid press brands Onassis as a wealthy shopaholic. And her shopping sprees enrage her husband. But in her daily life, Jackie’s style is now defiantly casual. She was very bohemian. She really went natural in a lot of ways. Allowed herself to. In fact, the enduring images of Jackie Kennedy was somebody in a ribbed sweater and very very tight jeans.
It’s a certain kind of old money look. It’s an old money good figure I don’t care kind of look. But that was style. That was style because she was flat-chested. Had she had enormous tits, that would have been vulgar. It’s knowing what’s right for you. What Jackie discovers is that good taste on any level is not easy to maintain around her new husband.
As is known, the bar stools on the Christina were covered in whale’s scrotum which Mr. Onassis used to love to point out to his guests. And the guest rooms or the master bedrooms forward were all in this pseudo rococo late 19th century cheesy hotel style. And I can recognize that he loved it. It was his home basically.
And she wasn’t allowed to touch a thing. He was very eccentric, overextended, tough, manipulating, and very paranoid in many ways businessman. And he had lots of rude moments on his home turf. She did the best she could. It did not turn out the way she thought. And he was when never going to be happy with her because he needed a Maria Callas, a Greek that understand him because basically he was a a very intelligent man, but he was of simple taste.
In 1975, Jackie is widowed for the second time when Aristotle Onassis dies at the age of 75. Although her final years with Onassis were tense and bitter, her breeding prevents her from airing dirty laundry in public. In a statement, Jackie says, “Aristotle Onassis rescued me at a moment when my life was engulfed in shadows.
He meant a lot to me. He brought me into a world where one could find both happiness and love.” New York, 1975. Jackie Kennedy Onassis begins the final chapter of her life. As the widow Onassis, Jackie is popular and lives a glamorous existence. She is spotted at the best restaurants, at galas, and theater openings with many different escorts.
For the first time, she embraces life as a single woman. But friends see she is adrift without a guiding discipline to absorb her energy. I had lunch with her one day and said, “Listen, you’ve got that brain of yours. Why don’t you use it? You’ve always been terrific with books. Why don’t you work for a publisher?” Using her connections, Jackie gets a job as editor, first at Viking Press, and then at Doubleday in New York.
Having inherited $26 million from the Onassis estate, Jackie doesn’t need the money, but she does need to reinvent herself. She knew that she could make a grand entrance in a dress and shake hands and charm people. What she didn’t know was if people valued her simply for who she was as a person.
And that she finally learned as a late bloomer, really, in her late 40s when she went back into the workforce. Inadvertently, at the age of 46, Jackie once again becomes a new American archetype. A single working woman bringing up a family. Every time Jackie had a goal. And I suppose that even in the the last period, she had a goal.
Contentment may have been the word. Given her love of literature and her early training with Grampy Jack, it’s not long before Jackie earns serious respect as an editor. Her list of authors is impressive, ranging from the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz to America’s Bill Moyers, Diana Vreeland, and Peter Beard.
What really mattered to her was a kind of a personal rich life. Not rich life like rich life, but rich in good books, good conversation, um friends she could trust, I guess. I was very impressed that when we’d have lunch, she would wear trousers with no tights, bare feet, and loafers, and a very, very old beaver coat.
And I thought it was great to have this kind of 20-year-old beaver coat, you know, that was worn at the edges. I mean, that’s true style. It’s not American style, that’s European style. Jackie only seeks out public attention when it serves her ongoing passion for historic preservation. In New York, she turns her attention to Grand Central Station and launches a massive and successful campaign to save it from the wrecker’s ball.
She also preserves the history she helped create by founding the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. It now houses all of the archives of the Kennedy administration. One of the happiest choices that Jackie makes in the last chapter of her life is to pick Maurice Tempelsman as her companion. He is an older, balding, portly, married man, but within that unlikely package, she finds her soulmate and her heart’s desire.
Together they share a love of the arts and a life of simple pleasures. Having had everything, she’s finally realized that the best thing for her was to live a simpler life. In a way, she she ran away from glamour, from beauty to for a steadier, if uh difficult to understand relationship. And uh she was happy that way.
Jackie is diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in February 1994. Characteristically, she greets the news of her fatal illness with stoic courage. “I’m almost glad it happened because it’s given me a second life,” she says. “I laugh and enjoy things so much more.” Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis dies in her apartment in New York on Thursday, May 19th, 1994.
According to her wishes, she is buried beside President Kennedy in Arlington Cemetery. Each year, 5 million visitors pay their respects at the Kennedy grave and the eternal flame still burns as brightly as Jackie’s enduring legacy. Jackie Kennedy, I think, without doubt, left us a legacy of of uh taste. That that, That would be my word for it.
Uh Uh it can take its place in fashion, home decoration, and entertaining. But then also, most particularly, in demeanor. Uh she simply had it. She simply uh carried an aura of of kind of authority of taste. You just knew that what she was doing was right. And uh as such uh it was an example, I think, to to I hope literally millions of people of how one conducts oneself in in this complicated life of ours.
Jackie once said that if you bungle raising your children, whatever else you do well doesn’t matter very much. By her own standards, she was supremely successful. Before his tragic death, John Jr. was the editor of a political magazine called George. Caroline is now a successful lawyer, wife, and mother. As for her personal life, Jackie made sure that no one would ever know anything for sure.
Her will protects the private details of her life. And in the years before her death, Jackie burned many of her personal papers. True to form, Jackie covered her tracks in style. And in the process, saved her dignity and her mystery forever. >> Woo.
