A Lore Unto Herself: Jacqueline Lee ‘Jackie’ Kennedy Onassis

There has never — or so it’s tempting to surmise — been an outfit so chillingly emblematic of its owner as the double-breasted Chanel suit famously worn by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis during the swearing-in as president of Lyndon B. Johnson aboard Air Force One at Dallas Love Field on November 22, 1963. Designed by Chanel but made in candy-pink wool bouclé by the New York outfitter Chez Ninon — thus honouring both the trends that had shaped her when studying in Paris in her youth and the tradition that First Ladies wore clothing made in America — the suit epitomised the classical dynamism at the core of her style smarts. Having just hours earlier been splashed with the blood of her husband, John F. Kennedy, as the pair were transported towards a luncheon at the Dallas Trade Mart in a 1961 Lincoln Continental convertible limousine, it also allegorised so much more that came to define her: loyalty, fortitude, resolve, melancholy dignity, and tragedy. 

But the lens-friendly symbolism encapsulated by a two-piece garment now locked away in a climate-controlled vault at the National Archives in Maryland — imperiously elegant apparel, grotesquely soiled — speaks only of the legend, not the life. The person residing in the collective memory — style icon, tragic-but- stoic widow — is but a heavily abridged version of the woman born Jacqueline Lee Bouvier in Southampton, New York, in 1929. 

The trait that seems to elude most accounts of Jackie (as we’ll call her from here, to avoid the nomenclatural challenges her life entails) is the extraordinary erudition, the cultural perspicacity, that began to reveal themselves in her formative years, spent largely in Manhattan and at the family estate in East Hampton. “I hated dolls, loved horses and dogs, and had skinned knees and braces on my teeth for what must have seemed an interminable length of time to my family,” she once said. “I read a lot when I was little, much of which was too old for me. There were Chekhov and Shaw in the room where I had to take naps — I never slept but sat on the windowsill reading, then scrubbed the soles of my feet so the nurse would not see I had been out of bed.” Tolstoy, Tennyson and Edna St. Vincent Millay were soon regulars on her reading list, and while a French-literature major at George Washington University, aged 21, she studied at the Sorbonne and the Louvre museum’s École du Louvre in her junior year, and later won Vogue’s Prix de Paris competition with an entry that included a treatise on Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Sergei Diaghilev. 

The trait that eludes most accounts is the extraordinary erudition that revealed itself in Jackie’s formative years.

Later, as First Lady, Jackie (no doubt drawing from the dog- eared philosophy and Greek classicism strewn around the White House drawing rooms) took to scribbling notes in the margins of her husband’s speeches and, according to the Hellenic scholar Nancy Sultan, orchestrated an expensive but successful drive to make Washington D.C. the cultural and intellectual nucleus of the country. The image-bolstering effects of her intelligence were not lost on J.F.K., who, as Jackie dazzled Charles de Gaulle with her excellent French in 1961 (she was also fluent in Spanish and Italian), quipped: “I’m the fellow who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris.” He also, at her behest, welcomed the intellectuals Arthur Schlesinger and John Kenneth Galbraith and the cellist and composer Pablo Casals into a hitherto rather ‘jockish’ social life. Years later, during her two-decade career as a literary editor (for Viking Press, then for Doubleday), between endless fundraising parties for the arts, she furthered the careers of Nobel prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz as well as Peter Sís, Dorothy West and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. 

In human affairs, of course, such fierce intelligence is rarely limited to cultivated endeavours, and savvy women of Jackie’s birth and background — Provençal artisans and Bonapartist participants in the Battle of Waterloo on her father’s side; wealthy self-made Irish Catholic immigrants on her mother’s — knew full well that she could climb more rungs on the social ladder by marrying into wealth. And so, in her role as a photographer at the Washington Times-Herald, Jackie wooed a young Massachusetts senator into a marriage that for him, too, was expedient: this debonair, bookish, multilingual young woman from an elite if only modestly wealthy family (her charming drunkard father, Jack Bouvier, was a stockbroker operating during a lengthy Wall Street lull) could certainly facilitate his access into Wasp circles (the one velvet rope he had not by then surmounted). 

Jackie’s second marriage, to Aristotle Onassis, who had been an acquaintance of J.F.K.’s and a love interest of her sister Lee Radziwill, was also, shall we say, opportune. 

Suitors since J.F.K.’s death five years previously had included the banker André
Meyer, Professor Galbraith, the World Bank president Robert McNamara, and the former British ambassador Lord Harlech, but — despite one friend stating, “Jackie, you’re going to fall off your pedestal if you marry him” — she chose the Greek shipping magnate, 23 years her senior, allegedly telling friends she had made her choice to secure stability and refuge overseas for herself and her two surviving children, Caroline and John. Indeed, the dispensability of non-strategic marriages in high society may well be illuminated by the fact that her Belgian-born diamond dealer Maurice Tempelsman, arguably her truest love, has been described in one publication as “her third husband in all but legal terms for the last decade of her life”. 

Much is synopsised in the bloodstained fibres of that pink Chanel suit — the adversity soaked into her life.

Like most supremely intelligent individuals, Jackie was an ambivert. We have the audaciously gregarious Jackie who invited the T.V. cameras into the newly refurbished White House to check out her work; who once strolled into a supermarket, seized the microphone, and announced, “Please carry on with your shopping, but I want to tell you why you should vote for my husband”; and who supposedly interrupted the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev with the words, “Please don’t bore me with statistics” at a formal banquet at the Vienna summit in 1961. Then we have the aloof, diffident Jackie who eschewed the term ‘First Lady’ (“It sounds like a saddle horse”); who jocularly congratulated her sister Lee Radziwill, before their relationship soured, on her prolific procreation as a method of staying out of the limelight; who so craved privacy that, asked by a journalist what her German Shepherd puppy Clipper liked to eat, quipped, “Reporters”, and who later engaged in epic court battles with Ron Galella, the man dubbed the ‘godfather of the U.S. paparazzi culture’; who shunned her first husband’s memorial service on the 20th anniversary of his death because she knew it would become a media frenzy; and whose oversize sunglasses, widely deemed a style statement, actually served as the closest thing to a refuge for a publicity magnet who didn’t want to be a hermit. 

So, yes, much is synopsised in the bloodstained fibres of that pink Chanel suit. Firstly, there is the sheer adversity soaked into the fabric of her life. That began with her parents’ divorce, when she was 10, which saw her father, John — a rakish cove who got too drunk the night before the wedding to walk her down the aisle, but whom she adored nonetheless — leave the family home. There was an endless stream of bereavement from there: John’s death four years into her first marriage; the death of a stillborn child just before the birth by Caesarean section, with another child dying in infancy; and the death of Aristotle Onassis in 1975, when she was still only in her mid forties.

Secondly, there is the sheer loyalty of a woman who eschewed the safe haven on offer to her when the Cuban missile crisis brought the world to the brink of nuclear catastrophe, and instead stood by her husband’s side in the White House; who helped varnish the rather hagiographic way in which her husband’s 1,000 days in office is remembered, with the words, “Don’t let it be forgot that for one brief, shining moment, there was Camelot”; and who executed all of the above while being blithely unconcerned about her husband’s manifest placement of his political career above her, and indeed his multiple infidelities. “In a cheerful but resigned way she told me that, of course, she knew all that,” her close friend Carly Simon, the singer, once recalled. “She just didn’t care so much because she knew Kennedy loved her, more than any of his other affairs.” 

But the suit doesn’t touch on the finer points of Jackie’s psychological architecture — neglected nuances touched on, but rarely probed, in so many of the books about her, and in the excellent 2016 movie in which she is portrayed with apposite grace and nuance by Natalie Portman. Besides those, there is inevitably a swirling ecosystem of rumours, too: of imminent divorces and a hefty sum paid by her first spouse’s father on top of significant sums paid by the Kennedys for Jackie to play her role in a picture-perfect (and therefore White House- worthy) family unit; of a one- night stand with supposed serial monogamist Paul Newman in 1968, as well as dalliances with Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra and even J.F.K.’s married brother Robert F. Kennedy; of marriage contract clauses including frequency of sex; and of abusive behaviour by her second husband. 

The only person to have walked the Earth who will ever know the full truth spent the last chapter of her extraordinary life flitting between manageable exposure in the vicinity of her Fifth Avenue apartment and blissful privacy on her 400-acre estate at Martha’s Vineyard, devoting much of her time to her grandchildren. When that Chanel suit is finally put on public display — in 2103, per her daughter Caroline’s instructions in a deed of gift in 2003 — beholders will be glimpsing but a piece of a vast, complicated jigsaw. 

Read the full story in Issue 98, available now.

Photo Credits: Getty Images