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    The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words
    The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words
    The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words
    Ebook174 pages2 hours

    The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words

    By Bill Adler

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    About this ebook

    As her own words prove well, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis could be at times funny, buoyant, candid, irreverent, and of course poignant, too. This collection of quotes shares her thoughts on marriage, family, political life and ambition, publicity, privacy, and more as she confided them to intimate friends, family, and interviewers alike.

    Memories of her childhood, her love for Jack, her children and grandchildren, the Kennedys, her often misunderstood marriage to Aristotle Onassis, her years as a widow, and her later companionship with Maurice Tempelsman are all represented here, as are some rather remarkable correspondences with the Johnsons, the Nixons, and the Khrushchevs.

    A sampling of her wit and wisdom:

    • "I was a tomboy. I decided to learn to dance and I became feminine."

    • "Well, I think my biggest achievement is that, after going through a rather difficult time, I consider myself comparatively sane."

    • "When Harvard men say they have graduated from Radcliffe, then we've made it."

    • "If Jack proved to be the greatest president of the century and his children turned out badly, it would be a tragedy."

    Forty years ago, when the nation was coming out from under a period of mourning, Bill Adler edited The Kennedy Wit and in so doing helped the world remember a man and a president, not just a sorrowful event. To commemorate the tenth anniversary of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's death, he has edited yet another book of quotes celebrating life -- this time the life of Jackie.

    The accompanying DVD documentary is considered by many to be the definitive film biography of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and was produced by CBS News Productions for Arts & Entertainment Network.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateOct 13, 2009
    ISBN9780061873638
    The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: A Portrait in Her Own Words
    Author

    Bill Adler

    Bill Adler is the editor of four New York Times bestselling books, including The Kennedy Wit, and is also the president of Bill Adler Books, Inc., a New York literary agency whose clients have included Mike Wallace, Dan Rather, President George W. Bush, Bob Dole, Larry King, and Nancy Reagan.

    Read more from Bill Adler

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      Book preview

      The Eloquent Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis - Bill Adler

      THE EARLY YEARS

      Childhood

      When Jackie was just four years old, she, her newborn sister, Lee, and their nanny went for a stroll in Central Park. A short while into their walk, Jackie wandered off. Just as a police officer spotted her walking alone, she stepped up to him and said firmly, My nurse and baby sister seem to be lost.

      Even at an early age, Jackie loved to read and write verse. The following is an excerpt from a childhood poem written in anticipation of Christmas:

      Christmas is coming

      Santa Claus is near

      Reindeer hooves will soon be drumming

      On the roof tops loud and clear.

      About her early reading choices, Jackie once said: I lived in New York City until I was thirteen and spent the summers in the country. 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. 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 and 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. My heroes were Byron, Mowgli, Robin Hood, Little Lord Fauntleroy’s grandfather, and Scarlett O’Hara.

      Jackie also recalled learning French as a child while sitting around the dining room table: When we were children our mother used to make us play a game. We sat at the table and every child had in front of them ten matches. Each time you said an English word, you’d throw a match away. [The winner held the last match.]

      On yet another defining moment in her childhood, Jackie has said, I was a tomboy. I decided to learn to dance and I became feminine.

      School Days

      Young Jacqueline Bouvier attended Chapin (elementary) School on the Upper East Side in Manhattan, and as loved ones recall, she was often sent to see the headmistress. Her mother once asked, What happens when you’re sent to Miss Stringfellow?

      Well, I go to the office and Miss Stringfellow says, ‘Jacqueline, sit down. I’ve heard bad reports about you.’ I sit down. Then Miss Stringfellow says a lot of things—but I don’t listen.

      She spent her high school days at Miss Porter’s, where she once wrote to a Farmington friend: I just know no one will ever marry me and I’ll end up as a house mother at Farmington.

      When she graduated from Miss Porter’s in 1947 at age eighteen, she wrote in the class yearbook under Ambition in Life: Not to be a housewife.

      Jacqueline referred fondly to Miss Helen Shearman, who taught Latin at the Holton-Arms School, where Jacqueline studied for two years, and who also had a reputation for being somewhat demanding: But she was right. We were all lazy teenagers. Everything she taught me stuck, and though I hated to admit it, I adored Latin.

      All my great interests—in literature and art, Shakespeare and poetry—were formed because I was fortunate enough to find superb teachers in these fields."

      Reminiscing about her transition into adulthood, she said, It happened gradually over the three years I spent at boarding school trying to imitate girls who had callers every Saturday. I passed the finish line when I learned to smoke, in the balcony of the Normandie theater in New York from a girl who pressed a Longfellow upon me then led me from the theater when the usher told her that other people could not hear the film with so much coughing going on. Growing up was not so hard.

      College Days

      Jacqueline Bouvier attended Vassar College for two years, then spent her junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris and her senior year at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

      During a summer session at the University of Grenoble (where she was enrolled in a six-week intensive language-arts course prior to her year at the Sorbonne), she lived with a French family and wrote home: They just grow on you so—they get nicer every day and open up to us and treat us like members of the family. We all laugh hysterically through meals and the mother is so good-natured. They are of the old aristocracy and hard up now and have to take in students.

      She also recalled the kindness of the French students at the University of Grenoble:

      They helped us with our compositions. I wrote mine in halting French and my friend did it all over. It really was very hard and they all took it so seriously and searched for words to use—it was really so nice of them to take all that trouble with some dumb foreigner who couldn’t do her homework.

      At age twenty-one, Jackie entered a contest, sponsored by Vogue, for a chance to win a trip to Paris. The following is an excerpt from the essay she submitted describing how her prior travels through Europe had influenced her:

      Being away from home gave me a chance to look at myself with a jaundiced eye. I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide, and I came home glad to start in here again but with a love for Europe that I am afraid will never leave me.

      While studying at the Sorbonne, she and Claude de Renty, the daughter of her landlady, took a trip together in 1950: I had the most terrific vacation in Austria and Germany. We really saw what it was like with the Russians with Tommy guns in Vienna. We saw Vienna and Salzburg and Berchtesgaden where Hitler lived: Munich and the Dachau concentration camp….

      Photographs unavailable for electronic edition

      About that same trip, she wrote: It’s so much more fun traveling second and third class and sitting up all night in trains, as you really get to know people and hear their stories. When I traveled before it was all too luxurious and we didn’t see anything.

      They made several side trips in southern France:

      I just can’t tell you what it is like to come down from the mountains of Grenoble to this flat, blazing plain where seven-eighths of all you see is hot blue sky—and there are rows of poplars at the edge of every field to protect the crops from the mistral and spiky short palm trees with blazing red flowers growing at their feet. The people here speak with the lovely twang of the ‘accent du Midi.’ They are always happy as they live in the sun and love to laugh. It was heartbreaking to only get such a short glimpse of it all—I want to go back and soak it all up. The part I want to see is la Camargue—a land in the Rhone delta which is flooded by the sea every year and they have a ceremony where they all wade in on horses and bless it—La Bénédiction de la Mer—gypsies live there and bands of little Arab horses and they raise wild bulls.

      Jackie’s Mother

      Jackie’s mother, Janet Lee, married Jackie’s father, John B. Black Jack Bouvier, on July 7, 1928. Jacqueline Bouvier was born a year later, on July 28, 1929, at Southampton Hospital on Long Island. Her sister, Caroline Lee (called Lee), was born three and a half years later on March 3, 1933. The marriage foundered, and the parents separated in 1936, attempted a short-lived reconciliation in 1937, and finally divorced in 1940. In 1942 Janet married Hugh D. Auchincloss. The union produced two children, Janet, born in 1945, and Jamie, born in 1947. Auchincloss also had three children from previous marriages, Hugh III (Yusha), Nina, and Thomas.

      During Jackie’s junior year at the Sorbonne, she told her stepbrother Hugh Auchincloss: I have to write Mummy a ream each week or she gets hysterical and thinks I’m dead or married to an Italian.

      When her mother and stepfather had been married for a decade, Jacqueline, then twenty-three, wrote a series of poems, each spotlighting an event made possible only by their marriage. Her introduction read: It seems so hard to believe that you’ve been married ten years. I think they must have been the very best decade of your lives. At the start, in 1942, we all had other lives and we were seven people thrown together, so many little separate units that could have stayed that way. Now we are nine—and what you’ve given us and what we’ve shared has bound us all to each other for the rest of our lives.

      Jackie’s Father

      John B. Black Jack Bouvier was a stockbroker whose finances were as erratic as the stock market. Jacqueline adored him, and they maintained a close relationship, even after her parents separated and then divorced.

      Bouvier often visited Jacqueline at Miss Porter’s School: All my Farmington friends loved Daddy. He’d take batches of us out to luncheon at the Elm Tree Inn. Everybody ordered steaks and two desserts. We must have eaten him broke.

      The following is a poem Jackie had written for her father:

      I love walking on the angry shore

      To watch the angry sea

      Where summer people were before,

      And now there’s only me.

      When Jackie’s father died in 1957, she planned his funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. She chose garlands of daisies in white wicker baskets, saying, I want everything to look like a summer garden.

      Jackie’s Sister, Lee

      Jackie said of her sister: Lee was always the pretty one. I guess I was supposed to be the smart one.

      Jacqueline also once complained to a friend: "Lee is so dippy about Jack

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