What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?
On the one hand, she sued William Manchester over “Death of a President,” his masterful account of the assassination of her first husband, former President John F. Kennedy, and was known to exile emotionally those who cooperated with articles and/or books about her and her family (her children’s nanny Maud Shaw, her baby brother Jamie Auchincloss).
On the other hand, she was the “Camera Girl” of the title of another Jackie summer tome, this one by Carl Sferrazza Anthony (Gallery Books, $29.99, 379 pages), the “Inquiring Camera Girl,” that is, for the Washington Times-Herald, asking cheeky questions of people on the street, including a young Sen. John F. Kennedy. Later, as an editor at Viking Press and then Doubleday & Co. she aggressively pursued everyone from Michael Jackson to Martha Graham for memoirs that spilled the beans. “What’s the point of biography,” Taraborrelli says she told him, “if it doesn’t reveal secrets?”
Like most of us, Jackie liked other people’s secrets. Her own, she expected to keep. Indeed, we can see her as Taraborrelli describes her, ensconced in the lime and red bedroom of her apartment at 1040 Fifth Ave., her breakfast tray laden with books, magazines, newspapers and, yes, the tabloids.
As Taraborrelli’s title suggests, he purports to dish secrets, and even inveterate Jackie watchers, who thought there was nothing left to say, will find fresh meat here that contradicts the conventions of the American “Camelot” that Jackie conjured with historian Theodore White after JFK’s death. According to Taraborrelli, it was Jackie’s younger sister Lee — beautiful, less reserved — to whom JFK was first attracted. But their mother — the steely Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, who had been raised and raised her girls to marry well, meaning rich — and a friend whose husband admired Jackie a little too much conspired to align Jackie’s and JFK’s destinies. This in turn would set up a kind of heir-and-spare relationship between Jackie and Lee that would leave the kid sister always in the shadow of her charismatic sibling.
Lee and the love the sisters shared, along with the jealousy, get better treatment elsewhere as Taraborrelli has other fields to furrow. One of the more startling revelations is the extent to which money drove Jackie’s life. This is not meant as a criticism but the inevitable consequence of a woman growing up in a society in which women traded their beauty, their sex appeal — in her case, her Jackie-ness — for a secure life and more. “Money is power,” Taraborrelli quotes her as observing, “and I want both.”
The only trouble is that in such a time and place men could and did withhold money from women as a kind of power over them. They still do. Grumpy Grampy James Lee was a skinflint. Daddy John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III was a ne’er-do-well, alcoholic, philandering stockbroker who nonetheless adored his girls. Stepfather Hugh D. Auchincloss, a real father figure to Jackie, Lee and even JFK, didn’t make any financial provisions for the Bouvier sisters. Adored and adoring father-in-law Joseph P. Kennedy was willing to pay, depositing $100,000 in Jackie’s bank account the day she gave birth to first surviving child Caroline, according to Taraborrelli. Still, the Kennedys were, shall we say, frugal. (There’s a great scene in which wife Rose decides not to serve baked potatoes for the lobster dinner, because they would use too much electricity baking in the oven.)
It wasn’t until she married wily Aristotle Onassis — who emerges as a surprisingly sympathetic figure looking for love, particularly when son Alexander died after a plane crash — that Jackie’s money problems were solved. (Her portfolio would be nurtured by diamond magnate and businessman Maurice Tempelsman, her last long-term relationship. According to the book, this was a platonic relationship as was her marriage to Ari, who was still seeing opera diva Maria Callas with Jackie’s blessing.)
Jackie had a pragmatic code about sex — no nooky with married men, no playing around while married and sometimes no fooling around with a husband you weren’t attracted to. She apparently had lovers. (The book spends a little too much time on pining architect John “Jack” Warnecke, who has lots to say but would’ve never been in the husband sweepstakes, because he was in debt.) And yet, the woman who supposedly deferred to JFK like a good wife is quoted as saying of men: “They can only do so much.” Ouch.
It is rather her relationships with women — the distant, contrary Lee; boisterous Kennedy sister-in-law Ethel and fragile sister-in-law Joan; tragic baby sister Janet Auchincloss Jr.; beloved mother-in-law Rose, whom Jackie called “Belle Mère”; warm-hearted Lady Bird Johnson, wife of JFK’s vice president and successor, Lyndon B. Johnson; and, above all, hypercritical, controlling but fiercely protective tiger mother Janet — that give the book its emotional drive. The Jackie who emerges here, though self-centered, imperious and occasionally vindictive, is also loving, thoughtful, familial and capable of generosity.
She’s also just terrific at tragedy — decisive, empathetic, with just the right words, touch, images. On Nov. 22, 1963 and the three days that followed, she held herself, her family and a nation together.
The Jackie nobody knew, however, was falling apart inside. Whatever the transactional origins of her marriage to JFK, she never got over him or the trauma of his death. And she blamed herself for that, as if grief were something from which you move on. But you don’t move on. You go forward, as she did.
Her great quality, her courage, her gift to the nation and why we still obsess about her was her ability to go on amid the darkness, facing death from non-Hodgkins lymphoma on May 19, 1994, without self-pity. For all his dishing, Taraborrelli is a compassionate storyteller. Here he is on her at the end:
“Every day, she’d move steadily forward, just as she always had. (Journalist friend) Pete Hamill put it best: ‘She hung the celebrity in the closet and lived her life. She could’ve lived out her days in exile in Europe…She chose instead to live in New York City, a city as wounded as she was.’”