JACKIE LIVES

And what did she do to merit this furor? Nothing, except be herself. 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. 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.

The first American example appeared early in this century with Alice Roosevelt, a blue-eyed blonde with a delicate face and an imperious manner. “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 . . . were written for her. Because of her, more girls were called Alice than any other name. 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. . . . 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.

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. All these women have things in common: personality traits, overlapping experiences, the way they came to fame. Each was an essentially private woman who became known through her relation to a public man. And each sustained that fame on her own.

All three were beautiful, photogenic, magnetic, stylish, and spoiled; willful, acquisitive, resilient, and canny. And yet, they often seemed unsettled and restless as well, with an aura of sorrow. They were self-centered and frequently generous. They were feminine, with whims of iron. They were world-famous beauties who could not keep their husbands faithful. They are fairy tales, cautionary tales, and morality tales rolled into one.

Each of these women was born rich, but none of them grew up in a happy home with both natural parents. 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. 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. Jackie’s parents fought constantly and divorced when she was eleven. Diana’s mother bolted when the girl was six, and a wicked stepmother assumed the reins at home.

Each married young, to an older man, and their marriages soon faltered. They had to contend with unsympathetic, sometimes openly hostile in-laws. Alice married a man who, Collier says, was a “legend of debauchery in Congress.” Jacqueline Bouvier did the same. 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.

Each had a way of pre-empting the spotlight. The royal marriage first became rocky on foreign visits, when crowds clamored for Diana instead of the prince. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy to Paris,” said John Kennedy in 1961. In 1905, Teddy Roosevelt included his daughter in an eighty-man delegation to the Far East. 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.”

After their first marriages ended, Diana and Jackie took up with men widely seen as unsuitable (perhaps seeking vengeance on their previous in-laws). For both women, the second matches were the keys to the kingdom of shopping. Accounts of what Diana and Jackie spent soon surfaced in tabloids, but, as usual, Alice had gotten there first. 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. . . . How would you like Archie [her half-brother] to give up college to pay your debts?”

These high-maintenance women all enjoyed the high life, associating with the kind of people Teddy Roosevelt called “the malefactors of great wealth.” Alice’s father objected to his daughter’s spending time with the children of the robber barons he was supposed to be fighting. Similarly, John Kennedy had been made uneasy by Jackie’s cruise on the Onassis yacht, the Christina, in October 1963.

Self-denial was not among their virtues, but they all had deeper, more serious sides. Diana and Jackie raised their children well under difficult circumstances. 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. Diana, at home in the world of Gianni Versace, visited the world of Mother Teresa and raised funds for her causes. These contrasts merely cranked up public interest: Which of all these were the dominant aspects? Which, in the end, would win out?

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis showed the world four faces: the delicate girl turned first lady; the dark tragic queen of the Kennedy funeral; the trophy wife of Onassis, dripping in rubies; and the single working mother in New York. Just when the public was sure it had pegged her, another face emerged. 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. The public had an unending fascination with her days and her nights, her clothes and her houses, her children and her men. Especially her men.

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. 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. They didn’t in the end because she cost too much to maintain. Having failed to marry one man that she loved because he couldn’t afford her, she then married the one man who could.

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. There is Onassis himself. Tina, his neurotic first wife who died at forty-five under mysterious circumstances. Christina, his suicidal and neurotic daughter who died under her own mysterious circumstances at thirty-eight. Maria Callas, his neurotic and heartbroken mistress who died at age fifty-three, perhaps of sorrow. And Alexander, his difficult son who died in a plane crash at twenty-four.

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. Klein and Moutsatsos agree that the marriage with Onassis began with real affection. They also agree it was odd. The groom immediately returned to his mistress. The bride stayed with her children in America. 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 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. Onassis, after the rain of tragic deaths that visited him, focused on Jackie as the source of his troubles. 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.

At age forty-six, a widowed Alice Roosevelt Longworth left her husband’s Ohio forever. (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.) She returned home to Washington to pursue her one true calling: her profession of being herself.

At much the same age, Jackie Onassis came back to Manhattan to do much the same thing. 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.

For the first time, she was free of money anxieties, of the many demands of her difficult in-laws, of ambitious and unfaithful men. 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 last beau, Maurice Templesman, was a millionaire, but a far more low-keyed one, who seemed to care more about her than her image. He was with her when she died in 1994, still very much an American princess. 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.

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. Was her playboy boyfriend, Dodi, a phase? Would she have joined the jet set completely? Married a barrister? Joined a religious order? Settled down on a farm? 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.

No other royal provoked the hysteria that Diana did, but no other royal had her contradictions. No other first lady roused the frenzies that Jackie did, but no other first lady lived her life. 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).

She was not a candidate for sainthood, as all her biographies make clear. “Jackie is too much of an egotist,” said Onassis’s sister (who liked her).

And yet, when it mattered, Jackie was there. An ethereal fantasist, she was nonetheless at her best when things were rough, and she did not abandon people in trouble. 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. 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.

“But what has she ever done?” Stalin’s daughter asked when, after fleeing Russia, she met Alice Roosevelt Long-worth. But to put it this way is to misconstrue the whole matter. At this level, one doesn’t have to do, just be. Be beautiful and sad, be complex and resilient, be willful, be charming, be strong.

This is life as a novel. It offers vicarious thrills in the heroine’s spending sprees, yachts, clothes, and jewels. 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. In the midst of the most unpredictable plot, it gives us the most satisfyingly predictable story.

In her later years, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had trouble believing that her life had really happened, or at any rate, had happened to her. Who can blame her? As an editor, she would have turned down a book that unlikely. Only real life can create such a saga. “Tell us a story,” we ask of these women. And they do.

 

Edward Klein

Just Jackie

Her Private Years

Ballantine, 384 pp., $ 25.95

 

Kiki Feroudi Moutsatsos

The Onassis Women

An Eyewitness Account

Putnam, 368 pp., $ 25.95

 

Christopher Anderson

Jackie After Jack

Portrait of the Lady

Warner, 560 pp., $ 7.50 paper

 

Laurence Leamer

The Kennedy Women

The Saga of an American Family

Ballantine, 796 pp., $ 16 paper

A frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, Noemie Emery lives in Alexandria, Virginia.