Wilma Flintstone of the popular cartoon series went shopping in a department store in one 1962 episode – and couldn’t help herself from envying a hat and clothes in the new “Jackie Kennelrock” look.
From the time she stepped onto the world stage as the spouse of the Democratic presidential candidate in 1960, the public persona of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy immediately began to solidify, the finer details planed away as she was shaped by the media into a modern-day American Cleopatra.
Being unusually young, wearing her brown hair in a bubble-shaped flipped-curled style, and possessing the seemingly rarified backstory of an Eastern seaboard debutante who was college-educated in Paris, dressed in haute couture, went fox-hunting and waterskiing, devoured volumes of history and spoke several languages, it wasn’t long before that persona became a caricature.
And while she was compared to a movie star and a form of Yankee royalty, Jackie Kennedy’s formal claim to fame was the unofficial position of First Lady of the United States, always making her ultimately a political figure and thus a subject of interest to editorial cartoonists.
And it wasn’t long before the nation’s creators of playing cards, comic books and satirical coloring books soon followed with their own Jackie Kennedy cartoons.
Here then, in the first of a series of articles to be published over the next two or so weeks, is a look at how, half a century ago, the nation awoke to its coffee and opened its newspapers, and had a chuckle about the latest take on what “that girl” (as her predecessor Mamie Eisenhower called her) in the White House was doing for the Administration.
The caricaturing of this First Lady did not end with the 1963 death of her President. As she went on into widowhood, and then a controversial second marriage, a second widowhood and then a busy professional and social life in New York City until her 1994 death, every move by Jackie Kennedy Onassis was captured by the pointed pen of social satirists.
There is a total here of some 42 cartoons and caricatures of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the first such curated collection. Most of the cartoons from the early 1960s have not been seen publicly since being initially published during the Kennedy Administration.
Initially, the media cast her, as it largely still does, by her clothes. Specifically, the cost of her trademark fashions. During a presidential campaign, the whiff of extravagance posed a dire image problem for any candidate, and the press gleefully cooked up the idea that Jackie Kennedy and the Republican presidential candidate’s spouse Pat Nixon were in a war of fabric: who spent more, who bought from more expensive stores, who had a more cutting-edge style. By October of 1960, the “election” between Jackie and Pat had reached ridiculous proportions, leading Mrs. Kennedy to later quip in exasperation, ”
A 1960 cartoon spoofed the media obsession of comparing the cost of clothes between presidential candidate spouses Jackie Kennedy and Pat Nixon.
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After the new First Lady joined the President on his first state visit to Europe, with stops in Paris, Vienna and London, this London cartoon sought to sum up oJackie Kennedy as the beacon of modern American democracy – in a gown by Givency and holding a copy of Vogue magazine.
A famous Parisian newspaper cartoon poking fun at de Gaulle’s infatuation with Mrs. Kennedy.
Jackie Kennedy’s independent goodwill mission to India in the spring of 1962 left some of its citizens in a near state of worship of her.
After Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev personally encountered a far more acerbic Jackie Kennedy than he’d imagined, her popularity seemed a more formidable Cold War propaganda factor.
As suggested in this cartoon referencing a pejorative stereotype, After the Kennedys received a warm reception in the South and Central American nations they visited – especially Venezuela, where it was feared they would not – some political observers credited it to the spontaneous emotional reaction of crowds to the First Lady, rather than the President.
After both of the President’s brothers made policy-related goodwill foreign trips, Jackie Kennedy’s own trips – which were part of a State Department strategy approved by Secretary of State Dean Rusk to win non-aligned nations to American loyalty by “attraction” rather than military threat, were also credited for popularizing the Administration.
While her passion for books and reading hardly engendered the same degree of interest as her appearance, this cartoon made clear that Jackie Kennedy prevailed over a family of readers.
After Jackie Kennedy persuaded the French government to loan the iconic Mona Lisa painting, the President was seen as being shaken up a bit that his wife seemed to have more influence over President DeGaulle than he did.
Here the little children of the White House are shown saying their prayers for world leaders, as if they were family members – as well as their absent, globe-trotting father and mother.
On a pack of satirical playing cards, Jackie Kennedy was turned into the Queen of Hearts.
The “Kennedy Coloring Book” showed Jackie Kennedy with all her trademark touches.
A political satire version of a book about Caroline Kennedy’s dolls gently lampoons Jackie as the nation’s hostess.
Another page of the satirical Kennedy doll book, spoofs Jackie’s fashions being exclusively designed by Oleg Cassini – who is seen as yet another doll of the Administration.
Jackie Kennedy was used as a character in a comic book about an odd boy named Herbie, placing a Buddha statue in the East Room.
In another comic book, the First Lady greets characters by inexplicably giving them a model of a Viking ship.
Perhaps not quite the fantasy depicted in this comic book version of Jackie Kennedy, she swoons over her husband.
The stylistic influences that Jackie Kennedy had over the average American housewife was seen as even moving them to get their little sons sons a bowl-cut hair style as Jackie Kennedy did for her son John.
Converging the news that Jackie Kennedy was pregnant with another child and that it was predicted a Pope in the near future would break historic precedence by not being Italian, had Swiss Guards concluding that one of the Catholic Kennedys would soon take over the Vatican itself.
“There goes those Kennedys, looking on the bright side again,” two storks commiserate; In an era when the globe was brought to the brink of nuclear war, Jackie Kennedy’s pregnancy was seen as a signal of political optimism for the near future state of the world.
Shortly after their infant son Patrick died, the Kennedys celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary – and then Jackie was off to Europe again on her own. The cartoon suggests that the couple themselves must be growing weary of such a peripatetic marriage. “It’s been ten years Jack,” runs the caption, “When are we going to settle down.”
The American First Lady’s image was everywhere – or so it seemed, as this cartoon implies.
The First Lady’s popularity was not just with women and foreigners. An average American working guy confesses to his bartender over a drink at the bar, “Ive got a crush on Jacqueline Kennedy,”
With the President’s first brother serving as Attorney General and then the ascendance of his second brother Teddy assuming his seat in the U.S. Senate in 1963, the notion of the “Kennedy Dynasty” was born, with Jackie Kennedy’s popularity being perceived as a credible asset that translated into growing support of the family’s political fortunes.
As 1963 proceeded, her global fame was such that, as this cartoon suggests, the sun rose and set on Jackie as part of the Kennedy team with Jack.
Cartoonist Jim Dobbins, who used Jackie Kennedy as a figure in many of his earlier works focusing on her impact on foreign affairs, published this image forecasting the role of Texas in the 1964 election.
After the presidential widow moved to New York, she became extremely upset when a woman’s magazine published an article “Jackie Kennedy’s Manhattan” along with a map of where she and her children lived out their new lives. Her agitation was not about the cartoons of her, but the revelation of the details of her private life.
Jackie Kennedy’s 1968 remarriage to Aristotle Onassis horrified those who considered his appearance and lifestyle as inappropriate for what she continued to symbolize to them. So began more eviscerating caricaturing of her, as in the cartoon cover of a comedy album depicting her and Ari.
With the shipping magnate Onassis jokingly nicknaming his wife Jackie Kennedy as “Supertanker,” the cartoon here morphs the former First Lady into a bit of a hardware asset now owned by Onassis.
Jackie’s husband was not spared the cartoonist’s pen either, depicted here entertaining on his famous yacht.
When the former First Lady was surreptitiously snapped sunbathing nude, she appeared again on a satirical deck of cards, this time as a nearly naked Queen of Spades.
A rather leering visage of Mrs. Onassis was used as the recurring image on another deck of playing cards.
Jackie Onassis was included among a group of other popular New York nightlife celebrities, including Donald Trump, Carole Channing and Jackie Mason by famous cartoonist Hirshfeld.
A 1975 caricature of the former First Lady at a Kennedy family tennis tournament five months after the death of Onassis, signaled her return to the fold of the President’s family and full-time residency again in the United States.
In the fall of 1975, Jackie Kennedy Onassis was caricatured in a more positive light when she returned to work for the first time in 22 years, starting her career as a book publishing editor.
Now a familiar figure among the crowd of lunching publishing professionals at many of New York’s most popular midday spots, this Hirshfeld Jackie Onassis removes and gestures with her removed trademark sunglasses.
Depicted again by Hirshfeld at a time when she had genuinely proven herself in the new identity of an urban historical landmark preservation activist; she is depicted in her Fifth Avenue apartment.
A final caricature of Jackie Onassis towards the end of her life suggests the weariness of spending so much of life having to smile for the public cameras.
A cartoon appearing at the time of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s death in 1994, referencing the strongest association of her long public life, that with the legend of Camelot which she invoked thirty years earlier in a romanticization of her late husband’s brief presidency.
Even posthumously, the former First Lady was familiar enough to be caricatured. This New Yorker image was used in reference to her diamond earrings, one of the many objects of curiosity sold at the public 1996 Sotheby’s auction of her possessions.
As recently as 2011, an editorial cartoon of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis appeared, this one in reference to the release of her 1964 oral history taped interviews during which she unreservedly voiced her often sharp view on many public figures of the era.
Lastly, here’s a video with both still and moving images of the early 1960s pop culture Jacqueline Kennedy inspired as First Lady, set to a rock-and-roll garage-band’s original composition, issued on a 45, entitled appropriately enough, “The Jackie Look.”
Categories: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, The Kennedys
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