Her greatest art form was her life.
Her full name was Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, but from the start she was always just “Jackie” to both those who genuinely knew her as a real person, and to those who felt they truly knew her, so closely was she followed in the news for both the large, important events that she impacted and the small, mundane moments of her existence.
More than half a century has passed since she first entered the public imagination and nearly a quarter of a century since her death, but the single-word name of “Jackie” still conjures her visual image to not just those who read about and saw her pictures when she was alive, but now just as strongly among those born long after she was making news simply for being Jackie.
Why does this person endure or matter?
Beyond Labels
She was known first to the closed world of East Coast “High Society,” when she was named “Deb of the Year” in the late 1940s.
Cameragirl….
Soon after, her name was associated with both poignancy, wit and a sense of the ridiculous to residents of the nation’s capital city in the early 1950s who ready the daily edition of the long-gone newspaper Washington Times-Herald where she wrote six days a week as that publication’s “Inquiring Cameragirl” columnist.
The American nation largely embraced her as “First Lady” during the early 1960s tenure of her husband John F. Kennedy’s tenure as President, and so too did those European, Middle Eastern, South American countries she made goodwill trips to as a symbol of the United States.
With her remarriage to global millionaire businessman Aristotle Onassis, and her adventures to the far corners of the earth, the world soon knew her as “Jackie O,” a cheeky moniker.
Yet she has somehow not just endured as a figure of powerful interest, but well into the 21st century her life story seems to thrive. There are always new books on her, new documentaries and dramas.
Living on.
Jackie lingers in a way that seems to surpass the impression of President Kennedy.
This may be due less to the fact that the abrupt end of his relatively young life affixed and confined him in a place and time that today’s technology and conduct seems to now further us from more rapidly, and more to do with her more abstract timelessness.
She survived the tragedy; he did not.
She had to figure out how to not just live on, but make sense of her existence.
Jackie’s philosophical remarks, most often in writings that have since become public or expressed freely to those who knew her well, in combination with her formidable intelligence, wisdom and insight seem to make her observations acute, almost naive at times in stating often-unspoken obviousness. Yet somehow, what she said remains relevant to those who weren’t living her particular life.
Her experiences were utterly, uniquely hers; but what she took away from them remain relatable to anyone dealing with the challenge, jubilance, confusion and kookiness of just living.
It was the result of conscious living. With all of her interest in the fine and performing arts, and all those she knew at the top of their crafts, one can see that own her best work of original art was how she lived.
Imaginative Creative
Insistent Individualism…
From her earliest days, Jackie was a creative, conceiving new venues to express timeless truths, innovating with such fresh expression that she helped erase the lines between the centuries to highlight what most endures about human life.
She resisted and resented the classification and demographic tactics that seek to summarize a person, labeling, pinning and boxing them up as nothing more than a set of statistical data.
With ferocity, she defended her right to be an Individual and to continue to create herself.
While writing was her primary form of self-expression, she also painted in watercolors and oils, danced, drew cartoons and sketched in pencil and ink, edited.
She was not an architect or fashion designer or painter or actress or even a psychologist.
Designing herself….
She was a little bit of it all.
For all the hype about her clothes, the cut and cloth are less important elements than the fact that she began adapting and designing what she wore, working personally with couturiers by providing sketches of what she envisioned herself wearing.
While this did take on importance for her “state trousseau” as First Lady, she had been doing this long before her husband’s presidency or even marrying him, at least since 1951.
In her head about even what was on it…
And when she did it for what she knew would be large, public occasions, she referenced historical figures, from painting and even ancient sculpture.
All of her “style” was rooted in “substance.”
So what?
Single-name creatives in many artistic fields prized their individualism, some of whom she knew and some of whom served as role models for her: Hemingway, Picasso, Scavullo, Nureyev, Fellini.
It would be easy to dismiss her sensibilities as those afforded by her well-groomed, well-educated, well-mannered social background.
To the connoisseurs of such things, however, there are many other women of her class and era with equal or more exquisite tastes in clothes, architecture and interior design, a finer hand at drawing and painting, even penmanship, a more absorbing knowledge of dance, music, theater and film, and on and on.
To historians, there are other wives who endured much to give more, like Eleanor Roosevelt, or faced a permanently altered mental state from witnessing trauma, like Mary Lincoln.
It isn’t the facts of her biography that make her who she became, it was how she refused to permit those facts to confine her thinking and choices. What makes Jackie a worthy study for people of all ages, genders, races, or other confining labels and demographics is the larger sense of Individualism that came to lead all of her sensibilities and thus shape her very existence.
She showed this inclination early. It deepened with her self-preserving need to emotionally shore herself up after the daily public accounts of her parents’ acrimonious divorce proceedings. It became a matter of survival after experiencing a trauma that few human beings could ever mentally survive.
Nightmare, Evolution, Empathy
The component that so many of the accomplished lacked yet which she possessed and, ultimately, defined her more distinctly, was her empathetic encouragement of others to do unto themselves as she did for herself.
Always observing….
Not to look to her or any other celebrity and mimic the way they speak, act and look but rather, if necessary, to find a person they admire and emulate the way they evolved, inwardly.
To invest in their own lives.
She even stated that people shouldn’t be copying her clothing style; rather, they should be focused on developing a style uniquely for themselves.
There is a distinct arc to her growing and deepening empathy for others.
Her work at the newspaper opened her eyes to the thriving working-class and government employees that kept Washington running.
Campaigning for her husband’s presidency exposed her for the first time to those surviving in poverty, an experience all the more intensified when she began visiting non-European nations as First Lady.
Sitting beside another person, let alone one’s own spouse, being killed by a gunshot wound that shatters a skull and, further, having their brain tissue and blood splatter on their own face, and into their own mouth, eyes and nose is beyond comprehension.
Always thinking…
And then, for that moment to be permanently captured in still and moving images, and replayed perhaps millions of times – how does a person ever truly recover from the reality of such a nightmare?
What kind of interior life must one have, what sort of unconscious strength must one call up to then move on from such a pinpoint of time forward, into a rich and full existence?
One way of doing it is by starting to look outward, at the lives of others. To me, the single most defining vignette of Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s life is one told to me by her friend Kitty Carlisle Hart, about the presidential widow asking that she bring her to a Queens veterans’ hospital, right into the trauma unit to visit young American soldiers who’d been brought straight from the killing fields of the Vietnam War, who had lost arms, legs, parts of their faces, shrieking, freaking, sobbing, inconsolable, incoherent.
Hart recalled hauntingly how for nearly two hours she watched Jackie go up to these men, one by one in their hospital beds, to hold, kiss, and touch, unrestrained in expressing a silent, compassionate unity with them. She shook when she saw Jackie gently place her lips for a long time on the bandaged wound of a man who’d been shot in the same part of the head where the President had been.
Enroute to the VA Hospital in Queens.
Most of the men, Hart recalled, were unable to make out just who this person comforting them was; what mattered was how this person was.
In the otherwise silent drive back into Manhattan, Jackie piped up only once: getting out and seeing what others must forever endure helps remind “a person” that they are never really alone in having to live with what they must, and that others often have greater challenges than oneself.
So often, in her verbal and written expression, Jackie refused to use the word “I,” instead employing the word “one.” It is always suggested she employed this more remote expression as a reflection of upper-class formality; that is true. Yet given the context of her own experiences, it is also less a impersonal tactic intended to put distance between herself and others but, in fact, an abstraction speaking to being part of a larger experience.
Born on July 28, 1929, were she still alive, Jackie would be celebrating her 88th birthday today.
Although she died at just 64 years old, she lived long enough to noticeably age and, unlike her first husband, mature through the different stages of life from debutante to matriarch, from the Fifties to the Nineties.
Many sentimentalists cling to the idea of her being stuck in time with JFK, a static icon of the 1960s, the perpetually perfect Mrs. Kennedy in candy-colored clothes. In truth, they may be grasping onto their own youth in that time for nothing was more antithetical to her core than stagnation.
She was Jackie Onassis, and she liked and used her second name insistently and proudly. It represented not just her choices, but her right to define herself and embrace her choices.
Always becoming…
She did not define herself, however, as the daughter of Jack Bouvier, or wife of Jack Kennedy and Ari Onassis. In a revealing 1970s interview with an Iranian interviewer, she emphatically emphasized that while those roles shaped her, these labels and others were never the sum totality of who she really was at that moment, and always becoming.
One small, daily ritual that helped keep on her on track and away from the grooves of Society Matron, Presidential Widow or Trophy Wife was so simple that it has entirely escaped notice or comment in all the thousands of articles, books, studies and other media looking at Jackie.
It was just this: integrating her indelible public persona (in later life she herself half-humorously titled this persona as “Jackie O”) into the routine existence she chose to live. That meant walking around New York to go about her business.
She never quite believed she was worthy of the attention in her that never abated, but she was too schooled in mythology to be entirely bewildered by it. On a practical level, this meant dealing with strangers every single day who were convinced they really did know her as a person when, in fact, they knew her as a persona.
Jackie Kennedy Onassis even made dealing with the well-intentioned curious, the exuberant fans, the sick weirdos, and the earnest
Publicly Fearlessly, Privately Tactically
Considering the trauma of murder she experienced, it’s remarkable to think that she chose to live without any security, just walking the streets with the crowds of Naples, New Delhi, Dublin, Moscow and, of course, her beloved Big Apple. Contrary to popular misconception, she only had Secret Service protection for five years after the assassination.
Don’t you dare.
It also explains why, if strangers did approach her that she’d rather they said something rude than take her picture: in the flash of a split-second one couldn’t always know whether a small piece of metal whipped out and aimed at you is a camera or a gun.
Depending on the circumstances, she had a few switches to flip when strangers approached her, intending to engage or just be acknowledged by her.
She told her stepbrother that she didn’t want the karma of being rude to anyone, but that tourists especially (from “Iowa” she added) seemed oblivious to the fact that she was out and about, like everyone else, with mundane things to do – like not be too late for the dentist.
More often necessary than not, however, she could turn on the ice water fast. Rather than speak or look at them, she did this seemingly by magic, with a sort of an enforced aura; it was as if she emitted the warning of a skunk, a special Jackie gas that made it clear to anyone even thinking about coming up to bother her as she paused on a street corner for a green light to keep their distance. It was as if she was forcing them to read her mind and it said: Don’t you dare even think of coming near, let alone talking to me.
Of course, this didn’t always work.
Other times, she used a tried and true tactic, she’d “give ’em the old PBO.” She’d first employed the “polite brush-off” as First Lady, instructing her press secretary to use it in declining media requests.
In public, the PBO had a range.
Looking beyond…
In response to a nervous jumble of well-intentioned flattery, Jackie might just swivel her lantern face towards them and turn the klieg lights full-on, offering the visceral yet ephemeral phenomena of an up-close and personal, real-live Jackie O smile, illuminating her green-brown eyes even in sunlight, without speaking one word. Full charm offensive with minimal output.
If a question, tossed gently in her path was innocent enough, and she chose to respond, she could turn and look at the stranger or keep her eyes focused ahead. In that curious blend of resonant nouns and whispery vowels that formed her distinct voice, these were words chosen to be both purposefully vague and stop any further interaction. “Yeass…,” or “I don’t know,” or “No, I don’t..,” or “I’m sorry…” or “Oh, I wish I could but I’m going over to see a friend…” or the best one, that got her off the hook fast – “No, I’m not…” when asked if she was really Her.
Even if they knew she knew that they knew it was “Her,” Jackie had surreptitiously offered them a moment to remember.
There was also what one of her lifelong friends dubbed “The Big Freeze.” There was no mistaking this. It was total. It was intended for one of two types of people, used either when crossing paths with someone she knew and had good reason not to like, or a persistently rude and insulting stranger.
No matter what they said, she acted as if they did not exist. If they stood in front of her, she looked through them as if they were a ghost.
Don’t be fooled, could be a “Big Freeze” smile…
Better yet, for it disconcerted to the point of unravelling the person, Jackie stared directly in their direction, while affixing the focus of her eyes on..the top of their head.
This was a practiced discipline, for she never once even glanced below their forehead. “If you just have to face someone you detest, smile to yourself and keep your eyes fixed on the top of their head,” she assured her friend Vivi Crespi who feared a confrontation with someone involved in the same love triangle.
One might term it “situational denial,” but she developed it as a way of coping with loud and gnashing creatures that could not be directly confronted: “I learned it from dealing with Mummy’s mean little dogs….if you can’t pull it off, well just wear sunglasses.”
Oddly, she didn’t seem to freak out if she was being followed at a distance by either a curious admirer or even a photographer; on several occasions, friends she was walking with spoke with concern when they detected someone trailing. Such instances were harmless and, as she pointed out to Georrge Plimpton once, “it was none of her business how people chose to waste their time.”
She seemed to even understand such an impulse, being a genuine voyeur herself. In the 1980s, she confessed to getting a thrill by following the elusive actress Greta Garbo, returning home or to the office gushing a commentary of fascination about the legendary woman that were likely being said at that moment by people following Jackie following Garbo.
And then there were those times when she unexpectedly, exuberantly responded with a metaphoric embrace, without regard to how large a crowd she had attracted simply by engaging with an individual who she stopped for.
A Mind
After many years of formal contact with her, filtered and facilitated by the trust of her lifelong confidante Nancy Tuckerman, I was nearly speechless when, upon first meeting her, she not only responded to me but did so with time and apparent enthusiasm.
She did so despite the rapidly gathering mass that accumulated and soon pressed in on us, seemingly oblivious to their shouts and snapshots to instead indulge me in a rather geeky thread of conversation about 19th century residents of Lafayette Square, the park across from the White House that she helped save.
Taking the book.
Oh, she remembered there was a great old book about this – she just couldn’t remember the title. She went into some detail and vaguely quoted the introduction.
We then moved onto further arcana about the reason for such rarity of authentic signatures of one of her ancient predecessors, Ida McKinley – – and then the startling offer of one of her own.
When I next knew I would see her, I was carrying a green-morroco bound copy of Our Neighbors on Lafayette Square she had been referencing. Before I could say hello or place it in her hand, she clutched at the musty old volume.”You found it?!” Then quickly opened to the title page. “Yes! This is it!”
Leaving with the book (there he is, far left, watching her go)
Never having quite lost her inclination for acquisitiveness, she also kept it, presuming the pricey little relic was a gift from me to her. She was actually right about that, however startling her firm grip on the gift. Later, the book with my inscription to her, turned up in a lot of books at the famous 1996 auction of her possessions.
Lost in the moment was my own fuller recognition that she’d somehow managed to remember not just the face of her first encounter with the eager student me, but the facts of what was initially discussed. It was that mind.
The Subversive Outsider
If one knew nothing of what she said and thought and read, or what she composed and edited, it would be easy to continue seeing her as nothing more than a First Fashion Model Lady.
Lifelong dot-connector…
If one didn’t consider the complexity of her experiences, the nuance of her opinions and observations, or the depth of her private relationships with individual family members and friends, one could easily box her up as, in the words of one dismissive journalist, a “pampered dilettante.”
Her perpetual self-education, her grasp of the history of civilization and her part in a horrific world tragedy all converged to hone her instincts and insights.
It made her unable to resist using her unique global status to observe the universalities among different peoples and cultures.
And that’s how, and why, she was always connecting the dots.
Yet, by what she said and did, she rarely forget that she was ultimately no different from those who lacked her privileged status, striving to find the balance point between pride and humility, earthiness and formality, sensitivity and selfishness, offering irreverence towards the pompous and dignity towards the easily neglected, an example of attributes who was nevertheless beset by deficiencies.
And, as poignant and telling as her observations could be, her remarks were almost always tinged with some kind of humor: sarcasm, irony, a sense of the ridiculous and most of all, irreverence. She was a great tease, pulling pranks throughout her life, weaving the mundane into the extraordinary in that dreamland realm of what her emphatically conventional mother once declared to be a “subversive imagination.”
Subversive may be the last word most people would associate with the beloved former First Lady, but it was practically a mantra.
The fact that she designed the clothes and chose the cut and color to use as mute diplomatic symbols has been so overemphasized that the singularly most important fact of how her appearance was merely one tactic in her arsenal of subversions for the higher purpose of deconstructing formidable foreign forces is lost.
Rarely did she speak and when she did, it was never exactly what she thought, thus giving more time to model for the the crowds, especially the “big boys” and give them what they wanted, a dazzling confection of submissive femininity. If they presumed that Jackie Kennedy was dutifully adhering to the societal confines of her gender, they were sorely mistaken – and she was wildly succeeding.
Most acutely as First Lady in interactions with world leaders, Jackie would emphasize appearances to the point of distraction, while carrying out her secret agenda of clinical observation, detecting the truthfulness of who they were and what they thought.
Her mind on Nikki.
Few public figures have employed more flirtatiously fatuous flattery, correct in her calculation that massive egos like Charles DeGaulle (“General Halitosis” she dubbed him in private), Pandi Nehru and Nikita Khrushchev would roll over for more belly-rubbing faster than a litter of lonely puppies and let her see their Achilles heels so quickly it would turn the best of Cold War spies green with envy.
Then she filed her whispered reports of pithy observations, assessing their degrees of honesty and ability to listen to the President, Defense Secretary, Attorney General, and Ambassadors. It didn’t mean JFK devised policy based on Jackie’s dinner banterings, but it helped shade and sculpt the choices he made.
Jackie’s mind work began very early. Grasping the truth that our perceptions become our reality, she found she could escape emotional trauma by slipping into that colorful, zany fantasy world of her “secret garden” imagination long before she reached adulthood. While her mother might be slapping her face red, and her father inappropriately boasting to her of his adulterous exploits, in the head of silent, big-eyed little Jackie Bouvier was living the life of Scarlett O’Hara from the film Gone with the Wind and Mogli from The Jungle Book; she would later name both as being among her early role models.
Talk to the animals…
While Scarlett is well-known, Mogli is worth closer consideration: a human more comfortable in an unaffected primal world, where humane sensitivity overrode the rigid barriers artificially constructed by those of her own kind. She often almost seemed to prefer the company of animals over people, at least in the first half of her life.
“Im an outsider,” she bluntly insisted to those insisting she was the ultimate insider.
There is so much still to be discovered about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis and still so much being explored about her that is proving fresh and instructive. She lived a purposefully layered life; critics might even say it was, at times, a bit rehearsed.
Someone who was emotional intimate with Jackie throughout her entire life truly discerned it best: in order to get on with her private life, she had to use her public life, in order to function as the sixty-something Mrs. Onassis, she had to play the ageless “Jackie O.”
If crystallizing the modus operandi of her existence, it might simply be said that Jackie’s life was her art.
If there is any one legacy of enduring value to all people of all demographics, it is one seemingly simple idea: all you have to really do to have a great life is a) think, and b) apply balance.
A Diligence for Balance
From the time she was a child, Jackie Bouvier was always fascinated by ballet, a performing art that required the same diligent discipline as her favorite, lifelong sport of horse riding: balance.
It was an ideal that she applied even in the visual arts – her paintings and drawings were rich but never cluttered, the interiors of her rooms had muted backgrounds with loud splashes of color, her impatient frustration for political change was always tempered with the practical reality of negotiation.
Never ceasing to strive for and often achieve a sense of balance was always at the core of her “life as art” existence.
Her place to meet and eat….
In the last years of her life, one of her editorial assistants recalled his nervousness as he mustered the courage to raise a personal matter with Mrs. Onassis, while she was in the final creative throes of an intricately-planned party she was hosting at the grand old New York restaurant, The Russian Tea Room. As editor of a new book on the last Russian czar, nothing that moment was more important to her.
The assistant finally broke in on her parade to stammer out the news that he had a chance to go to Europe for the first time in his life – but that it would mean he would be unable to attend the party. Should he take the trip? She fell silent, staring her massive hazel eyes right into him as if, he said, he had “two heads.” She wasn’t angry. She was shocked.
“Of course, you must go,” she said. “Life comes first.”
Categories: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Legendary Americans, The Kennedys
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