Jackie Kennedy Onassis was the most popular First Lady in history. But scratch the surface of her fairy-tale marriage to President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and you find a tale of betrayal and infidelity. While she was the pin-up campaign wife, her womanizing husband was gallivanting with dozens of women, including Marilyn Monroe. After JFK’s and RFK’s assassinations, Jackie ran for safety into the arms of Aristotle Onassis. This is her story.
Early Days
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born in Southampton, New York, on July 28th, 1929. Her father was a well-known Wall Street stockbroker, John Vernou Bouvier III, who earned the nickname “Black Jack” due to his flamboyant lifestyle and love of playing cards. Her mother was socialite Janet Norton Lee.
Jackie and her younger sister, Lee Radziwill, grew up between Manhattan and Lasata, the Bouviers’ country estate in East Hampton on Long Island. But while the Bouviers lived the good life, the father often lost money playing cards.
Privileged Childhood
Through their financial ups and downs, the Bouvier family maintained the appearance of living the high life. John was particularly fond of his eldest daughter, Jackie, and once called her “the most beautiful daughter a man ever had.”
As such, he wanted only the best for her, spoiled her rotten, and ensured that she grew up as part of America’s elite. Jackie led a very privileged childhood, loved riding horses, took ballet lessons, was an avid reader, and learned French, Spanish, and Italian.
The Great Gatsby
However, as much as John Vernou Bouvier III loved Jackie — who learned independence from her paternal grandfather — he loved the bottle, cards, and women more. Living through the 1920s Jazz Age on Long Island, he must have cut a bit of a Jay Gatsby figure, and her parents’ marriage was as rocky as the Rockefellers.
When the Wall Street Crash hit in 1929, John lost most of the family’s money. He and Janet separated in 1936, and they divorced four years later in 1940.
Education
In 1935, Jackie enrolled in the prestigious all-girls Chapin School in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She was a bright but mischievous student, with one of her teachers describing her as “a darling child, the prettiest little girl, very clever, very artistic, and full of the devil.”
Jackie was profoundly affected by her parent’s divorce and the newspapers publishing intimate details of the split. As such, those who knew her best said she “had a tendency to withdraw frequently into a private world of her own.”
Growing Family
In 1942, Janet married Hugh Dudley Auchincloss Jr., lawyer, stockbroker, and heir to his father’s Standard Oil fortune. Jackie and Lee inherited three stepsiblings from Hugh’s previous marriages, and Jackie became very close with Hugh “Yusha” Auchincloss III. Janet and Hugh had Janet Jennings Auchincloss in 1945 and James Lee Auchincloss in 1947.
The family lived between Auchincloss’ Merrywood estate in McLean, Virginia, and Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island, where 13-year-old Jackie would drive the 1940 Ford Deluxe Convertible Hugh gave her mother as a wedding gift.
Miss Porter’s School
While Jackie became close to her new stepfather, she felt she never really fit in as she was a child of divorce. After leaving Chapin School, she attended the Holton-Arms School in Northwest Washington, D.C., from 1942 to 1944, then Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, until 1947.
She chose Miss Porter’s to put some distance between her and her family. In her senior class yearbook, classmates complimented “her wit, her accomplishment as a horsewoman, and her unwillingness to become a housewife.”
High Society Debutante
Jackie wanted to attend Sarah Lawrence College, but her parents made her attend Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in the autumn of 1947. Again, she was a bright student who took part in the college’s art and drama clubs and wrote for its newspaper.
Disliking Poughkeepsie, Jackie traveled back to Manhattan almost every weekend, and there, she stepped out as a high-society debutante. Hearst newspaper columnist Igor Cassini even dubbed her the “debutante of the year.”
Bohemian Paris
In 1949, during her junior year, Jackie jumped at the chance to study abroad and moved to bohemian Paris. She studied at the University of Grenoble at the foot of the French Alps and at Paris’ most famous academy, the Sorbonne.
In Paris, she met and fell in love with John P. Marquand Jr, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning American author John Phillips Marquand. She wanted to marry him, but her mother disapproved and wouldn’t allow it.
Rude Awakening
So, Jackie moved back Stateside to focus on her education. She transferred to Washington, D.C.’s George Washington University and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in French literature in 1951. Then, she jumped headfirst into journalism, beating hundreds of other applicants to land a 12-month junior editorship at Vogue magazine.
The position entailed working for six months in the magazine’s New York City office and six months in Paris. The internship must have felt like a dream, but Jackie Bouvier was in for a rude awakening…
Vogue Magazine
On her first day at Vogue magazine, the managing editor advised Jackie to quit and go back to Washington if she wanted to find a husband. You see, being 22 and single in elite social circles was frowned upon in those days. So, she moved to Washington and worked her way up from receptionist to roving reporter at the Washington Times-Herald.
She met stockbroker John Husted and they became engaged after just one month. But three months into their engagement, Jackie broke things off, saying he was “immature and boring.”