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    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy
    Ebook126 pages53 minutes

    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

    By Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer

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    About this ebook

    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, first published in 1961, is biography of the first-lady, from her early childhood to her meeting and marriage with John F. Kennedy. The book ends with the family’s move into the White House (and before the President’s tragic assassination in November 1963). Author Mary Rensselaer Thayer worked closely with Mrs. Kennedy to produce the book, and it is reported that Jacqueline prepared much of the initial draft. Included are 35 pages of illustrations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPhocion Publishing
    Release dateNov 1, 2019
    ISBN9781839740121
    Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

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      Book preview

      Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy - Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer

      © Phocion Publishing 2019, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

      Publisher’s Note

      Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

      We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

      Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

      MARY VAN RENSSELAER THAYER

      Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy was originally published in 1961 by Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York.

      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Contents

      TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

      Part One 5

      Part Two 21

      Part Three 38

      Epilogue 49

      About the Author 50

      Illustrations 51

      REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 87

      Part One

      JACQUELINE LEE BOUVIER was not really a pretty baby. Instead of looking rosy, she looked peaked. She was six weeks late in arriving and somewhat unexpectedly chose to be born on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July. Plans had been made for the great event to take place in New York. But since both mother and doctor were weekending in their summer homes, there was a last-minute switch to the small, efficient hospital in nearby Southampton. She weighed eight pounds and seemed, understandably, more mature than most newborn babies.

      Her mother was twenty-one. A brunette beauty with a lovely name, Janet Lee, she had been belle of her debutante season and, despite her smallness and appealing femininity, was one of the most skillful and daring horsewomen in the country.

      The baby was named after her father, Jack Bouvier, whose full, distinguished name was John Vernou Bouvier III. He was thirty-seven, and until his marriage the previous year had been considered one of social New York’s most irreconcilable bachelors. He was dark, in summers tanned to swarthiness, and so good-looking that friends nicknamed him The Sheik, while strangers were forever taking him for Clark Gable. Together, Mr. and Mrs. John Vernou Bouvier III were considered the handsomest couple on Long Island. Their daughter, Jacqueline, would start life with every asset.

      Within a very short time baby Jacqueline began to blossom into a beauty. She possessed four teeth when she had aged as many months. She could talk, and really talk, before she was a year old. All her loving relatives—two sets of grandparents, five aunts, an uncle, a dozen or so young cousins—agreed that she was an altogether remarkable child. When they dropped in to see the baby, they admired her fluff of faintly curling black hair, her newly rosy complexion, her wide eyes, all set off so coquettishly by the froufrou of peachy-pink point-d’esprit flounces on her beige wicker bassinet.

      No one imagined, of course, that this placid infant would someday be the thirty-first First Lady of the land. Nor that the bassinet, now painted white and simply trimmed with ribbon-threaded dotted swiss, would cradle Jacqueline’s look-alike son, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr., the first White House baby in over half a century.

      Three days before Christmas, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was christened at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York. Her father’s only brother, William Sergeant Bouvier, who was affectionately known as Bud, had died in October and his almost ten-year-old son, Michel, acted as godfather. Jacqueline was dressed in an exquisite Paris creation first used at the christening of her maternal grandfather, James T. Lee. Three generations of babies, including Caroline Kennedy, have worn this charming christening robe. It is long-skirted, with puffed sleeves gathered at tiny wrists, and is fashioned of gossamer lawn, frilled with fine lace and strewn with miniature bouquets hand-embroidered in microscopic stitches.

      Since early childhood Jack Bouvier had summered at East Hampton in the enormous lawn-and-garden-surrounded stucco Bouvier house. It was called Lasata, an Indian name meaning Place of Peace, but was by far the liveliest spot in the neighborhood. There were five Bouvier sisters and brothers: Jack, Bud, Edith and the strawberry-blond twins, Maude and Michelle.

      Janet Lee was in her early teens when the James T. Lees spent their first summer in East Hampton. She was second in a trio of attractive sisters, Marion, Janet, Winifred, who later were to cause considerable local excitement not only because of their charm but because each owned an automobile with a fancy, distinctive horn! The Bouvier twins were around Janet’s age and they became friends. Their brother Jack was sixteen years older than Janet. A notable charmer and desirable matrimonial catch, he had no time to notice teen-age friends of his sisters.

      Janet Lee was brought up in the Glittering Twenties like the daughters of many well-born, affluent New York parents. She went to Miss Spence’s School, learned the social graces and studied two years at college (one at Sweet Briar, and another at Barnard). Besides, she developed an intuitive command over horses which was to carry her to the top rank of women riders. She grew prettier as the years passed and made her debut conventionally at a dance at Sherry’s. It was the summer afterward that Jack Bouvier began to find time for his twin sisters’ young friend.

      On July 7, 1928, Janet and Jack Bouvier’s wedding took place in St. Philomena’s Church in East Hampton. The six bridesmaids wore jonquil-colored chiffon and green straw hats. The matron and maid of honor, sisters of the bride, reversed the color scheme with green chiffon and jonquil-yellow hats. It was all so perfect that a New York society reporter rapturized on her typewriter: Have you ever glimpsed the loveliness of a bed of nodding green and gold jonquils in the sunshine? Surely you’ve all seen a stately bride bedecked in satin, lace and silver? Combine these effects and you’ll have a glowing picture of Mrs. John Vernou Bouvier III, stepping into the sunshine from the door of quaint St. Philomena’s Church yesterday with her attendants about her.

      There were five hundred guests at the midday reception on the porches and lawns of the Lee house on Lily Pond Lane. Meyer Davis’s orchestra played (as it played at the Inaugural Ball for President and Mrs. Kennedy). The couple sailed off on the Aquitania. All this was true to pattern in rosy, pre-depression years.

      The newlyweds returned to a small, rented house in East Hampton, and when winter came moved to a New York apartment. A year after Jacqueline was born her grandfather, James T. Lee, gave his daughter Janet a duplex apartment in a Park Avenue property he owned. An ultraconservative, James Lee,

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