Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: The Youngest American First lady of the 20th Century

By Mr Ghaz, September 1, 2010

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Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis: The Youngest American First lady of the 20th Century

“I’m sixty-two now, and I’ve been in the public eye for more than 30 years,” Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis told a friend in 1991. “I can’t believe anybody still cares about me or is interested in what I do.” How wrong she was.

At 31, she was the youngest American First Lady of the 20th century. She lived in the White House only from 1961 to 1963, yet remained an object of admiration, and even obsession, until the day she died.

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Part of the fascination with Jackie was due to timing; television exploded as a mass medium in the early 1960s. Later after the assassination of her husband John F. Kennedy (JFK), she provided a place to focus the grief of millions.

She was more, though, than a pretty face on the small screen or the queen in a sad fairy tale. As a modern Supermum, she raised Caroline and John into exemplary adults, avoiding the portholes many of their cousins hit. Just as feminism arrived, she went to work as a book editor, earning her way up the corporate ladder. She kept trying at romance, too, marrying Aristotle Onassis and, after he died, settling into a relationship with financier Maurice Templesman.

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A tribute to Jackie Kennedy – plus some spectacular clothes she wore in the White House – was exhibited in several American cities recently. “It was an opportunity,” says curator Hamish Bowles, “to explore the style and the substance of a woman who defined a generation.”

Camelot

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Although she called it Camelot only after JFK’s assassination, Jackie began working on an image for the administration the moment she and her husband moved into the White House. She thought everything through.

Take for instance, that the many photographs of the family at play, which appeared in magazines like Life. Seemingly casual, some of them were in fact professionally lit, and the people in them styled and posed. She was aware of what the camera did for the children, and for the family.

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All of Jackie’s efforts at creating a Kennedy image came together in a 1962 television tour of the White House – 56 million people watched that night. The show displayed her meticulous restoration of the executive mansion. But it was the First Lady, not the restoration that riveted America. “I remember watching and listening to Mrs. Kennedy more than thinking about the White House,” says Barbara Bush, whose husband became the US president in 1989. (She’s also the mother of the president, George W. Bush.)

Creating Camelot also meant that bad habits were discouraged, at least in public. A lifelong smoker, Mrs Kennedy did her best to veto photographs that showed her with cigarette in hand. Her press policy was “minimum information given with maximum politeness.”

Style

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“I feel as though I have turned into a piece property,” Jackie told an acquaintance in early 1961. During the presidential campaign the previous summer and autumn, the press and the public focussed intently on the young Mrs Kennedy. The blunt cut of her hair, the clean, simple lines of her brightly coloured clothing – women across the world craved the Jackie Look.

Partly it was the sheer novelty of her. Jackie was a new woman for a new time – the ‘60s.

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Department stores began using models and drawings in ads that looked like Jackie. The subject of all this attention was left somewhat bewildered. “What does the way I wear my hair have to do with my husband’s ability to serve as president?” she asked.

The security became so intense that Jackie realized she needed help from a professional. She turned to New York designer Oleg Cassini, writing to him, “I refuse to have Jack’s administration plagued by fashion stories of a sensational nature – or to be the Marie Antoinette of the 1960s.” Cassini recalled his meetings with Mrs Kennedy, when they worked out what she would wear at her husband’s swearing in: “She asked me to come and meet her in her hospital room just days after she gave birth (to John), two months before the inauguration. All the other women would be wearing furs, looking like bears. My concept was to make her look divinely simple – a beige coat and hat. She came out, and was instantly distinct.

Immediately a style was established. It was not a French look, not an American look, but a Jackie Look. She said to me, ‘You dress me perfectly for the role.’ For the role! And what was the role? “First Lady of the country, And First Lady of the world, really, at that moment.”