July 28, 1929– Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis lived during an era when I was always aware of her celebrated enigmatic personality. During my lifetime, she was always the subject of some magazine article or news feature. From the time that she was the beautiful young bride of a handsome young US senator, to elegant First Lady, to anguished widow, to bikini clad wife of a Greek shipping tycoon, to NYC career woman, her life was always under scrutiny.
Kennedy-Onassis has rather an odd prominence in my life. The Husband & I are the human voices for our 2 terriers. Junior speaks in a dumb lug Jethro Bodine (Max Baer’s The Beverly Hillbillies character) voice & Lulu talks in Jackie Kennedy’s breathy monotone, both superbly reproduced by my spouse & me.
For most of her life Kennedy-Onassis was dependent on the kindness of sadists. Her Wall Street broker father, John Vernou “Black Jack” Bouvier III was too drunk to walk her down the aisle on her wedding day; John Fitzgerald Kennedy presented her with a parade of breathless bimbos that are still being talked about 50 years later; Aristotle Socrates Onassis had his yacht’s bar stools covered in the skin of whale testicles & made her sign a prenuptial contract; none of them ended up breaking her down.
Kennedy-Onassis was not the sort of girl who fell apart from a day or a month or a year of bad news or bad press. She kept it together. She fought for a legacy in what she regally regarded as History, a notion that included her passion in 18th century France & the prerequisite of maintaining a complicated ruse, both prideful & humiliating, around the requirements of marriage. She was a woman who used every single one of her formidable gifts when facing the men in her life or the public’s perception of those relationships.
Kennedy-Onassis was an elegant, educated, calculating, intelligent, sophisticated woman. She also wielded real power because of her connections to powerful men. She also was flawed, of course. She could be a snob (I can be a bit of a snob so I have an affinity for her).
Kennedy-Onassis was not all good or all bad. Even after audio tapes of her 1964 conversations with historian & friend Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were released in 2011, & hearing her voice again, she remains vague & veiled.
Whoever she was, she remains a Gay Icon & a Style Icon, a revered First Lady, & she has a lauded place in the history of the USA. You can hate her if you want. She wouldn’t care & it wouldn’t change a thing. You would also be in the minority. She remains one of the most admired women of all time.
Despite the tragedies: she lost a baby, a husband & a brother-in-law in the span of a half decade, she was able to live the life so many people seem to strive for: privilege, glamour & bottomless bank account. Can you imagine? Her husband’s brains were blown out onto her lap & then she had to be a beacon of strength for an entire nation when she was just 34 years old. The woman had balls, in addition to brains & ambition.
Listening to the tapes today to prepare this column, her whispered voice seems like something that she could put on & use to her advantage. She was known to be a smart manipulator. Her father told her to always hold back & reveal little of yourself. Like her nemesis, Marilyn Monroe, she created her voice & she created her mystery. This is why she rarely did interviews, & she was perceived as unreachable & untouchable to the public. Naturally, this made Kennedy-Onassis even more fascinating to the public. To keep the mystique going throughout her life, she never allowed pictures to be published of her smoking cigarettes or any recordings of her swearing, both which she both did all the time.
A Fashion Icon for certain, in the 1960s her pal designer Oleg Cassini provided Kennedy-Onassis with the clean suits, skirt hem down to middle of the knee, 3/4 sleeves on notch-collar jackets, sleeveless A-line dresses, above-the-elbow gloves, low-heel pumps, & the famous pillbox hats atop that bouffant hair that became known as the “Jackie Look”. In the 1970s it was wide-leg pantsuits, large lapel jackets, gypsy skirts, silk Hermès scarves, & large, round, dark sunglasses became the new look. She often even wore jeans in public, white jeans with a wide belt paired with a black turtleneck, never tucked in, but pulled down over the hips was how she was dressed the one time I caught a glimpse of her near St. Ignatius Loyola at East 84th & Park Avenue where I went to mass sometimes.
“Sex is a bad thing because it rumples the clothes.”
For most of us, a Gay Icon‘s attributes include glamour, flamboyance, strength through adversity, & a hint of androgyny. They are often either tragic or martyred figures, or prominent pop culture idols. Jackie Kennedy-Onassis fits the bill. She was a woman of her era & who knows how she would have felt about the changes in the lives of gay Americans & Marriage Equality. She certainly knew gay people. She was a very close friend & cousin of gay writer Gore Vidal & hung out with Tennessee Williams & Truman Capote. On the other hand, she shut down her son John F. Kennedy Jr.’s acting career, his passion, because she feared that he would “become a fruit”. I am certain she would have not been happy if JFK Jr. had married me as I had planned.
“I want minimum information given with maximum politeness.”
She always described the White House Years as the happiest time of her life. During that controversial time as she took on a total remodel of the Presidential residence, her BFF was White House Chief Usher J.B. West, a gay man who she called “the miracle maker of the White House”. They shared cigarette breaks, gossip & gifts. West writes in his memoir Upstairs At The White House: My Life With The First Ladies (1973) that Jackie gave him a gift of a vermeil cigarette case inscribed: “With deep appreciation for Jan. 20, 1961 – Nov. 22, 1963″.
In January 1994, Kennedy-Onassis was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, the same cancer that I would spend a year doing battle in 2014. I’m still here, but she only made it to May, 2 months before her 64th birthday.
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