Anyone who has seen the series Emily in Paris, in which Lily Collins plays a charming American who lives countless adventures in the French capital, can imagine, saving the distance, what Jacqueline Kennedy’s stay must have been like before she became such. .
Jackie was, by birth, linked to European culture. Her ancestors were French, and from them she had inherited her maiden name, Bouvier. The family loved to fantasize about very ancient origins that supposedly dated back to 1086. They said that one of her ancestors had been, in the 14th century, secretary to Charles V of France.
In reality, these aristocratic whims had no basis. It all had started in 1815, when Michel, a simple cabinetmaker, emigrated to America because, as a former soldier of Napoleon, he was in the crosshairs of the Bourbon repression carried out by the supporters of Louis XVIII.
Jackie, from the upper class, had the refined education that would later allow her to dazzle the Kennedys. The fortune of her father, John V. Bouvier III, known by the nickname “Black Jack”, suffered seriously after the crisis of 1929, the year our protagonist was born, but the family continued to live at full speed, convinced that The Great Depression was going to be just a passing storm. An image of splendor had to be maintained, regardless of the price.
Inevitably, the time came when it became impossible to turn away from the financial situation, as the family returned to its middle-class origins. The economic decline was going to leave a deep mark on her little girl, inspiring in her a sense of insecurity and a fear of poverty that would mark her forever, as her biographer Sarah Bradford points out.
Jackie was a precocious child, fond of reading beyond her years. At just eight years old she was already enjoying, for example, The Lady with the Little Dog, a story by Chekhov, the famous nineteenth-century Russian writer, which aroused her enthusiasm. But her life experienced deep trauma when her parents divorced her. At that time, something like this constituted a powerful source of social shame.
The worst thing, however, was the emotional impact. The girl became accustomed to looking at reality from a distance, without getting involved on an emotional level. To combat a world that was becoming hostile, she took refuge in a privacy to which nothing had access.
Parents competed for their daughters’ affection. Black Jack emerged as the undisputed winner. A lover of luxury, he did not hesitate to squander the money he had and the money that was lent to him. This was how he won the affection of his two daughters, in the role of his great pampering, while his ex-wife, Janet, remained as the unfriendly figure who tried to impose discipline.
Unlike Jack, Janet prioritized social status above all else. She was still young and attractive, so she tried to assert her advantage in the marriage market and she did not stop until she found a good match that would provide her with the desired financial stability, within the calculated strategy of social advancement of she. The chosen one was millionaire Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., one of the heirs of the Standard Oil oil company. Therefore, he is the owner of a huge fortune.
Auchincloss had previously gone through two disastrous marriages, one of them to Nina Gore, the mother of the writer Gore Vidal. This, with a malicious pen, although not without some reason, would present Janet as a careerist. However, it is also true that she found a husband she could trust, completely opposite to the effervescent and irresponsible Bouvier.
One might assume that, thanks to her stepfather, Jackie never had to worry about money again. It wasn’t exactly like that: while her stepbrothers lived comfortably, she had to be content with an insufficient allowance for the elitist circles she frequented. Barely fifty dollars a month did not allow him, for example, to keep her own horse at Miss Porter’s school in Farmington. This school was one of several elite centers in which she obtained her education, aimed, in reality, not so much at shining professionally as at meeting a suitable husband. At least, that was her mother’s intention.
His cultural preparation, however, interests him more than flirtations. That is why he took the opportunity to spend a year in Europe, from 1949 to 1950, where he attended the University of Grenoble and the Sorbonne in Paris. She follows the tradition of high society, she is accustomed to sending her children to the Old Continent on a training trip, but at the same time she finds a way to escape from a strict mother with whom she had continuous friction.
How must you have felt when you started that adventure? There is a photograph of her in which we can see her on the deck of the ship that will take her, along with other students, to France. Her radiant smile tells us everything about the enthusiasm with which she then faced the future.
The French capital will fascinate you, among other reasons, for the ease of access to high culture, in the form of theaters or ballets, and for the pleasures of nightlife. Meanwhile, she stays in the home of an aristocrat, the Countess of Renty, a former collaborator of the Resistance who had been interned in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Her husband, also anti-Nazi, died in prison. That left her, during the postwar period, in a difficult situation. To cope with her financial complications, she rented her rooms to young students.
Jackie will live with a simplicity to which, until that moment, she was not accustomed. France has not yet recovered from the conflict, so it is difficult to have certain comforts, such as heating. Bathing is restricted to once a week. The same happens with certain foods: to access coffee and sugar you must have a ration card.
But all these inconveniences are not the essential thing. The most important thing is that the young woman found a domestic environment in which she felt comfortable. The Countess, Jackie wrote to her half-brother Yusha Auchincloss, was “a heavenly mother.” Her enthusiasm can be read in positive terms, of joy at what she had just found, but also as an implicit confession of how unhappy her life in her home had been until then.
The year in Paris was unforgettable for him in many ways. He acknowledged, for example, that he had never been so happy or lived so carefree. That had been the highlight of his life.
The trip served him, first of all, to perfect his skills with French, the only language he could use. With this, it was easier for him to read the great writers, like Proust, or become interested in the history of art. But above all, she gained self-confidence. She understood that being a woman passionate about knowledge should not be a reason for stigma: “I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something that I had always tried to hide.”
Paris was a deeply transformative experience. In Dreaming in French (The University of Chicago Press, 2012), Alice Kaplan, one of Jackie’s biographers, tells us that Paris was the perfect incubator for her countless talents: “Her style, her sharp wit, her way of imagining, They were perfected there.”
When he returns home, his professional future is more or less clear. He wants to dedicate himself to something that has to do with literature, such as publishing, as he confesses to his father. In 1951 she was presented with a great opportunity: she won a prize organized by Vogue magazine to be a junior editor for a year in Paris, beating out more than 1,200 applicants. However, she gives up this great dream. Forced, perhaps, by a mother scandalized at the mere idea of ??her accepting a scholarship as if she were lower class?
His stepfather has found him a consolation prize. Through Arthur Krock of the New York Times, she gets him a job at the Washington Times-Herald, a much less stimulating publication. Her editor-in-chief, Frank Waldrop, will ask Jackie in her first job interview if she wants to pursue a career in journalism or just wait until she gets married. She assures him that she wants to make a career.
He will write a section in which he asks questions to strangers, whom he must also photograph. The issues always have a touch between unusual and frivolous, not without a certain ironic sense of humor. Like when asking if women are a luxury or a necessity, or asking your interlocutor when he has discovered that women are not the weaker sex. In some cases, the questions seem to anticipate what her later life will be like: “Which first lady would you like to have been?”, “Would you like your son, when he grows up, to be president?”, “The wife of a candidate.” Should she participate in the campaign with her husband?”
What she doesn’t know is that she will return to Paris a decade later as the first lady of the United States. Little does she suspect that she will have to spend many more years and two marriages, to John F. Kennedy and to Aristotle Onassis, before she can finally resume her professional dedication and have her own career as an editor.
