Less than a decade before she became the world’s most photographed woman, Jacqueline Bouvier regularly worked behind a camera for the Washington Times-Herald, soliciting opinions from the capital’s ordinary residents and taking their pictures. “Camera Girl,” Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s new biography of the young Jackie, illuminates this portion of her life; the chapter titled “Inauguration” does not take a reader to the snowy, ask-not-what, pillbox-hatted noontime of January 20, 1961, but to the day, eight years earlier, when Dwight Eisenhower assumed the Presidency. That afternoon, Jackie was on assignment for the paper, writing a feature about the people who had turned out for Ike’s parade. That night, she attended an inaugural ball as a guest of the new Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy.
The real business of her evening was conducted during a cocktail party at Kennedy’s house. The senator’s friend Lem Billings told Miss Bouvier that anyone who married Jack would “have to be very understanding” about how he “had been around an awful lot” and “known many, many girls.” However delicately put, the message was as clear as a declaration that the United States intended to remain in Berlin: Kennedy’s bride should expect him to continue cultivating and maintaining a vast array of female alliances.
Discover notable new fiction and nonfiction.
“Camera Girl” (Gallery) makes plain that the young Jackie was clever and educable, a woman who preferred her own curricula—books, socializing, and travel—to anything imposed by the schools that she attended. Two years at Vassar, in Poughkeepsie, left her unimpressed. Anthony offers some shaky evidence that she may have been expelled for breaking curfew, but the likelier explanation for her departure was that she’d spent her junior year at the Sorbonne, through a Smith College study-abroad program, without Vassar’s permission.
It was in postwar Paris, Anthony writes, that Jackie perfected a knowledge of “how to be ‘on,’ to make an intentional impression, to invent herself into a character.” She acquired a small Leica camera and brought it on her travels throughout France, subordinating schooling to adventure, though she managed to do fine at both. On June 9, 1950, she wrote to her mother:
No wonder she didn’t want to go back to Poughkeepsie. Her mother didn’t want her to, either, but only out of bitter opposition to Jackie’s father, who craved her return. Janet Norton Lee and John (Black Jack) Bouvier had been divorced for a decade, and Jackie was an asset that they continually contested. Janet, living outside New York, worried that Jackie would fall into Black Jack’s Manhattan orbit after graduating from Vassar; he had invited Jackie to live with him and promised her a job on Wall Street. When his daughter left the school, Bouvier was “crushed,” unaware that in this instance Jackie welcomed her mother’s manipulation. His relatives believed that the defeat accelerated his drinking and self-isolation, though he had been in decline, financially and otherwise, since the mid-nineteen-thirties, when his brand of venturesome stock-brokering was reined in by the man Franklin Roosevelt appointed to be the first S.E.C. chair, Joseph P. Kennedy.
Janet, however, was unyielding. Jackie, accustomed from an early age to her mother’s rages, once pronounced her to be scarier than Stalin. Janet never stopped phonying up her Irish ancestry into something more Waspish and aristocratic. (Jackie was never so flagrant, but when fame arrived she clearly didn’t mind the American public believing that she was more than one-eighth French.) Janet eventually found stability in her union to the quiet and very wealthy Hugh Auchincloss, and she urged each of her daughters to focus on making a prosperous marriage, even if it was as dull as her own. When Jack Kennedy came along, Janet did not like his line of work, preferring Jackie’s first fiancé, a young Wall Streeter named John Husted, until she found out how little money of his own Husted had to manage.
After coming home from France in the late summer of 1950, Jackie again fell under Janet’s control. She decided to complete her undergraduate degree as a French-literature major at George Washington University, then an unexceptional, racially segregated school, much overshadowed by Georgetown. Many G.W. students were commuters, but Jackie was the only one who made the daily trip from Merrywood, an estate across the Potomac which Hugh Auchincloss had purchased in 1930. G.W., now more residential, has a Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis dormitory on I Street, with a bas-relief of young Jackie on a plaque by the front entrance.
From 1950 to 1951, she was serious about her studies, but not enough absorbed by life at the school to have her yearbook picture taken; one finds no trace of her in the 1951 Cherry Tree. Two years after Jackie’s graduation, Joseph P. Kennedy’s publicist included the Sorbonne but not G.W. in a press release announcing Miss Bouvier’s engagement to his son. The desired effect was of a balanced marital ticket: an old Continental family, the Bouviers, soldering its quiet sort of glamour to the Kennedys’ arriviste kind.
During her year at G.W., Jackie set her heart on winning Vogue’s Prix de Paris contest, which promised six months of training in the magazine’s New York offices and a return to Paris, this time as a junior editor. Anthony gives a detailed account of the rigorous application process—round after round of writing essays and critiquing layouts—and he establishes the zealous flair of Jackie’s approach. “I could be a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century,” she wrote to the judges, “watching everything from a chair hanging in space.” The biographer forgives his subject a bit of résumé finagling and a couple of small lies deployed in order to secure a deadline extension.
Jackie won the contest, went up to Manhattan, and was photographed for the magazine by Richard Routledge. (His picture is the basis for that G.W. bas-relief.) But, in the end, she turned down the prize. Janet, who wanted to prevent the proximity to Black Jack that would come with those six months in New York, insisted. Jackie sent her mother a dead snake inside a hatbox, but she knuckled under all the same.
In October, 1951, Jackie got a job at the Washington Times-Herald, after Auchincloss asked the columnist Arthur Krock to put in a good word for his stepdaughter. Krock had been instrumental, years before, in getting the paper to hire Jack Kennedy’s wartime girlfriend Inga Arvad, and also his favorite sister, Kathleen (Kick) Kennedy. Anthony goes so far as to say, not implausibly, that Jackie’s working at the Times-Herald “would inevitably evoke memories of the two women who had meant more to Kennedy than any others—a significant factor in Jack Kennedy’s early perception of her.” Again, Jackie’s commute began from Merrywood, which—Anthony doesn’t mention—was built, in 1919, for Newbold Noyes, Sr., a co-owner of the venerable Washington Evening Star, one of the Times-Herald’s competitors.
Frank Waldrop, the editor who hired Jackie, later recalled, “I’d seen her type. Little society girls with dreams of writing the great American novel, who drop it the minute they find the great American husband.” Yes and no. Though Anthony doesn’t depict it, mid-nineteen-fifties Washington was a lively place for aspiring newswomen eager to buck the prejudices and the odds. Selwa (Lucky) Roosevelt, who had been Jackie’s classmate at Vassar, was married to Theodore Roosevelt’s grandson Archie, a C.I.A. agent, when she began writing a well-connected column for the Star called “Diplomatically Speaking.” In her memoirs, she writes, “Until then, society reporters simply described the food, flowers, decor, clothes, and entertainment, and gave a complete list of guests. They did not look for the political or international implications of who was there and who wasn’t, who spoke to whom and who didn’t.” Nancy Dickerson, a young CBS radio and television producer before she became a famous on-air correspondent, made both a notable career and—from the viewpoint of someone like Janet Auchincloss—a financially enviable marriage. In 1964, she and her husband, a businessman, bought Merrywood. When it came to literary talent and professional longevity, the most distinguished of the era’s women journalists was the resolutely single Mary McGrory, who—except for the composition of a few political profiles—spent years on the Star’s book-review desk before being allowed to write sharp, stylish commentary about the Senate during the Army-McCarthy hearings, in 1954.
Seeking the same sort of break during her early days at the Times-Herald, Jackie chased after Princess Elizabeth, hoping to produce a feature when the future monarch came to Washington. She was unsuccessful, but the princess’s visit brought an unexpected opportunity. Waldrop assigned Jackie to the rotating, uncredited “Inquiring Photographer” slot, and she decided to ask six of the paper’s photographers, “Is Princess Elizabeth as pretty as her picture?” The column was soon hers, with a byline, and renamed “Inquiring Camera Girl.” Her twenty-month run with it is the charming and surprisingly informative heart of Anthony’s book.
Jackie took thumbnail pictures of her subjects with a big, heavy Speed Graflex, which she learned to use at the Capitol School of Photography. “Published six days a week,” Anthony explains, “the column averaged 144 individual interviews monthly—a total of nearly 2,600 people by the time she left the job.” Jackie occasionally persuaded celebrities and personal acquaintances—even John Husted and “Mummy”—to take a crack at answering the queries she invented for the column. They ranged from the silly (“Why do you think so many people crack corny jokes in elevators?”) to the semi-profound (“What are people most living for?”) and the oddly prescient (“Are women’s clubs right in demanding Marilyn Monroe be less suggestive?”). She sought respondents across class and racial lines, and when she wasn’t asking about things in the news (Christine Jorgensen’s gender-transition surgery) she sometimes posed questions that were on her own mind.
Anthony does nice work, without fetching too far, when he ties the column’s subject matter to Jackie’s biographical time line. Around the time of Husted’s proposal, she asked interviewees, “Should a girl pass up sound matrimonial prospects to wait for her ideal man?” Later on, when things got more serious with Kennedy, her questions followed suit: “Can you give me any reason why a contented bachelor should get married?” and “The Irish author, Sean O’Faolain, claims that the Irish are deficient in the art of love. Do you agree?” As she experienced a bit of Kennedy’s 1952 Senate campaign, she asked, “Should a candidate’s wife campaign with her husband?” Her low moods and her frustrations with Waldrop were occasional subtexts; Anthony notes that the editor “threatened to fire her when she asked pedestrians what local newspaper they liked best and printed responses that chose the competition.”
There was wit to what she did, and it earned her the chance to write bigger pieces, illustrated with her own ink sketches, not only on Eisenhower’s inaugural but also on Princess Elizabeth’s coronation. In June, 1953, Kennedy sent a telegram to his fiancée in London—“ARTICLES EXCELLENT—BUT YOU ARE MISSED”—his “second and final courtship ‘love letter,’ ” according to Anthony.
The political calculations that went into his family’s approach to the marriage can make the Windsors’ vetting of Lady Diana Spencer seem quick and humane. Anthony writes that Gore Vidal—another Auchincloss stepchild, from an earlier marriage—remembered Jackie saying that Jack and Joe and Bobby “spoke of me as if I weren’t a person, just a thing, just a sort of asset, like Rhode Island.” But Jackie wanted what she knew she was getting into. Anthony astutely conveys the couple’s “mutual ambition” and shared emotional reticence: “Jackie was similarly unwilling to fully express her feelings, making them a comfortable match.” Kennedy blamed his chilly mother for his own “inability to easily express emotion,” a deprivation to which his bride could relate. Both had also grown up with fierce but feeling fathers. Jackie liked Joe from the start, and she knew exactly how to relate to the old shark—“You ought to write a series of grandfather stories for children, like, The Duck with Moxie”—a skill that excited envy in her future sisters-in-law.
Anthony has made a career of First Ladies, with writings ranging from the anecdotal to the deeply researched; his lengthy, surprising biography of Florence Harding appeared in 1998. With Jackie, he tries to avoid hagiography, but, more than a bit smitten, he sometimes fails, as when he mistakes a little mastery of conventional wisdom for “a deep discernment about the creative process.” He displays a desire to make the most—which is to say, too much—of a research report that Jackie prepared for Kennedy in 1953 on the French war in Indochina, presenting it as the cornerstone of a great moral partnership, whereas Jackie herself remembered it mostly as a tedious exercise in translation. Nonetheless, Anthony likes to believe that, as she worked, “in her imagination . . . Jackie was in the streets of Saigon and the rice fields near Hanoi.”
The title “Camera Girl,” drawn from her column’s rubric, implies the importance of images to Anthony’s book. He starts with a chapter about how, in mid-1949, “employing their enmity to her advantage,” Jackie extracted from each of her parents more than the amount of money she needed to buy the camera she wanted to take to France. Though Anthony places a lot of emphasis on this “little Leica,” he includes, among the dozens of photographs in the book, very few images that Jackie might have taken with it.
It is reasonable for the author to resist lunging too frequently into the future, but readers will inevitably project themselves forward into the next phases of Jackie’s life, when she became almost subordinate to the representations made of her by others: the photographs of Jacques Lowe; the 8-mm. frames of Abraham Zapruder; the silk screens by Warhol; the shots by the paparazzo Ron Galella, her tormentor on the streets of Manhattan. Galella died last year, but his Web site still carries an account of how he took “the most purchased, most recognized, most talked about, most significant photo [he] ever captured,” the one he called “Windblown Jackie,” in October, 1971. He was in a taxi at the corner of Madison and Ninetieth, and Jackie turned to face him in response to the driver’s honking. “It’s a superior picture,” Galella wrote, “like DaVinci’s most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.” When Galella kept at it, a “furious Jackie” asked him, “Are you pleased with yourself?”
She can be forgiven for forgetting a time when she was the hunter and not the game. Frank Waldrop put her on probation for ambush-interviewing two of President-elect Eisenhower’s young nieces on their way home from school. That happened a few years after a museum guard chased her out of a gallery at the Louvre when he saw her taking pictures of “DaVinci’s most famous painting.” Jackie wished, Anthony says, “to disprove the popular myth that the eyes of the Mona Lisa were always gazing directly back at the person looking at her.” The angry guard asked, “Who do you think you are?” She didn’t yet know, but she was steadily moving toward an answer. ♦
