The sad life of Jackie Onassis
J. Randy Taraborrelli's new book "Jackie: Public, Private, Secret" suggests Jackie O might have been happier if she'd married a plumber instead of a president.
The Daily Mail is, without a doubt, a tabloid. Despite that, I still enjoy reading it. When I went to the DM site today, the headline story was about Jackie Onassis. Apparently, there is a new book about her with some further details about her life.
The book is called Jackie: Public, Private, Secret, and it’s out this week. The book contains a lot of interesting tidbits that I hadn’t known before, and the DM included some of them in their story, with the headline written in the usual DM tabloid fashion of squeezing as much dirt into an article title as possible: “How the Kennedys cynically paid tragic Jackie millions to create the picture-perfect family that JFK needed to get to the White House, while ignoring the serial cheating that rocked their marriage.”
Here are the tidbits from the book included in the DM’s story:
Jackie’s suit she wore in Dallas is in the National Archives and will not be displayed until 2103, 140 years after the assassination.
Her pillbox hat has disappeared; nobody knows where it is now.
She burned many of her letters before her death to preserve her privacy.
She was always fearful of poverty and preferred lovers who were wealthy.
She kept a ledger of expenses and carefully noted all expenditures.
JFK’s adultery took a toll on her, and he gave her STDs.
The STDs contributed to the birth of a stillborn daughter.
She took a call from Marilyn Monroe for JFK.
She was compensated with $100,000 for each live-born child she bore.
She had sex with JFK the day before he was killed.
RFK’s death sent her over the edge emotionally.
She drank and took pills in the years after JFK’s assassination.
White House staff supposedly saw Aristotle Onassis slip into her bedroom the night before JFK’s funeral.
She apparently bedded Robert Redford and Warren Beatty and wasn’t very impressed by either.
Aristotle Onassis regretted marrying her; it wasn’t a loving marriage.
His son arranged for her to be photographed nude, but she laughed it off.
She had nerve damage in one shoulder because of her clutching of her husband’s body after he’d been shot and killed in Dallas.
She did not approve of her son becoming involved with Madonna.
On her deathbed, she regretted letting JFK’s assassination poison her life.
Wow, there are quite a few things there I did not know about her. All of it leaves me wondering if the fame and money were worth it in the end. I don’t think so; I think she might have led a happier life if she had married an electrician and avoided the Kennedys completely.
While I’m on the topic of the Kennedys, they have to be some of the worst men on the planet in how they treat women. Jackie O was a good-looking woman, and she should have been enough for JFK. Instead, he ran around with other women and brought STDs back to their marital bed. Gross, but not a surprise considering his family’s track record with women.
I grew up in Massachusetts, and the Kennedy mystique was still considerable in those days. I read a lot of books about JFK and RFK and their times. I bought into the Camelot myth (now called “came-a-lot” after the disclosure of JFK’s constant adultery) until all of the dirt started coming out. I can understand why Jackie O pushed the Camelot stuff; she wanted to sanctify her husband’s memory and their time in the White House.
But it was all bullshit, like most other historical myths, and the ugliness of those times has come out in the intervening years between JFK’s assassination in 1963 and today. Nobody believes any of the Camelot stuff anymore, and that’s probably for the best. The truth had to come out sooner or later.
Jackie Onassis will always occupy a notable place in the history of the 1960s; her life could never be called boring or run-of-the-mill. Yet I cannot imagine what it must have been like to navigate all of it and remain sane: married to a serial adulterer from a low-class family of Irish bootleggers, living through an assassination that might also have killed her, then having to try to find a way to find the money to protect her children after her first husband’s public murder, and being chased by the bloodsucking media for the rest of her life.
If you think about all that, plus the harshness of being in the public spotlight for so many years, it’s a wonder she got through all of it. I wouldn’t wish her life on my worst enemy. I don’t think any of it was worth it in the end, and I wonder something: if she had to do it again, would she have married JFK? Or would she have picked a different path and had a more normal life far away from the spotlight and the corruption of politics?
We’ll never know, of course, but if she had picked a different path, then it’s likely that none of us would ever have heard of her in the first place. I wouldn’t have written this post, and you wouldn’t be here reading it.
RIP, Jackie O.
Did you enjoy this post? If so, you are welcome to buy me a coffee. You can buy one coffee or as many as you like to support this blog. I thank you in advance for your kindness and support.
