IELTS Reading Exercise 31

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Onassis, Obituary

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis was a woman on whom the burdens of modern fame fell to the utmost degree. The coming of television, and the jet age which allowed an unprecedented range of presidential travels, made hers one of the most famous faces of the century. And her husband's assassination in Dallas made her the very symbol of grief and loss. She refused Mrs Lyndon Johnson's suggestion that she change the pink Chanel suit smeared with his blood. 'I want them to see what they've done to Jack,' she said. They had been married just 10 years in a union which brought together the energy, the ambition and the new money of the Kennedy family with the old social elite of the Bouviers.

She learned early to control her private sadnesses. Although her parents divorced when she was 13, her dashing and handsome father 'Black Jack' Bouvier had promised to give her away at her wedding. An alcoholic as well as a rake, he became too drunk - on whisky thoughtfully sent to his room by Jackie's mother - even to attend.

She had the usual childhood of the privileged elite - learning to ride and hunt - and was educated at Miss Porter's School and Vassar. But by her own talent, she won the Prix de Paris offered by Vogue magazine, with essays on Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and Serge Diaghilev. She turned down the offer of a job in Paris with Vogue to work as a journalist in Washington. She did well, being sent to cover the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London and young Senator Kennedy cabled her: 'Articles excellent, but you are missed.' On her return from that trip he proposed.

In her youth she deliberately sought out fame, delighting in being named America's Debutante of the Year in 1947, and wooing the young Senator Kennedy with single-minded determination. She haunted his office, bringing picnic lunches to his desk and offered to help edit his speeches. She hated politics and campaigning, once telling her sister Lee that she had found the perfect escape by remaining almost constantly pregnant. But she became the first would-be First Lady to invite the TV cameras into her home for a prolonged interview and the first to invade a supermarket, seize the microphone, and announce: 'Please carry on with your shopping, but I want to tell you why you should vote for my husband.' Once installed in the White House she re-decorated it thoroughly, and then escorted the TV cameras throughout, an unheard-of invitation to a public intimacy which is still the most-requested single TV show at the Museum of Broadcasting.

Having embraced fame, she then flouted it, fighting a series of battles for privacy with her husband's White House press secretary, Pierre Salinger. Asked once what she would most like to feed her new Alsatian puppy, she bluntly replied: 'Reporters.'

She was never quite a Kennedy, telling her sister that 'they romp around like a bunch of baboons on the loose'. Until the assassination of her husband, she performed in public precisely as he and American public opinion would have wished in a pre-feminist era. She appeared content to be the ultimate presidential accessory, providing glamour and children and that stylish patina of old money which approximates aristocracy in America. 'I am the man who brought Jackie Kennedy to Paris,' was the President's opening line to a state banquet hosted by General Charles de Gaulle, whom she delighted by speaking in excellent French. 'I'd like to shake her hand first,' said Nikita Khrushchev as he waited to meet the Kennedy couple before their Vienna summit in 1961. At the formal banquet, seated beside the Soviet leader, she interrupted him with the sentence: 'Please don't bore me with statistics.' He laughed, pulled his chair closer, and promised to send her a puppy from the dog the Soviets had just launched into space.

Once a widow, she rebelled. She shunned publicity and the ceremonies of the Kennedy myth. On the 20th anniversary of her husband's death, she refused to attend the memorial service at Arlington cemetery, and instead went for a lonely stroll on the beach at Martha's Vineyard. Above all, she married the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, to the bafflement of an America who saw her as the high priestess at a national shrine. One motive seems to have been the need for sufficient wealth to guarantee privacy, for her children as well as herself. He was an old acquaintance of her husband, the man who had introduced young Senator Kennedy to Winston Churchill in the south of France, and who had lent her his yacht after the deep depression which followed the death of her premature baby in 1962.

Warned by a friend that she would 'fall off your pedestal' if she married Onassis, she replied: 'That's better than freezing there.' In the shell which the Onassis money ensured, she avoided interviews and interviewers, and rebuilt her life on her own, litigious terms. She took a persistent photographer to court to stop his ambushes, and fought one bitter legal battle against William Manchester's book Death Of A President and another against the Onassis family to retain the $26 million bequeathed to her.

Although she did not need the salary, she insisted on having a career as a book editor at Doubleday. And although some of her colleagues saw her as a part-timer, she edited two best-sellers, and secured for her company the rights to the Michael Jackson autobiography Moonwalk. She brought to the task a flair and a style which made it acceptable to be a cosmopolitan in America, to drink wine and enjoy art, and to impose her Francophile tastes on that ultimate American symbol, the White House. Insisting on private time to enjoy her horses and her hunting, she was loyal when it most mattered. She refused all pleas to go to the protected bunker during the Cuban missile crisis, and insisted on remaining in the White House with her husband.

Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Onassis, born July 28, 1929; died May 19 1994.

Source: The Guardian, 1994