FINDING JACKIE

A pop-culture study of the woman who was once known around the world.

The first thing to know is that Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (1929-1994) pronounced her name Jack-leen. The next is that her long-stated ambition was “not to be a housewife.” While she had her foibles—including, Eaton chronicles, the ability to whirlwind her way across a tony boutique in a few minutes and rack up a $100,000 bill—she was also a person of considerable substance. She made some curious choices in life, including, by the author’s account, her marriage to Aristotle Onassis, which was not happy, as reflected by the comparatively small sum of money she received when he died. Still, upon Jacqueline’s own death in 1994, as if by some silent agreement in the world press, Wayne Koestenbaum noted that “her marriage to Onassis was erased with the absoluteness of Soviet regimes banishing dissidents from the historical record.” Kennedy—so she was known in her last years, the Onassis name deleted—was eminently gossipworthy, and Eaton, who writes in a breezy style, doesn’t refrain from throwing out red meat: Jackie complained about John F. Kennedy’s womanizing; Onassis and Jackie had a 170-clause marriage contract; Jackie enjoyed a “champagne-tastes” hedonism, “so maybe Camelot wasn’t such a magical era. Maybe America’s queen had always been a bitch.” The author also offers discerning observations, including Jackie’s pulling Bobby Kennedy aside to say, “America’s going to the dogs. I don’t know why you want to be president.” Eaton’s offhand delivery, seemingly tossed off at times (“And who is this man she’s marrying? He’s most often portrayed as a pirate”), is better suited to a magazine article than a serious book, but readers will still glean a thing or two they might not have known before.

A middling but sometimes insightful portrait of an American icon.