December 17, 2000

Her Majesty

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A new biography of Jackie O. proves once again that she will never be out of fashion.

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First Chapter: 'America's Queen'

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By WILLIAM NORWICH

AMERICA'S QUEEN The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. By Sarah Bradford. Illustrated. 500 pp. New York: Viking. $29.95.

ou can make a nice chunk of change writing about Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis. Virginity lost, money found, Valentino clothes, big horses, little foxes, the father complex, high infidelities, Miss Porter's School and, on the yacht Christina, Aristotle Onassis' bar stools covered in the skin of a whale's scrotum -- this is all pay dirt for the average biographer.

More than 50 books and some 15,000 newspaper articles have featured Jacqueline Onassis. Perhaps the most provocative project isn't the tome with the latest hiccuping tidbit but the historiography of this particular Kennedy library. Every year there are more books and more articles. They usually begin by hailing the glamour and allure of the stylish first lady, and then bury her under an avalanche of hearsay.

Here's a scoop. I met Jacqueline Onassis a few times. Our brief conversations went something like this: I said, ''Hello, Mrs. Onassis,'' and Mrs. Onassis responded, ''Hello,'' right back. (Any publishing deals yet?) Once I think she said, ''Hi.'' At no time did she ever say, ''Call me Jackie.'' So if you don't mind, I won't start now -- although, having read ''America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis,'' by Sarah Bradford, I feel I'm practically on gynecological terms with Mrs. Onassis.

One expected a great deal from ''America's Queen.'' Bradford had access to people who were close to Mrs. Onassis, people who had never spoken publicly about her when she was alive -- including her sister, Lee Radziwill. A well-connected British writer (in England, her title is Viscountess Bangor), Bradford is also well regarded; her previous biographies include ''Disraeli,'' ''The Reluctant King: The Life and Reign of George VI, 1895-1952'' and, most recently, ''Elizabeth: A Biography of Britain's Queen.'' In the press material issued at its publication, Bradford's book is said to promise ''a much-needed corrective to the many gossip-ridden accounts that have proliferated since Onassis' death.''

Bradford's entree into the upper levels of society helped her amass a density of detail unusual in most biographies of Jacqueline Onassis. The book is dedicated to the New York philanthropist Samuel Peabody and even includes an entry from the diary of Peabody's sister, Marietta Tree, who, in April 1986, jotted down a note about having lunch with Maurice Tempelsman, the diamond dealer who was Mrs. Onassis' last romantic companion. Tempelsman, Tree wrote, ''is currently Jackie Onassis' best friend. He is v. dependable, which is a quality she obviously likes in a man, having seen it so seldom.'' Throughout ''America's Queen,'' various members of the East Coast Protestant establishment share waspish observations and recollections about the elegant Roman Catholic who hovered over the center of their hive.

Most of the biographical material in ''America's Queen'' will be familiar to anyone who has read any of the previous books about Mrs. Onassis. Not surprisingly, Bradford's account begins at the beginning and goes all the way to the end, encompassing the subject's childhood in New York and East Hampton; her parents' bitter divorce; her subsequent fear of poverty; the suggestion that the young Jacqueline's passion for her father, John (Black Jack) Bouvier, a heavy drinker and compulsive womanizer, was nearly incestuous. According to her boarding-school yearbook, Jacqueline Bouvier's ambition was ''never to be a housewife.'' In John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis, she found father figures, Bradford explains at great length. Bradford also reminds us that President Kennedy had gonorrhea and got a headache (or so he told the British prime minister Harold Macmillan) if he didn't have sex at least once a day. Nonetheless, the president liked his wife.

''Turn on the lights so that they can see Jackie,'' President Kennedy told an aide on the night of his inaugural gala in 1961. And there was light. Good light. Bad light. The last sunlight the president saw was in Dallas. Riding in the motorcade, the bright glare stinging her eyes, the first lady reached for her sunglasses. ''Take off the glasses, Jackie'' were the president's last words to his wife.

''And all I remember is seeing my husband, he had this sort of quizzical look on his face, and his hand was up, it must have been his left hand. And just as I turned and looked at him, I could see a piece of his skull and I remember it was flesh-colored,'' Jacqueline Kennedy told the Warren Commission.

''It's hard to recreate the impact of the president's funeral and those four days in America,'' Ambassador William vanden Heuvel observed, ''but that was when Jackie became indelibly inscribed on the mind of anyone who watched that event. All of her life, I think, people who had seen that, and those days, never thought of her in any other way.'' But Bradford says Jacqueline Kennedy manipulated the public and conspired to create that sympathy by inventing the myth of the Kennedy ''Camelot'' after the president's death.

Bradford also says that Robert F. Kennedy ''was Jackie's great love . . . a secret rock at the center of her life,'' although she doesn't provide conclusive evidence that the relationship was sexual. A former flame of the first lady's, Roswell Gilpatric, is quoted as remarking that after Senator Kennedy's death, Jacqueline Kennedy ''seemed highly agitated, even unbalanced.'' The years of her marriage to Onassis, Bradford observes, provided escape and protection, but they were offered by a man who saw his wife as a golden trophy.

Bradford notes that Mrs. Onassis shopped a lot. Considering certain unimaginable facts of her life, was this really so bad? Please, Mrs. Onassis, here's a charge card. Have a ball.

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis never had much to say on the record, especially after her first husband's assassination in 1963. Instead, she left her papers -- a treasure-trove of information, according to people familiar with the collection -- to the Kennedy Library in Massachusetts, where they are, for the time being, embargoed. Bradford seems to have tried to compensate for the absence of Mrs. Onassis' own voice by attempting to include every scrap of information that came her way. But despite (or maybe because of) this, something is amiss in Bradford's book, and it has to do with the author's perspective.

In the mid-1990's, after the critical success of her biography of Britain's reigning queen, it must have been suggested that Bradford continue to mine for majesty -- and why not in the provinces? Didn't Frank Sinatra send two dozen red roses with the message ''You are America's queen'' when Mrs. Onassis died in 1994? (Note to Sinatra biographers: Mrs. Onassis' favorite flowers were cornflowers.)

Unfortunately, Bradford is not culturally sympathetic with her American subject. In fact, I'd bet my Burberry that she thinks America is ''bad tweed.'' A constitutionally British condescension toward Americans shimmies throughout the text of ''America's Queen.''

Until Jacqueline Kennedy became first lady in 1961, Bradford writes, ''glamour was a commodity singularly lacking in contemporary American politics and, indeed, in American life east of Hollywood.'' In other words, Sarah Bradford to Diana Vreeland, the Duchess of Windsor, Babe Paley et al.: drop dead. Bradford appears to concur with Lady Jean Campbell, who attended President Kennedy's funeral and wired back to The Evening Standard of London her conviction that the first lady had ''given the American people from this day on the one thing they always lacked -- majesty.''

Women's Wear Daily once described Mrs. Onassis as ''the most outstanding woman in the world.'' Bradford writes: ''Outstanding for what, you might ask? Apart from her performance after the assassination, when she 'broke the nation's heart and held the country together,' she did nothing of substance. And yet, through her looks, her style, her mysterious personality, she had a hold on the world's imagination in a way that no one else had. 'Culturally something happened between her and the decade that she lived in,' said Doris Kearns Goodwin, 'and that is what is really interesting to try and figure out.' ''

And that is a book that would be really interesting to read.

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William Norwich is the editor of Style & Entertaining, a periodic supplement to The New York Times Magazine.

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