America's Queen
The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
By Sarah Bradford.
Illustrated. 500 pp. New York:
Viking. $29.95.
YOU 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.
