It’s June 1949, wedding season, and it seems like all the girls in Jacqueline Bouvier’s social set are on the hunt for a husband.
Not Jackie.
The 19-year-old Vassar student can’t think of anything drearier than settling down and getting married.
“Can you think of anything worse than living in a small town like this all your life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake?” she asks one of her beaux.
Her ambition, according to her high school yearbook: “Not to be a housewife.”
Instead of a ring, Jackie wants a camera.
Specifically a Leica IIc, the best point-and-shoot model on the market. And despite it costing $185 — a whopping $2,100 in today’s dollars — she will have it.
It helps that her indulgent dad, forever trying to one-up his ex-wife (Jackie’s mom) will buy anything for his favorite daughter.
So begins Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s terrific “Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy” (Gallery Books).
It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Jackie gets her camera.
It’s what happens after she gets her camera that’s so remarkable.
She brings her Leica to Europe for her junior year abroad in Paris.
She takes it to the Louvre, to Rome and to Vienna.
It leads her to embark on a career as a journalist — with her own column, The Inquiring Camera Girl, and, later, to take up with a young senator named John F. Kennedy, destined for the White House.
Mainly, it opens her eyes.
“I don’t want to just live for pleasure,” she writes to her beloved stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss, shortly after getting her Leica.
“I want the satisfaction of being creative and some larger purpose.”
Jacqueline Bouvier’s mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss, did not want her daughter to go to France.
Jacqueline had gone to Europe the summer before, but that was with well-heeled WASPS who were chaperoned by a high school Latin teacher.
This was different.
Jackie would be going by herself, unsupervised, to study, for a whole year, among — in Janet’s view — Latin lotharios and communists when she should be working on finding a husband in the States.
But after her initial taste of continental life, Jackie was determined to spend her junior year in Paris.
Vassar didn’t have an option to study abroad there, so she sneakily applied to Smith College’s program at the Sorbonne and got in, though she had to take a six-week language-intensive course in Grenoble before heading to the City of Lights.
Fortunately, her father, John “Black Jack” Bouvier, encouraged her intellectual pursuits — and loved to go against anything his ex-wife Janet said.
When Janet refused to give Jackie the money for an extravagant new camera, “Black Jack” happily obliged.
She proudly wore it around her neck “like it was a diamond necklace” as she boarded the ship to France.
In Europe, she took her Leica everywhere.
Guards chased her out of the Louvre when she tried to get a close-up of the Mona Lisa.
Her camera got her kicked out of a fashion show, too, where she tried to sneak in as a journalist.
During a side-trip to Vienna, Soviet police stopped her when they saw her snapping pictures of a government building and hauled her away for three hours of questioning.
(The young Jackie made light of the experience to her step-brother: “Stalin doesn’t scare me half as much as Mummy does,” she joked.)
Sferrazza Anthony writes: “For the first time in her life, Jackie was free to socialize with anyone she liked regardless of their status, go where she wished, do what she wished, and, most importantly, pursue her deepest intellectual curiosities.”
When she got back to the States, Jackie shocked everyone by dropping out of Vassar and enrolling in George Washington University for her senior year.
(Despite her immense wealth and privilege, as a Catholic from a divorced family Jackie never felt entirely comfortable among the WASPs at Vassar; GWU proved much more her scene.)
She majored in French literature with a minor in art history; she wrote all her papers in French and “illustrated her presentations with color slides she’d photographed in the Louvre, then donated them to the art department.”
Jackie now lived with her mother and step-father in McLean, Va., outside D.C., and she had to field her mother’s constant nagging about getting married.
Initially, Jackie wanted to move to Europe permanently, and she applied to a Vogue contest that gave the winner a kind of Parisian fellowship at the magazine.
Yet at the last minute, she withdrew.
Her step-father had agreed to pay for a trip to Europe that summer after graduating GWU, if Jackie accompanied her younger sister, Lee, and she leapt at that opportunity instead.
When she got back to the States, her step-father actually went against his wife’s wishes and helped her get a meeting with an editor, Frank C. Waldrop, at the Washington Times-Herald.
“Do you want to go into journalism or do you want to hang around here until you get married?” Waldrop barked at her in their first meeting, after she mumbled something about taking pictures.
“No, sir,” Jackie told him.
“I want to make a career.”
In October, 1951, she began a job at the Times-Herald as a gofer, getting coffee for staffers and sitting at the front desk.
Waldrop was skeptical about this former debutante of the year.
“I didn’t care how well she’d written in school,” he later recalled.
“She was not being hired as a reporter. I’d seen her type. Little society girls with dreams of writing the great American novel, who drop it the minute they find the great American husband.”
But Jackie wore him down.
In less than a month, she convinced him to let her try her hand at the paper’s “Inquiring Photographer” column, featuring man-on-the-street portraits and interviews with half a dozen people all responding to the same question.
For her first one, she asked six professional shutterbugs “Is Princess Elizabeth as pretty as her picture?” a few days after the royal’s visit to D.C.
Soon, Waldrop gave her the column, renaming it the “Inquiring Camera Girl.”
Every day, she pounded the pavement looking for people to interview. She asked truck drivers what they thought of the fashions of Christian Dior, clowns if their “smiling face [hid] a broken heart” and psychiatrists “how do you think you’re maladjusted?”
Sometimes her questions were philosophical — “what are most people living for?”, “what is the greatest need for people in the world today?” — and other times they touched on current events and politics — “how should health care for the aged be provided?”
She interviewed cleaning ladies and clerks, children, artists and performers, and even members of government, including Vice President Richard Nixon.
She proved adroit and getting people to talk with her and reveal all sorts of things — even if she had trouble operating the laborious Graflex camera.
(When she told the photo department she had a Leica, they laughed at her and said they didn’t use such fancy equipment.)
She later used that skill to write features on the coronation of Elizabeth II in London and the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
She illustrated her features herself too, with witty little cartoons.
She loved her work so much that she broke off an engagement to a nice but boring guy when it became clear that he found her career silly — and that “the most important thing in his life was making a dry martini,” as she told a friend.
“I want to marry a man with imagination,” Jackie told her sister, Lee.
“And that’s not easy to find.”
‘I want to marry a man with imagination. And that’s not easy to find.’
Jacqueline Bouvier, to her sister Lee
But then she met John F. Kennedy.
Jackie actually did have some reservations about marrying Kennedy — partly because, as Sferrazza Anthony asserts, she knew he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be faithful, but also because she would have to give up her career.
Yet the dashing young senator respected her intellect — bought her books instead of flowers or jewels — and asked her to help him for a speech he was planning to give about Vietnam, to dissuade Congress from supporting French forces there.
Jackie translated dozens of French articles for him, and wrote a report that he would use to address the Senate.
At that moment she saw that marrying him wouldn’t be consigning herself to the role of a housewife, because she believed he would be the president of the United States.
They married in 1953; Jackie trained another Girl Friday to take over her column, though her editor promised that he would always hold a spot for her.
(The paper ended up folding a year later.)
Jackie went on to travel the world and meet leaders and eventually — many years after JFK’s assassination — went back to publishing, working on books.
As Sferrazza Anthony writes: “Jacqueline Bouvier was determined not to merely witness history. She would make it.”
