“One must be so close to the flame to be alive.”
 
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, via Carly Simon, Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie

Caroline Kennedy's copy of Touched by the Sun is available via the Nick Harvill Libraries store. 

​Name the Doubleday book editor who, when asked whether she would be attending the company sales conference in Dallas, replied dryly, “I think I’ll pass on that one.”

​The answer is after the JUMP.

“Find a priest who understands English and doesn’t look like Rasputin.”

Aristotle Onassis, The $20,000,000 Honeymoon

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

​“Publicity is like rain. When you’re soaking wet, what difference does a few drops more make.”
 
Aristotle Onassis, Jacqueline

Image Credit: Jacqueline

When he assumed the presidency, John F. Kennedy hoped to tamp down the Cold War rhetoric between the United States and the Soviet Union. He quickly learned how difficult this would be after a summit with his Soviet counterpart, Nikita Khrushchev. JFK sought common ground by stating the obvious, that “a nuclear exchange would kill seventy million people in ten minutes.” Khrushchev just looked at him blankly “as if to say, ‘So what?’ … as if he didn’t give a damn if it came to that.” Lamented JFK, “I never met a man like this.”

​According to Gore Vidal in Palimpsest, A Memoir, Kennedy did know someone like this, someone much closer to home. Per Vidal, “during Jack’s thousand days as president, he discussed” this person “almost as much as he did Khrushchev, and in much the same manner.” Whom did Kennedy believe to be the moral equivalent of Nikita Khrushchev?

• His wife’s official couturier, Oleg Cassini.
• His wife’s decorator, Sister Parish.
• His wife’s hairdresser, Kenneth.
• His wife’s mother, Janet Auchincloss.

​Hint: The answer is not the person banned from the White House for kicking JFK’s daughter Caroline (according to Michael Smith).
 
The answer is after the JUMP.

​In the 1950s, a Washington, D.C./Newport, Rhode Island socialite expressed doubts about her daughter’s upcoming marriage to one of America’s most eligible bachelors, complaining, “The wedding will be just awful — quite dreadful. There will be one hundred Irish politicians!”

Who was this unenthusiastic mother-of-the-bride?
 
Hint: Despite her claims to the contrary, this socialite mother was unrelated to General Robert E. Lee.
 
The answer is after the JUMP.

“Jackie [Onassis] might have hated him. (Ron is convinced it was a love-hate relationship.) But it’s clear that many of his subjects recognized that the guy made them look really good. Because he’s an artist and a realist. Anybody can be made to look good in the studio, but Galella made them look good on the street and on the run. And he may have been a real pest at times, but I suspect a person of Jackie’s taste must have recognized that he did take some very flattering pictures of her.”
 
Glenn O’Brien, The Photographs of Ron Galella, 1965-1989

There is no getting around it. Ron Galella stalked his number one prey (and source of income), Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. He went so far as to date one of her maids so as to have an inside track on her social engagements. In his book, Jacqueline, Galella boasted that his line in the sand would be breaking and entering into her 1040 Fifth Avenue apartment (as if that was a virtue for which he should be applauded).

And yet ... the two were co-conspirators when it came to her legend. He claims to have selected only flattering photographs of Onassis, and either he was telling the truth, or she was the most photogenic woman of her generation (and perhaps she was). In any case, without his candid snapshots, the record of her most incandescent and fascinating years would be incomplete. No one captured the former first lady's natural beauty like Ron Galella. There might have been more talented photographers but certainly no one with his audacity, his shamelessness. The result was something utterly unique. Da Vinci might have had his Mona Lisa, but Galella, his Jacqueline. 

The most comprehensive and elegantly produced book of Ron Galella's work is Greybull Press's The Photographs of Ron Galella, 1965-1989. The copy he affectionately inscribed to Elizabeth Taylor is available via the Nick Harvill Libraries store. It is the only one of four books from Taylor's library that we acquired that has not yet sold. Elizabeth Taylor, by the way, was after Jackie, Galella's most bankable celebrity.

Image Credit: Jacqueline

Of the following four statements about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, which is untrue:

• In October 1968, Aristotle Onassis attempted to purchase the painting as a wedding present for his fiancée, Jacqueline Kennedy.
• The French once loaned this priceless treasure to the United States for display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
• Pablo Picasso was arrested in connection with stealing it in 1911.
• Hedda Hopper portrayed the woman on whom the portrait was based in a 1926 Hollywood film.

The answer is after the JUMP.

“There are four kinds of wealth that make up glamour and the beautiful people. They are social, monetary, physical, and psychological. [Jacqueline Onassis] has all four and that is why she is the most glamorous women in the world.”
 
Ron Galella, Jacqueline

Image Credit: Jacqueline

A copy of Jacqueline signed by Ron Galella is available via the Nick Harvill Libraries store.

In February 1968, Cecil Beaton wrote in his diary that he had attended the ballet with a female friend. In his account of the evening, he noted that the strain of the last five years had aged his friend, but it did not show “in photographs and she is still the most photogenic person in the world, infinitely more so than her infinitely more beautiful sister.”
 
To which sisters did he refer?

• Olivia de Havilland and Joan Fontaine.
• Nancy Mitford and Lady Diana Mosley.​
• Jacqueline Kennedy and Lee Radziwill.

 
HINT: The two sisters had shared one special summer but seemed to have grown apart by middle age. 

​The answer is after the JUMP.