The Stylishness of Her Privacy

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She belonged to a time -- a tragedy -- when large literary lines did not seem off, or ridiculous, as they might now. Hamlet and Lear, "if worthy their prominent part in the play," wrote Yeats, "do not break up their lines to weep." She, magnificently, did not break up her lines to weep. There was another thought that was associated especially with her husband: Courage is "grace under pressure." But that line applied to her in some truer way than it applied to him. She earned it in a harder fashion.

Jacqueline's father-in-law Joseph Kennedy went off to Hollywood decades ago and figured out the fundamental rule of the Age of Celebrity: "It doesn't matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are." The principle works for the short run, which is usually the only run that celebrity needs. Jacqueline Kennedy endured in the long run. Even in the earliest days after the Inauguration in 1961, she located the saner and contrary principle in a memo she wrote to her press secretary: "I feel strongly that publicity in this era has gotten completely out of hand -- and you must really protect the privacy of me and my children."

She was a civilized woman (John Kennedy was about half-civilized). Her civilized quality derived in large part from her insistence that her life belonged to her and her children. It is hard enough for a celebrity to be sane; fame is a distorting, corrupting and even psychotic environment. People in a healthy community gossip about people they know. It must disturb something in human nature to gossip so addictedly about people one doesn't know -- all of those brightly painted, artificial familiars.

Jacqueline Onassis was clearly a sane woman. She kept a seemly silence. And for all the fragility she may have suggested in the big, round sunglasses and the head scarf, she wore some inner armoring; she possessed an eerie talent (a strategy of self-protection well known to those who handle dangerous animals) to make herself disappear, to dematerialize. If you saw her on the street, she would seem to abstract herself out of public attention, a kind of elegant vanishing. She would be, as she finally is now . . . elsewhere.