Online Reporter
NEW YORK. – Thirty years ago, in April 1996, two years after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s death, fans could bid on everything from the former first lady’s French textbook to her diamond engagement ring.
When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994, aged 64, she had lived a life that few could fully fathom.
She was the US’s most photographed widow, a woman who married into dynasties twice over, and a working literary editor who fiercely defended her private world.
So when a lifetime’s archive of her possessions went under the hammer in April 1996, demand was so intense that 100,000 copies of the auction catalogue were printed.
This brochure also functioned as a rather pricey lottery ticket: 30,000 buyers’ names were entered into a draw to see the objects up close in a pre-sale viewing at Sotheby’s in New York.
Costing US$90 for the hardcover version and US$45 in paperback, this glossy 584-page book itemised the 1,195 lots, most of which came from the Manhattan apartment where Onassis had lived since 1964.
Newsweek culture editor Cathleen McGuigan told the BBC:
“For a lot of people, the catalogue is the closest they’re going to come to the sale, and is going to be the one tangible document that Jackie fans are going to have. This is the ultimate Jackie document.”
According to the BBC’s Tom Brook, what was really being sold was the glamour and style embodied by the former First Lady.
“The catalogue caters to a public hunger to find out what went on behind the impenetrable Jackie Onassis façade,” he said.
Among its contents were previously unpublished photographs of her Fifth Avenue apartment interior.
Sotheby’s chief executive Diana Brooks told the BBC that the photographs revealed “a very elegant apartment” that was “also very much a home”, with an obvious emphasis on “comfort and warmth”.
This home was filled with mementoes and trinkets accumulated over three decades of an extraordinary jet-set life.
These glimpses of her private world made clear how closely the apartment was bound up with the life she rebuilt following the trauma of November 1963.
After her husband, US President John F Kennedy, was assassinated, she bought a home in Washington DC just three blocks from where they had lived while he was a senator.
To her dismay, this new home quickly became a popular tourist attraction, and she put it up for sale.
As a grieving young widow, she craved the privacy offered by New York. A day after her 35th birthday in July 1964, she bought the 15-room penthouse apartment with views overlooking Central Park for US$200,000.
While she lived in many properties throughout her life, including a house on a private island in Greece owned by her second husband, the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, she always returned to her New York apartment on the 15th floor.
It was there that she died. A year later after her death, it was sold for US$9.5m.
There were so many items up for auction because, as Brook noted, “Jackie Onassis never threw anything away.”
Hundreds of her possessions had already been sent to the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, while her children Caroline and John Jr had decided what they wanted to keep for themselves.
As the New York Times pointed out, even Sotheby’s officials conceded that they were offering not masterpieces but the “leftovers” that neither her children nor the Kennedy Library chose to keep.
The items in the catalogue ranged from wire baskets valued at US$30 to a 40-carat diamond engagement ring given by Aristotle Onassis, which was expected to fetch US$600,000.
Some of the more personal items included a French grammar textbook that was a memento from the former First Lady’s school days.
Adorned with hand-drawn sketches of women in stylish clothes, it was a childhood hint that she would become a fashion icon.
The lowest price paid was US$1,250 for six books about Asia. – BBC
