CAMERA GIRL : THE COMING OF AGE OF JACKIE BOUVIER KENNEDY by CARL SFERRAZZA ANTHONY : MISTRESS MANIFESTO BOOK REVIEW

 Camera Girl has a different perspective on the life of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy than most of the Jackie books I've read because it focuses on her life before her marriage to John F. Kennedy as a career woman.  The senator who would take the White House and end his presidency assassinated. was barely romantic and had not actually courted her much.  He was too busy and too much of a womanizer to think of it.  

Born Jacqueline Bouvier in 1929, the child of divorced parents who were always at war over her and her sister,  the future First Lady had a natural intelligence but wasn't especially academic. She was artistic and drew fun images revealing a sense of humor, considered being an actress, but being a writer was her most earnest desire.  Only an eighth French, more Irish, Jackie worked hard to learn French language and culture and adopt that ethnicity as her heritage. She was multi-lingual and a perfectionist.

Her step-father had greater wealth than her father, who was in a slow decline of fortunes and health. Pressure to marry and before the age of 21, she wanted to be a writer and journalist first. This book follows her efforts, against sexism, as she established herself as a roving photographer who wrote an article composted of  quotes of conversation. She came up with the interesting  questions and that asked people from all walks of life to answer. Her time as the Inquiring Photographer lasted about a year and a half and ended as she became officially engaged to the Senator. One of her articles focused on questions inspired by Marilyn Monroe.  

How could Jackie do more than be a housewife when most employers had the "you'll just get married anyway" attitude?  She, as an expensively educated young woman, tried to campaign to be assigned to hard news but the social status implied by that education actually went against her. (There were women employed as journalist at the time.)  Connections landed her a start, but even then she was told that an engagement would end her employment. 

It didn't help that her mother felt that men would not marry intelligent women and that her aspirations for her daughters was that they would marry way up.  Many a beau entered her life, most not serious, and she herself began to see marriage as the strongest opportunity she could have. She had a fiancee that she returned a ring to.

This book asserts that, though years younger than Kennedy, and certainly not as worldly, Jackie knew what she was doing when she decided she wanted to marry the womanizing man.  Warned by John's best friend Lem, she decided that a lot of opportunities, including being able to influence, came along with being the wife on a senator or First Lady. She advised her sister-in-law to evaluate those opportunities to stay in marriage. She used her research skills to help John F. Kennedy succeed.

Page 285:

Distinctly unromantic, Kennedy qualified his inability to easily express emotion by claiming it was a result of his mother being unemotional and rarely expressing affection to him.  By accepting this deficiency in him, Jackie realized she was just as unusual...."

***

Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, we have been interested in the saga of Jackie, Johm, Marilyn, and Big and Little Edie Bouvier.  Of interest to the Little Edie fans is that Jackie's father, nicknamed Black Jack, a sexual adventurer, may have had an affair with Little Edie, his niece.  You'll also learn more than in Grey Gardens about how it was that the Bouvier inheritance was depleted and possibly mismanaged by Black Jack, who was the brother of Big Edie. He may have used some of their money to finance Jackie's first trip to Europe in 1950, where she lived in Paris.

This book has much to reveal about Jackie and the relationship she had with those parents, who both wished to control her and have her to themselves; as a result she became careful with her words - both written and spoken.  She manipulated them by sometimes leaving out information or thinking three steps ahead.

page 91:

Reviewing her early writings during her train ride from New York to Kingston, Rhode Island, station, near Newport, would remind Jackie that she not only had a gift for adapting the events of her life into fictionalized stories but had always relied on doing so, particularly as a way of responding to the unpleasant incidents of her life, including her parent's divorce.  "It amuses me," she wrote at that time, to craft fairy tales.  When her balance was thrown off or her boundaries were crossed, Jackie would retreat into the role of imaginative chronicler, casting allies as heroes, violators as villains, artfully transfiguring reality.  She often illustrated her fanciful chronicles with caricatures of friends, family members, teachers - and herself, literally turning her real life into an absurdist cartoon world.

C 2024  book review-report  Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights

If you're interested in more about Jackie, John F. Kennedy, Big and Little Edie Beale, Marilyn Monroe - you've come to the right place.  To pull up posts about these famous people, you can use the search feature and put in their names, or you can go into the archives.

2014 

August
LITTLE EDIE BOUVIER BEALE of Grey Gardens Fame. Her Affair With a Married Man May Have Done Her In.

December

Special Edition
AN EYE TO JACKIE KENNEDY ONASSIS

2016 

May

MARILYN MONROE (Norma Jeane Baker)

Mistress of Super Agent Johnny Hyde Early in Her Career

N ANGEL WING : HOLIDAY GIVING and CHARITIES 

2017

March

KATHLEEN “KICK” KENNEDY ; Sister of J.F.K., Widow of Billy Hartington, Mistress of Peter Wentworth Fitzwilliam When They Died in A Plane Crash

2020

July

JUDITH KATHERINE IMMOOR  AKA CAMPBELL EXNER : MISTRESS OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY : COURIER BETWEEN KENNEDY AND MOBSTER SAM GIANCANA

August

MIMI ALFORD : BEFORE MONICA LEWINSKY THERE WAS A J.F.K. INTERN IN THE WHITE HOUSE

September

MARY PINCHOT MEYER : WAS SHE THE PRESIDENT'S TRUE SOUL MATE?  WAS SHE ASSASSINATED BY THE C.I.A?