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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?

CATHERINE WALTERS INTO OLD AGE : WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT and THE PRINCE OF WALES FIGURE INTO HER SURVIVAL

Perhaps the most surprising thing about courtesan Catherine Walter's story is that ex-lover, poet, and confidant Wilfrid Scawen Blunt figured in it to the end.

After her brief time in Paris, Catherine returned to England.  In the 1880's she featured in the goings on in Mayfair - London, as she had twenty hears earlier when her beauty and horsemanship made her career. She set herself up in a house in 1882 and began writing with Blunt once more, despite the ending of their romance which had been horrible for him. It turns out that she and Wilfrid wrote letters back and forth to each other for forty years.  Perhaps her instincts had been right that he would make for a loyal friend all along.  

At her house in Mayfair, Catherine became the hostess of a salon, which was the more fashionable way to be 'at home' to receive friends on a certain day and hour, as had been the custom. It was because of this salon that she began to be included again in society at least a little bit, as the class structure and notions of womenhood began to change slowly. She held teas on Sunday afternoons, when she knew that men would be able to come and women would generally not be able to. Both Blunt and the Prince of Wales came to visit as did the Prime Minister Gladstone. The women who showed up tended to be artists, writers, and actresses. 

It's not known who all were her 'protectors' were in her years as a courtesan in England, but what is known through Blunt is that in his last visit to her, when he and she were both debilitated with age, she showed him a drawer full of letters which proved that she also had been writing back and forth with the Prince of Wales, who seemed interested also in her welfare. Implied is that possibly the Prince had been one of the men who had once had a relationship with her and provided for her.

Catherine Walters had the gift of making old lovers into friends. (This reminds me of the woman who may be considered the most famous courtesan of the 21st century, Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman who also remained friends with the various men who kept her.)

She kept a friendship with Marquis of Hartington - Spencer Compton Cavendish, now in politics, who had been a man she once wanted to marry, and whose family had provided a liveable, life-long annuity.

However, as she aged she had increasing trouble with her lungs and at one point it was HRH, the Prince of Wales who sent a doctor to attend to her.  In 1889 the cure was the South of France, and months away from cold, rainy London.  Both Hartington and the Prince of Wales came to visit her as she lived in the South of France.  In her mid sixties her health had declined to the point where was in pain and took daily medications. She grew thin and was half deaf and half blind by 1918. She still wrote, using pencil instead of pen, her handwriting difficult to read. In 1920 she had a fatal stroke and died.

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BIGHEARTED

 

VICTORIAN ERA ENGLAND AND IMPROVEMENTS FOR WOMEN'S RIGHTS

 Page 309 :

".... All the great courtesans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries treasured their autonomy and guarded it jealousy, an impropriety which marked them off, more than most anything else, from their 'respectable' sisters. This was so even though the position of women - particularly married women - in the mid-nineteenth century was better than it had ever been.  It is hard to imagine, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the profoundly radical changes to the position of women about the Divorce Act of 1857, and the Married Women's Property Act of 1882. Before the latter a married woman could own no property (although among the very rich, pre-nupital settlements often circumnavigated this), nor even control any earnings she might have (this was changed by legislation in 1878), and she had the legal status of a minor, on par with children, criminals and the insane. Although prior to 1857 she could be divorced by her husband, she herself was debarred from filing a divorce suit - or any other kind of legal action - against him. Most critical of all was the fact that the husband had complete control over the children, who like his wife, were his legal property. A woman had no redress. In the case of her adultery, for instance, a husband could - and invariably did - simply take her children away from her for good.

The Acts of 1857 and 1882 changed all this.  As well as divorce and other law reforms, the nineteenth century saw many other campaigns by women to improve their circumstances - the campaigns for the vote, for the expansion of job opportunities, and for better educational rights all belong to this period..."

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