America's Queen - Hardcover

Bradford, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0670874221 ISBN 13: 9780670874224

Publisher: Viking, 2000

Synopsis

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was and is an icon for women. Beautiful, exquisitely dressed, cultivated, gracious, a little mysterious and almost regal, she personifies the way we would like all our world leaders' wives to be. Sarah Bradford paints an extraordinary portrait of a woman riddled with contradictions: kind, considerate, proud, loyal and loving, yet also supremely selfish, manipulative and greedy. Drawing on remarkable new testimony from those closest to Jackie, "America's Queen" follows her from her rigid, bleak childhood to the glorious glamour and complication of life as Kennedy's wife, to the even more glamorous but ultimately poisonous marriage to Onassis, to the final serenity of her years as a New York publishing editor. The secrets of Onassis's will, Jackie's affairs, her extraordinary spending habits, her treachery to old friends - all of these are revealed together with her public life as the ultimate trophy wife.

About this title

Review:

Fresh from her well-received life of Queen Elizabeth II, the English historian and biographer Sarah Bradford turns her hand to America's own answer to royalty, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Painstakingly detailed, impressively fair, the result is the most definitive account yet of a woman who captured the imagination of the American public like no First Lady before or after her. Bradford seems to have interviewed almost everyone who had ever been intimate with Onassis, including George Plimpton, Gore Vidal, Joan Kennedy, and even a few ex-lovers. Most notably of all, Jackie's sister Lee Radziwill speaks with unexpected frankness about the mixture of rivalry and affection that marked their relationship since childhood. Jackie-lovers, take note: this is no hagiography, and its subject certainly comes off as no saint. As gracious as this American icon could be, she also had moments of coldness and even greed, including a particularly shocking moment by the bedside of Ari Onassis's dying son. Yet, in the end, non-airbrushed anecdotes like these only serve to make this most private of public figures even more fascinating. Jackie was, as Bradford writes, "a complex woman of many facets, concealed insecurities and intricate defense mechanisms, a strong urge toward the limelight contrasting with a desire for privacy and concealment.... Behind the mask of beauty and fame lay a shrewd mind, a ruthless judgment of people, antennae finely turned to any sign of pretentiousness or pomposity, and a wry, even raunchy sense of humor." The figure who emerges from subsequent pages is as compelling as the heroine of any novel, and it is to Bradford's credit that she doesn't seem to have fallen completely under her subject's spell. Her approach is sympathetic, but never fawning; candid, but never sensationalistic. For those who are curious not about Jackie's glamour but about its source, America's Queen offers an unprecedented look at the flesh-and-blood woman behind the Camelot myth. --Carlotta DeWitt

About the Author:

Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. She is the bestselling author of several biographies, including Disraeli, selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; George VI; Princess Grace; and The New York Times bestseller Elizabeth. Married to the Viscount Bangor, she lives in London.

About this edition

• Publisher: Viking
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0670874221
• ISBN 13: 9780670874224
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 704