An intimate look at the complex and absorbing relationship between two extraordinary women.” —Jay Mulvaney, author of Kennedy Weddings: A Family Album
“A rich and nuanced portrait.” —Publishers Weekly
“Pottker divulges startling vignettes.” —Washington Post
Yes, another Jackie book. But, unlike its hundreds of predecessors, this one reveals Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in a different role: that of daughter. Although sometimes portrayed as a social climber, Jackie's mother was a decisive, opinionated woman capable of taking charge, even in the White House. (On the night of November 22, 1963, for instance, it was she who instructed the nanny to tell Caroline and John-John the devastating news of their father's death, thus sparing her daughter the emotional torment. Examining the relationship of Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss and Jackie, one realizes that mother-daughter relationships always resound more than we think.
An intimate look at the complex and absorbing relationship between two extraordinary women. —author of Kennedy Weddings
By combining beauty and reticence, style and simplicity, gaiety and dignity, while playing a pivotal role in history, Jacqueline Kennedy became as tantalizing a figure as Cleopatra, a woman to be written about until books are written no more. Now a pair of new biographies claim to reveal for the first time information central to an understanding of Jacqueline Kennedy's character. Yet these two volumes could not be more different in style, content, seriousness of purpose or usefulness to the reader.
Pottker's focus on the former first lady's relationship with her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss, is a great waste of time, really, considering that the meandering presentation of evidence largely demonstrates—albeit against the author's will—that Jackie became the woman she was despite, rather than because of, her conventionally minded, critical and exacting parent. Painting Janet as a charming woman unfairly reviled as "cold" and a "social climber," the author immediately substantiates those criticisms by making two concessions. First, she admits that Janet entered into a second marriage to Hugh Auchincloss because he had money, although he was so dull as to resemble, in the words of his stepson Gore Vidal, "a magnum of chloroform." Second, Pottker acknowledges that Janet, the grandchild of poor Irish immigrants, pretended to be a descendant of Robert E. Lee because it would impress the society in which she hoped to move.
Janet is revealed to be not only an absorbed, selfish woman, but a hypercritical parent as well. She told Jackie that her hands were too big, her clothes too sloppy, her shoulders too wide. She took little notice of her daughter'sintellectual interests. When Jackie won Vogue magazine's Prix de Paris, which would have allowed her to work in France for a year, Janet dissuaded her from going, saying, "You're making the biggest mistake of your life. You're going to be twenty-two years old in July and you're not engaged yet."
Some qualities inculcated by or inherited from her mother were indeed useful: From Janet, who ran enormous households and rode horses competitively, Jackie learned to be brave, meticulously well prepared and beautifully dressed. She learned French because Janet, wishing her children to be fluent, spoke it at meals. But despite Pottker's claim that this book clarifies the nature of their relationship, the reader never gets a sense of what their time together was like. For all Pottker's protestations, it is quite possible that Jackie found her mother a pretentious and onerous presence whose criticisms helped make her private life not a refuge from public clamor but merely another trial to be endured.
—Penelope Mesic
Bloated, stumbling account of Janet Auchincloss, her family, and the social world that produced Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. It is certainly curious that for all of America's obsession with its de facto queen, Jackie Kennedy, there has been so little said of the Queen Mother. This could be attributed to Janet Auchincloss's social set, which shunned vulgar publicity, but today's curious reader need no longer suffer in ignorance; Pottker (Crisis in Candyland, 1995) has dragged the woman, warts and all, into the spotlight. With the assistance of Auchincloss's two sons and countless relatives and staff, Pottker moves from the roots of the Lee and Auchincloss families through the lives of Janet and Hughdie and the world that sheltered Jackie until she married Jack. The work is remarkably detailed-and surprisingly drear. Although for the most part (following a deadly pair of opening chapters), the story moves along at a steady clip, the author has hobbled the narrative with over-reporting, reducing her dramatic cast of characters-Black Jack Bouvier, iron-willed Janet, mercurial Jack and Jackie-to a collection of minutiae. From the very beginning, the author lacks discernment; it's as if she determined to include every detail recorded in her research, from how Janet wore her stockings to the style of young Jackie's headboards (they had cane inserts). Equal space is accorded to the story of Jackie's second miscarriage and an account of the decor of Janet Jr.'s debutante ball. This is an odd editorial choice, but the author's judgment moves from questionable to shocking when she informs us that immediately following JFK's assassination, Jackie "used the bathroom and noticed, again, that she hadher period." Although Pottker has succeeded in evoking the wealth and lifestyle of her subjects, she has done little to bring their relationship to life. Well-researched, but vulgar and plodding.
