Janet and Jackie
 Jan Pottker
 (Associate Writer & Reviewer - Dr. Alma Bond)
 2001 St. Martin's Press
  ISBN: 0312266073


The Story of a Mother and Her Daughter. Janet Bouvier Auchincloss was a constant & significant presence in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's life. It was Janet who helped instill many of the qualities that would make Jackie famous: her inner strength & discipline; her charm & reserve, her love of the arts & her exquisite taste.

Janet not only played a pivotal part in Jackie's wedding to JFK, but served as an important & face-saving stand-in for her daughter during the White House years. The only book to explore the fascinating mother-daughter relationship, Janet and Jackie is filled with stories never before published, shedding new light on the personal life of an American icon.

Associate Reviewer Dr. Alma Bond writes:

Janet and Jackie is supposed to be the story of Jackie & her mother, Janet. It really isn't. It is the tale of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, with whatever material the author could dredge up about Janet, to compose still another book about Jackie. Not that it isn't interesting; we Jackiephiles love to read anything about our heroine. But it would have been more accurate to entitle the book Still More about Jackie.

According to Pottker, the crucial role played by Janet in shaping Jackie in the role of First Lady has never been known to the public nor emphasized by the press, who preferred to cram the stories of Jackie with gossip about the more newsworthy Kennedy family. This book attempts to clarify the relationship between the famous mother-daughter couple, & to set the record straight.

It is interesting how ubiquitous the number eleven was in Jackie's life. She lived with her father Jack Bouvier, for only eleven years. The time from Jackie's first date with Jack to the time of the final disaster was eleven years. And strangely enough, Onassis & Maurice Tempelsman were in her life eleven years apiece. Janet's impact, however, lasted for a full sixty years, from the time of Jackie's birth till her mother's death, & influenced the formation of Jackie's character more than anyone else.

Janet was terribly strict & highly critical of the adult Jackie who once said, “I feel that I am reasonably turned out when I leave the house, but then my mother will tell me my shirt is too short, my hem uneven, and my topcoat button dangling by a thread.” Janet was furious with her daughter Lee (as she was later with Jackie) when she had an affair with Aristotle Onassis. Janet called him “a moral leper.” Her carping criticism probably did more to mold Jackie's perfectionistic personality than anything else in her upbringing.

Janet's domination reached the point where she would think nothing of smacking her daughter across the face. When Jackie was twenty-two years old, her mother argued with her about whom she dated. Jackie answered, “Mummy, I'm grown up. You can't tell me who I can see and who I can't.” Incredibly, Janet responded to this healthy self-assertion by slapping Jackie on both cheeks. Years later, almost in a scene of deja vu, little Caroline was playing with some friends. Somehow they had gotten hold of a lipstick & were decorating each other's faces. When Jackie came into the room & saw Caroline's smeared face, she slapped her repeatedly, first on one cheek and then on the other, backing her through the room until they reached the far wall. The children stood there stupified.

Jackie's identification with Janet was deep & wide, & she was practically a mirror image of her mother in many ways, such as horseback riding, athleticism, her ladylike manners in public, her reserve, & her temper. Much of what we admire about Jackie in the role of the First Lady was grounded on her emulation of Janet. The refurbishing of the White House into a thing of comfort & beauty was modeled on her exposure to Janet's renovating of the Auchincloss homes.

The identification also took place in Jackie's ideas of the role of a woman. Both she & Janet, in keeping with their times, felt that marriage was the only way for a woman to secure her future. Jackie believed this along with her mother until after Onassis died, when for the first time she tried to establish an identity of her own as an editor. “I have always lived through men,” she said. “Now I realize I can't do that anymore.”

Both women had ferocious tempers. Once Jackie & Lee had a fierce battle. Jackie kicked in Lee's door in frustration. Janet's temper was even more violent. When her step-daughter Nini dared to tell Janet that something she said she read in the newspapers was wrong, she flew at her step-daughter's face with her long nails. Nini grabbed Janet's wrists & pulled her to the floor. As a result, Hugh D. Auchincloss dismissed Nini from the house, telling her she was no longer welcome at Hammersmith Farm. It is a moot question which lady should have been banished.

Despite her severity with her children, Janet was extremely generous about standing in for her recalcitrant daughter to cover her refusal to attend the multitude of official & semi-official functions, teas, degrees, etc.. that bored her. Jackie was not a political woman, & much about her husband's work bored her. Although she loved Jack, she was not interested in the details of his administration. Pottker reveals the fact that Jackie had not even registered to vote! By standing in for her daughter, Janet helped to sooth the feelings of the boycotted guests & smooth over the sheer quantity of Jackie's absences.

At a White House post-inaugural party for the family, Jackie, as usual, was absent. The President was visibly perturbed. There were lots of questioning looks from the family. When asked where Jackie was, Joe Kennedy snarled, “She's upstairs resting, God damn it!” Guests were incredulous when Jackie gave a tea to honor her mother & then never showed up. When asked where Jackie was, Janet replied, “She's out walking the dog.” More important was Janet's standing in for the First Lady when she became area chairman for the National Cultural Center, later renamed the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The Center's success was largely due to Janet's long & hard work.

Mother & daughter had a very complicated relationship, one that Jackie's personal secretary, Mary Barelli Gallagher, wrote in her best-selling book was a “push-pull relationship,” that sometimes Jackie sought out her mother & other times remained cool & literally unapproachable. Jackie could be a very revengeful person, when it came to her mother. Angry that Janet had allowed some of Jackie's personal letters to be published, she got even by seating her & her husband far back on the reviewing stand so they could only see the back of Jack's head as he delivered the Inaugural Address. The prize seats that apparently had been reserved for the Auchinclosses were given to their children.

Yet despite her ambivalence, Jackie in many ways was a loving daughter. It was Jackie who took care of her mother when she was dying of Alzheimer's disease, & made possible her care by financial support. She set up a million dollar trust fund for Janet, & made sure that she continued the activities she once liked, even if she were no longer capable of understanding them. It was Jackie, not Lee (who rarely came to see Janet) who made sure to visit her mother frequently in her long illness, & scheduled a generous amount of time from her work as an editor to spend with Janet in her last days. She also put care into selecting a devoted staff, who took her out to whatever would be of interest to her in town.

Janet and Jackie makes for interesting reading, & brings to light appealing & sometimes amusing material about the famous mother-daughter couple. Pottker helps us understand how little Jackie Bouvier became America's Queen, & in so doing has created a book of historical value.

The writer ends Jackie's story on a nostalgic & fitting note. “..in all the talk over the years about Jackie, and in all the eulogies she received...those mentioned were her children, her past husbands..., her father..., and Rose and Joe Kennedy. Not one reference is made to the woman, Janet Lee Auchincloss, who purposely & sometimes unwittingly shaped Jackie into the icon of an era.”

More from Jan Pottker: Celebrity Washington. Co-author Dear Ann, Dear Abby: The Unauthorized Biography of Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren.
(01/06/02)

Dr. Alma Bond
2002©Alma Bond
A RebeccasReads.Com Sr. Associate Reviewer

A RebeccasReads author featured in Authors & Books

Reviewer's Bio:
Dr. Alma Halbert Bond is the author of ten published books, including:
The Deadly Jigsaw Puzzle;
The Tree That Could Fly;
Tales Of Psychology (2004);
I Married Dr. Jekyll And Woke Up Mrs. Hyde (2000);
The Autobiography Of Maria Callas, A Novel (1998);
On Becoming A Grandparent: A Diary of Family Discovery (1994);
Who Killed Virginia Woolf? A Psychobiography (1998);
Profiles of Key West (1996).

She recently recorded her new manuscript, Old Age Is A Terminal Illness, as an audio book.

She is also the author of a just published children's picture book called The Tree That Could Fly.

Dr. Bond teaches Psychology & Writing online at WriterSchool.