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Description
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KENNEDY ONASSIS, Jacqueline Bouvier (1929-1994). Twenty two autograph letters signed ("Jackie") and one printed telegram, to R. Beverley Corbin, Jr., Farmington, Connecticut, 1945-1951. Together 75 pages, 8vos, on personal stationery and stationery of Miss Porter's School, all but one with original envelope. [With:] KENNEDY ONASSIS. Black and white photograph, unsigned, n.d. (6¾ x 4½in.), LOVE LETTERS FROM A FEISTY, TEENAGE JACKIE BOUVIER TO HER HARVARD BOYFRIEND THE EARLIEST JACKIE KENNEDY LETTERS TO APPEAR AT AUCTION. A wonderful archive of letters, most written when she was 16 and 17 years old, to her Harvard boyfriend. They display a funny, spirited, at times cynical young woman, but one with great intelligence and a strong will of her own. She hated Miss Porter's finishing school--"prison" she calls it--and said "if school days are the happiest of your life, I'm hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight." In another letter she calculated down to the hour the length of her upcoming Christmas break, when "I can commute happily back and forth between my doting parents until they both get sick of me..." "I'm never going to send my children to boarding school," she jokes on 3 October 1946. "The boys can go to P.S. 148 with gangsters, and then go to Columbia & the girls can go to Hunter College and they'll all be morons but at least they wont have to tear around and get their teeth knocked out playing hockey every day... Can you think of anything worse than living in a small town like this all your life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake?" On 12 February 1947 she tells Corbin to smuggle in cigarettes, chocolate "and a hip flask to shock Mrs. J." The letters also reveal her cooling enthusiasm for her young suitor, who seems to have been badly hurt when Jackie refused to kiss him during one visit: 10 October 1946: "I do love you though--and can love you without kissing you every time I see you and I hope you understand that." 20 January 1947: "I've always thought of being in love as being willing to do anything for the other person--starve to buy them bread and not mind living in Siberia with them--and I've always thought that every minute away from them would be hell--so looking at it that [way] I guess I'm not in love with you." The final, undated letter announces her (brief) engagement to John Husted, which lasted only a few months in 1951. "What I hope for you," she tells Corbin in parting, "is for the same thing to happen as quickly and as surely as it did with me. It will when you least expect it." Provenance: By descent to the present owner. (24)
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