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John Bouvier III was a swarthily handsome stockbroker who cut a dashing figure around New York and, because of his year-round suntan, was known variously as "Black Jack," "the Black Orchid" and "the Sheik." His marriage in East Hampton to Janet Lee, the handsome daughter of an indigo-blueblooded, wealthy (Manhattan real estate, banking) family, was a major event in the 1928 summer season. And just one year later, the Bouvier family doctor was summoned from Manhattan to preside at the birth of Jacqueline.
From birth to young womanhood, Jackie and her younger sister Lee (now married to her second husband, Prince Stanislas Radziwill, a Polish nobleman turned London businessman) lived according to a social pattern as undeviating as a cotillion. Winters were spent in a Park Avenue apartment (where Black Jack indulgently permitted Jackie to keep a pet rabbit in the bathtub) while Jackie attended fashionable Chapin School. At six, Jackie had her own pony, by twelve she was riding in horse shows, and her love of horses is abiding. As Jackie and Lee grew older, they met their beaux under the Biltmore clock, fox-trotted through subscription dances at the Plaza and St. Regis with a beardless stag line known for decades as the "St. Grottlesex" set. The languid summers were whiled away in East Hampton, where Jackie played tennis on the grass courts of the Maidstone Club and modeled at the annual Ladies Village Improvement Society fashion show.
But even then, Jackie Bouvier seemed somehow removed from her group; her friends noticed it and still recall it. In 1940 her parents were divorced. Two years later, Janet Bouvier married Hugh D. Auchincloss, a Washington broker, but Black Jack, who died in 1957, never remarried. Jackie adored her father, and her eyes still glisten when she speaks of him. "He was a most devastating figure," she says. "At school all my friends adored him, and used to line up to be taken out to dinner when he came to see me."
After the divorce, Jackie became even more withdrawn, more apart from the St. Grottlesex group. "Her father," says one friend, "was the closest person in her life."
For Jackie Bouvier, the locale changed after the divorce, but the routine was much the same: Holton-Arms, a blue-chip girls' school in Washington, replaced Chapin, and the gilded summers in East Hampton gave way to the 75-acre waterfront Auchincloss estate in Newport, R.I. If anything, life was more mutedly elegant than before: Merrywood, the Auchincloss chateau in suburban Virginia, is rich with taste and culture: soft-spoken butlers pad across the wine-colored carpets; mellow, morocco-bound classics line the walls; and television is relegated to a tiny recess on one side of the vast fireplace. While the Kennedys were haranguing one another with political questions at their Hyannisport table, dinner at Merrywood was often conducted in French.