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Then, in 1950, Jackie Bouvier found an outlet. After two years at Vassar, she went to Paris for a year's study at the Sorbonne. It was an experience that has shaped all her tastes, and her letters of the time bubble with her excitement. "Dearest 'Yush,' " she wrote to her stepbrother, Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., "At last I allow myself the luxury of writing you! I have been so busy up till now and have to write Mummy a ream each week or she gets hysterical and thinks I'm dead or married to an Italian . . . It is so different, the feeling you get of a city when you live there. I remember last summer when we were here, I thought Paris was all glamour and glitter and rush, but of course it isn't. I was so goggle-eyed at the nite club you took me to—I went to the Lido the other day and it just seemed too garish. I really lead two lives—flying to the Sorbonne and Reid Hall—in a lovely quiet gray rainy world—or like the maid on her day out—putting on a fur coat and going to the middle of town and being swanky at the Ritz Bar! I really like the first part best . . ."
Bartlett's Pair. Returning to the U.S., Jackie cringed at the prospect of "being a little girl at Vassar again." She decided to stay with her mother and stepfather and complete her studies at George Washington University. She had matured, and her tastes had taken lasting form. Says Charles Bartlett, Washington correspondent for the Chattanooga Times, and an old friend: "She was no longer the round little girl who lived next door. She was more exotic. She had become gayer and livelier."
It was at Bartlett's insistence ("He got to be quite a bore about it") and at a dinner in his home in 1951 that Jacqueline Bouvier first met the young, handsome, rich and highly eligible young Democratic Representative from Massachusetts. Sunday-supplement legend claims that Jack Kennedy "leaned across the asparagus and asked for a date." Jackie denies the story; asparagus, she says, was not on the menu. But Jack Kennedy was far from impervious to beautiful young women, and, admits Jackie, "it was more than just meeting someone. It started the wheels turning."
They moved slowly at first. Jack, heavily involved in his Senate race against Henry Cabot Lodge, spent most of his time in Massachusetts. "He'd call me from some oyster bar up there, with a great clinking of coins, to ask me out to the movies the following Wednesday in Washington." Meanwhile, Jackie had gone to work for the Washington Times-Herald for $42.50 a week as an inquiring photographer. It was an insipid job, and Jackie had her difficulties with it ("I always forgot to pull out the slide"), but she managed to enliven it occasionally with bright questions. Asking a group of prominent matrons which presidential candidate, Eisenhower or Stevenson, they would like to be marooned with on a desert island, she got a much quoted response from Mrs. Edward Foley Jr., wife of the Under Secretary of the Treasury: "I'll take Adlai any time. Where's the island?" Jackie ended her venture into journalism with a flourish and her own byline, covering the coronation of Elizabeth II.