'America's Queen' Excerpt: Part I

— -- Below is the first chapter of Sarah Bradford’s new biography America’s Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, published by Viking Books.

Chapter One, Golden Gatsby YearsShe was born with a sense of theater, of carefully choreographed exits and entrances, an eagerly awaited baby, who arrived an improbable six weeks late in Southampton Hospital, Long Island, on July 28, 1929. The birth had been scheduled to take place in a New York City hospital but Jackie, characteristically, chose to make her first appearance on a hot Sunday at the height of the summer season in the newly fashionable Hamptons. She was the first child of Janet Norton Lee and John Vernou Bouvier III, born just over a year after their wedding in nearby East Hampton, where both her grandparents owned comfortable summer houses in what was virtually Wall-Street-on-Sea. Within months of her birth, the stock market crash of October 1929 had cast its shadow over the Bouvier family fortunes, giving Jackie and her younger sister, Lee, born four years later, a sense of insecurity and fear of poverty that was to last almost all their lives.

From early on Jackie became aware of sexual politics within her family, of power emanating from the dominant male, with women as lesser elements competing for his attention. It was a game she quickly learned to play, extracting the maximum she could from the situation. All her life she would be irresistibly drawn to the most powerful, successful man in a group. (A cousin said of her fondness for a man like her future father-in-law, Joseph P. Kennedy,”If Jackie was at the court of Ivan the Terrible, she’d say, ‘Ooh, he’s been so misunderstood … ’”)

The two dominant males in Jackie’s early life were her paternal grandfather, Major John Vernou Bouvier Jr., and her father. Her grandfather, known as “Grampy Jack” or “Grampy Bouvier” to his ten grandchildren and “the Major” to everyone else, was the center of summer family life at Lasata, the stucco, ivy-clad house on Further Lane. It was strategically situated near the ocean and the Maidstone Club, the heart of East Hampton social life, where the Bouviers had purchased a cabana in 1926. At Lasata, the Major was not only the undisputed head of his household but a personage in the village of East Hampton as well. As a former trial lawyer he was fond of the sound of his own voice and would regularly deliver the speech at the Memorial Day celebrations in East Hampton, which marked the opening of the summer season.

When the Bouviers first arrived in East Hampton as summer visitors in 1912, the place was still a “simple” resort compared with the more sophisticated Southampton, with saltbox houses, a duck pond and a village green sheltered from the ocean by huge sand dunes. Inland, flat potato fields stretched to the horizon. The Bouviers’ first house was a three-story, verandaed building called Wildmoor on Appaquogue Road; in 1925 the Major’s wife, Maude Sergeant, bought Lasata with her father’s money. It was not until 1935 that the Major, having inherited a considerable fortune from his uncle Michel Charles “M. C.” Bouvier, took over the house and began to live the expansive life to which he felt entitled, and which ended, at his death, in the financial ruin of the family.

Each May the various Bouvier households would move out of their Park Avenue apartments for the summer to East Hampton, where Maude would transplant her entire household staff to Lasata. Lasata-an Indian name meaning “place of peace,” a misnomer as far as the explosive Bouvier family was concerned-stood on a comfortable twelve acres, with a tennis court, Black Jack Bouvier’s stables for eight horses, each stall marked with its occupant’s name in gilded lettering, tack room, jumping ring and paddock, extensive vegetable gardens, a grape arbor and Maude’s “Italian garden,” edged with boxwood and dotted with classical statues. Bouvier accounts of Lasata as “built along the lines of an English country manor” exaggerate its size, but the Bouviers, following the Major’s example, were given to exaggeration.