Darwin Porter - Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

With admiration, affection, and respect Rest in Peace

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis 1929-1994

Chapter One

Jackie Grows Up with The Black Prince Her Gambling, Womanizing, Bisexual Father

At the 1934 Southampton Horse Show, Jackie stoodboth emotionally and physicallybetween her mother, Janet Lee Bouvier, and her father, Black Jack Bouvier.

From the beginning of their long and complicated sisterhood, Lee Bouvier(in the carriage) lived in Jackies shadow.

Torn from the pages of The Great Gatsby , Black Jack Bouvier helped define the Roaring Twenties. He was seductive, charming, dangerous, and, in the words of his wife, Janet, a barnyard rooster.

His legitimate daughters included Jacqueline and Lee Bouvier. His illegitimate twins, and boy and a girl, were sent to Britain.

A womanizer, Black Jack was also bisexual, indulging in numerous affairs with both young men and women, often on the same night. He was a hedonist, a rogue, a gambler, a scoundrel, a rascal, a libertine, and a heartbreaker, leading a dissolute life which featured promiscuous sex and other vices he claimed were not fit to mention in polite company. A moneymaker who dabbled with high risks, he also spent recklessly.

Janet, holding her happy daughter, Jacqueline, was unaware of the oncoming Wall Street crash that would mar their lives.

This was the man who functioned as Jackies role model for her future husbands, John F. Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. Because of the early examples her father established, she was perhaps able to indulge, or at least overlook, their frequent betrayals and infidelities.

Perhaps Black Jack loved my darling Jacqueline, too much, at least in the opinion of Janet.

Black Jack himself, [formally known as John Vernou Bouvier III], later recalled that My daughter, Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, could have chosen a more opportune time to come into the world. She was born on July 28, 1929. In October came the great Wall Street Crash, plunging the world into a depression. I suffered terrible losses that day.

I was called Black Jack by my friends, because of my dark skin color, he claimed. My enemies had their names for me. Sometimes, the ladies referred to me as The Black Sheik, claiming that I looked like Rudolph Valentino. I was also called The Black Orchid. My favorite nickname was The Black Prince. When Jackie started going to the movies, she said if Id gone to Hollywood, I would have given Clark Gable competition. After all, we had the same mustache. Jackie got her good looks from meor so they say.

I was a stockbroker, but not a conformist, he said. A bit of a maverick. My motto came from Martin Luther. He who loves not wine, women, and song, is a fool his whole life long.

Born in 1891, Black Jack was the oldest son of Major John Vernou Bouvier, Jr. He was one of five children, each of whom would become a future aunt or uncle of Jacqueline Bouvier. These included Black Jacks younger brother, William Sargent Bouvier, nicknamed Bud; Black Jacks sister, Edith; and two strawberry blonde twins, Maude and Michelle Bouvier.

Black Jack had graduated from Yale in 1914 at the bottom of his class. His classmate, Tom Collier, later said, He never opened a book, but practically seduced every virgin who came on the weekends, hoping to pick up Yale undergraduates in the local taverns.

Your Relationship with Jackie is Unnatural

Janet (Jackies mother) to Black Jack

No one could believe it. On some nights, he had three or four girls waiting downstairs to be serviced. What a stud! He would bop one and then summon the next. He treated girls something awful, but they flocked to him. We called him The Great Lover. From what I observed of him in the shower, he had one powerful weapon.

When the United States entered World War I, Black Jack was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps. Black Jack wrote Collier, While waiting for this dirty little war to end, Im spending all my time in the smoke-filled, honky-tonk, back alley bars and brothels of the Carolinas.

After the war, he acquired a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

His friend, Louis Ehret, a wealthy realtor, said, Jack was reckless with money. He ran up huge gambling debts. What he didnt drink, he pissed away on women. I think he invited half of New York to his apartment at 375 Park Avenue. Women flocked around him like moths to the flame. He even shacked up with Mae Murray, whod starred in Erich von Stroheims The Merry Widow. Quite a contrast. his dark skin against her powder puff whiteness. One night he went home with Texas Guinan after we visited her speakeasy. He once told me that hed impregnated at least a dozen women, arranging back alley abortions for them.

The biggest scandal that circulated about him was that he was seducing his twin sisters, Maude and Michelle, Ehret claimed. They loved to party as much as he did. Some women wanted both Bud and Jack in their beds at the same time. The reference was to his alcoholic brother, William Sargent Bouvier.

Black Jack got to taste the beestung lips of silent screen vamp Mae Murray, the Merry Widow herself.

Bud could drink even more than Black Jack, if that were possible, Ehret said. The Major eventually cut Bud off, calling him a contemptible parasite and dirty nuisance.

Black Jack went every day to the Maidstone, the most exclusive country club of East Hampton. If the weather was fair, Black Jack would strip down and sunbathe nude in the courtyard, much to the delight of the society ladies passing by. Some of them would stop and stare in disbelief. As Kathleen Bouvier wrote, He never saw any reason to conceal what the good Lord had given him. And by his own reckoning, he had given him just about everything. His seductiveness lay in his aura of unquestionable masculinity. He looked like the concrete realization of a young girls dreamy fantasy, a glamorous sheik who would whisk her off to his tent in Araby.