Jacqueline Bouvier, whom the world would know a decade later as Jackie Kennedy, wanted to make a career as a photojournalist. She toured postwar France with a small Leica camera and worked for a local Washington newspaper. She inflated her resume to win Vogue's Prix de Paris and invented little tricks to get her boss to extend her deadlines. Nothing a journalist hasn't ever done.
All this is told in his latest biography Camera Girl (Galeria, 2022), written by Carl Sferrazza Anthony, which has just been published in the United States. In the book Jackie appears as an intelligent and educated young woman, with very clear ideas, who prefers to follow her nose and her instincts instead of the curriculum of Vassar University, from where it is suggested that she was expelled for trespassing in the third year to study at the Sorbonne.
Before leaving for Paris, in the middle of 1949, Jackie takes advantage of the bad relationship between her parents to get the money from each of them separately to buy a Leica and even a little more to round off the expenses of her trip. It was in Paris, says her biographer, where Jackie learned to know how to be, and she created herself as a character.
Upon returning to the United States, he tried to return to France in various ways, one of them appearing in 1951 at the Prix de Paris de Vogue. The winner would spend six months in the New York offices and then go to work as a junior editor in Paris. Jackie did it all to get through a rigorous selection process, from inflating a resume to writing a rousing cover letter: "She Could Be Some Kind of 20th Century Art Director General Watching Everything From a Chair Suspended in Space." She won the contest and got to go to Manhattan, but then she gave up the prize and never went to work in Paris.
In 1951 she got a job at the Washington Times-Herald. Frank Waldrop, her publisher, would later say: "I know that profile: girls from good families who dream of writing the great American novel until they give it up when they get the great American husband."
His first mission was to try to get an interview with the then Princess Elizabeth. It was unsuccessful, but her efforts convinced her editor who created a column for her called Inquiring Camera Girl. It was published six days a week with an interview and a portrait taken by Jackie with a big heavy Speed Graflex. The questions could be insubstantial, for example, "Why do you think people make jokes in elevators?" Philosophical, "What do people live for?" or on a more or less controversial issue, "Do you think Marilyn Monroe should be less suggestive?"
The author of the book does a good job of connecting the dots between the questions and the developments in Jackie's relationship with JFK. Around that time he began to be interested in other things. For example: “Can you give me one good reason why a satisfied bachelorette should marry?” Or in 1952 during the Senate campaign, “Should a candidate's wife run with her husband?”
At twenty months, and just as her editor had predicted, she quit her job to get married, but she left behind 2,600 completed interviews that today have served to discover her in an unknown facet: the most photographed woman in the world hunting unsuspecting people on the street to put them in front of her. of your lens.
