In honor of what would have been the former first lady’s 92nd birthday, Vogue revisits five surprising facts about her life.
5 Things You Didn’t Know About Jackie Kennedy Onassis
On this day 92 years ago, the former first lady and eternal style icon Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was born in Southampton, New York.
In 2014, a special expanded edition of Tina Santi Flaherty’s 2004 biography What Jackie Taught Us was released; timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of Onassis’s death. (Flaherty had come to know the first lady as a neighbor in her apartment building.) The book shed light on little-known details of Onassis’s life, including her hand in shaping the Metropolitan Museum of Art and (brief) employment at Vogue, generating a robust portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.
Here, in honor of Onassis’s birthday, we revisit five surprising facts from Flaherty’s insider perspective.
Though Jackie accentuated her French heritage through her maiden name, Bouvier; pronounced her name the French way (Jac-leen); and spoke the language fluently during public engagements such as a dinner with President Charles de Gaulle at Versailles, she was actually just one-eighth French. Her mother, Janet Lee, was 100% Irish, having descended from immigrants who fled County Cork and the potato famine in 1852. And while Jackie got her French last name and lineage from her father’s side, he was also Scottish and English.
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Eugenia Miranda,Marley Marius
