The Allure Of Jackie

Bazaar looks back on a photo session that helped make an icon.

- Stephen Mooallem

Natalie Portman’s portrayal of a grief-stricken Jacqueline Kennedy in Pablo Larraín’s new film Jackie plumbs a powerful image of the former first lady seeking refuge in mystique, manner, and self-medication following the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. That Jackie—the widowed young mother of two small children—would become emblematic of a dark fragility that lurked just beneath the surface of American life. But it was in the pages of Bazaar on the eve of Camelot that another image of Jackie once emerged.

On January 3, 1961, photographer Richard Avedon and Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland traveled to the Kennedy family compound in Palm Beach to photograph the president-elect, Jackie, and their children, Caroline and John Jr., for the magazine—the only formal session the new first family would sit for between the election and the inauguration that year. The shoot occurred on the same day that the U.S. officially severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, and according to Smithsonian curator Shannon Thomas Perich’s book on the session, The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family, the president-elect spent much of the afternoon receiving updates from President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s office as aides, Secret Service, and Kennedy family members (including matriarch Rose Kennedy) came and went. Jackie, who had given birth to John Jr. just five weeks earlier, was photographed in an evening gown by Oleg Cassini that she later wore to a pre-inaugural gala, and six black-and-white portraits from the sitting appeared in Bazaar’s February issue, offering a glimpse of the new president, his wife, and his children not as state figures but as an American family.