THE extraordinary publicity which John Kennedy Junior's wedding attracted two weeks ago indicates just how great public interest in his family continues to be. For many Americans, it seems, the Kennedys remain the closest thing to Britain's house of Windsor their country has yet produced. The name Kennedy somehow still manages to evoke an image of old fashioned graciousness, and good manners.
For this deeply distorted perception, the Kennedys are principally indebted to Jacqueline Bouvier, a woman who understood the importance of projecting (and maintaining) a public image no matter how at odds it might be with reality. Only in recent years has the true story of her life in the White House been revealed, but, even before her first marriage to John Kennedy, Jacqueline Bouvier was busy creating a persona redolent of aristocratic privilege and gentility. And yet the very act of entering the public arena - which she chose to do while still a single woman - would have been unacceptable to members of the social circle she claimed to represent.
American society can be ruthlessly stratified. This is nowhere more the case than on the east coast, where families who can trace their ancestry back to the earliest immigrants from Europe consort exclusively with one other. Their behaviour has been examined in the novels of Edith Wharton as well as by her literary successor, Louis Auchincloss, whose work demonstrated how little had changed from the beginning to the middle of the century.
Traditionally, the old families of the east coast would vote Republican, avoid all attention from the press, inter marry and are neither Jewish nor Roman Catholic. Their acronym is of course WASP: White, AngloSaxon Protestant.
This was the social strata which Jacqueline Bouvier was widely and understandably perceived to embody. In fact, her aristocratic airs were studiously acquired and the history of her family artfully arranged to suggest grander origins than were actually the case. The Bouviers, it was proposed by her grand father in a piece of vanity publishing called Our Forebears, were related to a number of old titled French families. More prosaically, the first Bouvier to settle in the US was a cabinet maker from Provence, who managed to establish a friendship with Napoleon's exiled brother Joseph Bonaparte.
While the Bouviers managed to be included in the very first edition of the American Social Register, they could never be considered of first rank because they were Roman Catholics.
Worse still, Jacqueline Bouvier's maternal origins were Irish; her great grandmother Mrs Merritt was considered so coarse that she was never introduced to visitors and treated as a family servant. And throughout the first half of this century the Bouvier fortune went into precipitate decline, making the social position of a young woman such as Jacqueline even more vulnerable. When her mother Janet married for a second time - to the very wealthy Hugh Auchincloss, whose family was considered much better placed than the Bouviers - the reality of her status became even more apparent.
Perhaps for this reason, she grew to be a deeply avaricious woman, primarily pre occupied with securing her financial future while simultaneously projecting the image of a woman who was above such concerns. When Kennedy was president, she managed to spend the equivalent of his entire salary - some $100,000 on clothes alone, arguing that if she were not well dressed "everyone would say your wife is a slob and refuse to vote for you".
Before meeting John Kennedy, she had been engaged to all young stockbroker named John G W Husted Jr, but allowed herself to be talked out of this when it was discovered that her erstwhile fiance earned a mere $17,000 annually. Only with her second marriage to Aristotle Onassis and the very public financial settlement this entailed did Jacqueline Bouvier's mercenary nature become widely known.
Infatuated as she was with her own appearance, an addiction to clothes might have been expected but this, again, goes against the traditional WASP ethos. There is a story, possibly apocryphal, that upperclass women at the end of the last century would order their clothes from the house of Worth in Paris and then not wear them for a year or two lest they appear too vulgar and new.
Jacqueline Bouvier never exhibited any such reluctance. While still a teenager, she was running up clothing bills and having to deal with complaints from her father about over expenditure.
While it is tempting to see her in the light of the beautiful but financially exposed heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, Lily Bart, she really had more in common with another of the same author's creations; The Custom of the Country's ambitious and tough minded Undine Spragg. The ruthlessness of her nature was kept hidden under an always soft spoken voice and demure manner.
Her interest in horse riding and sailing, her association with the fine arts and her seeming desire for privacy - when it suited her - all appeared to demonstrate that Jacqueline Bouvier was a woman superior in both character and background from most others. But it ought not to be overlooked that before marriage to John Kennedy, she worked as a journalist, producing a column for the Washington Times Herald called The Inquiring Camera Girl.
While she may have conformed to some popular image of what constituted a member of old American society, Jacqueline Bouvier never was and never could be such a person. For all her expressions of distaste about the naked ambition of the Kennedy clan, in the end she was little different from the family into which she married.