A documentary reviews the life of the famous occupant of the White House, a mass idol decades before Diana of Wales.
Now that the fourth season of the Netflix series The Crown brings Diana of Wales to the stage, the woman who challenged the Windsors based on her powerful and omnipresent public image, it is interesting to remember that the media passion unleashed by the princess has an incontestable precedent in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, subject of a new documentary that can be seen on Movistar.
I Am Jackie O is a correct Canadian production, directed by Tanya Maryniak and Anna Wallner, whose main interest lies in the enormous archival material collected. Photos, filming, fragments of interviews and various testimonies, provide traces to the portrait of Jacqueline Bouvier (Southampton, New York, 1929 - New York, 1994), the eldest of the daughters of a bad marriage in good American society who will come to be famous
Like Diana, Jackie gained public notoriety when she married, in her case, John F. Kennedy, twelve years her senior, a senator and member of an influential family who, in November 1960, would be elected the 35th president of the United States. A womanizer and disinclined to abandon his bachelorhood, it was her father who urged him to marry, with the White House in mind.
Once his goal was achieved, he turned his wife and two children into important political assets. Although without a similar result, Prince Charles, also undecided, received from his father, the Duke of Edinburgh, the final push to marry Diana, 13 years younger and much more suitable to occupy the throne than his beloved Camilla Parker.
In both cases, unhappy marriages. But, far from the pathological publicity obtained by the disagreements of the princes of Wales, no one knew of the physical ailments or the court of lovers that surrounded Kennedy until long after his death. The two women in this story aroused enormous popular sympathy and were admired as fashion icons, although only Princess Diana kept public opinion on her side until the end. It is enough to remember the catharsis that her tragic death on August 31, 1997 caused in the United Kingdom.
But what would have happened if the fatal accident had not occurred and if her marriage to Dodi Al-Fayed had been consummated? Very probably the same thing that happened to Jacqueline Kennedy when, after the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968, her brother-in-law - and lover, according to all rumors -, terrified and fed up with playing the role of official widow, took refuge in the arms of his former admirer, the magnate Aristotle Onassis.
It was precisely Jacqueline's escape with Onassis, in the summer of 1963, highlighted by the press with the consequent damage to her public image, that decided her to follow her husband on his electoral trip to Texas, where Kennedy would meet death on November 22, in the city of Dallas. Jacqueline was sitting next to him, and in a recording played a thousand times, she appears dressed in the famous pink suit - a perfect copy of a Chanel model -, stained with her husband's blood and brain mass, trying to leave the limousine in which the president lies, hit by two fatal shots. For months, various testimonies assure, she will relive over and over again the sequence of the attack of which she has been an exceptional witness and her pain will be a kind of hallmark. But the young widow will lose general favor by adding Onassis to her surname.
Her wedding on the island of Skorpios caused rivers of ink to flow and the bride was widely censured. Testimonies from biographers and acquaintances collected in I am Jackie O point to economic reasons behind this union. Jacqueline loved money and the comfort and security it provided. Her children would receive the best education in the United States and she would lead a life of maximum luxury with Onassis, between Athens, Paris and New York. But things soon went wrong. In 1973, Alexander, 23 years old, Onassis' favorite son, died in a plane crash.
The collapse of the tycoon is total. The documentary maintains that in his delirium he came to blame Jackie for being the bearer of a disastrous destiny. Onassis wants a divorce, but dies before getting it, in 1975, at 69 years of age. Hated by Cristina, the tycoon's daughter, and by her entire Greek family, Jackie achieves an advantageous financial agreement (there has been talk of 26 million dollars), and settles, finally free, in New York. Her life then takes a calm course, far from the expectations of other times. And in that atmosphere of manageable notoriety, she would die of cancer in 1994, before turning 65, the great precursor of the Lady Di phenomenon.
