Carl Sferrazza Anthony: Taking A New Look at Jackie Bouvier Kennedy.

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Jackie Bouvier Kennedy

Renowned historian and author Carl Sferrazza Anthony has done the impossible. In his new book Camera Girl, The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, he has told the usually forgotten and misunderstood origin story of a woman, who accurately described herself as the art director of the 20th Century. Indeed, much of the latter half of the 1900s saw a world obsessed with First Lady Jackie Kennedy, and intrigued by her as she became Jackie Onassis. Even 60 years after she left the White House as a widow, when I walked the Hapsburg’s Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria, her name still hung in the air – like communion wine on the lips of the faithful. There, in the grand, baroque receiving room at the center of what was once one of Europe’s greatest palaces built to rival Versailles, the guide mentioned that we gawking tourists were standing in the same room where the Austrian government officials once received Mrs. Kennedy.

But beyond the mythic images of her blood-stained pink suit from that day in Dallas in 1963, or the dark sunglasses that would become her signature look in the 1970s, was a woman who grew up and was fashioned the ultimate outside insider. A nation, and a world hung their dreams on a woman that did not exist. At least not in total. As Sferrazza Anthony uncovers in his latest work on this iconoclastic figure, she was the survivor of an abusive mother and an emotionally needy father. She was an eccentric soul who dreamed of writing bylines and headlines, not grabbing them for herself. She had a relentless, almost pathological drive to be her authentic self – individualistic. Though from the very beginning of her life, others tried corseting her into roles that she found sometimes useful, but hardly determinative or even all that interesting.

In his latest book, Sferrazza Anthony dramatically captures her subversiveness, her incisive and self-deprecating wit, and her passion for the power of language and words that was sparked by her time studying at the Sorbonne in Paris and traveling throughout Europe. More than John Kennedy’s widow or being Jackie O., Sferrazza Anthony paints a portrait of woman who, like we the reader, was a multidimensional chameleon, and an ever-evolving human being.
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