Childhood
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stock broker John Vernou Bouvier III (also known as 'Black Jack Bouvier') and Janet Norton Lee. Jacqueline's younger sister Caroline Lee—later known as Lee—was born in 1933. The Bouviers divorced in 1940. Janet Bouvier later married Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr. in 1942, and had two more children: Janet and James Auchincloss.
Her mother had Irish ancestry and her father's ancestry included French, Scottish, and English. Her maternal great-grandfather emigrated from Cork, Ireland, and later became the Superintendent of the New York City Public Schools. Michel Bouvier, Jacqueline's paternal great-great-grandfather, was born in France and was a contemporary of Joseph Bonaparte and Stephen Girard. He was a Philadelphia-based cabinetmaker, carpenter, merchant and real estate speculator. Michel's wife, Louise Vernou, was the daughter of John Vernou, a French émigré tobacconist, and Elizabeth Clifford Lindsay, an American-born woman. Jacqueline's grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr., fabricated a more noble ancestry for his family in his vanity family history book, Our Forebears. Recent scholarship and the research done by Jacqueline's cousin John H. Davis in his book, The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family, have disproved most of these fantasy lineages.
Bouvier spent her early years in New York City and East Hampton, New York, at the Bouvier family estate, "Lasata". Following their parents' divorce, the Bouvier sisters divided their time between their mother's homes in McLean, Virginia and Newport, Rhode Island, and their father's homes in New York City and Long Island. Bouvier attended the Chapin School in New York City.
At a very early age, she became an enthusiastic equestrienne, and horse-riding remained a lifelong passion.
Read more about this topic: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“But childhood prolonged, cannot remain a fairyland. It becomes a hell.”
—Louise Bogan (1897–1970)
“Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)