Jacqueline Bouvier’s mother, Janet Lee Auchincloss, did not want her daughter to go to France. “I want the satisfaction of being creative and some larger purpose.” “I don’t want to just live for pleasure,” she writes to her beloved stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss, shortly after getting her Leica. Jackie wins a bike race with friends in Europe. It leads her to embark on a career as a journalist - with her own column, The Inquiring Camera Girl, and, later, to take up with a young senator named John F. She takes it to the Louvre, to Rome and to Vienna. She brings her Leica to Europe for her junior year abroad in Paris. It’s what happens after she gets her camera that’s so remarkable. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that Jackie gets her camera. The summer she turned 21, Jacqueline Bouvier explored rural France and enjoyed being young and free. So begins Carl Sferrazza Anthony’s terrific “ Camera Girl: The Coming of Age of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy” (Gallery Books). It helps that her indulgent dad, forever trying to one-up his ex-wife (Jackie’s mom) will buy anything for his favorite daughter. And despite it costing $185 - a whopping $2,100 in today’s dollars - she will have it. Specifically a Leica IIc, the best point-and-shoot model on the market. Instead of a ring, Jackie wants a camera.
Her ambition, according to her high school yearbook: “Not to be a housewife.” “Can you think of anything worse than living in a small town like this all your life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake?” she asks one of her beaux. The 19-year-old Vassar student can’t think of anything drearier than settling down and getting married. It’s June 1949, wedding season, and it seems like all the girls in Jacqueline Bouvier’s social set are on the hunt for a husband. Oleg Cassini’s widow files $350M lawsuit over long estate battle Ron Galella, ‘Paparazzo Extraordinaire’ and Jackie O stalker, dead at 91 Jackie Kennedy was prepared to die during Cuban Missile Crisis, ex-Secret Service bodyguard claims in new book Secret Service detail recalls his years with Jackie Kennedy
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