When Jacqueline Lee Bouvier, the future First Lady, graduated from Miss Porter’s School, in Farmington, Connecticut, in 1947, the yearbook made note of her wit, her accomplishment as a horsewoman, and her unwillingness to become a housewife. Ample evidence of the first of these traits is to be found in a cache of unpublished letters which is coming up for auction at Christie’s next month, most of them written from Farmington, and all addressed to R. Beverley Corbin, Jr., a beau who was a student at Harvard. “If school days are the happiest days of your life, I’m hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight,” Jackie—as she signed herself—wrote in the fall of 1945, when she was sixteen.
In the letters—of which there are about twenty, all but one written in the course of about eighteen months, and which are valued at twenty-five to thirty-five thousand dollars—Jackie is, like most teen-agers, cynical, whimsical, and vulnerable, by turns. There is much chafing against the regulations of school, where visits from callers were strictly governed; in one letter she informs Corbin that she will be visiting a church in Boston on a field trip, and suggests that he arrange to turn up coincidentally in the pews at the appropriate hour. Some boys had pulled a similar stunt when her class visited a New Haven museum the previous year, she said. A teacher had asked the guards to expel them from the galleries, “but she couldn’t do that to you in a church.”
She complains about the dullness of her environs—“some man is beating his wife in the street which is the only interesting thing that’s happened all day”—and plans alternative education prospects for her own children. The boys, she says, will go to public school in New York City (“with gangsters”) and the girls to Hunter College: “They’ll all be morons but at least they won’t have to tear around and get their teeth knocked out playing hockey.” She is unimpressed by Vassar—“a huge lonely place”—on a visit, adding that if her father insists on her going there she will rebel and work her way through Sarah Lawrence until he relents. (She attended Vassar.) When an aptitude tester comes to the school, Jackie reports that the career path determined most suitable for her was that of a waitress or a photographer. (The latter, at least, she did become for a while, at the Washington Times-Herald.)
Jackie’s parents had divorced four years before she went to Miss Porter’s, and some of the letters give an insight into family affairs: in advance of a much anticipated Christmas holiday, she writes dryly that “I can commute happily between my doting parents until they both get sick of me.” In 1946, she reports that, at her mother’s, “the stork is hovering over our roof” (its bundle contained her half brother, James Auchincloss), and in a letter written from her father’s house in Hot Springs, Virginia, she says that “Daddy’s on the phone yelling at his poor little Clerk on the Stock Exchange and I can’t hear myself think—which probably won’t make too much difference.”
Her relationship with “Bev darling,” as she addresses him, appears to be more companionable than passionate: she writes fondly of cooking him scrambled eggs after a summer dance in Newport, and tells him of the parties she plans to go to when she’s on vacation in New York. “I’ll make the hours you stay up till look like the curfew for a two-year-old,” she says. By early 1947, when Corbin is out of college—“you ought to make a wonderful tycoon,” she writes, “the ruthless type who eyes you with a glance of steel and has a lovesick secretary lurking in the background”—the relationship is apparently faltering. (The final communication is a note in which she tells him she is engaged to marry John Husted, an engagement that ended a few months later.) Things with Corbin appear to fall apart over a kiss, which Jackie declines to bestow while the pair are at Rockefeller Center. He accuses her of not loving him; wounded, she withdraws in a manner recognizable to anyone who has navigated the perilous territory between epistolary romance and the face-to-face kind. “I do think I’m in love with you when I’m with you,” she writes. “But it’s awfully hard for me to stay in love with someone when I only see them every three months and when the only contact I have with them is through letters.” ♦