Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: A Life - Hardcover

Thus, for Jackie's alleged defloration in a Paris elevator, consult All Too Human, and for her alleged beddings of Brando, Sinatra, Beatty, and Bobby Kennedy, read Jackie After Jack. Spoto paints a more restrained Jackie. Sure, she frolicked in moonlit Mayan pools in 1968 with a married ex-JFK cabinet member, but Spoto says she never slept with Bobby, that JFK's Marilyn Monroe fling was a one-night stand, and that Jackie demanded that he take pity on the suicidal actress. Jack and Jackie were kindred: "Each endured a lonely and difficult childhood with emotionally distant mothers and philandering fathers ... each had cultivated a certain solitude." Jack was cold, amoral, uncultured; Jackie nudged him on civil rights, regaled Niebuhr and Nehru, brought art and mind to the White House: "Underneath a veil of lovely inconsequence, she concealed ... an all-seeing eye and a ruthless judgment." Spoto makes their last months--when, ironically, they found real love for one another--as poignant as the moment she found his skull in her hand.

From the self-doubting kid whose vile mother talked her out of accepting Vogue's Prix de Paris to the self-possessed editor of Dancing on My Grave and A Cartoon History of the Universe, Spoto's Jackie is a plausible character one wishes one could have known. --Tim Appelo