For the past two weeks, I’ve had my hands on the catalog of the century.
Sotheby’s, New York’s prestigious auction house, reluctantly agreed to lend me a press copy of the 584-page wish list documenting each item for sale from the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, former first lady, former shipping baron’s wife, former doyenne of New York society and America’s first, last and only queen.
The three-day auction, which has generated feverish worldwide attention and is expected to bring in a minimum of $5 million, will begin Tuesday.
Regrettably, I won’t make it to the sale. Previous commitments aside, I don’t have a prayer of getting anywhere near Sotheby’s ultraexclusive event.
But for one brief shining moment, I have the book, which is fast becoming a collector’s item at $90 a pop. And a girl can dream.
As I scrutinize each of the 1,195 lots in the catalogue, I am alternately awed, amused, startled and touched. There is a pair of horrifyingly ugly candlesticks (lot 308), which Sotheby’s delicately describes as “unusual.” For $7,000 to $9,000 I could own two snub-nosed, belligerently grinning marble beasts balancing palm shaped candlesticks on their gilt saddles.
Or I could bid on young Caroline’s White House bedroom chests (lots 1148 and 1149), chipped, faded and utterly charming. Sotheby’s estimates the small chest will go for $500-$700 and the large chest for $600-$800.
I want JFK’s golf bag and clubs (lot 754, estimated at $700-$900). I would display them like sculpture in my living room and maybe, on special occasions, take them out to the links.
If I were in the mood to spend some serious money, I could make an offer on the power jewelry Aristotle Onassis gave Jackie during their unfortunate, though lucrative, time together. His engagement gift (lot 442) is a diamond necklace dripping with emeralds, BIG emeralds. For a mere $100,000, it might be mine.
Even more than the goods themselves, I am intrigued by the fascination — my own and so many others’ — with a woman most of us never met and whose years as first lady a growing number remember only vaguely.
True, buying something from her estate would be like buying a glamorous piece of American history. And America doesn’t have much glamorous history to spare. But for me and many others, I think the desire to own a piece of Jackie’s legacy is more personal.
The Kennedy first family was the first family of our collective past, and we were all subjects of Camelot. Most of us just lived on the wrong side of the moat. And all those Life magazine images of Caroline and John-John with their parents in the White House or Hyannisport somehow merge with the snapshots of us with our own parents.
I have often joked that my father in his prime looked like JFK, and my mother, with her brunet hair and impeccable posture, looked like Jackie. Today my dad and Teddy could be twins.
Indeed, except for some disappointed Nixon supporters, we were all caught up in the Kennedy craze. Rich and poor, black and white, we all mimicked the fashions and craved the mystique of the first couple. Jack and Jackie held the focus of the nation and were the lens through which we viewed ourselves.
Maybe that’s why many of the objects in Jackie’s estate seem so familiar. On her walls hung botanical and architectural prints strikingly like those found in my parents’ and their neighbors’ homes.
There also are loads of costume jewelry, some classic, some hopelessly dated, of the sort I might have found in my own mother’s jewelry drawer: ethnic pieces from the hippie ’60s, pounded gold cuffs from the disco ’70s (Yes, even Jackie went to Studio 54), jewel-encrusted broaches shaped like butterflies and scorpions, which call to mind dowager grandmothers taking tea.
I am most moved by the many stray porcelain pieces scattered throughout the catalog. On her first trip to England, my mother collected odd pieces of china. Too delicate to use, they matched nothing in the house and eventually found their way into the garage sale when the family home was sold. I guess they ended up at Jackie’s.
Perhaps it is a sense of belonging that I want to capture when I contemplate putting in my bids. Neither Caroline nor John F. Kennedy Jr. are interested in the items on the block. This stuff has no place to go, and the reason it’s being auctioned off at Sotheby’s instead of unloaded at a whopping yard sale is not so much that what the Kennedy kids think is ratty most of us would scrimp a lifetime to possess. It is being sold at Sotheby’s because it once belonged.
Jackie chose to accessorize her life with these pieces.
I’m not one for idolatry or for coveting someone else’s keepsakes, but I can understand wanting to own a piece of history when that history is already connected with my own.
In the Sotheby’s catalogue there is a bamboo-framed watercolor of a bird in a cage. The object is vintage ’60s, right down to the perky lettering spelling out “Jackie 1966.”
It’s the kind of thing my parents would have bought on their honeymoon, then later hung in our family room. I imagine I might never have even noticed it. But when my empty-nester parents finally decided to sell the house and divvy up the contents among the children, I would have retrieved that picture and treasured it as a memento of a golden era in their lives before my life began.
Sotheby’s is selling Jackie’s birdcage for $100-$150. I hear they take bids over the phone.
