The well-to-do mother had a taste for thrillingly bracing aphorisms: “Weakness isn’t something you’re born with. … You learn it.” When Jackie began to host teas during Jack’s presidential campaign: “Perfect strangers in the home sitting on your antique furniture?. … It is a new world, isn’t it?” Less comically, when Jackie was still in a trance of post-traumatic stress disorder in mid-1964: “We’ve all lost Jack, but it’s been eight months! You have to snap out of it.” This astonishing matriarch — who married the sexy “Black Jack” Bouvier and then the impotent Hugh Auchincloss; who impregnated herself with Hugh’s sperm (using a spoon to do so, in his stepson Gore Vidal’s account) and thus conceived two children — is by no means unknown, although Taraborrelli brings her to splendid renewed life. His trick of turning incidents into highly coloured tableaus threaded with dialogue makes excellent use of well-trodden material.
