‘No one could have imagined the success of this sale’: The US public’s frenzy over Jackie O’s possessions

In April 1996, two years after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s death, fans could bid on everything from the former first lady’s French textbook to her diamond engagement ring. 

When Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis died in 1994, aged 64, she had lived a life that few could fully fathom. She was the US’s most photographed widow, a woman who married into dynasties twice over, and a working literary editor who fiercely defended her private world.

So when a lifetime’s archive of her possessions went under the hammer in April 1996, demand was so intense that 100,000 copies of the auction catalogue were printed.

This brochure also functioned as a rather pricey lottery ticket: 30,000 buyers’ names were entered into a draw to see the objects up close in a pre-sale viewing at Sotheby’s in New York. Costing $90 for the hardcover version and $45 in paperback, this glossy 584-page book itemised the 1,195 lots, most of which came from the Manhattan apartment where Onassis had lived since 1964.

‘Some of the personal items include a textbook with drawings of women in elegant clothes’.

Newsweek culture editor Cathleen McGuigan said: “For a lot of people, the catalogue is the closest they’re going to come to the sale, and is going to be the one tangible document that Jackie fans are going to have. This is the ultimate Jackie document.”

What was really being sold was the glamour and style embodied by the former first lady. “The catalogue caters to a public hunger to find out what went on behind the impenetrable Jackie Onassis façade,” he said. Among its contents were previously unpublished photographs of her Fifth Avenue apartment interior. Sotheby’s chief executive Diana Brooks said that the photographs revealed “a very elegant apartment” that was “also very much a home”, with an obvious emphasis on “comfort and warmth”. This home was filled with mementoes and trinkets accumulated over three decades of an extraordinary jet-set life.

These glimpses of her private world made clear how closely the apartment was bound up with the life she rebuilt following the trauma of November 1963. After her husband, US President John F Kennedy, was assassinated, she bought a home in Washington DC just three blocks from where they had lived while he was a senator. To her dismay, this new home quickly became a popular tourist attraction, and she put it up for sale.

‘Within the first hour of bidding, the estimate for the sale $5 million was surpassed’.

As a grieving young widow, she craved the privacy offered by New York. A day after her 35th birthday in July 1964, she bought the 15-room penthouse apartment with views overlooking Central Park for $200,000 ($2m or £1.5m today). While she lived in many properties throughout her life, including a house on a private island in Greece owned by her second husband, the shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, she always returned to her New York apartment on the 15th floor. It was there that she died. A year later after her death, it was sold for $9.5m ($20m or £15m today).

There were so many items up for auction because, as Brook noted, “Jackie Onassis never threw anything away.” Hundreds of her possessions had already been sent to the Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, while her children Caroline and John Jr had decided what they wanted to keep for themselves. As the New York Times pointed out, even Sotheby’s officials conceded that they were offering not masterpieces but the “leftovers” that neither her children nor the Kennedy Library chose to keep.

A childhood hint that she would become a fashion icon

In the hit 2026 FX miniseries Love Story, which revisits the doomed 1990s romance of Carolyn Bessette and John F Kennedy Jr, one of the most poignant scenes shows John and Caroline going through their mother’s possessions before deciding what to sell. “They catalogued my high chair,” complains JFK Jr, as played by Paul Anthony Kelly.

The items in the catalogue ranged from wire baskets valued at $30 to a 40-carat diamond engagement ring given by Aristotle Onassis, which was expected to fetch $600,000 ($1.2m or £900,000 today). Some of the more personal items included a French grammar textbook that was a memento from the former first lady’s school days. Adorned with hand-drawn sketches of women in stylish clothes, it was a childhood hint that she would become a fashion icon. One of the most personal items was a black enamel cigarette lighter, a reminder that in private Onassis was a chain smoker.

The lots were sold over a four-day period from 23 to 26 April 1996 across nine separate sessions. Space in the sale room was limited to about 2,000 potential buyers a day. Sotheby’s anticipated that the auction would raise more than $4.6m ($9.4m or £7m today).

“The most costly items were those intimately associated with the White House years.” A child’s rocking horse that was priced at $75,000 went for $400,000 ($820,000 or £600,000 today). “Never in their wildest dreams could anyone from Sotheby’s have imagined the success of this sale,” he said. Bargains were few. The lowest price paid was $1,250 for six books about Asia. A three-string necklace of fake pearls, shown in a famous 1962 photograph of Jackie with her toddler son John tugging at them, was estimated at $500-$700. It went for $211,500. Her cigarette lighter, expected to reach $300, went for $85,000. The textbook with the clothes doodles fetched $42,500 ($87,000 or £64,000 today).

The item that raised the biggest price was her enormous engagement ring, which went for $2.6m ($5.3m or £4m today). Cut from the 601-carat Lesotho III diamond, it was bought by Anthony O’Reilly, billionaire chairman of the Heinz food group, who the New York tabloids swiftly labelled the Ketchup King. O’Reilly decided to buy the diamond for his wife Cryss, herself a member of a Greek shipping family, after seeing it in a newspaper. The second highest price was $1.3m ($2.7m or £2m today), paid for the antique French desk where President Kennedy signed the partial nuclear test ban treaty in the aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis.

Among the highest profile buyers was actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who at the time was married to Maria Shriver, President Kennedy’s niece. His biggest purchase was Kennedy’s MacGregor golf clubs in a bag inscribed “JFK Washington DC”. The $772,500 he paid was quite a bit higher than the $900 price it was expected to fetch. He also bought a Norman Rockwell painting of the president for $134,500 and a leather desk set for $189,500.

In total, the “leftovers” sold over the four days of frenzied bidding went for $34.5m ($71m or £52.5m today). Not a single item was unsold.