In the summer of 1961, seven months after her husband moved into the Oval Office, Jackie Kennedy joined JFK at Buckingham Palace for a dinner given by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, floating through the gilded state rooms in an ice-blue Chez Ninon gown and elbow-length gloves. Eight years earlier, she had been one of the 40,000 Americans who visited London for the Queen’s coronation in her role as The Washington Times-Herald’s “Inquiring Camera Girl”—sending home regular dispatches about both the Mayfair society set and the patriotic fervor that swept through the city in the run-up to June 2, 1953.
Rather than a standard assignment from the paper, the trip had been proposed by her friend Aileen Bowdoin’s mother, who thought that a girls’ trip might cheer Aileen up following her recent divorce. Jackie had traveled around Europe for the first time with Aileen’s younger sister Helen in 1948, and jumped at the chance to do some on-the-ground reporting, promptly pitching and getting sign-off on the idea from her managing editor Sidney Epstein. On 22 May, she boarded the ritzy SS United States —the largest ocean liner ever constructed in America—just days after her boyfriend, Senator Kennedy, had seriously broached the subject of marriage for the first time. Two years before—having won Vogue’s prestigious Prix-de-Paris contest—the future First Lady had turned down the magazine’s offer of a job out of concern that she would never meet a suitable husband working in New York, taking a position on the DC-based newspaper as a secretary instead. And while she met JFK at a dinner party shortly thereafter, she still harbored ambitions of being a “serious” writer as a young and ambitious Vassar graduate in the early ’50s.
In a peculiar turn of events, the future Queen proved the catalyst for the soon-to-be First Lady’s shift from a clerical role to a writing one. The then Princess Elizabeth came to DC on a royal tour in 1951, with half a million Americans crowding into the streets to watch her drive past in a motorcade with President Truman. Jackie was among them—later sneaking into an invitation-only press conference swarming with established journalists at the Statler Hotel. Her notes from the event convinced her boss, Frank Waldrop, to pair her up with the stringer behind the paper’s “Inquiring Photographer” column, which saw six carefully chosen people asked for their thoughts on a different topic. Less than a week later, the debutante got her first bylined column by asking six prominent men: “Is Princess Elizabeth as pretty as her picture?”
It made sense, then, that Jackie would be dispatched to London to put questions to the British public ahead of the Coronation. (“Do you think Elizabeth will be England’s last queen?” she enquired of the crowds in Piccadilly Circus.) Also on board the SS United States for the five-day crossing: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, neither of whom had been invited to usher in the reign of Elizabeth II, and disembarked at Le Havre before going on to their Bois de Boulogne home. “Passengers stare at the Duke, aware that if he had not abdicated they would not be sailing to the Coronation of his niece,” Bouvier noted while on board. “Sometimes children ask for autographs, which he gives cheerfully.” Years later, Stéphane Boudin, the interior designer commissioned to redecorate the Windsors’ 14-room apartment in Wallis-blue wallpaper and 18th-century paneling, would help Jackie to reimagine several rooms in the White House.
Jackie wasn’t invited to the coronation either, of course, but rather than checking into a Mayfair hotel, she stayed in the W1 apartment of Lady Abel Smith, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen since 1947. The South Audley Street flat lacked the plush modern amenities of the SS United States. “It was freezing cold in London,” Aileen later recalled. “It was raining all the time. We’d come back to the apartment and sit on the edge of the tub, and put our feet on the bottom, and run hot water over them until we couldn’t stand it any longer.” The streets of London, meanwhile, still bore the scars of the Blitz, with piles of rubble a common sight and post-war privations still making themselves felt. It would be another year until the British government lifted its final rationing restrictions on essentials such as meat.
Naturally, the 23-year-old Jackie focused on more glamorous scenes in her Transatlantic bulletins—writing rapturously about The Dorchester’s façade, created by revered stage designer Oliver Messel and featuring “pale blue balconets” with “purple and gold draperies.” “At night gas-fed torches on long white poles blaze above the main entrance,” continued one of her reports. Not everyone within her earshot was quite so enamored with the hotel, though. “One woman turned to another and said, ‘No, darling, let’s lunch at Claridge’s. That’s where all the deposed monarchs are staying.’” In the evenings, Jackie infiltrated the upper echelons of both British and expat society, dancing at the 400 Club alongside the Marquess of Milford Haven and the Maharaja of Jaipur and attending a party at the Londonderry House Hotel with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall.
The Vassar graduate managed to get a number of solid scoops, too. One of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting told her that she would be going to bed at an unconscionably early hour the night before the ceremony—and with good reason. “They have to be in Westminster Abbey by 6:30 a.m. Tuesday, and their hairdressers arrive at the Palace to fix their hair at 3 a.m.,” Jackie wrote. As her source explained, “We wear a tiara, you know, and that takes a bit of arranging.” An unnamed person was also loose-lipped about a certain element of the coronation regalia. “A secret mark has been placed on the crown of St Edward. This is to enable the Archbishop of Canterbury to distinguish between front and back… He has no intention of making a mistake this time. In 1937, when the Archbishop crowned King George VI, he placed the crown on backwards.”
Jackie’s access on the day of the coronation itself proved more lacking. Even as she brought the atmosphere in “bright and pretty London” to life for The Washington Times-Herald’s readers—describing everything from the crowds gathering in Trafalgar Square to the mood at a performance of Guys and Dolls attended by Princess Margaret—the closest she could get to Westminster Abbey was a seat along the procession route courtesy of the Burberry boutique, where she watched the Gold State Coach roll past, later dashing into the mass of spectators to get quotes for her next piece. As it turns out, it’s a few words she received from America rather than anything she filed to her editor in DC that would change her life irrevocably: “Articles Excellent—But You Are Missed,” JFK wrote in a telegram to his then-girlfriend in an uncharacteristically emotional moment. A month later, their engagement would be announced.