Word: conniff
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Your review of the Conniff-Considine-Jackie Kennedy love affair [March 24] neglected one thing: to name Considine the alltime top fan-magazine writer. If that series wasn't pure fan-book output, with its sappy descriptive reporting and maudlin handling, then this commentary deserves a Pulitzer Prize nomination at least...
Jackie, thinks Conniff, was anxious to combat the barrage of unfavorable publicity caused by William Manchester's book The Death of a President. "She's a fighter for all her frail beauty," he maintains. During the Manchester episode, she called Conniff several times for advice; in turn, he asked for a favor: the interview. An old friend of both Jack and Joe Kennedy, Conniff was hardly likely to be hostile. Jackie imposed no conditions on him, as she had on Manchester, nor did she ask to read the copy ahead of time. "She trusted us not to make...
...Travail. The interview began in front of the Guggenheim museum (where a beatnik type "swept off his rakish Astrakhan hat and stood transfixed"), then moved on to Schrafft's (where John Jr. had a butterscotch sundae), and ended up at a friend's Fifth Avenue apartment. Conniff and Considine are unabashed admirers of "the young woman who bears such assorted burdens as Gallup's pronouncement that she is the most admired person of her sex in the world ... a woman who has been on the best-dressed lists most of her adult life ... the smile that...
...Conniff is the first to admit, the interview contains no startling revelations or disclosures. But when Considine stops painting his elaborate word pictures and lets Jackie talk, it gives a clear, poignant picture of her present life-along with its travail. Her children, for instance, are sometimes targets of madness or abuse. "I still haven't gotten over that strange woman," recalls Jackie, "who leaped at Caroline as we came out of church on All Saints' Day. She shouted at the poor child, 'Your mother is a wicked woman who has killed three people! and your father...
...Conniff and Considine tactfully avoided mentioning Dallas and deleted an exuberant remark Jackie made praising Bobby: "I'd jump out of the window for him." Conniff is so pleased with the interview that he plans to run it again in the Easter Sunday issue...