Cruel price of being Camelot's queen

It's no coincidence that the matriarch of America's first fictional family, The Simpsons, boasts the maiden name Bouvier, although Marge is better known for her towering blue hairdo than her pill-box hats.

Keen on quirky political satire, the creators of The Simpsons were inspired when they decided Marge should be called after Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis.

And despite Homer's comically irresponsible, lazy, beer-obsessed existence, evidence in the latest book on the 20th-century icon suggests Marge's lot is far happier than her namesake's.

In Sarah Bradford's recently published biography, America's Queen, we are exposed to the full extent of the medical problems of the philandering former US president, and how they affected her.

Bradford explains the reason why, in addition to bearing two premature children, Caroline and John, she had one still-born child and miscarriages.

The underlying cause, she writes, was "almost certainly Chlamydia, contracted from Jack as a result of his gonorrhea. . .it is unlikely that Jack confessed his medical problems in respect of this to Jackie."

So much has been written about the intensely private woman that was Jackie Kennedy Onassis - more than 30 books and now this latest tome - her life has been unpicked to such a degree as to render her almost as fictional a figure as Marge Simpson nee Bouvier.

Bradford, a heavyweight author respected for her probing biographies of, among others, Disraeli and Queen Elizabeth, offers a comprehensive assessment of this enigmatic woman.

Particularly insightful are the passages about Jackie's early years, her ambitions in the fields of journalism and literature, which paint a picture of a highly intelligent, cultured, classy young and ultimately unforgettable young woman.

As it turned out, her potential was to become merged with that of her husband, whom she met in her early 20s. From the beginning of her marriage she was treated as an asset, a trophy who could help Jack Kennedy achieve the presidential prize.

Throughout the 10-year relationship she kept her poise and strength of character despite being married to a man who once confessed to the British prime minister Harold MacMillan that if he didn't have sex at least once a day he got a headache.

Or, as he said rather more explicitly to an acquaintance: "I get a migraine headache if I don't get a strange piece of ass every day."

It is an undeniably tragic story, this tale of a girl who wrote in her high school year book that her ambition was "not to be a housewife".

In her later years she achieved considerable success as a book editor in New York, but ultimately her legacy is that of being the most famous wife in White House history.

For people of that era she evokes a series of poignant images. The ultimate hostess in glittering gowns, the home-maker spending thousands of dollars restoring the White House. Everything from the kind of rollers she put in her hair to the bed linen she reportedly changed twice a day was copied. But she is most remembered and respected for her composure and grace at her husband's funeral.

One of the hundreds who gathered outside her Fifth Avenue apartment in Manhattan after her death in 1994 said her dignity at that time was "enough to bind our wounds . . . This whole country was bleeding together".

That she put up with her husband's infidelity, a trait she was well aware of before she became Mrs Kennedy, is put down to her obsession with the security money and marriage could bring. Freud would have a field day with the fact that in many ways John F. Kennedy resembled Jackie's father, Black Jack, who used to regale his daughter with tales of his own adulterous exploits.

A child of the Depression whose family's "old money" fortune took a blow after the Wall Street crash in 1929, the year she was born, Bradford concedes it is unlikely she would have married Kennedy had it not been for his family's wealth. She spent her life attempting to be Jack's No 1 but always came a poor third to his political ambition and his womanising ways.

In America's Queen, however, there are signs that towards the end of his life Jackie's relationship with Jack had reached a new, more hopeful stage. "I don't care how many women Jack sleeps with as long as I know he knows it's wrong and he does now," she said in 1963.

Soon after his assassination in Dallas, in the same year she told her decorator Bill Baldwin: "I know my husband was devoted to me. I know he was proud of me. It took a very long time for us to work everything out, but we did, and we were about to have a real life together."

The book reveals that during the aftermath of his death she began a string of affairs and took comfort in the company of her late husband's brother, Bobby, a man Gore Vidal said was the only one she had ever truly loved. "There was always something oddly intense in her voice when she mentioned him to me," he said. Five years after Kennedy's death, Bobby was assassinated.

Jackie became agitated and unbalanced after his death. Among other things, she was said to keep referring to Bobby as her husband and ordering people around as though she were still First Lady.

Some years after her husband was murdered she married Greek billionaire Aristotle Onassis, another man who was to be unfaithful to her and who had acquired her as some kind of trophy wife. This "betrayal" knocked her temporarily off the pedestal America had built for her but, despite the failure of the marriage, it gave her the security, financial and otherwise, she desperately sought.

A GLIMPSE into why it was almost inevitable Jackie would turn her back on life in America is provided in the book. "Can anyone understand how it is to have lived in the White House and then, suddenly, to be living alone as the president's widow? There's something so final about it.

"And the children. The world is pouring out terrible adoration at the feet of my children and I fear for them, for this awful exposure. How can I bring them up normally?" she said.

"I despise America and I don't want my children to live here. If they are killing Kennedys my kids are No 1 targets." She later credited Onassis with rescuing her at what was the bleakest time of her life, despite the unhappiness that blighted much of the relationship.

If that was the bleakest time, her later years, living with her companion Maurice Tempels man in New York and working as editor at Doubleday, were undoubtedly her happiest. Wearing her trademark outsize sunglasses she would stroll in Central Park with her grandchildren.

This semi-anonymous existence was only interrupted when the paparazzi spotted her, chasing an exclusive picture of Jackie O. A friend, the author Edna O'Brien, summed up the seemingly fairytale existence marred by tragedy. She led, she said, "a jewelled life with a dark river running through it".

After she landed the role of Jackie in a TV series in 1991, Irish actress Roma Downey put it perfectly when she said: "It's the kind of role that if you sat down to make it up no one would believe it."