Hollywood's New Cover Girl

JACKIE IS IN LOVE AGAIN! exulted

Movie Mirror, one of the dozens of film fan magazines that exist solely because there are film fans. Alongside that revelation, Movie Mirror ran a smiling cover portrait of Jack Kennedy's widow, together with her two children. Readers who bothered to turn to page 16 were rewarded with the full scoop on Jackie's new romance: "She is in love with life . . . with people . . . with her new surroundings."

Hot & Cold Hors d'Oeuvres. If it stretched the imagination, not to mention good taste, for a movie fan magazine to put Jackie Kennedy on its cover, the magazine's editors were apparently equal to the strain. Movie Mirror, in fact, is only one of six fan magazines currently featuring cover stories about Mrs. Kennedy in what might seem to be a journalistic conspiracy. And without exception, all of them combine the same provocative windup with total nondelivery inside.

JACKIE'S FIRST PARTY! HER PRIVATE INVITATION LIST, promised Inside Movie. Inside Inside Movie, some anonymous hack noted that Mrs. Kennedy had concluded her mourning period, and then went on to surmise exactly what kind of party she might now properly throw: "Hot and cold hors d'oeuvres ... a table set with the finest silver, china and crystal."

Modern Screen's cover hinted slyly that Jackie had discovered a new heart interest: JACKIE KENNEDY AND THE TV STAR. All that added up to, on page 46, was that Robert Vaughn (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), who has never met Mrs. Kennedy and quite possibly never will, considers her "my intellectual ideal." Or so Modern Screen claimed.

TOO SOON FOR LOVE? mused Photoplay, and decided to let its readers answer the question. On page 88 it printed a multiple-choice coupon for filling out and mailing. Should Jackie Kennedy: 1) "Devote her life exclusively to her children and the memory of her husband?" 2) "Begin to date--privately or publicly--and eventually remarry?" 3) "Marry right away?"

Screen Album uncorked a readers' "Special," THE HEARTBREAKING SACRIFICE JACKIE WANTED TO MAKE FOR CAROLINE & JOHN JR. Whatever that was, the magazine did not say; it was much too busy at tearjerking: "She had got through the things that must be done. She had arranged to give the nation back its dignity. 'My life is over,' she told herself. She was like a garden in which everything had withered."

Motion Picture rang both Jackie and her sister, Princess Radziwill, into its cover act: WITH SADNESS WE REPORT: WHY JACKIE'S SISTER is A BAD INFLUENCE ON HER. In the past year, said Motion Picture, Princess Radziwill, described as a "jet-setter," has insistently urged her sorrowing sister "into this eddy of meaningless movement." With dismay the magazine also reported that Mrs. Kennedy had actually been seen in Shepheard's, the Manhattan discotheque that is "one of the jet-set's favorite rendezvous."

Connie to Caroline. Several other fan magazines, although overlooking Mrs. Kennedy's cover possibilities, managed to squeeze her into their current issues. Modern Screen's annual Yearbook, a compilation of events the magazine considers worth reprising, noted that for Cary Grant, 1964 was the year he turned 60, and for Jackie Kennedy it Was a YEAR OF MEMORIES, OF COURAGE AND OF PAIN.

Movie Stars trumped up an exclusive, with the aid of Hollywood Starlet Connie Stevens, I FOUND GOD IN YOUR SCHOOL, proclaimed Miss Stevens in a story subtitled "Connie Speaks to Caroline." The statement rested on the fact that as a teen-ager Miss Stevens had attended a Sacred Heart school on the West Coast and that Caroline, years later, is enrolled in a Sacred Heart school in New York.

Mrs. Kennedy has been treated to this sort of gratuitous attention from the fan and gossip-mongering magazines before. Two years ago, a rash of equally meretricious cover stories popped up on newsstands. One of the articles ruefully confessed that Jackie Kennedy hated Hollywood. If she didn't then, she has every reason to now.

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