Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

NEW YORK -- She was, in life, the most private of citizens, the most public of American icons. And so it is in death that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis is being doubly mourned -- both as the complex woman beloved by family and friends and as the womanly ideal revered by a generation of Americans."

Meanwhile in Massachusetts Jack Kennedy dreamed Walking the shore by the Cape Cod Sea Of all the things he was going to be. Thus begins a poem that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote in October 1953, 10 years before her husband died and 15 years before she added Onassis to her name. He would find love He would never find peace For he must go seeking The Golden Fleece All of the things he was going to be All of the things in the wind and the sea. That's the ending of the poem about Jack Kennedy's dreams, the final offering of a new book that came to stores this month and is already a bestseller.

WASHINGTON -- One morning, more than 30 years ago, a moving truck loaded with antiques pulled up to a White House service entrance. The driver was helped in unloading by a Smithsonian curator named James Ketchum and by another person -- a quiet, dark-haired woman in a pullover sweater and jeans.The driver asked Mr. Ketchum who she was."The first lady," came the astonishing reply.And so she was.Jacqueline Kennedy was the woman who embodied the nation's traditional past -- and its liberating future.

Mildred F. Lane,96, who looked inside a "big fluffy bun" while another woman asked "Where's the beef?" died Saturday in New Hope, Minn., from injuries she suffered during a fall. When Ms. Lane was 80, an advertising agent discovered her while she was buying yarn in a Chicago knitting shop. She appeared in commercials for Wendy's restaurant chain. In her most famous, filmed in the mid-1980s, she stood between two other women while wearing bifocals. The trio criticized other hamburger restaurants, with one asking: "Where's the beef?"

Oh, Jackie -- she's still starting trends.After the frenzy of the April auction of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' estate, it's no surprise that the major accessories trend right now is Jackie O jewelry. Major costume jewelry designers who saw their pieces fetch astronomical prices are reissuing them, and they've got plenty of company.Kenneth Jay Lane, a friend of the former first lady who saw close to 50 pieces of his costume jewelry sell for four- to six-figure sums in the sale, is putting most of them back into production.

Simon H. Rifkind, 94, a famously versatile lawyer whose clientele included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, needy Holocaust survivors and Municipal Assistance Corp., died Tuesday in Manhattan.

Sotheby's auction house will auction the estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (above) on April 19.The four-day sale is expected to bring about $5 million for some 1,200 items, including the desk on which President John Kennedy signed the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and a pair of obelisks that sat in the Red Room of the Kennedy White House. Estimates for individual items were not immediately available."The sale of the Estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis will be among the most memorable auctions ever to take place," Sotheby president Diana Brooks said.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis praised President Clinton after he delivered a stirring speech marking the opening of a new museum at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. "That was wonderful," she said. Other Kennedys were as enthusiastic. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II, whose father, Robert, was assassinated in 1968, said that both his father and his uncle would have approved of Mr. Clinton. Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, who with her husband led the effort to renovate the library, said, "President Kennedy lives on in those he inspired to enter public life."

Judge Irving Ben Cooper,94, who granted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis relief from a relentless photographer and upheld organized baseball's exemption from antitrust laws, died Tuesday in New York. He was a judge in New York Criminal Court for 30 years before President John F. Kennedy named him to the federal bench, where he presided for 32 years.Suzanne Charpentier,86, the French actress better known by her screen name Annabella for such films as "Napoleon" and "Hotel du Nord," died of a heart attack Wednesday in Paris.

After 35 years and who knows how many thousands of photographs of her face, you'd think one more picture of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would evoke nothing more than the usual response: fascination and curiosity about the woman now known the world over as Jackie O.But something about this photograph was different. Different and disturbing.Certainly it's not the way she looks. In fact, at 64 she looks remarkably like she did at 34. And 44. And 54. The hair is still dark, the wide-set eyes steady, the jaw firm.

Like Audrey Hepburn and Princess Diana before her, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy had the looks and the look.Anyone searching for a modern style hero found dazzling salvation in Bessette Kennedy, 33, believed dead along with her husband John F. Kennedy Jr., and sister Lauren Bessette, after a plane crash last weekend."

In his 38 years, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. has been an actor, a prosecutor, a philanthropist and a magazine publisher. But first and forever, from the moment of his birth as the son of a just-elected president to a plane crash Friday night, he was that quintessential American phenomenon, the celebrity. He was famous chiefly for being famous.Yet JFK Jr., in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, insisted repeatedly in interviews that his was a "normal" life. And grieving friends recalled him yesterday not as a brilliant mind or stunning talent but as a man who embraced life and bore the weight of fame with good humor.

Robert White lives in Catonsville but keeps his financial prospects, and maybe his heart, in Camelot. Many of us moved out of the neighborhood years ago, but White believes there are things that keep tugging us back: a vision of our youth, a remembrance of half-vanished ideals, or a shot at a really good deal on an ashtray in which John F. Kennedy once dumped an acrid cigar.White has spent the past 35 years collecting mementos of the martyred Kennedy, who had the good sense to be president before the age of Monica Lewinsky, Paula Corbin Jones or Kathleen Willey.

Oh, Jackie -- she's still starting trends.After the frenzy of the April auction of the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' estate, it's no surprise that the major accessories trend right now is Jackie O jewelry. Major costume jewelry designers who saw their pieces fetch astronomical prices are reissuing them, and they've got plenty of company.Kenneth Jay Lane, a friend of the former first lady who saw close to 50 pieces of his costume jewelry sell for four- to six-figure sums in the sale, is putting most of them back into production.

Since her marriage last weekend to John F. Kennedy Jr., Carolyn Bessette has been breathlessly described as the beautiful and brainy new Queen of Camelot. Interviews with friends and former colleagues reveal a more recognizable young woman: a child of affluent suburbia, with less interest in academics than in downtown clubs, whose extraordinary looks, sophistication and ambition propelled her rapidly upward through the fashion industry in New York.Armchair Freudians have also noted the many similarities between Ms. Bessette-Kennedy, as she has chosen to be called, and Kennedy's famous mother, the late Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Judge Irving Ben Cooper,94, who granted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis relief from a relentless photographer and upheld organized baseball's exemption from antitrust laws, died Tuesday in New York. He was a judge in New York Criminal Court for 30 years before President John F. Kennedy named him to the federal bench, where he presided for 32 years.Suzanne Charpentier,86, the French actress better known by her screen name Annabella for such films as "Napoleon" and "Hotel du Nord," died of a heart attack Wednesday in Paris.

Like Audrey Hepburn and Princess Diana before her, Carolyn Bessette Kennedy had the looks and the look.Anyone searching for a modern style hero found dazzling salvation in Bessette Kennedy, 33, believed dead along with her husband John F. Kennedy Jr., and sister Lauren Bessette, after a plane crash last weekend."

Meanwhile in Massachusetts Jack Kennedy dreamed Walking the shore by the Cape Cod Sea Of all the things he was going to be. Thus begins a poem that Jacqueline Kennedy wrote in October 1953, 10 years before her husband died and 15 years before she added Onassis to her name. He would find love He would never find peace For he must go seeking The Golden Fleece All of the things he was going to be All of the things in the wind and the sea. That's the ending of the poem about Jack Kennedy's dreams, the final offering of a new book that came to stores this month and is already a bestseller.

NEW YORK -- The long-anticipated auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' possessions last night featured fierce battles among telephone buyers who were clearly willing to ignore the estimated prices.A rocking chair that President John F. Kennedy used to ease his back pain fetched $442,500, nearly 90 times the price it was expected to command in an auction of Mrs. Onassis' estate.The oak chair, which Sotheby's auction house had expected to go for $3,000-$5,000, was sold to a telephone bidder.

NEW YORK -- The cover is so self-consciously quiet it looks more like a wedding album than an auction-house catalog. Yet the cool white cotton cover with discreet silver lettering that says only "The Estate of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis April 23-26, 1996," with Sotheby's name in small letters at the bottom, has captured the public's curiosity in a way no other auction catalog ever has.This 584-page publication, which is $90 in hard cover and $45 in paperback,...