A series of romantic letters written by Jackie Kennedy to a British ambassador are set to hit the auction block, and they reveal why she married a Greek shipping magnate instead of the bureaucrat they were addressed to.
Following the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Jacqueline struck up a relationship with aristocrat Sir William David Ormsby-Gore, the U.K.’s ambassador in Washington and a childhood friend of JFK.
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The former first lady wrote the initial letter just months after the death of her husband, which sparked a series of correspondence that led to Ormsby-Gore, the fifth Baron Harlech, asking her to marry him.
“Jackie had few people to support her really, and David Ormsby-Gore was there for her … really helped her through her time of grief,” Matthew Haley of Bonhams, the auction house that will sell off the cache of letters later this month, told the European Broadcasting Union. “They continued to correspond and see each other, ultimately they went on holiday once or twice, and clearly romance blossomed.”
The letters suggest Ormsby-Gore was able to provide support to Kennedy that few others could provide.
“Ormsby-Gore in fact lost his wife, and so they were a widow and a widower, really sort of supporting each other,” Haley says. “And what comes through these letters is just the sort of touching relationship they had that very nearly blossomed into marriage, but not quite.”
The director of private collections at Bonhams believes it was this closeness that actually kept them apart.
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“In the end Jackie writes to him and says you’re like a dear brother to me and I can’t marry you for that reason.”
Shortly after her relationship fizzled with Ormsby-Gore, Jackie Kennedy struck up a romance with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, one of the richest men in the world at the time.
The pair married on a private Greek island just eight months after Jackie turned down Ormsby-Gore.
The love letters became available for auction through the sale of the Harlech family’s private art and antique collection.
The letters are expected to generate a lot of interest from collectors in the U.S., as 2017 marks the 100th anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s birth.
Bonhams estimates that the Kennedy memorabilia could fetch as much as C$250,000 with the entire collection pulling in over C$1.6-million.