‘SHE KNEW HE CHEATED ON HER, BUT IT WAS THE SCALE OF IT THAT BECAME PUBLIC AFTER HIS DEATH THAT DEVASTATED HER’
THE nondescript white cardboard box sat in a darkened corner of the attic, forgotten for years. It was only when the box was opened that its gruesome contents were revealed.
Neatly folded inside, still stained with the blood of President John F Kennedy, rested the pink suit worn by First Lady Jackie Kennedy on 22 November 1963, when her husband was shot dead in Dallas.
The astonishing revelation that the Chanel outfit, one of the most symbolic items of clothing in history, sat unattended for two decades in the attic of the Washington, DC, home of Jackie’s mother, Janet Auchincloss, is one of a series of bombshells in a new book about America’s most famous first lady.
Janet – who died in 1989 aged 81 – was handed the outfit by Jackie’s White House maid, Providencia Paredes, after an exhausted Jackie returned to the White House on the night of her husband’s assassination.
The first lady had refused to take off the bloodstained suit, even as Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B Johnson, was sworn in as president, saying: “Let them see what they have done.”
According to author J Randy Taraborrelli, whose new book Jackie:
