Vogue breaks down the story of Jackie O’s most notable sojourn—to Queen Elizabeth's coronation, as the Washington Times-Herald’s “Inquiring Camera Girl.”
, floating through the gilded state rooms in an ice-blue Chez Ninon gown and elbow-length gloves. Eight years earlier, she had been one of the 40,000 Americans who visited London for the Queen’s coronation in her role as’s “Inquiring Camera Girl”—sending home regular dispatches about both the Mayfair society set and the patriotic fervor that swept through the city in the run-up to June 2, 1953.
Rather than a standard assignment from the paper, the trip had been proposed by her friend Aileen Bowdoin’s mother, who thought that a girls’ trip might cheer Aileen up following her recent divorce. Jackie had traveled around Europe for the first time with Aileen’s younger sister Helen in 1948, and jumped at the chance to do some on-the-ground reporting, promptly pitching and getting sign-off on the idea from her managing editor Sidney Epstein.
It made sense, then, that Jackie would be dispatched to London to put questions to the British public ahead of the Coronation. Also on board the SS United States for the five-day crossing: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, neither of whom had been invited to usher in the reign of Elizabeth II, and disembarked at Le Havre before going on to their Bois de Boulogne home.
Jackie wasn’t invited to the coronation either, of course, but rather than checking into a Mayfair hotel, she stayed in the W1 apartment of Lady Abel Smith, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen since 1947. The South Audley Street flat lacked the plush modern amenities of the SS United States. “It was freezing cold in London,” Aileen later recalled. “It was raining all the time.
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