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“Sometimes I have to undress to put on my bathing suit. My wife does the same thing,” commented an unperturbed Aristotle Onassis when journalists showed him a copy of the Italian magazine Playmen in December 1972. In that issue, his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, widow of President John F. Kennedy, appeared completely naked during her summer vacation on the private island of Skorpios (Greece). The Greek tycoon did not seem surprised or outraged by the unauthorized images of Jackie, then 43, as God had brought her into the world: sunbathing bikini-less, carefree, and without losing her graceful demeanor as a former student of Miss Porter’s School in Connecticut.
The reaction of the Americans was not the same. Bootleg copies of Playmen appeared in New York and Washington. Jackie’s photographs caused a stir and outrage in public opinion and a small earthquake in high political circles. A few months later, in February 1973, Screw magazine published the images in America. “Naked Jackie Kennedy!” was the front-page headline chosen by Al Goldstein, owner and publisher of the pornographic pamphlet. Inside there was a photo titled “Jackie Kennedy’s Billion-Dollar Bush,” a derogatory and misogynistic play on words that made reference to the former first lady of the United States and to the immense fortune of her husband, at that time estimated at $1 billion ($100 billion, about €91 billion, today).
It was not the first time that photographs of a celebrity like Jackie Kennedy without clothes were published. But the former first lady was not just any famous person. She was “America’s Widow,” the most photographed woman in the country, the...