Jackie Bouvier spent the night before marrying JFK at the now-destroyed Newport mansion
A fire that destroyed Newport’s historic Stonor Lodge on Thursday also took with it a place of solitude for former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
According to a 2013 Boston University report with a Kennedy historian Tyler Hughes, the then Jackie Bouvier spent the day before her marriage to John F. Kennedy in Newport, Rhode Island, on September 12, 1953, at the historic mansion on Bellevue Avenue.
Hughes told BU that Noreen Drexel, who owned the “Stonor Lodge’’ was a friend of both Jackie and her mother. The soon-to-be First Lady, feeling overwhelmed before her wedding day, showed up unannounced at her friend’s home with a book and a request to spend the day.
According to the BU report:
Noreen was in her bedroom when Jackie rang the door, and a maid answered the door and a startled Noreen came down the stairs. ‘Oh Mrs. Drexel! Could I please stay here for the day? I just need to get away – I won’t bother you! I brought a book!,’ Jackie said,’’ according to Hughes. “And so, as Noreen later told me, Jackie spent her last day as a single woman curled up on a couch with a book in the sun room at Stonor Lodge.
The Kennedys were no strangers to Newport, the seaside city where Jackie grew up and where the couple spent a few weeks each summer in the early 1960s.
Gallery: JFK’s life in New England
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