Happy Independence Day to my fellow Americans! The Fourth of July is a day when we mark our national independence from Britain, but I thought it was also a perfect day to highlight a fascinating bejeweled moment from our enduring special relationship. Let’s have a closer look at the jewels worn by Jacqueline Kennedy and Queen Elizabeth II for a dinner at Buckingham Palace in June 1961. (Want to read an ad-free version of today’s article? It’s up now for subscribers over at Hidden Gems!)
Of all of Queen Elizabeth II’s meetings with American presidents, the 1961 dinner with President and Mrs. Kennedy has to be one of the most fascinating of them all. The dinner took place at a particularly tense time politically. Kennedy, who had been elected the previous November, had taken office in January and was immediately plunged into the choppy waters of the Cold War, including the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April. On the day after Memorial Day, the Kennedys flew across the Atlantic to begin their first overseas diplomatic visit.
The presidential couple arrived in Paris, spending three days in France during which Jackie capably spoke with their hosts in French. She also delighted the capital city with her sartorial looks, including a sparkling pink gown festooned with sequins for a state dinner with the de Gaulles at the Elysee Palace and a heavy white satin Givenchy gown for a theatre gala at the Palace of Versailles. So enthusiastically received was Jackie that, at the end of the French leg of the trip, Kennedy famously quipped. “I am the man who accompanied Jacqueline Kennedy in Paris.” But the serious political purpose underneath the soft power diplomacy of the trip weighed heavily. In Vienna on June 4, President Kennedy held a lengthy face-to-face meeting with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to discuss several thorny subjects, including issues in Germany and Laos.
After the Vienna Summit, Jack and Jackie flew to London, where their schedule included a mix of public and private events. The couple stayed with Jackie’s sister, Lee, and her husband, Prince Stanislaw Radziwill, in their home, No. 4 Buckingham Place. Kennedy held a marathon private meeting with Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, and then he and Jackie headed to Westminster Cathedral for the christening of her niece, Anna Christina Radziwill. (JFK was the baby’s godfather.) And then, back to Lee’s home to change for the grand finale of the trip: a dinner with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh at Buckingham Palace.
The private dinner marked the first time that an American president had dined at Buckingham Palace since Woodrow Wilson’s state visit with King George V and Queen Mary in 1918. Both of the Kennedys, though, were familiar with the world of British high society. President Kennedy’s father had served as the British ambassador to the Court of St. James in the 1930s, and during that time Jack worked at the American embassy in London. And during her early career as a journalist, Jackie had traveled to London to cover the 1953 coronation.
Plans for the dinner had been in motion for some time, and a diplomatic tussle over the guest list led to a chilly atmosphere ahead of the event. The palace had asked Jack and Jackie to name guests they’d like to see seated at the table, which would have room for 50. According to David Charter, Jack requested that Princess Marina’s name be added to the guest list, while Jackie wanted to dine with Princess Margaret, as well as her sister Lee and Stash Radziwill.
But there were issues. Princess Marina was tied up in last-minute preparations for the wedding of her son, the Duke of Kent, three days later in York. Princess Margaret was expecting her first child. And the Radziwills were both divorcees, a status that still wrinkled royal noses during that era. Charter writes, “Back and forth the diplomats went as the palace objected to Jackie’s guests and Jackie objected to the objection.” Finally, he notes, it was decided that the Radziwills would be allowed to attend after all. According to Gore Vidal, Jackie felt stung over the whole thing.
Regardless, the royal and presidential couples were all smiles when cameras snapped them inside the palace ahead of the black-tie dinner on the evening of June 5. Both Vidal and Cecil Beaton would later share that Jackie wasn’t particularly impressed by the aesthetics of the palace or the royals on that particular evening, but if that is indeed the case, she kept up her usual serene public face for photographers. Perhaps the splendor of candlelight at Versailles, especially for a Francophile like Jackie, had set her up for inevitable disappointment afterward.
Jackie and Prince Philip were even pictured smiling and laughing together as the Queen spoke with President Kennedy ahead of the meal. Charter writes that it was actually the connection between the two heads of state that was perhaps the least fruitful that evening. Though Kennedy leaned heavily on British government figures, including Macmillan, for advice during his presidency, Charter notes that he was wholly unused to viewing a woman, even a monarch, as an equal colleague. “Elizabeth struggled to get to know a commander in chief who preferred the counsel of men,” he writes, adding that “there were no women in his cabinet nor among the close circle of buddies he turned to for support.”
Inside the palace’s state dining room, the invited guests gathered around one large table for the dinner, which consisted of “cold cream of pea soup, fillet of sole cooked in white wine sauce, saddle of lamb and salad mimosa and a soufflé of orange liqueur.” President Kennedy took his place to the Queen’s right, while Mrs. Kennedy was seated beside Prince Philip. Beneath a portrait of King George III, from whose grasp the American colonies were wrested during the revolution, the two couples dined alongside a roster of guests that included not only the Radziwills but also the President’s sister, Eunice Kennedy Shriver. Prince Philip’s widowed sister, Princess Margarita, was present with her son, Prince Kraft. Those gathered around the table also included Lord Mountbatten, the Macmillans, Lord and Lady Home, Rab and Mollie Butler, Lord and Lady Porchester, and Lord and Lady Westmoreland, among others.
But the evening is perhaps remembered as much for its fashion as for its food or its diplomatic content. Both the First Lady and the Queen opted for evening dresses in shades of blue for the dinner. Jackie was elegant in an ice blue sleeveless shantung silk dress with a dramatic boatneck neckline, acquired from the New York boutique Chez Ninon. Run by Nona Park and Sophie Shonnard, the Park Avenue boutique was a custom dressmaking salon that provided American customers with fashions based on European designs. (This was a common and legal practice at the time.) This particular gown, which is now housed in the JFK Presidential Library collection, was their “freehand interpretation” of a dress by Hubert de Givenchy.
The Queen opted for a fuller silhouette for the evening. The Daily Mirror described Elizabeth’s attire as “a full-length gown of larkspur silk tulle with a fitted bodice and a very full skirt, gathered horizontally.” The dress featured contrasting straps and a matching belt detail at the waist. Both ladies wore long white gloves with their gowns for the dinner as well.
Though the dinner was a black-tie event, which meant that the most impressive gala jewels, including tiaras, were not on the menu, both ladies also sparkled in carefully-chosen bejeweled accessories. The Queen reached for a particularly treasured suite of jewels from her personal collection for the dinner: the George VI Sapphires. As the names suggests, the antique suite of diamond and sapphire jewels was a wedding present from her father, the late King. Her necklace, earrings, and bracelet all form part of the set, though the bracelet was a later addition crafted during the Queen’s reign rather than one of the original nineteenth-century pieces.
She also wore another extremely important Victorian-era jewel for the dinner, pinning Prince Albert’s Brooch to the gathered tulle bodice of her evening gown. The brooch was Albert’s gift to his bride-to-be, Queen Victoria, on the eve of their royal wedding in February 1840. In her diary, Victoria enthused that the brooch was “splendid,” adding that it was “really quite beautiful.” She wore the sapphire and diamond cluster on her wedding dress the next morning, and she treasured it for the rest of her life.
Indeed, Victoria considered Albert’s brooch to be so important that, in her will, she designated it as an Heirloom of the Crown. That means that the brooch is passed directly from monarch to monarch, to be worn by the queen (whether regnant or consort). It’s been worn by every single woman who has inhabited the role since: Queen Alexandra, Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother), Queen Elizabeth II, and, most recently, Queen Camilla. The brooch coordinates beautifully with the George VI Sapphires–but even more important than that, it makes an important statement: “I am the Queen.”
For her night out at the palace, Jacqueline Kennedy also added some extra sparkle to her sleek evening look. On the shoulders of her dress, she pinned a trio of diamond leaf brooches. These had been a gift from her mother-in-law, Rose Kennedy, on her wedding day in 1953. Jackie even wore two of the brooches pinned to her bridal gown during the ceremony.
Two more diamond brooches from her collection had been nestled into her hair. Jackie loved to wear jeweled hair ornaments, often placing various brooches and pins from her jewelry box into her hair to mimic the look of a tiara. A few days earlier, at the Palace of Versailles, she had worn several diamond brooches together in her hair for a cobbled-together tiara look.
Jackie finished off the jewelry look with her diamond waterfall earrings. The earrings, which were purchased by Jack from Van Cleef & Arpels in New York, were a gift to celebrate the birth of their daughter, Caroline, in 1957. They feature a pair of married elements: floral studs from which detachable waterfall pendants are suspended. Jackie wore them constantly during the White House years for gala occasions. Fittingly, the earrings belong to Caroline Kennedy today.
There’s a small coda to the discussion of the jewels worn by Jackie for the Buckingham Palace dinner. During one of her trips to see her sister in London in the early 1960s, she encountered a stunning diamond sunburst brooch in the window at Wartski. It was love at first sight. To be able to pay for the brooch, she decided to sell the diamond leaf brooches that Rose Kennedy had given her as a wedding present–but to soften the blow, she had a pair of replica brooches made that were set with paste.
The sunburst brooch became an iconic piece in Jackie’s collection. It was also a jewel that she often used as a tiara-style hair ornament. Above, she wears the brooch in her hair during a state visit from Grand Duchess Charlotte and Hereditary Grand Duke Jean of Luxembourg to Washington in the spring of 1963. Like the waterfall earrings, the sunburst brooch now belongs to Caroline Kennedy.
At the end of the evening, the Kennedys departed the White House in separate cars. President Kennedy departed in a car bound straight for London Airport, accompanied by Harold Macmillan. He told a reporter outside the palace, “I have had a great trip here. We successfully baptized a godchild and I had a chance to talk to the Prime Minister for four hours.” Meanwhile, Jackie was driven with her sister back to the Radziwill home in Buckingham Place. After a quiet day of rest and antique shopping, followed by a private dinner party, she flew to Athens on June 7 with her sister and brother-in-law for a holiday. She returned to the United States nine days later.
In 2017, the Netflix drama The Crown presented an episode dedicated to the relationship between Queen Elizabeth II and the Kennedys, and the June 1961 dinner at the palace was a major part of the episode’s storyline. As so often happened with the royal soap, some of the costuming was a little bit off. The outfit worn by Jodi Balfour as Jackie Kennedy was particularly incorrect. Look at that strapless ’90s-style prom dress! A far cry from the gown that Jackie really chose for the evening.
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