Jackie Kennedy Love Letters Go for $134,500

Jacqueline Bouvier (Kennedy Onassis) wrote quite a lot of letters -- there was no email, after all -- to her boyfriend at Harvard, a 21-year-old fellow named R. Beverley Corbin Jr., in the late 1940s. A Christie's auction held on Thursday landed them in the hands of a "French lady" and "very big fan of Jackie Kennedy," who made the purchase over the phone, reports CNN. She paid $134,500 for 22 letters and a printed telegram. The letters had been estimated at between $25,000 and $35,000 pre-auction, but the power of Kennedy Onassis clearly bumped that up a bit.

Some tidbits from her letters, written when Jackie was 17:

On kissing:

"I do love you though -- and can love you without kissing you every time I see you and I hope you understand that."

On true love:

"I've always thought of being in love as being willing to do anything for the other person -- starve to buy them bread and not mind living in Siberia with them -- and I've always thought that every minute away from them would be hell -- so looking at it that (way) I guess I'm not in love with you."

On her (brief) engagement to someone else (John Husted):

"What I hope for you is for the same thing to happen as quickly and as surely as it did with me. It will when you least expect it."

On school (she went to Miss Porter's School in Farmington, Connecticut):

"If school days are the happiest of your life, I'm hanging myself with my skip-rope tonight."

"I'm never going to send my children to boarding school. The boys can go to P.S. 148 with gangsters, and then go to Columbia & the girls can go to Hunter College and they'll all be morons but at least they wont have to tear around and get their teeth knocked out playing hockey every day. ... Can you think of anything worse than living in a small town like this all your life and competing to see which housewife could bake the best cake?"

In another letter, she asks Corbin to "smuggle in cigarettes, chocolate 'and a hip flask to shock Mrs. J.'"

Oh, Jackie!

Love (letters) hath a price: $134,500 when author is Jackie Kennedy [CNN via Daily Intel]