She had moxie. At the door of the Washington Senators locker room, she asked players about their slogan. Then they broke off their losing streak and Jackie was hailed as a good luck mascot.
JFK once called her fey, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “displaying magical, fairytale, or unearthly properties,” as if you had breakfast with a leprechaun.
The size suited her. She could show that whimsical side and even draw cartoons for the column. Waldrop gave her a byline and renamed the column “Inquiring Camera Girl.” John Husted, her fiancé for three months in 1952, dismissed it as “a tacky job,” but Jackie would later say she “loved every minute.”
She won over gruff male colleagues who were skeptical of her way of finishing at school. A reporter was so impressed that he offered to take her to an execution. She enjoyed provocative questions: “Would you rather men respect you or whistle at you?” “What would you talk about if you dated Marilyn Monroe?”
She asked truck drivers and yelled at them when they stopped at a red light, “What do you think of Dior’s spring fashion line?” Anthony said questions sometimes reflected concerns about Jack: “The Irish author, Sean O’Faolain, claims that the Irish are deficient in the art of loving. Do you agree?”
She didn’t hesitate to ask esoteric questions: “In ‘The Doctor’s Dilemma,’ George Bernard Shaw asks whether it is better to save the life of a great artist turned villain, or a commonplace honest family man. What do you think?” And she didn’t speak condescendingly to working-class subjects, remembering seeking out “salty” characters.
That’s probably how she found my larger-than-life dad, who was a DC police detective responsible for Senate security.