Nancy Tuckerman
Loyal confidante and social secretary of Jackie Kennedy who dispensed brisk advice on etiquette
NANCY TUCKERMAN, who has died aged 89, was a childhood friend and later social secretary of Jacqueline Kennedy (later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis), and an expert on modern etiquette.
Slim, erect and always carefully coiffed, Nancy Tuckerman was described in one newspaper as “gentle and gracious, supple as steel but granitelike in her discretion”. Known as “Tucky” to intimates, she was never glamorous, but with her aura of New England commonsense and her total loyalty she provided a vital protective shield to the widowed American First Lady after the assassination of her husband in November 1963. She handled all the letters of condolence and later, as “Jackie’s” spokeswoman until her death in 1994, politely but firmly fended off media inquiries deemed too personal.
“I never said: ‘No comment’,” Nancy Tuckerman recalled, but she conceded that “of course, we never did comment on anything.” Even after Jackie’s death she remained the soul of discretion, though she let her guard down slightly in 1996 in the introduction to a catalogue of an auction of her late friend’s possessions at Sotheby’s, New York.
Nancy Ludlow Tuckerman was born into East Coast aristocracy on October 24 1928 in Tuxedo Park, New York. Her father was a Manhattan stockbroker, her mother an event planner. A great-greatgreat grandfather, Oliver Wolcott, was one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence and served as governor of Connecticut.
Nancy Tuckerman first met the young Jacqueline Bouvier when they were classmates at Chapin School, an upmarket establishment in New York, recalling her friend as “the naughtiest girl in the fifth grade”. On one occasion they sneaked out of school to ride one of Jackie’s horses bareback. When Nancy fell off and injured her arm, Jackie concocted a story to keep the escapade a secret.
They remained friends, and room-mates, at Miss Porter’s School, another upper-crust establishment in Farmington, Connecticut.
Her father would not allow Nancy to attend college and she worked for a travel agent in New York until Jackie, when chatelaine of the White House, called to ask whether she would be willing to take over as her social secretary from Letitia “Tish” Baldrige, who had resigned.
She arrived at the White House in April 1963, and was put to the test that September when she was put in charge of making the arrangements for a state visit by Mohammed Zahir Shah, the then King of Afghanistan.
Wanting to make the visit memorable, she suggested a post-prandial firework display on the South Lawn of the White House. The display was originally planned to last eight minutes, but in the interests of economy the president requested that it be reduced to four. Misunderstanding his instructions, the fireworks organiser cut the time back but not the number of fireworks.
“There was an explosion that you wouldn’t believe,” she recalled. “It was as if war had begun. The king’s bodyguards and the Secret Service men protecting the president jumped into place. The White House switchboard was inundated. It was thought that a plane had crashed into the White House. The following day, all the newspapers reported on the White House’s new social secretary … Jackie said: ‘You’ve upstaged the King of Afghanistan!’ ”
On November 22 Nancy Tuckerman was at the White House planning another dinner, for the West German chancellor Ludwig Erhard, when she was told the president had been shot and killed in Dallas. After helping with funeral arrangements and assisting the president’s widow to move out of the White House, she remained a spokeswoman for her friend, later shielding her from impertinent enquiries about her marriage to her second husband, the Greek shipowner Aristotle Onassis.
She took a job with Olympic Airways, which was owned by Onassis, and in the early 1970s arranged for the company to sponsor an early version of the New York City Marathon. In 1975 she became an editor at the publishers Doubleday, where Jackie joined her in 1978 and where they often worked together until Jackie’s death from non-hodgkin lymphoma.
In 1995 she was co-author with Nancy Dunnan of a revised edition of the American socialite’s bible The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette, addressing such important questions as what a lesbian couple should write on the birth announcement of their child, what to do when your teenage child dyes his/ her hair green. (“The way to keep hair from being an issue in your family is to realize its irrelevance in light of the greater teenage issues of unwanted pregnancy, Aids, and deaths from drunk driving.”) She claimed to have invented the term “boomerang child”, to define the problem of offspring who return to live at home after college. (“Remind him your rules once more apply, and charge him rent.”)
Nancy Tuckerman was unmarried.
Nancy Tuckerman, born October 24 1928, died August 1 2018