The sale of 33 intimate and private letters written by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis to a Catholic priest in Ireland has been canceled after her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, intervened, Page Six has learned.
Dublin’s All Hallows College had planned to auction the letters written more than 50 years ago by Jackie to Father Joseph Leonard. They were expected to fetch more than $1.36 million at an auction on June 10.
But the sale fell apart after representatives for Caroline Kennedy and her family made an appeal claiming the letters should be historically preserved. Also, a new will of Father Leonard, Jackie’s confidante who died in 1964, came to light, which showed he left the letters to his Catholic order, the Vincentian Congregation, rather than to the college as previously believed.
Jackie began writing to the priest after they met during a visit she made to Ireland, and the letters, starting in 1950, reveal her loneliness and suspicion that her then-husband, JFK, could cheat.
“He’s like my father in a way — loves the chase and is bored with the conquest — and once married, needs proof he’s still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you. I saw how that nearly killed Mummy,” Jackie wrote of JFK to Leonard in July 1952.
While reps for Caroline Kennedy, US ambassador to Japan, did not respond to requests for comment, All Hallows College spokeswoman Carolanne Henry told NBC News that the Kennedy family had become involved in the discussions over the letters. The family hopes they would be preserved as historical documents, as Leonard’s letters to Jackie are at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.
Henry said the ownership of the letters “was a factor in the auction being canceled, because they were not ours to sell. That, and the introduction of the Kennedy family into the proceedings.” On Friday, in a sad end to the story, All Hallows College, which urgently needed funds the letters sale might have brought it to continue, announced it was closing.