A TINY PEEK BEHIND THE CURTAIN.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

Watching ``Jackie: Behind the Myth'' makes you wonder what Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis would have been like had she been born 20 or 30 years later.

Born in 1929, Jackie was very much a product of her times and upper-class social status. She was charming, a debutante with an Audrey Hepburn quality. Her career as a journalist - the inquiring photographer for the Washington Times-Herald - was a brief interlude until she married John F. Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts and most eligible bachelor in town. She had set her sights on him so she wouldn't lead the ordinary life that she feared.

She then played the dutiful wife and mother, working behind the scenes, offering suggestions for her husband's speeches and finding ways to promote the arts by bringing entertainers such as classical cellist Pablo Casals to the White House.

In her famous television tour of the redesigned White House in 1962, she was asked about what role the government should play in aiding the arts. Jackie sidestepped the question, saying it was complicated and that she thought the White House should have the best. Unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, Jackie did not see herself as a full partner in the administration, but she was perhaps the most effective first lady this country has had since Eleanor Roosevelt. Both the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Kennedy Library in Boston owe much of their existence to her efforts.

But like the current first lady, she had a straying husband. Jackie was no stranger to this kind of behavior - her own mother had divorced her father when Jackie was 11, a victim of his philandering ways. In the documentary, Pierre Salinger tells about being confronted by a reporter about the president having mistresses. He says his reply was that the president spent 15 to 16 hours a day running the country, and if he were having some extracurricular activity, so what. Salinger says he never heard anything again from the reporter.

While this may be relevant as a historic note about how times have changed, it tells us nothing about Jackie. The only allusion the documentary makes about how she might feel about JFK's affairs is an observation from a friend that Jackie had the ability to pull a ``curtain'' over some parts of her life. Given how she adored her father despite his indiscretions - and was upset when her mother conspired to keep him away from her wedding - and looked away from her husband's transgressions, there is no attempt in the documentary to examine this.

Does this documentary really tell us the story of ``Jackie: Behind the Myth''? No. Like the Salinger quote, there is too much information about events and such that don't deal directly with the woman and her struggles. Its tone is also too reverential, not a sainted portrait per se, but one that refuses to go too deep and that glosses over other events. The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968, clearly was a factor in her marriage to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis a little more than four months later, but this is only mentioned in passing. Nor is there any real explanation about the turbulence at the end of their marriage just before Onassis died in 1975 in Greece. It is simply noted that she was in New York City at the time.

Yet the documentary succeeds to a degree despite itself, and that is because of Jackie. She was a fascinating character on the world stage, who through her poise (look at her at JFK's funeral), style (a glamorous first lady who wore designer clothes) and taste (she chose relatively unknown architect I.M. Pei to design the Kennedy Library, helping to spark his career) has had a lasting influence on culture.

In 1978, she begin a career as a book editor and edited more than 100 books over the next 16 years until her death from cancer in 1994. Hearing testaments about Jackie's encouragement from authors such as Peter Sis, who wrote a children's book for her, gives the viewer a glimpse into Jackie's depths.

The documentary contains no mention of John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death this year, though there are numerous shots of his youth. It does offer one tantalizing tidbit - Jackie left behind tapes to be played after her last child has died.

Ironically, it will be up to future historians to give us the real Jackie behind the myth. This documentary will give you only a taste.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1) Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis began a second career in New York in 1978, becoming a book editor.

(2) Jackie and John F. Kennedy had two children, John Jr. and Caroline, who were adored by the nation during the Camelot years.