Jackie Kennedy’s Stylist Reveals All in New Book
Jackie Kennedy’s Stylist Reveals All in New Book
Caroline HallemannSat, August 22, 2026 at 11:00 AM UTC
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Many women view the salon chair as a sort of confessional, but few stylists can say they’ve served as a confidant to a client list as impressive as Peter Lamas’s. Over the course of his decades-long career, Peter has worked with everyone from Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor, to Audrey Hepburn and Diana Ross. He was there for the shaping of Mia Farrow’s iconic Rosemary’s Baby pixie, a look he doesn’t recommend for everyone—“Pixie cuts, you have to be careful with. That's a very daring, youthful look, and it doesn't work on everyone. If you happen to be having a large frame or a round face, I don't recommend it because a pixie cut pronounces the features.” And he did Judy Garland’s hair for her wake. “Peter, will you make my mother beautiful one last time?” her daughter Liza said to him. “How could I refuse?” he thought.
But perhaps his most significant working partnership was with Jackie Kennedy, a relationship he details in his new book, Jackie Kennedy’s Stylist.
Peter, a Cuban-born immigrant who moved to New York in his teens, found early success in the city working with some of the biggest names in hair. “I had the opportunity to meet Vidal Sassoon and Paul Mitchell when they first opened up on Madison Avenue, and I became an apprentice. They were my mentors. They tested me. They saw my talent and appreciated what I had to offer,” he tells T&C.
“Sassoon took a great interest in me and the rest is history. And then I joined Kenneth Battelle’s salon. And that was as exciting as Vidal. With the kind of clientele Kenneth was bringing in, the models and the hip people and music, and so on, Kenneth Salon was the mecca for high society.”
Naturally, that’s where Peter met Jackie. Kenneth was known for styling the former first lady’s signature bouffant (and Marilyn Monroe’s iconic blonde locks, but that’s another story). But one day, he was unavailable to work with her, and asked Peter to fill in.
“He said, ‘I'm not going to be around tomorrow. You'll be doing Jacqueline Kennedy’s hair,’” Peter recalls. “And I got all shook up, let me say, to be honest.”
Jackie was a fan of Peter’s work, and he started to fill in doing her hair whenever Battelle was busy. Eventually, when the paparazzi made it unbearable for Jackie to visit the salon (this was the late 1960s, when photographers including the notorious Ron Galella were aggressively pursuing her in public, trying to take her picture), Peter became her go-to stylist, as Kenneth didn’t make house calls.
“I became the convenient, talented stylist that had scissors, would travel,” he says. Those scissors took him all the way to Skorpios island in Greece in 1968 for Jackie's intimate wedding to Aristotle Onassis.
Jackie and Ari Onassis on their wedding day in 1968.Bettmann - Getty Images
“Throughout the celebrations, I noticed the complex emotions on display—the Kennedy family’s polite but reserved smiles, [Jackie’s sister] Lee’s somewhat forced enthusiasm, and Jackie’s expression that was serene but not quite ecstatic,” he writes in the book.
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“I’d gotten to know two Jackies over the years. There was Jackie Kennedy—widow of JFK, perfectly composed, a little shy, dignified in a way that felt both natural and carefully guarded. When I worked on her hair then, she carried herself like someone the whole country was watching, which of course they were. She was quiet, gracious, aware of every gesture. Then she married Onassis and became Jackie O. It wasn’t vulgar or anything like that. But something shifted.”
Both versions of Jackie, he tells T&C,were confident. “She carried herself with an incredible attitude and femininity and personality, and she was intelligent. She opened her mouth and you wanted to hear what she had to say.”
One evening, many years after the wedding in Greece, Peter did Jackie’s hair for an event at Lincoln Center celebrating President Kennedy’s legacy. As her hair processed, Jackie began to speak about the assassination, something she had never brought up to Peter before. She mentioned the Zapruder film, and her fears in that moment that she would be killed as well, and that her children would be orphans. And she shared her thoughts on who actually shot JFK.
“Oswald was a stooge,” Jackie said, according to Peter. “It’s pretty obvious he didn’t kill my husband.”
Peter also recalls that Jackie believed Marilyn Monroe had been murdered. “Marilyn didn’t kill herself. She was murdered. You can bet on it,” she said, in Peter’s recollection, noting that the movie star was killed by “the same people who killed my husband.” Jackie didn’t offer any further details.
That conversation about the death of President Kennedy, is “hard to talk about” even today, Peter says, but it illustrates the relationship he had with Jackie, and the trust she had in him.
“I think most stylists will reveal this to you. We become sort of like a trusted psychotherapist, or a confessional priest,” he says. “When you're doing somebody's hair, doing their makeup, advising them on skincare, anything that has to do with their appearance, they become confidants. They trust you because you are handling one of their most important, valuable assets: how they look.”
Despite the stories gathered from decades of interactions with some of society and Hollywood’s biggest names, Peter says his book isn’t a gossipy tell-all. Rather, “It’s my story, my humble beginnings. It's my journey of having big dreams, and being able to help people.”
Jackie’s Stylist is on sale now.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
