There is something so familiar about the young brunette girl in the club wearing a simple white tee and jeans. The perfectly symmetrical features, the big eyes. The graceful way she carries herself — not like a model, exactly, more like royalty.
It’s Jackie Kennedy all over again.
Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, eldest daughter of Caroline Kennedy, has been channeling the look and style of her late, fabulous grandmother ever since she was a teen.
So far, she’s kept a low profile. But as she graduates from Harvard University next Thursday with a bachelor’s degree in English and starts to make her way in the world, she will be impossible to ignore — especially as her doppelganger is about to experience a cultural resurgence.
Jackie O is the subject of dueling film projects, both due out next year, and last week, Hyperion announced it would publish a series of interviews she recorded in 1964 with historian and family friend Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Schlesinger, who started out as a speechwriter for JFK in 1960, stayed close to the family through three generations and got to know Jackie’s granddaughter before his death in 2007.
“Rose was and is the leader of the pack — her opinion counts. She is highly regarded within the ever-
expanding [Kennedy] circle,” the Pulitzer-winning author told biographer C. David Heymann in an interview for “American Legacy: The Story of John & Caroline Kennedy.”
“In many respects,” he said, “she is the face and future of the clan.”
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Rose Kennedy Schlossberg was raised on the Upper East Side, the eldest of three children of artist Edwin Schlossberg and, of course, Caroline Kennedy. Her name, which came from her great-grandmother, was chosen not by her mother but by Jackie — who, ironically, never liked her mother-in-law, or vice versa. But as she once told press secretary Pierre Salinger, “The old bat’s about 100 years old, so let’s give her some respect.”
The former first lady was a regular presence in Rose’s life, right up until Jackie’s death in May 1994, when her granddaughter was 5. Jackie used to make regular visits to the Schlossbergs’ apartment for what she called a “roll around” with baby Rose. When Rose was a little older, “Grand Jackie” — the Schlossbergs’ name for “grandma” — would take her on outings to playgrounds and museums, including the Met, right across the street from Jackie’s apartment.
“Jackie, who lived just a few blocks away from the Schlossbergs on the Upper East Side, saw Rose basically every day and doted on her,” says Kennedy biographer Christopher Andersen. “Jackie knew it was important to sow the seeds of good behavior early on, and she tried to do that in the final years of her life. It was a mission for her.”
Jackie’s neighbor Barbara Stoller told Heymann about seeing Jackie in the playground near Central Park “in T-shirt and jeans with those famous large oval sunglasses on her face, pushing Rose back and forth on the swing . . . Jackie would talk to Rose as if she were addressing an adult.”
Jackie even showed up once to chaperone a school trip to the American Museum of Natural History, and the fashion icon was the only grandmother in the bunch. On another visit to the museum with Rose, Jackie brought along a family friend, Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. “Rose was all over the place, 20 yards ahead of us, a real hell-raiser,” he told Heymann. “She reminded me of Jackie when she was young. Rose was very bright and very independent.”
Along with younger sister Tatiana, Rose attended the posh Brearley School, which costs $34,000 a year. Here, says one former teacher who asked that her name be withheld, Rose kept a low profile but stood out in spite of herself.
“She tried not to draw attention to herself, which was quite a task considering her family name,” she told Heymann. “Rose looked like Jackie, perhaps even a bit sexier looking, though not as refined. She has the dark good looks of a Bouvier and the sensibility of a Kennedy.”
Growing up in the simultaneous glow of family celebrity and the shroud of constant tragedy wasn’t easy. The death of her beloved uncle John in 1999 hit her hard.
“Rose withdrew after John’s death,” a member of the Kennedy family told Heymann. “He’d been like a father to her. She went into a six-month depression during which she barely spoke to anyone. She stopped eating — she must have lost 30 pounds.
“If there was a saving grace, it was that both Jackie and John Jr. left her considerable trust funds. At the age of 14, Rose was worth millions.”
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Grief put her off track academically, but only for a short time. “She did extremely well in school, evidenced by the fact that she wound up at Harvard, although I suppose you could argue that every Kennedy winds up at Harvard — or its equivalent,” said the Brearley teacher.
By all accounts, Rose seems to have passed herself off as a civilian at the Ivy League university, studying English, taking film classes and cultivating an interest in fashion — an indication the formative years spent with Jackie were paying off.
She took part in Project East, a Harvard-based charity, which hosts an annual fashion show combining established Asian designers (Vera Wang, most recently) with emerging ones. Rose, a member of the executive board, has walked the runway as a model for the past two years. Bruce Mount, the photographer who shot her in her most recent show, says he wasn’t initially aware of Rose’s dynastic history.
“When I was taking pictures of her, I had no idea who she was,” Mount told The Post. But, he adds, “there were no airs about her of being a princess. She was just a normal person working hard to make the show a success — very pleasant and professional.”
After the show, he started finding his Rose photos all over. “Once they came out,” he says, “people started grabbing them and reposting them.”
Project East wasn’t Rose’s first foray into publicizing small designers. In 2007, friends convinced her to pose for the local T-shirt label Only NY. “We did a little shoot in the neighborhood,” one of the label’s founders says, “and my friend who was shooting it knew her. So she just came along, and we took photos and had fun.”
Like Mount, he had no idea he was working with a Kennedy. “I didn’t even know who she was,” he says. But the Rose pictures were the ones that garnered major attention in the lookbook, both in the number of hits and in comments. “The one of her in front of the fence, that was a lot of people’s favorite,” he says.
At college, freed from the protective embrace of her parents, Rose found herself occasionally keeping company with high-wattage friends — a hobby that her A-list uncle, JFK Jr., also enjoyed. “She’s in the fast lane,” a source close to the family tells The Post.
In January of last year, she was spotted giving a tour of the Harvard campus to none other than Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson. That night, the odd threesome was spotted out at the Boston nightclub Estate. Rose also brought a high-profile date — fellow student Mike Einziger, guitarist for the band Incubus.
“They all came in together, and they all left together,” says an Estate representative. “Samantha was spinning, but Lindsay hung out with Mike and Rose. I couldn’t tell if [Mike and Rose] were together, but it seemed like they were pretty close.
“She wasn’t drinking, I believe,” he hastily added.
It was an unusually public night out for a young woman who’d managed to stay out of the Boston media spotlight — and perhaps the ensuing coverage rattled her. Rose hasn’t been spotted out carousing since then, say Boston gossip sources.
“She’s not out on the town much, or we would know it,” says Gayle Fee, columnist for the Boston Herald.
“I have yet to see her around,” says Boston Globe party photographer Bill Brett. “And,” he points out about her one social appearance, “Estate is kind of a quiet club. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it.”
Perhaps Rose had simply figured out what her grandmother knew as a young woman: You can go out as much as you want as long as you figure out how to not get caught. Jackie used to go out with boys all the time when she was a student at Vassar — she just didn’t broadcast it.
“She dated frequently . . . but she never named names, never disclosed herself,” Heymann quotes her Vassar classmate Selwa Showker as saying.
The young Bouvier also had a habit of sneaking cigarettes in her dorm room while at Miss Porter’s School for Girls — and was even once caught in a bawdy photo pose, with her shirt off the shoulder and a sultry look on her face. The photo eventually made its way back to her family (and earned her a stern talking-to from her grandfather).
But in the age of Facebook, Flickr and the iPhone, nobody gets off that easy. Snaps abound online of Rose in typically collegiate poses: blowing smoke rings while slumped against a wall; brandishing a keg cup and a grin; watching a friend smoke a hookah; kissing a guy and a girl at the same time. Nothing too incriminating — especially given her “Gossip Girl”-esque upbringing — but certainly evidence that she enjoys a party.
Then there was that incident in the limo on Aug. 27, 2009. Riding in the motorcade on the way to Uncle Teddy’s funeral, she flipped off the paparazzi — and, intentionally or not, the crowd behind them.
It could have been simply a 21-year-old’s reaction to the glare of media scrutiny at a difficult time. But it was also a subconscious nod to her grandmother, who had been in the habit of grumbling, early on in her marriage, about riding in limos with her campaigning husband.
But biographer Andersen believes that Jackie — regardless of her true feelings — would never have been filmed making such rude gestures to the public. “If Jackie were around today,” he says, “I can only imagine the kind of talking-to she would give her granddaughter.”
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Understandably, the stresses of a political family may have spooked Rose enough to keep her from ever running for office herself. Her on-campus political activity seems to have been nil: “I’m sorry to say,” a spokesman for the Harvard College Democrats says, “that Rose has not been an active member during my time here.”
She’s been a cheerleader for her mom, though, first supporting her potential Senate run in 2008 — telling the Harvard Crimson that she thought “it’s an exciting prospect and [I] look forward to whatever role my mom chooses to play in this new era of American politics” — and, later, encouraging her to let it go. When Caroline took herself out of the running, her decision was said to be influenced by Rose, who advised her mother to rise above the ugly name-calling that ensued after a few public interviews went badly. “You’re above it,” she reportedly told her mother. “You ought to quit.”
Rose hasn’t been totally politically dormant: She did donate $350 to the Obama campaign, public records show, and she reportedly volunteered for Democrat Alan Khazei’s campaign for US Senate in Massachusetts last year. (The Khazei campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
Perhaps the pressure to seek political office will win out over the risks she’s seen befall family members who came before her.
If Jackie gave Rose the fashion gene, she got an equal dose of political DNA from JFK. And she made one telling, if offhand, comment to a relative upon hearing that her cousin Patrick would not seek re-election to his Rhode Island congressional seat: “I’d better hurry up,” she said, “and run for something.”
Whether or not she was joking, it’s a good bet that soon we’ll be seeing a lot more of Rose.
sara.stewart@nypost.com