A JACKIE KENNEDY watcher from way back, Boston Bureau Chief Gavin Scott was understandably skeptical about the story in the Boston Herald Traveler. After all, he says, "when I was in Madrid I covered a Jackie-and-Garrigues scare; when I was in London it was a Harlech scare." Now some headline writer seemed to be marrying Jackie off to Aristotle Onassis. Though the story sounded dubious, Scott was cautious enough to check it out. Soon he was on the phone to New York alerting the editors to this week's late-breaking cover story.

Within hours, TIME correspondents were going after the story in force. And in a year that has seen more than its share of grim news, their assignment offered a pleasant, if hectic, change of pace. A quick phone call to Rome sent Bureau Chief Jim Bell flying off to Athens. There, with the help of our stringer Mario Modiano, Bell chartered the only plane at the airport that was not controlled by either Onassis or the Greek government. He was taken for a look at Onassis' private island of Skorpios, and he is still frightened. "The pilot passed so low over the harbor," says Bell, "that I could see the tattoos on sailors' arms."

From Hong Kong to Paris to New York, TIME correspondents filed their contributions. In London, Bureau Chief Curt Prendergast tried to track down Lord Harlech; in Dublin, a stringer searched out the remaining Kennedy relatives. Washington's Bonnie Angelo, summoned from a Detroit union hall where Hubert Humphrey was promising higher social-security pensions, hurried eastward to deal with the world of million-dollar yachts and $3,000 dresses. From San Francisco, Bureau Chief Judson Gooding filed a personal reminiscence on the Jackie he knew when they were both students at the Sorbonne.

Although time was short, a rewarding amount of material eventually reached the desks of Researcher Judith Tyler, Associate Editor Robert Jones and Senior Editor Michael Demarest, who collaborated on the cover story.

Researcher Andrea Svedberg comes from a family of varied talents. Her grandfather won the 1926 Nobel Prize for chemistry. Her grandmother, a retired medical doctor in Stockholm, won the International Stalin Peace Prize in 1953.

Her father is a noted Swedish architect. She herself decided to be come a lawyer. But she lost patience with the law almost as soon as she entered school; for the past three years she has put her enthusiasm to work on TIME'S color projects. For this week's fashion layout, says Andrea, she was delighted that she and Photographer Ben Martin were able to use celebrities as models. The pros, she says, are not as much fun to deal with. "Besides, they have schedules that are as demanding as mine."

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