Just Jackie

by Edward Klein

  “Campbell was a guru for a lot of people of Jackie’s generation, but his book was very bad scholarship. He was not a great scholar. He was radically anti-Semitic … and in that respect he was like Jackie’s father-in-law Joseph Kennedy.

  “Did Jackie see through these people? She may have, but it remains an intriguing question how much she saw through people like Campbell and Onassis and Joe Kennedy. In fact, it is the central question of her life: How does one live publicly in a world where one has to lie?

  “Jackie was pitched headlong into the midst of such a world. And all her life, she had to make decisions to lie, or not to lie, and to go on living.”

  “THAT’S JACKIE…. THAT’S JACKIE….”

  One evening in March 1980, Jackie stepped off a freight elevator into a crowded Soho loft, where an Academy Awards party was in full swing. Two men followed her off the elevator into the noisy, smoke-filled room. One was her escort for the evening, Pete Hamill, the ruggedly handsome, Brooklyn-born columnist for the New York Daily News. The other was a slightly built young man who was wrapped in the saffron robes of a Buddhist monk and carried a photo of the Sri Rajneesh on a leather thong around his neck.

  “Hi, Pete,” said Julienne Scanlon, a Broadway musical star and the wife of the party’s host, public-relations man John Scanlon. “What would you like to drink?”

  “I’ll just have a Coke,” said Hamill, who had lived the life of a sober alcoholic for the past eight years. “Oh, by the way,” he added nonchalantly, “this is Jackie.”

  Julienne stared in disbelief at Hamill’s date, who was dressed in a floral blouse, black trousers, and patent-leather pumps.

  “And what would you like to drink, Jackie?” Julienne managed to stammer.

  “I’ll have what Pete’s having,” Jackie said.

  The bartender, a young woman, took one look at Jackie, and dropped the glass she was holding in her hand. It smashed on the floor, and when she bent to pick it up, she cut herself so badly that her hand would not stop bleeding.

  In all the confusion, Julienne had barely had time to deal with the young man in the saffron robes.

  “And who are you?” she finally asked the follower of Sri Rajneesh, who had wandered in from the little Neeshie ashram located on Franklin Street across from the Scanlon loft.

  “I’m with Jackie,” he said.

  “Jackie, do you know him?” Julienne asked her.

  Jackie looked at the monk, and shook her head.

  “Pete!” Julienne called after Hamill, who had begun to disappear into the crowd. “This fellow says he’s with Jackie.”

  Hamill ran back to the entrance, grabbed the confused Neeshie by his homespun robe, and hustled him into the freight elevator.

  “I’m with Jackie!” the young man yelled as he disappeared. “This is a sign! We were meant to be together!”

  “I think I should go to the hospital to get some stitches,” said the bartender.

  Jackie followed Hamill into the jam-packed loft, which consisted of one large living area with windows all around, and a big bedroom, where three or four television sets were blaring at the same time. Edward Koch, the mayor of New York, and a bevy of journalists and writers were watching Jane Fonda hand Dustin Hoffman an Oscar for his performance as a beleaguered father in Kramer vs. Kramer.

  Hamill knew a thing or two about the problems of fatherhood. He was still trying to repair some of the damage he had inflicted on his daughters Adrienne and Deirdre when they were growing up and he was drunk a lot of the time. After he stopped drinking, Hamill lived for a number of years with Shirley MacLaine, but she had always made it clear that she did not want to have anything to do with his daughters. Faced with a choice, Hamill dumped his kids, rather than Shirley, which made him feel doubly guilty.

  Jackie did not know what to make of Hamill’s struggles with his conscience and his rebellious daughters, who were now eighteen and sixteen, and were showing signs of being troubled kids. Jackie was touched by Hamill’s confessions of guilt, but parenthood meant a great deal to her, and she found it hard to forgive Hamill for having been such a bad father. His candor did not evoke her sympathy; it only made her realize how angry she must have been at her own father for letting her down as a child.

  For his part, Hamill was a writer who had fashioned himself as a voice of the workingman. He had once written a scathing denunciation of Jackie for selling herself to Onassis for a few pieces of gold. He eventually thought better of publishing his intemperate words, and had put the column away in a drawer. But when he started dating Jackie, the column resurfaced and was printed by his rivals at the New York Post as a way of embarrassing him.

  He was surprised to learn that Jackie was very different from Shirley MacLaine, Faye Dunaway, and his other self-absorbed celebrity girlfriends. Jackie was much more open, and seemed genuinely interested in him and his work. All of Hamill’s writer buddies assumed that he was sleeping with Jackie, but he was always too much of a gentleman to confirm their suspicions.

  Jackie sat down on a bed next to a journalist who was so smashed that at first he did not recognize her. He offered her a toke, which she politely refused.

  “A couple of people were ripped to the tits, they were so drunk,” said Patsy Denk Powers, an actress and producer who was co-hosting the party with the Scanlons. “And I thought, please, God, don’t let them go back there into the bedroom and say anything to Jackie.”

  By now, however, people had heard that Jackie was in the bedroom, and they were wandering back to take a look.

  On the TV screen, Dustin Hoffman leaned over the shoulder of the Oscar statuette, paused, then observed wryly to the billion people who were watching: “He has no genitalia, and he’s holding a sword.”

  The loft exploded in rowdy laughter. When it subsided, two words could be heard repeated over and over again: “That’s Jackie That’s Jackie ”

  “SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT”

  Pete Hamill embodied many of the bad-boy qualities that had attracted Jackie to John Kennedy and Aristotle Onassis. But Hamill also represented a break with Jackie’s past. He was both masculine and sensitive, a bang-it-out-on-the-typewriter kind of reporter and an accomplished novelist and painter. He was a liberal New Yorker whose consciousness had been raised by the women’s movement. He was not threatened by strong, independent women, and he had no qualms about treating Jackie as an equal.

  As a working journalist, Hamill lived a hand-to-mouth existence. He had neither the money nor the desire to insulate Jackie from the real world, where he got the material for his columns and novels. His love affair with Jackie, who was notoriously press shy, surprised a number of people, who could not understand her attraction to a poor, ink-stained wretch.

  But it did not surprise the author of this book, who had the chance to observe firsthand Jackie’s fascination with members of the fourth estate. In 1981,1 was the editor in chief of The New York Times Magazine and was bringing out a new novel at Doubleday, where Jackie had recently taken a job as a part-time editor. She liked my novel well enough to make one of her rare public appearances at my book party. She wrote me a note shortly after the party, praising my book, and I called her a few days later for lunch. We became friendly, and that Christmas she invited me to a party at her home on Fifth Avenue.

  “Oh, Ed,” she told me at one point during the party, “I’m so glad you could come. Journalists are the most interesting people in the whole world!”

  Given her ambivalence toward journalism and true confessions, it was fascinating to see what Jackie had chosen as her life’s work. She spent three days a week—Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays—at Doubleday, where she attended editorial meetings and gained the respect of her fellow editors as someone who knew how to shepherd her projects through the editorial bureaucracy, and get her books approved.

  “She telephoned me one day from Doubleday,” said John Loring, the former design director of Tiffany & Company, who worked with Jackie on a series of six Tiffany
lifestyle books. “Some people had called an editorial meeting to get us to do certain things that she and I did not want to do with the book we were working on. And she said, ‘We have to psych them out on this one. You know, we’re not going to argue. We’re just going to psych them out.’

  “She did her homework thoroughly before the meeting,” Loring continued, “and she knew what every man and woman was up to, and what they were trying to put over, and who was siding with who and who wasn’t. And she knew how to tip the balance at the right moment in a meeting to get it the way she knew it should be done.

  “And we were sitting across the table from these people who were proposing these unacceptable things, and she leaned over and whispered to me, ‘Look at them! Look at them! They’re all so vile, so vile! They think of things every minute that we couldn’t imagine in a lifetime.’ ”

  At Doubleday, Jackie occupied a cramped, nondescript corner office on the twentieth floor.

  “There were a lot of books and paintings around her office,” Loring said. “But there was no decoration, no personal touches of anything whatsoever. Well, maybe a photograph or two, the children or something. But there was nothing that would have told you that this was in fact her office. She was not being Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She was being an editor at Doubleday.

  “And for the first number of years, she did not want to go out to a restaurant,” Loring went on. “So we would end up with a brown paper bag full of Styrofoam containers—iced tea, cole slaw, potato salad, and some kind of sandwich—sitting on the floor of Jackie’s office, eating out of these containers. We rather liked the floor because you could spread out a great many photographs, and just make this great accretion of paper and stuff all around you in every direction. We could crawl across the floor, and grab a photo and put it there, and I would have this photograph, and Jackie would have that one, and we had a lot of fun. And one time Jackie turned to me on the floor and said, ‘Robin Leach’s Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous should cover this event. That would give people out there something to think about.’ ”

  At the beginning of a project, Jackie and Loring would each make a list of about fifty stylish people they thought should be included in the book.

  “About fifty percent of our lists were identical, so there was no discussion,” Loring said. “If there was someone who I didn’t know but who Jackie particularly wanted, she’d just say, ‘Believe me, John, this is the right person to put there.’

  “And then I would make most of the phone calls. Jackie would say, ‘If you need me to step in, I will, and make it happen.’ And one time she said about someone, ‘If I have to go and beat them up, I will, because with their social pretensions, they wouldn’t dare say no tome.’

  “Once, we wanted to do a cookbook, but the marketing department at Doubleday said, no, you’re not going to do that until you write a book on American weddings. Thank God, that was about the time that Caroline was getting married, so Jackie was suddenly interested in weddings. She said, ‘Let’s just get all the books we can on weddings.’ So we got all these books, including Martha Stewart’s, and decided that it was too dogmatic, because it attempted to tell people exactly how to do the checklist and countdown to the terrifying event. Jackie’s attitude was, ‘Let’s try to liberate the American girl from this nightmare.’

  “While we were doing this wedding book, we came across a photograph of asparagus from a market with red rubber bands around it, and it was just beautiful. And Jackie said, ‘Asparagus is so beautiful. It’s more beautiful than the pictures of flowers. I don’t see why American girls don’t just carry bunches of asparagus at their weddings. But I guess that would be too close to the truth.’ ”

  Much of Jackie’s time at Doubleday was spent alone in her office, whispering intently into the telephone, trying to persuade famous people to tell all in their autobiographies.

  “I remember Jackie’s presentation of a book to be written by a fellow named Michael Jackson,” said an old publishing hand who had watched Jackie in action. “She’d done all the financial projections, but what was impressive about it was that she was explaining to a roomful of older people why this book could be immensely successful and why it was worth paying a lot of money to get it. And she was right: it became an immense bestseller. She was not someone who backed down when she thought she was on the right track.”

  A number of other celebrities, including ballerina Gelsey Kirkland, succumbed to Jackie’s persuasive editorial charms. But the biggest prize of all, Frank Sinatra, continued to elude her. This made Jackie all the more eager to snag Sinatra for a Doubleday autobiography. In her dogged pursuit of the famous crooner, she went so far as to invite him to have dinner with her in New York. They were photographed leaving the restaurant together, looking as though they were out on a date, which gave rise to the inevitable tabloid rumors of a hot romance.

  Nothing could have been further from the truth. Jackie had never liked Sinatra, and had discouraged John Kennedy from having anything to do with him when he was President. “Jackie hates Frank,” Kennedy told his brother-in-law Peter Lawford, “and won’t have him in the house.” Sinatra might be the greatest entertainer of his generation—and a sure-fire bestseller as an author—but Jackie considered him to be tacky and low class. He was not a candidate to share her bed.

  “THE DEFINITION OF HAPPINESS”

  As a single working mother and a woman of a certain age (she was now in her early fifties), Jackie became increasingly confident of her ability to make decisions on her own. But maturity also brought with it some unwanted changes. She was buffeted by the hormonal storms of menopause, which in her case seemed to be more severe than in most women. Her gynecologist prescribed Premarin, an estrogen replacement made from the urine of mares, and Provera, a progesterone replacement. Although these drugs were also supposed to help a woman maintain her youthful appearance, Jackie’s face began to sharpen and show signs of age. In the mid 1980s, she had the first of three face-lifts. And she started seeing a psychotherapist.

  Jackie had always believed strongly in psychotherapy, and was open to ideas that could help people cope with their lives. She was responsible for Doubleday’s publishing Out in Inner Space: A Psychoanalyst Explores New Therapies, by Dr. Stephen Appelbaum, the Erik Erikson Scholar at the Austin Riggs Center, one of the best psychiatric hospitals in the country.

  “Jackie and I had a sort of friendship,” Dr. Appelbaum said, “and met a time or two in New York for social reasons, and corresponded and talked on the phone. She had an interest in just about everything, but how deep it went was hard to tell. I don’t want to call her deceptive exactly. She was quite open and receptive. But she was also strangely opaque and unrevealing. Free as she was up to a point, beyond that point you did not learn anything.

  “There was, of course, some special circumstance in her relationship with her father that made her have relationships with various powerful men,” Appelbaum continued. “But leaving it at that would be selling her short, and be one-dimensional. She had an independent, managerial, controlling streak. Her sibling position—she was the firstborn and the older of two sisters—made her by nature controlling, a person who took the initiative.

  “She was the kind of person who would say to me when I was discussing a manuscript, ‘Use my house as a drop,’ as though she was a gun moll. I detected a certain tensile strength there. So it would be a disservice to call her overall a dependent person. She wasn’t. She was no clinging vine. If a woman has, as women do, something missing in the sense of power, they can get it by affiliating themselves with powerful men. They are adopting for themselves the power they are close to. It’s a method of being strong and independent. You can live through men, like Jackie, and have a lot of iron.”

  She had always lived through men—her father, JFK, Bobby, Onassis. Now she was trying to break the habit of a lifetime, and define herself. She was not certain where she was going, or how she was going to get there, but she was determined not
to travel in the old grooves of the past.

  After Dallas, she had tried to recapture a life of power and glory, but her marriage to Onassis had turned into a disaster. Now she was beginning to wonder if the key to her happiness might lie somewhere else—in the simple pleasures of family, friendship, and work.

  “What has been sad for many women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families,” she said. “There they were, with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the window-pane? Leave their fine minds unexercised?

  “Of course women should work if they want to,” she went on. “You have to do something you enjoy. That is the definition of happiness: ‘complete use of one’s faculties along the lines leading to excellence in a life affording them scope.’ ”

  Since her days in the White House, Jackie had always had a great influence on the way women looked at themselves. Because she was such a private person, and allowed the public to know so little about her, she acted as a kind of tabula rasa on which women could project their fantasies.

  In the 1980s, not many women were sure that they wanted to emulate Gloria Steinem and other politicized feminists, who were often portrayed by the media as man-hating, childless fanatics. By contrast, Jackie seemed to have it all. Not only was she lovely, stylish, and clearly attractive to men; she was also smart, capable, and a very good mother. Women who wanted to have a measure of independence and a profession of their own, without sacrificing the benefits of womanhood, looked to Jackie’s example. They thought to themselves: If Jackie can do it, so can I.

  “Jackie was tradition and modernity, the old femininity and the new womanhood, seemingly sustained in a perfect suspension,” wrote the feminist author Susan J. Douglas. “Jackie had these traditionally ‘masculine’ qualities—she was smart and loved intellectual pursuits, she was knowledgeable about history and the arts, she wore pants, and she had big feet—yet she was still completely feminine, a princess, a queen.”