by Sam Kashner
The following year, Lee had hoped to finish her memoir, tentatively titled “Opening Chapters,” but instead she appeared on the February 2, 1975, cover of Warhol’s Interview magazine. In the accompanying interview, she confessed to Warhol that her “deep regret” was that she “wasn’t brought up to have a métier. I’m mainly interested in the arts, but because of my kind of education, my interests were never channeled in any particular field . . . I should have been in the decorative arts as I’m a very visual person.”
Warhol and his cohort Bob Colacello had a firsthand glimpse of Lee’s visual eye and knowledge of art history. They arrived one rainy day at Lee’s Fifth Avenue apartment to accompany her and Jackie to the Brooklyn Museum. The sisters were waiting in the lobby, dressed in identical trench coats with scarves on their heads, both looking like sane versions of Edie Beale.
“After the usual greetings,” Colacello described, “Mrs. Onassis’s first words were ‘So tell me, Andy, what was Liz Taylor like?’ I couldn’t believe it. Here was the only person in the world who was more famous than Elizabeth Taylor and she wanted to know what Elizabeth Taylor was like . . . And what’s more, it was asked in the voice of Marilyn Monroe! If Marilyn had gone to Foxcroft and Vassar, that is. The same girlishly sexy breathiness.”
At the museum, Colacello noticed that
Lee seemed to know everything there was to know about the exhibition. “Oh, look, Jackie,” she would say, “that bowl is just like the one we saw in the Cairo Museum.” She could list the Pharoahs and the dates they ruled. She seemed to have the mind of a curator, and the taste of an aesthete. Jackie looked at her the way a pupil looks at a teacher, intently, taking it all in. Lee talked, Jackie listened. Lee led, Jackie followed. And there was no sign of their reputed competitiveness.
Secure in her own territory—the visual arts—Lee did not have to compete with her sister.
* * *
LEE’S PASSIONATE LOVE affair with Peter Beard was tested by his lack of interest in exclusivity and marriage and the differences in the ways they liked to live. Peter purchased a small cabin on sixteen acres in Montauk to refurbish, with an old windmill as his main abode. In the meantime, Lee found staying at the cabin cramped and uncomfortable. When she moved to Southampton, she began to see less of Peter, but what really ended their affair was Peter’s involvement with a sultry model named Barbara Allen, who moved in with him. Lee showed up and made a huge fuss, insisting that Peter was hers. Although he found it rather amusing, their love affair was over, though Lee and Peter have remained good friends. Actually, of all of her lovers, Peter is the one who has remained most loyal to Lee in the ensuing years.
10
Working Girls
I have always lived through men. Now I realize I can’t do that anymore.
—JACKIE
There’s no necessity of doing anything when nothing is demanded of you . . . maybe fate will come to get me.
—LEE
After the death of Onassis in March of 1975, Jackie returned to the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port for a brief visit. She felt overwhelmed by memories of her life there with Jack: “This was the only house where we really lived, where we had our children, where every little pickle jar I had found in some little country lane on the Cape was placed, and nothing’s changed since we were in it, and all the memories came before my eyes,” she remembered.
That evening, Rose Kennedy invited her to take a walk on the beach, not wanting to leave her alone. “I can’t remember Jack’s voice exactly anymore,” she confided, “but I still can’t stand to look at pictures of him.” (Photographs of Jack remained in her children’s rooms but nowhere else in her Manhattan apartment.) When she was left alone, she dipped into the works of two of her favorite poets, C. P. Cavafy and George Seferis. Even before her Greek sojourn, she’d loved these poets, and now the melancholy tone of Seferis’s “The Last Day” spoke to her mood:
“This wind reminds me of spring,” said my friend
as she walked beside me gazing into the distance, “the spring
that came suddenly in the winter by the closed-in sea.
So unexpected. So many years have gone . . .”
When she returned to Manhattan in September, Tish Baldrige noticed how listless Jackie seemed. John Jr., 14, was still attending the Collegiate School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and Caroline, 17, was planning to study art at Sotheby’s in London. (Gloria Emerson noted that “it is Caroline who now writes the verses and sketches. Her mother does not write or paint, which is too bad, for genuine gifts were once there.”) They did not need her as much, and Jackie found herself at loose ends. She sought help from a psychiatrist and from an acupuncturist, Lillian Biko, who told Cosmopolitan that Jackie “had problems because she’s so secretive. Which is why she sees me.” Tish suggested that Jackie consider going to work.
“What—me work?” Jackie had joked, but she immediately warmed to the idea. Tish, no longer Jackie’s private secretary but still her friend, and now the head of a Manhattan public relations firm, later told the New York Times:
I really felt she needed something to get out in the world and meet people doing interesting things, use that energy and that good brain of hers. I suggested publishing. Viking was my publisher, and I said to her, “Look, you know Tommy Guinzburg—why don’t you talk to him?”
Jackie arranged a lunch at Le Perigord on East 52nd near Sutton Place with Tom Guinzburg, Viking’s publisher, whom she had met years earlier through George Plimpton (they had been young men in Paris together) and through her stepbrother Yusha, who had been a hall mate of Guinzburg’s at Yale. It was not lost on the publisher that Jackie, now forty-six, would be of inestimable value to any publishing house, given her high profile, her vast range of friends and acquaintances, and the cachet that her name would bring. “What author could not be lured to Viking by the promise of having Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis as his or her editor?” commented Christopher Andersen, one of Jackie’s many chroniclers. Guinzburg also felt that if Jackie ever decided to write a memoir, he would be there to catch the bouquet.
The publisher immediately offered her a part-time job four days a week as a consulting editor at a yearly salary of $10,000. She would acquire books but would not necessarily have the daily labor of editing them. Obviously not needing the money after her $26 million settlement from the Onassis estate, she accepted.
By the second week of September 1975, Jackie showed up at Viking’s office at 625 Madison Avenue to begin work, the first paying job she’d undertaken in over twenty-two years, since being the Inquiring Cameragirl for the Washington Times-Herald for twenty-five dollars a week. Despite the hordes of fans crowding the lobby of Viking’s offices trying to get a glimpse of her, Jackie quickly made it apparent to her coworkers that she did not expect—or want—any special treatment. She settled into her small office and was seen making pots of coffee for her colleagues and staff. She also did her own typing and filing and phone calling. “I expect to be learning the ropes at first,” she told reporters. “You sit in at editorial conferences, you discuss general things, maybe you’re assigned to a special project of your own. Really, I expect to be doing what my employer tells me to do . . .” She also realized that “like everybody else, I have to work my way up to an office with a window.” As much as she tried to fit into the editorial corps at Viking as a fledgling editor, there was still no escaping her off-the-charts fame and mystique. No sooner had she begun working than renowned Life photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt was sent by the magazine to photograph Jackie in her new job.
Among the first of several books she worked on at Viking was Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Sally Hemings: A Novel, a then controversial work about Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved mistress, and a novel she was especially drawn to by Nancy Zaroulis, titled Call the Darkness Light, about a nineteenth-century mill worker in Lowell, Massachusetts. “I realized that the story would illuminate a period of American history and lives of a whole group of women,”
she commented, lives far from the protected privilege that the Bouvier girls had been born into.
Jackie also took partial credit for Jay Mellon’s The Face of Lincoln, a collection of Lincoln daguerreotypes, though the editors of note, Barbara Burn and Elisabeth Sifton, had no recollection of her involvement. But as Jay Mellon was a friend of Peter Beard’s, it’s possible that she had a hand in acquiring the book for Viking. The book certainly reflected her keen interest in American history and in particular the American presidency.
Two of the books she edited for Viking reflected her long interest in tsarist Russia: In the Russian Style in 1976 and Boris Zvorykin’s The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales in 1978. The first came out of Jackie’s friendship with Diana Vreeland, who’d asked her to accompany the Metropolitan Museum of Art director Tom Hoving to Russia. Vreeland was curating a show at the Met’s Costume Institute and needed help in persuading the Hermitage Museum to lend the Met clothing once worn by Alexandra, the last tsarina of Russia. Jackie commissioned Audrey Kennett, a former editor of British Vogue who had traveled to the USSR during the Cold War era, to write the copy, while Jackie selected the photographs and provided the captions. The Costume Institute exhibition was extremely popular, and In the Russian Style was well received, except for a caviling review by Russian composer Nicolas Nabokov in the New York Review of Books in which he complained that the book was “the work of a dilettante.” Jackie was embarrassed by the review, but she continued her association with Vreeland, writing a catalogue for another of the fashion doyenne’s exhibitions, Vanity Fair, meant to be a refutation of the seventeenth-century writer John Bunyan’s attack on the human foible of vanity. (This struck close to home: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress was one of Jack Kennedy’s favorite books.) Jackie’s catalogue essay was in the form of an interview with Vreeland, titled “A Visit to the High Priestess of Vanity Fair.” In it she and Vreeland extol the superb craftsmanship of couture (“the sewing, the cutting, the intricate beadwork”), noting that cultivating fashion helps to keep these ancient skills alive.
Through her friendship with Andreas Brown, owner of the Gotham Book Mart, Jackie was introduced to the work of the Russian artist and illustrator Boris Zvorykin. As an editor at Viking, she was able to bring out a new edition of his illustrated The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales.
Three years later, Jackie would have another occasion to express her admiration of Russian artists. In December of 1981, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz was invited to be the guest of honor at a dinner held for prominent patrons of Poets & Writers, the nonprofit organization devoted to writers and the literary arts. It was an annual event meant to thank major donors for their support, but when Milosz bowed out because his wife was ill and in the hospital, the program director at the time, Eva Burch, suggested replacing him with the émigré Russian poet Joseph Brodsky.
As this was six years before Brodsky himself was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the organization’s executive director, Galen Williams, worried that he would not be well-known enough to the assembled guests. Eva suggested that Mikhail Baryshnikov—who was a close friend of Brodsky’s—accompany him as cohost of the evening. So it was arranged and held at the home of investment banker and arts patron Terry Kistler, who lived at 1040 Fifth Avenue—Jackie’s building. Guests included Susan Sontag, Michael and Alice Arlen, David Rose, Timothy Seldes, the Arthur Schlesingers, and Jackie Onassis.
Everyone arrived before the guest of honor, and everyone was dressed to the nines (except for Susan Sontag, who wasn’t, and Brodsky and Baryshnikov, who arrived together in corduroys and jeans). Jackie appeared resplendent in a black-sashed red tunic and black wide-legged silk pants, looking for all the world like a Russian Cossack.
As soon as Brodsky walked through the door, she stood up and said as loudly as her whispery voice would allow, “I can’t believe I’m meeting you at last! Is it going to be as it is in my dreams?”
Abashed, Brodsky turned red and mumbled, “I hope we have a chance to talk later,” before spinning off to the bar for a glass of Jameson Irish whiskey, his favorite libation.
When it came time to be seated for dinner, the name places apparently had been switched by one of the guests, so Jackie found herself seated across from Brodsky, instead of at his side, at a table so wide that it made conversation difficult. Things got more awkward when the guest who had seated herself next to the Russian poet told him he had the profile of Napoleon. Already worn out from having to make small talk with people he didn’t know, Brodsky suddenly jumped up and left the table. Baryshnikov and Sontag followed him out of the room, and out of the party.
After he left, Jackie stayed for a while longer, smoothing things over by telling Terry Kistler, “Russians are so emotional. You should see how Nureyev behaved.”
But she had relished the evening. In Brodsky, two realms Jackie admired merged completely: poetry and Russian culture. Ironically, a decade earlier the American poet Robert Lowell had become obsessed with Jackie during one of his manic phases, writing to her constantly. Perhaps if he had been Russian, she might have written him back.
(Lowell wasn’t the only writer obsessed with Jackie and, by extension, with Lee. In the early ’70s, Gore Vidal wrote a novel titled Two Sisters about two women who are clearly modeled on Jackie and Lee, a novel much discussed among literary and social circles but not a critical nor a commercial success. When the novelist and relative-by-marriage Louis Auchincloss read it, he commented that he “fervently hoped Gore had finally gotten them out of his system.” He had not.)
* * *
THOUGH SHE HAD always been a traditionalist in her views of women’s place in society, since starting her job at Viking, Jackie’s perspective had undergone a sea change. She now believed that “what has been said for many women of my generation is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families”—a lament that Lee had been making for decades. Sixteen years after Betty Friedan’s consciousness-raising masterpiece, The Feminine Mystique, published in 1963, Jackie recognized the dilemma of women “with the highest education, and what were they to do when the children were grown—watch the raindrops coming down the windowpane? Leave their fine minds unexercised? Of course women should work if they want to.”
Friedan had once said, “It is easier to live through someone else than to become complete yourself,” a challenge that Jackie was now rising to. Even Gloria Steinem noticed Jackie’s change in consciousness, and put her on the cover of Ms. magazine. Jackie had agreed to be interviewed by the magazine because, as Steinem recalled, “it treated her as a person, instead of talking about her husbands. She asked me to remove references to them from the interview. She said, ‘It has helped me to be taken seriously as an editor, for my own abilities.’”
So work, for Jackie, was an awakening. George Plimpton, who had befriended her a lifetime ago in Paris, witnessed that blossoming, realizing that at last Jackie had “come into her own.”
When she was with Ari, she put aside parts of herself to pursue his interests. I sense a change in her . . . very much more like the girl I first knew, who had a great sense of fun and enthusiasm. It must be an electrifying, extraordinary thing for her to be on her own—she was always somewhat diminished by the men around her . . .
Although as a young woman she’d aspired to be a journalist (she once said, “If I hadn’t married I might have had a life very much like Gloria Emerson’s”), by embarking on a career as an editor she became closer to the idea she expressed in her Prix de Paris essay: “a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth Century, watching everything from a chair hanging in space . . .”
Instead of becoming a writer, Jackie would now discover other writers and bring them into print. And she loved it. At one point she said to her friend Mabel Brandon, a fellow preservationist and graduate of Miss Porter’s, “Oh, Muffie, aren’t we lucky we work?” As William Kuhn noted in Reading Jackie:
Jackie’s discovery in these years was th
at reading by herself in a corner, sailing on a yacht, and buying couture clothes in Paris were all a great deal less sustaining than going into the office and drinking coffee out of a Styrofoam cup.
As part of her mandate to attract major writers and personalities to Viking, Jackie tried to convince the Duchess of Windsor, Wallis Simpson, to write her memoirs (she offered to fly to Paris to meet with the ailing duchess), and Princess Margaret’s ex-husband, the photographer Lord Snowdon, to write his. Neither agreed. She tried to cajole Frank Sinatra, who had always been interested in John Kennedy’s widow, but he, too, wasn’t forthcoming. After two years at Viking, Jackie jumped ship, and many attributed it to her failure to lure major figures to the publishing house. But there was another reason.
In 1977, Viking published a suspense novel by the former British Conservative MP Jeffrey Archer, titled Shall We Tell the President?, about a fictional attempt to assassinate Ted Kennedy. The novel had already been published in Britain, and given its subject matter, Guinzburg reportedly assured Jackie that she would not be associated with the book. But after it was roundly panned by reviewers, including a veiled reference to Jackie in New York Times book critic John Leonard’s review (“Anyone associated with the publication of this book should be ashamed of herself”), Jackie felt that Guinzburg had left her vulnerable. In the resulting furor, Jackie suddenly resigned, complaining that Guinzburg had told the New York Times that “she knew all about exactly what happens in this book, and I didn’t know about it at all!”
