Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Sometimes editors are unable to move ahead the projects that interest them. This also fell to Jackie’s lot. She encouraged a piano duo who had become biographers to start working on a book on Vogue’s onetime photographer Baron de Meyer. Ultimately she could not get the Doubleday brass to approve it. She had to write to Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale and apologize because she couldn’t take it any further. Fascinating projects on the photographer Berenice Abbott; on the man who walked a tightwire between the World Trade Center towers, Philippe Petit; and on the architecture of American houses, from those of presidents to those of pioneers, by her good friend John Russell, were ones that she tried but failed to move forward. Jackie even had to tell Cathy Rindner Tempelsman, Maurice Tempelsman’s daughter-in-law, that her book had not met with the approval of the reader to whom Jackie had submitted it. Though Jackie was a powerful force at the company and could swing some deals with a clout other editors simply did not have, she could not advance a project that would have meant much to Tempelsman. Her rejection of it shows that she sometimes had to put the company’s interests before her own.

  Working Side by Side

  Bill Barry worked for many years as Doubleday’s deputy publisher, a powerful figure who kept track of the money and served as Steve Rubin’s right-hand man. Barry originally thought of becoming a priest. After deciding against the priesthood and leaving the seminary, he joined Doubleday’s religion department, hoping to become an editor. He soon began working on an MBA at night and then rose through the ranks, learning to manage the different divisions of the company. Now a publishing consultant in his fifties, he’s still a good-looking man, who, behind half-closed eyes, gives the impression of a Roman senator who has witnessed every variety of human power and excess. When Jackie knew him, he was significantly younger than she was and would have been one of the most handsome men in the company.

  Barry remembered that Jackie employed a variety of ways to get what she needed at Doubleday. She thought of men as “either puppy dogs or alpha males.” With some she could be “absolutely seductive”; with others she could be a “fierce advocate” on behalf of the authors and projects she wanted to publish. At times her manner was “almost schoolgirlish,” in deference to what she, at least, thought of as much greater and more creative talents than her own. But she often got her way. In the days after Jackie died, the PBS talk show host Charlie Rose chaired a panel discussion on his program remembering her. In addition to Bill Barry and George Plimpton, the panel included Jackie’s friend Brooke Astor, the one-time White House photographer Jacques Lowe, and the legal counsel of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Ashton Hawkins. At one point Plimpton recalled that Jackie had once asked him to go to a children’s party dressed as a pirate. Did he do it? “I did. I did everything she told me to do.” Ashton Hawkins added wryly, “We all did.” All the men in the group laughed heartily.

  At Doubleday, Barry remembered, Jackie sometimes agreed to do things she didn’t particularly want to do. He told her that she could win special favor for her books and motivate the sales force if she came for lunch before presenting her titles later that afternoon at a sales meeting on Long Island. Jackie agreed. “So she comes out early,” Barry explained. “I get a select group of the sales reps around the table. I escort her into the dining room of the Garden City Hotel, and she sits down at the table. As the lunch started off, one rep thought it was important to tell the whole table about his recent dental surgery. Having noshed on the bread plate, he takes out a newly installed dental bridge” to show the table.

  This quickly defused any collective nervousness. Barry remembered her reaction. “She was unabashed.” She went on to ask everyone what his territory was, what books he’d recently read. “She couldn’t have been more engaged, more cordial. It wasn’t a veneer. It was genuine. One asked if it wouldn’t be too much of an imposition for him to take a picture of her with the group, something which normally she would have been repelled by, but she agreed to it with a smile.”

  Barry concluded, “So she was very good at doing what she had to do and came across as a very strong advocate for her books. I don’t think these things were easy for her. I don’t think they came naturally. I know she realized she didn’t have to do them, but that was her commitment.” Her performance, he thought, was both “honorable and pragmatic.” If the guy taking out his bridge was doing something odd because of his social anxiety, she wanted to put him at ease and charm him so he’d sell her books to all the right bookstores. She didn’t particularly like to use her fame to promote her authors’ books, but if someone like Barry told her it would help sales, she was willing to go along.

  Barry remembered too, though, that she was especially pleased when he invited her into his office in the 1990s to talk about her salary. Her performance and her longevity at the company had been rewarded with successive increases as she moved from associate to senior editor. Now her salary went over $100,000 for the first time. “She was as proud of herself as she could be. This was something she had clearly attained on her own. It had no relation to her husbands, how much money she had, or the covers of magazines she would be on every week. This was Jackie Bouvier who had distinguished herself with an editor’s skill, by her own lights, with some mentoring, but also with close attention to how the business got done.”

  Barry wasn’t always in the driver’s seat in his relationship with her. Jackie went out of her way to introduce the younger man to some of her most powerful contacts, once delegating him to represent Doubleday at a Washington publishing party, hosted by Senator Edward Kennedy, in honor of Carl Elliott. Barry was aware that Jackie rarely visited Washington, and understood that as much as she wanted to be there to fete Elliott in person, “she also wanted all the attention to be on the former congressman and didn’t want to risk diminishing the celebration of him that might have happened had she attended herself.”

  If she knew instinctively how to win over the salesmen on Long Island, she also occasionally knew how to sell Barry on a project that he was skeptical about. She and her longtime collaborator, Shaye Areheart, wanted to do a children’s book by the leggy A-list supermodel of the 1980s Paulina Porizkova. Jackie had had success with Carly Simon’s children’s books, and Scott Moyers thought she was proud of initiating the whole genre of children’s literature by well-known personalities. Barry wasn’t convinced that the book was a good idea. “I was very resistant to giving her whatever amount of money she wanted. I understood the commercial viability of Carly Simon’s books and some of the others, but this wasn’t an obvious match.” So one day, unannounced, Jackie walked Porizkova into Barry’s office, saying, “ ‘Paulina was just visiting and I thought it would be good if you two met.’ I have no doubt that Jackie had coached Paulina in terms of what she should do. She sat down and stretched one willowy leg out and bent it over the other. I was being worked. I knew I was being worked. I let Jackie know that I knew that I was being worked. In the end I just decided to relent, because it wasn’t so much money.”

  Jackie and Barry also worked together on trying to convince Richard Gere to do a Doubleday book. They weren’t sure whether he would be willing to do an autobiography or a book on Eastern spirituality, but they both knew that deploying Jackie might do the trick. Gere and one of Jackie’s authors, Jonathan Cott, started talking about producing a series of television programs on alternative healing therapies. Their hope was that a book might result from the TV series. Jackie was worried that Cott’s tastes, like her own, ran to arcane and not particularly marketable ideas (English eccentrics, Egyptian myths, and Emily Dickinson poetry were all the subjects of books Cott did with Jackie). She reasoned that if Cott could coauthor a book with Richard Gere, it might give him some financial independence. So she was particularly close to the Gere negotiations, not only because a Gere book would help Doubleday, but because it would help Cott, about whom she felt especially protective. As with any Hollywood personality, the negotiations were long and carried on through lawyers and ot
her third parties. In the midst of this, one of the tabloids published a photo of Gere pinching the bottom of supermodel Cindy Crawford, whom he eventually married. Jackie did a little sketch of a devil with horns on the picture and sent it along with a note to Barry: “What do you think of our author now?” Jackie was not above taking an interest in the scandal sheets. Her playful flirtation with Barry was a way of both amusing herself in the office and enlisting his continued financial support of her book projects. The Gere project never got off the ground, but her friendly collaboration with Barry flourished.

  As they grew comfortable with each other, Barry could sometimes cautiously engage her on the subject of her own fame. “I was in her office with the door closed,” Barry remembered. “She had bummed a cigarette. She was an occasional social smoker. The window cleaners were coming down the outside. They were right there. They look in and they recognize Jackie. The way her desk was situated, she was peripherally aware of them, but I was looking at them head-on. I said, ‘He’s mouthing Jackie O.’ So she turns around, she gives that beaming smile, and she notices ‘Javier,’ the name stitched on the pocket of his uniform. ‘And he’s Javier,’ she replied, completely neutral. In other words, I am who I am. He is who he is. It wasn’t said with any condescension.” Most of the time Jackie didn’t like anyone to refer to the commotion her celebrity caused, but she would allow Barry to see that it had become something which she found completely unremarkable. By this time in her life, she neither loved the attention she attracted nor hated it. It was just there.

  Barry continued, “I somehow used that as the jumping-off point, and I said, ‘Have you thought of doing your own autobiography?’ She made a gesture indicating someone who was a real pain,” and here Barry imitated her famous whispery voice, “ ‘Oh Bill, I can remember when I was working with Michael Jackson.’ She would be up on Martha’s Vineyard and Jackson would be on the phone complaining to her about the burdens of celebrity.” On the phone she was sympathetic to Jackson, but she really didn’t want to rehearse in print her own reaction to the events that had made the world take notice of her. She told Barry, “ ‘I can remember just repetitively tracing the floral pattern’ of the upholstery where she was sitting, listening to Jackson, ‘looking out to the sea and thinking I would never squander my time writing my memoirs when there are beaches to be walked.’ ”

  Barry would not take no for an answer. “I challenged her a bit on that—we had the kind of relationship where I could go at her. I said to her in a friendly gibe, ‘And what about your obligation to history?’ She said something along the lines of—and with a seriousness she was absolutely entitled to—‘I think I’ve honored my obligation to history.’ Now, that could have referred to a whole bunch of things. It may have referred to the fact that she’d done these tapes about the assassination that had a seal on them,” which weren’t to be released in her lifetime, “or that she had discharged so many obligations with such generosity and aplomb that she simply wouldn’t be saddled with the self-revelation that an autobiography required.” Jackie had in fact already tried being a writer and rejected it as a path forward, so memoir-writing was out of the question. She wanted to be responsible for the written work of authors who she considered had more interesting things to say than she did. There is fragmentary evidence that she kept a visual diary of some of her travels, and perhaps she considered leaving this behind as one record of her life. She once showed Raquel Ramati a little sketchbook she kept of the places she had been and some of the scenes she had witnessed. She kept this occasional visual memoir, but she showed it to very few people, and it has never been published.

  Jackie and Barry once flew down to Washington together. She was interested in working out a publishing relationship between Doubleday and the National Gallery. They were late to the airport and the last to arrive on the plane. Their seats were in the back, so they had to walk all the way down the aisle of the plane, with a hundred fellow passengers craning their necks to look at them. “Look, Bill,” she whispered with her head down when they finally reached their seats and sat down, “everyone knows you.”

  Noticing her fame and joking about it were okay as long as she was doing the joking and she was with someone she trusted. It was generally not okay to refer to it at any other time. While Barry was flying down to Washington with Jackie, the flight attendant leaned over him to tell Jackie, “I’ve always admired your fashion sense.” Jackie gave her “a polite smile and recognition, but it was not anything she wanted to be noted for. Ever. Whereas her books she was passionate about. If someone was knowledgeable about one of her books, she would be spontaneously engaged. In the absence of the autobiography she had no inclination whatsoever to write, her books were as good an insight into her as exists outside of a very small group of her intimates.” Her list, then, was both Jackie’s achievement and her most revealing testimony about who she was. It is the tangible legacy of a woman who spent nineteen years transforming manuscripts into published works.

  If the story of her office life has her moving from a shy celebrity recruit to a senior editor with an established list, there are equally compelling stories told by the list itself. Her books tend to cluster around the roles she herself had played. She never spoke in public about what it was like to be married, or how she grew into a new woman after her marriages were over, but the books she decided to publish tell the story for her.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jackie regularly consulted one of her writers, Mike D’Orso, who lived in the South, by telephone. One of the times she called, D’Orso’s seven-year-old daughter, Jamie, picked up the phone. He could tell she was talking to an adult by what she was saying. “Fine.” Pause. “Second grade.” Pause. “Playing with my dolls.” Pause. Then she called out to her father across the room, “Daddy, it’s the dead president’s wife.” That was the paradox of Jackie’s fame: she lived for three decades after her first husband, married another man, edited dozens of books, and collaborated with scores of writers, but she remained famous for having been the wife of JFK. Children remembered her for something adults usually knew better than to mention to her.

  Daddy, it’s the dead president’s wife.

  A CHILD ANNOUNCING JACKIE ON THE PHONE

  Her devotion to silence about her two husbands is part of what feeds the curiosity about what those marriages must have been like. What was it like to be married to Jack Kennedy and to put up with his infidelity? How did she feel about having the nation’s sex symbol, Marilyn Monroe, as one of his admirers? What was it like to be married to Ari Onassis, legendary for his vulgarity as well as for carrying on a public affair with Maria Callas while still married to Jackie?

  Jackie’s biographers have speculated on these questions, going over and over what little information can be found in public documents or gleaned from the guarded remarks of Jackie’s friends about her marriages. All along, however, the most revealing information has been hiding in plain sight. In Jackie’s books she commented in the most public way possible about what she thought of the institution of marriage, about presidential mistresses, about what it was like to have a career in order to circumvent unhappiness in a marriage, about Marilyn Monroe’s sex appeal and Maria Callas’s eyes, and about how a woman might guard her privacy in the midst of a marriage the world regards as public business. Six of her books, spread out over sixteen years, show her choosing to back authors who wanted to deal precisely with these questions. Jackie was intimately involved in encouraging Barbara Chase-Riboud to publish her historical novel about Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with his slave, Sally Hemings (1979). She also had a role in helping Princess Grace to step away from her marriage-turned-stale to Prince Rainier by sponsoring the American publication of My Book of Flowers (1980), a first attempt by Grace to have a career of her own that was not in acting. Diana Vreeland’s Allure (1980) paid tribute to the primal eroticism of both Monroe and Callas. Jackie stood behind young novelist Elizabeth Crook in The Raven’s Bride (1991), a story of what it
was like for an extremely private woman who loved horses to be married to a prominent elected official more devoted to his career than to his marriage. Finally, Dorothy West’s novel The Wedding (1995) makes both philosophical and poetic remarks about marriage that Jackie endorsed by putting them on paper between hard covers. Jackie never came out and said more clearly what her marriages were like than in the way she chose to become involved in these book projects. All of them have a unity on the question of marriage, and a wisdom, achieved sometimes painfully, sometimes pleasurably, that ran parallel to, echoed, and emerged from her own experience.

  A President and His Mistress

  Barbara Chase-Riboud is an American sculptor and poet who lives in Paris and Rome. She grew up in Philadelphia, finished degrees at Temple and Yale before moving to Paris in the 1960s, where she married the French photojournalist Marc Riboud, and had her artwork shown in museums and galleries. When she first met Jackie, Chase-Riboud had also had a volume of poetry published at Random House, with Toni Morrison as her editor. The Ribouds had some friends—also friends of Jackie’s—who vacationed on a Greek island near Skorpios. Jackie regularly invited them all over to Skorpios, and Chase-Riboud remembered everyone’s reluctance to go. Jackie sometimes had to beg her friends to come visit her in Greece. She once telephoned when Nancy Tuckerman was already in Greece, stopping to see other friends before a planned visit some weeks later to Jackie, and saying, “Nancy, can you come now?” She was sometimes lonely and needed friends, and she could afford to send a helicopter to pick them up.

  Soon after they met, Chase-Riboud found herself on the beach with Jackie, tête-à-tête. In the distance speedboats circled the island with cameramen whose telephoto lenses were pointed in their direction. It was one of the things that discouraged Jackie’s friends from visiting her. Jackie had to work hard to put everyone at ease, calling Skorpios “the island of Dr. No,” a reference to the hero’s evil rival in the first James Bond film. But Chase-Riboud was charmed by the former first lady and attracted to her dry sense of humor. She told her she couldn’t bring herself to call her Jackie, and used the French Jacqueline. Jackie laughed, saying that “only you and my mother call me that.”