Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Why had she married Onassis in the first place? She told the journalist Pete Hamill, whom she dated in New York a decade after the death of Bobby Kennedy and who later wrote about her in Newsday, “I wanted to go away … they were killing Kennedys and I didn’t want them to harm my children. I wanted to go off. I wanted to be somewhere safe.” Nancy Tuckerman always regarded Jackie’s marriage to Onassis as “a mistake.” She rejected the idea that Jackie wanted to get out of the country in 1968 for the safety of her children after the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Jackie had continued to live mainly in New York, because the children were still in school there and had spent comparatively little time in Greece. Five years after JFK’s death, she was still depressed and had not entirely recovered. She was tired of being the president’s widow. She had been boxed into a role she didn’t want to play for the rest of her life. Marrying Onassis was not only getting outside the box but destroying the box.

  Very early on, Jackie and Onassis decided to remain married but to go their separate ways. She knew precisely what Grace was going through with Rainier, and publishing Grace’s book was giving Grace a way out that Onassis had never allowed Jackie when he was alive. After Onassis died in 1975, she never spoke critically of him to her authors or colleagues. She would occasionally pepper her conversation with his name. One of John’s friends remembered her saying, when she wasn’t sure whether she’d found the right restaurant, “I think this is where Ari took me.”

  A Geisha and a Diva

  There was another enormous wink, an in-joke about Jackie’s marriages, that readers would discover only if they paid close attention to the small print of the acknowledgments of Jackie’s next book, with Diana Vreeland. The idea was to produce a big-scale picture book of ideas from fashion. Vreeland had spent a lifetime selecting such images for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Now she would reprise that role for Jackie, selecting not just pictures of women in wonderful dresses but also news photos, pictures of face-lift surgery, and newsreel images of royal ceremonies. The broad, hold-all concept was “allure,” which Vreeland defined by saying, “Allure holds you, doesn’t it? Whether it’s a gaze or a glance in the street or a face in the crowd or someone sitting opposite you at lunch … you are held.” Vreeland decided that as she would be approaching some of the most powerful photographers in the world, and their most famous sitters, for permission to reprint their work, she would need a letter of introduction. So she asked Jackie to write her one. There was something funny about this. Vreeland was herself a figure of world renown at this late stage in her career. She counted the likes of Andy Warhol, Jack Nicholson, and the Duchess of Windsor among her friends. It was rather like Mao Zedong asking for a letter of introduction from Zhou Enlai.

  Jackie’s letter, on Doubleday letterhead, begins with a kind of absurd contradiction, typical of Vreeland, who probably wrote the letter for Jackie to sign: Vreeland’s book on fashion photography “would not be limited to either fashion or photography.” It would include “even the work of the papparazzi [sic].” What must the recipients of such a letter have thought? Here was Jackie, legendary for her lawsuit against Ron Galella and other paparazzi in order to keep them at a distance from her, writing to introduce Vreeland, who, at least in the world of fashion photography and celebrity, needed no introduction, and defending Vreeland’s choice of work by the paparazzi. Maybe Jackie’s misspelling of “paparazzi” was her single slip to show that Vreeland was taking her for a bumpy ride and she was holding on tight. It seems more likely that they were both fairly good-humored about Vreeland’s outline for her project. Jackie sincerely admired the magnificence, the drama, and the magnetism of Vreeland’s photograph selections. Further, Jackie endorsed Vreeland’s selections of pictures of her husbands’ best-known mistresses. Marilyn Monroe had had a brief affair with JFK, and by 1980, when Vreeland’s Allure was published at Jackie’s behest by Doubleday, this was well known. Indeed, Monroe had made it almost embarrassingly public by singing him a sexy “Happy Birthday” when he was in her audience at Madison Square Garden. Monroe had committed suicide during the very week that Vreeland was taking over the editorial position at Vogue. She began work just as the outgoing editor was putting together the finishing touches on an issue which, by chance, included an article with a tribute to Monroe and several photographs. Vreeland’s colleague wanted one of the photos taken out. It was too “triste” in light of what Monroe had just done. Vreeland replied, “You can’t leave that out! You cannot! It’s got all the poignancy and the poetry and the pathos of the woman in it!” That was in 1962. In the late 1970s, Vreeland explained what she loved about this photo to Christopher Hemphill, a protégé of Andy Warhol’s and Fred Hughes’s who was helping her assemble Allure. “Marilyn Monroe! She was a geisha. She was born to give pleasure, spent her whole life giving it—and knew no other way.” Some people said the same of Jackie. The art historian and Picasso biographer John Richardson told Sarah Bradford that Jackie had a geisha quality: “She did have this tremendous charm, that wonderful soft voice—I think pleasing was what she was about.” What did Jackie say to Vreeland about the Monroe photograph? Probably nothing, but the fact that she silently allowed Vreeland to include it shows Jackie content to acknowledge Monroe’s ur-sexiness, a quality that Jackie did not think she shared with the screen icon.

  It seems as if Jackie was able to separate her editorial self from the woman whose husband had had a public fling with Monroe. She was thrilled, about the same time she was working with Vreeland on Allure, when a proposal came into Doubleday that promised pictures from Bert Stern’s last photographic session with the actress. “Marilyn Monroe!!!” Jackie wrote in a memo to her colleague Ray Roberts. “Are you excited?” She proceeded to the businesslike details of how much they might bid (somewhere between $50,000 and $100,000) and what writer they might find to write the text to accompany the pictures. Vreeland’s treatment of Monroe was probably like this for Jackie too: a publishing opportunity rather than a moment to reflect on a personal injury. In any case, if injury there had been, she was able to rise above it.

  Not content with having touched on Jackie’s personal history only once, Vreeland included in Allure a whole series of photos of Maria Callas. She was an opera diva who was also celebrated as the mistress of Onassis. Callas had gone out with Onassis before his marriage to Jackie, but they started to be photographed together again shortly after Jackie married Onassis in 1968. Nor did Callas withhold bitchy remarks about Jackie, speculating publicly to reporters that Jackie was not making Onassis happy, hence his willingness to be photographed once again with her. The sense of Callas as a much more powerful, dangerous, and temperamental rival than Marilyn Monroe is captured in the pictures Vreeland selected. One of them shows Callas as Medea, very angry indeed. Vreeland said of one of the Callas photos, “If eyes were bullets, everyone in sight would be dead.” Another showed a process server, having delivered a legal document to Callas in her dressing room, informing her of an action against her by one of the companies with whom she was under contract and being given in return a piece of the diva’s mind.

  (photo credit 4.1)

  Vreeland also captured another, different side of Callas, which ran parallel to Jackie’s own experience. It was the fact that Callas could be a magical, nearly mythic character onstage, with a voice of inhuman proportions, and the next moment be an ordinary woman with money problems, a woman who had to eat and drink, who gained weight, who lost her voice as she grew older and sounded more like a gravel truck than a goddess. Vreeland recounted the story in Allure of how she had once invited Callas to her apartment in New York for Thanksgiving. Vreeland was a collector of celebrated artists. She awaited the diva’s arrival. Callas made her entrance. Before sitting down to the table, she enchanted the guests. She was a marvel of emotion, drama, and theatricality. But seated before a plate of turkey, “She was as common as mud.” This vibration between Callas’s two selves, queen and ordinary woman, an icon who was only flesh and blood, Cinder
ella turned back into a serving girl—this was a vibration that everyone around Jackie felt, too. It was an effect over which Jackie had only limited control. More than one of her authors and colleagues remembered that she sometimes liked to play with it. Her routine was to stand by the elevator door at Doubleday, where she knew she’d be seen, wishing her guest a whispery goodbye while everyone inside the elevator after the doors had closed craned their necks to see whom the American goddess could possibly have been addressing. Publishing Vreeland’s photos of Maria Callas and Marilyn Monroe was far from Jackie’s revenge on two husbands who had cheated on her. By the time she published Vreeland’s book in 1980, she was paying tribute to their allure.

  Texas Romance

  Jackie admired Bill Moyers, and his opinion mattered to her more than that of many others. Moyers brought a manuscript to her that he was sure would interest her. It was a novel about a young woman who had been married to an ambitious man already in high elective office. The young heroine of the story was shy, loved horses, and fiercely protected her privacy. The marriage went wrong, possibly because of her husband’s adultery, but almost certainly because he put his love of power before love of his wife. The two split up after only eleven weeks, and the man left the governorship of Tennessee in the scandal. He went to live among the Cherokee. His wife returned to live with her father. Afterward, hounded by intense public curiosity over what went wrong with her marriage, the woman ordered that all images of her be destroyed, that all her papers be burned, and that she be buried in an unmarked grave.

  Moyers brought the novel to Jackie precisely because of its similarity to her own story. It was a novel about the marriage of Sam Houston, one-time congressman and governor of Tennessee, who later fought Mexico in the successful war to claim Texas and became the Republic of Texas’s first president, before it joined the United States. His marriage to Eliza Allen, a woman from a good family, came apart after only a few weeks, with neither one making any comments about why they split. Eliza wished to be buried in an unmarked grave to forestall public curiosity about the details of her private life. There are many parallels to Jackie’s life. For example, she was significantly younger than JFK, who was already a senator when they married. She quickly found that he spent more time on the road campaigning for higher office than he did at home in Georgetown with her. Of course, Jackie’s first marriage ended under different circumstances, but her determination to protect her privacy matched Eliza Allen’s. Like Allen, Jackie even instructed her children in her will to do all they could to prevent the publication of any of her letters, and she burned a few herself.

  Bill Moyers’s wife, Judith, recalled, “I absolutely do see the parallel between Jackie’s life and Eliza Allen’s. We saw that parallel. We thought that was why Jackie might be interested in the book.” Another feature of the novel that interested Jackie was that Sam Houston had figured in a chapter of JFK’s book, Profiles in Courage. That book, which Jackie had suggested he write when he was laid up, recovering from one of his back operations, examined politicians who had sacrificed their careers for important matters of principle. Houston, long after his marriage to Eliza Allen broke up, sacrificed his political career in Texas by refusing to swear loyalty to the Confederacy when Texas seceded from the Union.

  The novel’s author was a young woman, Elizabeth Crook, the daughter of a Johnson administration official who had served as the American ambassador to Australia, among other positions. She had known Moyers since she was a child and had worked for him briefly. This was her first novel, and she had suffered its rejection by many editors before Moyers recommended it to Jackie, who decided quickly to buy it. When Jackie telephoned Crook, she could barely believe her ears. Like the writer she was, she became obsessed with Jackie’s words over the phone, saying incredulously to herself over and over, “Jackie wants to acquire it.” It was two miracles at once: first, to have Jackie as her fairy godmother, and second, that her much-rejected novel would now actually be published.

  Jackie’s sponsorship of Crook was a lot like her support of Chase-Riboud in telling the Sally Hemings story. Both were young writers who were out to rescue wronged women whose names had been nearly erased from the historical record. Both chose fiction rather than biography or history while working much of their historical research into the characters’ stories. The Houston Chronicle, in its review of The Raven’s Bride: A Novel of Eliza Allen and Sam Houston, Crook’s novel, which took its title from Sam Houston’s nickname, “The Raven,” among the Cherokee, quoted Crook as saying that she wanted “to write about a woman overlooked or misrepresented by history.” Although the manuscript had already been edited before it arrived on Jackie’s desk, she did try to tinker with its subtitle. Jackie suggested the subtitle “A Novel of Sam Houston’s First Wife,” preferring it to “Sam and Eliza Houston,” which Crook had proposed, “because,” as Jackie pointed out to Crook, “that sounds like an old married couple nodding into the sunset.” That didn’t adequately describe Allen’s marriage to Houston, and it’s interesting that Jackie should have taken an interest, because it didn’t describe either of her marriages either. The novel was fascinating precisely because it described a tempestuous and ill-suited match that was the opposite of “an old married couple nodding into the sunset.” In the end, they compromised, and Jackie allowed Crook’s subtitle to go forward, the only revision being that Eliza Allen came first: “A Novel of Eliza Allen and Sam Houston.”

  Jackie had a special affinity for younger women writers and did much to advance their work. She was especially excited about Crook’s novel and did more to promote it personally than she ever agreed to do for Michael Jackson. Steve Rubin remembered that Jackie “was insane for Elizabeth Crook.” Jackie went out of her way to attend the launch party that Bill and Judith Moyers threw for Crook in their New York apartment. She allowed photographers to circulate, even though at some other book parties she had the guests informed in advance that cameras were forbidden. She also persuaded her daughter Caroline and her husband Ed Schlossberg to come, as well as her Martha’s Vineyard neighbor Walter Cronkite. White wine was served in the library, where Bill Moyers’s Emmy was on display, and sushi was passed among the guests, who also included the actor Tony Randall and the gossip columnist Liz Smith. A picture of Jackie looking as radiantly proud of Crook as if she were her daughter and standing with both Moyers and Rubin was taken at the occasion. The fact that Jackie is also pulling at her cuticles, a frequent habit, showed that the camera’s presence was costing her some effort.

  Jackie wrote Judith Moyers a thank-you note that same night and had it hand-delivered to the Moyerses’ apartment the next morning at the same moment they picked up their morning paper. It includes a little of her trademark flippancy and her genius for a funny non sequitur. Jackie wrote that the party had made everyone happy and left them feeling better about their colleagues and themselves. “People go to California and roll around on the grass for days to get that feeling (I hear!)—but it’s ersatz.” Going to California as a false path to joy is an indelible Jackie image. If she had to go to a party at all, a book party in Manhattan was more her idea of fun than a cast party in Beverly Hills.

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  If Jackie was drawn to Crook’s first novel because of parallels to her own life, it’s interesting that in that same era she was also sitting down with young women of Crook’s age and advising them—playfully, but advising them nevertheless—not to marry, and not to mix their money with their husbands’ money if they did. Karen Karbo, an essayist, novelist, and author of Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (2000), sat on a panel of judges to award a literary prize that was to be given in a ceremony at the Kennedy Library. Jackie was in attendance and sat next to Karbo onstage. Karbo had two memories of that evening. They had to sit there “listening to an HOUR-long keynote speech by George Plimpton about his love of fireworks.” It was far too long. Jackie “crossed her legs when we first sat and didn’t move a muscle from that moment on. I could s
ee why—every so often a photographer would swoop in front of us and snap her picture. She was as still as a lizard on a rock. She wore sensible beige spectator pumps and a beige pants suit.”

  Most of all Karbo remembers the part of the evening before the speeches. They were walking from the preliminary cocktail party with one of the library staffers, another young woman, who had been assigned to show her and Jackie where to sit on the stage. Karbo had just had a baby; the other young woman had just been married. They were chatting about this when Jackie interrupted them to say how much she admired modern young women, how many choices they had, all the things they were free to do in their lives. Then she made her show-stopping remark: “But you know what I always say! Never marry, never mix your money!” Karbo thought she was teasing, saying the sort of thing you might say to charm a stranger at a party, but she also remembered that Jackie brought this up on her own. The other two women were too in awe of her to initiate anything. Karbo, who later made the subject of being married to a husband who didn’t contribute his share to their marriage into an essay in the New York Times, ended up thinking about what Jackie had said a great deal, and ultimately agreeing with her. Both The Raven’s Bride and her laughing conversation with Karen Karbo show Jackie to be content with Americans giving greater freedom and independence to women than she had ever known with Kennedy or Onassis.