by William Kuhn
Simon & Schuster was anxious not to lose a memoir by Carly Simon when Gollob moved to one of its rival publishing houses, so he agreed that he wouldn’t take the project with him. However, he found a way around this once he was installed at Doubleday. His new colleague Jacqueline Onassis knew Carly Simon from Martha’s Vineyard. If Jackie were to telephone Carly and to begin a new conversation with her about writing a memoir, it wouldn’t be Gollob’s project anymore.
Carly Simon’s recollections are a little different, and her first memory of her books at Doubleday begins with a telephone call from Jackie. She thought they had met only once before, at a restaurant called the Ocean Club, then “the” place on the island, when the maître d’ had taken her over to a table where Jackie and John were sitting to be introduced. Or possibly they’d met at the Styrons’ house. Martha’s Vineyard had a small literary community that included people such as the writer William Styron, the playwright Lillian Hellman, and the columnist Art Buchwald. Jackie loved being a part of this circle as much as she loved being at the beach, and it would not have been unusual for her to come across Carly Simon, who lived on the island most of the year, during one of her summers there. However, Carly Simon remembered not knowing Jackie well and thus being surprised when Jackie telephoned around 1988 to ask “in her unselfconsciously but also extravagantly seductive way if I would do my autobiography.” Carly Simon was not the only one of Jackie’s authors to recall that she had a seductive, even flirtatious manner on the phone, but she was the only woman to say so.
Carly Simon laughed at the memory. “What could I say?” What do you say when Jacqueline Onassis calls you up and asks you to write about yourself? “I told her I’d love to consider it. We discussed how I might do it.” Jackie suggested that she devote individual chapters to significant characters in her life. For example, there might be chapters on Mike Nichols, her sisters, her first husband, and her children. “She thought it could be individual chapters about me and that person. A lot of my history would then come out of my description of that relationship. So I began writing.”
She started writing about building a house on Martha’s Vineyard with her first husband, James Taylor. She wrote something like seventy or eighty pages before she came to an impasse. She realized that much of her story revolved around her father and mother. Her mother was still alive, and she didn’t want to hurt her. Nor did she want to write around the topic: “I wanted it to be with teeth. If I was writing autobiography, I didn’t want to make it novelistic. In a song you can be untrue.” Her twelfth album, Hello Big Man, released in 1983, made several references to her parents. When her father first met her mother, he said, “Hello, little woman,” and she said, “Hello, big man.” The album included a song about her parents. “In the last verse, what happens is the reverse of what really happened. It was a fairy tale about how a child wishes to see her parents love each other forever. But in the autobiography I was trying to write, if I had the memory, I didn’t want to beat around the bush. I realized I couldn’t do the story without deeply hurting my mother.”
Carly Simon’s husband at the time, Jim Hart, was aware of her dilemma. He suggested submitting to Jackie instead one of the children’s stories Carly had written. This was the origin of Jackie and Carly Simon’s first children’s book together, Amy the Dancing Bear, a bedtime story Carly had dreamed up to tell Sally and Ben, her children with James Taylor. She loved staying at home in New York to put them to bed. “It got me out of the social scene, or attending some event connected with the music business. We’d be all three sitting together on a king-sized bed, one on either side of me holding an arm, hoping the other one would let go of the other arm so they could have me all to themselves. There’s never been a time since when there was so much competition over me! I loved it. I would turn out the lights and imagine a story to tell them.” When Carly Simon showed Jackie the story, she was delighted. Margot Datz, an artist friend of Carly Simon who had painted murals in people’s houses all over the Vineyard, did the pictures for the book. The book tells the story of a young bear who resists her mother’s call for her to go to bed and dances all night as her mother falls asleep.
When the book was released, it was a considerable success. The executives of Doubleday’s parent company, Bertelsmann, flew over from Germany to congratulate both author and editor at a party. It was the first time anyone had seen a children’s book by someone famous in a field outside of writing, a melding of two categories that in 1989 seemed strange. “Wow, what’s this, mann?” Carly Simon remembered, mocking a hippie German accent, but in fact Jackie had stumbled onto a new genre that is still profitable in publishing today. Most noncelebrity children’s book writers aren’t thrilled about the development, but Paul Simon, Steve Martin, and Katie Couric have all followed Carly Simon into print with their own books for children.
The success of Amy the Dancing Bear in 1989 led to three more children’s books: The Boy of the Bells (1990), The Fisherman’s Song (1991), and The Nighttime Chauffeur (1993). Although Carly Simon never wrote the memoir that had originally been imagined, elements of her autobiography are intertwined with the stories of the books: not only her childhood stammer, which appears in characters who are “mute” and rediscover their voices, but also her love of her children and her love of her mother. She dedicated Amy the Dancing Bear to her mother, Andrea, and her daughter, Sally.
In Jackie, Carly Simon had discovered an older woman whom she wanted to please as deeply as she had longed in childhood to win her mother’s approval. They lunched and had tea together in Carly Simon’s circle garden on the Vineyard. They once went together to see a matinee in Vineyard Haven with a lunch packed by Jackie’s housekeeper, Marta Sgubin. A little boy, prompted by his mother, who recognized them in the street, ran up to Carly Simon and asked for her autograph. Then his mother noticed Jackie standing there as well and told the boy it was the president’s wife. The boy ran back and said to Jackie, “Oh, Mrs. Washington, may I have your autograph too?”
As in any close relationship between mother and daughter, there were teases that pinched and small senses of betrayal, too. Jackie and Carly Simon went to hear the Spanish tenor Plácido Domingo, and backstage afterward, the star flirted with Carly. The next morning a messenger arrived with a signed Plácido Domingo photo that read, “My darling Carly, I will adore you forever.” She called Jackie, saying, “Can you imagine? He sent this to me! I think he’s in love with me.” Jackie burst out laughing and said, “I signed and sent that picture to you.”
Carly Simon was aware of the differences between the two women’s interior decorating styles. She had consciously tried to create a rough, kid-friendly house, almost the opposite of Jackie’s more austere style, with its Audubon prints and Proustian chintzes. Once Jackie gave her a boxed set of magnificent reproductions of artworks at Russian palaces, such as Petershof and Tsarskoe Selo. She sent it with an impish note: “If you’re ever planning on doing some interior decorating in the next little while, this could give you some ideas.” Carly Simon recalled in self-defense, “She loved my little slum here … But,” she added later, perhaps slightly doubting herself, “I don’t know how sincere she was, because I read somewhere that she’d made fun of my house.”
Most significantly of all, Carly Simon recalled Jackie giving her a small dinner at 1040 Fifth Avenue before the launch party for their last book together, The Nighttime Chauffeur. The party was to come after dinner across the park in Tavern on the Green. She was to arrive in a white horse-drawn carriage, to imitate the events of the book. At the last minute, Jackie told her she wasn’t coming to the party after dinner. “You go alone. You’ll be fine. It’s about you, it’s not about me.” Carly Simon recalled feeling like a child abandoned in the grocery store. “Jackie!” she protested. Jackie was devoted to Carly, and Rolling Stone’s one-time publisher Joe Armstrong, who was Carly’s intimate friend, surmised that in Carly Simon Jackie saw the person she “couldn’t be anymore.” But Carly couldn’t bel
ieve that Jackie would not come to support her at the party. More than a decade later, it still bothered her: “How hurt I was … it was that kindergarten sense of betrayal.”
Jackie often avoided parties where she thought she would be the center of attention and take the spotlight off her author. She was not above canceling at the last minute, as she did with at least one of her other authors whom she also counted as a friend. Moreover, the launch of Carly Simon’s last book came late in 1993, when Jackie was suffering from unidentifiable symptoms that heralded the beginning of her final illness—something that Carly Simon couldn’t have known, as Jackie didn’t yet realize it herself. The next year, when Jackie’s cancer was diagnosed, she went to a luncheon at Carly Simon’s apartment in the city. At the end Carly Simon impulsively stuffed into Jackie’s pocketbook the lyrics to a song she’d written, “Touched by the Sun,” and intended to dedicate to her. The song talks of wanting to learn from great people who avoid safety and choose a life of danger, like Icarus in Greek mythology, who flew too near the sun. She based the song on a poem by Stephen Spender that she’d loved since childhood and that she’d heard both JFK and Jackie had admired, too. The guitar part of the song was complicated, and she didn’t want to play it for Jackie in front of everyone at the lunch, but she made sure that Jackie saw the lyrics. That evening, Jackie telephoned, touched by what Carly had done. She didn’t need to be told that the song was about her.
Wearing Her Pearls into the Ocean
Jackie’s experience with Carly Simon led directly to her publication of children’s books by two other young women, one a musician and the other an artist. They came to her via Jann Wenner, and as with anything having to do with Wenner, there was an element of youthful romance, combined with the unexpected, that helped Jackie renew and prolong her own youth. Wenner was the editor of Rolling Stone, and his friendship with Jackie worked precisely because he was between her and her children in age. She wanted someone who could give them some contact with an older person’s world but who was not so old that they’d immediately reject him as uncool. For his part, Wenner liked celebrities, and was surprised to find that Jackie didn’t mind flirting with him as well.
Claudia Porges Holland, now Claudia Beyer, first met Jackie in the late 1970s. She had been working at Rolling Stone for a couple of years on and off. “I used to work for Joe Armstrong before the magazine moved to New York. I was nineteen or something. I then worked for Annie Leibovitz when the magazine was moving from San Francisco to the East Coast. I was helping get her situated and finding her an apartment. Shortly after that I was an assistant to Jann Wenner’s assistant, Iris Brown. Those were wild days!” The magazine was known in the 1970s for promoting the “gonzo,” or participatory, first-person journalism of Hunter S. Thompson, who joined the Hells Angels motorcycle gang in order to write about them. Its combination of political commentary with rock-and-roll music reporting was in tune with the freewheeling zeitgeist of the 1970s, when the magazine’s encouragement of marijuana use and mockery of the establishment made it a must-read for many young people.
Beyer remembers that generation’s feeling of being free to do what you wanted. “I went every year at Christmas with my family to St. Martin. One year I decided just to stay on the island. I abandoned my job to go down and live there. I was living in a little shed. I had a little hammock. I used to hitchhike around because I didn’t drive. I used to collect my mail at a boutique. One day there was a handwritten letter from Jann Wenner. ‘Hi, how are you? I’ve got a little favor to ask of you. I told Jackie Onassis you were down there and said you might show her around when she comes down in a few weeks.’ ” Could she go to La Samanna, the island’s premier resort, and meet Jackie? “I was barefoot and dirty,” she said, exaggerating how unused she was to receiving celebrities on the island. “I went to the front desk in my little sarong. ‘Could you ring Mrs. Onassis?’ They weren’t going to do it. I showed them Jann’s letter, too. ‘Okay, okay,’ the woman behind the front desk said. I could watch her face fall as she talked to Jackie on the phone. The woman hung up and said, ‘She’ll meet you at the bar in ten minutes.’ My friend Tommy and I met her at the bar. I showed her around. I chartered some boats. She wanted to see my little hut. It was so primitive: a little concrete bunker. She thought it was really funny. I had some pearls that I’d inherited. I used to wear them into the ocean. I showed her a little tiny book of miniature drawings I’d done. ‘You should do a book of your life here someday,’ Jackie said. ‘You remind me of Wide Sargasso Sea.’ ”
Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel, Wide Sargasso Sea, is about the life of an heiress living in the Caribbean, conceived as a “prequel” to a more famous Victorian novel. It’s the story of Mr. Rochester and his first wife, before the beginning of Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel, Jane Eyre, in which Jane meets and falls in love with Rochester. It is sometimes regarded as an important feminist and postcolonial work by critics today, because Rhys gave a sympathetic account of the heroine’s descent into madness after her unhappy marriage to Mr. Rochester in England, and also gave West Indians a voice they had seldom had in English literature before. Jackie was entranced, because suddenly, there in St. Martin, Claudia unintentionally brought to life the imaginary world of one of her favorite books. It was almost as if Claudia were playing out an alternative version of Jackie’s own youth. Jackie had been the correct young woman in pearls when she married JFK. Here was an uninhibited young woman who romped into the surf wearing her pearls, kept a journal for her artwork, and thought of showing her art to a wider world: all things Jackie would have liked to have done herself.
Claudia ended up leaving St. Martin. She was not often in touch with Jackie, but she did send her a birth announcement for her first son. It was probably ten years later. Meanwhile, via Rolling Stone, Claudia had met Jody Linscott, a rock-and-roll musician who toured as a percussionist with the Who and, in addition to working with Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey, played with many of the best-known rock performers of the later twentieth century. “Jody and I stayed friendly over the years,” Claudia said. “We were in New York together in the late 1980s. We started to do this little book just to entertain our kids on the train to Boston. It began with a little alliteration. Jody turned the alliteration into a continuous story. We thought it was a good story, and our kids liked it. I did a few collages just to see what would happen. We didn’t have a plan. Then I read somewhere, maybe in People magazine, that Carly Simon was doing children’s books with Jackie at Doubleday. I didn’t want to just call her out of the blue. I thought I’d just write a little note. ‘Hi, it’s been so long. I’ve got a little book project and I’d love to show it to you just to see what you think about it.’ Three days later there was a message on my machine. One of her assistants called and asked if I could come in to meet Mrs. Onassis. There I go with my little collages and the whole of Jody’s text.” “This is charming,” Jackie said, looking at the material Claudia had brought in to show her. “She turned to Shaye Areheart and said ‘Let’s do it.’ ”
The success of her book with Carly Simon gave Jackie the confidence to make such quick decisions. No one was more shocked than Claudia. “I thought it was just going to be a preliminary thing. I hadn’t seen her in years when I showed her the book idea.” After Jackie agreed to do it, Claudia went straight downstairs, out onto Fifth Avenue, and spent thirteen dollars in quarters at a pay phone to call Jody Linscott in London. She wanted to share the incredible news right away.
Jackie now became the impresario of Claudia and Jody’s traveling road show. The idea behind their books was the formation of a traveling band, the Worthy Wonders, who went from place to place, learning about the different cultures they visited on their tour. It was multiculturalism for children avant la lettre. The two young women often consulted with Doubleday’s designer Peter Kruzan, and would go into Jackie’s office wearing elaborate costumes. Claudia recalled, “My illustrations are kind of crooked and a little goofy. Peter Kruzan was shocked that I
worked with fingernail scissors and not with some sort of X-Acto knife. Jackie would say, ‘You’re like a little lace-maker.’ She was wonderful to work with. Everything was easy. Sometimes we’d show up with all three of our kids. I remember changing diapers in the bathroom at Doubleday. We used to dress in this very bright hippy-dippy way. It rubbed off from Jody’s rock-and-roll sensibility. Jackie loved the way we dressed and took our picture in the office.” Jackie’s “little lace-maker” comparison, which she had picked up from Diana Vreeland, and the photos of the young women’s outfits were both signs that she was enjoying herself with Claudia and Jody.
The launch for the first book was at the Sindin Galleries, then at Seventy-ninth and Madison. “It was our party,” Claudia said, “not Doubleday’s, but they did end up buying us a case of champagne. We had all the originals framed and sold many of them through the gallery. Jackie bought one. She came to the opening.” The young women were disappointed that Doubleday didn’t do more to promote the book. “Why no book signings?” they asked. The promotions department replied, “Who would come?” Doubleday, having allowed Jackie wide latitude to produce an expensive children’s book that could not be expected to bring in the sales of something like Carly Simon’s books, was unwilling to spend anything further on the project.
Nevertheless, Jackie was enthusiastic about doing another book. Once Upon A to Z: An Alphabet Odyssey came out in 1991. The second book, The Worthy Wonders Lost at Sea: A Whimsical Word Search Adventure, was slated for 1993. For this book, Jody Linscott had written, produced, and performed some music. It was the first time she ever sang on a recording, and she did it by borrowing a friend’s studio. Jody and Claudia had the idea of producing a CD to be packaged and sold with the book. If Jackie could not move Doubleday to spend more money on promotion, she could at least make some calls and use her name to investigate the feasibility of the CD idea. As Peter Kruzan remarked, “Who’s going to refuse a phone call from Jacqueline Onassis?” Claudia knew that Jackie was doing a lot for them and was a little embarrassed to complain about Doubleday’s failure to promote the book. Jackie’s telephone calls to record producers were worth a good deal more than whatever Doubleday might have spent on book signings.
