by William Kuhn
Jackie proposed Emily Hahn, a well-known writer for The New Yorker, who had also traveled in China. Hahn was a bizarre character who, according to her granddaughter, smoked cigars, held “wild role-playing parties in her apartment,” taught her grandchildren Swahili obscenities, and whooped “passionately at the top of her lungs” when she passed the gibbon cage at the zoo. This was Jackie’s mistake: to pair a Hahn with a Cabot. Muffie remembered Emily Hahn as “a very tough, very takeover” sort of woman. “We didn’t get on.” Ultimately, Muffie told Jackie she didn’t want to do the book. They parted as friends. Muffie concluded that Jackie “didn’t have enough confidence in me as a writer.” She then added, with charming self-deprecation, “She was right. I was very green.” Her book about her mother did eventually appear, in 2003. The fact that Muffie persisted with her project and managed to find another publisher for it suggests that at this stage in her career, Jackie was green, too.
Ms. Jacqueline Onassis Publishes
a Novel on Working Women
In the late 1970s Jackie came to know a power couple in publishing, William and Roslyn Targ. Bill Targ was a distinguished editor who had recently retired from Putnam, where his most famous coup was signing Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, in 1968. Putnam paid Puzo a $5,000 advance and sold the paperback rights alone for more than $400,000. Roslyn Targ was a literary agent. In retirement Bill Targ set up his own company to produce handmade books on heavy paper in limited editions. The books were unique works by highly regarded authors such as Tennessee Williams, Norman Mailer, and Saul Bellow—precisely the sort of publishing that most attracted Jackie. When Targ produced a memoir of his career, Indecent Pleasures, in 1975, Jackie wrote to him out of the blue to say she loved it, and this was the start of their friendship.
Jackie did not often take lunches with literary agents, one of the main avenues by which editors find new books for their lists. Scott Moyers remembered that she would see a few agents whom she knew, but if she started going out with others, every agent in New York would want to take her out. Jackie preferred to take on new projects from people she already knew and trusted. She made an exception for Roslyn Targ, who told Jackie of a manuscript by a Massachusetts novelist whose first work Bill Targ had published at Putnam in 1977. The author was Nancy Zaroulis, and her new novel was about a woman who worked in a textile mill in Lowell, Massachusetts, in the 1830s. The novel explores the fierce independence of this woman and her oppression at the hands of men and mill owners, but it also ranges over all American history of the period up until the Civil War. Jackie liked the story and she trusted the Targs’ judgment, so she acquired it as her first novel for Doubleday.
Nancy Zaroulis’s Call the Darkness Light appeared in the summer of 1979. It had a significant commercial success. Doubleday profited by selling the paperback rights to New American Library. Family Circle ran serial excerpts from the novel. A publisher in England bought the foreign rights for more than six figures. It’s hard to know exactly why it was such a commercial success, as Zaroulis’s subsequent novels never sold that well, but some of the reason may have been the publicity blitz in advance of publication that connected the book to Jackie. As with In the Russian Style, the late 1970s were years in which she was finding her way in publishing, and she never allowed her name to be used in connection with one of her books in quite so forward a fashion again.
Throughout the early months of 1979, her involvement with the book appeared repeatedly in the press. Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of Ms. in the early 1970s, did a cover story on Jackie in March 1979 featuring Jackie’s picture and a headline, “Why Does This Woman Work?” Unusually for her, Jackie cooperated with Steinem—the only other magazine interview she agreed to in her post–White House years was with Publishers Weekly—and told her about the projects she was acquiring, including Zaroulis’s novel on nineteenth-century working women. Steinem admired Jackie and hoped she would be a model for other middle-aged women who might also strike out and find fulfillment through work that had previously been denied them. Steinem asked this rhetorical question: “Given the real options of using Kennedy power or of living an Onassis-style life, how many of us would have the strength to return to our own careers—to choose personal work over derived influence?” Here Jackie also set out the parallels between Zaroulis’s heroine and her own experience. “What has been sad for many women of my generation,” said Jackie, “is that they weren’t supposed to work if they had families. There they were 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 underexercised? Of course women should work if they want to. You have to be doing something you enjoy. That is a definition of happiness … It applies to women as well as to men. We can’t all reach it, but we can try to reach it to some degree.”
The article also quoted Jackie’s exchange with a cabbie who drove her to work one morning. “Lady, you work and you don’t have to?” he asked. She said yes. “I think that’s great,” he replied. Maybe he also appreciated that she had left her Lincoln Town Car behind and was paying him for a ride in his democratic taxi instead.
The evidence that Jackie was pleased by Gloria Steinem’s piece lies in the fact that she kept a framed copy of the Ms. issue with her picture on the cover, signed by fifty of the magazine’s staffers. Of the hundreds of magazines that had appeared with her picture on the cover, it was the only one that she kept and that survived among her effects until the sale held at Sotheby’s in 1996. One New York Times columnist, Frank Rich, remembered that even Betty Friedan had claimed Jackie as “a closet feminist,” because she set an early example of how to be a working mother. Not everyone was entirely happy with this, however. Linda Grant De Pauw, the historian Muffie Brandon hired to write the text for Remember the Ladies, spoke out publicly after Gloria Steinem’s article appeared. De Pauw said that far too much influence had been ascribed to Jackie for the book. In De Pauw’s experience, Jackie had had nothing to do with it, and De Pauw had certainly never had any contact with her famous editor at Viking. Steinem’s homage had touched a nerve of resentment of Jackie’s money, privilege, and exaggerated accounts of her achievements.
De Pauw’s denunciation of Jackie and Gloria Steinem added to the frenzy and furor that preceded the publication of Zaroulis’s novel. Jackie’s association with the book was trumpeted in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post, among others. Jackie even talked to a reporter about the new novel when she turned up at a fundraiser thrown by Lally Weymouth, the daughter of the Post’s owner and publisher, Katharine Graham, to benefit a library on the history of women that Arthur Schlesinger and his wife were founding at Radcliffe College. Doubleday used to have a suite off Fifth Avenue where the publisher held book parties to celebrate new publications. Steve Rubin, an old hand in publishing who had seen everything, was nevertheless amazed at the turnout for the Zaroulis book. It was the first time he saw Jackie’s drawing power in action. The correspondent from the Washington Post was appalled at the behavior of the crowds and estimated that several hundred people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the suite hoping for a glimpse of Jackie. When her colleagues tried to smuggle her out of the party through a side door, the crowd broke and ran toward her. There was mayhem, and it was a terrifying experience.
Zaroulis remembered that Jackie had very little to do with the actual publication of her book. “I didn’t know Mrs. Onassis well … I didn’t really work with her because the book was published as I wrote it.” Jackie had acquired it for Doubleday, but other editors had taken care of the publicity and production questions. The first time Zaroulis met Jackie was at the publication party. All this might seem to support De Pauw’s indignation that Jackie should be given any credit for her own book, but that would be unfair, because Jackie’s labor was often symbolic as well as of the sort that required pencils and erasers. The reporters who covered Zaroulis’s book noted that in 1979 Jackie had just turned fift
y and had found occupation with Doubleday that was a kind of middle-aged renewal. Several of the newspaper articles noted the connection between Zaroulis’s examination of exploited female workers in the nineteenth century and Jackie’s finding new satisfaction in her life as a working woman. Jackie’s lending her weight to the Schlesinger Library’s new emphasis on women in history and Zaroulis’s novel about working women in nineteenth-century Lowell were both steps on the long road toward female emancipation in America, according to another article. Although Jackie may not have had to get her white cuffs dirty with an inky manuscript, she was certainly setting an example in the same way she had in 1963.
Conover Hunt, who went on from Remember the Ladies to curate an exhibition space in Dallas devoted to remembering the assassination, grew suddenly serious when the conversation turned from the Bicentennial project to her later work. “I was born in 1946,” she said. “I had no model. We looked at Jackie O. When she died we all had lunch at the Palm, including many of Dallas’s women leaders, to salute a woman who in finding herself had helped us find a way.” When it was suggested to her that Jackie’s contribution had been “significant,” Hunt said, “No,” her voice vibrating with emphasis. “It was remarkable. It was phenomenal. She could have caved. She could have lost it that day in Dallas, but she didn’t. There are millions of women who watched and remember that. She not only survived but she led the way, led the whole country through that awful weekend. And then went off and found, after doing her child rearing, after assuring the security of the children, her life, her intellectual interests, which she had certainly not brought to the forefront when she was with President Kennedy, but which were always there.” In the 1970s, Jackie, like many women, felt it was time for women to have more prominent jobs and careers. “There was a great sense among the leadership,” Hunt continued, “with people like Lady Bird Johnson, and Mrs. Onassis in her own way,” that the time had come for women to make a stand, have a voice, play a part. Remember the Ladies and Nancy Zaroulis’s Call the Darkness Light were both books typical of an era when the American women’s movement was ceasing to be the preserve of radicals and becoming more popular. Hunt concluded by saying of Jackie in the ’70s, “She was a woman of her time, even though she has become a woman of all times.”
You Are an Eighteenth-Century Woman
With a few exceptions, Jackie was never again as prominent promoting one of her books in the press as she was with Nancy Zaroulis. Nor was she as far forward as other first ladies—for example, Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson—in promoting the ERA. Her instinct was to do things quietly and behind the scenes. Her only antidote to mob scenes on the street was to keep as low a profile as she could. In the 1980s she was involved—more actively as an editor than she had been with either Remember the Ladies or Call the Darkness Light—with a group of books on the lives of privileged women in history. These books came from the pens of two New Yorkers whom she knew socially, Olivier Bernier and Louis Auchincloss.
Bernier was educated in Paris and at Harvard. Auchincloss told the story of how Bernier’s stepmother, Rosamond Bernier, was in such a hurry to leave the Paris apartment of her husband and end her marriage to Bernier’s father, Georges Bernier, that she was on the verge of walking out the door without taking any of her things. Then she saw Olivier, and decided on a whim that he looked so lonely she’d take him. Rosamond Bernier later married John Russell, an English art critic working primarily in his later career for the New York Times. So Olivier Bernier was raised in the world of art dealing, art criticism, and connoisseurship on two continents. His father and Rosamond Bernier had edited and contributed to France’s foremost art magazine, L’Oeil. He was an art dealer himself in New York for a decade and then devoted himself to writing popular books on European history and lecturing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Nowadays he guides tours sponsored by the Met to the princely houses, châteaux, and castles of Europe, often those that are still in private hands and closed to the general public. Auchincloss said of Bernier, both archly and a little enviously, “Olivier Bernier would have been very much Jackie’s dish.”
Jackie was part of a circle of well-heeled enthusiasts of eighteenth-century art, history, ideas, style, and culture. Her friends Charles and Jayne Wrightsman were in the same circle and gave several galleries of ancien régime furniture to the Metropolitan Museum. Though Jackie was not herself an avid collector, the most valuable pieces of her own furniture, auctioned by Sotheby’s after her death, were from the same period. Women who knew Jackie often thought of her as modeled on one of the aristocratic courtesans, originally court ladies but ultimately “favorites” or girlfriends of the monarch, from this era. Dorothy Schiff told Jackie in 1964, “You are an eighteenth-century woman. You should be the mistress of a king or a prime minister.” So when Diana Vreeland did a show at the Costume Institute in 1981 on eighteenth-century women, Jackie was a natural to commission a book to accompany the exhibition and be sold in the shop.
Olivier Bernier wrote the text and assembled the art for the book, The Eighteenth-Century Woman, which is arranged in brief chapters on individual women, such as Abigail Adams, Madame de Pompadour, and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. Jackie also helped to arrange a public seminar at the Met to which Bernier, Louis Auchincloss, and Erica Jong were all invited. The invitation of Jong is an important indicator of Jackie’s unblinking attachment to at least one variety of the new feminist politics. Jong had written the runaway bestseller Fear of Flying, published in 1973. In the novel the heroine unashamedly explores sexual desire beyond the confines of marriage. This was an important step forward for feminism because the novel openly celebrated female eroticism, which had often been veiled, denied, or silenced in previous writing about women. Jong’s novel was the Sex and the City of her day, but a lot racier, because it was more taboo then than now.
Jong believed that she was invited to the Met seminar because she had just published Fanny, a novel about an eighteenth-century woman in England. Bernier remembered being invited to Jackie’s apartment for dinner after the seminar. Auchincloss and Jong were also there. He recalled the men turning pale at the dinner table as Jong launched into graphic details about the birth of her daughter, born in 1978. Bernier noted that Jackie sat there unflinchingly, merely nodding and affirming what Jong was saying. Jong was interested in the subject because the research for Fanny had turned up evidence that the eighteenth-century profession of accoucheur, practiced almost exclusively by men, was more lethal for pregnant women than the old-fashioned midwives, who were always women. Jackie was clearly on Jong’s side when it came to discussions of childbirth, whether ancient or modern.
Jong recollected that Jackie was “passionate about books. She was a reader. She was a lover of poetry. She was fascinated by the eighteenth-century woman. In a way she was an eighteenth-century woman, especially in her pragmatism about marriage. She married two men who were useful to her both financially and socially.” She implied that Jackie was ready to deal with the consequences of such matches and that such pragmatism was characteristic of upper-class eighteenth-century women, too. Jong pointed out that Jackie’s mother, Janet, “was the same way. She married a man, Hugh Auchincloss, who was said by Gore Vidal to be impotent.” Auchincloss nonetheless had great wealth and social position. While Erica Jong and Jackie were not best friends, they were on friendly terms. “She frequently called me for blurbs,” quotes that she could put on the back of her books’ jackets to sell them, Jong said. “She was serious about her work, not a dilettante.”
One mark of the fact that Jackie was not a dilettante was that she published enough books on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women to become a specialist. From Bernier she commissioned a subsequent book on the Duchesse d’ Abrantès, a woman who not only witnessed but also participated in the rise to power of Napoleon Bonaparte. This book was entirely Jackie’s idea. She also encouraged Bernier to do an English translation of letters among European crowned heads about the French queen Mar
ie Antoinette. Bernier remembered having a dilemma, as many of the letters talked about the queen’s troubles persuading the king to have sex with her. Jackie agreed that it was strong stuff but said that he had to go ahead and she would publish it. That book became Bernier’s Secrets of Marie Antoinette.
Bernier loved working with Jackie. Their editing sessions together often began with a cocktail in her apartment on Fifth Avenue. She smoked cigarettes with a long white cigarette holder, like Cruella De Vil. Bernier saw the same pragmatic toughness in her that Jong had seen. She could be very sweet, and she gave him a little plate with an image of Louis XV on it in memory of one of their books together, despite the fact that he left Doubleday to go to another publisher which offered him a bigger advance. “She was considerate and thoughtful, but she was no innocent waif,” said Bernier. “She made very sure she could live in the style she wished.” In other words, she forgave him for holding out for a bigger advance from another publisher because she had done the equivalent herself. Bernier saw her more than once at a party coming in and standing all by herself. Not only were people afraid to go up to her, but her shyness sometimes put people off. Once she went to a book party at the Seventh Regiment Armory that was filled with literary and urban notables. She went in and stood by herself in the middle of the floor for several beats. No one approached her until a couple from the Midwest, total strangers to her, rushed up and began gushing.
