Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  (photo credit 7.1)

  Jackie did what she could to enhance Vreeland’s artistic credentials. She arranged an exhibition of Vreeland’s selection of photographs from the book to be staged at the International Center of Photography, where she served on the board, in the autumn of 1980. A photographer captured the two together at the party, clasping one another. Their eyes and lips seem less like those of two lovers of fashion than of two powerful women determined to advance commercial projects. Jackie also spoke openly to the press about the book and her role in it in a way she would later give up doing. She told Newsweek that Diana Vreeland was “an original,” and the reporter from the Washington Post sent out to interview Vreeland was surprised to find just how original she was. Vreeland had a strange, fashion-model walk, bent over backward, “as if she might put her hands on her hips and break into cheerleader’s kicks at any second.” She smoked with her Lucky Strike cigarette hanging “from the corner of her mouth, gangster style.” He also noticed that she rouged the back of her jaw line, the sides of her forehead, and even her ears. “It sort of widens the face,” she told him. “Don’t you think? Mm-hmmm? C’est merveilleuse.” This was the strange creature Jackie was backing to the hilt.

  Jackie told the press that she had helped select the pictures for the book at Vreeland’s apartment. Some of her comments say as much about her passions as about Vreeland’s. Jackie said that Vreeland’s “visual sense” was a combination of the Ballets Russes and the Arabian Nights: “She sees like Diaghilev and tells stories like Scheherazade.” Newsweek, the New York Times, and the Washington Post all responded with rave reviews. The highbrow Christian Science Monitor went one further and pointed precisely to what the two women were trying to do. Allure, wrote the Monitor’s critic, suggests “a contemporary theory of beauty.” Referring to one of Vreeland’s most famous phrases, “Elegance is refusal,” the critic explained that elegance is “the refusal of convention, of taste, and even of fashion in favor of the most flagrant expression of one’s own uniqueness. Without excuses. Without apologies. But with lots of artifice and style … Now that’s character. And that’s allure.” The New York Times agreed. What was startling about the most beautiful photographs—for example, a paparazzo snapshot of Greta Garbo—was “the revelation of character.” This was how fashion’s oddest dictator and the world’s most photographed woman decided to define beauty in 1980. Jackie wanted to publish work about Vreeland’s legacy even after Vreeland died. She wanted someone to write Vreeland’s biography and found a connection via Cecil Beaton to a writer she thought would be ideal, Hugo Vickers. Vreeland had often commissioned Beaton to work for Vogue. Before he died, Beaton had chosen Hugo Vickers as his official biographer. Vickers met Vreeland in 1980 via Beaton’s secretary. Whenever Vickers was in New York, he had dinner with her. When Vreeland died, in 1989, he came to the United States for her memorial service held in the Metropolitan Museum. Vickers discovered Jackie among the mourners, and when she left the service, he snapped two photos of her as she got into her car. The snapshots show her doing what she did every day: facing a phalanx of photographers. What they reveal of her character is a wary dislike of a familiar situation, an elegant forbearance. Does she show a little surprise, too, that someone she recognized from indoors at the service should have left the museum before her to join the paparazzi outdoors? Perhaps the best revelation of her character ever captured by the paparazzi was the photograph of her walking down Fifth Avenue, oblivious of her surroundings, reading a book (see this page).

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  Vickers thought she might have been a little annoyed at his photographing her, but the following year, when they began discussions about writing Vreeland’s biography, Jackie seemed to have forgotten. In 1990 Vickers began talking with Vreeland’s sons and the literary agent Andrew Wylie about writing Vreeland’s biography. Jackie wanted to be the editor, so she called Vickers into a meeting in her office. Vickers wrote up the meeting in his diary and left a wonderful image not only of Jackie at work but also of why she thought a Vreeland biography needed to be written.

  When Vickers came into the lobby of the floor at Doubleday where Jackie worked and waited for her assistant to come fetch him, he was surprised to see Jackie coming herself, “walking slowly, not slinking, but gentle, casual, friendly. She wore dark slacks and a cashmere pullover with gold jewelry … She has pale, soft skin, a tiny diamond mark on her right cheek, and tiny lines round her eyes.” Her hair, he thought, “looked like an enormous lampshade,” and she played with it, scooping it in her hands and putting it up, as she spoke to him in her office. He told Jackie that he thought Vreeland had exaggerated in her storytelling. Jackie disagreed. She thought most of Vreeland’s stories were true. She thought Vreeland had been ill-used by the Metropolitan Museum. The museum directors, Jackie said, were “stuffy and pompous. Hoving was better than Philippe de Montebello,” but even Tom Hoving had demanded to know what Vreeland’s academic qualifications for coming to advise the Costume Institute were. Vreeland had replied, “What do you mean, academic qualifications? You know I have no academic qualifications. That’s not why I am here. I’m here to get people into the museum.” One of Vreeland’s predecessors, Margaret Case, had committed suicide by jumping out the window of her apartment after Vogue fired her, so Jackie thought that Vreeland was brave to make a new career at the Met on a small salary. “There was never any self-pity, and it can’t have been easy for her,” Jackie told Vickers. She also pointed to Vreeland’s achievement: she transformed what was “previously a sleepy, neglected backwater,” the Costume Institute, into a new destination at the museum. The annual December gala, where Jackie herself was usually the star guest, “each year brings in so much money.” Thus, in commissioning Vickers to do a Vreeland biography, she was commemorating not only Vreeland’s elevation of costume to high art, but also her own role in making it happen. The Vreeland biography was eventually written by the wife of Vreeland’s lawyer, but Jackie made it clear that Vreeland stood at the cornerstone of what interested her most about art and photography. What drew Jackie to Diana Vreeland was the way she could wrap together fashion and photography, describing both in such an offhand, offbeat way as to render them closer to art than to design. Vreeland gave Jackie the confidence to select for publication the bizarre as much as the beautiful.

  These Worn-out Girls at $1,000 a Day—

  They Kill Me

  Deborah Turbeville was a remarkable photographer whom Vreeland had commissioned for Vogue. One critic has characterized Turbeville’s work as “ghost stories,” combining the “hauteur of post-Punk” with the plain odd. Turbeville came to Jackie’s Vreeland party at the International Center of Photography on the arm of Vreeland’s Allure collaborator, Christopher Hemphill. The world of fashion photography could be very small, but Jackie wanted Turbeville to go beyond fashion in a book project she outlined for the photographer. Jackie’s star turn during JFK’s presidency had been her appearance at Versailles for the French state dinner. Jackie had always been interested in French history, and President de Gaulle had praised her knowledge of the subject. In later years, Jackie had been back to visit Versailles and had been shown the petits appartements, or private living quarters of the royal family, as well as the back stairs used by servants and private visitors of the people who lived in the palace. Jackie wanted a book of photographs to examine the rooms that were off the beaten path, unseen by tourists, who saw only the grandest of the public rooms. This was the contradictory and probably unconscious impulse of a woman who spent all her life trying to quash the publication of tales of her own private life in the unseen rooms of the White House.

  Jackie asked Louis Auchincloss to write a literal-minded introduction to the subject that would give a detailed history of what had gone on inside the palace in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at the peak of royal power. From Turbeville she wanted something much less literal and more atmospheric. Jackie wrote in her Editor’s Note, hiding anonymous
ly behind a royal “we,” that “we wanted to match Louis Auchincloss’ formal portrait of Versailles with Deborah Turbeville’s dream; to unite a master of the precise and mistress of the poetic.”

  Turbeville had come to fame as a fashion photographer with an unusual vision. As the critic Vicki Goldberg wrote in the New York Times, Turbeville was known for her “soft-focus style that combined poignancy and dislocation, lyricism and stark loneliness.” Her women might have appeared in a film by Ingmar Bergman or in Woody Allen’s Interiors. As Diana Vreeland put it, “I adore Turbeville’s girls. These worn-out girls at $1,000 a day—they kill me. We don’t know who they are, or why they are, or why they are so beautiful.” Goldberg said that though many people had photographed Versailles, only the turn-of-the-century great Eugène Atget had left as personal a stamp on images of the palace as Turbeville had. It was no coincidence that Jackie had brought out those Atget images as a book too.

  Turbeville remembered Jackie asking whether she had read Nancy Mitford’s Madame de Pompadour or her biography of Louis XIV, The Sun King. “I think in a way Jacqueline felt that she was a kind of Madame de Pompadour. Because she was such a patron of the arts. She was a very romantic figure. ‘Oh dear,’ ” Jackie told Turbeville, “ ‘but you have to read this Nancy Mitford book.’ ” Jackie loved grand architecture and specifically chose Turbeville for this project because she remembered that her photographs conveyed a great feeling for buildings. Jackie also loved royal ritual and aristocratic manners, but she had the same playfulness on the topic that Nancy Mitford had, which somehow kept displays of social hierarchy in perspective. Both of them could appreciate elaborate courtesies as a form of art, but neither of them could take it all that seriously.

  Jackie stood behind Turbeville and backed her up with the authorities at Versailles when the photographer wanted to bring in monkeys, piles of dead leaves, and models in costume. Jackie talked to the curators and advised Turbeville not to mention the monkeys in advance. When one of the curators complained to Jackie that Turbeville was creating soft porn à la David Hamilton, Jackie’s support didn’t waver. She also spoke to Vicki Goldberg at the New York Times. “On the back stairs,” Jackie told Goldberg, “everybody was throwing chamber pots out, sellers were trying to sell laces, Voltaire was stomping up, love letters were passing hands, and assignations were going on. All those lives, you can just feel them, like ghosts.” In short, what Jackie imagined on the back stairs was the same irreverent history Mitford had described—grandeur and great philosophers mixed with turds, corsets, and adultery. Those “ghosts” reappeared in Jackie’s Editor’s Note, where she said that Turbeville had captured at Versailles a “labyrinth peopled by ghosts of her imagination,” a vision inspired partly by Watteau but also by Salvador Dalí and Edgar Allan Poe. Many of Jackie’s visual projects, and the photography projects most of all, have that sense of recapturing something in the past, something unnameable, something beautiful, often strange, but also vanished.

  Guns and Bourbon

  In stark contrast to Unseen Versailles was a book of photography that Jackie picked up from her editorial colleague Jim Fitzgerald as he was preparing to leave Doubleday. Fitzgerald had decided to move to a better position with a rival publisher and needed to parcel out his Doubleday projects to other editors before he left. He asked Jackie whether she would be willing to take on a book of photography by William Eggleston, to be entitled The Democratic Forest. Eggleston was not well known outside the world of art photography. A Museum of Modern Art curator, John Szarkowski, had helped launch Eggleston in the 1970s as the first major American photographer who worked in color. Fitzgerald was surprised to learn that Jackie not only knew Szarkowski, but was well-informed about Eggleston. She was happy to take on the project. Fitzgerald had been born in Texas; Eggleston was from Tennessee. When Fitzgerald telephoned Eggleston in Memphis to say that Jackie was to be his new editor, Eggleston replied, “Well, my man, I’d best be gettin’ up there to meet mah new editor, then.” Both men enjoyed teasing New Yorkers with elaborate good-old-boy accents. In Eggleston’s case, the accent concealed that he’d come from a privileged plantation background. It also concealed the photographer’s alarming eccentricity. Jackie may well have had the chance to wonder what she’d got herself into.

  When Eggleston arrived in New York, Fitzgerald took him to Jackie’s office to introduce him. He was then called away for a few minutes for a phone call. Fitzgerald recalled, “I came back about twenty minutes later and he was on the top of her desk with these boots on, illustrating a Prussian soldier’s march. She was just sitting there, delighted. They were both kind of wacky in a really weird way. But it just jived really well. So then we were going to lunch. Now, lunch with Jackie was always a calculated thing. You couldn’t just go to a deli or something. There was this new hotel just up the street that had just opened up—the Peninsula, I think. So we go there and they knew her and they gave her a table in the back. We sat down. The waitress came up and Bill ordered a drink. ‘Well, I’m sorry. We just opened. We don’t have our liquor license,’ the waitress said. This was tantamount to the Civil War still being on. So Bill said, ‘I’ll be right back.’ We sat and chatted. I don’t know where he went or how he did it, but I think he was back in about ten minutes with a bottle of Old Crow and three glasses and some ice. He thought we were going to all sit there and get plowed under … Well, two of us did.” Jackie didn’t care for bourbon.

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  She did respect artists, though, and even before she met Eggleston, she was fascinated to hear of Fitzgerald’s first visit to the photographer’s home in Memphis. “I drove over,” Fitzgerald remembered. “He was in the swimming pool with a tuxedo jacket on and his underwear and he was painting the pool blue. ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ ” he asked himself. “Nothing. You’re in Eggleston’s house. A lot of guns. A lot of bourbon.” The critic for Newsweek who reviewed The Democratic Forest when it came out in 1989 had a similar though more unsettling feeling when he first met Eggleston. “Looking every lanky inch the elegant Southern gent in a tailor-made, three-piece suit, the photographer William Eggleston meets a visitor to his Memphis home with one hand outstretched in greeting, the other gripping a revolver.” Once inside, the critic found that Eggleston had enough “antique guns to stock a modest arsenal.”

  The idea for the book had originated with an editor at an English publisher, Secker & Warburg, and Fitzgerald did much of the work for the Doubleday edition before he left. Nevertheless, Jackie’s consent to be associated with it highlights the way in which the book intersected, in some ways jarringly, with her typical visual concerns—for example, her passionate hatred for the skyscrapers taking over the city—as well as with her own history. Eggleston and the English publisher had recruited the novelist Eudora Welty to write an introduction to the book. The book’s only works of conventional beauty are of the countryside near the plantation where Eggleston had grown up. Most of the photographs are of litter, urban sprawl, fluorescent lighting, and chance views through windows where he has asserted that the composition and color of the photo itself possess a beauty that surpasses the subject matter. Welty points out that Eggleston has focused on Atlanta skyscrapers, proliferating like weeds and rearing up “like bullies.” Rarely are human beings in the pictures, and Welty says of the skyscrapers that “no last drop of humanity” could come from these cityscapes we’ve allowed to spring up “like fortifications.” As if to underscore this ominous tone, she then moves to Eggleston’s photograph of the Texas School Book Depository on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, which she describes as “indelible in the world’s memory as the source of the gunshots that killed President John F. Kennedy.” But Welty refuses the notion that Eggleston has dwelled on the negative. Rather, she says that his work shows all that the “mundane world so openly and multitudinously affirms” and thus his “fine and scrupulous photographs achieve beauty.” Yes, the building in which Lee Harvey Oswald stood to kill the president has awful his
torical memories for us, but these memories contrast with the spare elegance of Eggleston’s photograph. Eggleston’s aesthetic was almost the reverse of Vreeland’s: where she wanted to ornament, to embellish, and to reject the mundane world, he wanted to look closely at it to see what beauty, in the careful framing of his photograph, he could establish was already there.

  With Eggleston, Jackie moved beyond the teaching of her original mentor. She could embrace two very different notions of photographic beauty. She was able to look in a clear, dry-eyed way at the ghosts of her own past. Maybe she never fully overcame the horror of the assassination, but it says something about her bravery, her practicality, and her sense of the priority of art that she was willing to take on the Eggleston project. That the Dealey Plaza photograph appeared in The Democratic Forest was a coincidence. Fitzgerald hadn’t thought about it before asking her to take over the project, but she didn’t shudder and ask that it be sent back to him when she found it. She went straight ahead with it.

  In fact, Jackie had some of the same easy familiarity with Fitzgerald, a younger man with whom she sometimes shared a cigarette and who wasn’t afraid to tease her, that she had with Bill Barry. Twice a year Doubleday would have a big sales meeting in which the new season’s books would be presented to the sales force. In the old days there had been a party atmosphere and free spending from company expense accounts, so Fitzgerald looked forward to going. One year the sales meeting was to be in Texas. Fitzgerald remembered, “She had a sense of humor.” He could get her to acknowledge even the most sensitive subjects. “I asked her if she was going to the sales conference in Dallas.” Said Jackie dryly, “I think I’ll pass on that one.”