Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Jackie’s Orientalism

  One of the first important writers to inspire Jackie was André Malraux, Charles de Gaulle’s minister of culture, whom she met in Paris in 1961. Malraux had been an archaeologist, a novelist, and a fighter in the French Resistance during the Second World War. When Jackie met him, the two fell a little under one another’s spells. Letitia Baldrige overheard one of Jackie’s friends asking her what was so great about Malraux. He wasn’t even attractive. “The First Lady shot two thunderbolts straight into the questioner’s eyes. ‘He happens to be a war hero, a brilliant, sensitive writer, and he happens to have a great mind.’ ” Malraux was equally taken with Jackie, and promised her the loan of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa from the Louvre; the painting came to Washington’s National Gallery in 1962. Malraux was also the one who raised the alarm about Egyptian antiquities being flooded by the building of the Aswan Dam, starting in 1960. This resulted in Jackie’s work to save the Temple of Dendur, originally built around 15 BCE, and bring it to America. As a young man Malraux had been on a dig in Cambodia and written a novel about the experience. This led directly to Jackie’s visit to the ancient Cambodian temple at Angkor Wat in 1967. Malraux was the first to interest her in the non-Christian civilizations of Asia and the Near East. So when Jackie was married to Onassis and sat down to dinner in Paris with French photojournalist Marc Riboud, she was excited to hear that he’d been in Cambodia as well and that he’d made Asian subjects, even in Communist China and North Vietnam, one of his specialties.

  In about 1974 Onassis and Jackie invited Riboud to dinner with them at Maxim’s, then Paris’s most exclusive restaurant, where you had to be Jackie to get a table and you had to be Onassis to pay for it. Riboud was a little shocked at Onassis’s coarseness. He made rude jokes, which Riboud called “below the belt.” Jackie tried to keep the conversation on a higher plane. She wanted to talk about their mutual friend Cornell Capa. She encouraged Riboud to go and photograph Angkor again. They struck up a friendship that outlasted her marriage to Onassis. One of her assistants who dealt with Riboud at Doubleday when Jackie signed him up to do a book of photographs on a Chinese mountain, Capital of Heaven, remembered Riboud as a strangely sexy older man. Riboud wasn’t afraid to flirt with Jackie, either.

  Riboud had traveled extensively in China and had been struck by a particular mountain range, the Huangshan, from the top of which there were spectacular views. “It was not only a beautiful view,” he recalled, “but a sensation. A mystical experience.” It was customary for young married couples to hike up to the top of one peak in the range. Couples who for some reason could not get married also went there to commit suicide. Riboud’s voice was vigorous and friendly over the phone from Paris. “I told her about these mountains. I told her, ‘You should come. Let’s go there.’ ” Jackie never went with Riboud to the mountain sometimes called Capital of Heaven, but she did go to China for the opening of I. M. Pei’s new hotel there, the first time the renowned architect had ever built a structure in the country where he had been born. Jackie knew Pei from the building of the Kennedy Library in Boston, and when she found Riboud would be there at the same time, she agreed to meet him in Beijing to help him with some photography he had planned to do for Time magazine at a new Chinese university. While there, they found a photography studio where newlyweds went to have their pictures taken. It was unusual for Jackie to travel and not be recognized, but the Chinese seemed not to know her, so she was relaxed enough to go into this studio and have a photo made with Riboud. The next time he was in New York and he was invited to Jackie’s apartment with Maurice Tempelsman, Riboud was able to announce over his predinner drink, “Jackie, I have the picture of your wedding with me.” He explained, “I showed her the picture. Voilà.”

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  The photographs that appeared in Riboud’s Doubleday book are of cloud-enshrouded peaks. In the book he thanks Jackie for championing his work, saying that she “was the first to believe that those misty snapshots could make a book.” She and Riboud asked François Cheng, the first member of the Académie Française of Asian origin, to write an introduction. Cheng recalls going to the top of one peak with fellow travelers and admiring a sudden view through clouds: “We remained long silent, profoundly moved by a splendor which we felt should endure forever, but which we knew deep in our hearts to be fleeting.” The note of nostalgia returns. In Jackie’s books of photography, beauty is often of the past, evanescent, never to come again. There’s an element of sadness because it’s so hard to recapture, even in a photograph.

  When the book came out, Riboud wrote in the copy that he presented to her, “For Jackie, who has always been on the top of CAPITAL OF HEAVEN. I am expecting more summit meetings.” It was their only book together, although they continued to have a warm friendship. Still, Riboud wouldn’t do everything she asked him to do. “She wanted me to do a book on the vegetable jardin of Versailles. She heard about this jardin from someone. When I went there it was a total jungle.” He took one look and then phoned her in New York to say “Non.”

  Riboud’s project on China and Jackie’s discussions with him about Malraux and Angkor fit together with a book of photography she did on Egypt: in both she imagined herself embracing the East. Before becoming an editor, she went to India as first lady and traveled to Egypt with Onassis, in addition to making forays into Cambodia and Pakistan. She loved what she found. When the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, she knew of his work from having read it in French and wondered whether there wasn’t some way for Doubleday to get the rights to publish Mahfouz in English. Alberto Vitale, then the chief executive officer of the holding company that had recently purchased Doubleday for the German media company Bertelsmann, had the same idea independently. He had spent part of his childhood in Cairo and wanted Mahfouz as well. He knew the competition among American publishers would be fierce, so he went to Jackie, someone he knew would have the clout to reach Mahfouz, and found her willing to help.

  Jackie knew David Morse, a prominent New Yorker who had served as a labor advocate in the Truman administration and as director general of the International Labor Organization, which had itself been awarded a Nobel in 1969. Morse in turn knew the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmed Esmat Abdel-Meguid. Morse told Jackie he would call Egypt. Jackie remembered, “I said to him, ‘David, what time is it in Egypt?’ He replied, ‘It’s three A.M., but he won’t mind. He’s a friend—we used to be law partners.’ ” Abdel-Meguid sent his son to find Mahfouz, and Mahfouz accepted Doubleday’s offer when Vitale flew out to arrange the details.

  Doubleday took over a large number of titles from Mahfouz, and by 1992 the cumulative sales for twelve different books was about half a million copies, an impressive figure in publishing. They sold well because the Nobel, and Doubleday’s publication of new translations of many of Mahfouz’s novels, coincided with the beginning of the first Gulf War in 1990. There was a great curiosity in the English-speaking world about the domestic life and worldview of Muslims. Jackie was excited to be involved in this, not only because Mahfouz was an author of real literary merit, but also because she knew some of the culture and conventions of the eastern Mediterranean from her own experience. She told her Doubleday colleague Martha Levin that the father figure in the Cairo Trilogy, three Mahfouz novels that followed the same Cairo family through several generations, was someone she had encountered herself. Levin remembered one conversation when Jackie told her, “You know, I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece.” There was silence while Levin thought to herself, “Who doesn’t know that, Jackie?” but murmured assent instead. “And the main character, the father,” Jackie continued, “he really reminds me of the men in Greece.”

  Palace Walk, the first novel in Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, is an attack on the unreasonable power of the father, who wields absolute and ill-tempered power over his wife and children. He’s a hypocrite and an egotist who rages to his wife about his opposition to a pro
posed marriage, “No daughter of mine will marry a man until I am satisfied that his primary motive for marrying her is a sincere desire to be related to me … me … me.” The same story was played out in Onassis’s opposition to his daughter Christina’s romantic relationships, which Jackie witnessed firsthand.

  Still, it didn’t make her think less well of Egypt, for which she had an enduring fascination. She chose historic black-and-white photographs for the covers of the books in the Cairo Trilogy, and was proud enough of these particular books to take them along as part of her show-and-tell for the Publishers Weekly interview. So when the young photographer Robert Lyons wrote to her out of the blue, saying that he’d taken some pictures of Mahfouz and asking whether she would be interested in one for the jacket art of any future Mahfouz books, she picked up the phone and called him in California.

  When Lyons had first heard of Mahfouz, he had flown to Egypt to meet him. He showed the writer some of his photographs of Egypt, and Mahfouz promised him the use of one of his short stories for Lyons to include in a book of these photographs. Jackie looked at the same photos and said she wanted to publish the book. She told Lyons that she saw him as being in the tradition of two nineteenth-century travelers: the photographer Roger Fenton, who’d done studies of his sitters in oriental costume, and the scholar Richard Burton, famous for his translation of the Arabian Nights. Lyons’s book with Jackie, Egyptian Time, came out in 1992.

  Jackie also set up an exhibition of Lyons’s work at the International Center of Photography and attended his launch party there. All Lyons could remember of that night was the hubbub of the crowds in the galleries but a great hush when she descended the staircase to the downstairs gallery where his pictures were being exhibited. She allowed Lyons to fly to Hong Kong, at his own expense, and supervise the reproduction of his images as they came off the press so they were exactly as he wanted them, the kind of direct participation in production that a publisher almost never allows an artist or a writer. For her part, in this new third-party collaboration with Mahfouz, she found that her ideas about beauty were taken to a new level in the way the novelist described the childhood origins of our aesthetic sense: “Life’s first love,” Mahfouz wrote in the story that appeared in Egyptian Time, “is of food, especially sweets … They are the first exercise in the love of beauty. A child runs, grasping his tiny coins, never satisfied or jaded, to taste with keen craving everything good and delicious, crowning his campaign with knafeh, baklava, cake and chocolate.”

  Learning to Look

  Jackie’s last book of photography was one that pulled together all the things she loved about the medium. Toni Frissell was a photographer working in the 1940s and ’50s, known not only for her work in fashion magazines, but for her photojournalism in Europe during World War II. One of the curators at the Library of Congress’s photographic collection called Toni Frissell’s daughter Sidney Frissell Stafford in the 1990s to say that the library had received some telephone calls from people interested in writing about her mother’s career in fashion photography. Sidney Stafford thought to herself that really there was more to her mother’s work than fashion photography. “Why don’t I do a book?” She put together a proposal and sent it to several publishers. When she got a call from a voice identifying herself as Jacqueline Onassis, Stafford recalled, she was surprised. Once she had talked to Jackie and gotten over the shock, she knew she’d found the right editor. Frissell’s life in many ways ran parallel to Jackie’s. Not only had Frissell known Jackie’s mother and photographed Jackie’s wedding in Newport, but both of them loved the aura of old money now mainly spent and the tattered opulence that remained. George Plimpton, whom Jackie hired to write the introduction to the Frissell book, quoted Toni Frissell as saying, “When we give a dinner party, the people who serve wear green jackets and white gloves, but my drawing room curtains are in shreds.” Or, in the case of Frissell’s photograph of the Vanderbilts at tea in Florida in 1950, the money had not been spent and nothing was in tatters.

  Both Jackie and Frissell had an irreverent view of fashion. Frissell dropped one of her models into the dolphin tank at Marineland in Florida to achieve an effect that was lovely, otherworldly, and at the same time don’t-try-this-at-home-ladies. Jackie chose this shot for the cover of the book.

  Like Jackie, Frissell was impatient with being known for her work on fashion, so when the Second World War came, she took the opportunity to photograph soldiers, bomb destruction in London, and children displaced by the Blitz. Toni Frissell was also the first to photograph the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of black pilots trained in the South who fought and flew missions together during the war. Her photographs helped pave the way for the recognition of African Americans’ contribution to the war and for the integration of the armed services after the war.

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  Jackie and Frissell loved hunting on horseback. Frissell made a portrait of Miss Charlotte Noland, who had founded Foxcroft, a girls’ school in the country around Middleburg, Virginia, where Jackie rode. Frissell captured the tailored elegance Jackie also adored about hunting costume, as well as her admiration for the unmarried, old-fashioned women who ran girls’ schools before the war. “Ride like hell, little darlings! Ride like hell!” Frissell remembered hearing Noland call out when she visited the school with her mother and saw the headmistress riding out—sidesaddle—with some of her students.

  Jackie led a group from Doubleday down to the Library of Congress in Washington to look through the negatives Frissell had left there and make one of the initial rounds of selection for the book, even though many of the photographs had not been catalogued. The only people who had the historical memory and the knowledge of the social milieu to identify the people in the photographs were Frissell’s daughter, Sidney, and Jackie. So while Sidney and Jackie leafed through photos, saying “Oh, that’s old so-and-so,” librarians were standing in the background, ready to scribble down the pair’s identifications. The two women spent a long day going through album after album of photographs. They had brought with them a group of disposable cameras in order to take rough shots of the Frissell images they wanted to use. Someone snapped Library of Congress photograph curator Beverly Brannon with Jackie and Sidney Frissell Stafford at work. Set to one side were the photographs Toni Frissell had taken of Jackie’s wedding to JFK in 1953. Peter Kruzan, Doubleday’s art director, remembered, “We had gone through pages of photographs, and of course there was that pile [of wedding photographs] still sitting on the table. That was the white elephant that no one wanted to talk about. We finally had to just sit down and say, ‘Okay, Jackie, the last thing we have to do is your wedding.’ And she went through it.” Sidney Stafford remembered the same awkward moment: “It was kind of uncomfortable for all of us. Jackie just said, ‘Of course we have to use one of the wedding pictures from my mother’s house. Let’s use that one.’ It wasn’t one of the more glamorous pictures of her. Her choice surprised me.”

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  Sidney Stafford told the critic from the New York Times assigned to review the book that it was “not your typical coffee-table photography book.” She called it a “photobiography.” It was not just her mother’s photographs but “the story of a woman.” Two women, actually. Whether consciously or not, Jackie summed up her own affinity with Frissell in the jacket copy for the book, over which she would have had direct control. Frissell, says the book’s jacket, “stretched the boundaries of the privileged world into which she was born and became one of the most innovative and renowned photographers of her time.” The books Jackie edited spoke to her stretching of the boundaries of her world as well. During the declining months of her life, Jackie had come to identify herself so completely with her job that she preferred going into Doubleday to staying at home in bed. The Frissell book was one of the last she ever worked on.

  She had persuaded the editor in chief at Town & Country, Pamela Fior
i, to run excerpts from the Frissell book timed to coincide with its publication. The magazine’s photo editor Bill Swan remembered that when the Town & Country staff visited her in 1994, Jackie was physically strong, though she was already ill and had a big bandage on her cheek. What struck Swan most when he came into the conference room and was introduced to Jackie was the contrast between the famous photos of her and the way she behaved in person. In her photographs, Swan remembered, “she has just a blank, middle-distance stare.” In person, he was surprised to find, she was more animated than he expected, more “engaging, almost little-girl-like” in her enthusiasm for the work she was showing them. It was hard to believe that the Jackie who warned off paparazzi with a cold glance could be the same as this neat woman wearing pencil-leg trousers and Chelsea boots, who came over and asked him to write his name in her book. Jackie O. wanted his autograph.

  Pamela Fiori was also aware of Jackie’s lymphoma diagnosis. “I was sitting in a chair and she plopped—yes, plopped—on the floor next to me and began showing and telling [photographs], with the enthusiasm of a seven-year-old. As she did, she would point to something and look me in the eyes. I prayed she wouldn’t look too closely, because she would have seen that my own eyes had welled up. Here was the world’s most famous woman sitting on the floor beside me, hoping I would be interested in what she was showing me.” Enthusiasm for one of her book projects was what Jackie did. It was natural. It wasn’t work for her. She was also surrounded by a Doubleday team that was devoted to her. Swan noticed of Jackie’s colleagues, “It wasn’t what you’d expect. The relationship wasn’t stiff or formal at all. It was very casual. You could tell they loved her.” When the Town & Country people prepared to go, Jackie took them to the elevator and treated her visitors affectionately. When the elevator doors opened, she said, “Now, scamper in, scamper in!”