Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Sidney Stafford remembered that by the time the first finished book was in her hands, in the summer of 1994, Jackie had already died. She told the New York Times about Jackie’s role in the publication of the book, saying, “I don’t think my mother ever had an inkling that I would do this book … But I think that she’s up there, somehow saying it’s O.K. and especially pleased with whom I did it.”

  Perhaps an epitaph of which Jackie would have been prouder still appeared in a different book, one she had edited a few years earlier. John Pope-Hennessy was a British art historian who was an expert on Renaissance sculpture. He had headed up two distinguished London institutions, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum, before coming to New York to chair the department of European art and sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum. Jackie knew many of the curators at the Met, and her friend John Russell, the art critic for the New York Times, had been instrumental in boosting Pope-Hennessy’s career at the Met by writing approvingly of his rearrangement of the Met’s European collections. Pope-Hennessy had written an article in the Times in which he had sketched out a few reminiscences of his career. Jackie asked him to flesh this out as a full-scale memoir, which she published at Doubleday as Learning to Look in 1991. Early in the book, Pope-Hennessy explains why art matters. It has no utilitarian ability to feed the poor, “but works of art have always seemed to me to have a supernatural power, and I believe that visual images constitute a universal language through which the experience of the past is transmitted to the present, and by whose means all lives can be immeasurably enriched.” This is a fine example of an author putting into words an idea that, inchoately, Jackie herself had put into a collection of her books on photography. Pope-Hennessy’s emphasis on “the experience of the past” enriching the present was an idea Jackie often returned to in the images she selected for publication. Moreover, all her books aimed to capture varieties of beauty in the visual world that included an element of what Riboud called the “surnaturel” and the poetic.

  For Jackie, of course, you could find beauty in places besides photographs. One of those places was dance, movement, and ballet. Jackie told Publishers Weekly that all little girls were interested in ballet, and that preserving the little-girl fascination for dance in herself was another way of fueling her journey of self-discovery. If her books of photography were about exploring beauty, her books on ballet were about exploring the body.

  CHAPTER 8

  David Stenn recalled his first attempt at writing a Clara Bow biography. He wanted to make his work different from the poorly researched Hollywood biographies that had been published previously, so he’d thrown every fact, detail, and statistic he had discovered about Bow into his partly completed draft, which he then submitted to Jackie. She returned his manuscript to him covered with suggestions for cuts, changes, and revisions. “It was eviscerated,” he remembered, laughing. She understood how hard he had worked on the research for his subject, but her advice to him was “Be like Fred Astaire. Don’t let the hard work show.”

  I was the star dancer from America.

  FROM AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  JACKIE EDITED

  Jackie had been fascinated with dance ever since she was little. A significant subset of the books she acquired addressed great American dancers in different traditions: classical ballet, modern dance, and Hollywood. She did three books with Gelsey Kirkland. She commissioned a book on Fred Astaire soon after he died. She asked Rudolf Nureyev to write an introduction to stories by Alexander Pushkin, one of which had inspired one of the greatest ballets in the classical repertory, Eugene Onegin. She worked with Martha Graham on her autobiography and agreed with Graham’s friend the ballet critic Francis Mason that Doubleday should publish a book of recollections about the choreographer George Balanchine after he died. She also asked for an autobiography from Judith Jamison, a dancer who headed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater soon after the death of its founder.

  Many of the books on ballet that Jackie commissioned are books about how the dancer’s body needs to be forced into unusual poses in order to execute the required movements of classical ballet. They deal frankly with eroticism, seductiveness, and sensuality. Sometimes they tell about the mutilation of the dancer’s body in order to achieve a greater physical perfection. These books are not just about Jackie’s love of ballet, they may well be about her consciousness of her own body. There are links between the dancers’ stories and her own.

  Dancing on Her Grave

  Gelsey Kirkland, a principal dancer with two of America’s most important ballet companies, the New York City Ballet and the American Ballet Theatre, was one of the most famous prima ballerinas of the twentieth century. The artistic director of the New York City Ballet, George Balanchine, put her in starring roles while she was still a girl and created a new staging of Stravinsky’s Firebird for her before she was eighteen. Growing restless under Balanchine’s direction, she left the New York City Ballet to join the ABT, saying that she wanted to perform in more traditional ballets. There she created memorable roles with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who was also her lover. A high-profile life on the stage and universal acclaim in the 1970s brought with them an addiction to cocaine, which she was able to sustain as one of the most bankable ballet dancers of that decade. Reviewers in the early 1980s, however, began to notice that her dancing had become more erratic. She missed rehearsals and even performances. The management of the ABT began sending her threatening letters about breach of contract. Early in 1984 she scraped bottom: she missed a flight from New York to Boston, where she was due to begin a tour with the ABT, in order to buy cocaine from one of her dealers, a former boxer who lived with his family in, as she described it, “one of the rankest places on earth, a basement apartment in the Forties near Eighth Avenue.” Outside she met a young man, Greg Lawrence, who was also trying to find some coke. Lawrence was a part-time freelance reader of books for a film studio. He also managed a TV production company across the street and was, in his own words, a “glorified bookie.” He was also a writer and poet, though until he met Kirkland he had published none of his work. They couldn’t wake their dealer, so they returned to Lawrence’s two-room apartment, which had “no furniture whatsoever, only a mattress on the floor, books and papers scattered everywhere.” Lawrence’s girlfriend was away. They found that together they had a small supply of cocaine, so they decided to spend the night together.

  This was the beginning of a romance during which they did drugs but talked of quitting. Kirkland was well aware of the difference between her star earning power and her new lover’s garret existence. She feared that Lawrence might be taking advantage of her. She didn’t know whether it was “intuition or wishful thinking,” but she hoped he was different from the men who had let her down. “We seemed to be deeply in love, but the trust between us was wavering,” she recalled. Once he disappeared for an entire night without telling her where he was going. She accused Lawrence of manipulating her.

  Lawrence, who had dismissed his former girlfriend, persuaded Kirkland that their life might be better if they were off drugs. She broke her contract with the ABT and they went to live on a farm in Vermont where she could end her addiction. With Lawrence’s help, she began writing a memoir of her childhood and growth as a dancer. It was a form of therapy and a way to exorcise her demons. She wanted to reflect on her own life as well as warn others away from the traps into which she had fallen. It was Lawrence’s idea to organize the writing of her memoir around the men in Kirkland’s life: first her father, then Balanchine, followed by Baryshnikov, and finally Lawrence himself. In August 1984 they signed a contract for the book that was to become Dancing on My Grave, and Jackie, whom Kirkland knew in part because Jackie served on the board of the ABT, was to be their editor. Jackie was in awe of Kirkland’s dancing and no doubt thought she might help a struggling artist regain her place in the limelight. She could hardly have known in advance that the finished manuscript would prove to be as controversial a bestseller
as it became.

  Kirkland traced her problems to an alcoholic father. She believed that she had learned in childhood to rebel against her father and that this was the origin of her passive resistance to Balanchine. At first she was a fanatical devotee of the master: “I had to please him. I loved him more than my own father.” Later she decided to believe in rumors she heard of his sexual impotence and admitted, “I developed the habit of mentally undressing him, without any attraction, simply fascinated to know if he possessed all the attributes of the male anatomy.” Thus she had a strange Electra complex whereby she eroticized her relationship with her father. She saw her relationship with Balanchine through the same lens.

  Indeed, much of her relationship with the world is experienced via sex in the book. She recalled that her first introduction to competition and performance was through horseback riding. At a summer camp she lost her confidence and was thrown from a horse after the other girls convinced her to do a belly dance in front of the counselor who was her riding instructor. She gave up competitive riding for good and never told anyone why.

  One of the most scandalous parts of the book was Gelsey Kirkland’s attack on Balanchine. She was not only a dancer attacking her teacher but also a prima ballerina attacking a master of the dance world. She accused him of encouraging the self-destruction of children. For example, he required young girls to deform their bodies by twisting the femur bone in its socket in order to achieve the proper “turnout,” with feet splayed at a 180-degree angle. She also said he encouraged jealous rivalry among his female pupils and created an atmosphere that “was a mixture of convent and harem.” The young Kirkland wanted to show that she could stand up to him and walked out of one of his classes where he dared to criticize her heroes, Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn. Afterward, they snubbed one another and didn’t speak for more than a year. Indeed, Kirkland sometimes provided more damaging revelations about herself than she did about Balanchine. She had had breast implants and snipped off her earlobes. She had also had silicone injected into her ankles and lips. She suffered from anorexia. On tour in Russia, she had decided that the radio in her hotel room was being used to spy on her, so she smashed it with a hammer.

  In the book, she also went into detail about her love life with Mikhail Baryshnikov. Seeing Baryshnikov perform made her decide to leave the New York City Ballet to become his partner. In 1974 he defected from the Soviet Union and they both joined the ABT. They first slept together before he had even learned English and while she knew no Russian, returning after a supper with friends to her mother’s Upper West Side apartment, where she decided that they couldn’t have sex in the room where she had grown up so chose her brother’s room instead. “After groping with buttons, belt, and zipper, Misha appeared for a brief moment to be a statue … a pedestal of rumpled clothes at his feet. He seemed embarrassed, like a bashful god. I shared his discomfort and dimmed the lights to conceal my own naked form. Our embrace did nothing to relieve the pressure. This would be our first performance. We were both suffering from stage fright.” The star of the Russian ballet, so daringly quick onstage, proved also to be rapid in bed. “Sensing what was expected of me, I waited for him to be done. I felt no need to fake what had not taken place, what could not have taken place in the time that had elapsed. After he came to rest in my arms, we both turned back into stone. It was over.” Her father, then Balanchine, then Baryshnikov: she had hero-worshipped all three and all three had disappointed her.

  Reviews of the book were almost uniformly hostile. One reviewer in the New York Times said of Kirkland that “so intense and panicky is her focus on herself that her insights into other people and events are blurry.” Another called it “one of the saddest stories ever written.” The Washington Post spoke of the “crudely sensationalist tactics of the book,” and in the Ballet Review another critic called Gelsey Kirkland “the Judy Garland of ballet,” saying that the grave she was dancing on was one she’d dug for herself. Perhaps because of the intemperate reviews, and because of word of the book’s revelations about Baryshnikov, who was a sex symbol in the 1970s and ’80s, the book sold extremely well. It was published in 1986 and was one of Jackie’s first bestsellers.

  This did not mean that bringing out the book was easy for her. The book ruffled feathers at the ABT, and some believed that it had caused trouble for her there. The memories of the book at Doubleday were not all happy ones, either. Although it was a commercial success, almost everyone who worked on the book remembered Kirkland, and particularly Lawrence, as being exasperating characters. Steve Rubin recalled of Kirkland, “She’s a little nuts,” and added of Lawrence, “He’s the problem. He’s always been the problem.” Another colleague echoed this assessment, calling Lawrence “a very difficult man.” Bruce Tracy said that they were both “high-maintenance.” Scott Moyers remembered that Jackie was proud of the book’s success, but said that there had been little person-to-person contact between her and the authors: “There wasn’t much of a direct relationship there.” Herman Gollob, then editor in chief, laughed when he was reminded of the book. Kirkland had gone on a book-signing tour as part of her contract with Doubleday. She wanted to break the contract and come home when she got bored midway through. Jackie persuaded her to go on.

  The success of Dancing on My Grave led to two more books, one on how the newly drug-free Kirkland returned to the stage and created new roles in London, The Shape of Love (1990), and a children’s book about a little girl whose twin loves are ballet and horses, The Little Ballerina and Her Dancing Horse (1993). Neither book sold as well as the first one. Like Gelsey Kirkland, Jackie was the daughter of an alcoholic father. She, too, had loved ballet and horseback riding from an early age. She, too, grew to be legendary for performances exhibiting her carriage and grace on a worldwide stage, though the role she created was her own rather than one from the classical dance repertory. She would have been sympathetic to Kirkland’s self-consciousness about her body, for women who are objects of constant attention are encouraged to edit the way they look, not only through their clothes but through dieting and cosmetic surgery. Jackie was herself on a constant diet, and when her son returned home from school, he asked their cook, Marta Sgubin, to serve something other than “diet food.” Even Jackie’s closest friends, among them the Irish writer Edna O’Brien, worried at how thin Jackie kept herself. O’Brien remonstrated with her once when Jackie leapt up on a ledge in her apartment to arrange a curtain and O’Brien remarked on how little of her there was. Jackie shot back, “Edna! I’ve always been thin.” Other people also worried over the way Jackie treated her body. Karl Katz, one of Jackie’s friends at the Met, noticed the way she would tear at her hands, her fingernails, and cuticles, particularly if she had to sit through a boring speech.

  Jackie continued to respect Balanchine and brought out a book that was a monument to his memory after she edited Kirkland’s book. She continued to serve on the board of the ABT long after Kirkland left. While she produced some commercial books that critics might deride as “crudely sensationalist”—Kirkland’s is only one of them—her personal presentation remained modest, low-key, and the reverse of self-revealing. This very contrast, however, points up interesting disjunctures that highlight who she was and how her mind worked. She rarely talked about Black Jack, but her unreliable father loomed large in her relationship with two romantically unreliable husbands. She told a friend from Miss Porter’s how self-conscious she was and how much she’d hated being forced to undress in semipublic with other Senate wives as they got into Red Cross uniforms for a charity event. This made the friend laugh, as she suspected Jackie of wearing particularly flossy underclothes in anticipation that the other women would inspect her. She exercised, sacrificed her appetite, and exerted self-control to withstand all that scrutiny: this was the work required to achieve her outward appearance of grace and serenity. In revealing her secrets, Kirkland revealed the secrets of many women, perhaps even Jackie.

  She Had Quite a Naughty Spark to
Her

  Sarah Giles worked for Vanity Fair, which became one of the hottest magazines of the 1980s. In 1987 Fred Astaire died, and the magazine’s editor, Tina Brown, assigned Giles to write an article based on interviews with Astaire’s friends, including their comments on his life and work. One day after the article had appeared, Giles was working under another deadline at her desk when the telephone rang. Giles remembers, “I picked it up and said hello. Then came a sultry whisper, which said, ‘Hello, this is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.’ ” Giles replied, “Yeah, and I’m the Queen of Sheba. Who the hell is it? I’m busy.” Slowly, as the voice on the other end of the line calmly reiterated her identity, it dawned on Giles that it actually was Jackie, whom she had never met, and, swallowing hard, she made her apologies. Jackie told her not to worry. It happened all the time. She was telephoning because she’d seen Giles’s article on Fred Astaire and she wanted her to turn it into a book.

  Giles was usually not impressed by big names. Her father had been the editor of one of Britain’s most distinguished newspapers, The Sunday Times, and her mother, Lady Kitty, was a Sackville, one of Britain’s oldest aristocratic families. Nevertheless, she was immediately seduced by Jackie’s manner and by the flattering way in which she talked about England, saying she had once met Fred Astaire there. “She was so flipping charming,” remembered Giles, perhaps because “she had quite a naughty spark to her.” Jackie wanted Giles to expand the list of people she’d talked to about Astaire. Instead of going to the usual celebrities, Jackie wanted Giles to interview noncelebrities—for example, Astaire’s housekeeper, the man who made his shoes, and his chiropodist. Jackie wanted to know all about these people behind the scenes who were helping put on Astaire’s show. She also wasn’t confident that Alex Gotfryd, Doubleday’s art director, was up to producing a jacket for the book that was as beautiful as she wanted it to be. Jackie told Giles, “We love him. We just love him. But are we really sure he’s the right man for this?” Jackie’s question, Giles thought, was her rather wicked way of inviting Giles to find someone from outside who could produce a glossier, more glamorous book.