by William Kuhn
Jackie’s spirit and the spirit of rarefied courtly India live on in A Second Paradise, a kind of reincarnation of all that she’d marveled at when she’d first gone to India in 1962. But she didn’t live entirely in the past. She had no wish to return to her White House days. What she had in the 1980s was vastly better: freedom to travel with obscure academics, to make visits without fanfare, to be attended by her only son, and to leave behind something entirely of her own creation, a finely illustrated book. Naveen Patnaik acknowledges Jackie’s contribution, but the reader won’t find it without hunting in the back of the book. That so perfectly fit her modest and ironic sense of humor about herself that it, too, has to be called “overcivilized.”
Walk Like an Egyptian
Jackie didn’t look on all historical courts with regret for fallen grandeur. She was interested in the courts of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt, too, but the book she commissioned that was published in 1987 showed that she also had an affinity for the kooky and the absurd. Jonathan Cott was a regular contributor to Rolling Stone in the 1970s and 1980s. He had written articles for the magazine based on interviews with Bob Dylan and John Lennon. Jann Wenner remembered Cott as “very much in Jackie’s style. Very intellectual, arcane, dreamy. He was just the kind of person Jackie would like. She loved writers.” She had been introduced to Cott by Jim Fitzgerald, her Doubleday colleague, who specialized in popular culture and shared an interest with Cott in Bob Dylan. She then worked with Cott on a book tribute to John Lennon after his death. What Cott submitted to her next, however, was completely different. He had seen a small paragraph in the New York Times about Dorothy Eady, an unusual Englishwoman who believed she had been the lover of an Egyptian pharaoh in an earlier life. Eady had forsaken a comfortable life in twentieth-century England to go and live in a mud hut in Egypt, where she participated in archaeological research on what she was convinced was her former life. Strangely enough, when she would say to the archaeologists, “I remember the ancient garden was here,” they would dig and discover an ancient garden. Cott was surprised when he went to meet Jackie in her office to discuss writing Eady’s story: she had seen the same paragraph in the newspaper and pulled it out to show it to him.
Jackie’s interest in Egypt and the archaeology of other Middle Eastern cultures went back a long way. When she redecorated the White House, she said she was particularly proud of the Blue Room, where she had restored the original French furnishings from President Monroe’s era with a motif from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign of the same period. André Malraux was also someone with whom she discussed Egypt, and the Temple of Dendur eventually came to New York partially as a result of those conversations. Malraux had sent her a limited-edition book to which he’d written the preface, Sumer (1960), which pictured Sumerian sculpture discovered in a region roughly corresponding to modern Iraq. He wrote an inscription in French saying that the book contained images of little goddesses and her special goddess was one of fecundity—was he teasing her?—and he hoped this goddess would bring her the good wishes of Queen Subad, or Shubad, who had lived in Sumer two thousand years before the Christian era. So to Cott’s surprise, when he showed Jackie an ancient crown of Queen Subad, that a curator of the British Museum had shown to Dorothy Eady, Jackie already knew all about it. She told Cott, “It’s one of the most precious things ever unearthed—so beautiful.” Cott still thinks of that exchange with Jackie rather wonderingly, saying, “Jackie had a remarkable but unself-conscious way of bringing the entire world back home.” He noticed that she had in her private collection at 1040 Fifth Avenue rare volumes of Egyptian history and ethnography commissioned by Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, the Description de l’Égypte. Jackie, like Eady, had all of ancient Egyptian history at her fingertips. She told Cott that Malraux had introduced her to a curator from the Louvre, Christiane Desroches Noblecourt, who had arranged a King Tut exhibition that traveled to the National Gallery in 1961. Noblecourt had also acted as their guide when Jackie and Onassis and Caroline had gone on an expedition up the Nile to visit Egyptian antiquities in 1974.
When Cott finished his account of Dorothy Eady’s strange life in England and Egypt, Jackie arranged for a cover to be designed that captured a bit of the heroine’s slightly ridiculous personality. It’s a pair of red lips painted on an ancient Egyptian statue. But neither Jackie nor the book’s reviewer in the New York Times regarded Eady’s idea that she had once served a pharaoh and been more recently reincarnated as an ordinary nonroyal Englishwoman as entirely absurd. The Times reviewer noted that reincarnation stories often contained the element that Eady’s did of a love gone wrong, often with a royal lover. “Perhaps these passionate affairs represent a universal human metaphor for the spiritual quest gone awry; the longing for God invested in another mortal, and therefore doomed?”
Jackie’s love of royal ritual may well have had something to do with being a Catholic, since the grandeur, costume, and elaboration of the mass recall something more historical and more divine than everyday human lives. Francis Mason noted in his review of Jackie’s Martha Graham book that Graham admitted to having been influenced by the Catholic Church, “the glamour, the glory, the pageantry, and the regality.” Diana Vreeland’s emphasis on fashion that achieved a transfigured moment, the ordinary rendered extraordinary, carries some of the same feeling. Vreeland’s model was less the Catholic Church than it was either the British coronation ceremony or the Ziegfeld Follies. Having been rendered instantly royal herself in the aftermath of JFK’s assassination, a process that must have seemed to her not all that different from Eady’s supernatural vision, Jackie became not less but more interested in reading about royalty in history. Perhaps she hoped to find there clues about how to live her own life in the present.
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Nicholas and Alexandra
After the French Revolution in 1789, the other most notoriously violent end to a European monarchy came in 1917. Under orders from Lenin, the Bolsheviks murdered the Russian tsar, Nicholas, and his wife, Alexandra, along with their five children and some of their attendants in July 1918. This followed the tsar’s abdication in 1917, after he had become discredited during the disasters of Russia’s involvement in the First World War. Jane Hitchcock recalled that besides being interested in the deaths of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, she and Jackie had also been fascinated by the fate of the Romanov family. She explained they were both “intrigued by the Russian Revolution, the French Revolution, because they somehow seem extremely accessible and also because I think everybody puts themselves in the position of those people. Would they have been able to escape? Would they have done it differently? What were the forces swirling around them?” Also, these people lived in palaces and wore clothes that were themselves works of art. As Hitchcock put it, “The sheer beauty of the Romanovs was not to be believed.” Loving to know more about them was partly about the drama of sudden death, but also about the fate of people who lived ornamented lives because, whether they liked it or not, they served as embodiments of ideas larger than themselves.
Jackie’s interest in Romanov history also had a Vreeland origin. Vreeland had asked Tom Hoving to take Jackie with him to Russia in the late 1970s when he was meeting with curators from the Hermitage to facilitate exchanges with the Met. Vreeland was using Jackie as her secret weapon to persuade the Russians to allow more of their most valuable clothes to travel to New York for one of her shows at the Costume Institute. During this visit with Hoving, Jackie was shown a cape and hat made of swansdown and worn only once by the last Russian tsarina, on a visit to the opera. Hoving snapped her picture after Jackie asked the Russians whether she might try it on.
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The Russian playwright Edvard Radzinsky was convinced the first time he met Jackie that she was royal, and remarked later, in heavily accented English, that “she was a tsarina.” Radzinsky was equally fascinated with the Romanovs and wrote a long Russian biography of the last tsar, dwelling on the fin
al days leading up to his assassination. The completion of Radzinsky’s work happened to coincide with the dissolution of the old Soviet system in 1991, a revival of the Russian Orthodox Church, and a brief movement in the early 1990s to restore the Romanov monarchy in Russia. Radzinsky hated the Soviet system and painted a highly sympathetic picture of the Romanovs. Also in 1991, as the Communist government crumbled, human remains thought to be those of the Russian royal family were discovered at the bottom of a rough grave in Yekaterinburg, in central Russia, to the east of the Ural Mountains. DNA testing and the matching of DNA samples drawn from Britain’s Prince Philip, whose grandmother was the sister of the tsarina’s grandmother, confirmed that the bones were the remains of the murdered Romanovs. This came to the attention of the New York literary agent Lynn Franklin, who met Radzinsky on a visit to Russia. He agreed to work with her, and she was able to sell a brief English synopsis of a work that still needed to be translated to Jackie at Doubleday. One of the book’s strongest selling points was that this was a work of Russian history by a Russian author rather than by one of the Western experts on Russia who had been such a staple in providing information during the cold war. All these circumstances surrounding the acquisition of Radzinsky’s book gave it the feeling in advance of a potential bestseller, if it was handled right.
Jackie first met Radzinsky around a conference table in New York, where a group of Doubleday personnel, Franklin, and, via a Russian interpreter, Radzinsky conferred about what to do with the large and unwieldy manuscript in Russian. The Doubleday staff pointed out that Radzinsky had been successful as a playwright but never as an author in English prose. They were universally of the opinion that the book needed to be cut. Radzinsky’s English was rudimentary, but he recalled, “I am a writer. I understood the word ‘cut.’ ” The interpreter ignored him. She was hypnotized by Jackie. Radzinsky saw that he had to convince Jackie himself in order to save his manuscript. He had found among the papers of the Romanovs in the Russian archives a poem about forgiveness. He told the people at the conference table that his story was about forgiveness, about the tsar’s family forgiving their assassins. Radzinsky remembered looking over at Jackie: “I saw her eyes. She realized what I was saying and she understood. It was a magnificent moment. ‘No cuts. Let it all be translated. I want to read the whole book,’ she said.”
Jackie hired the translator Marian Schwartz, whom she knew via Schwartz’s translations of Nina Berberova. She sent Radzinsky out to Austin, Texas, where he stayed for more than a week with Schwartz while they went over the manuscript together. Relations between author and translator were not all smooth. He was a showman; she was an intellectual. Radzinsky suspected that Schwartz did not entirely understand his Russian. Schwartz saw that some of the long digressions on Russian history and some of the melodrama in Radzinsky’s text would irritate an English-speaking audience. It was left to Jackie to referee their disputes by telephone.
The tonal differences between author and translator also went to the heart of whether Jackie identified with the assassination of the tsar’s family and relived it as a part of her personal nightmare, or not. Radzinsky wrote a sensational account of the royal family’s death. Nicholas and Alexandra, along with their four grown daughters and their hemophiliac son, Alexei, had been led into a bare wooden room. A line of their former security guards along the wall suddenly brought out guns and began to fire at them. The tsar’s daughters had sewn some of the royal family’s jewels into their corsets. They had hoped to exchange these jewels for help in fleeing the country, and for a while the jewels deflected their assassins’ bullets. Radzinsky has a theatrical scene in which the killers of the tsar’s family reminisced about what had happened afterward at the Hotel Metropole: “They sipped unsweetened tea through a sugar lump, crunched the cube, and told stories about how the bullets bounced off the girls and flew about the room.” Radzinsky called the Central State Archive of the October Revolution, where he had found some of these accounts, “the Archive of Blood.” He was convinced that Jackie was the perfect editor for this book because she “was the woman who had had the same tragedy.” Wasn’t he embarrassed to submit text to her calling his source an archive of blood? Radzinsky said she was absolutely conscious of the connection between her history and the story of the book. “She had to be very strong to read this book. It was about forgiveness, but it was also about a cruel assassination, and about the mystery of the assassination. She immediately understood what I was trying to do. For her, it was a mission too. For her, it was about suffering. She wanted to read it.”
Marian Schwartz doubts that this was Jackie’s motivation for acquiring the book. “I think she was bigger than that,” she said. “The parallels probably occurred to her, but I would not assume this hit a nerve. She may have understood the draw this thing had. She lived with people’s insatiability for contact with her and wanting to know more about JFK’s assassination.” Schwartz was more impressed by the way Jackie approached the text as a professional editor. “She knew exactly what she had and what had to be done with it.” Schwartz paused and added drily, “You don’t sell that many copies of a book with an academic coverage of the subject.” She remembered that Jackie line-edited the manuscript and toned down some of Radzinsky’s sensationalism. As a professional translator Schwartz was aware that Russian and Anglo-Saxon attitudes to language are different. Russian is a highly colored and expressive language. To render it for English-speaking tastes, some of the emotionalism has to be removed and replaced with understatement. However, a lot of the drama remained even after Schwartz and Jackie had worked on the text. Schwartz recalled three categories in which she could place most of the letters she received after the book was published: “dead Romanovs, fabulous diamonds, and the church.” Whether Jackie was thinking of 1963 or not, many readers of Radzinsky’s book found it had some of the same compelling ingredients as the death of JFK.
Lynn Franklin is also skeptical about how directly Jackie connected the book to her own experience. Franklin thought the parallel was there for the reader to see, but she didn’t think that was Jackie’s main concern. “There was something pure about Edvard beneath all the showmanship that she responded to.”
The British editor and author Ion Trewin, who helped bring out the British version of Radzinsky’s book for Hodder & Stoughton, collaborated with Jackie in collecting photographs for the book. Some of the rarest photos of the Russian royal family came via a connection Trewin’s father had had to Tsarevich Alexei’s British tutor. Trewin brought these photos to New York for Jackie to see. He remembered meeting her for the first time. When he got to Jackie’s small office, she was sitting there reading something on her desk, with her big glasses pushed up on her head. When she looked up, he half expected to see the face he remembered from dozens of photographs in the 1960s, but in fact the age had begun to show and he could see small lines around her eyes. She asked him detailed and pointed questions about the photographs he’d brought. Had they been cleared for the right to publish them in America? How much did they cost? Why had he brought this one, or that, where the figures were hard to identify? They had a thoroughly professional discussion about what still needed to be done to the book. He wanted her to go through the manuscript and take out some of the Americanisms that might jar on an English readership. He said he would take care of some of the historical inaccuracies—for example, Radzinsky had placed the tsar’s visit to Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle right next door to the Tower of London because of his unfamiliarity with British geography. Trewin did not believe that Jackie had been thinking of 1963 while working on the book, though the parallel had occurred to him. He was too shy to raise it with her. Later he stumbled out onto Fifth Avenue, his head reeling after his long meeting with her. The buses were covered with bold advertisements for Oliver Stone’s 1991 movie JFK, which dredged up conspiracy theories about his assassination. Jackie might have schooled herself not to think about 1963, but the reminders were everywhere.
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hat was more likely to have attracted Jackie to the book, in addition to its commercial promise, was the way in which Radzinsky evoked the grandeur of a lost civilization. He talked repeatedly with one old lady who could remember Russia before the revolution. He described these meetings as “our nightly conversations in a Moscow kitchen, our journey to a drowned Atlantis.” This is the characteristic note of Jackie’s own faintly nostalgic view of history, in which we live today exiled from a land of former glories that can be recaptured only in books or memories or art. Much of the early part of Radzinsky’s book is about ceremony, such as those of the old tsar’s funeral and the wedding of Nicholas to Alexandra, the sort of ritual Jackie also loved in the court of the Bourbons.
The evidence, too, is that she had buried what memories she had of 1963 as deeply, though perhaps imperfectly, as she could. Nureyev once invited her to the private screening of a film in which he played a role and his character was killed by a gunshot. Jackie shouted out loud and covered her face when the gun was fired. She didn’t remove her hands until the lights came up, whispering her apology to Nureyev: “I just couldn’t look at that.” Cecil Beaton remembered accompanying her to an opera in which several shots were fired onstage. She jumped several feet out of her seat before regaining her composure. Jackie’s friend Karl Katz took her to A Bridge Too Far, a film set during the Second World War in which there was much gunfire and carnage. “It was a terrible mistake,” he later reflected. She was visibly upset during the screening and afterward. One of Jackie’s editorial colleagues was once sent a manuscript by a well-known author that had a dream sequence in which Jackie descended a staircase to look into JFK’s open casket; next to her husband lay Marilyn Monroe. In the manuscript, she seemed to see this and accept it. Jackie’s colleague wanted to acquire the book but consulted Nancy Tuckerman first. Tuckerman thought it would be better not to ask Jackie about the book and just let it go to another publisher. However, the editor was moved by the quality of the manuscript and telephoned Jackie on the Vineyard to ask whether they might waive the Doubleday rule that nothing was to be published about the Kennedy family. When Jackie came on the phone and the passage in question was described and the word “assassination” spoken, her colleague heard Jackie’s sudden intake of breath on the other end of the line. The book project was dropped. The colleague decided that for Jackie, although the assassination was a period in her life that had been consciously set aside, mentioning it could still hit a nerve.
