Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  (photo credit 9.8)

  It’s possible that Jackie saw herself as a more lighthearted and even comic figure than the grieving icon that Radzinsky and many others believed her to be. When she went to Russia, she tried on Alexandra’s opera costume and made no pilgrimage to Yekaterinburg. Her costume at the launch party for Radzinsky’s book at New York’s Russian Tea Room is interesting. Did she wear a simple black dress, as if she were in mourning for the murdered tsar, or something demure and unlikely to draw attention? No. She wore a dress that recalled a harlequin’s outfit from the Italian Renaissance. The harlequin was a stock comic figure in the productions of the commedia dell’arte, something between a jester and a buffoon, whose origins dated from sixteenth-century Italy. Jackie had shown an earlier interest in the harlequin figure when she had purchased a harlequin design drawn by Cecil Beaton and exhibited at a gallery in New York. Now she dressed in a harlequin motif for the party to celebrate the publication of Radzinsky’s book. She sat on a banquette with the author and looked vaguely distressed as he told her another of his tall tales. In the courts of kings, queens, and maharajahs, not only princesses, artists, and courtesans were in attendance but also professional clowns, who amused the assembled courtiers after supper. Her harlequin outfit was closer to clown than to queen, and perhaps the circus queen that people remembered her posing as when she was young was nearer her own vision of herself than the perpetual widow of popular imagination.

  CHAPTER 10

  Just a sheltered socialite.

  JACKIE ON HOW SHE WAS STEREOTYPED IN THE PRESS

  Jackie resented being considered a socialite. She thought that winning Vogue’s Prix de Paris was proof at an early age that she had substance as well as style, that she could compete with other talented young women to be chosen for a job that would require real work. Vogue in the 1950s was much more highbrow and socially exclusive than it is today. It published poets such as W. H. Auden, whose work took some training to enjoy, and featured couture clothes that were well out of the range of the ordinary pocketbook. Its models were often East Coast debutantes or young women from titled families in Europe. Jackie was perfect for the Vogue magazine of 1951, and that was a reputation she had to spend the rest of her life trying to live down.

  Arthur Schlesinger won his early fame by producing volumes of history on American liberalism and the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt. He also had a fondness for the social whirl and liked Jackie from the first time he met her at Hyannis in the 1950s. She liked him, too, and by the time JFK won the White House, they were on comfortable, teasing terms. At one of her most famous White House parties, the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals, who had refused to visit the United States after America’s recognition of the Fascist regime in Spain, played for the Kennedys’ guests after supper. At another party, in honor of her sister, Lee, many of her sister’s 1960s jet-setting friends flew to Washington for the occasion. Afterward Jackie told Schlesinger that she had come up with a test to measure “the artistic sensibilities” of members of the Kennedy administration. Whom would they rather have return to the White House, Pablo Casals or Lee Radziwill? She was making fun of Lee as a party girl, but she was also making fun of Schlesinger, who she suspected would choose Lee before Casals. As for herself, she had enjoyed herself at both events. Schlesinger noticed this about Jackie on another White House evening, when he and his wife were invited to a small dinner party that included Oleg Cassini and his girlfriend as well as a couple from Paris Match. Cassini and the rest of international café society didn’t bring out the best in Jackie, thought Schlesinger. If she hadn’t married JFK, he thought, Jackie would have turned out more like Lee. “But I love her,” he wrote in his diary.

  If she created books on high culture by publishing artists of the ballet world and novels of a Nobel Prize winner, she also did books on the taste, decorating habits, and manners of social elites in both America and Europe. She was willing to break the American taboo on speaking about social distinction, a topic more dangerous in American conversation than sex, politics, or religion. The Kennedys were the classic case of Americans’ desire to look at rich, handsome people having a good time without thinking too much about whether money in their case didn’t sometimes trump merit or how they had achieved social prominence. Joseph Kennedy loved Jack’s marriage to Jacqueline Bouvier. She put the stamp of good breeding and respectability on a fortune that came from cheap Hollywood films, Wall Street manipulations, and bootleg liquor. However, Jackie could sometimes be too much of a good thing. Jack Kennedy worried that she would tip the scale. It was fine for the Kennedys to be seen playing touch football, a sport all Americans could understand, but in the White House, Jackie’s evident liking for French clothes, fox hunting, and fine wines was a political liability. He once remarked that she had “a little too much status and not enough quo.” In the summers, when she vacationed with Lee and the newspapers photographed her boating with the Fiat magnate Gianni Agnelli off Capri or with Aristotle Onassis among the Greek islands, JFK wrote to her to protest. She was going too far. He wanted more pictures of the kids and fewer of her with kingpins. However, this was the price JFK paid for his freedom with other women while she was away, and she was happy, within certain limits, to make him pay the full fare.

  After JFK died, John Kenneth Galbraith advised Ted Kennedy that if he wanted to be serious about acquiring national political stature, he had to give up all the Camelot nonsense Jackie had devised for his brother’s memory. Being “beautiful people” for the short time they were in office was fine for Jack and Jackie, but in the 1970s Ted should not try that himself. Galbraith thought the residents of the White House ought to be drab and compassionate. There should be no black tie evenings with ladies in rhinestones. In short, having Jackie as his sister-in-law could be a liability as well as an asset as Ted planned his career.

  It is one of the strangest quirks of Jackie’s view of her own social position that she should repeatedly tell people she felt like an outsider in American society while most Americans regarded her as the ultimate insider. Even though she was married in Newport, lived on Fifth Avenue, and rented a house in the hunt country near Middleburg, Virginia, something in her was like a little girl with her nose pressed to the glass, looking in on the lives of those more privileged than she was. This quirk emerges in the books she published on America’s most famous shop for luxury goods, Tiffany & Co., on the life of a Vanderbilt heiress living in the 1890s, and on the decoration of bedrooms by baronesses who wouldn’t think of sleeping in anything less than a four-poster with velvet curtains. If she hadn’t been interested in the aesthetic that joined luxury goods with good manners, she wouldn’t have spent so much time commissioning books about it. Her books show her repeatedly supporting four-color anatomies of etiquette and social origins. They offer an opportunity to explore a significant theme in her character.

  Three authors whom she repeatedly backed to discuss top-shelf taste, history, and design were John Loring, Louis Auchincloss, and Didi Ladd. One was Tiffany’s design director for thirty years, another was the novelist of Manhattan’s haute bourgeoisie, and the third was an American debutante turned fashion model, expatriate, and French baroness. These were all occupations and pastimes that Jackie was particularly drawn to. The story of her relationship with these authors hints at how Jackie may have thought about what Cole Porter and Louis Armstrong called being “in high so-ci-ety.”

  Breakfast at Tiffany’s

  John Loring used to lunch regularly with Jackie at New York’s most exclusive tables, but he has the sort of charm that suggests he would have much rather been with you. He retired as Tiffany’s design director in 2009 and now divides his time between a newly gentrified patch of West Palm Beach and Manhattan, still busy with freelance designing, decorating, and writing.

  Loring worked on six books with Jackie, more than she did with any other author, and Nancy Tuckerman remembered that “she liked him, she really did.” Pictures of them together show her happy a
nd utterly at ease with him. Loring had a funny story about the origins of their first book together. Walter Hoving was the founder and president of a holding company that owned Tiffany and other expensive stores, such as Bonwit Teller. Hoving was of Jackie’s parents’ generation and a friend of Jackie’s mother, as well as the father of Tom Hoving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hoving told Loring soon after he was hired at Tiffany that not only was he going to supervise design, but because he had established a reputation as a writer on design in magazines like Architectural Digest, Hoving wanted him to write for Tiffany too. Hoving had in mind an illustrated book on Tiffany table settings. “My friend Janet [Auchincloss]’s daughter is an editor over at Doubleday,” Hoving told Loring. This was the true grand seigneur style—to refer to Jackie without mentioning her name. Hoving called both Loring and Jackie in to an appointment in his office. “He sat us down like two bad children,” Loring recalled, “and told us what we had to do.” There had been a book called Tiffany Table Settings in 1960. Now Loring and Jackie were being assigned to produce a book that would be called The New Tiffany Table Settings when it was published in 1981. For thirty years Tiffany had sponsored exhibitions of tables designed by famous hostesses and decorators in the shop’s Fifth Avenue showrooms. Now these table settings would be photographed for a book, as a way of promoting sales of flatware and plates in the shop as well as Tiffany jewels and other Tiffany objects that could be used to decorate the tables.

  (photo credit 10.1)

  (photo credit 10.2)

  (photo credit 10.3)

  After the meeting finished, Loring went back to his office thinking, “This is not going to happen. Why would she be interested?” Nevertheless, Hoving’s idea had come to Jackie at the very beginning of her Doubleday years, and it must have struck the management at the publisher as a good way to introduce her to some of the ins and outs of producing an expensive illustrated book, since a good deal of the work would fall on Loring’s shoulders and she could learn from him. Tiffany paid for the photographs and retained the copyright so the company could use them later for promotional purposes if necessary. Doubleday was a big operation with a good deal of capacity at its printing presses. This Tiffany proposition was probably not an enormous risk for the publisher. In the end, sales of the book made it among the top sellers on Jackie’s list. This and the subsequent five Tiffany books had sales that were mainly in the healthy five figures, exceeding those of many of Jackie’s books by well-known authors such as Judith Jamison, George Plimpton, and Stewart Udall, whom Jackie had hand-picked, but which did not live up to expectations. The Tiffany books would not have become such a regular feature of Jackie’s working years in publishing if they were not profitable. The fact that Loring went on to produce fifteen more Tiffany books after Jackie died, suggests that she and Loring had designed a winning formula.

  Jackie laid down a ground rule with Loring before they got started: “You have to understand that I cannot put my name on a commercial enterprise.” She said she looked on their book as a “social document,” not advertising. It was going to be snapshots of social customs, social settings, and life in a particular section of American society at a particular time. Several times Loring returned to this point. The book on Tiffany table settings and the other Tiffany books that came afterward were not “advertorials,” that is, sales plugs disguised as unbiased editorials. They were not glorified merchandise catalogues, even though the photographs are gorgeous, printed on beautiful paper, and the designers came up with theatrical settings for plates and silverware, most of which could readily be found for sale in the shop. Of course, Tiffany occupies a unique place in the history of design. It is the one American retail institution that has consistently championed beautifully designed objects for dining, wearing, and decorating for more than a century. Charles Tiffany and Louis Comfort Tiffany were two of America’s greatest nineteenth-century designers. Great architects of the Beaux Arts period at the turn of the century, such as Stanford White, collaborated with Tiffany designers. With a few exceptions, however, the books Loring and Jackie did together do not delve much into this history. They concentrate on what was for sale at Tiffany in the 1980s. They are snapshots of the way people spent money in the Reagan decade, when taxes were cut, when the Dallas episodes on television had nothing to do with Jackie’s moments there, and when Joan Collins in Dynasty embodied the era’s female zeitgeist. In the books themselves Jackie kept her distance: her name did not appear on the jackets or even in the acknowledgments. Nor was she mentioned in the New York Times review of The New Tiffany Table Settings. She told Loring that she wanted to do the book because she had worked on table settings at the White House and was proud of her innovations in White House entertaining—for example, she had broken with the old convention of dining stiffly at a long U-shaped table by seating guests at smaller round tables for eight or ten.

  In a later Tiffany book, Loring defended the glitzy, over-the-top displays of wealth by saying that the book provided “a unique social document of the times, the end of the Reagan era, and the settings of its celebratory mood, whose buoyant delight in the lavishly, splendidly ephemeral has not been seen since the great balls of eighteenth-century Europe.” This was certainly the era of French history to which Jackie gravitated, but Tiffany never produced anything as remarkable in the 1980s as the designers who had been hired by the French court in the 1700s. Neither Paloma Picasso nor Elsa Peretti, both of whom created objects for sale at Tiffany in that era, designed anything to compare with Sèvres porcelain or commodes by Boulle.

  Loring wanted to sell good design and make money. Jackie wanted to make beautiful books, and profitability was important to her, too. There was a market for expensive glamour in the Reagan years, and they meant to take advantage of it. They asked people to design table settings partly as a way to show off the chiefs of their two enterprises: for example, they chose Mrs. Walter Hoving at Tiffany and John Sargent at Doubleday. There were tables by decorators like Mario Buatta, whom the Reagans had asked to redo the state guest rooms at Blair House; Sister Parish, from whom Jackie had commissioned interiors; and even Jackie’s sister, Lee. There were tables by socialites such as Pat Buckley, C. Z. Guest, and Nan Kempner. There were also eccentric choices: Andy Warhol set up a table for someone spending a night in jail, and Diana Vreeland imagined what Catherine the Great’s breakfast table might look like as she read a morning letter from Voltaire. What Jackie and Loring added to Reaganism in these Tiffany books was a sense of humor.

  They had trouble on their hands when Henry Platt, who was vice chairman at Tiffany when the project started, insisted on putting his name on the cover of the book. Platt, a descendant of Charles Tiffany and Louis Comfort Tiffany, considered himself a social arbiter and held balls to introduce the young women of the season. When Loring phoned Jackie to tell her that Platt wanted his name on the cover because he believed it would help sell copies, Jackie replied, “Oh, he’s going to have to come to Doubleday to tell me that.” She set up a large meeting at Doubleday. “We’re going to put a spotlight on this behavior,” she said. Platt and Loring came to a Doubleday conference room where a large group of senior people from the publisher had gathered. Jackie was not there. It was unusual for her to be late. Finally she came in. “Now, Henry, what is your announcement?” she said as she sat down. Platt began, “For the sake of marketing the book, I will allow my name to go on the cover.” Platt meant that he wanted double billing with Loring. “In what order?” Jackie asked. Loring interjected, “Alphabetical!” Laughter came from around the table. Jackie remarked, “It is one of the great tragedies of editors that our names, unlike your own, must go unsung.” More laughter. Jackie knew that it was better to be quiet about one’s own achievements than to trumpet them aloud. She was not above issuing a public put-down to Platt, who got his name on the cover of the first book but on none of the others. Although she successfully resisted any credits to her in the books, Loring managed to get her to be a little more for
thcoming in different ways. As editor, she still remained largely “unsung,” but references to her began to crop up in subsequent books.