by Tina Cassidy
Guinzburg knew that in order for Jackie to be successful, she needed an amanuensis to help her in the office. Singleton was resilient, had a sense of humor, and she was pretty well liked in the other departments. Perhaps she could help the staff warm to Jackie, too.
He called Singleton into his office.
There’s a new editor about to start, he told her. Jackie Onassis. I want you to work for her. I know the last thing you want is another editor to report to. It won’t be easy, but you have the qualities needed for such a challenge. You’re going to have to handle a lot of stuff.
Guinzburg understood what that meant more than Singleton did.
While the young employee was shocked, she also knew immediately that there was no way she could turn down Guinzburg’s request. It was not because she wanted to work for a famous person, but because she liked him. Period.
I understand, she told him.1
She returned to her desk as Guinzburg called the rest of the editorial department into the conference room, hoping his publishing family would accept a new in-law.
When the meeting ended, two of the other editorial assistants came by Singleton’s desk.
“Well,” said one, “I guess you’re going to have a lot of extra work.”
That night, Singleton called a friend to tell her who her new boss would be.
There was a long silence on the other end of the phone as her friend contemplated the reason for someone so rich and famous to go to work at a publishing house.
“Why?”
On the fourth Monday of September, Jackie woke up and ate a boiled egg, fortifying herself for an important day. Over the weekend, as if it were one last fling before it was time to get serious, she had attended a Frank Sinatra concert—with Frank Sinatra. It was she who received the standing ovation.
Montauk was only a few weeks ago, but its memory was fading fast, overpowered by Manhattan’s energized transition to fall. Instead of heading straight to Radcliffe, Caroline chose to break free of Massachusetts for a while and enrolled in a ten-month decorative arts program, which would start soon, on October 1, at Sotheby’s in London. John was back at Collegiate, the exclusive boys-only day school on the Upper West Side, close enough to keep an eye on. Jackie had been putting the finishing touches on her country house in New Jersey and had signed on to the Shriver for President committee. It was a new beginning for her, too, and she must have had a few butterflies in her stomach that morning. She pulled on a gray shirtdress, grabbed her glasses, and allowed the doorman to hail her a cab.
“Six-twenty-five Madison Avenue,” she told the driver.
It was her first day on the job—her first day “working” since Jack had proposed. She was forty-six and, as the nastier gossip columnists like to point out, her face was starting to show it.
Besides Dorothy Schiff’s proposal in 1964 to make her a columnist, Jackie had had other job offers. While she was still mourning JFK’s death, some even joked that her “job” should be to marry Adlai Stevenson in order to turn him into a viable presidential candidate. Publicly, she shrunk from any suggestion about a second act, saying, “I’ll just retire to Boston, and try to convince John Jr. that his father was president.” Understandably, her children became her sole focus.
September 18, 1975. Frank Sinatra escorts Jackie out of the Uris Theater in New York via the stage door, where he was performing, on their way to dinner. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
In 1973 she had considered taking a lucrative gig anchoring an NBC television show about Venice and Angkor Wat. But Onassis had vetoed the idea.
“No Greek wife works,” he huffed.2
She was no longer a Greek wife.
Fashion houses asked her to be a spokeswoman or design her own line. Once she had told a reporter, “I was reading Carlyle and he said you should do the duty that lies nearest you. And the thing that lies nearest me is the children.”3 Now, the kids were practically gone. As Jackie’s cab pulled up outside of Viking, being an editor was the duty nearest her.
Singleton, upstairs in her cubicle awaiting Jackie’s arrival, was having a fashion emergency. She usually wore jeans to the office but on this occasion had chosen a denim jumper with a shirt and stockings, which had just snagged and run. She hastily shellacked her leg with clear nail polish and dashed down in the elevator, trailing noxious fumes.
Guinzburg had warned Singleton that there would be photographers, but she was utterly unprepared for the pandemonium on the other side of the elevator doors: fifty journalists—cameras, TV crews. There was Mrs. Onassis sailing in. As Jackie crossed the threshold, her transformation into a working woman was symbolic of one of the greatest shifts in American life since the Industrial Revolution, with 40 percent of women then in the workforce, a number that was increasing every day. That first step inside the building transformed her into a working woman, a new breed that was being celebrated, questioned, and picked apart in magazines, at cocktail parties, and on playgrounds across America.
Jackie did not seem to be weighed down by the history she was dragging behind her. She wore her glasses and her smile as a perfect mask. Singleton saw that this was not exactly a rescue mission she had to perform. Jackie was used to being mobbed. But Singleton—in her first of many protective acts—pushed her way through the crowd, introduced herself, grabbed Jackie by the arm, and led her to the elevator. Jackie ignored the media, never stopped to pose. She acted as if Singleton were her best friend and the only person in the lobby. And she started to babble. Jackie talked and talked and never stopped as they waited for the elevator, a monologue that did not cease on the ride up to the sixteenth floor. The chatter seemed to be a nervous reflex, or perhaps a defensive one. If she kept talking, no one would interrupt her with an inane or awkward question—the kind ordinary people ask when they become unhinged in the presence of a famous person.
Singleton did not pay much attention to the headlines during college about Jackie’s buying sprees and marriage to Onassis. And she had missed out on the era of the Kennedy mystique because she was in junior high school during the Camelot years when, by her own account, she “wasn’t sophisticated” and was “more of a bookworm.”4 But Singleton had been paying more attention lately, trying to understand her new boss. Over the weekend, there were reports and photographs of Jackie attending the Sinatra concert and having dinner with him at 21 after his performance.5 With few preconceived notions, Singleton was still surprised by this beaming, energetic, and seemingly sincere woman: a woman who acted like it was her first day at school, a woman who was going on and on and about how thrilled she was with the idea of being able to create books and what an opportunity this was and she was so excited to learn the basics of editing and publishing and her children were teasing her about not knowing anything!
When the elevator opened on the sixteenth floor, the Viking office and Singleton’s desk were right there. There was no additional layer of security, not even an extra door. There was no intercom system. Singleton suddenly realized that she—and she alone—had in several ways replaced the Secret Service and Onassis’s Pinkerton guards as Jackie’s front line of defense.
Singleton began her cursory tour by showing off her own little cubicle, piled high with manuscripts. The mound of mail caught Jackie’s attention.
“It’s already started,” Singleton told Jackie.
“I’m sorry,” Jackie groaned, rolling her eyes.
“It’s OK,” Singleton fibbed. “I’m looking forward to it.”
Singleton explained the phone system to her—mostly that there wasn’t one. She led her to a simple office nearby—smaller than most—with a window. Jackie scanned her standard-issue desk, a typewriter, filing cabinets, and a couple of chairs. She appreciated how small a publisher this was and believed it would be a good fit. Viking may have been making it up as it went along, but its lack of structure meant there would be lots of opportunities to learn.
Guinzburg, meanwhile, had been scheming to commemorate the day—for him as well as
for Jackie. What better way than surprising her with a portrait sitting in front of Alfred Eisenstaedt, the father of photojournalism, who had taken the iconic photograph of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square when World War II had ended. Eisenstaedt was setting up in the conference room while Guinzburg went into Jackie’s office to greet her, immediately struck by how happy and relaxed she seemed. He whisked her away to introduce her to the other department heads, who already were feeling resentful. After that, she sat down at a burled wood table in the book-lined conference room and posed for Eisenstaedt, who had placed some picture books—including one of his own—as a resting prop for her left hand, which was still wearing what appeared to be wedding rings. In another photo, Guinzburg, balding with longish gray sideburns at forty-nine, stood behind her, posing casually with a tie but no jacket.
When Eisenstaedt was done, Guinzburg took her to lunch at the Plaza and then granted some interviews.
McCall’s wanted to know how Jackie’s frequent flying to London, Gstaad, or Acapulco would square with a full-time job.
September 22, 1975. In the Viking Press offices, the newly hired editor sits with Viking’s Thomas Guinzburg, the man who hired her. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
“She’d be sure to come back with a book,” Guinzburg said. “People tend to think of her today as Mrs. Onassis. But remember Jacqueline Kennedy in Paris at the Élysée Palace with Charles de Gaulle and touring the Louvre with André Malraux. She was a cultural force for a whole generation—and she can be again.”
To Newsweek, he offered this understatement: “One is not unmindful of the range of contacts that lady has.”
Jackie was also low-key, telling a reporter: “I expect to learn the ropes at first. You sit in editorial conferences, you discuss general things, maybe you’re assigned to a special project of your own. Really, I expect to be doing what my employer tells me to do.”
On Jackie’s second day on the job, Barbara Burn, a special projects editor at Viking, took Jackie to lunch at Guinzburg’s suggestion to explain to her exactly what the role of a consulting editor was. Burn had made a reservation at the Carlyle Hotel, a location that would have made it easy for Jackie to head home after lunch, which Burn assumed she would.6
“Burn, [party of] two,” she told the host, when they arrived. The staff immediately cleared a large table and sat the women. Jackie ordered a salad. But the staff was so unnerved trying to respect her space that she had to eat her lunch with an iced tea spoon because no one saw her looking for a fork.
Jackie got down to business. “Look,” she said to Burn, “the only other consulting editor at Viking is Malcolm Cowley. I couldn’t begin to do what he does.”
Cowley had covered World War I for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, was part of the literary scene in Paris with Hemingway and Fitzgerald in the 1920s, and chronicled the expat scene. He had written a couple of acclaimed books and at Viking had pushed to publish Kerouac’s On the Road.
“So I don’t know exactly what I’m supposed to do,” she told Burn.
“Start by reading manuscripts and writing evaluations,” Burn told her.
When the check came, Jackie paid for it. But Burn, still in the mode of teaching Jackie the ropes of publishing, told her to “be sure to keep the receipt.”
“Oh, never mind, I paid in cash.”
“No, no,” Burn said. “You’re supposed to charge it and keep the receipt.”
On the walk back to the office, Burn was struck by how the masses of people parted before them, staring. Jackie never made eye contact, but did not complain.7
Once the world knew where Jackie worked, the office was deluged—with manuscripts, forty to fifty unsolicited ones per day; crazy phone calls from people asking her for money; adoring mail containing locks of hair; and new interpretations of the Kennedy assassinations. One woman sent in a portrait of her grandchild—dead, in a casket—because she said she had remembered when Jackie lost a child. Singleton intercepted such things.8 But she was becoming increasingly nervous about it and told Jackie what was happening.
“Throw it away,” Jackie told her. “Rose Kennedy responds to every card, every letter she gets about Jack or Bobby. She sends back a prayer card … You just can’t encourage that kind of thing. I know it sounds cruel but it’s better not to encourage it.”
Singleton appreciated that there was no sense perpetuating the myth. But not every request was so easily dispatched.
One morning, around 10:00, the receptionist called Singleton to the visitor’s waiting area because there was a large man there who wanted to see Jackie. When Singleton saw him, he told her he had dynamite strapped to him. Singleton could thank her psychiatric nursing experiences for being unflappable at that moment. She patted him down, was relieved to find nothing alarming, and accepted the manuscript he had brought for Jackie before loading him onto an elevator. Just as she did that, another elevator opened, disgorging a man dressed as clergy, who had also shown up a few times before saying it was his wish before he died to see Jackie. Singleton had a persuasive conversation with him and ushered that man back around to the elevator as well.
When Singleton returned to her cubicle, the phones were ringing. Tabloids had been increasing their cash offers for interviews, to no effect. But then Singleton was surprised to answer the phone and have Mike Wallace’s secretary on the line.
“I have Mr. Wallace on the phone for you,” she said.
Singleton, feminist or no, was annoyed that he had made his secretary call, and worse, the woman referred to her boss as “Mr. Wallace,” whose voice was suddenly booming through the receiver.
“Hi, Becky,” he said.
Two strikes, she thought. Becky? Not even Rebecca?
“How are we gonna get Jackie on 60 Minutes?” Wallace asked.
Singleton was completely unmoved—he had blown it at “hello”—and she was enjoying the fact that he was surprised by her solid refusal.
Wallace wasn’t the only one who was off the mark calling her Becky. Once, she wistfully remarked to Jackie that she really preferred the name Rebecca. Jackie laughed, then told her that she had never really been fond of “Jackie,” and preferred Zhack-LEEN, the French pronunciation, but oh well. Regardless, they continued to refer to each other by Jackie and Becky and laughed about it.
After Singleton hung up with Wallace, a regular gadfly was on the phone asking to speak with Jackie.
“I’m sorry, she is not available,” Singleton said.
“Then I would like a detailed description of what she’s wearing.”
Singleton declined.
The next caller said she wanted Jackie to know that a noted theater critic had parked his van in front of 1040 Fifth and was stealing her furniture. Singleton hung up.
But one threat was serious enough to warrant the FBI to spend the day there just in case the person rang again. He didn’t.
Not all of those seeking to meet Jackie were unstable. The author J. P. Donleavy made an appointment to see her, saying he was writing a book about fox hunting and could he speak to her about it? Jackie thought the request was odd, so she had Burn sit in on the meeting. But Burn had never fox hunted and so once she knew it was safe, Burn left them to talk. After Donleavy left, Jackie told Burn, “It was fine. I think he just wanted to meet me.”9
Jackie wasted no time settling into a routine and attempting to stifle any perception that she was a dilettante.10 She arrived by taxi between 9:30 and 10:00 AM, greeted the receptionist on the sixteenth floor—“Good morning, Patty,” “Good morning, Mrs. Onassis”—and then said hello to Singleton.
“Good morning, Becky!”
“Good morning, Jackie.”
She poured her own coffee into a paper cup with a plastic holder. There was an office rule: the first person in had to brew the coffee. One morning, Richard Barber, director of publicity at Viking, arrived to find Jackie wrestling on the floor with a bag of coffee trying to open it. She sheepishly handed it him. He opened it. And then she took
it back to brew a pot for the office.11
Back at her desk, the in-box would be stuffed with manuscripts that Singleton had screened to weed out the bad and the crafty—those seeking some sort of autographed response.
Singleton complained to Jackie about these blatant attempts to get a response just to say they got one from Jackie.
“OK,” Jackie said, about to show her sense of humor. “These ones that are really important or supposedly important, you sign those and I’ll sign some of yours.”
They forged each other’s signatures until they each got very good at it. Singleton shredded the little notes that Jackie sent her, such as “Write him ‘no’” or “Tell him ‘yes.’” She didn’t want anyone fishing through the wastebasket for a memento.
Singleton also screened her calls. Whenever a rumor rippled through the media, the switchboard would light up.
“Is it true that Jackie is playing a witch in an Italian movie?”
