Fittingly, now it was Jackie who had come to the Soviet Union to pursue the sort of cultural contact that Churchill had envisioned as marking the beginning of the end of the closed Communist society. As Macmillan liked to observe, many Russians longed as much as, if not more than, anyone in the West to see the barriers brought down. Thus the ambivalence with which Jackie’s requests for the release of certain treasures from the Soviet archives were met. On the one hand, when she asked for the costumes of Czar Nicholas and Czarina Alexandra, both of whom had been slaughtered on Lenin’s orders, the Communist bureaucrats were adamant that that would be impossible. On the other hand, there was on the bureaucrats’ part a certain palpable, even impish, desire to make an unprecedented gesture to Jackie. Finally, the Soviets surprised and delighted her by agreeing to send over the green-velvet-upholstered sleigh and lap robe of Princess Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great and Catherine I. Hoving wryly called Jackie’s triumph “a thrilling moment in detente—and for the Russian costume show.”
Shortly past 8 P.M. on the evening of December 6, 1976, Jackie, attired in a white strapless Mary McFadden dress that contrasted markedly with the workaday image she cultivated at the office, was the focal point of attention on the receiving line at the opening-night party for the Glory of Russian Costume show at the Met, for which she served as chairman. Tapes of Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky blared, and pungent clouds of Chanel’s “Russian Leather” perfume filled the air, as Diana Vreeland, at the top of her lungs, implored the many social figures in attendance—Lee Thaw, Françoise de la Renta, Marella Agnelli, and C. Z. Guest among them—to buy a copy of Jackie’s new book, which had been released that day. Soon after this, Viking hosted a small press luncheon at the Carlyle Hotel to publicize In the Russian Style. Lest any of the journalists violate his stipulation that all questions for Mrs. Onassis be confined to the book and nothing but the book, Tom Guinzburg hovered protectively about the fledgling editor, who wore a black turtleneck sweater, checked trousers, and a soupçon of makeup. Her bald, broad-shouldered boss scoffed at suggestions that she had had little role in the production of the volume. “Jackie wouldn’t have allowed her name to go on the book if she hadn’t been the prime mover behind it,” Guinzburg broke out. He added pointedly that she was not merely “a Hollywood type of star, with a double doing the hard part of the job.”
All in all, the publication of In the Russian Style was a supremely happy moment for Jackie. The book’s very existence testified to the success of her latest effort to try to fashion a new life, as she said, out of the “old anguish.” As far as Jackie was concerned, her career was well launched. She was involved in the preparation of various other Viking titles as well. Her books there would include a novel about Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, an anthology of Russian fairy tales, a biography of Mayor Richard Daley, a celebration of American women’s lives in the eighteenth century, and a collection of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln. Under the tutelage of Bryan Holme, head of the Studio Books imprint, she would develop an expertise in the production of illustrated volumes. Meanwhile, Tom Guinzburg’s robust remarks at the press luncheon, along with his gentlemanly determination to shield her from inquiries about any subjects that might prove distressing to her, can have left Jackie in no doubt that she enjoyed her publisher’s approbation and support. Thus perhaps the magnitude of the blow when, a month later, Guinzburg told her of a novel Viking planned to publish that depicted a conspiracy to assassinate a newly elected President Teddy Kennedy, who has managed to unseat President Carter in the 1980 Democratic presidential primaries. The plot was the stuff Jackie’s nightmares were made of.
There were times when Jackie’s abiding revulsion at the idea of a presidential run by the surviving Kennedy brother was palpable without her needing to utter so much as a word. When the previous year Carter had emerged as a contender for the 1976 Democratic nomination, Teddy had oscillated wildly between imagining that he would or would not challenge the Georgia governor whom he and other party liberals feared and distrusted. In the end, Teddy, exuding a melancholy sense that history might finally have passed him by, had decided to stay out of the race. After Carter became the nominee, he appeared to seize every opportunity to distance himself from the family of JFK and RFK, as if to demonstrate that he could win the election without them. The Kennedys in turn were pointedly disdainful of him. In the course of an October 1976 telephone conversation with Arthur Schlesinger, Jackie was treading familiar ground when she spoke of her displeasure with the Carter candidacy. Schlesinger commented without thinking that should Carter lose they could at least console themselves that Teddy would likely be the Democratic candidate in 1980. Immediately, upon hearing the eloquent intake of breath on the other end of the line, Schlesinger recognized his mistake.
Four months later, when Guinzburg entered Jackie’s office and shut the door after him so that they might speak in private, she responded instantly, viscerally, involuntarily, to his account of the assassination plot in the British author Jeffrey Archer’s new novel Shall We Tell the President? “It was just as though I hit her,” Guinzburg remembered years afterward. “She winced.” In that moment, all of the control that Jackie had painstakingly begun to retrieve in the course of her brave apprenticeship at Viking seemed to shatter. To make matters worse, such episodes, reprising as they did her sense of helplessness at the time of the trauma, were not anything she cared to experience in front of other people. She had long taught herself to flee before anyone could observe her like this. But in the present instance, escape was hardly an option. Jackie muttered something to the effect of “Won’t they ever stop?” Then, as the publisher looked on, she “visibly collected herself,” before posing a few quiet questions about the book. At a later date, Jackie would speak of what had been her own conscious efforts at the time “to separate my lives as a Viking employee and a Kennedy relative.” Perhaps, but somehow the phrase has the sound of a therapist’s retrospective advice. In any event, Jackie’s professional arrangement with Viking afforded her no veto power over which titles the house chose to put on its list, and eventually she accepted that if she wished to go on working there she had little choice but to endure the publication of the Archer novel. But, the question would soon arise, had she thereby countenanced it as well?
When in the fall of 1977 Shall We Tell the President? appeared in print, at least one prominent reviewer held Jackie directly responsible for a “bad thriller” that crassly exploited “a terrible fantasy—a continuing American nightmare,” the prospect of a third Kennedy killing, in order to boost book sales. “There is a word for such a book,” John Leonard wrote in The New York Times. “The word is trash. Anybody associated with its publication should be ashamed of herself.” The conspicuous pronoun at the end of that wickedly well-crafted last sentence emitted sparks. No feminist gesture, it was widely read as an indictment of Jackie, who of course had been accused of callousness and cold-bloodedness before. Leonard, whose excoriating review drew a good deal of attention, soon publicly confirmed that he had indeed been referring to Jackie. In the past, she had been castigated for her efforts to block the Manchester book. This time, the complaint was that she had failed to obstruct Shall We Tell the President? “She could have stopped its publication if she wanted to,” Leonard maintained.
Nor, her employer chimed in, had she even tried. Interviewed by The Boston Globe, Guinzburg insisted that she “didn’t indicate any distress or anger when I told her we bought the book in England several months ago.” Jackie’s reply to Guinzburg’s published account was to quit her job on October 13, 1977. Guinzburg had witnessed her intense bodily reaction to news of the book; he knew the pain his words had caused her. Now she simply could not abide the fact that he had chosen to tell the world a very different story. “When it was suggested that I had had something to do with acquiring the book and that I was not distressed by its publication, I felt I had to resign,” Jackie said in a public statement. But just a
s her announced reasons for coming to Viking in the first place had been greeted with broad public disbelief, so too were the reasons she offered for her departure. Thereafter, suspicions abounded that she had exaggerated or altogether fabricated her upset about the assassination novel, and that, in truth, she had quit her job solely due to pressure from her first husband’s family. To be sure, the Kennedys were far from delighted about the Archer novel, but in view of what Guinzburg later revealed about Jackie’s response when he first spoke to her of the book, her explanation rings true. In the wake of her departure from Viking, Guinzburg continued to publicly avow that he had observed no distress on her part: “My own affection for the Kennedy family and the extremely effective and valued contribution that Mrs. Onassis has made to Viking over the past two years would obviously have been an overriding factor in the final decision to publish any particular book which might cause her further anguish. Indeed, it is precisely because of the generous and understanding response of Mrs. Onassis at the time we discussed this book and before the contract was signed which gave me confidence to proceed with the novel’s publication.” In short, the man who only recently had defended Jackie’s genuineness now sought to call it into question.
Three weeks later, at a time of broad public curiosity about her post-Viking plans, Jackie, wearing an Oscar de la Renta sequined skirt and chiffon top, limited to a mere five minutes her visit to the Louis XV–style limestone town house on East Sixty-fourth Street where a private preview of the exhibition Paris–New York: A Continuing Romance was in progress at the Wildenstein galleries. Clutching champagne glasses, Givenchy-, Adolfo-, and Halston-clad socialites inspected French and American paintings and drawings at a benefit for the New York Public Library, organized by Brooke Astor, Mary Rockefeller, John Sargent, and others. As it happened, the full-bearded, sturdily built Sargent, president of the mass-market publishing giant Doubleday & Company, had been Jackie’s cohost at a small preliminary dinner party earlier that evening, where the guests had included Louis Auchincloss, the New Yorker writer Brendan Gill, and the historian Barbara Tuchman, whose book The Guns of August, about the First World War, President Kennedy had much admired. Despite the literary tone of the Onassis-Sargent event, Tom Guinzburg, though he too had purchased a ticket to the art gallery preview, had been conspicuously relegated to another hostess’s dinner table, leading to talk, apparently not without factual basis, that Jackie wished to avoid him. Her pairing this evening with Sargent, who in addition to being one of the nation’s premier publishing executives had the richly earned reputation of a ladies’ man and society reveler, spurred the fashion columnist Eugenia Sheppard to wonder in print whether Jackie might already have made some sort of arrangement with Doubleday.
Neither then, nor three months later when Doubleday announced her appointment to the post of associate editor, did the firm known for producing more books per year than any of its rivals seem a likely haven for her. Jackie was meticulous about matters of book design; Doubleday titles tended to be shoddily produced. Jackie had highly cultivated aesthetic tastes; Doubleday’s target audience was middlebrow, the firm’s objective being, as Edna Ferber once remarked, the placement of “books in the hands of the unbookish.” So why did Jackie choose Doubleday rather than one of the small New York firms specializing in art and illustrated books with whom she also had had talks in this period? John Sargent’s record in the matter of an earlier assassination-themed book whose publication had threatened to be painful to Jackie was surely no impediment to his efforts to sign her. Doubleday had been scheduled to bring out the American edition of a new book by the British writer J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, which featured fantastical riffs on the murder of JFK that the author billed as “pornographic science fiction.” Prominent in the work was a section titled “Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy,” which when it appeared as a stand-alone piece in the British literary magazine Ambit in the late 1960s had prompted Randolph Churchill, who was personally devoted to Jackie, to militate to have the journal’s London Arts Grant canceled. Presently, when John Sargent learned that the offending work was on Doubleday’s list of upcoming titles—indeed, that finished books were ready to be shipped to stores—he had the entire print run pulped. At so cost-conscious a publisher, the destruction of all those books—a gesture of respect for Sargent’s old friend Mrs. Onassis—was a huge deal. Eight years later, when Jackie accepted Sargent’s invitation to come to Doubleday, she was choosing a firm whose chief executive had emphatically put her sensitivities first in a way that Tom Guinzburg, for all of his public posturing, had simply failed to do.
Jackie’s arrival at Doubleday’s Park Avenue headquarters that February of 1978 had a Sisyphean quality. Again, there were the reporters and other curious people who descended en masse to monitor her comings and goings. Again, there was abundant skepticism about her intentions, some of her new coworkers being among the doubters. John Sargent, for his part, detected a certain amount of initial resentment among Doubleday staff members—“a feeling that perhaps Jackie wasn’t all that serious … [a] perception among the troops that this was just a diversion for her.” Jackie had spent the better part of two years proving herself at Viking, yet now it fell to her to demonstrate all over again that she really did mean to build an important career. More than that, she somehow had to make it possible for colleagues to deal with her as though she were any other Doubleday employee, which of course she was not. In effect, Jackie’s challenge was identical to the one that had faced her at Viking, and many were the predictions that her new job would end in disappointment and debacle as well. This time, however, she proved the skeptics wrong. At length, Jackie made such a point of wanting to be treated like everyone else, downplaying her glamour, scoffing at her fame, that, to Sargent’s sense, her new colleagues “couldn’t help but be charmed.”
At this most intensely and unabashedly commercial of houses, where she was to spend the rest of her career, Jackie would go on to publish numerous best sellers, the memoirs of Gelsey Kirkland and Michael Jackson, Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, and Bill Moyers’s Healing and the Mind notable among them. But what might be best described as her signature titles tended to be smaller, more personal affairs, reflecting as they did a certain late-twentieth-century patrician sensibility—the product of a once all-powerful world that she wistfully acknowledged to be in decline. With their overlay of poetic regret, a good many of the books Jackie produced at Doubleday—stylish volumes about such topics as women in the age of the Sun King, Indian court life from 1590 to 1947, the garden photography of Eugène Atget, and Stanford White’s New York—might almost have been created to adorn the window display at the carriage trade Madison Avenue Bookstore (now defunct), where she was herself a customer.
Interestingly, a similar preoccupation with cultural evanescence infused Jackie’s work during this period on behalf of the landmarks preservation movement. At various times, she spoke with poignance of Manhattan monuments disappearing, of patches of sky being snatched away, of a cityscape that was dying “by degrees.” Pressed to explain why she had become involved in the fight to save the ornate Beaux Arts–style Grand Central Station, whose bankrupt owners hoped to raise money by allowing a fifty-five-story commercial tower to be built above it, Jackie said: “It’s a beautiful building that I’m used to seeing. I’d be outraged if it was replaced by steel and glass.” The occasion for this remark was a widely publicized April 16, 1978, train trip by some three hundred authors, artists, performers, and other preservationists to Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court was to hear the owners’ suit to remove Grand Central’s previously accorded landmark designation in order that construction on the modernist Marcel Breuer–designed tower might begin. For all the notable names on the passenger list of the Landmark Express, as the train had been named for the day, none elicited greater press interest than that of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Her participation brought the preservationists’ cause national publicity that by
their own reckoning they could not otherwise have hoped to attain. For once, instead of ducking the melee of cameras and reporters, Jackie seemed eager to speak up: “A big corporation shouldn’t be able to destroy a building that has meant so much to so many for so many generations. If Grand Central goes, all of the landmarks in this country will go as well.” Still, it was less anything Jackie said or did that was so helpful as it was the very fact of her presence.
After the Supreme Court upheld the railroad station’s protected status, Jackie went on to play a prominent part in other Manhattan landmark disputes. She lent her star wattage to avert the razing of Lever House; to halt the construction of a fifty-nine-story office tower above St. Bartholomew’s Church; and to force a developer to decrease the size of a new office complex planned for Columbus Circle. The dynamic in all of this was comparable to what had occurred when she managed to secure the release of the princess’s sleigh from the Soviet archives; or when, at a later date, she won the assent of heretofore intransigent French authorities to let the photographer Deborah Turbeville into certain spectral back rooms of the palace of the Bourbons for the Doubleday book Unseen Versailles, the original creative concept for which had been Jackie’s. The exercise of personal power was certainly not a new experience for Jackie. In the past, she had done it on behalf of JFK, RFK, and others. The difference at this point was that she was acting not to advance anyone else’s purposes, but rather her own. Her interventions had important private consequences, in addition to the well-known public ones. Quite apart from any books produced or landmarks saved, Jackie’s successes contributed to her quiet, ongoing process of healing, as she whose life had been forever transformed by eight and a half seconds of absolute powerlessness asserted again and again that she was anything but helpless.
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Page 31