by William Kuhn
Kazantzakis also came up in a letter she wrote to Arthur Schlesinger in May of 1965 about his book on the Kennedy administration, A Thousand Days. She objected to Schlesinger’s characterization of Adlai Stevenson as a politician typical of Greek classical antiquity while Jack Kennedy was typical of classical Rome. She concluded from reading Kazantzakis that the Greeks had warred with the gods, that a desperate defiance of fate was characteristic of Greek tragedy and the Greek character. That epic struggle reminded her of Jack. It was unlike Roman politicians, who had more prosaic and practical ideas about power. “Lyndon Johnson is really the Roman—a classic Emperor—McNamara—maybe even George Washington are Roman—but not Jack.” She read her way into identifying with what she understood to be a Greek frame of mind long before she married Aristotle Onassis in 1968. Just as reading about the world of Byron and Melbourne had been a bridge from Black Jack to JFK, Kazantzakis led her to Onassis.
When she married Onassis, the changes she made on his yacht Christina were not all to do with the carpets and furniture. Peter Beard, a handsome photographer who has been described as “half Tarzan, half Byron,” spent a summer on Skorpios. He was having an affair with Lee, who was five years older, and was vaguely employed to look after the children. As he recalled, Jackie “stacked the library of the Christina with the works of new authors—poetry, nonfiction, art books, everything” and disappeared every afternoon while others napped to read by herself. “She was a voracious reader.” Beard’s assessment was that she did not have the confidence in her own ability and talents to pursue the life of an artist. “It frustrated her.” At an exhibition of Beard’s work, she took him aside to tell him, “I wish I could do what you’re doing—but I can’t.”
In one of the few times she ever ventured into print as an author, she wrote an afterword to accompany one of Beard’s books of photography. Beard had found some old photograph albums of one of the servants of Karen Blixen, who under the pen name Isak Dinesen had written an autobiographical account of her attempt to run a coffee farm in Kenya, Out of Africa. Jackie confessed in her afterword to Beard’s book that she admired Blixen. Like Gone With the Wind, Out of Africa tells the story of an abandoned young woman living in a rarefied social circle who has to learn to make do, manage an estate on her own, and deal with unfaithful men—some of the story Jackie had lived herself.
Aristotle Onassis complained that Jackie spent all her time reading. Another of Jackie’s intimates sensed the same thing. Dorothy Schiff was older than Jackie and the powerful publisher of the New York Post. Schiff hoped to use her intimacy with Jackie for the paper’s benefit. In the 1960s Robert Kennedy needed the Post’s support if he were to succeed as a senator in New York, and Jackie kept up her friendship with Schiff as a service to RFK. Schiff’s note of what she recalled of a personal tour around Jackie’s apartment mentions that “next to the living room but not with a door through was a library. She said she spent most of her time there.” Schiff looked hard to find a television but could not see one. Instead, she remarked on “a sofa covered in brown velvet, stained from where people had spilled drinks and things. There were bookshelves all around, with sets of books and single volumes.” Even in the bedroom, “at the foot of her bed was a long settee with books and magazines flung on it in haphazard fashion.” Not satisfied with her own eyes, Schiff had a translation made of the account in an Italian magazine of what it was like to work for Jackie, written by one of Jackie’s former maids, Greta, who had been fired. Greta’s chief complaint, like Onassis’s, was that Jackie spent a lot of time reading, and sometimes read past the dinner hour, so that her food was cold or overdone.
Models and Mentors
In the late 1960s Jackie commissioned Aaron Shikler to paint a portrait that would hang in the White House. Shikler did a number of studies for this portrait. The one Jackie told him she liked best depicts her lounging on a sofa reading a book. The portrait is similar to a famous portrait of one of Jackie’s heroines, Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of Louis XV, who helped give Versailles its reputation for being a center of France’s artistic life. Pompadour had been a friend of Voltaire. She aided and defended Diderot and d’Alembert, whose Encyclopédie was one of the most famous works of the Enlightenment. She helped found the manufacture of Sèvres porcelain. She was a patron of architects who laid out the Place de la Concorde and of painters like François Boucher, who flattered her by showing her the way she saw herself: on a sofa, in a beautiful dress, with a book. It is also significant that a Boucher painting of Pompadour with a book, similar to Shikler’s drawing of Jackie, appeared in one of the first books to which she lent a hand as an editor, Princess Grace’s My Book of Flowers. The patronage of creative artists, passion for eighteenth-century France, loving to hide herself away in a library from all those who wanted to inspect her in public, yet choosing an image of herself for public portrayal depicting her bookish intelligence: Jackie as a reader is the theme that connects all these different selves. In the Shikler portrait she took a step out of the closet toward declaring herself publicly.
(photo credit 1.1)
(photo credit 1.2)
Jackie has often been written about in terms of her two husbands, but the key transformative moment in her life—her decision to go to work as an editor—resulted from listening to and being advised by other women. Dorothy Schiff had been born to riches and privileges, but she planted the seed that ultimately bore fruit when she told Jackie how important work had been in her life. It is true that she was trying to persuade Jackie to write a column for the New York Post, which had scored a surprise hit when Eleanor Roosevelt first agreed to write a column. Nevertheless, Schiff was also trying to fill a void in Jackie’s life and knew that work could help heal Jackie’s wounds in a way that living on a yacht and decorating a house on Skorpios never would. Jackie realized that she wanted to work while she was married to Onassis. She put the idea to her husband, but he would not let her; a working wife would have undermined his Mediterranean manhood. So she could not put her career plan into action until he died in 1975. She took Schiff’s suggestion of working for the Post seriously, even letting herself be given a tour of the newspaper’s offices. Schiff was surprised when one day Jackie turned up very late for a simple lunch in her office at the Post. The cabbie had gone the wrong way, and Jackie seemed a little distracted. Schiff examined her outfit and found that she was wearing a blouse that was unbuttoned in the middle, with her net brassiere showing underneath. Schiff looked at her in surprise, and Jackie quietly buttoned it. It must have been hard for her when women examined her more meticulously than men did.
A more appealing suggestion came from her former White House social secretary Letitia Baldrige. Baldrige, like Schiff, knew the ins and outs of high society, and like Jackie had attended Vassar, but she also had a career, working, among other jobs, as an assistant to the American ambassadors in Paris and Rome. Later she wrote books on etiquette. As a social secretary, Baldrige was eventually too strong for Jackie, and in 1963 Jackie put Nancy Tuckerman in Baldrige’s place at the White House. However, the two stayed in touch, and Baldrige was certainly a model of how a working girl from a good family could stay afloat in decades when marriage was most women’s only option for economic survival. Baldrige suggested that Jackie try contacting Thomas Guinzburg, publisher of the Viking Press, to see whether a place could be found for her there.
Guinzburg was a Yale friend of Jackie’s stepbrother, Yusha Auchincloss. Jackie and Guinzburg were only two years apart in age and had known each other since they were both in school. He was also one of the founders of The Paris Review in the 1950s, with another of Jackie’s old friends, George Plimpton. In the early 1960s Guinzburg had shared a mistress with President Kennedy, so he had no particular awe of the Kennedy mystique. He was utterly at ease with Jackie. Unlike most people, he was unafraid of her. Guinzburg leapt at the idea of Jackie’s joining Viking. She may have known nothing about how to edit a book, but her contacts were superlative. She m
ight bring in any number of big names as authors, and having her on staff would be a public relations coup for the firm.
The most important influence on Jackie once she got to Viking in the fall of 1975 was Diana Vreeland. Vreeland had been a towering figure in the fashion world for decades, most famously as the editor of Vogue from 1963 to 1971. She had her hair lacquered into a black helmet that was said to make a metallic noise if you hit it right. In later life she wore striking tribal jewelry. The fashion press paid attention to her pronunciamentos, that the bikini was the most important thing since the atom bomb, for example, as if she were Wittgenstein. When the publishers of Vogue, incensed at her extravagance, fired her, Vreeland remade herself as special consultant to the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Her all-red drawing room had design affinities with Boucher’s painting of Pompadour, and she became Jackie’s mentor. When Vreeland died in 1989, at age eighty-six, after a long illness during which she kept most callers at bay, Jackie was the last person she allowed in to say goodbye.
Jackie’s first project at Viking came to her via Vreeland. In that era of détente, Thomas Hoving, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was fostering increased cooperation with Soviet museums. He forged an agreement with the Hermitage in Leningrad to borrow some Russian art treasures for their first display in the West. Vreeland was working on a show of Russian costumes at the same time. She suggested that Jackie should put together an illustrated book to accompany the exhibition. This was the origin of In the Russian Style, a big coffee-table book published in 1976 with detailed historical commentary on illustrations of Russian clothes through the ages, chiefly those worn by the aristocracy and in the court of the tsars. In a publishing career of nearly two decades, Jackie allowed her name to go on the spine only on this book.
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A Philosophy of Reading
What Jackie derived from Vreeland, however, was bigger than this single book. Vreeland had a philosophy which she put into Allure, a book on the secrets of desire and erotic attraction, which she had learned from a lifetime of looking at striking images. Jackie edited the book. Vreeland had a key insight on why women wanted to make themselves look good: it was not about vanity, it was about aspiration. To make her point, she turned to Cecil Beaton and Truman Capote. Capote had made a bitchy remark about Beaton’s becoming legendary for designing upper-class images, remarking that “out of the middle classes of England it’s rather curious to get such an exotic flower.” Vreeland disapproved of Capote’s cattiness. “Still,” she wrote, “Truman was getting at something and we should give it a name. It’s a form of wanting to be. We all want to be. You are and you want to be. How is it you do it?” You might deride this as social climbing or wearing clothes to get ahead, but in fact the best of us all aspire to be something bigger and better, smarter and wiser, than we were in the place where we were born. Diana Vreeland’s wisdom was to say that this was not snobbery but wholesome ambition. This was at the core of what Jackie learned from Vreeland, and reading was the path she chose, compelled by her intellectual aspiration. You are. You want to be. You read a book to find out how. Moreover, reading a book is adorning the mind, just as wearing a pretty dress is adorning the body. Jackie’s collaboration with her fashionable friend reached a peak of productivity when she persuaded Vreeland to put that principle into writing in Allure.
Two other of Jackie’s authors also managed to put into the books she edited words that had long remained inchoate or unspoken in her own personal philosophy. That was the magic of being an editor: to read a manuscript and to find there elements of a life, or fragments of philosophy, that are deeply familiar to you yet at the same time strikingly new because articulated for the first time. This is to find almost biblical reassurance for your own life. A “good book” confirms or expands or suggests exciting potential alterations in your own guiding principles. Of these two authors, the first was Martha Graham, the premier modernist dancer and choreographer of the twentieth century. Jackie’s achievement was to persuade Graham to write her autobiography. Imagine, then, Jackie’s satisfaction when she read this portion of Graham’s text: “I have a holy attitude toward books. If I was stranded on a desert island I’d need only two, the dictionary and the Bible. Words are magical and beautiful. They have opened up new worlds to me.” Nor were Graham’s choices in books always the hard or highfalutin ones. She liked spy stories. “I’m a very strange reader; I like espionage. Nothing lets me think more clearly through a problem than reading and alternating between two mysteries at the same time. Odd, but it works.” Graham said that from her earliest days as a dancer, she would go home in the evening, “gather some of my favorite books around me in bed, and take excerpts from them in green stenography notebooks.” Graham had built one of the foundations of her art on the practice of being a reader and argued here for the first time that a problem in movement could be sorted out by dwelling on the solution of a detective story. Jackie thus found two of her great passions, books and ballet, united in a text that brought prestige to her publisher and for which she alone was responsible.
The second of two authors whom she particularly admired was Bill Moyers. Moyers had served as press secretary and a key adviser to President Johnson, though he was originally a Kennedy appointee. He and his wife, Judith, had met the Kennedys in the White House, but they did not become friends with Jackie until later, when they all found themselves in New York and Moyers was establishing credentials as a commentator on PBS. What Jackie admired about Bill Moyers was not only his crusading, progressive politics but also the broad curiosity that spurred him to take up and investigate, on air, topics like mythology and alternative healing strategies in medicine. It was Jackie who first suggested that his series of interviews with Joseph Campbell, a specialist on comparative mythology, could be made into a successful book. Moyers did not believe her. She insisted. The Power of Myth, published in 1988, became one of the smash hits of her editorial list. Moyers wrote in his introduction that Campbell wanted to remind people that myth was not something to be experienced only through exotic travel or witnessing tribal ritual; rather, “one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.” The wisdom, solace, and insight on life offered by mythology were there to be had in thousands of the world’s religious and literary texts.
Jackie was someone who had always been more comfortable alone with books than in a crowd of people. Her good luck was less in marrying rich men than in finding a way to turn being a reader into something that might offer her a workable new life in the years after her children were grown. Being an editor was not the first thing that occurred to her. She had always had her work as a writer praised by adults and even friends who were professional writers. Part of her journey to a desk at a publishing house involved trying to be a writer, and that story, with its small victories and some hard knocks too, is just as important in revealing who she was.
CHAPTER 2
Many people who knew Jackie well when she was a young woman have talked about her talent as a writer. Her mother said that she always thought Jackie “had the temperament and talent of a writer, that perhaps she could write novels, poetry, or fairy tales.” One of her instructors at George Washington University, to which she transferred in 1950, after leaving Vassar and spending a junior year abroad in Paris, said that Jackie “could write like a million. She didn’t need to take my class.” Another English professor told a family friend after JFK’s election that he always knew Jackie would make a name for herself, “but I really thought it would be by writing a book.” One of the Vogue judges for the Prix de Paris said, on the basis of her application, that Jackie was clearly a writer. So why did she become an editor instead?
I keep thinking what power a great writer has.
JACKIE TO TRUMAN CAPOTE
In fact Jackie tried to be a writer and ultimately rejected writing as something she might take up as a career. Although previous biographers have known of them, Jackie’s published and
unpublished works have never been given much attention, even though to look at them together is to find out more about who she was and how she presented herself on the page than if one were to discover an old trunk of her love letters. She revealed herself in the process of writing works of both fiction and nonfiction. Here are her devotion to her father, her barbed wit, her self-mockery, and her uncertainty about sexual desire. Here are traces of her melancholy nostalgia for lost days. Any writer who sits down to commit herself regularly to print reveals something of herself, for all writers are to a certain extent lovers of themselves, narcissists, trying on varieties of sentences as an actor tries on different personas, admiring the voice they choose to put in writing just as an actor practices before a mirror. The writing Jackie is a Jackie with her dark glasses off, speaking to us directly about what mattered to her.