by William Kuhn
Chase-Riboud had recently read a new biography of Thomas Jefferson by the historian Fawn Brodie, who presented evidence that Jefferson had had a long relationship with one of his female slaves, Sally Hemings, and fathered several children by her. Chase-Riboud was so moved by the story that she went to Toni Morrison with the idea of writing an epic poem on Hemings. Random House said no. The house was interested in offering an advance if she wrote a historical novel, but the editors didn’t think they had a market for epic poetry. Chase-Riboud told all this to Jackie in 1974, when Onassis was still alive and Jackie was still some time away from becoming an editor. Nevertheless, she was excited by Chase-Riboud’s idea, telling her, “You have got to write this story.”
The story appealed to both of them on many levels. Part of Sally Hemings’s time with Jefferson took place in Paris, where Jackie and Chase-Riboud had both lived during important years of their young adulthood. Jefferson’s Monticello was in rural Virginia, which Jackie knew well. She and JFK had built a house not too far from there when they were in the White House. Jackie hunted on horseback in Virginia all her life. Most of all, Jackie knew about presidential mistresses, a fact that did not escape Chase-Riboud, who thought as she described the story to Jackie on the beach, “Here I am telling the former first lady about a former first mistress.” Although Random House’s rejection initially discouraged Chase-Riboud, Jackie’s enthusiasm impelled her to reopen her notes and start working.
In the following year, when Jackie went as a consulting editor to Viking, she arranged for Chase-Riboud to be given a contract for a historical novel on Sally Hemings. Jackie had moved from Viking to Doubleday by the time Sally Hemings was published in 1979, but she was certainly the prime mover in making the book happen. The book, although fictional, is based on thorough research. It suggests that when Jefferson’s wife died, he was attracted to Sally Hemings because she was of mixed race: she had been sired by his wife’s father and was thus his wife’s half-sister. It was not uncommon then for slave owners to sleep with and father children by their female slaves. After Martha Jefferson died, Jefferson went to Paris as American ambassador to the court of Louis XVI. Hemings joined him there when he sent for his youngest daughter, whom Hemings accompanied to Paris. She spent almost two years there, where according to French law she was free. Hemings returned with Jefferson to the United States, thus choosing effectively to reenslave herself, although she might have stayed in France.
This was one of the tough facts that Chase-Riboud found hard to imagine, and she recalled Jackie offering her insight on why Hemings might have chosen to stay in bondage to such a man “despite everything.” Jefferson was a brilliant man whom Jackie and JFK had both admired. One of JFK’s most famous quips when he was in the White House was at the dinner Jackie had arranged for all the nation’s living Nobel laureates. JFK said it was the greatest gathering of minds in the White House “since Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” Jackie had been taught to love Jefferson and his era by her step-uncle, Wilmarth Lewis, a great expert on the late-eighteenth-century Enlightenment, in which Jefferson was a prominent figure. She had two of Jefferson’s chairs in her collection of furniture on Fifth Avenue. She also made reference to Jefferson jokingly when she told Dorothy Schiff, whom she wanted to invite to lunch, that she couldn’t find her telephone number, so instead she was writing her a note, “Thomas Jefferson’s way.” Jackie’s admiration for Jefferson was in no way diminished by the fact that he had slept with Sally Hemings.
This was not the case for many readers of Sally Hemings. The novel became an immediate bestseller but was greeted by howls of protest from some historians who claimed that Chase-Riboud was sullying the reputation of one of America’s greatest presidents on the basis of fiction and hearsay. The historian and lawyer Annette Gordon-Reed has written a recent Pulitzer Prize–winning account of the Sally Hemings controversy in which she points out that Chase-Riboud’s book sold more than a million and a half copies and that it has had a bigger impact on the popular view of Jefferson than Fawn Brodie’s biography, which inspired it. She thinks Chase-Riboud’s fiction somehow struck a chord with the reading public, who wanted to believe in the story. CBS, hoping to capitalize on the book’s success, proposed to do a television miniseries. Learning of the television plans, two southern white men decided to use their power to stop the spread of what they regarded as a scandal. Dumas Malone, the author of a multivolume biography of Jefferson, and Virginius Dabney, the editor of one of Richmond’s newspapers and himself a descendant of Jefferson’s, went to Bill Paley, the head of the network, and got the proposal quashed. They would not have Chase-Riboud’s story about Hemings and Jefferson distributed any further.
Jackie played no public role in the controversy, and there is no mark of her involvement in the book’s gestation or in the book itself, but she remained a staunch supporter of Chase-Riboud through the postpublication aftermath of the book and long beyond. When Chase-Riboud published a novel, Echo of Lions, on a slave revolt aboard a ship bound for America, Jackie sent it to Steven Spielberg, suggesting that it had film possibilities. Jackie’s letter was important evidence when, years after Jackie died, Chase-Riboud brought a suit against Spielberg’s production company claiming that his film Amistad had stolen scenes from the manuscript that Jackie had originally submitted to him. Spielberg settled out of court with Chase-Riboud for an undisclosed sum. Afterward, Chase-Riboud owned houses in Paris and on Capri.
When Chase-Riboud decided to divorce her first husband, Jackie helped her again by providing sympathy and advice. “She got me through my divorce,” Chase-Riboud remembered. Jackie counseled her not to return to New York as a divorced woman, speaking of the vulnerability of divorced women of a certain class in the States. She was better off in France, Jackie thought, where divorced women were “not lonely occupants of Park Avenue bars.” They saw each other only occasionally, going to lunch sometimes at the Stanhope, the hotel just down Fifth Avenue from Jackie’s apartment. They sometimes found themselves on the same Air France flight from Paris to New York.
More developments in the Sally Hemings story took place after Jackie died in 1994: Jackie’s friend James Ivory and one of her authors, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, helped put the Sally Hemings story on the screen as Jefferson in Paris in 1995, with Nick Nolte as Jefferson and Thandie Newton as Hemings. Further, DNA testing from the later 1990s tended to prove what Fawn Brodie and Chase-Riboud had argued all along: that there were living descendants of the children Jefferson had by Hemings. Reflecting back on all this, Chase-Riboud said, “I never thought about what a daring choice Jacqueline made in publishing Sally Hemings, although no one expected the controversy and reaction it provoked … In a way, it became a strike against the way public history was written in America … including her own.”
By encouraging Chase-Riboud to write Sally Hemings, Jackie had given a woman who had never spoken before a historical voice. She had also placed a president and his mistress on the page without feeling any of the scandal or awe or intimidation or prurience that such a subject usually inspires. This is how men and women are, she seemed to be saying. Undoubtedly she was also alive to the power difference, which put many more of the cards in Thomas Jefferson’s hands than in Sally Hemings’s. She certainly felt that even in the 1980s divorced women, alone and uncoupled from their husbands, even in cosmopolitan New York City, were at a comparative disadvantage.
Another motivation for encouraging Chase-Riboud was to reflect on her own White House marriage to JFK. She has often been written about as the wronged wife of a man who was a kind of sex addict, who had so many mistresses that the CIA might have lost count of the different young women ushered into his bedroom when Jackie was away on weekends. It seems more likely, given Jackie’s role in the Chase-Riboud story, that she was more sympathetic to the dependent position of the mistresses than to the supposed injury done to her marriage. She had been told by JFK’s friend Lem Billings how many girlfriends there had been before she married him and
that JFK was unlikely to stop fooling around after the wedding. She had allowed Mary Van Rensselaer Thayer to publish her own flash of insight, on first meeting Jack Kennedy, that here was a man who didn’t want to be married, who was happy to have his freedom. Jack Kennedy told more than one person that he was only marrying Jackie because he was thirty-seven and people would think he was “queer” if he didn’t marry soon. Given the way JFK’s sexuality resembled similar roguish traits in her father, she might not have been surprised when what Lem Billings and others had warned her about came to pass.
In fact, there is evidence from that old Kennedy loyalist Arthur Schlesinger that she exploited her husband’s roving eye. Once when they were attending a rare after-theater party that Jackie was enjoying, she feared that Jack might grow bored and make them go back to the White House early. She told Schlesinger to find some pretty girl and take her up to JFK so he would want to stay. Jackie was too well versed in the sexual mores of the aristocratic classes in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when discreet marital infidelity was fine as long as the marriage was upheld in public, to be too shocked or scandalized by JFK’s sexual appetite. It may have liberated her to go off and do exactly what she wanted to do. As one of her more careful biographers has remarked, “Her silent acceptance of what others considered intolerable offenses freed her to explore precisely where she could flourish, and to discover to which life she could bring the best of herself.” Jackie’s role in the publication of Sally Hemings indicates her fellow feeling for women who struggled against their economic reliance on men, but she was hardly shocked by what men did with their liberty. Championing Barbara Chase-Riboud in her fight with the Virginia historical establishment showed that Jackie was unafraid of controversy over the reputations of great men in the White House, but no less in awe of the work of one of the nation’s founders. In pushing Chase-Riboud forward, Jackie showed with actions rather than words that whether black or white, descended from the enslaved or the free, American or expatriate, women had better stick together. Hers was that “second wave” feminism born of the post-Woodstock generation’s realization in the 1970s and ’80s that women deserved and could demand better.
Grace Notes
Princess Grace grew apart from her husband, Prince Rainier, in middle age. Married in Monaco only three years after Jackie’s marriage to JFK in 1953, Grace and Rainier often lived in separate houses, one in Paris and the other in Monaco, two decades later. Grace’s excuse was that she had to be in Paris during her children’s schooling. She actually preferred to be in a different house from her husband. She had begun a hobby of hiking in the mountains above Monte Carlo with the children when they were young. She would collect flowers, press them in telephone directories, and then put them together in collages. She had a sale of these collages in a Paris gallery and was pleased when all the artworks sold. The proceeds were to go to a charity in her name. When her husband and friends arrived at a restaurant after the show to celebrate, Rainier crumbled up the petals of a flower from one of the tables and put them on an empty plate. He held up the plate and cried out, “Sold!” Grace laughed to show that she could take a joke, and she understood that the value of her collages had something more to do with her fame than with her talent, but she was hurt, too.
Grace, like Jackie, longed to find a role other than pretty face or princess-on-demand. Finding a new career became especially pressing as her children grew older and prepared to leave home. Rainier blocked Grace’s attempts to go back to the stage or to films as inappropriate for their position in Monaco. She thought she’d found something in this flower project, only to be made fun of by her husband. Jackie recognized the predicament. The two women had known each other for a long time. They were the same age, both having been born in 1929. Both of them had made marriages that sent the media wild. When they were both newlyweds, Jackie had persuaded Grace to cooperate in a stunt that was essentially another way to poke fun at Jack’s inability to stop fooling around with other women. With Jackie’s help, Grace dressed up as a nurse and appeared without warning in JFK’s hospital room while he was recuperating from a back operation in the 1950s. Grace and Rainier had both visited the Kennedy White House. Later on, Rainier and Onassis were sometimes rivals, sometimes enemies, sometimes wary business colleagues. Jackie and Grace both knew what it was like to live as American expatriates, at the whim of temperamental European husbands under the Mediterranean sun.
Grace and Jackie had also worked together on a tribute to Josephine Baker, the African American woman who grew up poor in St. Louis but shot to European stardom when she sang and danced nearly nude with the Folies Bergère in Paris. She never had the same success in America, though Shirley Bassey acknowledged Baker as her model and mentor, calling her “la grande diva magnifique.” Baker refused to perform before segregated audiences in America. In the 1950s she accused the owner of the Stork Club in New York of racism when the restaurant refused to serve her. Grace Kelly rushed over, took Baker’s arm, and publicly stalked out of the restaurant, vowing never to return, and she never did. Grace and Baker were friends forever afterward, even to the extent that Grace offered Baker a villa and an income when she fell on hard times toward the end of her life. Baker died in 1975. In 1976 Grace arranged a gala tribute to Baker in New York, with Jackie as her co-chair, the proceeds going to benefit underprivileged children. Since Jackie very rarely made public appearances for charities, this says something about her devotion not only to Josephine Baker but also to Princess Grace.
Josephine Baker, like Barbara Chase-Riboud, and even to an extent Sally Hemings, was an African American woman who found greater freedom, appreciation of her talent, and acceptance in France than she had at home. All three were outsiders who had to leave their native country to feel at home. Though Jackie looked to the world like an ultimate insider, she often said she felt like an outsider. Whether it was because of her Catholicism, her parents’ divorce in the 1940s, when that still carried a considerable stigma, or her own shyness is not clear.
Part of Jackie’s role at both Viking and Doubleday was to bring in as authors big names whom she knew from her social rounds. Bringing Grace’s book to Doubleday, where it was published in 1980 as My Book of Flowers, was a way of both helping Grace and doing precisely what she had been hired to do. This was very early in Jackie’s career as an editor, when so much of the detailed work of negotiating the contract and shaping the text was taken care of by others. The book nevertheless shows unmistakable signs of Jackie’s hand and collaboration. The book is heavily illustrated, with many pictures of Grace in Monegasque gardens, as well as pictures of the flowers at her wedding to Rainier and her daughter Caroline’s wedding to Philippe Junot. It includes Grace’s flower collages, but it is also a book about flowers in art, architecture, dress, and furniture-making. Here is Grace describing her wedding, which might as well be drawn from the wedding of JFK to Jackie: “I was told how magnificent the flowers were at my wedding, but all I remember is that the flower arrangements in the cathedral were filled with Rolleiflexes, Hasselblads, and Nikons with telephoto lenses and flashbulbs.”
Grace also paid tribute to one of Jackie’s favorite French authors, quoting prominently from Charles Baudelaire at the head of her chapter on potpourri and perfume: “Je suis un vieux boudoir plein de roses fanées” (I am an old boudoir full of faded roses). After her run-in with the critics over In the Russian Style in 1976, Jackie often preferred to keep her name out of her books. Nowhere in Grace’s book is Jackie’s name mentioned, but there is a tribute to Rose Kennedy, toward whom Jackie had begun to feel more affectionate in the 1970s, as having “the regal bearing of a proud rose.”
Grace and Jackie concluded by putting a shared but secret joke on the back of the book’s jacket. It tells of Clark Gable in the 1950s on location in England and filming a scene that took a long time to set up. The director Delmer Daves wanted to distract his star, so he took him to look at some flowers in a nearby field, asking Gable, “Ha
ve you ever looked into the heart of a flower?” As they were standing there, looking closely at flowers, strangers drove up and asked for directions. After having driven off, they came back. “Are you Clark Gable? You are Clark Gable, aren’t you?” the driver said. Grace tells the rest of the story: “Gable leaned all those six feet over and answered, ‘My good man, have you never looked into the heart of a flower?’ ”
Jackie certainly experienced at the hands of Onassis a humiliation that was similar to the effect of Rainier’s crumbling the table flowers onto an empty plate in front of Grace’s friends. Kiki Moutsatsos, Onassis’s longtime personal assistant, was close enough to her boss and his sisters to be invited to family suppers from time to time. She published a book several years after Jackie’s death that includes several accounts of chilling scenes between Jackie and Onassis. The one that would have mortified Jackie the most, cut her to the quick, was when she was brought up short by her husband in the midst of the kind of intellectual speculation that she loved. Onassis’s sister Artemis was married to a Professor Garofalidis. Jackie, Ari, Artemis, the professor, Kiki, and others were gathered one night in Artemis’s house in Glyfada, which was near the runway for the Athens airport. Even though it was a big villa and opulently furnished, landing jets could kill the conversation with their roar. Ari liked the noise. It was the roar of money. He owned Olympic, Greece’s national airline, and it was his planes that made the noise. Jackie had that day been reading a biography of Socrates and asked Professor Garofalidis whether he thought Socrates had been one man or Plato’s invention to cover many men, a whole school of philosophers. The professor replied that he didn’t know and perhaps it was the same as Jesus Christ. Who knows whether he was one man or many? Onassis went into an ugly tirade: of course Socrates was one man. He asked roughly whether they hadn’t seen Socrates’ statue in the center of Athens. Jackie was so upset at being spoken to in this way that she tried to walk out the door into the rain, but she was pulled back inside by one of the men. Onassis sent her jewelry in the morning but did not apologize.