Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  The CD idea never materialized in the production of the first two books, although there were plans for a third book in which the Worthy Wonders visit India, one of Jackie’s own favorite destinations. Both young women were hopeful that their music idea might go a bit further with that one. However, Jackie became ill before their next book was finished. Shaye Areheart moved to another publisher. Claudia and Jody couldn’t interest Doubleday or other publishers in their third idea. It was sad, both personally and professionally, because they’d had a wonderful ride with Jackie. Looking back on it, Jody Linscott reflected on Jackie’s talent as an editor and on what she learned from her. If some of the text needed a little work, she recalled, Jackie “would make a suggestion very delicately that you would have to think about.” She knew how to lead people without telling them what to do, a considerable art. “In the music business,” said Jody Linscott, “you’d get an ‘artists and repertory’ or A&R person. They don’t have them anymore. When you were a singer or a songwriter or a band or whatever, they’d stand by you, stick with you, help develop your idea. They’d help bring the art out of you. It has all changed now. That’s in the past. But Jackie was very old-fashioned like that. My grandfather Robert Linscott was a senior editor at Random House. He discovered Truman Capote. He edited William Faulkner. He and Jackie had this similarity” in their attitude to bringing along authors. “I had a kind of understanding of the publishing business through him, even though I was a musician. I really appreciated how she worked, because I’d heard stories of how my grandfather worked. If you’re going to take somebody on because artistically you believe in them, you just want to bring out what they can do. That’s the call of an editor, and that’s the call of an A&R person with an artist. There’s a rapport between you, and it becomes personal.” In losing Jackie, Jody and Claudia lost something more than an ally. She was almost a parent who helped them give birth to their art.

  Claudia learned something from Jackie about staking your all on a project that animates you, however arcane or unpopular it might be. Whenever she and Jody went into the office, Jackie would press free copies of her other books into their hands. “We never left her office without an armful of books. She did things she was passionate about. It seemed so obscure to do a book called The Frenchwoman’s Bedroom, but it was beautiful. She was also crazy about Peter Sís,” the author of a children’s book called The Three Golden Keys, published, like Claudia and Jody’s last book, just before Jackie died. What remained of Jackie long after she was gone was not only the physical books she had edited, but also, and more important, the idea deep in the belly of creative artists that someone powerful had once believed in them, and might do so again.

  Prague Spring

  For most of the three decades between the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961 and its destruction in 1989, much of Eastern Europe lay shut off from the West. Civilians who tried to escape from East Berlin, controlled by Moscow, to the western part of the city, allied with NATO, were killed by Communist snipers. When President Kennedy went to Berlin in 1963 and said, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” he was showing Western support for the Germans whom Moscow was bent on annexing for the East. For most of the cold war, however, the Western European democracies and the United States decided that East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were—at least geographically—within a sphere of legitimate Soviet influence. Even when the Czechs rebelled against the Soviets during the “Prague Spring” of 1968, no armies from the West went to their assistance. Russian tanks crushed the rebellion. It was not until the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev decided that the Soviets could no longer afford the military expenditure that made control of Eastern Europe possible, that one by one the former eastern bloc countries began to declare their independence from Moscow.

  Jacqueline Onassis made a small but determined contribution to the renaissance of Western interest in Eastern Europe beginning in the late 1980s by commissioning the Czech artist Peter Sís to write a children’s book about his homeland. Sís had come to America in 1982 and fought off feelings of alienation in a strange country. Sent to assist in the making of a movie about the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, Sís was ordered home when the eastern bloc canceled its participation in the Olympics as part of its cold war conflict with the United States. Sís refused to go back and was granted asylum in this country. He longed to visit Prague, but both American immigration restrictions and the hostility of the Communist regime to Czechs who had left for the West prevented his return even for a brief visit. He made a successful living as an illustrator of children’s books and attracted the attention of a scholar of children’s books, Michael Patrick Hearn, who introduced Sís to Jackie.

  Jackie knew right away that she wanted to publish a book that Sís would illustrate, and she was sure he had something to say, so she wanted him to write it too. His artwork was different and darker from that in standard children’s books, even the ones she’d already published herself. They owed something to the monstrous images of Maurice Sendak, whose Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963, had been criticized for resembling children’s nightmares. An interview with Sendak helped Sís to find his first work in America. Part of Jackie’s commitment to Sís was long discussions during which they talked about what he should write. They started by considering adaptations of stories that were as much for adults as for children, such as the French novelist Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, in which two teenage boys search for a lost love. They also thought of Italo Calvino’s Baron in the Trees, set in the eighteenth century, in which a boy escapes from a cruel baron, his father, to live his life in the trees. These were both well-known authors with major reputations in European literature. Jackie may have been working on a book for children, but in collaborating with Peter Sís she was also following her passion for serious writing by authors of acknowledged literary standing.

  Sís remembered that “finally Jackie was the one who came up with the idea of doing a book about Prague.” He had tentatively raised this idea with other publishers, but they weren’t interested in Prague. They wanted more reliable subjects of interest in the West, such as Paris or Venice. Jackie’s instinct was that because Prague was meaningful to Peter, because he was even tortured by the memory of it, he could write an unusual book about it. “She talked about things without commercial considerations,” he said. They didn’t discuss money. Shaye Areheart did the book deal and discussed the amount of the advance with him. “It was never quite clear whether we were talking about children’s books or adult books,” he recalled. Jackie encouraged him to “be as free as you want to be” and not to worry about making matters too dark for children. “This was a chance for me to really let go. I was still trying at that point to make everything children-friendly.” He was still agonizing over his childhood memories of wonderful freedom in Prague combined with the lack of political freedom that had compelled him to leave everything that he loved behind. “Suddenly I could deal with all these feelings and subjects.” She gave him the license to do whatever he wished.

  Telling Sís to do whatever he wanted might well have horrified the money managers at Doubleday. Jackie said to him, “Why thirty-two pages?” which was the standard length for a children’s book. “She didn’t feel limited by the market,” he said. She selected Italian marbled paper and the book was printed in Italy, an expensive proposition. Shaye had to apply the reality principle whenever she could. Although the book came in at more than sixty pages, the commercial artist in Peter felt compelled to point out that “I was only paid for the book as if it were thirty-two pages.” Even so, Shaye might well have felt a tinge of what JFK and Onassis felt when they had to pay Jackie’s bills.

  Even Jackie may have regretted some of the license she had given her author. Sís said, “I had no idea how long it would take me to do the book, and I ended up needing double the time allotted. ‘Take all the time in the world you want,’ she said, and the project occupied almost a year. At one point she got nervous. We had
just had a little baby. I was in hot and humid New York trying to re-create Prague.” The centuries-old city of his youth couldn’t have been more different: one of his strongest recollections was of the cool air blowing out of cellars onto the street. He was finding progress difficult. Jackie went downtown by herself one day to call at Sís’s house and rang the bell. Finding him not at home, she walked over to a building housing artists’ studios at Lafayette and Spring Streets in Soho. She decided to try finding him there, without knowing precisely which studio was his. She created a stir in the building, wandering around different studios in her dark glasses and surprising artists at their tables by knocking unannounced on their doors: “Do you know where I can find Peter Sís?” “She finally found me,” he recalled, and she was happy with the incomplete work that he showed her, even though it was beyond the deadline. “Take your time,” she told him, but he knew very well that what she meant was to hurry up.

  When he finally finished, he had to take all his artwork in to Doubleday. “We had a meeting in a conference room that was all glass,” with a view over the towering buildings of midtown Manhattan. “We spread all the art on the floor. For an immigrant, this was the most amazing moment. I had all my art above New York and Mrs. Onassis was down on the floor looking at it.” She looked, she admired, she approved. Better than citizenship, a green card, or a passport, this was Peter Sís’s moment of arrival.

  He sensed that Jackie personally would be responsible for the book’s success—or perhaps he wished, like many of her other authors, to ensure its success by putting her name on it. But she would not allow him to dedicate the book to her. Instead she said the book must be dedicated to his baby daughter, Madeleine. He followed her advice, and indeed the narrator of The Three Golden Keys tells the story to Madeleine, born in New York with no knowledge or experience of her father’s native country. It’s a dreamlike recollection of being led around Prague by a black cat, who gives him three golden keys, ancient Czech legends that will reopen the door to his childhood. “She didn’t particularly like cats,” remembered Sís, but she permitted him to leave the cat in. He also put in “Thank you for a dream J.O.” on the reverse side of the title page.

  The book is not a standard children’s book. Its predominant colors are shades of black. It includes quotes from André Gide, who called Prague a “ville glorieuse, douloureuse et tragique,” and from Albert Camus, who felt lost and desolate in Prague’s “opulent Baroque churches.” It has a happy ending—the narrator unlocks the door to the remembered warmth of his childhood home—but again Jackie had pushed the limits of what was considered permissible in children’s literature. With Peter Sís’s work, she aimed at an unusual crossover audience of adults suddenly curious about one of the jewel-like Eastern European cities that had been off-limits to Westerners for the past thirty years.

  The benefits that accrued to Peter Sís were stunning, even though Jackie’s early death prevented him from ever doing another book with her. His next publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, allowed him to publish a book of sixty-eight pages, greater than the still-standard thirty-two, simply because his previous book had been with her. He remembered shyly, almost a little ashamed to recollect it, that she used to write him letters in which she called him a genius: “From the depths of my mind, thinking back, maybe she planted the seed for the awarding of the MacArthur grant.” In 2003 he was awarded a so-called genius grant when the MacArthur Foundation made him a fellow and gave him a stipend that freed him for several years from working for publishers.

  Jackie benefited too. She told Publishers Weekly in 1993 that she loved editing any book that took her on a journey into something she didn’t know before. Her collaboration with Peter Sís led her to go incognito with Maurice Tempelsman to Prague in 1991 to meet the Czech president, Václav Havel. Sís had first started talking to her about Havel before the Communist system fell apart. It fascinated her that a playwright like Havel might actually replace the Communist leadership. It seemed as if a true “republic of letters” was in the process of being born. Sís told her a story that delighted her of all the new Czech leaders coming to New York. Some of them were, like Havel himself, poets, playwrights, and dissident intellectuals. Before they began their round of official visits, someone told them, to their surprise, “Now, you must have a jacket and tie.” They were all wearing leather jackets. Jackie so loved the trip to Prague and the meeting with Havel that she started work on a book (one that never came to be published) that was to be a recounting of the Czech “Velvet Revolution,” whereby the Communist system was overthrown nonviolently and writers occupied the seat of power. Her wish to throw her weight behind Havel and his cohort was thoroughly consistent with the speech JFK had once made in Berlin. It was almost as if she wanted to say publicly and in print, “I’m Czech, too.”

  “She’s just a rich lady pretending to be an editor,” Peter Sís said he thought at first, when he recalled their work together. “That’s the stereotype people have of her. But in fact she was one of the most inspiring editors I ever worked with. She was always flying up there in the air and curious about all subjects.” She was as free intellectually as she encouraged him to be in his work. She modeled that freedom, as a mother does for her children. But he knew, too, that it was also his good luck to have been taken up by a woman who had as much power and who was given as much liberty as Jackie had at Doubleday. “Every artist gets to meet his Medici,” Sís said, referring to the powerful Florentine family whose patronage supported artists like Michelangelo during the Italian Renaissance. In Jackie, Peter Sís met his Medici.

  All My Children

  Publishing children’s books was not the only way in which Jackie applied what she’d learned as a mother to her career. She pressed, prodded, and protected a score of younger writers and junior editors. These young people were shocked to find that the world’s most famous woman acted less like a celebrity and more like their moms. The Texan novelist Elizabeth Crook was born in 1959, in between Jackie’s own two children, who were born in 1957 and 1960. In the 1990s, when Jackie was editing her two novels, Crook was in her thirties and still wore her blond hair in a long braid down her back. One of her very first memories was the death of JFK; she was four years old. Any American child who was alive in 1963 felt the world shudder and change at that moment, just as a younger generation did on September 11, 2001. It was a particularly meaningful instant in Crook’s family, because her mother was getting dressed to go and meet President Kennedy when he was killed. Her father had been an unsuccessful Democratic candidate for a congressional seat in east Texas. She was in the room with her mother and was surprised to see her weeping. “I had never seen her cry before. She and my dad had been scheduled to meet with the president later that day in Austin—Bill Moyers had arranged it. My dad was the president of the San Marcos Baptist Academy and outspoken in favor of President Kennedy among Baptists. The president was going to talk with him, because it was unusual for a prominent Baptist to speak up in those days in favor of a Roman Catholic. My mother was getting dressed for the meeting when the news that the president had been shot came on the television. I was in the room with her. She was trying to fit into a dress—she had just given birth to my sister a few days before and was trying to find something she could wear to the meeting. The television was on, and the news broke in, and I was very suddenly aware that the world had turned upside down.”

  Crook also had to cope with the surprise of Jacqueline Onassis entering her life when she agreed to publish her novels. “Oddly enough, it was her shyness that put me at ease,” Crook remembered later—that and the fact that Jackie was “motherly.” It was not always a matter of being wrapped in a warm blanket, however. Crook found that she was still a little afraid of Jackie and used to hope, when an issue came up and she had to telephone Doubleday, that Scott Moyers or Bruce Tracy would answer the phone. Jackie was softspoken in person and on the phone, but her written comments, especially on early drafts of Crook’s second novel,
Promised Lands, were not only direct but also brutal. “CUT” and “DELETE,” she wrote in all caps. “Overkill.” “Cloying.” “This is pretty trite. Can you recast?” “Overwritten, overwrought.” “Melodrama; I’d eliminate.” All these appeared in Jackie’s handwriting in the margins of Crook’s manuscript. At one point Crook had dwelled too much for Jackie’s taste on the stump of a dog’s tail, and Jackie said it should come out. Where Crook had put in a section on bringing up a baby, Jackie wrote that it was enough to put the reader off babies. Still, Crook recalled that “I would get off the phone after talking to her and feel just thrilled. Then I would realize that she had just told me the book had big problems, that a lot of work would have to be done. I can remember thinking ‘Why do I feel excited? She just told me to start over.’ She had a gift for criticizing a book without demoralizing the author. Her comments were blunt—especially her written comments. But I always felt she believed in my books and more generally in me as a writer. I always felt we were on the same side.”

  David Stenn was another of Jackie’s younger authors who responded to her combination of editorial direction and personal warmth. He was a young man who, just out of Yale, had had success writing and producing television shows such as Hill Street Blues, 21 Jump Street, and Beverly Hills 90210. He didn’t lack confidence, but like many writers, in the midst of one of his Hollywood biographies for her, he reached an impasse. He decided to take her up on her offer to contact her at home if need be. He felt comfortable going over to her apartment on Fifth Avenue to talk because he felt her maternal interest in him. His own mother was dying of cancer. He was confused about where his manuscript was going. He turned up at Jackie’s door wearing moccasins and shorts. She made him speak about his mother’s illness and sorted out his confusion about the manuscript over crustless sandwiches and tea.