by William Kuhn
Jackie also extended her protection to young people whom she worked with in the office. Lindy Hess, a former Doubleday editor who had moved on to direct a pre-publishing training program at Columbia University, helped Jackie hire Scott Moyers to be one of her assistants. He remembered that on the first day he met her he was nervous about what she would be like, but she just connected “things I’d told her about in my life with aspects of her own children’s lives, just to normalize it. ‘I’m a mom. I have kids. I work.’ She just put it on that plane. It was very reassuring. I remember finding her impossibly glamorous. She had on very subtle but beautiful jewelry. You know she had this fantastic carriage, presence, life force, ch’i. If anybody had ch’i, Jackie Onassis had ch’i. She was just fully turned on.” Working with Jackie, however, wasn’t always a matter of observing this beautiful life force floating down the hall. Scott also said, “If she had some criticism to make … Boy, she didn’t have to criticize very sharply for it to be ringing in your ears. I think because my feet lifted off the ground at first and everybody called her Jackie in the office, I remember somebody telephoned from the outside my first week there, and I said something like ‘Jackie can’t do this.’ It was somebody who actually didn’t know her. Afterward, I remember her very gently saying, ‘Scott, could you please use Mrs. Onassis?’ ” Shaking his head and laughing, he said, “I never did that again.”
Moyers had the sense, though, that he was genuinely being looked after in the office. “My mom had died of leukemia. She knew that,” he said, and when he ran a marathon to support the Leukemia Society of America, “Jackie wrote a big check to sponsor me.” She also offered him money when he hurt his knee after being hit by a drunk driver. She cautioned him about coming to work with his hair wet in the morning and bought him a blue wool hat to cover his head in the cold. When he came down with the flu, she made him take Theraflu and sent him to her own doctor for an appointment.
Bill Barry recalled one other example of Jackie looking out for her assistants. When the raise Doubleday proposed to give one of her assistants was what Jackie regarded as too small, she proposed to supplement the assistant’s salary from her own pocket and effectively embarrassed Doubleday into further increasing the assistant’s pay.
Another young man she took under her wing was Paul Golob, now the editorial director of Times Books, a partnership of Henry Holt and the New York Times. When he worked briefly at Doubleday as a young man in 1990 he got caught in the middle of office politics. The man who had hired him had to leave Doubleday in a hurry after his own patron, Nancy Evans, was fired and Steve Rubin came in to replace her. Paul was sitting at his desk at four in the afternoon. Jackie came looking for the man who had hired him, who was out of the office. “She stuck out her hand and pronounced her name in the French way: ‘I’m Jacqueline Onassis.’ ‘I just started here,’ ” Paul said, struggling to his feet and explaining that the man she was looking for was away. Should he leave a message that she had called? “ ‘Yes, if you could.’ She left; I sat down and tried to stop my heart from racing.”
After the man who had hired Paul left the company, “She noticed that I was kind of alone and unmoored. She would come to see how I was doing. She asked if I knew anything about Herbert Block, the cartoonist. ‘I’m thinking of doing a book with him. Would you have time to look at that?’ ” She asked Golob to write a report on the manuscript. “That was the thing where she felt she could continue talking to me.” It was clear that Jackie was giving Paul some work to forestall the company from firing him.
“They moved me to a desk in the middle of nowhere. I came back from lunch one day and there was a note from her. ‘I saw your office was empty and thought the worst. Please come see me.’ I think she had a mother hen thing. I’m a few years younger than her son was.” Eventually Golob left Doubleday for another publisher, but he kept in touch with Jackie, who invited him for lunch after the summer was over. “My feet didn’t touch the ground for a while. The fall came. I screwed up my courage to call her at Doubleday. I spoke to the assistant and said I’d like to have lunch whenever’s good for her. It had to be postponed several times. Finally the message came: can you come to her apartment for tea? It was the first week of December 1990. I was instructed to come at five P.M.
“I show up at the appointed time. I go up the elevator and it opens. There she was, standing in the entrance hall.” He had expected a housekeeper or a butler. “She was right there. Someone materialized to take my coat. She took me into this sitting room; a fire was going. It was a smallish room. Tea came in, and finger sandwiches. She started asking me questions. ‘Tell me what you’re working on.’ She was interviewing me. It was all about me. I started telling her about a book I was editing, The United States of Ambition, by Alan Ehrenhalt, about who chooses to run for office in America. Its argument was that the sorts of politicians we now get are based on the people who offer themselves for election, not especially the best people as picked out by experienced politicians. Those people determine the character of the government. In the old days party bosses chose people. Now people choose themselves. Ehrenhalt talked about the decline of deference. Young people used not to put themselves forward so much. That’s what prompted Jackie to say, ‘I remember when I was first married. I remember that Jack took me to the Senate to the visitors’ gallery and we sat up there and I remember him pointing to the different senators, the reverence in his voice—“That’s Senator Russell, that’s Senator Mansfield.” ’ He as a young senator was still part of the old deferential system. It was an intimate moment. I didn’t expect her to be sharing it with me. It was as if I was talking to my own mother. That was so natural. It was her life. ‘If I can be of any help, if you need endorsements, let me know,’ she said. We talked some more. It was about six. Next thing I knew I was walking toward the door, down the elevator, and out. My carriage had turned into a pumpkin and I was walking home.”
The Cinderella or fairy godmother effect that Jackie often worked on her writers and younger colleagues is something that many of them still remember now, almost two decades after she died. She knew she had this effect on them but didn’t particularly value it, because it didn’t cost her much energy or effort. Of greater value to her was the sense that she had raised her children well, and that also, in working as an editor, with tangible books to her credit, she had worked off some of the need for revenge against the world that she had written about to Harold Macmillan in the 1960s. Although her sense of grievance lessened over time as she contributed productively to the work at Doubleday, she remained alive to the presence of injustice in the world. One of the injustices she felt most keenly was that the value of women’s work had been persistently underrated or denied, that the roles and careers open to them were much more restricted than those open to men. If the hard work of being a mother was both undercompensated and undervalued, she was also interested in the way that women’s other economic, cultural, and political contributions had been underrated. A significant number of her books addressed women’s contributions to history. She was ahead of her time in commissioning writers to work on this topic, which is now a standard part of university history curricula. However, it wasn’t exactly grim political campaigning, because she had some fun with it as well.
CHAPTER 6
She’s a closet feminist.
BETTY FRIEDAN ON JACKIE
In 1975, John Warner, head of the Bicentennial Administration, and later a Republican senator from Virginia, teased Mabel Brandon that her hometown of Plymouth, Massachusetts, where the Mayflower landed, was not participating in the Bicentennial. Brandon was then the wife of the Washington correspondent of London’s Sunday Times, Henry Brandon. She had recently been involved in a historic preservation fight in Plymouth to buy the eighteenth-century house where the colonial playwright, poet, and historian Mercy Otis Warren had lived. Both Warner and Brandon came from Jackie’s world: Warner’s first wife was a Mellon; Brandon was known to her friends as Muffie, had attended Miss P
orter’s School, and would later serve as social secretary in the Reagan White House. Brandon reflected that millions of dollars were being spent on Bicentennial programs “deifying men and wars.” She took issue with this. “Who was talking about what life was really like—the toll the wars took? That’s where the women were.” About a meeting of the Bicentennial Administration, she said, “They had no right to have a closed meeting to discuss spending public funds … A man with a big cigar blew smoke in my face and said through clenched teeth, ‘Make it quick, baby.’ ” Forced to seek other channels of funding, Brandon and her friend Joan Kennedy decided to approach the big corporations who spent money advertising to women and ask them to support a project. Their idea was a traveling exhibition of documents, artifacts, clothing, and paintings that would celebrate the lives of preindustrial American women. The show would begin in Plymouth and then travel throughout 1976 to other American cities, half a dozen in all. Brandon approached her friend Tom Guinzburg at Viking and asked him to produce a hardback book to accompany the exhibition, eventually entitled Remember the Ladies: Women in America, 1750–1815. The title of both the show and the book came from a letter by Abigail Adams, who had written to her husband, John Adams, in 1776, “In the new code of laws I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”
Today the idea of an exhibition examining colonial women sounds uncontroversial, but the Bicentennial occurred just four years after Congress had passed the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, a proposed constitutional amendment guaranteeing that there should be no discrimination on the basis of sex in federal, state, or local law. Although President Nixon endorsed the ERA and it quickly gained more than a dozen state ratifications, its opponents guaranteed that it failed to gain the thirty-eight ratifications necessary for it to become a permanent amendment to the Constitution. The ERA ran into its most serious opposition in the Bicentennial year from conservative Republicans such as Phyllis Schlafly, who denounced it as “antifamily.”
The first lady, Betty Ford, along with Nancy Kissinger and Joan Kennedy, went to the opening of the exhibition Brandon had conceived in Plymouth in June 1976. When Betty Ford said before cutting the ribbon that the exhibition would help “focus attention on the unfinished business of our revolution for full freedom and justice for women,” she was booed by a group of anti-ERA protesters. They heckled her and carried signs saying “Stop ERA” and “Equal Rights Amendment Stamps Out the Family.” They chanted “Go away, ERA” and were met by proponents of the amendment chanting “ERA, all the way.”
Remember the Ladies was the first book Jackie worked on at Viking to come to publication. Although she was not in Plymouth for the opening, Mabel Brandon thanks her in the preface as one of the book’s editors. An article in Ms. magazine called Jacqueline Onassis, somewhat more accurately, one of the show’s “patrons.” Most of the work on the book was done by others, and Jackie’s first association with it came from Guinzburg’s pushing it in her direction, but the subject of the book—strong women in history who asserted themselves despite the conventions of a male-dominated society—is a theme of her subsequent books as an editor. She may not have gone to Plymouth wearing Givenchy and waving a pro-ERA placard, but her books allowed her to make a distinct contribution in favor of expanding the recognition of women’s role in history while she herself appeared to remain silent.
Much of the text of Remember the Ladies might have been describing her own experience, though the events it concerned took place two centuries earlier. One of her later authors, who was an expert on eighteenth-century history, found that Jackie was remarkably well informed about Abigail Adams, the most independent-minded and articulate among American first ladies. The book has Martha Washington, lonely and rather shy, telling a friend that while she was in Washington during her husband’s presidency, she never saw anyone. Her comment “Indeed I think I am more like a state prisoner than anything else” would certainly have echoed Jackie’s own feelings at times in the 1960s White House. The book also describes Dolley Madison as being such an inveterate and extravagant shopper that the duty alone on a shipment of her clothing from France was $2,000.
In addition to the experience of presidential wives, the book examines that of humbler women, pointing out that in the second half of the eighteenth century the death of young children was commonplace: “There were few mothers who did not bury at least one child.” Jackie had had her own problems with miscarriages and had buried two babies who did not live many hours beyond their birth. The book also gives her newly chosen career some weight by pointing to a historical precedent. One of the areas of colonial work in which women had specialized was printing and newspaper publishing, so to have joined Viking was less a new departure than a return to an earlier tradition. That must have appealed to a woman as history-minded as Jackie.
Conover Hunt was formerly the deputy director of a museum at Fort Monroe in Norfolk, Virginia, and has a distinguished résumé listing her other museum curatorships. She has a cultivated voice that suggests the Virginia of colonial plantations as well as a mint julep wit. In the 1970s, when Muffie Brandon hired her to be the curator of the Bicentennial exhibition, she was just out of her twenties. She was amazed at the broad-based coalition of supporters Brandon had put together. There were both blue-blooded ladies and left-wing activists who thought of marriage as counterrevolutionary. “Among the sponsors were the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association and the National Organization for Women,” she said. She paused a moment and added, “Fortunately they never saw each other in the same room.” Hunt recalled going to an editorial meeting at Viking in New York, where Jackie was present with other editors who were working on the design and layout of the book. “I thought she would be as big as Mount Everest. Instead, this tiny little woman in black slacks and a white silk blouse comes in. Very quiet. Said nothing. Great presence in her quiet way. Very, very reserved. She had obviously become that way by experience. She was not going to open up. The one time she opened up was when we talked about her children.” Hunt also remembered Jackie’s wearing “nine million gold chains—remember, this was the 1970s,” and listening attentively when a designer suggested that the captions to the photographs should be “flush left, ragged right.” Jackie said, “Now, explain that to me.” The designer replied, “That means, Mrs. Onassis, that everything is going to line up on the left-hand side and there’s not going to be margin justification on the right.” And she said, “Well, it’s just like it sounds like it is.” Hunt could see that working on the book was mainly a learning experience for Jackie and that her Viking colleagues were still learning themselves how to get along with her.
As Hunt was frantically trying to put together an exhibition in less than nine months, a call from People magazine came in offering free publicity if Hunt could arrange an interview with Jackie. This was ordinarily something that would have been handled by Muffie Brandon, but Hunt’s instinct was that, however tempting, the opportunity had to be turned down. “ ‘Out of the question!’ I said and hung up.” She laughed, remembering this. She and her team were working in the refurbished attic of Brandon’s Washington house, now owned by Hillary Clinton. “Muffie came in and said ‘What happened?’ and I said, ‘Well, you know, c’mon! It’s Jackie!’ Muffie replied, ‘Darling, I’m so glad you know how to handle the phones.’ I was just trying to get this exhibit up on time. I thought, what is this nonsense?” Guinzburg may have wanted Jackie on board at Viking for her connections and her publicity value, but the women around her knew instinctively that she wasn’t going to talk.
The women of Jackie’s social background were a good deal less sentimental about her than some of the middle-class authors whose lives she came into as a kind of apparition. To Muffie Brandon, now Muffie Cabot, since she married into one of Massachusetts’ founding families following the death of Henry Brandon, Jackie was mere flesh and blood. As she saw it, Jackie’s joining V
iking in 1975 was less a publicity coup for Guinzburg than it was a great favor he had done her, one that perhaps she didn’t altogether deserve. “Tom Guinzburg did her a very great service in giving her that job,” she said. When she fell out with Guinzburg over the Jeffrey Archer book, Muffie Cabot noted a parallel. “She also fell out with Ben Bradlee over his small book. She was very sensitive. She was protecting the flame, her version of Camelot. It happens.” Bradlee had produced an affectionate memoir of his friendship with JFK while he worked at the Washington Post during the Kennedy presidency. Jackie believed that Bradlee had exploited his friendship with JFK for profit. She never spoke to him again, cut him on the street in New York, and even refused to acknowledge him when they were vacationing in neighboring cabanas on St. Martin.
Muffie Cabot’s unsentimental attitude toward Jackie also derived from a later project they worked on together. This book, about Muffie’s mother, which Jackie encouraged but which was ultimately produced by a different publisher, showed not only that Jackie had a continuing interest in strong women who did daring things that were unusual for their time, but also why Muffie was not particularly in awe of her as an editor. Muffie’s mother, Janet Elliott Wulsin, set out with her husband in the 1920s on an exploratory expedition through the Far East that included China, Mongolia, and Tibet. They rode horses and camels, took with them Chinese collectors who amassed biological and zoological specimens, and also documented Buddhist rituals. Initially, Muffie thought she would write her mother’s story as a novel. She produced an outline as well as a sample chapter and showed them both to Jackie. “I love it,” Jackie said. “But I want to have someone help you.”