by William Kuhn
Another of New York’s Park Avenue personalities with whom Jackie worked in the 1980s was Louis Auchincloss. Auchincloss’s father was a cousin of Hugh Auchincloss, Jackie’s stepfather. He was a kind of distant relation of hers by marriage. Like Bernier, who made the history of the French court his specialty, Auchincloss knew the history of American blue bloods the way adolescent boys once knew baseball cards. Auchincloss was the author of more than a dozen novels that described the moral dilemmas of rich people from old New England families. His models were Henry James and Edith Wharton. If he never received the critical standing of those two Gilded Age novelists, he nevertheless carved out a niche for himself. His books sold well enough to make the publisher of his novels, Houghton Mifflin, happy. So Jackie was pleased to have him join her at Doubleday to do a little nonfiction.
In 1981 Jackie asked Auchincloss to write a historical introduction to a work of photography on Versailles by the fashion photographer Deborah Turbeville. They worked together more intensively on a family diary that had come down to Auchincloss via his wife’s grandmother, Florence Adele Sloane. Sloane had been born a Vanderbilt and lived her entire life with the benefit of an immense fortune. The diary covers a crucial period in the young woman’s life, including her debut in high society at the turn of the twentieth century, contemporary with James and Wharton. The idea was to publish long excerpts from the diary, with Auchincloss providing the necessary historical commentary to explain the context. Auchincloss put in such turn-of-the-century curiosities as the diarist’s train ride in a private car, noting that her uncle was going up to the front to drive the train, as he actually owned the railroad. Jackie, on the other hand, was interested in the way in which this very rich young woman was in fact imprisoned by her privileges. She wrote Auchincloss a note on a draft he’d produced, saying, “Being an Edith Wharton fan from way back there was no way I wouldn’t enjoy a diary from this period, but even beyond my own interest … I found myself being involved in Florence Adele as a young woman … She was bright, articulate, and frustrated as hell at times with her own life. There are virtually no published diaries of that period available. The upper class woman was the most strictly guarded of all. Could you put in something about the rites of society—how young women were presented—how many years did they have to find a husband before they were considered old maids? Love and a happy marriage was the only adventure for these spirited, protected women.” Jackie’s sympathy here was for a debutante whose life must have been even more constricted than her own. We look at Jackie, who had been dubbed by one New York columnist as “debutante of the year” in 1947, and see only glamour and promise. Jackie looked at a debutante of the 1890s and wondered, “How many years did this woman have to find a husband before she would be shunned as an unmarriageable spinster?” We look at Jackie’s wedding to JFK and see nothing but the sheen of a Newport summer. Jackie looked at Florence Adele Sloane and saw her marriage as her only chance to break free.
Doubleday published Sloane’s diary as Maverick in Mauve, because the 1890s are sometimes called “the Mauve Decade.” The publicity echoed Jackie’s letter to Auchincloss. An ad that ran in the New York Times in November 1983 to accompany the book’s publication reads: “Years before it was quite respectable, Florence Sloane had a mind of her own.” The body of the ad explains that “this enchanting, romantic young Vanderbilt heiress kept a diary. To read it now is to hear the authentic voice of a real-life Edith Wharton heroine: a passionate young woman prisoner to a gilded age.”
A young reporter from Vogue went to the book party at the Museum of the City of New York, which Doubleday and Auchincloss threw to celebrate the book’s publication. Marie Brenner was surprised to find not only that Jackie was there, but that she didn’t shy away from talking to a reporter. “There was no trace of the baby-doll voice as we talked,” Brenner wrote of her encounter with Jackie. “What had interested her in the diary was not the detailed descriptions of the Mauve Decade, she told me, but the character of Adele Sloane herself. She used the words ‘survival’ and ‘survivor’ several times, and it was impossible not to believe that her fascination for this diary had something to do with feelings of identification. ‘What was so moving to me was the spirit of this woman, and the dignity with which she lived her life, and her basic character,’ she said. ‘That her life would seem to be ideal, and then tragedy would strike her—losing her child, for example. And that her life was not going to be so perfect after all, that she would have enormous difficulties, but somehow her spirit and her character would carry her through. You realize, especially when she writes so movingly about the death of her child, how difficult her life could be.’ ” Brenner concluded that Jackie had chosen the book because the book was about her life, too.
Perhaps for that reason Jackie next encouraged Louis Auchincloss to do a book on women who had made something of the extraordinary privileges to which they had been born. In 1984 she edited False Dawn, in which he looked at more than a dozen women from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the era of Louis XIV. Individual chapters tell the stories of women such as La Grande Mademoiselle, the German wife of the heir to the French throne, who had to put up with an openly homosexual husband but also turned out to be one of the most detached and best-informed writers about daily life at Versailles, and Madame de Sévigné, a marquise whose husband died in a duel before she was out of her twenties but who made an art from her polished letters to her daughter in writing that is still fresh and memorable today. Auchincloss makes a telling point in analyzing a Molière play that makes fun of bookish women. “What one can see today in these plays is the opportunity that books offered to women, hitherto bound either to domestic servitude or the cloister, to operate on equal terms with the other sex.” Books leveled the playing field for these literate, privileged women. Through the written word, these women left a mark on the world when most of their sisters were silent and thus largely absent from history.
Doubleday’s advertising once again stressed that this was about seventeenth-century women who made “strides toward emancipation … remarkable in a male-dominated age.” However, the book’s reviewer at the New York Times did not buy this claim: Auchincloss had argued that “despite the age’s chauvinism, it produced an unusual number of women of accomplishment. But the age was a ‘false dawn’ because these gains were lost during the next century. This theory is interesting, but, for the most part, the women Mr. Auchincloss considers are not typical.” Auchincloss tended to agree with this criticism. False Dawn, he said, “laid an egg” because it seemed to promise more than it delivered in the way of women’s liberation. “The idea of the book, the importance of women of that kind: they were important if they were born to the job. You had to be born to it.” That was disappointing for American women in the 1980s, when birth counted for almost nothing and getting out and doing was all.
But was it? What Jackie had done by promoting the books of Olivier Bernier and Louis Auchincloss was to show the trials of women who, though born to wealth and power, still had to exert effort, intelligence, and ingenuity if they were to overcome the obstacles put in their way by men. This was less a celebration of aristocratic privilege than it was an evocation of the same kind of passion and determination found in those pioneering women who, a century later, sacrificed to found American schools and colleges for women. Miss Porter’s School and Vassar College had been lampooned at their founding in the 1800s as useless institutions. “Why educate a woman and teach her to read books if she is only going to raise a family?” argued men of the Civil War era and beyond. Similar arguments that slaves needed no education had also been made in that era. The founders of the first women’s schools fought hard to establish the principle that women needed to be educated if they were going to take an equal place with men in their society, and that principle had its origins in the rage for equality that dated from the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century. Jackie’s books with Bernier and Auchincloss were her smal
l way of keeping that education-for-women and education-about-women spirit alive. If she could fantasize at the same time about living her life in a Boucher canvas or in a boudoir furnished for a marquise, that was all the better.
From Privileged Women to Everywoman
“Just think, Nancy, he’s a professor of psychology who used to be a priest, and now he’s married.” Nancy Tuckerman remembered Jackie’s enchantment—part human interest, part plain gossip—with the life stories of her authors. Among them, Eugene Kennedy had a more interesting story than most. He left the priesthood to marry and remained a tenured professor in the psychology department of Chicago’s Loyola University. He was not related to the Hyannis and Palm Beach Kennedys; rather, he was a prolific writer and journalist who reached out to a wide, nonacademic audience. In the 1970s alone he had published books on counseling, on love and friendship, on religious belief, and The New Sexuality: Myths, Fables and Hang-ups (1972). Jackie had read a newspaper piece he wrote on Chicago mayor Richard Daley and encouraged Kennedy to write Daley’s biography. They enjoyed working together, and when Kennedy wrote a piece for the New York Times on a rebel politician, Jane Byrne, who had upset the all-male applecart of Cook County’s Democratic machine, Jackie and one of her Doubleday colleagues, Lisa Drew, called Kennedy into the office for a talk.
Jane Byrne was an official in the administration of Chicago mayor Michael Bilandic. Bilandic fired her in the late 1970s, and she plotted her revenge. She challenged Bilandic at the next mayoral election and beat him in 1979. She served until 1983. She was the first woman mayor of that city and still carries the record of having served as the only woman mayor of a U.S. city of Chicago’s size. She was an unpredictable and often a colorful figure. At one point, to bring public attention to the high crime rate in one of Chicago’s most notorious public housing projects, she went to live in Cabrini Green, an area of high-rise apartment buildings where cabbies refused to drive, let alone stop. She was also the first Chicago mayor to recognize the city’s gay constituency and to urge passage of a ban on handguns.
Jackie and Lisa Drew told Kennedy that he should write a book about Byrne, and he agreed. He didn’t dare to do nonfiction, but he did produce a novel about a woman’s surprising rise to political power in Chicago, called Queen Bee, in 1982. The book was not entirely admiring of this character’s performance. A Washington Post review said the heroine had “all the innocence of a cobra.” Jackie asked Kennedy whether he’d have to leave town as a result of his book’s critical portrait of the city’s sitting mayor. Although there was no one-to-one correspondence between Jane Byrne and the heroine of Kennedy’s novel, the book’s tone echoed some of the newspaper criticism of Byrne’s tough-minded but also operatic leadership style. Jackie was no universal supporter of women in positions of power, nor was she uncritical of the women who reached political prominence. She was ready for one of her authors to have a little fun at Jane Byrne’s expense. Nor was she afraid to correct Kennedy when he produced the draft of another novel with a female character who did not adequately resist men’s bad behavior. “No woman would react that way to a man,” she told him. “A real woman would kick him all over town.”
In the later 1980s, Jackie’s book projects that deal with women have this gritty pragmatism: a continuing attraction to the stories of strong women, but women who were more often American than European, not highborn, not perfect, but inventive, persistent, and determined to survive the odds against them. Her book projects in the second half of her publishing career were more often about Everywoman than about elite women.
In 1976 Doubleday had had a stunning success with the publication of Roots by Alex Haley. This novel, loosely based on Haley’s historical research in Africa and America on his own ancestors, tells the story of an African named Kunta Kinte who is forced into American slavery and his heirs’ evolution over centuries of living on American soil. The book was made into a popular television miniseries starring LeVar Burton, Ben Vereen, and Cicely Tyson. For the first time genealogy was not only the preserve of those who could trace their descent from the Mayflower. Haley’s book represented a new cultural flowering of the civil rights movement whereby people who had once called themselves “black,” because of the revolutionary Black Power movement of the 1960s, now became “African American,” a more settled and established American ethnicity with a historical dignity that came from distant origins long before slavery. Haley later had to settle out of court when plagiarism claims were made against him, but this did not diminish the landmark status of his book.
Inspired by Haley’s novel, a woman named Dorothy Spruill Redford began doing research on her own family background. She wanted the dignity for her daughter and granddaughter that Haley had achieved for his. She envied Africans and West Indians who knew their family history. Through painstaking research in local archives, she discovered that the first slave of Somerset Place, a plantation in eastern North Carolina, was an African ancestor of her family. She organized two homecomings at Somerset, in 1986 and 1988, to which she invited both the black and the white descendants of slaves and slaveowners at the plantation (Haley himself attended one of the parties). She began to organize to save the house at Somerset from destruction as well. Her historic preservation effort added another dimension to her story. This was picked up by People magazine and by national television in an era when anything Roots-inspired was still big news.
Either Jackie saw the article in People or someone pointed it out to her. She sent a colleague, Marshall De Bruhl, himself a southerner proud of his white-columned plantation background, down from Doubleday to try to put a writer together with Dorothy Redford so she could tell a book-length version of her story. The first writer they tried, a female academic, didn’t work. Then they hired the journalist Michael D’Orso, who worked for the Virginian-Pilot, the main newspaper in Norfolk, Virginia. D’Orso remembers spending long hot summer afternoons with Redford. He would lie on the floor of a housing project apartment with his tape recorder as Redford looked after her baby granddaughter while her daughter was at work. Redford was a powerful and determined woman, and her story moved him. Doubleday published their book together as Somerset Homecoming in 1988. The New York Times noted in a favorable review that the book’s story “is as much about a remarkable woman as about an American people.”
D’Orso remembered sitting at his desk at the newspaper the first time Jackie called him from New York. As he cared about his writing, he worried about writing a book with someone else. She reassured him of his authorial control and was pleased when he said he could do the job in six months. She called him occasionally to find out how he was doing, but when he sent in the text, the line editing was done by her assistant. He thought her strength instead was recognizing an idea that was worth exploring at book length and putting the people together to make it work. In D’Orso’s opinion, this was what made Jackie great. “She made books happen. She spotted the subjects and put together the projects. That was her forte.” In publishing Somerset Homecoming, Jackie acquired another favorite collaborator in Michael D’Orso, but she also did what successful marketers always do, publishing a Roots for women which built on Doubleday’s previous coup. She also grew from the young woman who read everything she could about the Palace of Versailles to an acquisitions editor who could look clear-sightedly and with fellow feeling at women who spent some of their lives in public housing projects.
Jackie was also adept at recognizing the passion and sympathizing with the ambition of her authors. David Stenn, for example, wanted to take the screen stars of Hollywood’s past and give them their due as artists. When he started working on a book about Clara Bow, the only thing most people knew about her was the legend that one night at a party in L.A. she had had group sex with the USC football team. Here was a beautiful woman with an unfairly tawdry reputation who deserved more credit for the work she had done. Jackie agreed. After she had published Stenn’s biography of Clara Bow, Runnin’ Wild, to good reviews in 1988, s
he would occasionally call him in Hollywood, where he’d gone back to producing and screenwriting. “When are you going to come back? When are we going to do another book?” Jackie asked him. She wanted him to do another biography. She suggested Norma Shearer, and though Stenn did not take up her suggestion, Jackie’s very mention of Shearer is revealing. One historian of Hollywood has described Shearer as one of cinema’s feminist pioneers: “the first American film actress to make it chic and acceptable to be single and not a virgin on screen.”
Asked how he got started on Jean Harlow, the subject he ultimately chose, Stenn responded by saying of the 1930s, “A woman in that era of Hollywood, navigating in a man’s world, is just inherently interesting.” Both author and editor wrestled with the evidence Stenn turned up that the glamorous Harlow had lived for a long time with her mother, that she was a passive figure and had allowed herself to be abused by men. “I remember saying to Jackie, ‘I feel like I have a choice here. I can invest her with a lot of strength, which she didn’t have, but it will make the book more lively. Or I can depict her as she was, but it’s frustrating.’ It was a rhetorical comment, because obviously I wasn’t going to do anything inaccurate. That’s why Bombshell was more challenging” to write than his book on Clara Bow. Asked whether there wasn’t a quiet and committed feminism in Jackie’s sponsorship of two books that wanted to recover artistic dignity for the work of two actresses that had been considered merely “commercial,” Stenn replied, “Absolutely! You know what her Farmington quote was. In the Farmington yearbook she said her ambition was not to be a housewife. That was heretical in the 1940s.” Although publishing biographies of Clara Bow and Jean Harlow would not have been heretical when Jackie did them, there remained a subversive motif that connected her schoolgirl days with her publishing days, and that was her insistence on telling a woman’s true story beyond the retouched photographic image.