Reading Jackie

by William Kuhn

  Jackie often invested as much in an author as she invested in a subject. In the fall of 1993, she and David Stenn had lunch to discuss his next project. He’d run across a scandal and cover-up at Hollywood’s biggest studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1937 the studio had invited more than a hundred chorus girls to attend what they thought was a casting call, but was really a stag party meant to entertain visiting salesmen. When one of the dancers, Patricia Douglas, realized that she’d been tricked and tried to flee, she was raped. She sued the studio, which brought out its most expensive legal guns against her, driving her out of Hollywood and into hiding. Stenn told Jackie that he didn’t know where the story would take him. “There’s this story and I can’t make heads or tails of it. It’s just in the newspapers. I don’t know what became of this woman.” Jackie replied, “Well, if anyone can find out what happened, it’s you.”

  Thinking back on that conversation, his last with Jackie, Stenn said, “When someone like Jacqueline Onassis, who has kept company with some of the great artistic figures of the era, has that kind of faith and confidence in you, you don’t even consciously realize what a motivator it is. It becomes almost unconscious. She meant it. That gesture of complete faith was almost like a sly command.” It led him to find Patricia Douglas, six decades after the original scandal, and persuade her to appear on camera in his film about the crime and the cover-up, Girl 27. In the film, she is a wonderful old woman, nearly in her nineties, with a face as creased and lined as that in an old picture of W. H. Auden or Lillian Hellman. It’s impossible to keep your eyes off her whenever she’s on camera. Stenn’s film is a tribute not only to Douglas’s courage in suing MGM, but also to her survival and willingness to talk about the scandal so many decades later. She lived to tell the tale, and though Jackie did not live long enough to see Stenn’s film, her spirit presides over it.

  Steve Wasserman was another young man whose work Jackie encouraged in the 1990s. He had been her colleague briefly at Doubleday. After he left to become an editor at Times Books, he was thrilled that she agreed to have lunch with him at Michael’s, a restaurant on Fifty-fifth Street in New York known for its big windows, white tablecloths, and media power brokers who converged there on weekdays at lunchtime. He remembered the table at the back where they sat, away from the prying eyes of the front room but where, because of his lunch companion, he at last earned the recognition of the restaurant’s famously discriminating owner. Jackie ordered an appetizer-sized portion of scallops for her lunch. When it came, there were four scallops on the plate. She ate three and left one. Wasserman also remembered telling Jackie about a biography he was editing, the story of a turn-of-the-century American woman, a contemporary of Adele Sloane, who traveled around the world and who at one time pretended to be insane in order to write a newspaper exposé of how asylum staffers were abusing their mentally ill patients. The book became Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist, written by Brooke Kroeger and published in 1994. Wasserman later wrote of Bly that “her feats of personal courage and social conscience were peerless. She was an extraordinary inventor of her own life.” Jackie listened quietly and then sighed, saying, “How remarkable, don’t you think, to have lived such a life. It is how I would have liked to live my own.” This may have been the practiced modesty of a woman brought up never to speak about herself, but it’s hard not to conclude that this was precisely how Jackie did live her life.

  Jacqueline Kennedy, 1957, by Yousuf Karsh. She told her Doubleday colleague Ray Roberts that she remembered the picture being taken at “ten A.M. in full evening dress, and he scared me to death!” (photo credit i1.1)

  Jacqueline Onassis with Jann Wenner at the Oyster Bar, Grand Central Terminal, 1977. When Wenner moved Rolling Stone from San Francisco to New York, Jackie took him under her wing. They later collaborated on a book about John Lennon and on an anthology of the best writing in the magazine. (photo credit i1.2)

  Jackie at Viking in 1977 with copies of her book In the Russian Style. Diana Vreeland sold the book at a party in the Metropolitan Museum, calling out to the crowd, “Buy a beautiful book!” but Nicolas Nabokov attacked it in the New York Review of Books. (photo credit i1.3)

  Jackie with American ambassador to India John Kenneth Galbraith in 1962 during her visit to India. She later edited several illustrated books featuring Indian artists. Galbraith said of Jackie’s trip to India that while the visit might have had some diplomatic value, mainly it was about having fun. (photo credit i1.4)

  “Vassilissa the Fair,” one of four stories illustrated by Boris Zvorykin in The Firebird and Other Russian Fairy Tales, which Viking republished in 1978 with an introduction by Jackie. She was interested in the Romanovs, Russian costume, and strikingly illustrated books. (photo credit i1.5)

  Jackie and former JFK aide William Walton at the International Center of Photography (ICP) for an exhibition of dance photography in 1978. She wanted to edit Fleeting Gestures, the book accompanying the show, but couldn’t persuade Doubleday to do it. She had better luck producing a book of nineteenth-century letters with Walton called A Civil War Courtship. (photo credit i1.6)

  Jackie and William Howard Adams at a benefit for the ICP, where she served on the board. Adams wrote the text for Atget’s Gardens (1979), a collection of turn-of-the-century photographs of French royal gardens. Jackie wrote that Atget’s photographs reminded her both of her Bouvier ancestors and of Greek islands in a windstorm. (photo credit i1.7)

  Jackie sitting with photographer Berenice Abbott and architectural historian John Harris in London at a party for the Atget book. Abbott was one of Atget’s greatest champions. Jackie also wanted to do a book on Abbott’s photography and planned to fly in a private plane with ICP curator William Ewing to Abbott’s house in Maine to discuss the project. “Bill, do you want to reserve the plane, or should I?” Ewing told Jackie that she’d better do it. (photo credit i1.8)

  Jackie and Nancy Zaroulis in 1979 at the Doubleday suite, where book parties were held. Zaroulis’s novel Call the Darkness Light, which followed the story of a female factory worker in the nineteenth century, was one of Jackie’s first commercially successful projects. (photo credit i1.9)

  Jackie permitted Diana Vreeland to reprint this image of Marilyn Monroe in Allure, the book they did together in 1980. She also wanted Doubleday to acquire a book on Monroe’s last photo session with Bert Stern. (photo credit i1.10)

  Gloria Steinem with Jackie. Jackie gave a rare interview to Steinem at Ms., and the magazine ran her picture on the cover with the headline “Why Does This Woman Work?” in March 1979. (photo credit i1.11)

  Saul Steinberg’s cover for Raquel Ramati’s How to Save Your Own Street, published in 1981. Jackie’s interest in architectural preservation and urban planning had begun in her White House years. (photo credit i1.12)

  Title page of To the Inland Empire, 1987. Former Kennedy cabinet member Stewart Udall and photographer Jerry Jacka produced the book after a hiking trip in the Southwest with Jackie. She cared about the design of her books and wanted them to be as beautiful as possible. (photo credit i1.13)

  Jackie with Eugene Kennedy at the launch of his novel Father’s Day in 1981. He was the only author who moved with her from Viking to Doubleday in 1978. Kennedy recalled working on a manuscript at Jackie’s apartment, where she smoked from an ivory cigarette holder and served cucumber sandwiches. (photo credit i1.14)

  Jackie and Philip Johnson, 1983. Jackie commissioned a book on Philip Johnson from her friend Rosamond Bernier. Both women were disappointed when they discovered Johnson had authorized another, similar book at the same time, and their project had to be dropped. (photo credit i1.15)

  Jackie and Peter Beard, 1983. Jackie told Beard at one of his photography shows, “I wish I could do what you’re doing—but I can’t.” Jackie wrote the afterword for one of Beard’s books that had been inspired by Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, a memoir they both loved. (photo credit i1.16)

  Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1988. One of Jackie’s greatest coups was to bring Mahfouz’s books to Doubleday. (photo credit i1.17)

  Carly Simon and Jackie on Martha’s Vineyard in 1989 for the launch of Amy the Dancing Bear, one of Simon’s books for children. They did four books together between 1989 and 1993. (photo credit i1.18)

  Bill Moyers, Maurice Tempelsman, and Jackie in 1992. Jackie edited The Power of Myth, Moyers’s interviews with Joseph Campbell, which discussed how an ordinary person could be transformed into a myth. (photo credit i1.19)

  In the year before her last illness Jackie was working on this book about untraditional medicine. She was instrumental in winning the right to reproduce a Georgia O’Keeffe painting for the book’s cover and told colleagues that to her the nautilus shell represented “infinity” or “eternity.” (photo credit i1.20)

  CHAPTER 7

  Jackie fit many people’s definition of what it was to be beautiful. Under Diana Vreeland in the 1960s, Vogue coined the term “beautiful people” to describe the Kennedy family, which had brought not only good looks but also youth, glamour, and high culture to the White House. Jackie was irritated by the fact that, over time, the high culture seemed to be forgotten and people only remembered her for high fashion and how good she looked in photographs. She couldn’t stop people from wanting to photograph her, but Doubleday had given her the opportunity to be active rather than passive. Through the books she commissioned she could explore what beauty meant, why some women come to be thought of as beautiful when others are not, why we are attracted to certain images, why they have such compelling power over us. The art critic for the New York Times, Grace Glueck, noticed this activist agenda after Jackie died. She compared Jackie to an evangelist who “wanted to convey her beliefs to the world around her, to pass on her ideas of what was beautiful, what was appropriate, what was right. And in so doing, she had a whim of iron.” Jackie had once been an aspiring photographer, and her books on photography not only reprise the first paying job she had taken, right out of college, but continue the journey she started there.

  Weren’t you once a photographer yourself?

  REPORTER’S QUESTION TO JACKIE

  As a wife with young children, Jackie was a dream for JFK’s publicity team. One 1960s film, shot to advance JFK’s political prospects, shows her sitting nervously on the wooden porch of a house in Hyannis. She has a tense, self-conscious smile. Off camera comes the disembodied voice of a reporter, who asks whether she wasn’t once a photographer and reporter herself. Her mouth is very wide as she answers, “That’s right.” Then, after a stiff pause, she adds, “I preferred to be on the other side of the camera.”

  That person on the other side of the camera was who she became. She went from being a figure caught in the glare of flashbulbs every time she walked on the street to being a woman who helped put enduring statements of why art matters into print. She was a woman who had been brought up on fashion magazines and had made a college-girl pilgrimage to visit Bernard Berenson at his villa, I Tatti, without knowing that he was a bit of a scoundrel. She was also a woman who chose photographs she found beautiful and took the risk of annoying critics by putting them between hard covers in order to make them available to a wide audience. Jackie shaped, shared, and illuminated the power of beautiful images.

  Nineteen Blackamoors

  Diana Vreeland runs like a persistent motif not only through Jackie’s publishing career but through much of her entire life. Just as Vreeland’s Allure offers insights into Jackie’s approach to fashion, sensuality, and the attractiveness of women such as Maria Callas and Marilyn Monroe, it also sets out a statement of what beauty is and why it matters. Jackie was about the same age as Vreeland’s two sons, whom she knew before she met and corresponded with their mother. It is only from the beginning of JFK’s presidency that the first letters from Jackie show up in the papers Diana Vreeland left to the New York Public Library after she died. In these rather formal letters Jackie asked Vreeland for advice on her clothes in the White House. She had hired Oleg Cassini to design her dresses in an agreement with Joseph Kennedy, Sr., who quietly paid the bills. She could thus avoid any scandal that would arise from dealing with couturiers who might disclose what she’d paid them. She was ambivalent about her appearance. She wanted to look good, but having her clothes and her body inspected so closely made her feel uncomfortable. There is a revealing metaphor in one of Jackie’s letters to Vreeland about Cassini: she said she would appreciate it if Vreeland occasionally helped him, as he valued Vreeland’s opinion and “would make me a dress of barbed wire if you said it would be pretty.”

  Vreeland was also insecure about the way she looked. She told a journalist from the Washington Post who interviewed her about Allure that she had been an ugly child. One of the things no one mentions about Vreeland is that in her pictures she looks as if she might have been of mixed race, although she always claimed to have been born plain Diana Dalziel to a prosperous British father and an American socialite mother in Paris. When Vreeland was born, in 1903, being of mixed race would have been nearly unspeakable. The Washington Post reviewer was surprised to find in Vreeland’s apartment when he arrived there a collection of nineteen blackamoor figurines, a convention of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European domestic decoration. They were probably Vreeland’s idea of a small joke, but then Jackie was joking about the dress made of barbed wire, too.

  Both women were also insecure about money. Diana Vreeland married a banker whose income was not adequate to their shared aspirations. She opened a lingerie business to supplement their income when they lived in England and worked for fashion magazines when they returned to America, neither of which paid her particularly well. Of her more than two decades of working for the Hearst Corporation at Harper’s Bazaar, she remembered later, “San Simeon must have been where the Hearst money went—I certainly never saw any of it.” Her husband, Reed Vreeland, died in the 1960s, and when Vogue fired her in 1971, she had to find another paying job, even though she had a severance package from the magazine. This was why she went to the Metropolitan Museum to curate shows at the Costume Institute. Even there she was not well paid by the standards of the New Yorkers she saw socially. Jackie recalled that a group of her friends each contributed to make up a “paltry sum” (Jackie’s words), an annual income of $30,000 a year, as the museum refused to pay her from its own budget. When fashion luminary André Leon Talley, who got his start by serving as Vreeland’s unpaid assistant at the museum, raised his own money difficulties in hopes of getting some help from her, she looked at him blankly. It was something that could not be discussed. So for Vreeland to begin Allure with the rather aggressive statement “There’s no pictures of poverty in this book!” suggests that she constructed a life for herself that denied parts of her own past.

  Jackie, too, was aware that her tastes often outran her budget. Born to a father who had more class than cash and raised in a household where all the money was to be inherited by Auchincloss children rather than by those who were there by marriage, Jackie made marrying for money one of her priorities. In those days, when women from her background didn’t work, many women considered a prospective husband’s finances before they married. JFK certainly had money, but when he died, Jackie discovered that much of his cash was tied up in trusts for her children. After Onassis died, she certainly found herself in funds, but a lifetime of worrying about money had already engraved itself on her consciousness. William Ewing, who curated exhibitions at the International Center of Photography and became friendly with Jackie, didn’t quite understand when the ICP’s director, Cornell Capa, told him never to ask Jackie for money. When Jackie once asked Ewing how he would put together funding for an upcoming show, Ewing was at ease enough with her to say he hoped she might help him with some money. Jackie’s reaction told him it was the wrong thing to say. “She shrank to half her usual size and had a pained expression. ‘Bill,’ she said to me, ‘don’t you know any rich people?’ ”

&nb
sp; When Vreeland wrote in Allure that “fashion must be the most intoxicating release from the banality of the world,” she might well have been talking about finding a fantasy relief from the banality of her own appearance and bank account. In the 1957 film Funny Face, the actress Kay Thompson played a character based on Vreeland, a madcap fashion editor who in one musical number commands her staff to “Think pink!” as she dances around the office scattering papers. Vreeland’s biographer Eleanor Dwight argues that the movie had a serious point to make, because it “illustrated Vreeland’s own conviction that fashion is an authentic art form, and is important because it makes life more beautiful.” Vreeland had a philosophy that might well have been taken out of Oscar Wilde. She didn’t want to dwell on mundanity or everyday worries. Rather, “you had to exaggerate and embellish the world, make it more vibrant and beautiful.” Or, as Wilde put it when he was criticizing the characters of Émile Zola, a French novelist who described low-life drunks and other down-and-outers: “They have their dreary vices, and their drearier virtues. The record of their lives is absolutely without interest. Who cares what happens to them?” What Wilde wanted in literature was “distinction, charm, beauty and imaginative power. We don’t want to be harrowed and disgusted with an account of the doings of the lower orders.” Jackie and Vreeland wanted the same in their book of photography. This is heady stuff when you think that it was endorsed by the woman who once served as first lady in a democratic republic that prides itself on its egalitarianism.